Fixer

by Gene Doucette

  “Professor, I need to know how to kill it before Corrigan hurts somebody and we’re looking at another McClaren situation. Do you understand?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t just yet. You might have to give me a minute.”

  * * *

  Kilroy wasn’t the best of runners. He had an odd gait that made him look like someone who was trying to move quickly while holding a ball between his knees, and his arms flailed about arrhythmically, as if he couldn’t quite figure out just exactly how to keep them from getting tangled up in his legs. He still had the bat in his hand, but didn’t seem to know what to do with it any more than he did his arms, so it swung wildly from side to side, rapping into telephone poles and parking meters as he passed them by.

  So Corrigan, who had started off more than a block behind, was having little trouble gaining. It helped enormously that there was hardly a soul in sight for Kilroy to threaten as it was approaching two in the morning. This also meant fewer moving parts in general, which was frankly a godsend for Corrigan, who had not only lost track of his present, he had given up trying to look for it.

  And then a car came down the street and offered him a cue. The sight was so alarming he actually stopped and stared at it as the front end of the car’s future sped past him. What he saw first was the headlight beam, which was uncommonly visible thanks to an early-morning mist. The beam seemed to stretch for hundreds of feet, terminating suddenly at the front of the hood and the beginning of a car that looked as though it were as long as a football field. Used to be he could distinguish between the present and the hypothetical future somewhat easily because the future was ever so slightly indistinct. But there was nothing ghostly about any part of this car.

  He knew perfectly well that the car was really car sized. But what he knew and what he saw diverged so dramatically that he was inclined to believe his eyes. I am so not prepared for this, he thought.

  “You’re doing fine,” Harvey said. He had reappeared and was sitting on the hood of a parked car. Another bad sign. Surely the rest of the menagerie was on its way. “Now keep going. He’s getting away.”

  “No, he’s not,” Corrigan said. Kilroy had stopped running at around the same time Corrigan had and for approximately the same reason; he’d seen the car, too. “He’s going to do something.”

  “Looks like,” Harvey agreed.

  “Go away, Harvey.”

  “Corrigangangangangawaititittttt,” said someone from behind him. He looked back and saw a Maggie-like shape moving in his direction. He ignored her.

  Kilroy had stepped out into the middle of the street. He’s going to wreck the car, Corrigan realized.

  The superlong car’s superlong hood continued past Corrigan as he ran in a vain effort to reach Kilroy before the car did. In another few seconds the hood reached Kilroy, at which time Kilroy swung the baseball bat into the driver’s side of the windshield. The formerly streamlined giant vehicle’s front jerked around like the head of an electrified snake and came to a jarring termination at a telephone pole.

  “No!” Corrigan shouted.

  “You have time,” Harvey said calmly. He’d been taking up sitting positions at various points along the route.

  “It’s too late,” Corrigan said. “It already happened.”

  “No, it hasn’t. That was the future. You know it.”

  “Yeah . . .” Corrigan said. “You’re right.”

  “Course I am.”

  I’m not going to like this, Corrigan thought as he realized exactly what he had to do next.

  * * *

  “Of course. That would make sense,” Calvin said, having woken up enough to wrap his mind around the concept. “He could . . . well, this thing could get to anyone, couldn’t he? No one would be the wiser for it.”

  “Exactly the problem,” Maggie said, a bit out of breath.

  “Always ahead . . . He would have to be vibrating at a different frequency, figuratively speaking. Like Pythagoras’s harp strings . . . yes . . .”

  “Professor—”

  “But if that’s the case—”

  “Professor, just tell me how to kill it, please?”

  “Oh, you can’t,” he said. “You’re on different planes of reality, my dear.”

  “Then how does he hurt us?” she asked.

  “Object permanence. A thing, like a knife or a bullet, might not be subject to the same constraints. It’s very complicated, but essentially it comes down to the question of whether time is an objective or subjective—”

  “Professor, I—Corrigan, wait!” she shouted. “Sorry; he’d stopped. I almost caught up.”

