Finity

PART FOUR The Pursuit of Happiness

It was odd that no one else had put a cottage out here. Maybe the landlord owned more of the beach than I thought, but then couldn’t he have made more money by building more cottages? And there was certainly plenty of room out here.

Whatever the reason for its isolation, that was part of what kept us coming back to the cottage, even though we always figured that the next summer, or the one after, there would be miles and miles of new construction going up, and our old refuge would be a refuge no more. As far as I could recall, in thirty years of marriage, Paula and I had been here every summer. Maybe longer. I had memories of being a child here.

Jeff the mailman came by every morning, with replacement groceries and the overnight mail that would contain requests and orders from our employer, a firm named ConTech, about which we knew very little. Apart from Jeff’s visits, we had the house and the beach to ourselves. Of course we had to keep doing the work that arrived, but it always seemed to be easy work and not the least bit time consuming. It was so dull and so easy that we seldom remembered, the next day, what we had done the previous day.

Every so often Paula and I made a little joke that the big nightmare of the job was the total absence of weekends. Packages arrived every day, with a couple of hours of work to be done in them, and we sent them out every day, with the previous day’s work done. There was never a day in which we didn’t put in our couple of hours, so in that sense we had no days off—but there was never a day with much more than two hours of work, three at most on rare occasions, now and then just half an hour, so we didn’t care much. We always made sure we had a pot of coffee the way Jeff liked it on the stove when he came by.

The ocean was ill-suited for swimming, being cold and rough with a beach that dropped off sharply, and it was all stone and gravel out there beyond the gray-black beach sand. The sea air was often cool and there was a great deal of fog most days. We might have been on any coast; it seemed to me that the sun did not always set in the same place, and once or twice I had remarked on that to Paula, without either she or I ever much caring to investigate or to keep a record. The cottage itself was warm and comfortable, not quite large enough for a real estate agent to call it “spacious” nor quite small enough for him to call it “cozy,” neatly kept and well maintained, with gray shingles and a stained brown and gray tin roof that made it blend pretty well into its surroundings.

We had evolved our particular way of enjoying the days there, and we seldom varied it. We never got up before dawn, because we preferred to conserve electricity. The propane generator’s tank was expensive to refill, and we wanted it to last all summer. Paula usually got up a few minutes before I did, just when there was light to see by, and lit the fire I had laid the night before in the woodstove. Insulation on the chimney tank was good enough so that there would be enough hot water left from the day before for her to run some of it into the bathroom shower tank, and take a quick, pleasant shower there before dressing. By the time she would emerge, naked and dripping, to towel off in the kitchen, the fire would be going and it would be pleasantly warm. She’d set the first coffee of the day, in its tin percolator, onto the stove, put on the clothes she had left hanging on hooks by the stove the night before, and climb back up the ladder to our bed loft to give me a hard shake and get me started.

Then it would be my job to pull on clothes, go downstairs, chop up some potatoes and onions, and put on a skillet of bacon. When there was enough grease, the onions and potatoes would join the bacon and I’d start whipping eggs with some parsley, chopped tomato, and crumbled tinned corned beef. As soon as the potatoes were brown, I’d pour the egg mixture in and stir the whole mess until it was solid, then split it onto plates. I always ate mine with Worcester and Tabasco; Paula took hers with ketchup, salt, and pepper, “the way God taught midwesterners to do it,” she would explain. “On the tablets that Moses brought back from his vacation trip to Florida.”

“Are you a midwesterner?” I would ask.

“My parents were. Or my grandparents. Or then again maybe I was. I don’t know. Anyway, a Farmer’s Breakfast doesn’t taste right without ketchup, salt, and pepper.”

“Maybe not, but this is a Hobo’s Breakfast,” I would say, “which I learned to make from someone who once met a hobo, and Worcestershire and Tabasco are the true and key ingredients, based on that authority.”

Paula would get a curious expression. “I can understand farmers eating a big breakfast, but why hoboes? A long hard day of catching trains and then lying around the railroad yards?”

That conversation, or one very like it, would continue through breakfast, and then it would be time for our morning walk together. Most mornings it was foggy but not raining; we both remembered days when it had been sunny or rainy, but not recently. We would set one of our alarm watches and walk one way or the other along the beach, for forty-five minutes, until it was time to turn back.

The beach never became really, solidly familiar, even after all these years. It didn’t seem to have any features distinctive enough to become familiar, for one thing. Going either way there were places that curved into the sea and places that curved back from it, broad shallow bays and peninsulas. There were places where the beach was wide and gentle, others where it was narrow and steep, a few where the pine trees came right down almost to the water. There were often things that were interesting on the beach—jellyfish, starfish, shells, things washed off ships, and once we had found a dead dolphin, though again, that had been some other summer than this one. Whichever way we went on the beach, since we always wanted to be ready to meet Jeff when he brought the mail—he came a long way from town and we wanted to make sure that he got his coffee and a bite to eat—we only had an hour and a half to walk, and Paula and I would therefore turn around at exactly forty-five minutes. Exactly forty-five minutes after that we always arrived back at the cottage, agreeing that it had been a terrific walk.

Jeff would arrive just as we finished brewing the second pot of coffee of the day, with both our mail and the groceries we had ordered. We’d get the new stuff put away as we talked to him, and give him the list for the next day. We tried to keep it a short list each day because it all came in the basket of the bicycle, an old clunky red single-speed Murray Missile, which he always leaned against the big column on the left side of the pillar. Given the awkwardness and weight of the bicycle he rode, we didn’t want him to overload his basket and have to work too hard.

The only mail was always the ConTech package, and in it there would be a list of things that we were to look up and write a report about; we looked everything up in the big, comfy reference room that we had put in upstairs—the landlord let us leave our books over the winter—and then typed the report on a manual typewriter and put it in the outgoing envelope for the next day.

I always meant to watch to see which way Jeff came from, or departed to, on the bicycle, because what we could see of the road from our porch gave us no indication as to which direction town was, and I was always afraid that in the event of an emergency, I might not be able to figure out which way to go. Paula always pointed out that if he could ride that heavy old bicycle from town, town just could not be too terribly far. The cottage had no phone, and we always meant to ask the landlord to see about getting us one for the following summer, but we never did.

We’d chat with Jeff for a while, hearing about doings of people that we didn’t know in town and about local politics that didn’t matter much to us.

Usually it would get to be about eleven-thirty, and then Jeff would say he had to be going, and we would urge him to stay to lunch. Lunch was always Campbell’s soup, either tomato or chicken noodle, and some grilled cheese sandwiches, always sharp cheddar on the sourdough bread that we made for dinner the night before. Jeff would have two, I’d have two, and Paula would have one. We’d usually talk Jeff into eating an extra half sandwich and having a second on soup, since he had a long ride to make every day.

Finally, Jeff would ride away, we’d do the little bit of lunch dishes, put on a third pot of coffee, and go upstairs to do our work. That really never varied; we would be asked to find and analyze all the synonyms for an English word, in all the languages we had dictionaries for, of which there were a great many. One day we would do all the synonyms for “stop,” one day for “good-bye,” one day for “leave,” and so forth. Then we would work out how they were all related to each other, and finally prepare a summary of how they were all linked to each other, type that up very carefully on the manual typewriter, and put the whole thing into the envelope for the next day.

We’d have a couple cups of coffee and go for the second walk of the day, along the beach, one hour out and one back in whichever direction we had not gone in the morning. When we returned we’d stoke up the fire with some fresh wood, and I would split some from the big pile on the back porch so that we’d have enough for the next day. I’d go out and do a little surf casting, and whatever I caught would be the basis of a chowder that night; Paula would make up some bread dough from the sourdough, then sweep out the house (it was so hard to stay ahead of the sand), and sit down to read poetry while it rose. I’d come in with the fish, about enough for the chowder—I never seemed to have particularly good or bad luck—and get that under way on the now-hot stove, which would feel lovely after I had been out in the windy cold of the late afternoon. The bacon, onions, and spices would spit merrily away on the bottom of the pot while I gutted, filleted, and chopped the fish; I’d give it a stir and add the potatoes and the cans of crushed tomato and creamed corn, then finally the fish itself and enough beer to make it soup. About the time I had it simmering, and felt like sitting down to read for a while, Paula would get up, carefully mark her place in her book, and punch the bread dough down. We’d sit and read companionably for half an hour, and then she’d knead the bread dough and set it out in loaves; half an hour later, when the chowder had been cooking for a good hour and it was definitely getting to be evening, she’d slip the loaves into the box oven of the woodstove, and then get out the wine. We’d both have a glass while the bread was baking and toward the end of that we’d pull the chowder off the stove and season it.

Somehow or other all that was ever left over was bread for the next day. Since the fire had been going good and hot all that time, the chimney tank water would be warm, and after doing the dishes, we’d use about half of it to run a hot tub, where we’d get a little drunk and silly, with some jazz record or other from the 1930s playing on the old record player in the place. After a while we’d start kissing, leading up to making love. The bathwater would get drained into the toilet reserve, and we’d towel off, go to bed, and fall asleep at once.

The next morning we would do it all again. Every so often we might, during a long walk, or while doing dishes, or even lying for a moment holding each other in the dark, have a little talk about how strangely alike all the days were, but it was never particularly serious; we could always recall just enough difference not to be alarmed.

Then one day I remembered to ask Jeff, as he was having the second half of his second sandwich, whether he’d like to stay for a glass of wine.

“That’s a very odd idea. I’ll be lucky to make it back to town by dinnertime as it is. I have to ride most of the morning to get out here, and then there’s always some mail to pick up on the road back in.”

“Which way is town?” I asked. “This is going to sound stupid but I’m afraid I don’t remember.”

“Oh, well,” he said, “I’m not sure I do, either. It’s sort of as if the bicycle does. Just watch the way I go when I leave—and go the other way if you have to go into town, because the way I come out in the morning is much shorter than the way I go back in the afternoon.”

