The Changed Man by Orson Scott Card Page B

Gemini said. “All you need is a friend who’s willing to turn off the machine while you’re on the far end. Nothing is left. And you can take care of the actual suicide yourself.”
    â€œSuicide,” Orion said with a smile. “Trust you to use the policeman’s term.”
    And that night, as the other guests slept off the alcohol in beds or other convenient places, Orion lay on the chair and pulled the box over his head. And with Gemini’s last kiss on his cheek and Gemini’s left hand on the controls, Orion said, “All right. Pull me over.”
    After a few minutes Gemini was alone in the room. He did not even pause to reflect before he went to the breaker box and shut off all the power for a critical few seconds. Then he returned, sat alone in the room with the disconnected machine and the empty chair. The crambox soon buzzed with the police override, and Mercy Manwool stepped out. She went straight to Gemini, embraced him. He kissed her, hard.
    â€œDone?” she asked.
    He nodded.

    â€œThe bastard didn’t deserve to live,” she said.
    Gemini shook his head. “You didn’t get your justice, my dear Mercy.”
    â€œIsn’t he dead?”
    â€œOh yes, that. Well, it’s what he wanted, you know. I told him what I planned. And he asked me to do it.”
    She looked at him angrily. “You would. And then tell me about it, so I wouldn’t get any joy out of this at all.” Gemini only shrugged.
    Manwool turned away from him, walked to the timelid. She ran her fingers along the box. Then she detached her laser from her belt and slowly melted the timelid until it was a mass of hot plastic on a metal stand. The few metal components had even melted a little, bending to be just a little out of shape.
    â€œScrew the past anyway,” she said. “Why can’t it stay where it belongs?”

FREEWAY GAMES
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    E XCEPT FOR DONNER PASS, everything on the road between San Francisco and Salt Lake City was boring. Stanley had driven the road a dozen deadly times until he was sure he knew Nevada by heart: an endless road winding among hills covered with sagebrush. “When God got through making scenery,” Stanley often said, “there was a lot of land left over in Nevada, and God said, ‘Aw, to hell with it,’ and that’s where Nevada’s been ever since.”
    Today Stanley was relaxed, there was no rush for him to get back to Salt Lake, and so, to ease the boredom, he began playing freeway games.
    He played Blue Angels first. On the upslope of the Sierra Nevadas he found two cars riding side by side at fifty miles an hour. He pulled his Datsun 260Z into formation beside them. At fifty miles an hour they cruised along, blocking all the lanes of the freeway. Traffic began piling up behind them.

    The game was successful—the other two drivers got into the spirit of the thing. When the middle car drifted forward, Stanley eased back to stay even with the driver on the right, so that they drove down the freeway in an arrowhead formation. They made diagonals, funnels; danced around each other for half an hour; and whenever one of them pulled slightly ahead, the frantically angry drivers behind them jockeyed behind the leading car.
    Finally, Stanley tired of the game, despite the fun of the honks and flashing lights behind them. He honked twice, and waved jauntily to the driver beside him, then pressed on the accelerator and leaped forward at seventy miles an hour, soon dropping back to sixty as dozens of other cars, their drivers trying to make up for lost time (or trying to compensate for long confinement), passed by going much faster. Many paused to drive beside him, honking, glaring, and making obscene gestures. Stanley grinned at them all.
    He got bored again east of Reno.
    This time he decided to play Follow. A yellow AM Hornet was just ahead of him on the highway, going fifty-eight to sixty miles per hour. A