CRONUS OF THE D. F. C.
BY LLOYD BIGGLE, JR.
She was wonderful and Forsdon was in love.
But he'd seen the future and knew that in
five days she was slated for murder!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
A bright, sunny day in May, and a new job for me. I found the room inthe basement of police headquarters—a big room, with freshly stenciledletters D F C on the door, and an unholy conglomeration of tubes, wiresand dials bulking large in one corner.
A bright young police cadet sat at a desk in the center of the room."Are you Mr. Forsdon?"
I nodded, and dumped my bag beside the desk.
"Captain Marks is waiting for you," he said and jerked his head towarda door to the rear.
Captain Marks had his office in a cubbyhole off the main room. It wasquite a comedown from the quarters he'd occupied upstairs as captain ofdetectives. He'd held onto that job past his retirement age and, whenthey were about to throw him out on his ear, D. F. C. came along andhe jumped at it. The Captain was not the retiring type.
His door was open, and he waved me in. "Sit down, Forsdon," he said."Welcome to the Department of Future Crime."
I sat down, and he looked me over. A lean, hard face, closely croppedwhite hair, and steely grey eyes that looked through a man, ratherthan at him. Small—five feet seven, a hundred and forty pounds. Youlooked at him and wondered how he'd ever gotten on the force in thefirst place, until you saw his eyes. I'd never felt comfortable in hispresence.
"Do you know what we have here, Forsdon?" he said.
"Not exactly."
"I don't either—exactly. The brass upstairs thinks it's an expensivetoy. It is. But they've given us a trial budget to see if it works, andnow it's up to us."
I nodded, and waited for him to go on. He packed his pipe, lit it, andthen leaned back and let the smoke go out.
"We have an invention," he said, "which I don't pretend to understand.You saw the thing?"
"Yes," I said. It wasn't easy to overlook.
"Walker calls it Cronus—for the Greek God of Time. It gives us randomglances around the city on what looks like a large TV screen—randomglances into the future!" He paused for dramatic effect, and Iprobably disappointed him. I already knew that much. "The picture ishazy," he went on, "and sometimes we have a hell of a time figuring outthe location of whatever it is we're looking at. We also have troublepinpointing the time of an event. But we can't deny the potential.We've been in operation for three weeks, and already we've seen half adozen holdups days before they happened."
"At least it's an ideal we've always worked for," I offered. "I mean,to prevent crime, rather than just catch the criminal."
"Oh!" he said, and went to work on his pipe again. "Maybe I didn'tmake myself clear. We saw the holdups on that screen, but we couldn'tprevent a single one. All we managed to do was catch the criminala few minutes after he had committed the crime. So it raises aninteresting question: Is it possible to change the future?"
"Why not?" I said.
Captain Marks thought a moment. "It isn't too critical, where theholdups are concerned. The criminal is caught immediately, the loot isrecovered, and the victim goes his way thinking kind thoughts aboutthe efficiency of the police force. But what about assault, or rape