“I see. Well, then, imagine you’re leaving right now; which way do you turn onto the road?”

“Are you facing me or following me?”

“Following, I suppose.”

“Then the opposite way from the way I turn if you’re facing me.”

“Are you sure you haven’t already been at that wine?”

Conversation lapsed, and once again, as always, he said it was time for him to go. Paula came back out of the kitchen with three glasses of wine and said, “Can’t you just have one for us? It’ll warm you up for the long ride, won’t take but a minute, and you can’t get drunk on one glass of wine.”

He shrugged, laughed, and agreed. He and I went out on the porch to drink our wine, accepting a mock salute from Paula’s raised glass on the way. I was delighted to see that we were getting some sun; for the first time I could remember I was seeing the long line of sand hills to the west of us, and I could tell that it was the west. I wondered why I had such vivid images of the sun setting over the sea, but perhaps I had seen that somewhere else, on some other coast at some other time. I stretched, sipped the wine, thought of something that I couldn’t manage to make myself speak, and said, “I have a thought.”

“That must be what the company pays you for,” Jeff said. “All the company ever sends you is the mail and groceries, and all that ever leaves is mail. So it has to be your thoughts they pay you for.”

“I—” I scratched my head. “I’m not really aware of getting paid.”

“Well, then, maybe the ideas are what the company doesn’t pay you for. Anyway it seems to be your work, whether you’re getting paid for it or not.” He put a strange emphasis on “work” that I didn’t catch the significance of.

“Guess that’s true. But I don’t think most people have all that much trouble identifying what their work is. In fact that seems to be one of the few things that people tend to agree on.” I finished my wine and set it down on the railing.

Jeff was nowhere to be seen. I ran out onto the road and looked for him, both ways, but there was no one there. After a long moment of puzzlement, I went back into the house to tell Paula. On my way through the door, Jeff brushed by me. “See you later,” he said.

Intent on telling Paula, I just said, “Sure, tomorrow,” and had walked right on into the kitchen before I realized; when I did, I said, “I think I just saw Jeff leave the house twice.”

Paula’s grin was full of mischief. “Was that before or after he went to the bathroom?” she asked.

“What?”

“While you were talking outside—just as you started to talk, because I remember you staring off at that little patch of sun—he suddenly turned around and darted into the bathroom. You didn’t notice he was gone. Then when you did notice, you ran out into the road. Just as you were coming back, he came out of the bathroom and the two of you passed in the doorway. Then he went on his way and you came in here to tell me he had left twice.”

I laughed with something that was very nearly relief, and said, “Well, I’m not so crazy as I thought. But—shit!”

I ran out to see which way he went on the road, but of course by now the thick fog was rolling in and the temperature was falling. He was gone once again, and once again I had no idea which direction town was.

“Cheer up, darling,” Paula said, brightly, sitting on the porch. “Remember that either way on the road eventually leads to town. In a crisis you might pick the longer way by accident but you’d still get there.”

“I just wonder what keeps defeating us in trying to learn that simple piece of information. And how Jeff knows to play along with it.”

“It’s not that urgent to know how to get to town,” Paula said, “and if it’s really important you will eventually find a way to find out. But it’s not like anything ever happens, much. Each day is nearly identical to the others, and so far there’s been no emergency in any of them.”

“But it could happen in the future.”

She finished her wine, in a few slow, thoughtful sips. “I suppose. Well, I’ll watch too, next time.” She took the package Jeff had delivered that morning from the armchair by the front door, where we always left it until we were ready to begin work. Paula opened it to read the instructions from ConTech for the day. “Well, let’s see. Today’s been an unusual day; will we get unusual directions to match?”

She looked at it and said, “Nope. Except it’s a noun this time. ‘Report on all synonyms, across as many languages as possible, for FINITY.’ ” We went upstairs to begin work.

As I was pulling down the Russian-English dictionary, a thought struck me. “Maybe there’s a way to find out without watching.”

“What?”

“I said, maybe there’s a way to find out without watching. To find out which way he goes on the road, left or right.”

“Who?”

“Jeff!”

“Are we back to that silly question?”

“I don’t think it’s silly.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be working?”

“Oh, all right.” I went back to what I was doing, and opened the dictionary to “finity.” I copied down the Cyrillic—I couldn’t pronounce it off the top of my head, and would have to figure it out later—when the phone rang.

Paula went to get it, and said, “No, we were just starting. And in French, it’s a simple cognate, the word is just finite. That’s right. The word we got for today was finity. Finity. Finity. Is there something wrong with the line? Finity!” she shouted.

I stood up, seized by pure terror. “Paula, get away from that thing! We don’t have a phone!”

She looked at me in some horror and tossed the handset away from herself as if it were a live rattlesnake.

“What do you want to know about finity?” a voice said from the sky, booming down through the roof. Except that it was loud enough to be God in a bad mood, it reminded me of Jeff the mailman. Outside the wind began to howl, a harsh, lashing storm like we had never known in thirty years on this beach.

“We need to know how to get there!” I shouted, not knowing how I knew, or even, really, what I was saying. “We’re trapped in something infinite, and we need to escape into something finite.”

“Santa Fe,” the voice said. “You are going to go to Santa Fe and get the answer there. And thank you for penetrating the United States. I am Iphwin. You know my avatar. This was the best interface I could manage, but you had to say the right thing to link us up across the border. Now I’m in, and I’m with you. Let’s go.”

I was crouching behind the bridge, in El Paso, and seemingly no time had passed. Paula was beside me, firing her rifle, and Iphwin crouched beside us as well. In front of us, on the bridge, Helen lay motionless, a scant three meters short of our position of cover. We could see the wounds in her back; she’d been hit several times. Further away, I could see the Colonel, hampered by his bad leg, had gotten no more than three steps from the esty before he’d been cut down. Opposite us across the roadway, Esmé, Jesús, and Terri were crouched around the other bridge abutment.

There didn’t seem to be any shots coming back at us.

“I just had an amazing hallucination,” I said, “that seemed to take days or years.”

“The cottage on the beach?” Paula asked.

“That’s the one,” I agreed. “Hallucination?”

“Not at all,” Iphwin said. “It was Iphwin Prime establishing a connection to you—it just composed an image out of whatever it could find in the two minds physically nearest my own. I would guess that the artificial intelligence had to crack the problem of telepathy to get through to both of you, using my brain as the local relay, and working through a radio implant in my skull. But that’s just a guess—I’m not privy to his thoughts unless he transmits them, and he’s really not interested in me since I’m just a bad copy of himself. Whatever he sent through to you, I knew he was sending, but not what he sent.”

He sat still for a moment, as if listening.

Paula and I were in bed, in the cottage, listening to the ocean roar, holding each other and starting foreplay. A voice that thundered high above the roof said, “The ones who were attacking you are temporarily suppressed. Helen Perdita and Roger Sykes are dead and therefore you must not waste effort in trying to rescue them. The suppression of the attackers will last a maximum of fifteen minutes, and they cannot pursue you across the Rio Grande. You will need most of the fifteen minutes to get over the ridge, out of sight and out of their rifle range. Other things will probably pursue or attack you shortly after you get over the ridge. Get going. Good luck.”

Back at the bridge again. Paula grinned at me, wild mischief in those green eyes. “Damn, and the interface was just getting good,” she said. “Okay!” she bellowed, to everyone else. “We’ve lost Helen and Roger and there’s no time to retrieve or bury them. We’ve got fifteen minutes at most to get over the ridge, before the people shooting at us come back. I’ll tell you how I know once we’re over the hill, but Lyle and Iphwin can confirm.” We both nodded vehemently. “Come on, people, haul ass!” Something in her tone made me—and Iphwin, I noted with amusement—obey as soon as I heard it. I was on my feet, putting the safety on the pistol, and slipping it into the back of my belt, before I fully knew that I was doing it.

She sprinted up the steep slope, heading for the top by as direct a route as she could manage, and I followed as best I could, with Iphwin rattling along at my heels. A glance backward told me that the other three were catching up pretty quickly, and in a few moments I was moving along with Terri.

“God, I’m sorry about Helen,” she blurted out. “And Roger too of course.”

It had just sunk in that the Helen I had been dealing with for the past few days was dead, along with god knew how many other versions of Helen. Whatever worlds still held a living Helen were probably very far away in the dimensions of possibility; I might never see a living version of her again at all.

I grabbed a rock for support and it tumbled, nearly rolling over my toes. A rattlesnake writhed out of the place where it had been, hissing and buzzing with anger, and I took a big step back, bumping Terri. She caught my arm and barely stopped herself from falling. The snake moved forward toward us.

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Paula said, above us. “Hurry, but watch where you’re going. Lyle, make sure you’ve got the safety on that pistol, and then toss it to me.”

I did, gingerly. She caught the pistol one-handed. The snake seemed to be uncertain, not approaching closer, but not backing off either. The rattling sound is more of a low, thrumming buzz, and it’s one of the most blood-freezing sounds I’ve ever heard.

The pistol spat once and the snake’s head broke in half; it lunged toward me as if in a strike, but fell back onto the trail, harmless now. “Don’t get too close,” Paula said. “They don’t really need their brains and I don’t know if he still has his fangs. Go around him carefully and keep coming. We’re only halfway up.”

We picked our way around the thrashing body of the snake; Esmé and Iphwin in particular gave it a wide berth. “Well, if anyone tracks us,” Paula said cheerfully, “at least they’re going to be startled by what’s on the trail.”

From there on the climb was easier, and when we got to the top of the ridge we found a road just a few feet below the top. We got down to it and headed downhill, into El Paso, at a dogtrot. It was hard to breathe and I got drenched in sweat, but at least it was downhill from there on. “All right,” Iphwin said, “I think we’re getting somewhere.”

“Save breath,” Paula advised. “We want to get down into the buildings where we can be harder to spot, just in case something is watching us, or in case the cyberphage was wrong and the enemy are able to pursue us. That was eleven minutes up the hill, by the way, including time out for the snake. Good going.”

