The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  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 Miss 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.

  Just 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 flavored 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 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 favorite 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 spacetimes, all generated by quantum processes he could not fathom in the slightest.

  Each side-slip 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 spacetime 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.

  It was not smart to lurk in the area, so he used his lock picks to enter the back of the apartment house, and again on Bundy’s door. The mailboxes below had helpfully reassured him that the mass murderer of so many women lived here, months before his crimes began.

  To pass the time he found the materials that eventually Bundy would use to put his arm in a fake plaster cast and ask women to help him carry something to his car. Then Bundy would beat them unconscious with a crowbar and carry them away. Bundy had been a particularly organized killer—socially adequate, with friends and lovers. Sometimes such types even had a spouse and children. The histories said such men were those who, when finally captured, were likely to be described by acquaintances as kind and unlikely to hurt anyone. But they were smart and swift and dangerous, at all times.

  So when Warren heard the front door open, he slipped into the back bedroom and, to his sudden alarm, heard a female voice. An answer
ing male baritone, joking and light.

  They stopped in the kitchen to pour some wine. Bundy was a charmer, his voice warm and mellow, dipping up and down with sincere interest in some story she was telling him. He put on music, soft saxophone jazz, and they moved to the living room.

  This went on until Warren began to sweat with anxiety. The transflux cage’s position in spacetime was subject to some form of uncertainty principle. As it held strictly to this timeline, its position in spatial coordinates became steadily more poorly phased. That meant it would slowly drift in position, in some quantum sense he did not follow. The techs assured him this was a small, unpredictable effect, but cautioned him to minimize his time at any of the jogg points.

  If the transflux cage moved enough, he might not find it again in the dark. It was in a dense pine forest and he had memorized the way back, but anxiety began to vex him.

  He listened to Bundy’s resonant tones romancing the woman as bile leaked upward into his mouth. The cancer was worsening, the pains cramping his belly. It was one of the new, variant cancers that evolved after the supposed victory over the simpler sorts. Even suppressing the symptoms was difficult.

  If he vomited he would surely draw Bundy back here. Sweating from the pain and anxiety, Warren inched forward along the carpeted corridor, listening intently. Bundy’s voice rose, irritated. The woman’s response was hesitant, startled—then beseeching. The music suddenly got louder. Warren quickly moved to the end of the corridor and looked around the corner. Bundy had a baseball bat in his hands, eyes bulging, the woman sitting on the long couch speaking quickly, hands raised, Bundy stepping back—

  Warren fished out the pistol and brought it up as Bundy swung. He clipped the woman in the head, a hard smack. Her long hair flew back as she grunted and collapsed. She rolled off the couch, thumping on the floor.