If time travel ever becomes a reality, police forces could be able to prevent crimes such as murder by going back to erase them. This ability would seem to be enough to dissuade potential murderers, especially if they don’t have access to time-travel devices themselves. But there are as many anomalies in life as in time travel, as Joel Richards shows in the following story of murder and its motives.
Joel Richards studied economics at Tufts, Ohio State University, and the University of Stockholm. He is married to a woman from Denmark, and they’re both marathon runners (she won the 1981 Copenhagen marathon); currently he owns a small chain of athletic shoe and clothing stores in California. His work has appeared in Skiers World, Amazing, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
JOEL RICHARDS
Torrance stood at the door seal with Sam Turner, glad to have the company. The number on the door was 6002, the name Harold Brown. Brown was a billing specialist at Security Factors. Torrance didn’t know what a billing specialist was. Paper pushing of some sort. The job label, the firm’s name, Brown’s name—they all had a featureless blankness. The building where Brown lived didn’t help either. Billing specialists couldn’t afford residences of distinction. No glitter palace, no neo-brownstone. Just a cubicle off a hallway two thirds up your typical big city monolith—not even the penthouse—in an undistinguished quarter.
Torrance did know two other things about Brown. He was a sports fan, and he would soon be dead.
Torrance thumbed the hail button. A moment later the annunciator inquired, “Yes?”
“Is this Harold Brown?” Torrance asked.
“Who are you?” the voice countered. Not too surprising. The door seal was transparent from Brown’s side. He didn’t know Torrance or Turner on sight.
“San Francisco Police.” Torrance flashed his badge at the seal unit’s verifier. He thumbed his null-privacy warrant and the door became transparent from his side as well, registering on Brown’s panel that his privacy seal had been legally breached.
Brown looked startled. It was Brown all right. Lanky, rumpled looking, with thin hair brushed forward over a receding forehead. He had looked startled downtime with a laser hole in that forehead.
“We’d like to talk to you about your safety, Mr. Brown,” Torrance went on. When Brown stood motionless, he added, “May we come in?”
The seal shimmered off and the door opened. Immediately Torrance and Turner began to assimilate data on Brown beyond the physical appearance they already knew. The entryway was a study in fake bamboo and pseudo batik. Nouveau Indonesian, very trendy. Cooking smells of ghee and peanut. Vision of a living/dining area beyond, one wall open to the lights across the way, one wall the usual holoscreen. Lots of rattan furniture. Maybe this went beyond decor preferences. If they were neokarman, it would get sticky fast.
A surprisingly attractive woman, dark and sharp-featured, was clearing the table as Brown led them in.
“These men are from the police, Darby,” Brown said.
The woman cast them an intent look, then continued with the dirty dishes to the kitchen. She turned back to them with composed features.
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
“We’d like a few words with you, both of you,” Torrance said.
“About what?”
Torrance turned from her to Brown, who had been standing by, his long arms hanging by his side. Much slower than his wife.
“We understand that you’re going to the burnball game tonight, Mr. Brown. That right?”
“Yes. I’m going with Tom Jenner from down the hall. He got the tickets.”
“Is there anything wrong with that?” Brown’s wife put in, easing around to stand by Brown’s side, facing Torrance and Turner.
Torrance sighed. There’d be no indirect approach with that woman around.
“Mr. Brown, if you go to that game tonight, you’ll be killed. Murdered.”
“Good lord,” Brown murmured and sat down with a force and rough aim that threatened the rattan.
“Who? By whom?” Mrs. Brown demanded sharply.
Torrance looked to Turner to draw the fire. He wanted to study Brown.
“We don’t know,” Turner said.
“But you always know. You must!”
“Not this time.”
Mrs. Brown had a point. Since the advent of the time probe only two kinds of crimes were committed—unplanned crimes of passion and crimes that were meant not to seem crimes. But this was neither.