We trotted through two switchbacks; my out-of-shape shins were beginning to splint, but I figured I’d better keep going— pain in the legs isn’t one of my favorite things but I was nearly sure it had to be more comfortable than bullets in the head.

The sun was high in the sky, and it was hot and unpleasant; our luggage had been back in the wrecked bus, and it didn’t look like anyone had managed to bring a water bottle. After two more switchbacks, we were down to slightly lower ground, and Paula gestured us to a halt—”No point in getting to where we can’t run or fight,” she said. “How is everyone? Keep walking while we talk.”

We had chosen to use one of the bridges some distance downstream of the centers of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, and now we were on a road that seemed to be going vaguely north and west, toward El Paso. “I wonder if we can find a car that still works,” Iphwin said. “That might get us much further from the border than anyone would expect us to get, and perhaps get us a breathing space.”

“Nice thought if we can make it happen fast,” Paula said. We came around a switchback and there were a few cars parked on the road. We kept looking for one with Telkes battery power instead of an internal combustion engine, but there weren’t many of those, and the few there were didn’t have keys in them.

“I don’t suppose any of us is a proficient car thief,” Esmé said, after the fourth Telkes battery car turned out to be without keys, “and unfortunately because the motors on these things are controllable PDC, there’s no way we can just jump one of them to make it run. It won’t run without the computer consenting to the process.”

“Have you ever stolen one?” Iphwin asked hopefully. “You sound like you know what you’re doing.”

“No, but I’ve arrested a lot of people who have,” she said, “and paid attention when they talked. Are we still headed for Santa Fe?” she asked Paula.

“Definitely,” Paula, Iphwin, and I said in unison.

Naturally enough a little explanation was required, so we managed to get most of it explained as we walked at a more relaxed pace down the highway toward the ruins of El Paso that we were beginning to catch glimpses of in the distance.

“Whatever happened here wasn’t particularly sudden or violent,” Jesús said, suddenly. “Not like some of what happened in the northern part of Mexico.”

“How do you know that?” Terri asked.

“Because every one of these cars was parked and locked. None of them has a bullet hole or any other kind of scar. No one has looted them for spare parts, either. And we haven’t found one that was wrecked, as you might expect if something happened that killed or disabled the driver, or the brain. For that matter I haven’t seen a human bone since we crossed over, which is really a contrast compared to the charnel house that the area right around the other side of the bridge was—there were bones and skulls and desiccated corpses everywhere, if you looked for them.

“I must say it looks to me like whatever happened here gave people more than enough time to park their cars and go into their homes. When we get further out of the high-risk zone, here, and have some time, I want to look in the houses. I wouldn’t be surprised to find everyone dead in their beds with the covers pulled up.”

“Or nobody at all,” Terri said. “What if they all just vanished?”

Jesús shuddered and crossed himself. “I’m a policeman,” he said, firmly, “and I like simple explanations for not seeing people. Everyone dead in his bed, that’s a simple explanation, and starting from that I can figure everything else out. But everyone just vanished into thin air—that’s a much tougher one. I’m not sure I can cope with that.”

“Hey—Telkes generator and keys in it!” Paula cried, running forward to an old Chevy van. “And a seat for each of us. Can’t beat that.”

It was locked, but it only took a moment to smash out a window and get in. We all piled in, and Paula said, “Okay, this is an ‘assisting robot’ model, one where the robot cuts in if it thinks you’re doing something stupid. I’m going to switch that out. Doorplate says Detroit made it in 2008, which means it was already old when the thing happened, and now it’s fifty-four years old. Tires are early-model permatires, though, so maybe it won’t go flat on us. Anybody knows any prayers, y’all say ’em.”

The motor started with a scream and a grind. As I watched, Paula disengaged the hand brake and let the car start rolling down the hill. “By the way,” she added, “if any of the radioactivity leaked from the Telkes batteries, we’re all gonna glow in the dark. Keep crossing those fingers.”

We shot down the hill, but it didn’t sound like the motor was working—I thought we were probably in some kind of free roll rather than under power. “What’s that pedal your left foot is working?” I asked her.

“Show you in a second, as we get to the bottom,” she said.

We whipped around two switchbacks, going faster and faster, but she never touched the brake. The second switchback put my heart into my mouth with the feeling that this contraption might just roll over any second, and the permatires, while they couldn’t really go flat or blow out, seemed to have distorted over the years, so that each of them was just a little less of a wheel and a little more of a cam, making the whole car rise and fall alarmingly.

We hit the bottom of the hill and Paula said, “Here goes.”

She jammed her foot all the way down on the accelerator and let her left foot slip off that mysterious third pedal. With a shriek of metal against metal, the van leaped forward like a rocket, and she yanked the stick that I had thought was the drive selector around frantically, pumping the left side pedal as often as she did. “We got it!” she shouted, over the rumble. “Enough force to break any rust there might have been and get it turning. The motors in these things are pretty durable but they never had much umph for starting.”

In a few moments we had slowed to a reasonable pace, and we were rolling almost smoothly, except for the camlike motion of the tires that still gave a feel of rolling over the ocean. “The tires all settled on their bottoms, and so now they hit their flat spots in unison. That’s why this thing is moving like a kid’s gallopy-horse.”

“Yep,” Paula said. “The pedal on the left is a clutch. The stick here is a gear selector. When they first came up with the Telkes battery, they weren’t thinking in terms of distributed direct drives; instead they just put in a big electric motor and used it like the old internal combustion engines. I can teach you how to drive it, but I don’t know how long this poor old thing will go.”

As it turned out, we covered almost sixty miles, and even with the broken window that we’d gotten in through, the air-conditioning managed to make it pleasant enough. We drove over the empty highway at a nice steady pace, not going nearly as fast as we could have, and it was midafternoon before there was a groan and a low-pitched thrum from the motor. We slowed down rapidly and stopped in a valley between two long, sage-blanketed ridges.

“Well, damn,” Paula said. “That’s a case of out of juice. But this thing runs pretty well. Anyone up for seeing if there’s a Telkes battery somewhere around here that we can find and swap in?”

“Makes sense,” I said, getting out. It seemed strange to stand on a narrow, crumbling highway, the van stalled dead in the middle of it, and not worry about any car that might be coming. We hadn’t seen a thing moving around Las Cruces, miles behind us.

“Well,” I said to Jesús, “if we are in charge of heavy lifting, maybe we should just walk over the ridge and get a look.”

“It’s a plan,” he said. Ten minutes later, sweaty and thirsty, we stood on top of the hill, squinting at a sign a hundred meters beyond us. A few more steps confirmed that it said: “RADIUM SPRINGS 4.”

“That’ll be four miles,” I said. “Not a great walk, normally, but figure that those batteries are apt to be heavy. And it will be a long while to go get them and then come back. I think we should all go, rather than leave people here.”

“That would be my guess, too,” Jesús said. “Christ, if we’d just had time to take our water bottles with us. But at least there should be shade there, and maybe some way of getting water we can drink. And we can’t leave everyone to sit in the desert while we go for batteries—they’ll be in big trouble by the time we get back.”

We trudged back and explained matters; nobody was happy about a walk in the hot sun, but choices were few and far between. Tired as we were, and thirsty, it was past four in the afternoon before the six of us managed to drag ourselves into the little town.

The drugstore, with its soda fountain, seemed sort of promising, and to our delight there were cases of bottles of Coke— “the real stuff,” Esmé pointed out, “not expat formulas. This would be worth a fortune for a chemical analyst to get his hands on—they’ve had to duplicate it from people’s memory of taste.”

“Not in my world,” I said. “They found a bunch of cases of it in a basement in Sydney, and got it analyzed. But anyway, whatever it might be worth financially, here it’s a lifesaver. Calories, liquid, and a wake-up drug—exactly what we need.”

The rusty caps broke rather than bent when we pried at them, and the liquid inside foamed up violently and then was instantly flat, but it was recognizably Coke, and I don’t think I’ve ever had anything better to drink than three warm Cokes in the back of the old Merriman’s Drugs.

“Well, there’ll be daylight enough if we leave now,” Paula pointed out, “and plenty to live off in this town if we spend the night here. Maybe we should do a little scouting.”

We found seven Telkes-battery trucks and cars, and taking a guess, picked the newest one. It took a crowbar to get under the hood, but we were rewarded by the wail of an alarm siren, which told us it still had power; unfortunately its motor seemed to be rusted solid. A few minutes later we had the set of three batteries out of it; each weighed about twenty pounds and would fit in one of the backpacks that Terri had scrounged from a Sears catalog store. The note attached to the packs said they were being held for pickup for a Mr. Wobbeck, along with an old-style fedora and a gray raincoat. We didn’t figure he’d be coming by for them.

Jesús, Esmé, and I agreed to carry batteries; Paula came along because she was the only one of us, so far, that could drive the Chevy van, but she was much too small to carry a Telkes battery in a pack for four miles. We each took along a couple of Cokes, and it’s amazing the difference that it makes to know that you can have a drink if you need one—we got back to the van in just about an hour and ten minutes.

Neither Jesús nor Esmé was much of a talker, and Paula was just tired enough not to start, so I was left alone with my thoughts—which were mostly about Helen. Seeing her dead had been a horrible shock, and yet I couldn’t associate the tough intelligence agent with whom I’d spent the last few days with the gentle, shy woman I was engaged to. I didn’t know if all the versions of her, all the tough versions of her, or just that one version of her were currently dead, and until I was released from this mission and picked up a phone, I wasn’t going to find out.

The hot road surface gnawed at the soles of my feet, and I moved over onto the gravel shoulder to give them a chance to cool. My feet and legs were going to be a mess tomorrow; I really hoped the Chevy van would hold up all the way to Santa Fe.

