The Changed Man by Orson Scott Card

somebody gasped. And Officer Manwool slipped a lovecord around Orion’s wrist, pulled it taut, and fastened the loose end to her workbelt.
    â€œOrion Overweed, you’re under arrest. That man can
see the ravine. He will not die. He was brought to a stop in plenty of time to notice the certain death ahead of him. He will live—with a knowledge of whatever he saw tonight. And already you have altered the future, the present, and all the past from his time until the present.”
    And for the first time in all his life, Orion realized that he had reason to be afraid.
    â€œBut that’s a capital offense,” he said lamely.
    â€œI only wish it included torture,” Officer Manwool said heatedly, “the kind of torture you put that poor truck driver through!”
    And then she started to pull Orion out of the room.
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    Rod Bingley lifted his eyes from the steering wheel and stared uncomprehendingly at the road ahead. The truck’s light illuminated the road clearly for many meters. And for five seconds or thirty minutes or some other length of time that was both brief and infinite he did not understand what it meant.
    He got out of the cab and walked to the edge of the ravine, looking down. For a few minutes he felt relieved.
    Then he walked back to the truck and counted the wounds in the cab. The dents on the grill and the smooth metal. Three cracks in the windshield.
    He walked back to where the man had been urinating. Sure enough, though there was no urine, there was an indentation in the ground where the hot liquid had struck, speckles in the dirt where it had splashed.
    And in the fresh asphalt, laid, surely, that morning (but then why no warning signs on the bridge? Perhaps the wind tonight blew them over), his tire tracks showed clearly. Except for a manwidth stretch where the left rear tires had left no print at all.
    And Rodney remembered the dead, smashed faces,
especially the bright and livid eyes among the blood and broken bone. They all looked like Rachel to him. Rachel who had wanted him to—to what? Couldn’t even remember the dreams anymore?
    He got back into the cab and gripped the steering wheel. His head spun and ached, but he felt himself on the verge of a marvelous conclusion, a simple answer to all of this. There was evidence, yes, even though the bodies were gone, there was evidence that he had hit those people. He had not imagined it.
    They must, then, be (he stumbled over the word, even in his mind, laughed at himself as he concluded:) angels. Jesus sent them, he knew it, as his mother had taught him, destroying angels teaching him the death that he had brought to his wife while daring, himself, to walk away scatheless.
    It was time to even up the debt.
    He started the engine and drove, slowly, deliberately toward the end of the road. And as the front tires bumped off and a sickening moment passed when he feared that the truck would be too heavy for the driving wheels to push along the ground, he clasped his hands in front of his face and prayed, aloud: “Forward!”
    And then the truck slid forward, tipped downward, hung in the air, and fell. His body pressed into the back of the truck. His clasped hands struck his face. He meant to say, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit,” but instead he screamed, “No no no no no,” in an infinite negation of death that, after all, didn’t do a bit of good once he was committed into the gentle, unyielding hands of the ravine. They clasped and enfolded him, pressed him tightly, closed his eyes and pillowed his head between the gas tank and the granite.
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    â€œWait,” Gemini said.
    â€œWhy the hell should we?” Officer Manwool said,
stopping at the door with Orion following docilely on the end of the lovecord. Orion, too, stopped, and looked at the policeman with the adoring expression all lovecord captives wore.
    â€œGive the man a break,” Gemini said.
    â€œHe doesn’t