Torrance continued, “Mr. Brown, if you go to the game you will be gunned from the unreserved section across the arena. It could be a sniper from some concealed hideaway, but our preliminary probe rules that out. It could be anyone out of a huge, dark mass of people, firing through the bottom of a bag of peanuts.”
Torrance looked at Mrs. Brown. “You see the problem.”
“You can’t head off the killer, so you have to save the victim. Or try to.”
“Yes. And that’s a new one for us, I may add.”
Brown stiffened. “But who would want to kill me? Are you sure it’s me they’re after?”
“There are two ways of finding out. Ask you questions, or sit here with you, watching the game on your screen until we see if someone else is killed around about the seventh inning.”
“Yes,” Brown said slowly, “I can see that. But I must tell you that I know of no reason for anyone to kill me.” He cast an abashed look at his wife. “Frankly, my job is too insignificant to fight, much less kill, for.”
Turner suggested that for starters Brown call his neighbor and plead illness to avoid going to the game. That touched a nerve all right. The Browns’ eyes met. Neo-karmans both—antagonists of the time probe, defenders of the right to act, to shape one’s own karma, even kill or be killed without being temporally reversed.
But now it was Brown who faced the certainty of being killed if he followed his principles. Or perhaps they were more Mrs. Brown’s principles. Brown got up, turning his back on his wife without a word, and went into the bedroom. Mrs. Brown held her tongue, but her eyes bored his retreating back with a glare that Torrance thought could be little less in intensity than the lasgun that awaited Brown at the arena.
Torrance suggested coffee and accompanied Mrs. Brown to the kitchen to assist. A direct woman and a tight schedule demanded corresponding bluntness.
“Do you have a lover who’d like your husband out of the way? I’m sure that you realize that we care not at all about your relationships except and as a prevention to murder.”
Mrs. Brown hesitated only a moment. “Yes. His name’s Burt Roberts, and Harold doesn’t know about it. But he couldn’t be the killer.”
“Why not? Not the type?”
She smiled a smile both rueful and cruel. “He’s not going to the game, I would have been in his bed in an hour.”
She gave Torrance the address of the bed, and he sent Sam out to tail Roberts. Then Torrance and Mr. and Mrs. Brown sat around watching a not very interesting game and drinking a lot of coffee. At about the second inning Mrs. Brown excused herself to make a call. At about the seventh inning there was a disturbance in the stands, with a quick pan to a medic unit being dispatched to a citizen in distress. The citizens around him seemed also to be in a distress of a more animated sort. But then the action quickened, and the camera returned to the scene of a rare double homer. After a while Torrance left. Mr. and Mrs. Brown sat glaring at each other.
* * * *
You’re not supposed to talk police business with your woman. Torrance had an out here. Her name was Barbro Vik and she was police, too; more precisely, a police psychologist. There were a lot more of those than field detectives. There were a lot more crimes of passion than the invisible crimes calling for detection.
Torrance wanted a psychologist’s insight. This psychologist was slightly built, not beautiful but striking, with waves of dark hair, high cheekbones, and a mouth a bit too large and mobile for her face. Aesthetically. Not at all too large and mobile for what Torrance and countless others could fantasize. Barbro Vik believed in using and enjoying her stronger attributes, though selectively. She had found Torrance’s mind and libido simpatico, and they had shared good conversation and erotic moments before.
Peter Torrance had a small cottage down the rickety Greenwich steps of Telegraph Hill. It was rainy season the first time Barbro had visited, and she had slipped on the green-algaed wood, skidding down two steps on her butt, then another five feet along the slick wood of an inclined ramp. Torrance had offered to pay the cleaning bill for her skirt and to massage her aching rear. She had accepted both offers on the spot, though she had known him only two hours. The relationship had prospered over the years. The secret, Torrance thought, being to keep decent intervals.