Did I want to get back to my old life, and to Helen? I was a scientist. I depended on information interchange. Unhook me from the networks, make me communicate by slow means or not at all, and there just wasn’t much I could do; so if I resumed my old life and job, I would be crossing over again. For that matter, I liked driving land vehicles well enough, but I thought very few, if any, of the worlds out there would tolerate my operating and navigating any kind of aircraft, ballistic ship, or orbital craft entirely by hand.

So even if I got back to Helen, I couldn’t go back to my old way of life without risking, every day and all the time, slipping away from her again. And unlike Iphwin, I couldn’t roll the dice so fast and often that sooner or later I got a roll I liked; no, if I got stuck in a bad world, I would be stuck for a while, and it would be a struggle to get out.

First conclusion, then: even if I found a way back to the Helen I had known, and it was likely to be very difficult and take a long time to do that, I had no guarantee that I would remain in that world with her for very long. Even if I didn’t wander off during a phone call, net connect, or plane flight, it could just as easily happen to Helen—and we could hardly arrange our lives to always be on the same connection and in the same vehicle.

Nor could I imagine being permanently unhooked from all communication. That might have worked for a caveman or medieval peasant, but I was a creature of the modern world and just a few days of being off the net and out of the loop was already driving me crazy.

Second conclusion: getting the Helen I knew, loved, and wanted back was going to be barrels of work for a very uncertain result.

We topped a rise and looked southward; from this particular spot we could just make out the little dot of the van, still at some distance. Sweat was pouring down our faces—those batteries got heavier somehow, after a couple of miles—and we were all glad enough to stop and drink our Cokes.

“I sure hope we can find beds tonight,” Esmé said, “because I really want some rest. Hard to believe we stood that watch down in Mexico, early this morning, eh, Lyle?”

“I’m not sure I believe anything much, right now,” I said.

“I still don’t believe the Colonel is gone, after all these years,” Paula said, “and I can’t imagine what you must be feeling about Helen, Lyle.”

“Neither can I, actually,” I said, telling the truth.

After a quick break to go behind a rock and pee, we continued our hike along the old highway, still mostly silent. We’d seen no trace of any attacker since El Paso. I scanned the hills but not very diligently.

Truth to tell, much as I had liked Helen, the Helen I had known—or the Helens, I reminded myself, since what I had known must have been a few hundred or thousand generally similar but subtly different versions of her—had fit very conveniently into my dull, steady life, and I was getting a sinking feeling that I just couldn’t count on a dull, steady life anymore. I was starting to feel vulnerable because of skills and attitudes I lacked; I needed to be a more adroit mechanic with more devices, I needed to be better with weapons, I needed to speak more languages, most of all I needed more poise in the face of uncertainty, because I now knew that anything and everything could drop out from under me at any moment.

To the extent that there had been any trouble of any kind in the life Helen and I had shared—and “trouble” was too strong a word, it had been more like occasional mild stress—I had been the one in charge of handling it and she had more or less sat there and let me handle it. Now that I knew how dangerous the world was—or the worlds were—I didn’t feel up to the job of protecting someone else, in exchange for not being lonely and getting some quiet affection. I hadn’t liked the hard, aggressive version of Helen much, but I had to admit she was better suited for the way things worked.

And another part of me just missed her terribly—any version of Helen would have been better than the great aching void I felt now—and wanted to be done with all the adventures, and back in a safe world where nothing ever happened. I recognized the signs of impending self-pity, and concentrated, instead, on watching the landscape for any possible ambush. None showed up.

With four of us to do the job, it only took a few minutes to get the “new” Telkes batteries into the Chevy van. It started right up, and we were almost air-conditioned into comfort by the time we pulled into Radium Springs.

Terri flagged us down and pointed us into a parking lot. “We’ve been busy,” she said cheerfully, after we rolled to a stop. We were in the parking lot of the Honeymoon Motel, a place that I suspected had been more than a hotel when last occupied. “We have the other batteries out and stacked in the lobby, so we ought to have enough cruising range to get to Santa Fe tomorrow. We’ve got five crates of Coke, and some dehydrated food from an outdoor supply store. And it turns out this place has a well, a roof tank, and electric hot water. The hardware store had an inverter, and Iphwin’s got two Telkes batteries set up to power the pumps. We’re filling the water tank on the roof right now, and we’ll have hot and cold running water tonight. Plus there were no dead people and no rats or snakes in here, and there’s beds for everybody.”

“Nearly perfect,” Paula said. “Good job.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say perfect,” Terri said. “Some of the posters on the walls are really gross. Do men really like that kind of thing?”

We went inside. It was obvious that this place had been a whorehouse. Well, we would have somewhere comfortable to spend the night, and some food to go to bed on; and I hardly thought that the morals of the place would prove contagious on one night’s stay.

I spent the night in an immense four-poster surrounded by alternating mirrors and pictures of young women in too much makeup and an unlikely variety of costumes. We hadn’t bothered with getting power to the electric lights, and the sun was well down by the time I got to bed, so the shapes were very dim and shadowy.

The next day, about halfway through the morning and as we were winding up the spectacular valley that cut into the desert there, drawing nearer to Hot Springs, Iphwin said, “There’s an experiment I’m supposed to do—seeing if I can contact the Iphwin program from inside America. It doesn’t know whether anyone can call out, only that it can’t call in.

“What I’d like to do is make a call from a pay phone, at the next little town or gas station we come to. Everyone else, stay way back and watch real close. Be ready to lay down covering fire, or maybe to just dump and run, because it’s just possible that I will set off some kind of alarm or alert. My progenitor thinks it can keep me or almost-me in this event sequence, and we won’t be talking—just seeing if we can talk—on the first try.”

“How do you feel about trying it?” Terri asked.

He shrugged. “It’s what I exist for, isn’t it?”

“That’s not an answer to the question. Lots of people come into the world for a reason, but it’s not their reason, and they shouldn’t be controlled by it. And this is going to put you and us in danger. You know that one reason why the machine-Iphwin is willing to do this is that it will still get information even if it loses the whole expedition, and it can always just create another one and try it again.”

“What Terri is saying,” Paula added, “is that it’s Iphwin Prime’s game but it’s your ass.”

Iphwin nodded. “I understand that. But I also don’t have the processing power or speed to cope with what we might find in Santa Fe. And if we’re overwhelmed there it will be too late. It’s a gamble, no question about that; if it works and we don’t trip any alarms, then we have all kinds of backup. If it doesn’t work, we—or at least you—know we’re on our own, and we get away and stay off the nets.”

“And if it’s a complete disaster?” I asked.

“That’s the least likely possibility. Besides, even if I try, the real highest probability is no dial tone and no connection of any kind, and then we can stop worrying and wondering about the whole issue.”

Terri and I argued with him about it for a while, but Paula gradually came around to Iphwin’s point of view, and I think if we had a leader it was Paula. Esmé and Jesús didn’t say much but they tended to back Paula. An hour later it was about four firm votes for Iphwin’s trying to make that call, to two lukewarm ones for waiting or giving the idea up. When an old gas station with a visible pay phone on a pole popped up over one of the many long rises, we slowed to a stop, dropped Iphwin off, and drove about a hundred yards further up the road, to get to the top of a hill where taking off would be easier.

We all sat in the van, with a back window opened; I was appointed the official watcher. I saw Iphwin pick up the phone, apparently get a dial tone, and dial. There was a faint shimmer, but it could have been the heat or eyestrain.

He hung up the phone and ran straight for us. “Well, at least he remembers where the van is—that’s a good sign,” Jesús said. “He can’t be too different from—”

Iphwin bounded the last few steps and dove into the van through the sliding door. Something in the way he was moving made me slam it shut as soon as he was in. “Get us out of here!” he gasped.

Not pausing to ask what was wrong, Paula stood on the pedal and popped the clutch, and we shot off downhill like a missile. The thought did come to me that this was a very old vehicle with no maintenance other than the old untrustworthy oil we’d poured into every possible port that morning. But it held up just fine. The lumping motion from uneven permatires even seemed to be smaller today, maybe because they were evening out and maybe because I was getting used to it.

By the bottom of the hill we were moving at about eighty miles an hour, and we shot back up it never getting below sixty. The old van wasn’t built to do much more than that, but we were at least getting all the speed that it did have.

After two more long hills, Iphwin gasped out, “Any side road we can find would be a good idea,” and Paula took us down the first old ranch track that came up. We bumped and slammed along that at a slower speed until we were out of sight of the highway, made a couple more jogs, and found, after a few miles of driving past cattle skeletons partially covered by decayed hides, a gate that took us a few minutes to pry open. A few more miles brought us to an old county road that climbed up out of the valley.

On the way, Iphwin told us what had happened while he was on the phone. First of all, he had gotten right through, and his mechanical counterpart had told him that there was an enormous amount of random noise and decades-delayed messages coming out of the former United States, much of it addressed to servers that no longer existed. A sizable number of messages, mostly badly garbled, were from the Department of the Pursuit of Happiness in Santa Fe, so we had a better reason than ever to go there. “That was all good news. Then Billie Beard got on the line. Which means that she’s onto us. I don’t know if she can operate or do anything, here, and I don’t know if my progenitor can do anything to block her or at least keep her from figuring out where we are—but I didn’t want to stick around to find out, either.”

“Damn straight,” Paula said. “And a good thing.”

The county road was winding around in a narrow canyon, following a dry creek bed, and when it emerged into an open area, we were all startled for a moment.

“When do you suppose they built that?” Esmé asked, finally, in a strangled voice.

In front of us was a gigantic highway, four lanes, with no visible entrances or exits—the county road ran under it, under a bridge—and the whole thing was in beautiful condition. It glowed warmly in the morning sun, like the best friend you ever had.

“In the worlds I came from, that’s called an autobahn, and they only have them in the German Reich,” I said. “Built back before cars were self-driving. You needed several times as much room on the road with human reaction times, not to mention human error rates.”

Esmé grunted. “There’s no such thing in the worlds I came from.”

