Three Days to Never

And he walked in all the sins of his father, which he had done before him…

— 1 KINGS 1 5:3

Twelve

Derek Marrity wasn't going to go near Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital — no, sir — even though he knew that's where Frank Marrity would be right now.

He needed to see Frank Marrity one more time, to tell him some things to do — and if Frank paid attention and did even some of what Derek would tell him, it should make the difference between living comfortably, on the one hand, and living in a twenty-four-foot trailer in a chain-link-bordered trailer park, on the other. But tonight would not be the night to approach him about it.

He rolled his left hand on the steering wheel to look at his watch, then with his right hand pushed the stem to light its face. Nearly 1:30 in the morning. Not a good time to be driving drunk, and with no believable driver's license, past the empty floodlit lots and the stray dogs and the dark car-repair garages of Base Line Boulevard in San Bernardino.

The conversation between Daphne and Frank Marrity would have ended at least an hour ago, and Frank Marrity would be asleep by now in his truck in the hospital parking lot.

Derek knew vividly what had taken place at the hospital. Frank Marrity had fallen asleep over Tristram Shandy in a chair in Daphne's room, but he had awakened when a man peeked in at the door of the room; the man had apologized and walked away down the corridor, but by that time Daphne had been awake too.

She had been uncommunicative before she'd gone to sleep, presumably woozy from the anesthetic; but now she had seemed alert, and not happy to see her father in the room.

There was a pad on the desklike table by her bed, Derek knew, and Daphne had written on it, u cut my throat in letters that tore the sheet of paper in a couple of places.

Frank Marrity, poor doomed soul, had said something like, "I had to, you were choking." coughing, she wrote. "Daphne," Marrity had protested, "no, you weren't coughing, you were choking. You would have died. I love you, I saved your life." She'd had to tear off the torn sheet of paper to write more, and then she had written: I was OK — u cut my throat — dont want to be alone w u. And of course after he had protested again that he had done it to save her, that he loved her, she had written I hate you.

At that point, Derek knew, Frank Marrity had stumbled blindly out to his truck and eventually gone to sleep on the seat, with some serious drinking indicated in the near future.

Probably one gang or the other had put microphones in the hospital room, and taped Marrity's half of the conversation. Derek Marrity didn't need to hear a recording of it.

One pair of taillights shone on the dark highway a hundred yards ahead of him, and in his rearview mirror two swaying headlights were coming up fast. It didn't look like a police car — probably a drunk. Good, thought Derek as he steered into the slower right-hand lane, any cops who are out here tonight will go after him, and ignore this sedate old Rambler. If it is old. I forget.

Then a new white Honda came up fast from a dark street on the right and rocked into a squealing right turn directly in front of Derek; he wrenched the wheel to the left, but suddenly the car that had been a hundred yards ahead was braking hard, and looming up fast in front of him in the left lane; and the car speeding up from behind swung wide to the left, as if to pass Derek, but instead of shooting on past in the empty oncoming lanes, its hood dipped as it abruptly slowed.

Derek stamped on the brake and the tires screeched as he braced himself against the wheel. The old Rambler rocked to a halt, shaking on its suspension. His vodka bottle tumbled out from under the seat and rapped his left heel.

His face was cold with sudden sweat. They've got me bracketed, he thought tensely — I could shift to reverse, but I know I wouldn't get away in this old wreck. I can talk to them, I can make a deal with them — they won't be rough, they've got no reason to be rough with an old man—

The Rambler was still shaking, in fact it was shaking so rapidly that the motion was a harsh vibration now, accompanied by a loud rattling hiss like a rain of fine gravel on the roof and the hood and even in the ashtray, though the windshield showed empty black night; only because it moved so fast did he notice the needle on the temperature gauge swing to the right.

And somehow he was getting an electric shock from the plastic steering wheel.

Derek's heart was racing, and he kept his foot pressed on the brake as he would cling to a tree trunk in a hurricane.

Then the shaking and the noise and the electric current were gone, and he almost fell forward against the wheel as if they'd been a pressure he'd been leaning against.

The Rambler was stopped, though the engine was still running. He made himself uncramp his hands from the wheel and focus his eyes out through the windshield, and he saw that his car was positioned diagonally across the center divider lines in the middle of the highway.

No other cars were visible at all, up or down the wide light-pooled lanes; no lighted signs, just an anonymous band of blue neon far away in the dark. The night was perfectly silent except for the grumble of the Rambler's idling engine. Shakily he reached for the key to turn it off, then noticed that the temperature-gauge needle was back down in its usual ten o'clock position.