Barbro liked visiting the cottage for other reasons. Together with its small brick patio and the overgrown lushness of its vegetation, it was a retreat that Torrance could never have rented or bought. It had been a legacy from his father, a noted commodity speculator who had died— unfortunately for Torrance—during a losing streak. The cottage, princely enclave though it was, was in fact the estate’s only asset of value left unencumbered. Torrance could feel his father in it sometimes, more than in the home Torrance had shared with his parents—not the bluff, risk-seeking man of his public face, but the questing mind and the intuitive spirit that found the cottage both an ideal vantage and retreat. Barbro had that kind of mind and spirit, too.
“Why do you think your man’s mad?” she asked, poking about his spice rack and mixing the salad dressing by feel.
“Because I can’t think of a sane reason for killing aimlessly.”
“You’re sure it was aimless? How close did you look at this guy Hansen’s life?”
Torrance gave the sauteing mushrooms a stir with his fork, sampling one. “We didn’t have to look. Hansen was the fourth one killed.”
“Fourth!” Barbro watched a too large stream of marjoram pour into her dressing, then looked at it in exasperation. “And who’d they give the Jehovah seat to? Not you?”
“By default. The big guns are all too busy with the assassination.”
Barbro gave him a look of compassion. “Poor Peter. But why Hansen?”
“Fifty-five-year-old widower. No near relatives. Inconsequential job. All in all, the least likely effect on the future.” He smiled thinly, “Though, in retrospect, we could have probably done best with our first victim. No apparent loss there.”
Barbro started toward the table with the salad. Torrance spared a moment for the shifting play of light on her sheen skirt as she came within the candle’s aura.
“How are you going to handle that at the press conference tomorrow?” she tossed back over her shoulder.
“With luck the assassination will attract the flak. But the party line is that Hansen was the second victim. Failing to find the killer, we saved the first—whose identity is screened by the Temporal Anonymity Act—and Hansen was the next, at which point we discovered that it was a random killing. We’ve hypnoed the others to forgetfulness, of course.”
“But you’re still not sure it’s random?”
“Pretty sure—but maybe tied into the assassination. Or triggered by it. In the old days they had waves of similar crimes, murders or whatever, with the publicity from one encouraging others, didn’t they?”
She nodded. “Hijackings, kidnappings. They’re more your copycat crimes.”
“Any common profiles there?”
“Nothing too startling or helpful. They’re done by loners, mainly. Often paranoid. Feel put upon by society. I’ll see if I can dig up some formal studies for you, but it’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”
He looked at her with present affection and a hint of lust to follow. “We’ll work on other things tonight.”
She met his smile. “We always do.”
* * * *
The mayor had preempted the press conference to his offices on the theory that any national exposure was better than none. Assassination of the President was shocking, deplorable, and a black mark against any city. But the black mark was there and wouldn’t go away. What remained was the opportunity to posture as a man of strength during a national crisis.
The stadium murder held no such stature. The first overt crime, profitless and likely mad, since the time probe’s advent, it was totally local and totally lacking in opportunity for statesmanlike mien. The mayor would have liked to exclude the subject from the press conference, but the press would have none of it. And worse, outside the hall local radicals were scuffling and protesting the use of the time probe to reverse karma—anyone’s and everyone’s—as reversal of the assassination would surely do.
The conference was opened by the western field director of the National Security Agency, who acknowledged the mayor’s introduction and then turned to the welter of cameras and reporters.
“I have a brief statement, ladies and gentlemen, which I hope will anticipate many of your questions. Afterward I will answer as many of them that remain that I can, consonant with national security.
“As we all know, the President was assassinated here in San Francisco three days ago. A cache of high explosives had been buried below the skimmerway, probably under the guise of road work. We believe that the explosion’s trigger was the rather narrow frequency band of the President’s emergency communicator, which accompanies him always and is always energized. A tight aperture reception channel, pointing straight up, was likely used to ensure that the President’s vehicle was directly above the explosive charge.