Paula nodded slowly and said, “I think I heard of something like this, as a proposal to link Moscow and Vladivostok, sometime in the next century—unless high-speed rail beat it out. Well. Imagine putting something like this way out in the desert here. But it seems to be going north to Santa Fe and it’s almost got to save us some time. Now how do we get up onto it?”

It turned out that when we went through the bridge to check on the other side, there was a “frontage road” that ran parallel to the huge highway; we followed that for a couple of miles till we came to a place where only a high curb and some dirt separated the two. By that time we knew the big road was called I-25, and that it went to Santa Fe, since it had distances to Santa Fe posted.

“Should we pull over and just bump our way over that curb?” Paula asked.

“It keeps getting lower,” I suggested, “so—oh!”

There was a sign that directed us to get into the left lane to get onto I-25 North. We followed that lane and in less than a minute we were on the big highway, headed north. Paula cautiously played around and found that she could get the van to do about seventy miles per hour without shaking us up too much. “I still don’t know why they built this road, but I’m glad they did,” she said. “Maybe this was an event sequence that got robots relatively late, and so America built these things before whatever it was happened.”

“Or maybe there’s an obvious answer that we’ll learn once we find out where and when we are,” I said. “Meanwhile at least we’re making good time.”

The landscape was, weirdly, not familiar; it took me a while to remember that most of the Westerns I had grown up seeing were in black and white, and besides had been shot mainly in south California. They had captured some spectacular scenery, but nothing like the wild array of jagged shapes that seemed to leap and dance in the desert light here; California has mountains and deserts, but New Mexico is a desert ripped by mountains. And as far as we could tell, on that magnificent highway that leaped ravines and slashed through hillsides on pillars of shining white concrete, we were alone.

“Iphwin,” I said, “I have a thought to ask you about. When did the various event sequences first begin using quantum systems to communicate?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Not much before 2015, I think, in any event sequence that contained America. Not much after 2050 in any of the event sequences we’ll have had contact with. The presence of a United States of America sort of dictates a given technical level, and of course if they don’t have it yet then we aren’t yet bleeding over into their reality, nor they into ours.”

“So it coincides,” I pointed out, “with the disappearance of America.”

“Very roughly,” he said. “There must be a thousand other things that coincide with it. And everything we know about the quantum switching process would argue that since exchanges and shuffles between very similar event sequences are far and away the most common, on the average the number of people moving out of America via the phone, net, or self-piloted vehicle must have been about the same as the number coming in. It’s a random process, after all.”

“Random unless you select,” I said. “Same way you got all of us into one world—you just kept shuffling till it happened.”

“Trouble,” Paula said. We were just topping a rise, and when I leaned forward to see what was happening, I nearly fell forward because she was pumping the brake like crazy and downshifting clear to first gear. At the bottom of the hill, stretching clear across the road, and bank to bank, was a pile of wrecked cars, ten or twelve high.

“It’s a trap and it might be a current trap—” Paula said, as she fought to get the car slowed down. “—but I hope it’s from sometime long ago.”

A shot burst through the windshield and pinged off the roof. There were bright flickers along the top of the pile—it looked like they had half a dozen shooters.

“This damned thing will roll if I do anything effective,” Paula grunted, crouching low. We were slowing rapidly now, but still that terrible wall was getting closer, and more shots were hitting the Chevy van. Jesús pushed me out of the way, yanked a window open, and returned fire, but shooting from the rocking, bouncing van, he hit nothing.

“Get the batteries against the back door and crouch down!” Paula shouted. I grabbed one and put it in place; beside me Terri and Esmé were doing the same. The back window rolled down and she shouted, “Jesús, I’m going to try a J-turn. Everyone, hold on!”

I wasn’t sure why she had shouted that specifically to Jesús until I saw him duck in from the side window and face the back. The van was bucking and pitching as its misshapen tires tried to slow it against its own momentum on the steep slope.

Paula drove onto the right shoulder and stepped on the clutch and brake; we skidded down the shoulder, and just as we came to a stop, the shots now hitting the van in great numbers and all of us crouching on the floorboards, Paula threw it into reverse and threw the wheel hard left. The van shot across both lanes of traffic, going backwards, until its rear end pointed at the snipers below; then Paula threw it into gear and stood on the accelerator, ratcheting slowly up through the gears. Jesús got off a few wild parting shots that probably went nowhere near the barrier below.

We roared back up the hill, and I hollered, “Who’s okay?”

“Me,” Paula said.

“Okay here,” Esmé said.

“Okay,” Terri said.

“Okay but very angry,” Jesús said.

And there was a long silence. “Oh, god damn it to hell,” I said, when I looked down. “Iphwin is hit.”

He was lying there, breathing fast, maybe conscious and maybe not, with a gory mess where his left shoulder had been. Probably the bullet had smashed the bone and driven fragments into the blood vessels around it; he was likely to be slowly bleeding to death, and from what I remembered of my Navy first aid, this kind of thing was just about impossible to stop.

We were halfway down the hill when Terri shouted, “Look up the next hill!”

There was a big truck parked there, and men with guns were getting out.

“Shit again,” Paula said. “We’re boxed in.” She was pulling to a stop as fast as she could. “Okay, everyone brace. There’s a ranch access road over to our left, and I’d just bet that that’s where we’re supposed to go but I don’t feel like meeting up with Billie Beard in a dry gulch. Therefore I’m gonna try to take us over an embankment and down that dry creek bed to the right. I don’t expect it to work, but if we roll I’ll try to roll it so the side door opens.”

We were already peeling out even as she spoke. “Use the van as a fort if you have to, but try to slip away just as soon as we wreck—maybe you can get away before they see you getting away.”

She made a sweeping S-turn so that we went over the edge of the shoulder nose first, and miraculously we skidded down the loose gravel and onto the grass without tipping. I thought she might have low-saddled us with one bumper on the shoulder and one on the ground and no wheels touching, but she gunned it and we dropped and then rolled forward.

The bed of the arroyo was firm packed sand and loose gravel, not ideal for a highway car, but I have to give that old van some credit—it stayed upright and it kept rolling.

The shots stopped hitting almost right away, and I noticed that the soil in the dry arroyo was just damp enough so that we didn’t leave a rooster tail of dust behind us. A lot would depend on how many of them there were and what contingencies they had gotten prepared for.

We whipped around a bend and Billie Beard—one of her, anyway—was standing there with a submachine gun. She sprayed us, and Jesús shot at her; I don’t know if she fell down or took cover. I heard Esmé’s low grunt, and turned to find that she was gut-shot, holding her belly. “Christ, that one was high,” she said.

“Just relax, as best you can,” I said, “and as soon as we get away from these guys we’ll get you taken care of.”

“Hit high, high, high,” she repeated. “Might’ve been hit in the kidney, liver, large bowel... getting kind of dark and I’m fading out, but there’s not much blood coming out of me, so I think it’s going into the ab cavity. Messy way to go.”

I checked for an exit wound, and she didn’t have one; the bullet had gone in below the left side of her rib cage, not very far below, and I was afraid she was probably right; the bullet had gone in where it was likely to hit her liver, stomach, or kidneys, and probably also sever some major blood vessels.

I could do nothing for her, and nothing for Iphwin, who was now lying still but had a faint pulse. I had a hard time even keeping my balance back there as the Chevy van rocked and bucked from side to side.

“Ha!” Terri sang out. “Can we get up there?”

“One way or another, but I think the odds are better below it.”

I grabbed a seat back, with my blood-soaked hand leaving a horrid stain, and peered forward to see what they were looking at. We were passing under a high bridge, part of some small county road.

A hundred yards beyond it, there was a paved path almost at the bank of the arroyo. “Let me take this carefully,” Paula said. “This would be one hell of a time to flip, after what we’ve just been through.”

She turned and backed carefully, and got a running start, spraying damp sand and nearly burying first the front bumper and then the back axle, but in one heroic bound, we were up onto the narrow road—path, really, it was barely wide enough for the van and a minute’s nervous maneuvering went into getting us pointed along it.

“Well, roads usually lead to other roads, and bridges are hooked to roads,” Paula said, “so somewhere back there, maybe, this will join a road that will get us out of this valley, and give us a chance to try to head north again. How are they?”

“Both unconscious, now,” I said. “If you want to, we can stop and try to treat them, but I’ve got nothing to stop the bleeding with, and I think they both have rapid internal hemorrhaging. I don’t think either of them will last out the hour.”

Paula pulled the van off the road and into a group of trees where it would be hidden. “Well, then let them die in comfort.” She climbed back to join the rest of us.

Jesús sighed. “I am going to miss Esmé. I worked with her so many years. And I didn’t like Iphwin much—who could? he was half machine!—but he was trying to learn to be human, and I am sorry he never finished the job.”

Terri was wiping her eyes. “We’re like the ten little Indians,” she said. “We just keep getting mowed down. There’s no way that we’ll make it there.”

Paula looked around. “Lyle, how are you feeling?”

“Stressed out and miserable,” I said, “but I’m still here. Sort of.”

Terri was crying, now, steadily, and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Jesús reached out to comfort her and she pressed her face into his chest, still crying. His eyes were looking into a black vacuum a thousand miles away.

Paula sighed and sat down next to me, in the middle passenger seat. “Put an arm around me, I need some comfort,” she said. I did; for a while I thought she wasn’t going to say anything further, but then she said, “We should be escaping but nobody’s got the energy. And at least Iphwin and Esmé get to die in some kind of peace. One of the Billie Beards saw us down by the stream; do you suppose the others will be along soon?”

“Hard to tell,” I said. “But I’m not fit for much, Jesús is pretty stressed, and—” I brushed her red hair off her face and found that it was partly stuck down with tears “—Paula, you’re not too well off yourself.” Internally I was gibbering on the edge of just sitting down and crying, and demanding that everything go back to making sense, but since everyone else had earned a collapse too, and was taking theirs, mine would have to wait. I fought down the sick feeling in my guts and the scream waiting in my throat, and said, as calmly as I could manage, “At the moment we’re on a road. What if we just drive far enough, right now, to be out of sight of the streambed? This whole ravine seems to be pretty brushy. They might still find us but at least we’d be somewhat concealed—and if they don’t find us, then we’ll get some rest and be ready to start in the dark. If they do, here’s as good a place to fight as any, since we’re going to be surrounded and heavily outnumbered and won’t stand much of a chance.”

