The Interrogation of Ephraim Sparkman and Other Stories

By Barry Spencer

This small volume of 4 short stories, the whole of which can be read in one sitting, takes the reader on what the author hopes will prove a fascinating journey. In the first story, from which the book takes its name, The Interrogation of Ephraim Sparkman, we travel, by the magic of words, through time and space to Mars in the distant future. In The Buddha’s Smile we find ourselves in a small Kalmyk village seized by the German SS deep inside the Soviet Union during World War 11. Next, comes The Blame Game. It’s 1975 and we are standing with the accused in the dock at the Old Bailey criminal court in London charged with assault with a deadly weapon. The last story, The Rabbi, follows the destiny of a young man from Berlin in 1938 to the battle of Stalingrad in 1943.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Sep 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483436227

Barry Spencer

Calling himself a Speculative Type Designer, Barry states that he often makes letters that may or may not look like letters. For over a decade he has researched, explored and played with the Latin letterforms and through his research and exploration he has been able to reach a point where he believes he has fundamentally altered the way that he creates, perceives and understands the shapes of the alphabet.Barry continues to explore the potential of letterforms while also writing and lecturing on graphic design, typography and type design.

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SPENCER

Copyright © 2015 Barry Spencer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3623-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3622-7 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 08/28/2015

Contents

The Interrogation of Ephraim Sparkman

The Buddha’s Smile

The Blame Game

The Rabbi

For Sherry,

who owns my heart, with infinite gratitude

for making this happen.

The Interrogation of Ephraim Sparkman

The courier, a Level Delta-ll Bot, clad in black leather tunic with blue epaulets and boots, the traditional uniform of the Citadel, clicked its heels, bowed stiffly and handed its charge, a manila envelope stamped with the intact red wax seal of CRAC, the Counter Revolution Action Committee, to the Chief of Police, Colonel Kai Germanicus.

Shall I await a response, Your Excellency?

The Chief of Police smiled inwardly. He always found the notion of a Bot programmed to click its heels as a gesture toward Teutonic efficiency mildly amusing. Ignoring the Bot’s staccato monotone, he broke the seal and rapidly scanned the contents of the envelope with his one eye. Stamped Top Secret, it was an order signed within the hour by Gustavus Renaldi, Chairman of CRAC, under conditions of the strictest security, to interrogate an individual named Ephraim Sparkman. Cyberspace was way too porous these days.

No, no, no. He gestured dismissively.

The Bot saluted, clicked its heels again, and left the room, strutting through the automatic doors. Germanicus heard the distinctive hum of the electric helivan rising from the gate of police headquarters and, through the wide sweep of his office window, watched as it meandered among the forest of superscapes, tracing a path up the rocky face of Acropolis mountain, to the massive structure of the Citadel which swallowed the tiny helivan into its gaping mouth like a gnat.

The officers of the night shift were at their posts on the floor below with their attendant Bots and the Weedshop in the lobby was still open, its lights blazing, with several customers viewing catalogs and trying samples, but the building was otherwise quiet. Germanicus poured himself a shot of whiskey from one of several crystal decanters that adorned his expansive desk, lit a cigar selected from several bristling from the breast pocket of his uniform and, leaning back in his chair, contemplated his domain with profound satisfaction: the city of Sparta, founded only ten years after the Great Migration, spread out before him like a vast undulating carpet. The pale sun had dropped behind the Citadel revealing the milky face of Phobos and her sister moon Deimos, like a bright star, rising in the east. Planet Earth was now visible, twinkling in the night sky. And at his feet lay the great city, a sea of colored, agitated lights, darting here and there, speeding down highways, gliding through the dark, forever moving on walk-ways, elevators, airbuses and helivans like a million fireflies. The western horizon burned a deep crimson as an old nuclear fusion cruiser, back with supplies and imported goods from Earth after its 21 day voyage, retracted its solar panels and soft-landed at the Spaceport. The brilliant lights of Sex City were winking provocatively while a football game, Sparta versus Moon City, was in progress in the flood-lit Sports Arena. Every highway, every moving walkway carried its blazing holographic billboard exhorting Spartans to buy, to sell, to visit. And above the towering superscapes, through which shot huge sky-elevators crammed with Spartans and Bots mingling with tourists and exiles from Ephesus, an Earth-like planet far beyond the solar system which evolved primates strikingly similar to homo sapiens, fleets of copters, helivans, airbuses, flying vehicles of a myriad kind, sailed majestically to destinations all over the great city according to set flightpaths. Only the Spartan Zoo lay in darkness, a light twinkling here and there, as Botkeepers went about tending the strange beasts, resembling animals long since extinct on Earth, captured from distant planets - monstrous reptiles huge as therapod dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers and massive, shaggy elephants with multiple tusks spreading like elk antlers. All over Sparta countless armies of Bots were busily at work, flying, driving, cleaning, cooking, repairing, working in the Pleasure Domes and virtual sex shops, in every home, in every building, at every street corner, serving their human masters and mistresses, faithful and unquestioning, taking instructions, obeying orders, undertaking any mission, programmed and controlled by MASCOM, the giant supercomputer housed somewhere within the bowels of the Citadel, legions of Bots guarding and ministering to its needs.