“The screening process is going on now. The problem, of course, is that while we know the time of the assassination, we do not know the time the explosives were planted. The President’s trip to open the Three Power peace conference had been laid on for over six months, with parts of the route a virtual certainty to any thinking man. Indeed, there may be other explosive caches under alternate routes. So we have had to set up our temporal cameras over a span of six months or more. Even with super-speed scanning, we have six months of real time to wade through.
“Within a day, or two at the most, we expect to pinpoint the time of the explosive implantation. It will be filmed and the film held in no-time stasis. We shall then arrest the assassins and remove the explosives. Your story will, of course, be a different one then. It will be the story of an unsuccessful assassination, the perpetrators known for some months. The President will be with us again. The peace conference, which has been in adjournment, will in this repaired reality have been ongoing for several days.
“I will now answer those of your questions that I can. Please identify yourself and ask away.”
The commotion—the waving of hands, arms, and bodies to attract attention—was prodigious. The director stabbed his finger.
“Roy Thorner, Associated Press. Mr. Director, the several-day delay in real time will result in dislocations— changes in the future that we will experience relative to what would have been had you avoided the assassination by simply rerouting the President’s approach to the conference hall. Why was that not done?”
“We considered the positive advantages of avoiding this dislocation. We considered it more important to apprehend the assassins. Otherwise, they might well do it again elsewhere, elsewhen. If we had done as you say, the assassination would not actually have taken place in the reality we are now living, and we’d not have known of the attempt. One of the common paradoxes we have to deal with.”
The director paused and extended a finger across the room.
“Valerie Townsend, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Can you hazard why this assassination was attempted—done, actually? Surely the assassins know that they’ll be caught and the assassination reversed.”
The director pulled on his pipe. “As you say, we can only hazard. We could be dealing with mentalities that are savoring these few days of grisly success as reward enough— even knowing that these memories will be soon reversed. Or they could be counting on the lesser ‘success’ of being arrested and tried publicly for what will be the attempt, not the fruition, of such an assassination. We can only guess at this point, which makes us even more anxious to catch the criminals. Does that answer your question?”
“Could it be,” the St. Louis reporter persisted, “that another major power could have engineered this assassination to test our readiness while without our elected President, or even to attack us while we are leaderless—hoping to obliterate San Francisco and preclude a reversal of the assassination?”
It was minutes before the director could speak over the ensuing uproar.
“I cannot answer that question directly. I can say that our armed forces were on full combat alert at the time of the assassination. This alert had been ordered by the President based on the warning of one of our prescients, who, however, could not zero in on any specifics for his concerns. It could have been the assassination. It could have been something else. We’ll never know. And if it were as you hypothesize, all the more reason that the peace conference proceed.”
Another reporter had his turn. “Brent Curley, Washington Post. Do you see any tie-in between the recent stadium murder and the assassination?”
The mayor caught Torrance’s eye as the director spoke.
“We’ve discovered no linkage as yet, and, frankly, have no reason to pursue that line of inquiry. Police detective Torrance is with us, however; he has prime responsibility for that investigation. I’ll ask him to present his findings.”
Torrance winced at the introduction and slowly rose to his feet. “Mr. Curley, our findings are minimal. You’ve seen the accounts of the stadium murder; perhaps you’ve written one. No one in the vicinity of the weapon noticed anything out of the ordinary, and the temporal camera tells us nothing of use in that darkened arena. We have hypothesized that the assassination of the President may have stimulated a copycat crime, except that they’re not similar in one most important regard. The President’s assassination was a well-directed crime. The stadium murder was a random one.”
“How do you know that?” Curley followed up, taking his glasses away from his craggy face as if to emphasize the point.
“Failing to locate the killer, we saved the victim in order to determine whether he was the specific object of the attack. He wasn’t. Mr. Hansen died in his stead.”
“So the murderer actually killed twice?”
“Yes.” And more, friend, Torrance thought, relieved at the question’s phrase. “But neither of these victims seems to relate to the assassination.”
A lady by Curley’s side broke in, “Could it be that they were of the assassination group, being killed to avoid later interrogation?”