“Good enough for me,” she said. “Sit in the passenger seat beside me, okay?”

We climbed forward and started the van. The tires now not only lumped, but rumbled—”Their surfaces must be rough,” Paula said. “Permatires never blow out, but I’d imagine a few dozen bullet holes don’t leave them at their best all the same.”

The narrow strip of asphalt switched back at a very steep angle, and getting around it was difficult. The rise was steep, too, and we could see the creek bottom the whole way up, so we kept going till we found another switchback—and again, the rise and the angle were problems. But halfway through that stretch of road, we were on the inside of a broad ledge, and no longer visible from the creek bed.

“Here we are, then,” I said.

“Esmé is dead, I think,” Jesús said, his voice perfectly flat.

I crawled back. There was no pulse, and the bullet wound was still slowly leaking blood; her pupils didn’t respond to light.

“I agree,” I said. “I don’t think she was in pain for long.”

There was a sudden, overpowering smell, and I saw the front of Iphwin’s pants become wet; his sphincter had let go. No pulse, nothing in the pupils.

It was a strange way to rest, but compared to what had gone before, it was almost restful: Jesús and I used the oil change pan that we found in the back to scoop out two shallow graves. Paula and Terri gathered rocks until there were enough of them to at least put a few obstacles in the path of a bear or coyote.

Nobody had any words to say; we just laid them in and covered them, and sort of said good-bye. Jesús sat by Esmé’s grave till it was dark, while the rest of us slept.

As soon as there was moonlight, just after midnight, we drove slowly up the strange, winding asphalt road. “I keep thinking there’s some reason for this road to be the way it is,” I said, “and I can’t figure it out, but it seems to be right on the front edge of my forebrain.”

“Well, this is a very wet ravine, too,” Terri said. She seemed to have recovered as much as she was likely to for a while, and was sitting on the seat immediately behind Paula and me, leaning forward to help us look for obstacles. “That might be artificial, you know. Maybe we’re in a public park?”

“Ha! That’s got to be it. Paved hiking trail in a public park. Probably we’re moving up toward a reservoir or something,” Paula said. “Good news, anyway, whatever the case, because we’ve got more vegetation to provide cover.”

Fifteen minutes of going slowly along the dark road by moonlight brought us up to the top, and we discovered that the guess had been right—it was a state park built around a reservoir. We drove out the main gate and found a road that would take us north; moonlight was more than bright enough, and we had three hours of cruising along it at about thirty miles an hour.

“I guess it’s a miracle that all those shots didn’t knock out the motor,” Terri said.

“Naw,” I said. “No moving parts except in the motor and transmission, and those had metal cages around them to shield people and electronics from the magnetic fields. Nothing much to hit. They might have got a wheel bearing, and they got two of us, but the basic propulsion system was pretty hard to stop.”

As if it had heard me, a wheel bearing began a dull screaming sound, and within another three miles, we had sparks flickering under the car. We left the van there and walked till almost dawn, when we found another tiny, deserted town, with what we needed—a motel with beds and some stores to loot. By the night afterward, we had four reasonably well-equipped backpacks, a sleeping bag each, and two lightweight tents. The only thing we didn’t find was another Telkes battery car, but that was less urgent. We thought it might take a few days to walk, or perhaps we’d turn up another car when we reached Albuquerque, in a couple of days.

That long walk was very strangely peaceful; we had none of us known each other well, even ten days before, and since then we had lost friends, lovers, our very worlds and realities, we four, and we had little to look forward to except solving a riddle posed by a machine, and yet we kept going as if we were four old friends out for a pleasant backpacking trip.

Albuquerque had been partly wrecked by flood and fire, but not looted; the further we walked into it, the more apparent it was that the people had vanished, and all the damage we saw was merely a case of things not being repaired. We found intact buildings next to burned ones, with useful and valuable stuff lying around; a city prone to flash floods, as its canals and sewers became blocked, had been partially washed away, but there was no plan to the damage. It was just as if everyone had walked away, a few decades ago, and left it to do this on its own.

After about forty minutes of wandering up and down residential streets, looking fruitlessly for a car with the keys in it, Terri said, “I have an idea.”

“That puts you ahead of the rest of us,” Jesús said.

“It might. I was just thinking, everything here looks like people just vanished, doesn’t it? And took nothing of any value with them?”

“Right.”

“So would they have taken their car keys?”

“Only if they were in their pockets,” Jesús said. “And besides, lots of people keep a spare in the house. This is a great idea, Terri. All we have to do is break into a house with a car we want in the driveway.”

Half a block later we found a suitable-looking Jeep with low miles and Telkes batteries, parked under a carport. We went around back to minimize visibility, in case someone hunting for us should be not far behind, and found a dog skeleton still chained to an overhead wire. “Poor thing,” Terri said, “don’t you just bet he starved or died of thirst?”

That cast kind of a pall over things, but in a minute we had discovered that there was no lock on the tool shed, and a perfectly fine crowbar was in there. With a little effort, the back door opened, and we were inside.

Not a thing had been touched; everything looked as if the owners had just planned to be gone for a few minutes. We scattered through the house to look for the keys; a moment later I heard Jesús swear, and ran to see what he’d found.

There was a desiccated cat on the floor, clearly mummified in the dry indoors, but that wasn’t it. Near the cat was a crib, and in the crib there was a scattered tumble of bones. “You see?” Jesús said. “They must have vanished with no time at all. They left their baby behind. And then after a while, the cat was hungry, the baby had probably already starved ...” He shuddered and crossed himself.

“What did you find?” Paula said, cheerfully, from the hallway.

“Something we’d rather not have seen,” I said. “There’s a corpse of a baby in here.” I looked around further and said, “And two plugged-in VR headsets on the bed. As if the people wearing them just vanished.”

Paula came in anyway, and, practical sort that she was, got a towel from the bathroom and made a makeshift shroud for the little pile of bones. “We can bury it in the backyard,” she suggested to Jesús.

Shortly Jesús and I were digging a small grave in back, in the hot desert sun, working our way through the hardpan soil. While we were doing that Terri came out to let us know that they had discovered a fairly large supply of soda in the basement, and a much larger supply of wine—”and the car keys,” she said. “On the worktable in the garage. We didn’t even have to come into the house to find them, if we’d known.”

By the time we had buried the little body, and put the birth certificate that we had found in the desk into a freezer bag under a rock on top of the grave, it was getting later in the evening, and we decided to stick around, have a dinner of canned vegetables and wine, and get started in the morning.

“The clue to it all, I think, if I could sort it out,” I said, “is the headsets on the bed. VR connect time is incredibly expensive everywhere, even today. And that VR box that they have is stamped with a US government insignia and says it was issued by the Department of the Pursuit of Happiness.”

“We’ve seen people appear and disappear, while talking on the phone,” Jesús pointed out. “And VR goes through the same quantum compression and decompression as the phone does.”

“But usually what people do is trade places between universes,” Paula pointed out. “How come no one traded in for these people?”

None of us could think of anything. Nobody wanted to sleep in the master bedroom, where we’d found the body, but there were two kids’ beds in other rooms, a guest bed, and the couch. Feeling noble, I took the couch, and fell asleep at once. It made two good nights’ sleep in a row, which left me feeling practically human.

The next morning we discovered, in the fridge, an unopened gallon of irradiated milk. Sure enough, it was still perfectly drinkable, though of course it had separated; there were also unopened packets of cereal, also irradiated and therefore not spoiled, though they had managed to become very dry. We all had two or three bowls of cereal and a large glass of milk. “Breakfast of seven-year-olds,” I said, “and look at how much energy they have.”

Just as we were getting up from the table—something about the niceness of the place made us stack our dishes in the nonfunctioning sink—Paula looked up over my shoulder, stared, and said, “Oh, shit.”

“Oh shit what?”

“This place has a silent alarm, people.” She pointed at a box on the wall where a little red light pulsed like a tiny, evil heart. “See? It says the alarm was activated.” She got up, walked over to it, and looked at the readout. “All the while we’ve been asleep, the house has been phoning for help. We can hope it’s been dialing a number that isn’t hooked to anything, but I don’t think we can count on it. Grab your stuff and run to the car—we’ve got to move.”

We were out the door and the Jeep was rolling, two minutes later. “How can whoever picks up that alarm be sure it isn’t an animal opening the door, or the door just falling down after all these years, or something?” Terri asked.

“They can’t be, but if they’ve got the resources to send, what, twenty people or so after us, so far, into this place, they probably can check out all the alarms eventually,” Paula said, making her third U-turn in ten minutes. She was jigging around, trying to find a way through a city of fallen bridges and washed-out roads. “We’ll just have to do what we can.”

Though it took hours to find our way through the ruins of Albuquerque, with so many bridges down, once we found a way back to I-25 it was just a bare hour to reach Santa Fe. We expected to be shot at, at any moment, or the car to die and leave us halfway between, but neither happened. “Here we are,” I said, pulling off the highway and heading into town, “and to judge by the number of signs telling us where to find the Department of the Pursuit of Happiness, we’ll probably find it pretty soon. That will put an end to one part of the adventure, and start another. Anyone have any profound thoughts?”

“I wish we’d never come,” Terri said, tears in her voice, speaking better for me than I had for myself.

The Department of the Pursuit of Happiness turned out to be on the old town square, facing the cathedral; it was a huge building and though forty years or more had gone by, it was conspicuously newer and in better shape than anything around it. It was huge, square, and forbidding, taking up at least one whole city block and reaching at least ten stories into the sky— we had seen it from the highway without knowing what it was.

