Engineering Infinity (34 page)

The girl in the next seat giggled
nervously at all this, and Warren frowned at her. Gratification resonated in
him, and he struggled with his own strange excitement. Somehow, he realized as
the discussion went on around him, the horror of death coupled with his own
desire. This came surging up in him as an inevitable, vibrant truth.

Hesitantly he asked Ms Weiss, “Do
we have them... serial killers... now?”

She beamed, as she always did
when he saw which way her lecture was going. “No, and that is the point. Good
for you! Because we have neuro methods, you see. All such symptoms are detected
early - the misaligned patterns of mind, the urges outside the norm envelope -
and extinguished. They use electro and pharma, too.” She paused, eyelids
fluttering in a way he found enchanting.

Warren could not take his eyes
off her legs as he said, “Does that... harm?”

Ms Weiss eyed him oddly and said,
“The procedure - that is, a normalization of character before the fact of any,
ah, bad acts - occurs without damage or limitation of freedom of the, um,
patient, you understand.”

“So we don’t have serial killers
anymore?”

Ms Weiss’s broad mouth twisted a
bit. “No methods are perfect. But our homicide rates from these people are far
lower now.”

Boyd Carlos said from the back of
the class, “Why not just kill ‘em?” and got a big laugh.

Warren reddened. Ms Weiss’s
beautiful, warm eyes flared with anger, eyebrows arched. “That is the sort of
crime our society seeks to avoid,” she said primly. “We gave up capital
punishment ages ago. It’s uncivilized.”

Boyd made a clown face at this,
and got another laugh. Even the girls joined in this time, the chorus of their
high giggles echoing in Warren’s ears.

Sweat broke out all over Warren’s
forehead and he hoped no one would notice. But the girl in the seat across the
aisle did, the pretty blonde one named Nancy, whom he had been planning for
weeks to approach. She rolled her eyes, gestured to friends. Which made him
sweat more.

His chest tightened and he
thought furiously, eyes averted from the blonde. Warren ventured, “How about
the victims who might die? Killing killers saves lives.”

Miss Weiss frowned. “You mean
that executing them prevents murders later?”

Warren spread his hands. “If you
imprison them, can’t they murder other prisoners?”

Miss Weiss blinked. “That’s a
very good argument, Warren, but can you back it up?”

“Uh, I don’t -”

“You could research this idea.
Look up the death rate in prisons due to murderers serving life sentences.
Discover for yourself what fraction of prison murders they cause.”

“I’ll... see.” Warren kept his
eyes on hers.

Averting her eyes, blinking, Miss
Weiss seemed pleased, bit her lip and moved on to the next study subject.

That ended the argument, but
Warren thought about it all through the rest of class. Boyd even came over to
him later and said, with the usual shrugs and muttering, “Thanks for backin’ me
up, man.”

Then he sauntered off with Nancy
on his arm. A bit later Warren saw Boyd holding forth to his pals, mouth big
and grinning, pointing toward Warren and getting more hooting from the crowd.
Nancy guffawed too, lips lurid, eyes on Boyd.

That was Warren’s sole triumph
among the cool set, who afterward went back to ignoring him. But he felt the
sting of the class laughing all the same. His talents lay in careful work, not
in the zing of classroom jokes. He was methodical, so he should use that.

So he did the research Miss Weiss
had suggested. Indeed, convicted murderers committed the majority of murders in
prison. What did they have to lose? Once a killer personality had jumped the
bounds of society, what held them back? They were going to serve out their life
sentences anyway. And a reputation for settling scores helped them in prison,
even gave them weird prestige and power.

These facts simmered in him for
decades. He had never forgotten that moment - the lurid lurch of Ms Sheila
Weiss’s mouth, the rushing terror and desire lacing through him, the horrible
high, shrill giggle from that girl in the next seat. Or the history of humanity’s
horror, and the strange ideas it summoned up within him.

His next jogg took him further
backward in time, as it had to, for reasons he had not bothered to learn.
Something about the second law of thermodynamics, he gathered.

He slid sideways in space-time,
following the arc of Earth’s orbit around the galaxy - this he knew, but it was
just more incomprehensible technical detail that was beside his point entirely.
He simply commanded the money and influence to make it happen. How it happened
was someone else’s detail.

