I, Executioner

Terry Carr, Eli Jayne

• Éditeur: Eli Jayne
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781087865560
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literature
• Sous-sujet: Science Fiction

It was a time of regulated sanity and world peace. Brain scanners helped keep it that way by identifying potential deviants, those on the verge of anti-social insanity. I was sitting in my chair in the Arena. It was my turn again. In the middle of what was once a stage sat thirty people scraped tightly to their chairs. And then they brought her in and I remembered…

I, Executioner, a Science Fiction Classic, was written byTerry Carrand first appeared in the Worlds of If Science Fiction magazine in January 1963.

Chapter One

I always shook when I came out of the Arena, but this time the tension wrapped my stomach in painful knots and salty perspiration stung my neck where I had shaved only a little over an hour earlier. And despite the heavy knot in my stomach. I felt strangely empty.

I had never been able to sort out my reactions to an Execution. The atmosphere of careful boredom, the strictly business-as-usual air failed to dull my senses as it did for the others. I could always taste the ozone in the air, mixed with the taste of fear—whether mine, or that of the Condemned, I never knew. My nostrils always gave an involuntary twitch at the confined odors and I felt an almost claustrophic fear at being packed into the Arena with the other nine hundred ninety-nine Citizens on Execution Duty.

I had been expecting my notice for several months before it finally came. I hadn't served Execution Duty for nearly two years. Usually it had figured out to every fourteen months or so on rotation, so I'd been ready for it. A little apprehensive—I always am—but ready.

At 9:00 in the morning, still only half awake (I'd purposely slept until the last minute), vaguely trying to remember the dream I'd had, I waited in front of the Arena for the ordeal to begin. The dream had been something about a knife, an operation. But I couldn't remember whether I'd been the doctor or the patient.

Our times of arrival had been staggered in our notices, so that a long queue wouldn't tie up traffic, but as usual the checkers were slow, and we were backed up a bit.

I didn't like waiting. Somehow I've always felt more exposed on the streets, although the brain-scanners must be more plentiful in an Arena than almost anywhere else. It's only logical that they should be. The scanners are set up to detect unusual patterns of stress in our brain waves as we pass close to them, and thus to pick out as quickly as possible those with incipient or developing neuroses or psychoses—the potential deviates. And where else would such an aberration be as likely to come out as in the Arena?

I had moved to the front...