"In His Hand Was a Sub-machine Gun"

"The Vanishing Witnesses."

By Ross Rocklynne (1913-88; Wikipedia HERE; ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; and Project Gutenberg HERE).

Illustrated by Robert Fuqua (1905-59; ISFDb HERE).

First appearance: Fantastic Adventures, January 1941 (ISFDb HERE).

Short story (16 pages).

Online at Archive.org starting (HERE) and finishing (HERE).

   "And out of the invisibility into which their incredibly fast, yet normal, motion had placed them, three men were becoming visible!"

IT could be a brilliant, but destructive, notion: There's no need to speed up the criminals, just slow down the crime busters . . .

Main characters:

~ D. A. Parkins ("Boyle, you are going to be that witness! You are going to be kidnaped!"), Dick Boyle ("Wa-a-a-it a minute — whoa!” Boyle halted him. “I’m not sticking my neck in any death trap . . ."), Patricia Velney ("The State’s key witness! Without her, we haven’t got a case"), Etienne Montcliff ("chuckled, made a hopeless gesture. 'I saw you watching from the window. It is an amusing game. One tries to escape. One almost reaches his goal when — pouf'"), Tonio Pagli ("had been about to turn state’s evidence on the leader of a powerful gang when he had disappeared. Boyle didn’t like the sullen, anarchic gleam in his black eyes"), Haggart ("It couldn’t have been more than seven or eight days ago — though, as you doubtless know, days and nights pass so quickly — not more than eight or ten minutes each — that there’s no way to keep track of time"), Harrigan ("It’s a job of murder now"), and Arno Vachel ("The master mind apparently was Arno Vachel, a physicist who had been disbarred from one of the big universities. It was he who had discovered the metabolism-slowing radiation, and its accompanying maintaining radiation").

Gosh-Wow science in a footnote:

  "Body metabolism has much to do with our time-sense, or our conception of the passage of time. And the metabolism-slowing ray of Dr. Vachel no doubt utilizes this apparent connection. Time is a relative thing, and perhaps its normal rate of passage is not normal at all, but simply a manifestation of our own physical reaction to it. Thus, the metabolism ray might be called, with more accuracy, a time-ray. At least, no scientific argument can exist against the paradox of time, when it obviously depends on so variant a yardstick as physical energy expenditure. — Ed."

Comment: If Rocklynne had taken more care with his plot, then this could have been, but isn't, a real winner.

Typo: So which is it, John or Arno?

References:

- Our author seems to be tapping into the myth of Sisyphus:

  "In Greek mythology, Sisyphus or Sisyphos is the founder and king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth). He reveals Zeus's abduction of Aegina to the river god Asopus, thereby incurring Zeus's wrath. His subsequent cheating of death earns him eternal punishment in the underworld, once he dies of old age. The gods forced him to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity. Through the classical influence on contemporary culture, tasks that are both laborious and futile are therefore described as Sisyphean." (Wikipedia HERE).

- "They were actually living, having their being, at a vastly slower rate than their captors. To their captors, they were but infinitely slowly moving statues; while the captors were, in comparison, almost streaks of lightning!":

  An episode of the original Star Trek series rests upon a similar premise. (WARNING! SPOILERS! Wikipedia HERE).

Resource:

- Earlier we dealt with Ross Rocklynne's "Atom of Death" (HERE).

The bottom line:

   “The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitude.”

   ― Aldous Huxley

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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