“Smart,” said Mavens professionally. “Now he can’t call out.”

Barbara pushed the boy onto his back and straddled him. She grabbed his hands, held them over his head and began to slash at his clothes.

“She doesn’t look strong enough to do that,” Bobby said.

“It isn’t strength that counts. It’s determination. Mian couldn’t believe, even now, this girl, a girl he thought of as his sister, was going to do him real harm. Would you?”

Now the boy’s chest was bare. Barbara reached down with the knife -

Bobby snapped, “Enough.”

Mavens hit a button, and the SoftScreen cleared, to Bobby’s profound relief.

Mavens said, “The rest is detail. When Mian was dead she propped him against the door, and called for her father. Wilson came running. When he opened the door his son’s warm body fell into his arms. And he called the Search Engine.”

“But Wilson’s semen.”

“She stored it, after that night she blew him, in a cute little cryo-flask she liberated from a medical lab. She’d been planning this, even as far back as that.” He shrugged. “It all worked out. Revenge, the destruction of the father who had spurned her, as she saw it. It all worked, at least until the WormCam came along. And so.”

“And so the wrong man was convicted.”

“Executed.”

Mavens tapped the ’Screen and brought up a fresh image. It was of a woman-fortyish, blond. She was sitting in some dingy office. Her face was crumpled with grief.

“This is Mae Wilson,” Mavens said. “Philip’s wife, mother to the two adopted children. She’d had to come to terms with the death of the boy, what she thought of as her husband’s dreadful crime. She’d even reconciled with Barbara, found comfort with her. Now — at this moment — she had to face a much more dreadful truth.”

Bobby felt uncomfortable, confronted by this horror, this naked grief. But Mavens froze the image.

“Right here,” he murmured. “That’s where we tore her heart in two. And it’s my responsibility.”

“You did your best.”

“No. I could have done better. The girl, Barbara, had an alibi. But with hindsight it’s an alibi I could have taken apart. There were other small things: discrepancies in the timing, the distribution of the blood. But I didn’t see any of that.” He looked at Bobby, his eyes bright. “I didn’t see the truth. That’s what your WormCam is. It’s a truth machine.”

Bobby shook his head. “No. It’s a hindsight machine.”

“It has to be right to bring the truth to light,” Mavens said. “I still believe that. Of course I do. But sometimes the truth hurts, beyond belief. Like poor Mae Wilson, here. And you know what? The truth didn’t help her. It didn’t bring Mian back, or her husband. All it did was take her daughter away too.”

“We’re all going to go through this, one way or an other, being forced to confront every mistake we ever made.”

“Maybe,” Mavens said softly. He smiled and ran his finger along the edge of his desk. “Here’s what the WormCam has done for me. My job isn’t an intellectual exercise any more, Sherlock Holmes puzzles. Now I sit here every day and I get to watch the determination, the savagery, the — the calculation. We’re animals, Bobby. Beasts, under these neat suits of clothing.” He shook his head, still smiling, and he ran his finger along the desk, back and forth, back and forth.

Chapter 19

Time

As the availability and power of the WormCam extended relentlessly, so invisible eyes fell like snowflakes through human history, deeper and deeper into time…

Princeton, New Jersey, USA. April 17, 1955 A.D.

His good humour, in those last hours, struck his visitors. He talked with perfect calm, and joked about his doctors, and in general seemed to regard his approaching end as simply an expected natural phenomenon.

And, of course, even to the end, he issued gruff orders. He was concerned not to become an object of pilgrimage, and he instructed that his office at the Institute should not be preserved as he left it, and that his home should not become a shrine, and so on.

Doctor Dean looked in on him for the last time at eleven P.M., and found him sleeping peacefully.

But a little after midnight his nurse — Mrs. Alberta Roszel — noticed a change in his breathing. She called for help and, with the help of another nurse, cranked up the head of the bed.

He was muttering, and Mrs. Roszel came close to hear.

Even as the finest mind since Newton began, at last, to unravel, final thoughts floated to the surface of his consciousness. Perhaps he regretted the great physics unification project he had left unfinished. Perhaps he wondered if his pacifism had after all been the right course — if he had been correct to encourage Roosevelt to enter the nuclear age. Perhaps, simply, he regretted how he had always put science first, even over those who loved him.

But it was too late for all that. His life, so vivid and complex in youth and middle age, was now reducing, as all lives must, to a single thread of utter simplicity.

Mrs. Roszel bent close to hear his soft voice. But his words were in German, the language of his youth, and she did not understand.

…And she did not see, could not see, the swarm of spacetime flaws which, in these last moments, crowded around the trembling lips of Einstein to hear those final words: “…Lieseri! Oh, Lieseri!”

Extracted from testimony by Prof. Maurice Patefield, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chair of the “Wormseed” campaign group, to the Congressional Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, 23 September, 2037:

As soon as it became apparent that the WormCam can reach, not just through walls, but into the past, a global obsession of the human species with its own history opened up. At first we were treated to professionally-made “factual” WormCam movies showing such great events as wars, assassinations, political scandals. Unsinkable, the multi-viewpoint reconstruction of the Titanic disaster, for example, made harrowing, compelling viewing — even though it demolished many sea-story myths propagated by uncritical storytellers, and much of the event took place in pitch North Atlantic darkness. But we soon grew impatient with the interpolation of the professionals. We wanted to see for ourselves. The hasty inspection of many notorious moments of the recent past has revealed both banality and surprise. The depressing truths surrounding Elvis Presley, O. J. Simpson and even the deaths of the Kennedys surely surprised nobody. On the other hand, the revelations about the murders of so many prominent women — from Marilyn Monroe through Mother Teresa to Diana, Princess of Wales — caused a wave of shock, even in a society becoming accustomed to too much truth. The existence of a shadowy, relentless cabal of misogynistic men whose activities against (as they saw it) too powerful women, actions carried across decades, caused much soul-searching among both sexes. But many true-story versions of historic events — the Cuba missile crisis, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the euro — while of interest to aficionados, have turned out to be muddled, confusing and complex. It is dismaying to realize that even those supposedly at the centers of power generally know little and understand less of what is going on around them. With all respect to the great traditions of this House, almost all the key incidents in human history are screw-ups, it seems, just as almost all the great passions are no more than crude and manipulative tumblings. And, worse than that, the truth generally turns out to be boring. The lack of pattern and logic in the overwhelming, almost unrecognisable true history that is now being revealed is proving so difficult and wearying for all but the most ardent scholar that fictionalized accounts are actually making a comeback: stories which provide a narrative structure simple enough to engage the viewer. We need story and meaning, not blunt fact…