  “Ah. As I was—”

  “Just skip ahead. Why can’t I hurt him with objects just like he can hurt me?”

  “Because of his position in time, he will always know what you’re about to do. He’d have to be suicidal, very confused, or simply not paying attention to allow himself to be harmed by someone in our present.”

  “So there’s nothing we can do to stop him, that’s what you’re telling me?”

  “There’s nothing you can do. Corrigan Bain is another story entirely.”

  “Why . . . oh, God, no!”

  * * *

  Having spent some of the early parts of his life surrounded by the kind of people who meditated regularly, Corrigan was intimately familiar with the idea of a mantra. He never fully appreciated the calming influence the repetition of one might have until he had to hurl himself from a curb and directly into the path of an oncoming vehicle, at which time he discovered his own personal mantra. “Please don’t be drunk, please don’t be drunk, please don’t be drunk . . .”

  His senses told him the sobriety of the driver was not nearly as large a concern as the fact that he was about to thrust his head and shoulders through the side of the car, which still looked perfectly solid. But intellectually, he understood the vehicle couldn’t really be a quarter of a mile long, so instead he focused on the driver’s competence.

  Astonishingly, he did not slam face-first into solid metal. Instead, the car moved away from him, a feat seemingly as likely as a river instantaneously jumping its own streambed. The future got wobbly from the change, and for just a second Corrigan stood entirely in the present. Even Kilroy disappeared from view.

  Corrigan watched the now normal-sized car swerve madly into the opposite lane and around him. There was a thump, but not the thump of the car hitting him; it hit something else. He blinked, and the future reasserted itself. Kilroy was lying on the pavement a few yards away, on his back.

  “The car hit him,” he said with undisguised amazement.

  “You changed the future,” Harvey said. He was sitting in a chair on the median strip and looking very full of himself. “Kilroy didn’t have time to react to the change. That’s how I bagged mine, remember?”

  “I remember. But it can’t have been that easy.”

  And it wasn’t. The Kilroy was already sitting up, rubbing his shoulder.

  “Whatarewhatdoingareyoudoing?” he heard several Maggies ask from behind him. “Streetgetofbeforetheoutofstreetbefore . . .”

  “Still alive,” Corrigan said. “Resilient little bastard, aren’t you?”

  Kilroy climbed to his feet, staring at Corrigan like a cornered animal. Then he opened his mouth and let out the most god-awful howl Corrigan had ever heard in his life. He clapped his hands over his ears and let out a scream of his own.

  * * *

  Maggie really thought she was keeping her shit pretty well together under the circumstances. She’d gotten over the whole “killer who cannot be seen” issue, and she’d come to grips with the idea that she was running after a fight she had no hope of contributing to in a positive way. She had even tapped her only scientific resource in a desperate attempt to problem-solve her way to a contribution. But when Corrigan Bain, a man she would never use the word love in describing but whom she nonetheless liked a great deal, inexplicably threw himself into the path of an oncoming car . . . we
ll, that was it. Clearly, she had no hope of controlling or even understanding what was happening in front of her, and she never would. Especially if Corrigan didn’t survive long enough to explain all of it to her.

  The car, which swerved to avoid Corrigan, ended up on the wrong side of the road for a good block before jerking itself back into the correct lane and then accelerating away madly, leaving Corrigan in a genuflected and unharmed state right in the middle of the street. And then he just stood there.

  “What are you doing?” she screamed at him.

  “Still alive,” Corrigan said. He was speaking—not to Maggie, but to an unoccupied spot on the median strip. “Resilient little bastard, aren’t you?”

  “Get out of the street,” Maggie shouted. “Before—”

  And then Corrigan fell to his knees, put his hand over his ears, and started screaming, apparently in acute pain.

  “Alrighty,” Maggie said. “Dunno what the hell is . . .”

  “Agent Trent?” said someone in her ear. She’d completely forgotten she still had Professor Calvin on the phone. What was he saying before? “Hang on,” she said.

  “What is that awful racket?”

