Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key (Tales of the Old Man Book 3)

Several years after the events of €œHelping Them Take the Old Man Down,€ Lieutenant Jimmy Randolph, a young veteran, can€t shake himself free from the traumas of war€"or the strange events at Perilous Base, a Texas military prison that housed one prisoner. Half a year earlier, Jimmy had come to Perilous as a last resort, a special interrogator meant to crack the silence of a mysterious century-old man who had said nothing for five years. Now, unsettled in a civilian world, he is summoned to act by a series of inexplicable events that lead him closer to understanding both himself and the prisoner he knew only as "Methuselah."

A 24,000-word novella, "Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key" is the fourth tale in William Preston's "Old Man" series; each story first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. The first two stories, "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" and "Clockworks," are available together as an e-book via Amazon. "Unearthed," the third story, is also available as an e-book. As of spring, 2014, a fifth and final story is in progress.

The stories do not tell the longer narrative in chronological order. The second and third stories both take place prior to the first; the events of the fourth story occur several years after the conclusion of the first. The author recommends that you read the stories in the order they have appeared rather than in chronological order.

Reviews

€œEach in His Prison, Thinking of the Key€ is a powerful tale of a veteran of the American war in Iraq and his struggles to reconcile the opposing realities of the violence, desperation and grief inflicted by the war versus the seemingly unaffected life of those back at home.

The story paints a stark contrast between the everyday existence of Jimmy's girlfriend and her friends and the soul-wrenching memories Jimmy had of his time with the prisoner. Life seems mundane and unresolved until Jimmy catches a news story about a man remarkably similar to his escaped prisoner. Then he sees €œa dark passage and a silhouetted figure seated at the end, lifting his head, eyes open and daring him to look back,€ and the chase is on.

€"Louis West, Tangent

The series is an homage to €œDoc Savage€ pulp heroes. But as with the other stories, there is more to the story than that.

Preston looks at issues of the evil men have done, even when it is rationalised through doing a greater good, or just doing plain evil€"whether it€s Stalinist purges, or waterboarding/Abu Ghraib. The new character, Jimmy Randolph, has to some extent been there/done that, but his special talents are to be used to get inside the head of the Old Man, and to seek out or create good, rather than brainwash to remove the evil.

The story neatly entwines a current narrative with recently finished events, so we know that something has happened, which Jimmy has to work his way through, in addition to the combat stress prior to that. And, quite charmingly, the Old Man as a pulp magazine hero is seen to be just that (you€ll have to read the story).

€"Mark West, BestSF

At its heart, this is a moral story.

€œYou couldn€t locate or understand the self by looking inward. You could only make sense of a self by observing its actions in the world. A good human was not a steady noun but a sequence of unexpected verbs. No matter if one sat in contemplation or acted for all the world to see: one became a full self by doing.€

There€s a strong hint here, appropriate given the story€s origin, of superhero vs supervillain, with the moral blacks and whites too starkly painted for reality€"or perhaps in the primary colors of the comics. Reality is the security state and the secret military base, which so often does wrong by intending to do right in its own lights, and whose personnel come in natural shades of gray. In this episode of the series, the security state isn€t the villain; they just aren€t capable of seeing the true picture and distinguishing the good.

€"Lois Tilton, Locus