Echo Round His Bones

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Echo Round His Bones (1967) is a story written by Thomas M. Disch. The story surounds one Captain Nathan Hansard of a future United States Army. In the this future a machine has been developed to transmit matter instantly. The United States has created a Mars base to which supplies and personnel are transmitted regularly. Captain Hansard is going to be stationed there and thus is transmitted.

At that moment Captain Hansard discovers an interesting and unknown side effect of the process, a copy of himself is made. This copy is unknown to the original and only slightly interacts with the original world. Hansard finds that he can walk through buildings with minimal effort and no one from the original world can see him. The only items he can fully interact with are other copies of people or items sent through the matter transmitter. This creates some peoblems, most importantly food, water, and the other people echos that have been transmitted. Hansard is able to located a transmitter which sends water to Mars and thus makes an echo of all the water it transmits. However, there is no transmitter for food supplies. This creates two problems, one is he has no food to consume, second, that there are a group of echos of men that have solved this problem by killing the echos of people transport and eatting them. Hansard must avoid this group in order to remain alive.

Hansard is saved when he finds the copies of the inventor and his wife, which are being provisioned by the orginal inventor which understands that this copying process is taking place. Together they are able to aviod the group of men looking for them for a time. Eventually a showdown takes place where Hansard kills the leader of this group.

However another plot line exists where the world is faced with nuclear disaster. A order has been sent to Mars with the original Hansard to launch the Nuclear weapons on a certain date. The copy of Hansard and the inventor decided that this must be stopped at all costs, but they need to be able to communicate with someone in the orginal world. They determine that this might be done by a copy occuping the same space as the orginal and subtly affecting the orginals mind when in a relaxed state. The copy of Hansard goes to Mars and links up with his orginal when he is sleeping and is able to communicate a plan to avoid the destruction of the Earth. The orginal Hansard is able to build some transmitters himself and place them in specific spots on the earth and transmits the earth to the other side of the sun to avoid the nuclear weapons.

This article is uncategorized. Please categorize this article to list it with similar articles. (June 2008)