“Cost? What do you mean?”
“Do you know what I was thinking, Roderick, as I watched all those horrible things on the scanner?”
“Well, I suppose that—”
“I was thinking that the very reason the Federation wanted to outlaw the scanner, Roderick, to suppress it without any consideration at all for all the good it might do, was because of the threat of the exact use to which I was putting it. Using it to spy and snoop and destroy lives and careers, Roderick. Using it for exactly the things I don’t want the Federation to use it for. But in order to keep them from doing it, I had to do it.” Sam uttered a sharp bark of what might have been laughter. “How do you like that for cost, Roderick?”
Bantry shook his head slowly. “Frankly, I don’t quite understand.”
“No? Well, you and Emily never had any children, did you? So you don’t know how bad it can be. But then, no one ever said that giving birth was easy.”
Marianna and Emily and Bruce were still in the Poconos. It seemed to Sam that until the ratification of the Constitution had finally been settled one way or the other, it was safer that way.
Until, he knew, he had delivered his own final part of the bargain.
It was the afternoon of September 29, 2074. For the fourth time since the formal debate had begun five months earlier the roll call of the senators was read as the Administration tried yet again to invoke the cloture that would make the Federation the supreme power in the world.
Sam paid little attention to the ongoing Ayes and Nays. He knew that no one had changed their minds in the nineteen days since the last vote.
“Dominguez.”
“Aye.”
“Duong.”
“Aye.”
“Edwards.”
“Nay.”
“Fairly.”
“Nay.”
“Farr.”
“Aye.”
Sam sat hunched in his seat, his eyes closed, the list of senators clear in his mind. No, no votes at all had changed. Cloture would once again be defeated by 41 nays, the filibuster carried on, the sovereignty of the United States preserved.
“Ferron.”
Samual Garraty Ferron took a deep breath and hunched his shoulders even further, as if willing himself into total invisibility. Without opening his eyes, thinking only of the brave new world of the time scanner to which he was helping give birth, he whispered, “Aye.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is a sequel to “Under the Wings of Owls,” January 1994; “To Change a Memory,” March 1994; and “Pandora’s Scanner,” June 1994.