“The building is built like a bank, a mint, or a prison,” Jesús said. “Big thick walls, windows far off the ground and very small, no good hiding places along its sides. There’s either something they want to keep in, or something they are trying to keep out.”

“Well,” I said, as we all got out of the car, “I don’t suppose they’ll have any active measures around to keep us from going in the front door. It does say ‘Lobby.’ And this seems to be a lucky day—no sign of pursuit yet, and no evidence that anyone knows we’re alive. Maybe the silent alarm just wasn’t hooked up to anything anymore.”

Paula shrugged. “Or maybe Iphwin—the cyberphage, I mean —is acting on our behalf, or maybe the bad guys can’t travel to anywhere this far north for reasons known only to the bad guys.”

“Or maybe they know where you have to go, and there’s no point chasing you all over the field when they can just wait for you there,” a familiar voice said.

We turned around and there was Geoffrey Iphwin, perfectly healthy, wearing his old ridiculous bright white ice cream suit with a painfully loud gold and purple tie. He looked at our slack-mouthed stares and laughed aloud. “Now don’t look so startled. Remember I was only dead in a few thousand of my existences; I crossed over here, with the assistance of the machine-Iphwin. Now a few thousand of me are talking to a few thousand of you. And here I am. I think the adversary is probably coming after us fast, so we should get moving. As for how I found you, I knew where you were headed and how you were traveling. Now, if everyone is ready, let’s go.”

We all were ready enough physically; we just didn’t have a clue as to how to deal with a person we all remembered as dead. But then, why fret about it? He seemed comfortable enough.

“We are coming up on the end of things,” Iphwin said as we crossed the public square. “I think when we get closer there will be some kind of attack. I still don’t know what’s going on and the knowledge may destroy me, or the program of which I’m an avatar, but I see no way I could avoid trying to learn it now. Suppressed curiosity, I bet, has killed more cats than exercised curiosity.”

Jesús said, “If they really want to stop us, why don’t they just hit this whole area with hydrogen bombs until it glows? That would be much more likely to work than trying to hunt us like deer.”

“I wish I knew that too,” Iphwin said. “Maybe it’s just against the rules, and the rules are being made up by someone of whom we have no knowledge. More likely they are afraid of damage to the place where we are going, and so they want to get rid of us in the way that spills the least stray energy. Or it could be something none of us has thought of.”

“It could often be that, at that,” Paula said cheerfully. “Do we have a plan for anything besides ‘walk up and pound on the front door’?”

“The front door sounds good to me,” Iphwin said. He really did look absolutely splendid in the suit, more so because the four of us were in our dirty, worn road clothes. “Least likely to be misunderstood and most likely to produce a result we’ll understand, eh?”

We were halfway up the steps when we heard “Don’t move a muscle” in a too-familiar voice.

I glanced back and saw a dozen copies of Billie Beard, all holding shotguns. “We’re glad we stopped you here. Cooperate and we won’t need to hurt you, don’t cooperate and we’ll cut you in half with all the shotgun blasts.”

Iphwin raised his hands and said, “Looks like it’s your game.”

Without replying, the dozen Billie Beards marched us over to the blank wall of the building and lined us up against the wall. Iphwin began to laugh, something we’d never heard him do before. “What’s funny?” Beard demanded.

We were inside the building, facing the outside wall—in mirror image to the lineup we had been in. Through the soundproofing we heard the muffled sput-thud, sput-thud of guns being fired point-blank into the wall.

“Some of those shots will get through sooner or later,” Iphwin said, “or they might remember that the front door is unlocked, so let’s get deeper into the building before they find a way in.”

We hurried down a corridor beside us; it might have been part of any administrative or technical building of the last 150 years, with CBS block walls painted landlord yellow on the lower part and pale blue on the upper; a black stripe separated the two colors at shoulder height. No doubt some architect somewhere had gotten a pile of money for deciding on that design.

A few minutes of dashing around corners and down corridors, always going up every flight of stairs, past frosted glass windows on doors, and big square wooden doors with numbers on them, was at least enough to get me lost, and to get all the noise of the attack on the wall outside out of earshot. We slowed to a brisk walk, and began to look for any signs or building guides that might give us a clue.

“How did you do that?” I asked Iphwin.

“Practice,” he said. “One reason why you didn’t get pursued much, till you got up here, was that everyone was chasing me, and one reason they were chasing me was because I was keeping in continuous radio contact with the cyberphage. I learned a very large number of very useful things. Not all of which I can explain or show you in the time we have left. Let’s get going—time is precious.”

To our surprise, the first sign we saw said “TO THE OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY.”

“Pretty strange,” I said.

“That a secretary gets a sign?” Terri asked.

I couldn’t help smiling. “Bet you didn’t review your American history recently. A ‘secretary’ in the American government was about what a cabinet minister is anywhere else. That’s the head honcho’s office, not where the typist lives.”

“I know that,” she said, her voice dripping with the kind of contempt that you can only get from an adolescent who has been told something she already knows. “What’s weird about there being a sign for the secretary’s office, in the building of the department he’s the head of?”

“What’s weird,” I said, “is that normally a cabinet secretary would have an office in Washington, and not in Santa Fe. It’s also weird that we found exactly what we were looking for this quickly.”

Paula looked at Iphwin, and he shrugged. “Pure chance plays a role, all the time, no matter what,” he pointed out. “It isn’t really so odd that every so often, even a creature of chance like me can just happen to be lucky.”

We found the door a few minutes later. The glass in the window broke readily enough when Jesús and I swung a small microwave oven from a break room like a battering ram. We turned the knob on the inside, walked past a receptionist’s desk, and found ourselves standing on thick, plush blue wall-to-wall carpet that seemed still to be brand-new; a faint odor of synthetics still hung in the air, indicating that the room had been closed all that time.

On the desk was an old-fashioned VR headset, and the chair was tipped back; there was a pricey pair of black wing tip shoes, at least forty years old, sitting on the carpet under the desk, next to two balled-up socks.

Iphwin shrugged, checked, and said, “The batteries on these computers were lifetime guaranteed, but I don’t think anyone ever thought a computer would have a lifetime like this. Let’s see what happens if we turn it on.”

Nothing did. We started to paw through the file cabinets.

“Here’s a specification,” Paula said. “For a national happiness policy.”

We sat down and pored over it, everyone looking closely. “At least in neurology, this world was ahead of the ones I grew up in,” I said. “Look at this. They have a really, really elaborate spec on the human brain. When they say they’re out to maximize human happiness, they are really not kidding. They know just what it is, it’s a brain state, and this is the program that’s going to make sure that while people are plugged into VR, their happiness gets maximized.”

“Shit,” Jesús said, “they must have made VR the most addictive drug in history—in fact, technically speaking, the most addictive drug possible. No wonder they all disappeared. They must have starved to death—”

“But we never found a body or a skeleton,” Paula pointed out. “Except for that one child who was too young to have a headset on.”

“What’s the ‘happiness algorithm’ define happiness as?” Iphwin asked quietly.

“I don’t read brain science much,” I said.

He grabbed it, looked at it, and appeared to think deeply for a moment. “Oh, dear,” he said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.”

“How long does it take to do things in the cottage?” I asked.

“In here, what it looks like,” Jeff the mailman said. “Out there, about a microsecond per day. But it’s different this time; I don’t have to create a job for you, so I don’t have to ride back and forth to town every day.”

“Does everybody have a satisfactory breakfast?” I asked, because I had plenty left on the stove. I wasn’t used to cooking for five, and had overshot somewhat.

“Are you this good a cook in the real world?” Terri asked. “Because if you are, I nominate you for cook, forever.”

“Hunger’s the best sauce,” I said, “and in this scenario, we’re all hungry. Dawn fishing will do that. How’s yours, Jesús?”

I took the grunt and the vigorous nodding of his head as approval.

“Anyway, Jeff, or Iphwin, or whichever you’d rather be while we’re here,” I said, “back in the real world, you were saying ‘Oh, dear,’ over and over. Or I guess your embodied version was. He must have called you up, and plugged us all into this interface. Are all those Billie Beards on their way to the office where our physical bodies are?”

“They sure are. I would estimate they will reach the office in two or three minutes. But with a million-to-one time ratio, we could stay here and take a long vacation for a few centuries, without pushing our luck, eh? Does anyone need time to relax before we get down to business?”

It was universally agreed that we didn’t, but it also seemed to be agreed that I should make up seconds for everyone.

“Well, then,” Iphwin said, “here’s what happened to America—or rather to all the Americans who were in America, in so many timelines. Around the early 2000s—anywhere from 1994 to 2022, depending on exactly which event sequence you were in—the Americans found the secret of happiness. Very possibly because they looked for it harder than anyone else ever did. And they came up with a unique plan: the government would pay for a universal wideband VR system to deliver happiness to everyone. Basically that involved a feedback loop; the headset measured how high the happiness indicators were in your brain, and an artificial intelligence in the system then decided whether your VR illusion needed to change to increase your happiness. It had to be a fairly smart artificial intelligence, you see, because there are many kinds of pleasurable pain (like seeing a tragedy or being melancholy about a lost love), and many ways in which delaying a pleasure enhances it, and pleasures about which people feel so guilty that they become miserable if they indulge in them.

“Now the artificial intelligences not only had tremendous leeway to do things, because they couldn’t anticipate what situations might come up, but they also had all sorts of ability to self-improve. It didn’t take long for them to develop the trick of simulating the personality of the person wearing the headset, and then ‘advance shopping’ the things that could happen in VR, to find out which one the person would like best. Thus they could keep moving the person from one pleasure to another, without having to ever experience a disjunction between what they thought the person would like, and what he did like.

“But of course VR comes through a quantum compression server, so part of the experience people were going to get was going to be the new world that they were quantum-shuffled to. The artificial intelligences quickly recognized that, too, and began to do the same thing that I do when I am trying to get near a specific worldline, or into a family of event sequences. They’d shuffle the person’s position frequently, in hopes of making them drop out somewhere better, and then they’d sample the new reality into which the person would emerge, to make sure it was better for the person than the one from which the person had come.

