Capitol - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,10

troops had begun fighting, but they kept coming to cities in their slow retreat. And in every city they came to, most of the citizens had refused to evacuate. "Declare us an open city," the mayors would say. "There are too many people to evacuate, and a battle would kill thousands. Millions. Declare us an open city." And so the military declared it an open city and moved on.

In less than a week they were at the outskirts of Washington, D.C., and when the general commanding the division that had just left Baltimore realized that even now Congress couldn't make up its mind, he surrendered and went home. And by that night, the war was over, except for a few futile pockets of resistance in the South and the West and the Midwest.

The first Russian troops to arrive in Berkeley only three days later found George Rines standing guard over his files with a few like-minded graduate assistants, as others, led by Doran Waite, tried to break in to burn the papers. "You can't let the Russians have this!"

"I can't let this knowledge be destroyed!" George yelled back. And then the submachine guns were pointed at them and the fight was over and the files were safe for posterity and it was only then that George realized that what he was fighting for was not knowledge, but his command of it, and the Russian scientists came only a week later and George was out of a job. They occasionally visited him to ask questions, but other than that, he was not allowed into the building. "Security," the Russians told him. "You might try to destroy something."

Eventually, however, they let him back in, offering him a position as a lab assistant. He took it.

And he watched in frustration as they kept making mistakes, kept violating simple rules of procedure, and he realized serious research was dead here. Enough had been done that somec and braintaping could be done on a fairly large scale. It didn't occur to the Russians-- or they were forbidden to let it occur to them-- that there was a great deal more theoretical work to be done on the question of man's soul.

"Am I correct," the Russian supervisor asked him one day, "in believing that your final report declares that these sleepers can never be revived?"

"Not as themselves. Not as sane human beings. They'd have to be cared for as infants."

"And they all have cancer?"

"Or something else."

That evening, at closing time, Goerge heard a Russian casually mention the fact that the bodies of the sleepers had all been sent to the mortuary for cremation.

"What?" George asked. He had heard correctly, they told him. "But they're people!" he insisted, shouting at the supervisor, whom he accosted in the lobby of the research building.

"Hopelessly ill people who can never be productively awakened. By any man's definition they're dead."

"Not by mine!" George insisted.

The Russian laughed. "Angry, aren't you? If you Americans had shown half so much spirit on the battlefield, we might not be here today." And he left.

George went to the files and reread the dialogues. Now he saw easily the real person behind the facade of phony memories. Now he loved them all, and mourned for their deaths. Now he understood why Aggie had left him, because in the long run all his work could be so easily undone, and at the last only the people remain, the only achievements that matter are the people he knew, and he realized he knew the dead sleepers better than he knew his wife, his daughters, or himself.

It was not in his nature to kill himself.

So he went to the braintaping room and erased his braintape. Then he went to the somec lab and injected the somec into his veins. They would cremate him, when they realized they had no hope of reviving him. But he would be asleep, and wouldn't notice.

And in the meantime, his memories were gone, because he knew who he really was, and he couldn't, after all, live with himself. Who you are may be fixed by the genes, he said to himself as the somec swept through him. But it doesn't mean you have to like it.
A THOUSAND DEATHS
Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?

-- Galatians 4:16

"You will make no speeches," said the prosecutor.

"I didn't expect they'd let me," Jerry Crove answered, affecting a confidence he didn't feel. The prosecutor was not hostile; he seemed more like a high school drama