  “Corrigan. I don’t know why he’s doing that, but if he keeps it up, we’ll have to contend with the cops soon.”

  * * *

  After a time, Corrigan realized he was the only one screaming, so he stopped. He opened his eyes and looked around. Kilroy was no longer in the middle of the road, and for just a moment, Corrigan thought he’d been given the slip. But then he spotted the creature about half a block away, limping and still holding his right shoulder. Kilroy hadn’t lost his bat, which made him dangerous to anyone who might stray too close. Fortunately, with the car gone, the only such beings around were Corrigan and Maggie, and possibly a few waterfowl, if Kilroy’s direction stayed true. He was heading for the bank of the river.

  “Stay away,” he said to Maggie before picking up his pace and heading after Kilroy. Even though what came out of his mouth sounded more like stayayayawayastayway, he trusted that for her it was clear enough. He didn’t expect her to follow his advice, but it felt good to have at least tried. It was only a matter of time before Kilroy decided to demonstrate his displeasure with Corrigan by taking it out on her.

  They were a good six blocks from the hospital now, to a point at which Mount Auburn Street veered closer to Memorial Drive and the Charles River, and also where the line of buildings between both roads disappeared, to be replaced by a small grassy island that—in an overpopulated city—qualified it as a park. Kilroy had reached a gathering of trees and slowed considerably, giving Corrigan all the time he needed to catch up.

  “Okay, ugly,” he said, as Kilroy turned to face him, “what do we do now?”

  The creature smiled, once again showing off his strangely huge mouth and rows of jagged teeth.

  “Kilroy,” he said through the smile.

  “Yeah. Whatever.”

  Kilroy raised the bat in his right hand and took a swing at the spot Corrigan would be standing if he didn’t know any better. But Corrigan did, and stepped aside. Then Corrigan drew the gun, aimed carefully at Kilroy’s head, and fired. Kilroy stepped to one side at the last second, the bullet heading toward the river beyond.

  “Huh,” Corrigan said. “Guess we have a problem, don’t we?”

  Rather than responding conversationally, Kilroy performed something approximating a curtsey, his arms gesturing wide with the flourish of a Shakespearian actor acknowledging the applause of the crowd. Corrigan felt as if he should bow in return, as if this were some sort of prebattle sumo ritual. But Kilroy was actually communicating a simple message. Here are my friends.

  Stepping into view from behind trees on either side of Corrigan were two other Kilroys. He’d walked right into a trap.

  * * *

  Archie switched the phone to speaker mode and dove into the contents of his marginally organized desk for his notes, of which there were plenty.

  On many occasions in the past ten years, he’d had members of the student body in this study. Without fail every one of them, upon looking around, would ask the same question. Where’s the computer? But to Archie, a computer was a large thing, possibly even a large thing attached to a larger thing that ran to an even larger thing—a warren of computational outposts that were connected by a series of cables and always, always, in a building to which one traveled. One did not have such a thing in one’s home, nor would one wish to any more than one would wish to have one’s coworkers sharing one’s house. Not to say that Archie wasn’t up-to-date on the revolution in personal computing, at least conceptually. Emotionally, his ideas weren’t real until he saw them written down on a piece of paper in his own handwriting. A computer file was too ephemeral, too nonphysical for him to digest.

  The drawback was that he had the organizational sense of a blind pack rat. So it took him a minute or two to find the right pages. As was the case for much of the top layer of paperwork on his desk, they were about Corrigan Bain.

  On the phone, he could hear a variety of strange noises in the background, including the screeching of car tires and a lot of gasping and panting. Agent Trent had momentarily forgotten she was on the phone, which was fine as he needed a few seconds to gather his thoughts, and he thought best when he had—there they are.

  “Agent Trent?” he called loudly, reading his notes at the same time. Someone had started howling on her end of the line. It sounded like that primal screaming therapy that was so popular in the eighties.

  “Hang on,” she said.

  “What is that awful racket?”

  “Corrigan. I don’t know why he’s doing that, but if he keeps it up we’ll have to contend with the cops soon.”