“Well, an essential component of pleasure is variety. And real pleasures are more pleasant than virtual pleasures, which is why sex hasn’t disappeared despite the invention of VR pornography. So the artificial intelligences quickly began to focus on giving people a pleasurable variety of real experiences.

“Pretty soon they realized that the real way to maximize somebody’s happiness was to break the message into smaller and smaller packets, so that the person thrashed around between a lot of worlds, and then solve the huge optimization problem created by the fact that parts of him were in thousands of different worlds which had thousands of different definitions, and many different versions of him would be dropping into many different worlds.

“The artificial intelligences were doing, on a much grander scale, what I did to put the team of you together—they were shoving people into new worlds, checking the world against the person’s tastes and experiences, and either deciding to stay or bump again. Every time they bumped someone, they triggered a chain of bumps that put thousands of other versions of that person into motion, but that was okay, because people like variety, and very often change alone makes them happy. Everyone kept swapping places, getting closer and closer to the point where when they took off the headsets, they would drop into worlds perfect for them.

“In a matter of a few seconds, the artificial intelligences had quantum-shuffled nearly everyone who was hooked up to the VR systems, millions or billions of times—so often and so far that most of Americans were in event sequences that were only very distantly related to this one. The effect amplified, because once you bump most of the people out of a world, it becomes a much tougher world to be happy in—a world where ninety percent of your neighbors and friends have vanished isn’t fun for most people—which meant that all the others had to be bumped too, and the people who popped in to take their place, and the ones who popped in to take their place, and so forth and so on. The artificial intelligences emptied out billions or trillions of worlds, as everyone migrated in the direction of greater happiness—and presumably they filled up billions or trillions of worlds that are somewhere very far away. Basically, everyone’s gone to their own personal heaven. And since the happiness algorithm was being kept as an American secret, only the American part of the net had it...”

“And only America went away,” I said. I poured fresh coffee for everyone, and then said, “Well, your mystery is solved, Iphwin. I suppose we could all go chase after them. Or you could take the happiness algorithm from this document, implement it over the whole world, and send everybody to heaven. Or you could be a nice guy and help us escape from Beard and her people, and then just let us go.”

“How far away is heaven?” Paula asked, with a frightened expression, as if she saw someone with a gun. “What?” Jesús asked. “Why are you—” Paula set down her coffee mug and walked over to the window to stare out. “Iphwin, whatever you do with us when we’re all done, please make sure I have access to this place. It’s good for the soul.” She stared for a long time and said, “You know, I can’t think of a single reason why this wouldn’t be the case, and I sure hope one of you will think of it.

“Anybody ever have a class in economics, where they talk about transitivity? Like if you like apples better than bananas, and bananas better than oranges, you’re supposed to like apples better than oranges? And you know how it makes a total mess of things if people then like oranges better than apples anyway, because then you could get someone to never eat the fruit, but just keep trading and trading and trading—”

“Oh, dear, again,” Iphwin said. “You’re right.”

Terri and I looked at each other, then at Jesús, and finally, speaking for all of us, Terri said, “Why did it just get incomprehensible in here?”

“Well,” Iphwin said, “which do you like better, apples, bananas, or oranges?”

“Apples, I guess,” I said, “and then bananas, kind of in that order.”

“Now, I give you the choice, and you take the apple and eat it. I give you the choice over and over, and you keep eating apples. So you settle down, once and for all, on just eating apples.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Iphwin, you’re thinking like a machine again. Pretty soon I’d stop liking apples so much, and want some variety. And then ... oh, god, I see it now. Ever hear about the grass always being greener on the other side of the fence?” I said to Terri.

“Yeah.”

“Well, if you were a sheep, and the whole round world were made up of fences and pastures, and your priority were always trying to get somewhere greener—you’d never eat any grass. You’d spend all your time jumping fences, because every time you jumped one, you’d see another, greener pasture, just beyond the next fence. You might get very far away, but you’d just jump and jump and jump, always improving but never finding a pasture where you could stop—even if you ended up back home, because maybe the desire to jump is just the desire for yet another change. Now, changing your mind and reshuffling into another world millions of times per second, for minute after minute, day after day, decade after decade, is not something a person would do—”

“But it’s something a machine would do. And it’s what the artificial intelligences did,” Iphwin finished. “The Americans are not all in heaven, as I’d thought. Paula’s right. The Americans are all still out there—way, way, way out there—as far as you can go in five dimensions of possibility, changing between awesome numbers of event sequences—and always having one more change to do. Chasing through time, forever. Space, time, and possibility are big enough so that they’re never coming back, but it’s finite—so they’re going to curve on and on, never coming back and never getting any further away. The only Americans who escaped that fate—”

“Were the ones outside the country,” I said. “And the only people who were going to come looking for America would be expat Americans, which is how all the worlds in which America had a lot of expatriates—the ones where it was conquered and the ones where repressive regimes came to power—all became so closely linked. And—Iphwin, it’s horrible, they’re only in each world for a microsecond or so, so they aren’t experiencing anything—”

“They’re experiencing whatever you experience when you are nanoseconds away from being perfectly happy—though not quite so perfectly as they will be about to be a few hundred nanoseconds after that,” Iphwin said, sadly. “Well, now I have a common interest with Billie Beard, at last. We need to suppress that algorithm, or there will be no more people, and hence no one for us to do things for. I will need to talk to her.

“However, when she’s trying to break down the door with a bunch of her well-armed avatars, it is really not the time for a reasonable conversation. Which reminds me, detection instruments I’ve found and activated within the building tell me that she’s now walking up the corridor to the office where your physical selves are, which means the next question is how best to get you out of there. If everyone is done with breakfast, let’s go for a walk on the beach.”

Did you ever start out to learn a game that made no sense, until one moment you suddenly found that you were just playing it, and it all worked? That was my experience of learning to cross event sequences and to move physically without needing transportation. It’s more a way of looking at the world, and just relaxing and falling through to another world, than anything else. Iphwin had a lengthy explanation about quantum processes inside the cells of the brain, and about how this might account for some mysterious disappearances throughout history, but this had no more to do with learning the trick than studying the physics of wheels or the history of paving does with learning to ride a bicycle. We got so we could do it, and then we got good at it. We all played with it for several days there in the beach cottage and on the land around it, retiring every evening to the cottage on the beach, until one day the sun came out, and we all shook hands, and were back in the office, standing around the secretary’s desk.

We heard the clatter of a dozen pairs of high heels in the hallway; the Billies were on the floor and looking for us. “My office, north of Surabaya, a week from now,” Iphwin said.

There was a thunder of feet outside, and all five of us just went, moving through all of the myriad worldlines until we found something where Beard wasn’t coming, then walking out the door, taking the Jeep—each of us individually, since the Jeep was there in so many worlds—and driving back down to Mexico. I had a couple of interesting conversations at the frontier, but there was no rule against driving in from that side, and my passport, of course, didn’t show that I had been anywhere since Torreón. Once I was far enough south, I got a decent hotel room, a long night’s sleep, and a ticket for Surabaya, which in this timeline was inexplicably called by some long Russian name.

A week later, I caught Mac the limo back to the Big Sapphire, collected Fluffy the cat and a few possessions, and went in for our meeting with Iphwin.

“Really,” he said, “since you’re always leaving selves behind as you do this—it’s an unpleasant thought but undoubtedly all of us got some self or other killed back in Santa Fe—from here on out you can live by moving into worlds where you’re rich, as needed, and you can more or less pursue any happiness you care to. I just thought we might all want to agree as to how to meet up at the virtual reality cottage; I had a feeling we might want to see each other.”

Terri wasn’t planning on returning to her parents; what teenager, given infinite money and choice, would? “It’s a big lots of worlds out there,” she said, “and I’m going to see plenty of it. Just now I’m a little depressed, but I figure there’s infinite adventure out there, or at least finite adventure so big I’ll never get done.”

Jesús nodded. “I understand the urge. I think I will take a little walk through a few million worlds, and see if there are places where I can do some good.”

Paula and I decided to make a vacation of it, down in Oz, since we had found out we were so compatible in the cottage. But after a couple of weeks of her perpetually wanting to go out and surf, or to the pistol range, or that sort of thing—and my wanting to sit on the beach and read—we understood it wasn’t going to work out. She left a very nice note saying she was off to stir up trouble in a few billion worlds, and not to leave the light on for her.

Me, I zipped through a billion worlds or so, taking about a year, till I found an event sequence where Helen had broken her arm the day before my leaving for the job interview, turned up in her hospital room with some ridiculous excuse, multiple armloads of roses, and the much-harder-to-explain Fluffy. It took a lot of explaining and some outright tale-telling, but Helen seems to be no longer suspicious, not even about my hypothetical rich uncle who left us the large fortune with which we were to raise kids in a big house in Auckland. We’ve got a Paula and a Terri, but an American girl wasn’t about to have a son named Jesús, so…

I had to settle for Joshua. Jesús says he doesn’t mind much. Iphwin doesn’t want any kids named after him.

It’s been years since I faced or felt real fear. In an abstract way it’s not a bad thing to know that I can handle fear, pain, or privation if I have to, but then I can endure headaches, too, if I have to. Now and then I take a second or even two off, and go to the cottage for a while, where I meet some of the others; the embodied Iphwin is there often, as he’s never really gotten used to a fully real world.

Mostly I am content.

What I hear of the others is what you might expect; Jesús, Paula, Terri, they’re all out winning glory and wandering across the worlds, flying Dutchmen on a quantum sea. I shall probably always prefer, like Iphwin, to stand on the shore and wave.

Now and then, late at night, I go to the cottage, and Iphwin and I spend a few days running on the beach together, and drinking wine, and talking. Then one of the three adventurers will drop in, and I will sit up all night while they talk of their adventures. I know that I enjoy listening to the stories more than I would ever enjoy the adventures. And knowing that, I am very happy.