“You kidding?” Jensen opened the clipboard and began to read the contents. “Billy Wayne Murphy. Life imprisonment for the murder of two eleven-year-old girls. Psychologists say you’ve never shown remorse. Have no emotional involvement with what you’ve done. In any capacity, whatsoever.”
He raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “I can’t imagine how that must feel. Which is the whole point, really.”
“It doesn’t feel like anything at all,” Murphy said coldly.
“Of course. Of course.” The scientist shut the clipboard with a snap. “Of course, of course, of course.”
“Because I’m innocent, you idiot,” Murphy fumed. “I was framed.”
“A man without emotions.” Jensen was still lost in his own musings. “Absolutely perfect. You’ll be able to trawl through history in an objective manner. Aha. See things exactly as they are. You’re just what we need to save the project.”
“I am not a psychopath,” Murphy repeated. “I was fixing my toilet at the time.”
Then an incredible thought struck him.
“Listen!” he said. “We could use your machine to prove my innocence! Go back and find who actually killed those girls!”
He tried to grab the scientist’s arm but both hands were shackled to his legs by chains.
“We already did.” Jensen glared at him and pulled away. “It was definitely you.”
“Wait a bloody minute!” Murphy exploded. “You just said, if the observer expects me to be the killer, or wants it to be me, then that’s exactly what they’ll see. Right?”
“Correct.” Jensen nodded.
“So who was the sodding Witness?”
“Me.”
“You bastard!” Murphy tried to lunge at the scientist but his chains snapped tight and he fell flat on his face.
“You’re hardly going to be impartial yourself, eh?” Jensen hauled Murphy to his feet. “At least helping us gets you out of prison.”
Murphy thought for a while. Then grinned.
“When you plug me into Sonja, I could see who really committed the crime.” He brightened. “Once we know, we might be able to find physical evidence to back that up.”
“Ehm…” Jensen looked sheepish. “Not anymore,”
“S’cuse me?”
“It’s a quantum thing. Schrödinger’s cat and all that stuff.” The scientist pursed his lips. “Once a past event has been observed on a quantum level, it kind of… becomes history. To all intents and purposes.”
Murphy frowned.
“Take your case, for instance,” Jensen continued. “Did you kill those kids? There are only two possibilities: yes or no. But… ehhh… now that I’ve looked at it, there’s only one. You definitely did it.” He spread his hands generously. “Therefore, you may as well assist us. Get off death row, eh?”
“I’m not a psychopath,” Murphy shouted. “I have emotions. My view of history won’t be worth a crap.”
“Shhh! Nobody has to know that.” Jensen put an urgent finger to his lips. “We need you on board to keep up corporate funding. The chairman’s patience is running out.”
“Oh. I see. Right.” Murphy gritted his teeth. “Well, since the morality of this project also seems to be a thing of the past, why don’t you just pretend Sonja found some terrible scandal in this… chairman’s past and blackmail him into keeping it going?”
“Because we needed a totally credible Witness to take on someone that powerful.” Jensen smirked. “Which is where you come in.”
“And people call me criminally insane,” Murphy snarled.
“Yes. Well. You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps.” Jensen’s smile widened into a manic grin. “Ha hah. Hahahahahah ahahahahahahahaha. Sorry.”
He pointed to a door behind them.
“The guards will take you for briefing and induction now. We’ll expect you online in a couple of days.”
Murphy’s shoulders drooped and the chains clinked sadly.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said finally.
“Good man.” Jensen patted him gingerly on the shoulder.
“I mean, you’ve proved I’m a stone-cold killer, then double-crossed me, eh?” Murphy gave a warped grin. “So, your days are most definitely numbered.”
Jensen blanched. “Statements like that aren’t going to go down well with your parole officer.”
“Just watch your back, that’s all.” Murphy turned and shuffled out the door, the scientist following a safe distance behind.
Edith pressed a few buttons and the men slowly faded away. She checked that the time stamp read seven days ago, inserted an earpiece and began to talk into the microphone again.
“Chairman? It’s me. Just went back and looked a week into the past, as ordered. Your suspicions are confirmed. Professor Jensen was obsessed with the impending failure of his project and intended to blackmail you for some fabricated indiscretion, to keep his funding coming.”
She adjusted her wig.
“He enlisted a psychopathic convict called Murphy to facilitate his scheme, but the potential Witness threatened to kill him. Since the professor was found dead a few days later, I assume Murphy found a way to make good his promise.”
She coughed politely.
“If you like, I can look at the day Professor Jensen died, just to be sure. No? Oh. You’ve already done that. I understand… And Murphy’s back on death row? Excellent.”
She nodded sagely.
“Let sleeping dogs lie, eh?” She glanced at her watch. “In that case, I’ve a couple of hours before lunch.”
Edith switched off the microphone. She retrieved her gum from under the console, popped it back in her mouth and sat back contentedly.
“Just enough time to find out what happened to a certain thirty pieces of silver.”
A Malediction on the Village
By Garth Nix
It was the end of winter and a witch on her broom flew with one of the south-bound scattered skeins of pink-footed geese, enjoying their sidelong glances and high-pitched honking, before she sheared off to her destination.
Mari Garridge had carefully studied her course in Flight Directions for the Sunken Eastern Lands of Anglia, but it was still quite difficult to fix her location and thus, her destination. The ground spread out flat beneath her in all directions, and was crisscrossed with a mystifying number of cuts, canalized rivers, dykes, and flood-mitigation workings leading up to and surrounding the many, muddy branches of a big estuary with several smaller inlets. Beyond the estuary lay the vast swathe of the sea.
Every small patch of relatively high ground held a church, and a village around the church, often sprawling into areas that surely must flood with great regularity. They all looked much the same from the air.
But only one village in roughly the right place had a large and shining, official-looking car parked by the green, and what might be described as a small throng milling about: clearly the welcoming party Mari had been told to expect. She angled her broomstick down towards them, once again thanking the unknown genius who had worked out how to affix a padded bicycle seat to the ancient stick of yew. The witches of yore had ridden sidesaddle on the barest padding of sackcloth and leather, a position Mari thought must have led to many falls on long air journeys.
As always, even with the bicycle seat, she dreamed of having a flying chair or chaise longue of her own. The broom, a borrowed mount which had served the fellows of Ermine College far longer than Mari had been alive, bucked, possibly in response to this thought. She hastily stopped thinking about comfortable cushions and actually sleeping while in flight, and patted the broomstick.
“Thank you, good broom,” she said, “for all your service.”
The people below were waving now, so it had to be the right place. Mari came in for a perfect landing on the road by the green, only having to run on three or four yards before she could stop. She stepped off, unstrapped her valise and set it and the broom down before turning to face the welcoming committee who had gathered in front of the war memorial, a plinth of three steps surmounted by the usual figure. This had supposedly been designed so that from different directions, it could be seen as either man, woman or child, and uniformed as being a civilian or a member of any of the four services; but in practice it mostly didn’t look like anything in particular.