The Visible Man and Other Stories Read Free

prohibited the transportation of prisoners on automated roads. Perhaps it was just some more of the expected psychological torture, taking the slowest possible route so that Rowan would have time to build up a greater charge of fear and dreadful anticipation for what awaited him in Boston.
    For Rowan, the trip had already become interminable. His memory of the jail in Newburyport, of his crime, of his hasty trial, of his past life—all had become hazy and indistinct. It seemed as if he had been riding forever, on the road, going to Boston for the execution of his sentence. Only that was real and vivid: the slight swaying motion of the car, the seat upholstery sticking uncomfortably to his sweat-soaked back, the ridged rubber mat under his feet. The countryside they drove through was flat and empty, trees, meadows, cultivated fields, little streams, sometimes a boarded-up gas station or a long-abandoned roadside stand. The sky was a flat, washed-out blue, and the sunlight was thick and dusty. Occasionally they would bump over a pothole or a stretch of frost-buckled pavement—the State didn’t spend much anymore to keep up the secondary roads. The car’s electric engine made no sound at all, and the interior of the car was close and hot with the windows rolled up.
    Rowan found himself reluctantly watching the little motions of the steering wheel, apparently turning all by itself, driverless. That made him shiver. He knew intellectually, of course, that he was sitting on the front seat between the sheriff and the deputy, but he couldn’t see them. He could hear them breathing, and occasionally the deputy’s arm would brush against his own, but, for Rowan, they were invisible.
    He knew why they were invisible, but that didn’t make it any less spooky. When the State’s analysis computers had gone down into his mind and found the memories that proved him guilty, they had also, as a matter of course, implanted a very deep and very specific hypnotic injunction: from now on, George Rowan would not be able to see any other living creature. Apparently the injunction had not included trees and other kinds of vegetation, but it had covered animals and birds and people. He assumed that when he “saw” through invisible people—as he now “saw” the portions of the car that should have been blocked from sight by the sheriffs body—it was because his subconscious mind was extrapolating, creating a logical extension of the view from other visual data in order to comply with the spirit of the injunction. Nothing must be allowed to spoil the illusion. Nor could Rowan break it, although he knew what it was and how it had been created. It was too strong, and planted too deep. He was “blind” in a special and insidious way.
    There were a number of apparently sound reasons for doing this to convicted criminals. It made it almost impossible for a prisoner to escape or to resist his captors, for one thing, and the State psychologists also claimed that the resultant sense of supernatural isolation would engender an identity crisis in the prisoner, and so help contribute to his rehabilitation. Totally “blinding” the prisoners would accomplish both objectives in a more logical way. But the State administrators had been growing increasingly perverse over the years, and they chose the cruelest way. How much more terrible a thing this was than total blindness—to make the victim live in a sunlit empty world, haunted by ghosts and voices, pushed and punished by unseen forces, never knowing who was with him or what they were about to do to him. So the State men inflicted this on prisoners because it was cruel and they enjoyed it, just as they would enjoy torturing Rowan in Boston, driving him insane again and again in the name of psychological rehabilitation.
    At that moment, past Topsfield but not yet up to the Putnamville Reservoir, their right front tire blew out.
    They went into a terrifying spin. The world dissolved into a whirling