MASCOM was the great Spartan innovation. Just contemplating the great computer filled Germanicus with profound satisfaction. Capable of trillions of calculations and decisions every second, it vastly exceeded human intelligence by orders of magnitude. All disputes, all potential suits at law, all political, constitutional, economic, social and moral issues were solved by MASCOM objectively and instantaneously, without bias or prejudice. It administered and governed Sparta in all its complexity. It was the final arbiter, the court of equity, the ultimate court of appeal, untrammeled by destructive human emotions, by sentiment, by fear or favor but nonetheless capable of human understanding. MASCOM was a spiritual machine, the ideal of the benevolent sovereign. He was at one with the citizens of Sparta standing in awe and reverence for the breadth and catholicity of its embrace. It was more than a benevolent sovereign. It had become a God, not a remote, unknown, inaccessible abstraction but a tangible presence in the thoughts and action, in the everyday life of all Spartans.

He raised his whiskey glass as though making a toast. Yes. It was all running with a cream-like smoothness. When did they first start to terraform Mars? About five hundred Earth years ago perhaps, no more than three generations….. amazing what had been achieved in such a comparatively short time. But they still had a long, long way to go. Sparta was a city of only about twenty million, an autonomous region but a state like its ancient Greek namesake on Earth. There were other cities like Sparta dotted over the surface of the planet but they lacked cohesion. It’s true, they conferred from time to time and traded, since no city can be self-sufficient, but with no thought of confederation. They were all too concerned about their own independence, whatever MASCOM advised. And out there, beyond the furthest city lights, beyond the wind barriers, beyond the protective domes, lay utter desolation, deserts of red sand and dust, pitted and cratered by ancient impacts, whipped into vast sandstorms by ferocious polar winds.

Germanicus sipped his whisky, drew on his cigar and turned to the business at hand, the interrogation order from CRAC. Like so many native Martians, he was tall, as if an Earthling had been stretched on the rack, with stringy muscles encasing his elongated bones, his narrow face lymphatic and sallow from lack of sunlight and sleep. But what immediately riveted the attention, what intrigued and mesmerized, was the diamond, big as an almond, sparkling brilliantly within the shadowy socket of the right eye, from which, now and then, tears dripped and streamed down his pallid cheek, not to be mistaken for tears of laughter, sorrow or compassion but irrigation to water the parched wadi of his socket. He was proud of his mental precision, his dedication to duty, his abhorrence of sentiment and his lack of impetuosity. Impetuosity undermined the systematic solution of life’s problems. He tended to see his Spartan world as a vast game of chess where each move must be carefully weighed and all possible alternatives logically analyzed before he took irreversible action, before his long, thin hand moved his Queen or his rook into place. He could be ruthless but his ruthlessness, which might have proved destructive, was tempered by a strong sense of self-preservation. His humor, if it existed at all, was subtle and exercised by a street-wise cynicism sardonically expressed by the merest shadow of a smile that played around his blue lips. It was these qualities that had raised him to the highest rank in the police force of Sparta and qualified him as the officer most admired and emulated by fellow police officers across the planet.

In the civil war that ruptured Sparta half a century before, Germanicus had taken a prominent role. While leading an assault on the huge robot factory in the industrial district on the southern border of the city, a steel splinter took his eye and lodged close to the brain where, the surgeons had discreetly determined, it should remain with its legacy of explosive headaches. Germanicus knew well enough that the weeping socket with its strange and mysterious tenant, that both attracted and repelled, hinting at the skull beneath, was an engine of intimidation. But that was just fine because he was in the business of intimidation. He enjoyed intimidation; he lived his life by intimidation; for him, intimidation was a moral imperative. Was he not terrifying yet fascinating, stretched to his full height, in his scarlet uniform, fixing a prisoner under an arc-light with his hypnotic gaze, his predatory nose and boney chin thrust forward, his sleek hair, like a black helmet, brushed back to his nape intensifying the skeletal cast of his head? The President was rarely seen, cloistered within the kremlinesque walls of the Citadel. But the Chief of Police was everywhere, his three-dimensional, iridescent, monocular image lit up at night, staring down at the pre-occupied denizens of Sparta as they frenetically went about their business.

The name, Sparkman, grabbed his attention, stirred a distant memory. Wasn’t Ephraim Sparkman the man