“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 gray 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.
He thought this through while his smart sofa whispered soft, encouraging tones. His entire world was smart. Venture to jaywalk on a city street and a voice told you to get back, traffic was on the way. Take a wrong turn walking home and your inboards beeped you with directions. In the countryside, trees did not advise you on your best way to the lake. Compared to the tender city, nature was dead, rough, uncaring.
There was no place in the claustrophobic smart world to sense the way the world had been, when men roamed wild and did vile things. No need for that horror, anymore. Still, he longed to right the evils of that untamed past. Warren saw his chance.
Spacetime intervals were wedges of coordinates, access to them paid for by currency flowing seamlessly from accounts, which would never know the use he put their assets to—or care.
He studied in detail that terrible past, noting dates and deaths and the heady ideas they called forth. Assembling his team, he instructed them to work out a trajectory that slid across the braided map of nearby space-times, all generated by quantum processes he could not fathom in the slightest.
Each side-slide brought the transflux passenger to a slightly altered, parallel universe of events. Each held potential victims, awaiting the knife or bludgeon that would end their own timelines forever. Each innocent could be saved. Not in Warren’s timeline—too late for that—but in other spacetimes, still yearning for salvation.
The car crash had given him a zinging adrenaline boost, which now faded. As he let the transflux cage’s transverse gravity spread his legs and arms, popping joints, he learned from the blunders he had made. Getting in the car and not immediately shoving the snout of the 0.22 into Clifford’s neck, pulling the trigger—yes, an error. The thrill of the moment had clouded his judgment, surely.
So he made the next few joggs systematic. Appear, find the target, kill within a few minutes more, then back to the cage. He began to analyse those who fell to his exacting methods. A catalogue of evil, gained at the expense of the sickness that now beset him at every jogg.
Often, the killers betrayed in their last moments not simple fear, but their own motives. Usually sexual disorders drove them. Their victims, he already knew, had something in common—occupation, race, appearance or age. One man in his thirties would slaughter five librarians, and his walls were covered with photos of brunettes wearing glasses. Such examples fell into what the literature called, in its deadening language, “specific clusters of dysfunctional personality characteristics,” along with eye tics, obsessions, a lack of conversational empathy.
These men had no guilt. They blustered when they saw the 0.22 and died wholly self-confident, surprised as the bullets found them. Examining their homes, Warren saw that they followed a distinct set of rigid, self-made rules. He knew that most would keep photo albums of their victims, so was unsurprised to find that they already, before their crimes, had many women’s dresses and lingerie crammed into their hiding places, and much pornography. Yet they had appeared to be normal and often quite charming, a thin mask of sanity.
Their childhoods were marked by animal cruelty, obsession with fire setting, and persistent bedwetting past the age of five. They would often lure victims with ploys appealing to the victims’ sense of sympathy.
Such monsters should be erased, surely. In his own timeline, the continuing drop in the homicide rate was a puzzle. Now he sensed that at least partly that came from the work of sideslip space-time travellers like himself, who remained invisible in that particular history.
Warren thought on this, as he slipped along the whorl of space-time, seeking his next exit. He would get as many of the vermin as he could, cleansing universes he would never enjoy. He had asked his techs at Advanced Spacetimes if he could go forward in time to an era when someone had cured the odd cancer that beset him. But they said no, that sideslipping joggs could not move into a future undefined, unknown.
He learned to mop up his vomit, quell his roaming aches, grit his teeth and go on.
He waited through a rosy sundown for Ted Bundy to appear. Light slid from the sky and traffic hummed on the streets nearby the apartment Warren knew he used in 1971. People were coming back to their happy homes, the warm domestic glows and satisfactions.