Free Impossible Things by Connie Willis Page A

said. “One through twenty-four.”
    The screen went to question marks and started beeping. I should have known better. The developer could handle a lot of orders, but asking it to expose perfectly good film went against its whole memory, and I didn’t have time to give it the step-by-steps that would convince it I meant what I said.
    “Eject,” I said. The Scotties blinked out. The developer spat out the film, rerolled into its protective case.
    The doorbell rang. I switched on the overhead and pulled the film out to full length and held it directly under the light. I had told Hunter an RV hit Aberfan, and he had said on the way out, almost an afterthought, “That first shoot you went to, what was it?” And after he left, what had he done, gone out to check on the sideshow kind of thing, gotten Mrs. Ambler to spill her guts? There hadn’t been time to do that and get back. He must have called Ramirez. I was glad I had locked the door.
    I turned off the overhead. I rerolled the film, fed it back into the developer, and gave it a direction it could handle. “Permanganate bath, full strength, one through twenty-four. Remove one hundred percent emulsion. No notify.”
    The screen went dark. It would take the developer at least fifteen minutes to run the film through the bleach bath, and the Society’s computers could probably enhance a picture out of two crystals of silver and thin air, but at least the detail wouldn’t be there. I unlocked the door.
    It was Katie.
    She held up the eisenstadt. “You forgot your briefcase,” she said.
    I stared blankly at it. I hadn’t even realized I didn’t have it. I must have left it on the kitchen table when I went tearing out, running down little girls and stewed roadworkers in my rush to keep Katie from getting involved. And here she was, and Hunter would be back anyminute, saying, “That shoot you went on this morning, did you take any pictures?”
    “It isn’t a briefcase,” I said.
    “I wanted to tell you,” she said, and stopped. “I shouldn’t have accused you of telling the Society I’d killed the jackal. I don’t know why you came to see me today, but I know you’re not capable of—”
    “You have no idea what I’m capable of,” I said. I opened the door enough to reach for the eisenstadt. “Thanks for bringing it back. I’ll get the paper to reimburse your way-mile credits.”
    Go home. Go home. If you’re here when the Society comes back, they’ll ask you how you met me, and I just destroyed the evidence that could shift the blame to the Amblers. I took hold of the eisenstadt’s handle and started to shut the door.
    She put her hand on the door. The screen door and the fading light made her look unfocused, like Misha. “Are you in trouble?”
    “No,” I said. “Look, I’m very busy.”
    “Why did you come to see me?” she asked. “Did you kill the jackal?”
    “No,” I said, but I opened the door and let her in.
    I went over to the developer and asked for a visual status. It was only on the sixth frame. “I’m destroying evidence,” I said to Katie. “I took a picture this morning of the vehicle that hit it, only I didn’t know it was the guilty party until a half an hour ago.” I motioned for her to sit down on the couch. “They’re in their eighties. They were driving on a road they weren’t supposed to be on, in an obsolete recreation vehicle, worrying about the cameras and the tankers. There’s no way they could have seen it in time to stop. The Society won’t see it that way, though. They’re determined to blame somebody, anybody, even though it won’t bring them back.”
    She set her canvas carryit and the eisenstadt down on the table next to the couch.
    “The Society was here when I got home,” I said. “They’d figured out we were both in Colorado when Aberfan died. I told them it was a hit and run, and you’d stopped to help me. They had the vet’s records, and your name was on them.”
    I couldn’t read her