Did I pass out? he wondered, his forehead still chilly with sweat. And did the guys in those other cars just leave?

Derek started the engine and cautiously lifted his foot from the brake and stepped on the gas pedal, and the car jumped forward. For a moment he thought the stress must have knocked a valve or lifter back into its proper position, and that the car was running uncharacteristically well; then he realized that it was his right leg that was performing smoothly.

His heart was still hammering in his chest, and he tried to take deep breaths. When he had straightened the car in the left lane and got it moving steadily at thirty miles per hour, he reached down and pressed his fist against his right thigh.

It didn't hurt at all.

He steered the Rambler across the right lane to the curb in front of a lightless cinder-block thrift store, clanked the shift lever into park, and cautiously climbed out of the car, leaving the engine running.

In the chilly night air he took two steps out into the street, then two steps back. Then he stood on his right foot and hopped around in a circle.

His teeth were cold, for his mouth was open; he realized that he was grinning like a fool.

He did three deep-knee bends, then crouched and crossed his arms and tried to kick like a dancing Russian. He tumbled over onto his back on the cold asphalt, but he was laughing and bicycling both legs in the air.

At last he rolled lithely to his feet and slid back into the driver's seat.

"I'm as giddy as a drunken man," he panted, quoting Ebeneezer Scrooge.

He took a deep breath and let it out, staring at the dark low buildings and roadside pepper trees that dwindled with perspective in the big volume of night air in front of him.

But in fact he wasn't drunk. This was sobriety — not the shaky, anxious sobriety of a few hours or days, but the easy clarity of months without the stuff.

She must have died after all, he thought. I can go to the hospital now. And — and I no longer have any reason to hate hospitals! And there are lots and lots of things I've got to tell Frank Marrity — he's going to be a very wealthy, healthy, contented man.

North of the San Bernardino city limits, Waterman Avenue becomes Rim of the World Highway as it curls steeply up into the mountains around Lake Arrowhead. The turns are sharp and the drops below the guardrails are often precipitous; the steep mountain shoulders are furred with towering pine trees, but at 3:00 a.m. the only view was of the lights of San Bernardino, far below to the south, dimmed and reddened now by veils of smoke. Forest fires on the other side of the mountain lit the fumey sky like a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Hell. Aurora Infernalis, thought Denis Rascasse.

The bus was pulled off the highway at Panorama Point, a wide sand-paved rest area, and Rascasse and Golze stood in the smoky darkness outside the bus, a yard back from the knee-high rail. The abyss below the stout railing was called Devil's Canyon, East Fork.

Golze glanced back toward the bus. "How's our boy, Fred?" he called.

From one of the opened windows in the dark bus came the driver's voice: "Breathing, through his nose."

"No obstruction to closing the lid, if somebody pulls in here?"

"Nothing's in the way," said Fred. "He's entirely in the bin, and I can close it quietly."

They had picked the young man up at Foothill and Euclid an hour ago. He was a student at one of the Claremont colleges, and he had stepped up into the bus with no hesitation when Fred had asked him to point out the 210 freeway on a Thomas Brothers map-book page. Now he was bound and gagged with duct tape.

Golze nodded and peered down at the glowing crisscrossing dotted lines that were San Bernardino's streets. "Where's your focus?" he asked Rascasse.

Rascasse pointed slightly west of south, toward the largely unlighted patch that was the California State University at San Bernardino campus. "Right behind the library."

Half an hour ago he had carefully laid on the grass down there a square of oiled glass with his handprints and a few of his white hairs pressed onto the slick surface of it.

Soon Rascasse would kneel down by the railing here, step out of his body, and let his astral projection partly assume the sensorium of the Rascasse focus down there behind the college library. At the same time he would still be aware of kneeling up here beside the bus — like a beam of light split by a slanted half-silvered mirror.

Rascasse would then be occupying two finitely different time shells — the minutely slower time three thousand feet below and this infinitesimally accelerated time halfway up the mountain. He would, briefly, be disattached from the confines of the four-dimensional continuum.

Golze would then cut the throat of the young man in the bus, and the fresh-spilled blood — the end-point of one of the lifelines on the freeway, the release of the young man's accumulated mass energy-would in that instant have drawn the hungry attention of one of the Aeons who existed in the five-dimensional continuum; and that creature would be aware of Rascasse, who for the distance of a second or two would be protruding out of the "flat" four-dimensional fabric like a thread pinched up out of a sheet of cloth.