“No sense to that. If, unlikely though it seems, one of them is of the assassination conspiracy, we’ll step back and arrest him before he is killed in the arena.”
Another man rose nearby. “Carl Brody, Texarkana Sentinel. Why wasn’t there a forward probe of the President’s movements to head off the assassination?”
A collective groan and wave of laughter swept the room. Torrance gestured to the director, though he could as well have answered. So could ninety-five percent of those in the room, Brody not among them.
“Because of the nature of time and the probe machine, Mr. Brody. The past exists. The future doesn’t yet. So the machine can travel only to the past and then ahead to the timepoint from which it sent the traveler, plus a few nanoseconds of relay time. It can’t probe the future beyond its own existence.”
The press conference dissolved in the tension release of laughter and irresolution, tailing off to a ragged halt. Torrance filed out with the mayor and wondered what to do next.
“One of the pluses of this job is that when you don’t know what to do next, someone tells you.”
Sam Turner looked up at Torrance, who had delved a message from the day’s mail and was waving it about. Turner got up ponderously, walked over to Torrance’s battered desk, and took the message from Torrance’s hand. He walked back to his desk and creaked heavily into his seat to read it.
“I killed Hansen at Tuesday’s burnball game. I will kill tonight during the final inning. Be in a clearly marked San Francisco Police car at the Mission Street gate following the game and I will turn myself in.”
“Very melodramatic,” Turner observed. “But also to the point.”
“He’ll make great detectives of us, Sam, if he’s not a burnout.”
“You mean if he really does it? Turns himself in? Kills again? Or is he a copycat of the first copycat?”
Torrance laughed, perhaps the appropriate response to the innumerable and sometimes absurd permutations possible. He reached for his coffee cup, whose contents had already ringed some of the day’s correspondence.
“I assume the letter can’t be probed,” Turner went on.
“Right. Called in on the voice-to-fax circuit from who knows where.”
Turner’s jowly face broke into a grin.
“I think we should go and be turned into great detectives. Particularly considering that I can’t think of a better line of action.”
Torrance had traded his laugh for a look of perturbation.
“Sam, there’s more to this somehow, someway. But I don’t see it. I do see that we’re being jerked around on someone else’s string. So let’s be ready for anything.”
Turner sighed. “Peter, how do we get more ready than we are?”
“We expect anything, not just what we’re told to expect. And we take Barbro Vik. If we can get her.”
“Why her?” Turner raised a heavy eyebrow.
“She’s a psychologist. Maybe she can spot an abnormal, possibly dangerous, situation before we can.”
“That’s a quality that might come in handy,” Turner said. “In fact, I’m willing to bet on it.”
Police skimmers of the current era were not meant for congenial social gatherings of more than two. Barbro Vik sat in the back, a less obtrusive vantage point. The view ahead was bleak—a study of humanity in the mass as they strode, sauntered, or slouched into the arena.
“We’ve narrowed it down,” Turner noted. “From a Bay Area of seven million to eighty thousand.”
“None of whom we know,” Torrance grinned. “The players excepted. Maybe Willie Gervin did it. He’s having a bad season. Could use the publicity.”
“One of them knows you,” Barbro said from the back seat.
“Christ!” Torrance swore. “It’s one of the reporters from the news conference. I’d recognize that sharklike approach anywhere.”
By then the man had approached the skimmer, Torrance’s side. Shambling in appearance, alert in manner, he leaned down to address Torrance through the open window.
“Expecting a repeat performance, Lieutenant? Anything here for a hungry reporter?”
“I thought your field was political analysis, not murder,” Torrance answered.
“It is. But occasionally they overlap. Seems to happen a lot in San Francisco.”
“Twice, Curley, twice,” Torrance said acerbically. “Not a lot. Two murders in twelve years.”
“But within two days of each other. Something of a coincidence, no? And three would put it far beyond the realm of chance.”