As was the diagnosis, which he
could barely follow, four months before. Useless details. Only the destination
mattered; he had three months left now, at best. His stomach spiked with
growling aches and he took more of the pills to suppress his symptoms.

In that moment months before,
listening to the doctor drone on, he had decided to spend his last days in a
long space-time jogg. He could fulfil his dream, sliding backward into eras “nested,”
as the specialists said, close to his own. Places where he could understand the
past, act upon it, and bring about good. The benefits of his actions would come
to others, but that was the definition of goodness, wasn’t it - to bring joy
and life to others.

As he decided this, the vision
coming sharp and true, he had felt a surge of purpose. He sensed vaguely that
this glorious campaign of his was in some way redemption for his career, far
from the rough rub of the world. But he did not inspect his impulses, for that
would blunt his impact, diffuse his righteous energies.

He had to keep on.

He came out of the transflux cage
in a city park. It was the mid-1970s, before Warren had been born.

His head spun sickly from the
flexing gravity of the jogg. Twilight gathered in inky shadows and a recent
rain flavoured the air. Warren carefully noted the nearby landmarks. As he
walked away through a dense stand of scraggly trees, he turned and looked back
at each change of direction. This cemented the return route in his mind.

He saw no one as night fell. With
a map he found the cross street he had expected. His clothing was jeans and a
light brown jacket, not out of place here in Danville, a small Oklahoma town,
although brown mud now spattered his tennis shoes. He wiped them off on grass
as he made his way into the street where Frank Clifford lived. The home was an
artful Craftsman design, two windows glowing with light. He searched for a sure
sign that Clifford lived here. The deviations from his home timeline might be
minor, and his prey might have lived somewhere else. But the mailbox had no
name on it, just the address. He had to be sure.

He was far enough before Clifford’s
first known killing, as calculated by his team. Clifford had lived here for
over a month, the spotty property tax records said, and his pattern of
killings, specializing in nurses, had not emerged in the casebooks. Nor had
such stylized killings, with their major themes of bondage in nurse uniforms
and long sexual bouts, appeared along Clifford’s life history. Until now.

The drapes concealed events
inside the house. He caught flickering shadows, though, and prepared his
approach. Warren made sure no one from nearby houses was watching him as he
angled across the lawn and put his foot on the first step up to the front door.

This had worked for the first
three disposals. He had gained confidence in New Haven and Atlanta, editing out
killers who got little publicity but killed dozens. Now he felt sure of
himself. His only modification was to carry the pistol in his coat pocket,
easier to reach. He liked the feel of it, loaded and ready.
Avenging angel
, yes, but preventing as well.

Taking a breath, he started up
the steps - and heard a door slam to his right. Light spattered into the
driveway. A car door opened. He guessed that Clifford was going to drive away.

Looping back to this space-time
coordinate would be impossible, without prior work. He had to do something now,
outside the house. Outside his pattern.

An engine nagged into a thrumming
idle. Warren walked to the corner of the house and looked around. Headlights
flared in a dull-toned Ford. He ducked back, hoping he had not been seen.

The gear engaged and the car
started forward, spitting gravel. Warren started to duck, stay out of sight -
then took a breath.
No, now.

He reached out as the car came by
and yanked open the rear passenger door. He leaped in, not bothering to pull
the door closed, and brought the pistol up. He could see the man only in
profile. In the dim light Warren could not tell if the quick profile fit the
photos and 3D recreations he had memorized. Was this Clifford?

“Freeze!” he said as the driver’s
head jerked toward him. Warren pressed the pistol’s snub snout into the man’s
neck. “Or I pull the trigger.”

Warren expected the car to stop.
Instead, the man stamped on the gas. And said nothing.

They rocked out of the driveway,
surged right with squealing tires, and the driver grinned in the streetlamp
lights as he gunned the engine loud and hard.

“Slow down!” Warren said, pushing
the muzzle into the back of the skull. “You’re Clifford, right?”

“Ok, sure I am. Take it easy,
man.” Clifford said this casually, as if he were in control of the situation.
Warren felt confusion leap like sour spit into his throat. But Clifford kept
accelerating, tires howling as he turned onto a highway. They were near the
edge of town and Warren did not want to get far from his resonance point.