And Rascasse would leap and cling to the bodiless spirit, mind to incomprehensibly alien mind, and look out at the unphysical landscape that he would then perceive surrounding him; and since space and volume didn't exist there, it would be just as accurate to call it the landscape he would be surrounding. Lifescape, fatescape.

He would be out of his body for no more than a second by his watch, but time didn't pass on the freeway — an hour out of his body, a day, a year, wouldn't give him a better comprehension of that non-space.

For that timeless moment Rascasse's perspective would be freed of things in the way — viewed from this bigger space, nothing in the normal four-dimensional continuum could be in front of anything else, or under it, or hidden inside it; and seeing a man or a car at one moment would not make it impossible for him to see them simultaneously at other moments too. Golze had said once, when he had stepped back down into sequential time, that it was nearly the perspective of God. And he had seemed both wistful and angry to have to say nearly.

The cold wind from over the top of the mountain behind Rascasse smelled of pine sap and wood smoke, and he was shivering when the radio on his belt buzzed softly. He unsnapped it and said, "Prime here."

"Quarte here," said a voice from the radio, frail and tinny under the vast night sky. "You said it might get surreal, and not to hesitate to tell you about crazy things happening. Uh, man and superman."

Rascasse switched the frequency-selector dial on the radio. "Right," he said into the microphone. "So what happened?"

"I was in the lead car," came the voice from the radio, "and after the number three car swerved in from the south, number two came up from behind and blocked him on the north. Then in my rearview I saw the Ra — the—"

"The subject car, the quarry, go ahead."

"Right. It suddenly accelerated toward me faster than… any subject car like that should be able to. And he didn't hit me, he should have, but he didn't, but I heard a huge bang, like an M-80. Uh, Caesar and Cleopatra."

Rascasse switched the frequency again, impatiently. "Go on," he said.

"Well, then he was gone. I mean, the car was just gone, not visible anywhere up or down the highway, and not in any of the lots to the sides. The scanner says the subject car is about three miles northeast of us right now. But the weird thing is, the guys in the number two and three cars got out, and it turns out each of them saw the, the subject car suddenly accelerate toward him! Like the subject car split into three cars, each shooting straight at one of us!"

"Arms and the man," said Rascasse quietly, almost absently.

On the new frequency, Rascasse went on, "Find him again, but this time wait until he's out of the car, and then ghosts."

Rascasse switched frequencies again, but after several seconds realized that the field man had not caught the cue. "Dammit," he whispered, and switched back to the previous frequency.

"—try that," said the field man, and then his signal was gone.

"Shit." Rascasse switched the dial back to its previous setting, and the man was saying, "Are you here? Was that a cue? There's no ghosts on the list."

"Never mind," snapped Rascasse, "we're here now. Hit him with a trank dart when he doesn't know you're onto him."

"Okay. What was it about ghosts?"

"It's—a Shaw play that wasn't on your list. Never mind. Just bring him to me. That's all."

" Kay. Later." And the signal was gone again. Rascasse hooked the radio back onto his belt and took a deep breath of the cold, smoke-spicy air.

"Ghosts is by Ibsen," said Golze.

"I know, I know. Shut up."

"I guess that old guy in the Rambler isn't just some relative in town for the funeral."

"Shut up, I said." Rascasse exhaled, almost whistling. "What happened there? When our fellows tried to grab him, and his car disappeared."

"It wasn't bilocation," said Golze. "Trilocation, that is — because the car went in three directions too, not just the man… assuming the man was in the car; he might have 'ported away an instant before. I would have, if I was him, if I'd had that option. But that wouldn't explain three apparent cars."

"Does it sound as if he's used the Einstein-Maric artifact?"

"That wouldn't explain the multiple cars either, or at least I can't see how it would. Maybe Charlotte shouldn't kill Marrity. He could know some things."

"A decision made is a debt unpaid," said Rascasse. "And the Mossad will have briefed him, with compulsions, on what to tell other agencies. The daughter will be more valuable to us isolated. And," he added, waving at the bus behind them, "it wants this offering from each of us — our dues — and Charlotte has been in arrears."

"Our souls."

Rascasse shrugged. "Anything that would interfere with our chosen polarity."

"Does it really count as binding payment if you're drunk when you pay it?" Golze asked. "The rest of us don't drink alcohol. Charlotte does."

"For some people, and Charlotte's one of them, drink is a valuable disassembly factor. But once it's disassembled her, she'll have to leave it behind too."

"That'll be a day. You were kind of sweet on her once, weren't you?"