“Do you know something worth telling?” Torrance asked mildly. “Or are you playing at my job?”
The reporter reached inside his rumpled tweed jacket and Torrance felt Sam’s leg stiffen beside him. Curley extracted a pipe, already filled, and proceeded to light it.
“Reporting can be detecting, too, Lieutenant. But, no, I don’t know anything. I’m just having fun guessing. And looking forward to having fun at the game. Think Gervin can break out of his slump?”
“He’d better, if the Seals want to make a run of it,” Torrance said equably.
“Right,” Curley said and thumped the side of the skimmer. “See you around.”
“The man has his points,” Barbro said, watching the reporter meld into the crowd. Torrance and Turner turned over their shoulders to look at her. “He let you off the hook.”
“He may know as much as we do,” Turner said. “How about a copy of that letter showing up on his fax machine? Maybe the killer wants publicity this time.”
“Could be. Any thoughts, Barbro?”
“We may have a zealot on our hands if Sam’s right. Someone wanting a forum to argue a cause—like a public trial to spout it out.”
“If he hasn’t already, to someone like Curley,” Turner said.
From the innards of the arena came the crowd’s throaty roar. Turner switched on the sports band. The Seals were taking the field.
“Do we really care whether the Seals win this one?” Torrance asked. “Whether Willie Gervin breaks out of his slump?”
“Not I,” said Barbro.
“Let’s have a cup of coffee,” Turner said.
* * * *
About the seventh inning the tension started mounting. Everyone in the car was fidgety. The game was close, and no one was leaving the arena.
“I wish they’d break this game open,” Torrance said irritably. “It’d thin the crowd.” He thumbed the comm button to Priestly inside. “Anything doing there?”
“Negative,” came the flat reply. “Good game, though.”
Torrance grunted and switched off.
The game stayed tight to the end. At the end a man was killed.
“There’s nothing I can do,” Priestly’s voice crackled testily. “By the time I can get to where I can guess it came from, the guy’ll be out of the arena along with eighty thousand others.”
Already the first few fans were skittering down the ramps, some bounding in a victory exuberance, others merely driven to a faster pace by a desire to beat the mob out of the parking area. They clearly had no idea that a killing had taken place. The rivulet swelled to a stream of humanity, growing ever thicker as its speed slowed by its own press. A figure detached itself from the mass and started toward the police skimmer.
“Oh, no!” Turner groaned. “Curley again!”
“I’ll get rid of him,” Torrance said.
Curley shambled over to the driver’s side, his jacket open and his shirt billowing over his belt. He opened his mouth, but Torrance waved him off.
“Disappear, Curley. It’s dangerous. Watch from the sidelines if you want, but get out of the way.”
Curley stopped short a few feet from the window, his hands moving aimlessly, then reaching inside his jacket. His voice showed no indecisiveness but flowed on slowly and evenly. “Peter ...” Barbro said at the same time, but Curley’s voice steamrollered droningly on, “You don’t have it right yet, Lieutenant. I’m your killer. Now I’m going to kill you.”
Curley’s hand was emerging smoothly from within the jacket and was holding a gun, not a pipe. Almost excruciatingly, it leveled on Torrance’s face.
Curley pulled the trigger. Torrance pitched forward, scorched through the eye, the beam passing through his head and diagonally down through the upholstery and out the skimmer floor.
Turner tried to break his personal deep freeze as the lasgun swung slowly toward him.
From the back seat Barbro Vik shot Curley through the heart.
* * * *
The police commissioner was there, and Barbro found his presence oppressive. This was far more than a police matter to Barbro. She found the time-consuming deferences to rank, the solicitous attendance of the underlings, hard to take. Turner was the only sympathetic face. He wanted his partner and friend back. Barbro wanted her friend and lover. The commissioner cared nothing for the emotional context. He simply wanted a policeman back and a murder to go away.