“Slow down, I said!”

“Sure, just let me get away from
these lights.” Clifford glanced over his right shoulder. “You don’t want us out
where people can see, do you?”

Warren didn’t know what to say.
They shot past the last traffic light and hummed down a state highway. There
was no other traffic and the land lay level and barren beyond. In the blackness,
Warren thought, he could probably walk back into town. But -

“How far you want me to go?”

He had to shake this man’s
confidence. “Have you killed any women yet, Frank?”

Clifford didn’t even blink. “No.
Been thinkin’ on it. Lots.”

This man didn’t seem surprised. “You’re
sure?” Warren asked, to buy time.

“What’s the point o’ lyin’?”

This threw Warren into even more
confusion. Clifford stepped down on the gas again though and Warren felt this
slipping out of his control. “Slow down!”

Clifford smiled. “Me and my
buddies, back in high school, we had this kinda game. We’d get an old jalopy
and run it out here, four of us, and do the survivor thing.”

“What - ?”

“What you got against me, huh?”
Clifford turned and smirked at him.

“I, you - you’re going to
murder
those women, that’s what -”

“How you know that? You’re like
that other guy, huh?”

“How can you - wait - other guy -
?”

The car surged forward with
bursting speed into a flat curve in the highway. Headlights swept across bare
fields as the engine roared. Clifford chuckled in a dry, flat tone, and spat
out, “Let’s see how you like our game, buddy-o.”

Clifford slammed the driver’s
wheel to the left and the Ford lost traction, sliding into a skid. It jumped
off the two-lane blacktop and into the flat field beyond. Clifford jerked on
the wheel again -

- and in adrenaline-fed slow
motion the seat threw Warren into the roof. The car frame groaned like a
wounded beast and the wheels left the ground. The transmission shrieked like a
band saw cutting tin, as the wheels got free of the road. Warren lifted,
smacked against the roof, and it pushed him away as the frame hit the ground -
whomp
. The back window popped into a crystal shower
exploding around him. Then the car heaved up, struggling halfway toward the sky
again - paused - and crashed back down. Seams twanged, glass shattered, the car
rocked. Stopped.

Quiet. Crickets. Wind sighing
through the busted windows.

Warren crawled out of the
wide-flung door. He still clutched the pistol, which had not gone off. On his
knees in the ragged weeds he looked around. No motion in the dim
quarter-moonlight that washed the twisted Ford. Headlights poked two slanted
lances of grey light across the flat fields.

Warren stood up and hobbled - his
left leg weak and trembling - through the reek of burnt rubber, to look in the
driver’s window. It was busted into glittering fragments. Clifford sprawled
across the front seat, legs askew. The moonlight showed glazed eyes and a
tremor in the open mouth. As he watched a dark bubble formed at the lips and
swelled, then burst, and he saw it was blood spraying across the face.

Warren thought a long moment and
then turned to walk back into town. Again, quickly finding the transflux cage
was crucial. He stayed away from the road in case some car would come
searching, but in the whole long walk back, which took a forever that by his
timer proved to be nearly an hour, no headlights swept across the forlorn
fields.

He had staged a fine celebration
when he invented masked inset coding, a flawless quantum logic that secured
against deciphering. That brought him wealth beyond mortal dreams, all from
encoded 1s and 0s.

That began his long march through
the highlands of digital craft. Resources came to him effortlessly. When he
acquired control of the largest consortium of advanced research companies, he
rejoiced with friends and mistresses. His favourite was a blonde who, he
realized late in the night, reminded him of that Nancy, long ago. Nearly fifty
years.

The idea came to him in the small
hours of that last, sybaritic night. As the pillows of his sofa moved to
accommodate him, getting softer where he needed it, supporting his back with
the right strength, his unconscious made the connection. He had acquired major
stock interest in Advanced Spacetimes. His people managed the R&D program.
They could clear the way, discreetly arrange for a “sideslip” as the technicals
termed it. The larger world called it a “jogg,” to evoke the sensation of
trotting blithely across the densely packed quantum spacetimes available.