"Irrelevantly."

Golze pulled a lock-back knife from his pocket and opened the blade. "She thinks she'll be allowed to go back, remake her life."

"Do you care what she imagines?"

Golze laughed fondly. "Care? No. Note." He waved the knife toward the bus. "My dues are paid up. Fred!" he added, speaking louder.

"Yo," came Fred's voice through the open bus window.

"Ask your boy if he's a Christian."

"He nods," called Fred after a moment.

"Aw, too bad. Tell him he's gift-wrapped for the Devil."

"Cruelty is another good disassembly factor," remarked Rascasse. "But it will eventually have to be given up too."

"Don't anthropomorphize me," said Golze with a laugh. "Have to be given up? 'Man can't will what he wills.' I'm a roulette ball."

Rascasse shook his head. "Schopenhauer. Philosophy will be left behind too. Even rational thought, eventually."

"Can't wait."

"You'll go far. It's time for you to get aboard the bus."

Golze laughed softly and trudged away across the packed sand and disappeared around the lightless front of the bus. A few moments later the bus shifted perceptibly as he stepped aboard on the far side.

We need to succeed at this soon, Rascasse thought as he began taking deep breaths in anticipation of stepping outside his body. I need access to the bottom half of the chalice.

He shuffled to the guardrail and knelt in front of it. It was a horizontal wooden pole supported at every ten feet by a steel stanchion, and he leaned his chest against it, draping his arms over the far side.

He had been twelve, the first time he had left his body; he had simply got out of bed one morning and looked back and seen his body still lying in the bed. Terror had driven him back into it, and for the first time he had experienced reentering his body: like a tight bag being pulled over his head and sliding down his arms and legs and eventually closing over his toes. A few years later he had experienced it again, while breathing through the ether-sprinkled mask during a dental operation. And by the time he was twenty, he had been able to step out of his body at will, with only the faintest reflexive twitch of vertigo.

He felt a flash of cold now, and then he was standing beside his kneeling body, carefully noting that it was balanced and leaning firmly against the guardrail. He flexed the fingers of his right hand, and saw the kneeling body's fingers spread wide.

He leaped forward into empty space, and then he could not only still feel the guardrail against his chest, but also smell the grass of the college lawn and feel oily glass under his fingers — and then he was rocked by the explosion of energy sweeping through higher dimensions as the young man on the bus gave up the ghost, and Rascasse was on the freeway.

Here time was distance, and he was unable to move anything but his attention.

By a perception that did not involve light he could see the bus, and Golze and Fred and the dead boy inside it — and he could see them from all sides at once. Even their organs and arteries, and the valves and crankshaft of the bus, and the secret sap and inner bark of the surrounding trees, were as clearly visible as the mountain. And he could see all sides of the mountain, the fires on the northern slopes and the compacted gravel under the asphalt of the roads.

He moved away from this close perspective, and saw the men now as zigzagging lines, their recent actions and their future actions laid out like rows of tipped dominoes, blurring out of focus at the far ends; the moon was a long white blade in the sky. Golze was beside Rascasse's body, telling him "Ibsen," and Golze was also climbing into the bus, and cutting the young man's throat, and leaving the bus and talking to Rascasse again, and the bus itself was driving out of the Panorama Point rest area, making a loop with the trail of earlier versions of itself driving in.

This was the perspective of the crows in the Grimm brothers's fairy tale "Faithful John" — flying high above the surface-bound characters and able to see things previously encountered and things still to be met.

The young man in the bus was a line of blended figures like Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, and the line ended at the point where the young man's astral body made a turbulence that spread into the sky.

It was a motionless shock wave, and Rascasse's attention followed it outward, away from the precise time and place of the young man's death.

And Rascasse wasn't alone. A living thing that seemed to consist of buzzing or corrugations was with him, its thoughts as evident to him as the inner workings of the bus but far more alien to him than the courses of the stars or the repetitive patterns of cracks in the stone of the mountains.

Rascasse knew at least that it was summoned by the human sacrifice.

The living thing occupied a region that extended far in a dozen directions from the early morning hours of August 18, 1987, and Rascasse's disembodied self overlapped the thing's self.

Lines like arcing sparks or woven threads stretched across a vast vacuum, and he could discern the thread that was his own time line, with several exploded segments along its extent; he was occupying the cloud around one of the ruptured sections now, just as he was occupying the others in his previous and future excursions onto the freeway.

