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Looking for help to find a science fiction short story about a man send to the past to serve his sentence, and at the end when he is happy, married and successful, his is recaptured by a co-worker who in reality is an undercover time detective looking for him, and he is sent to Hiroshima (or Nagasaki) one hour before the bomb and the short story ends there.

I read this short story about 15 years ago in a science fiction anthology whose title I do not remember, out of the Salt Lake City library and Google is not of any help.

user14111
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Ivan Torres
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1 Answers1

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Assuming you remember the Hiroshima part wrong, you may be thinking of "My Object All Sublime", a 1961 short story by Poul Anderson, which was also the (unaccepted) answer to the question A short story where criminals are sent back in time as punishment?. You might be able to read it at Google Books. Does any of these covers ring a bell?

The story is narrated by the time cop, under cover as a friend of the exiled criminal in 20th century Chicago. The ending:

His excitement softened. He looked from the window and the night, inward, toward the bedrooms. "And my wife and kids," he finished, most gently. "No, I wouldn't go back, no matter what happened."

I took a final breath of my cigar. "You have done rather well."

Liberated from his gray mood, he grinned at me. "You know, I think you believe that yarn."

"Oh, I do." I stubbed out the cigar, rose, and stretched. "The hour is late. We'd better be going."

He didn't notice at once. When he did, he came out of his chair like a big cat. "We?"

"Of course." I drew a nerve gun from my pocket. He stopped in his tracks. "This sort of thing isn't left to chance. We check up. Come along, now."

The blood drained from his face. "No," he mouthed, "no, no, no, you can't, it isn't fair, not to Amalie, the children—"

"That," I told him, "is part of the punishment."

I left him in Damascus, the year before Tamerlane sacked it.

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user14111
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    Part of the punishment is to punish the wife and children? – Whelkaholism Oct 08 '19 at 14:42
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    @Whelkaholism I think that being "part of the punishment" is for the man to feel the anguish of being torn away from people he loves, not the other way around... though that likely will be collateral. At least, that's how I interpreted it. – Daevin Oct 08 '19 at 15:21
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    It would hardly be a punishment to sentence the criminal to a life they prefer to the one they were exiled from as a result of their crime(s). – Upper_Case Oct 08 '19 at 16:57
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    @Daevin: I think you misinterpreted it, then. Michaels says that it's not fair to his wife and children, and the narrator says that that's part of the punishment. (The story leaves it pretty "open" how much we should sympathize with Michaels vs. the narrator, how much we would agree with each if we understood the full story. I think that this statement by the narrator is intended to show that, at least in this respect, our beliefs about justice align with Michaels' rather than the narrator's.) – ruakh Oct 08 '19 at 18:03
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    Thank you so much! Yes, that is the short story I was looking for. Best regards! – Ivan Torres Oct 08 '19 at 18:30
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    @IvanTorres You're welcome! You can officially accept my answer by clicking on the check mark next to it. – user14111 Oct 08 '19 at 19:31
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    @ruakh I disagree, I think the general context is around Michaels having a family to lose, not specifically punishing the family. It makes little sense to punish the family that wouldn't have existed if he wasn't put there in the first place. Why create a family to punish? It actually wouldn't make any sense to do that, unless the overall punishment was to give Michaels something to feel anguish about, making the family a secondary target of the punishment. – Daevin Oct 08 '19 at 19:57
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    @Daevin: Part of the punishment of Michaels is that this terrible thing is happening to the wife and children that he loves: namely, Michaels' sudden disappearance. This sort of thing is very common cross-culturally; see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_punishment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attainder, https://www.google.com/search?q=children+in+cages. – ruakh Oct 08 '19 at 20:18
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    @ruakh yes, that's what I mean: the intended punishment is ultimately to torment the perpetrator, with the punishment of the family being collateral/secondary. Essentially that Michaels' anguish is "part of the punishment", whereas the family's anguish is a means-to-an-end for punishing Michaels. It not being fair to the family is part of Michaels' punishment, not Michaels' absence being part of the family's punishment. – Daevin Oct 08 '19 at 20:48
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    @Daevin: Yes, exactly; you have it now. :-) – ruakh Oct 08 '19 at 22:34
  • On the good side for Michaels, the sacking of Damascus was well known to the people in advance. In fact, the citizens there sent emissaries to Tamarlane to ask for peace. If Michaels is as smart as he seems, he would have gotten himself out of there and, once again, gone over to the winning side as he did in WW2 in Poland. – user3429534 Aug 10 '23 at 11:54