  “He sounds in pain.”

  “I think he is. Hold on, okay?”

  “Holding.”

  The notes were a summarization of a drawer full of research into Corrigan’s background, research he’d had to compromise a number of his personal ethics to obtain. But it was, he constantly told himself, important. Because he had figured out fairly early on how it was possible to see the future on a short-term basis much in the same way his fixer friend could, but that was only one component of the whole. What he learned from his extra research was that Corrigan Bain didn’t just see the future. He heard it, smelled it, tasted it, and touched it as well. In other words, Corrigan didn’t just see, he experienced.

  Michael’s team could approximate the visual aspect fairly simply—it was really just a matter of light, or more rightly, optics—but not the entire package. Not until they understood how such a thing was even possible.

  The answer to that wasn’t in Corrigan’s history. But it was in Archie’s notes.

  “Where are you . . . Hey!” Maggie was shouting again.

  “What’s going on now?” Archie asked.

  “He’s run off again. It looked like he was saying something, but I couldn’t hear him. So what were we talking about?”

  “I was saying that while you could never find a way to do harm to this being, Corrigan should be able to.”

  “Why is that?” It sounded as if she’d begun to run again, which caused the hands-free speaker in her ear to jostle against the side of her head and make an annoying fuzzy scratching noise that roughly matched her gait.

  “I don’t know if it’s anything he’s seriously thought about before . . . he never struck me as much of a deep thinker . . .”

  “No kidding,” she remarked.

  “. . . but there is really no reason for him to remain in the same present which we currently occupy.”

  “Come again?”

  “The reason Corrigan knows the future is that he experiences it, and the reason he experiences it is that he exists in all phases.”

  “What?”

  Archie sighed and tried again. “Agent Trent, in order to hurt this . . . future being, one must first travel into the future, to the same plane of existence he occupies. But our
fixer friend doesn’t need to do any traveling. He is already there.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Now +

  Kora-gan of the Echo People expressed a funny/scared look that made the Kilroy Prime of the River Tribe Kilroys laugh. Seeing Kora-gan so confused/frightened made the Prime feel good/happy for figuring out that Kora-gan was the See and for not being afraid.

  The Kilroy Prime had been told the old legend/myth of the See as a child-thing over a hundred cold-cycles past. The See of legend/myth was the bringer of darkness/pain, who with mighty hands would rend the world in two until there was no world to rend. Through him would the Void Beyond be given voice and form. The See was the destroyer of all.

  Or so it went.

  It wasn’t supposed to be real/true; something to tell the child-thing at dark-time to frighten it into behaving. But then was the time word/rumor came from the Hill Tribe Kilroys that their Prime had been slain in a great battle with the See. This word/rumor spread through the Fourteen Tribes faster than a hundred gathering screeches. When the Prime heard it, much of the tale had been draped in legend/myth that the Menials of his Tribe swallowed whole, but as the Prime, he knew there was an essence of non-myth in its core. With effort, he chewed away at the falsehoods and got to the truth/fact inside. The See was real, and he hid/traveled among the Echo People.

  So on the great/horrible day two cold cycles past, the Kilroy Prime of the River Tribe Kilroys knew/understood what it meant that one of the Echo People spoke to him. They were trying to turn themselves into Sees with one of their Echo machine/devices. He knew/understood what he had to do.

  The killing of Echo People was an idea/notion the Prime had never entertained before that day. Everyone in the Tribes knew the Echo People were best left alone. They were Primitives and worthy of no more than pity/scorn. But sometimes, when they acted foolish and forgot their place/role in things, they needed to be punished.

  What the Kilroy Prime never imagined/thought was how much he would enjoy this. The Echo People were stupid, more stupid then the lowest of the Menials, and so easy to frighten/terrorize. In fulfilling his duty/oath to the Tribes, he had stumbled/discovered a greatness. He, Kilroy Prime of the River Tribe Kilroys, was the bringer of death himself, a god-thing to the lowly Echo People. So he gave them his name that they might know who had smote/punished them.