Just as a photograph of lunar craters can seem to show domes and ridges until the eye's perspective shifts to see craters and cracks, the arcs or threads were also visible as tiny, tightly wound coils, like knots in an infinitely tall and wide stack of carpets.

In the shorter wavelengths of his attention, the lifeline of Albert Einstein was discernible — extending from the band that included Ulm, Germany, in the region of 1879 to the band encompassing New Jersey in 1955.

Rascasse had paid attention to the Einstein line before, and knew what he would see. Even viewed as a stretched-out arc rather than a coil, the Einstein line was a tangled mess; it intersected with a number of other lines, one of which showed branches near the intersections — looked at from another perspective, these branching lines could be seen as two lines merging into one, but Rascasse was imposing time's futureward arrow onto the vista — and so the branches were childbirths, offspring.

Einstein's second wife was his first cousin, whose maiden name was Einstein, and their lifelines from 1919 through her death in 1936 were a hopelessly interconnected hall of mirrors; and from the midst of that confusion a third thread emerged in 1928, in the region of the Swiss Alps, though it didn't seem to arise from one of those branchings that indicated a childbirth.

Rascasse's attention was on that spontaneously arising thread. It went on to intersect with another thread at several points, and showed two offspring branches — close focus indicated that these two were the lifelines of Frank Marrity and Moira Bradley — and then the strange thread ended in 1955, in New Jersey, so close to the end of the Einstein thread that they almost seemed to have merged. They were, in fact, extraordinarily similar.

Rascasse shifted his attention forward in the direction of increasing entropy, to Frank Marrity's adulthood.

Marrity's thread intersected with another in 1974, and the daughter's resulting branch was distinct for a distance of a dozen years; but in 1987 a new thread was in their cluster too, and Rascasse's attention couldn't make out where that new thread had come from either. Whatever it was, whoever it was, it made a confusion of Marrity's lifeline—just as the cousin-wife's line had made a confusion of Einstein's. There appeared to be a rupture in Marrity's lifeline there in 1987, or perhaps the rupture was in the newly intruding thread; they were so close and so similar that Rascasse couldn't be sure.

Rascasse occupied the tight-focus end of his attention, and he saw the Marritys' newcomer as a zigzagging line in San Bernardino in a narrow section of 1987; and, sampled at several points, the newcomer's line was in a sequence of cars that were all the green Rambler station wagon. But even in the car the newcomer was hard to follow — at least once the Rambler seemed to end and then begin again in a different place.

None of this was easy to perceive. The whole 1987 region was chaotic, with thousands of lifelines blurring into a cloudy unity, especially at the bands that were Mount Shasta and Taos, New Mexico. This haze was the Harmonic Convergence, turbulent with virtual personalities that arose as points in the psychic fog but that extended no farther in time.

Lieserl Maric's time line bent impossibly in this cloud: Instead of moving forward in the direction of time, it bent sharply sideways, perpendicular, and simultaneously occupied miles and acres of space, and then ended in the static tornado around Mount Shasta. She had jumped out of the four-dimensional fabric, but to move through space instead of through time.

Somehow it seemed that she had ridden a golden helix from Pasadena to Mount Shasta; and Rascasse realized that in cross section the helix would be a swastika shape.

Rascasse's focus on the 1987 maelstrom had tilted him back toward that time, and he could feel his attention losing scope, narrowing down. The bus was a looping track through the area that was late summer, like a particle of dust enacting Brownian motion in a glass of water, and he could see the little loop in its track that was its stop halfway up the mountain at Panorama Point.

He let himself fall back into specific spatial locality and the conveyor belt of sequential time.

He was on his knees, and his arms were clinging to the railing post. He had been in this position for so short a time that his knees didn't yet ache from pressing against the hard, sandy surface.

He got to his feet, and was standing, staring out at the lights of San Bernardino when Golze came trudging up from behind.

"Did you see my tattoo?" Golze asked.

"I saw our man in the green Rambler," said Rascasse shortly. "He doesn't appear to have been born — he simply showed up here and now within the last few days."

Golze whistled, all flippancy gone. "Now that could be the old lady's device at work. I thought he was Frank Marrity's father."

"No, he's not. I can't imagine who he is. But speaking of Marrity's father, he also doesn't show a mother or a birth — it looks as if he simply appeared in 1928, in the Swiss Alps — but he died in New Jersey in 1955. I remember it. We killed him."

"So Derek Marrity's dead? Been dead for thirty-two years?"

"Right."

"And he had no mother or birth? I thought he was Lisa Marrity's son. Lieserl Maric's. Einstein's grandson."

"No, Lieserl… adopted him."