The crackling, ozone-tinged atmosphere of the probe room didn’t help any. Everyone was milling around mentally and physically from the impact of the camera run-through of Torrance’s murder, the time-reversed picture of Curley retreating to the stadium, the backtracking to Curley’s lethal blast across the arena.
“Quick reactions, Lieutenant,” the commissioner said to Barbro. “You were almost ahead of Curley.” He looked at Turner critically. Sam had been nowhere near his gun.
“Something felt wrong,” Barbro said. But not wrong enough fast enough for me to save you, Peter.
“Perhaps we should make more use of our psychologists in the field. Not keep them back at the office,” the commissioner considered. It was still a technical problem to him. He straightened and his voice became crisp. “Let’s get on with it.”
Harding and Samuels, the arresting detail, edged forward.
“Okay,” the commissioner said, “you’ve both got it down? You’re to wait for him at the turnstile as he arrives. You take him as he enters the arena, warn him of his rights, then bring him downtime to now.”
They nodded and stepped through the portal. A faint blurriness, and they were back with Curley between them. The two detectives propelled the reporter forward, and Samuels produced a lasgun which he handed to the commissioner. Barbro looked at Curley and the lasgun. As of now that gun had never been fired. At least not tonight. A flood of hope and relief fought with the anger that Curley’s face aroused.
Curley seemed neither discomfited, bewildered, nor angry. More amused. He raised an inquiring eyebrow.
“Take him to the interrogation room while we locate Torrance,” the commissioner directed, then raised his hand and addressed Curley. “You’re charged with two counts of murder. You can view the run-through at the room we’re going to. You’ve had the usual rights read to you. Additionally, you have a right to a lawyer during the interrogation. Want one?”
“Nope,” Curley said.
The commissioner motioned them out, then turned to Barbro.
“Why don’t you check Torrance’s office. He should be there—as I remember it now.”
Barbro nodded, her opinion of the commissioner’s sensitivity rising.
The corridor to Torrance’s office seemed interminably long. She noticed details she had never seen before— flyspecks, chipped paint, the indentations on the floor of a long-moved-away watercooler. And then there were the sounds. She stood at last at Torrance’s door and listened, ears turning to owl ears, nighttime acute. She heard a shuffling or rustling—something.
Barbro Vik took a long breath, knocked, and turned the knob.
Peter Torrance looked up at her from the clutter of his desk, puzzled but smiling faintly.
“Hi, Barb.”
She managed to make it to the chair by his desk and folded into it. She reached out a hand and covered his on the desk top. And she cried.
Torrance stood up and walked over to her. Standing above her he massaged her shaking shoulders, inhaling gratefully the scent of her hair.
“I can guess,” he said. “I remember going to the arena with you and Sam, and our killer never showed. When we got back to the station I was told that I had been killed but the killing reversed, the killer arrested before the game and brought to nowtime. But till now, I’ve been dead to you, in one memory line at least. Another memory told you that you’d left me here an hour ago. But there was only one way to tell. That it?”
Barbro nodded. Torrance kept on kneading her shoulders.
“It’s been kind of a deadtime for me. Something about being told you’ve been killed will do it to you. One thing—it’s got me thinking in different ways. I’ve got this mess figured out, but I needn’t have bothered. Curley’s going to tell us.”
Barbro looked up. “He’s in Interrogation 4 now.”
“Let’s go see him. If you don’t mind going around with a walking paradox.”
She got up shakily and smiled. “Funny—you don’t look paradoxical.”
Barbro reached for Peter’s hand.
* * * *
Torrance walked down the corridor, feeling a damned sight happier to be alive than someone who’d never been killed.
The commissioner looked up when Torrance and Barbro walked in. So did Curley.
“We’ve just shown him the camera run-through.”
The commissioner turned back to Curley, who still had a fascinated, bemused expression on his craggy face.
“Proud of it?”
“Proud’s not the word,” Curley said slowly. “Fascinated. To see myself killing and being killed. That’s fascinating.”
