 What is the punishment for murder in the future?
A gun is an interesting weapon; it can be hired, of course, and naturally doesn't care who hires it. Something much the same can be said of the gunman, too.... The evening was dark, it was unlikely that the other even saw the circle of steel that was the mouth of the shotgun barrel, now resting on the car's window ledge. And at that moment, the universe caved inward upon Joseph Marie Prantera. There was a falling through all space and through all time. With luck, the syndicate would get him off with a couple of years at Quentin. A door slid open in the wall in a way that Joe had never seen a door operate before. The other spoke precisely and slowly, the way a highly educated man speaks a language which he reads and writes fluently but has little occasion to practice vocally. Joe had been born in Naples and his mother had died in childbirth. With the exception of a faint nausea, which brought back memories of that extreme condition he'd suffered during ... during what? It opened on his approach, the door sliding back into the wall in much the same manner as the room's door had opened for Reston-Farrell. He looked out, however, not on the lawns and walks of a sanitarium but upon a wide boulevard of what was obviously a populous city. The fear of police, of Al Rossi's vengeance, of the measures that might be taken by Big Louis on his failure, were now far away. Two were seated there now, papers, books and soiled coffee cups before them. Reston-Farrell, the one Joe had already met, was tall and drawn of face and with a chainsmoker's nervousness. He wondered, all over again, if this was some kind of pressure cooker. The maternal linage was almost universally ignored." Whatever the something else was, a slot opened in the middle of the table and a glass, so clear of texture as to be all but invisible, was elevated. "What is the date, Old Calendar?" "2133," Reston-Farrell said. "2133 A.D. they would say." Warren Brett-James said softly, "Mr. Prantera, you are no longer in the year 1960, you are now in the year 2133." Briefly, we have transported you, I suppose one might say, from your own era to ours." Reston-Farrell said, "Suffice to say, you are now one hundred and seventy-three years after the last memory you have."
 Psychiatric Care
 Death  Erasure from the timeline  Life in prison  Psychiatric Care