“How about enlightening, Curley?” Torrance asked. “Or should I call you Enlightened One? Or liberating. That’s a better word, maybe. Think killing me will free you from the wheel?”
“Wheel?” the commissioner asked.
“Wheel of life. Cycle of rebirth. He’s a neokarman, isn’t he? Or haven’t we found that out yet?”
Curley looked at Torrance with new respect. It made Torrance angry, and he fought to put it down.
“No scoop on him yet from Washington,” the commissioner said. “He’s got no record, so police sources are no good. We’re trying other agencies.”
“We know all we need to know,” Torrance said, sinking into a chair. It felt good. He stretched out his legs. “Curley’s trying his own variation—to work through several lifetimes of human experience in one go-round. To know himself and the universe in all sorts of ways. As a killer and as a victim. Right, Curley?”
Curley nodded and smiled ineffably.
“What’s the point?” the commissioner demanded angrily. “We’ve reversed tonight’s two killings, but the evidence of them—not to mention Hansen’s—will put him away for a lifetime of psychic reengineering. It can’t be worth it!”
Torrance nodded to Curley.
“There’s no crime,” Curley said. “Not even on your camera. There won’t be, after tonight.”
The commissioner stared at him.
“Tonight,” Curley went on patiently, “they reverse the assassination. I was sent here from D.C. to cover the assassination. No assassination, no Curley in San Francisco.”
“No crime,” Torrance nodded.
“It’s all been deadtime. Or will be deadtime,” Curley said. “That’s the police word for it, isn’t it? New memories for us all coming right up!”
“Then why do it?” the commissioner demanded in exasperation. “Again, what’s the point?”
“Can you know good till you know evil, commissioner? Can you know either unless you practice them—not one, but both? Do the terms have any individual validity beyond a general view of morality? I’m willing to take some risks to work through all of this. I want to get beyond good and evil, free myself from these ties, and then move on—to enlightenment, I hope.”
“By killing?”
“Yes, even that. What do I care about those people? You’ve reversed or will reverse all the killings anyway. I’ve had a unique chance here. If I can gain understanding, get where I want by killing . . . and being killed . . . and living again—then I’ll reach for it!”
“That’s perverse! Worse—it’s perverted, egomaniacal, amoral!”
“By your lights. But I don’t care much about moral judgments—yours anyway. I could argue that neither did Buddha. I’ve handed out less lasting trauma than Gautama. He walked away from his family when they got in the way of his search for enlightenment.”
Torrance shook his head. “The commissioner’s right, Curley. Equating yourself favorably with the Buddha— that’s megalomania. Do you really see yourself as a bodhisattva?”
“Let’s just say that I’m not sure I’m ready to leave this world after working through a lifetime’s stream of unalloyed good karma like my more doctrinaire brethren. Or what they’re so sure is ‘good’ karma.” Curley smiled quizzically. “Being a newspaperman may have something to do with it. You see so much of the perverse, dark side of humanity. Maybe that’s not a part of the human experience to be discarded without trying it. Well, I had a no-risk shot at finding out.”
Curley looked about him, scanning faces. No one spoke.
“I can go back to Washington and play it by the book,” he went on. “Got a lifetime before me to pile up that old good karma. But maybe this deadtime still accrues to my karma and gets me beyond—to an awareness where past karma doesn’t matter. Maybe my essence spans several time lines. And, yes, maybe in one of them I will reach release from the wheel.”
“But you had to kill to find out,” the commissioner said scornfully. “All this karma crap can’t explain that away. You’re a cold-blooded killer!”
“Nowtime only,” Curley said.
* * * *
In Washington, D.C., an award-winning journalist makes an appointment with a psychoprober to deal with anxieties he’s never had before.
In San Francisco a detective wakes up at night— sometimes in his lover’s arms—with dreams and fears he can’t localize. Sometimes she wakes up in his arms, crying for reasons she can’t explain. They see a lot more of each other than they used to. Some unseen bond has pulled them together. They can’t tell you why.