"So why did you kill him, in '55? You keep killing all these interesting people, rather than talking to them. You sure you don't want to call off Charlotte?"

"Yes, I'm sure. We did talk to him. We concluded that he would be more use to us dead than alive — though in fact he has not been much use so far."

"How did we think he would be of use to us dead?"

"As a guide, an oracle, because of his origin. And he might yet serve as that." Rascasse turned and started back toward the bus. He paused in front of the folded-open door. "I think we should dump the body of our… toll, right here."

"Sure," said Golze, grinning, "we leave a trail of corpses. Like Hansel and Gretel, so we can find our way back."

Thirteen

Frank Marrity awoke in the hospital-room chair when the aluminum-framed window had just begun to pale with dawn. Daphne was asleep under the thin-looking blankets, the IV tube still taped to her elbow, and he was impatient to get her out of here.

He reached into his shirt pocket for the NSA man's business card, and pulled out two cards. One was the NSA man's, blank except for the 800 telephone number, and the other was Libra Nosamalo Morrison's. Veterinary Medicine.

I should have given her card to Jackson, he thought, along with the taxi company's card. Or maybe I should give Jackson's card to her. Who are any of these people? Libra Nosamalo — deliver us from evil.

He stood up and stretched, then crossed to Daphne's table and wrote on the top sheet of her pad, Went for a smoke—back in five. He laid the pad on her blanket.

He walked past the nurse's station to the elevators, and as he was crossing the carpeted ground-floor lobby, nodding to the bored-looking woman behind the desk, he already had a pack of Dunhills and a Bic lighter in his hands — and he was surprised to see Libra Nosamalo Morrison herself, outside the window glass, standing beside a blocky concrete bench and smoking again. She was looking away from him, out toward the still dark parking lot.

He shuffled to a stop.

She was at St. Bernardine's yesterday afternoon, he thought. What is she doing at this hospital now, this children's hospital? Well— Dunhills, Milton, Housman, Laphroaig scotch — obviously she's here to talk to me. At about five in the morning.

Don't talk to her, Jackson had said.

Marrity took two steps backward, then turned to go back to the elevators.

But behind him he heard her voice call, "Frank?" and he stopped, and then turned around.

She had stepped inside, and as soon as he looked squarely at her she turned her head toward him and waved, smiling. She was still wearing her sunglasses — in fact she was still wearing the black jeans and the burgundy blouse. Her right hand was in her purse, possibly groping for a pack of cigarettes. Was she going to ask him to go outside and smoke with her?

A man was pushing through the door behind her, but Marrity's attention was on the woman, who now pulled a big steel revolver out of her purse.

As Marrity watched, the gun was raised to point at his face.

"Frank!" screamed the man behind her, lunging forward and apparently punching her in the back; her arm swung wide in the instant that Marrity's ears were shocked by the hard pop of a gunshot. Glass broke and clattered behind him.

The man behind her was his father, and the old man was staring hard at the blue carpet. "Don't look at her, Frank!" the old man yelled, nearly as loud as before. "She's blind if you don't look at her!" Derek Marrity spun to face the woman behind the reception desk. "Get down!" he shouted at her.

Marrity crouched and looked toward the hallway that led back to the elevators.

"Frank!" called the woman in sunglasses. "Look at me!"

It reminded Marrity of what the cartoon figure had said to Daphne a few hours ago—Say I can come in, Daphne! — and he looked instead at one of the dozen blue couches and dove behind it.

She fired two shots anyway, and one of them made the couch jump.

"Somebody look at me!" she yelled.

"You're facing the elevators!" shouted Derek Marrity, apparently at the Libra Nosamalo woman. "We're behind you!"

"Liar," she said, and two more shots shook the lobby air.

If she steps around this couch, she'll have a clear shot at me, Marrity thought. He braced himself to sprint for the hallway, but in that instant he heard the doors clack open, and then his father called, "She left. She couldn't see. Go to the elevator hallway without looking back."

Marrity got to his feet and made himself look only toward the elevator doors as he hurried out of the lobby. His father was beside him, hardly panting. He seemed much less sickly now than he had yesterday.

"And out the back," the old man said. He even had a suntan now.

Marrity hit the 2, button. "No, I've got to get Daphne."

"Frank, she's dead, there's nothing you can do for her. You've got to get out of here."

… she's dead…

Marrity's heart froze, and the next thing he was consciously aware of was jumping up the stairs two at a time. Behind and below him he heard his father bang aside the stairway door, which hadn't had time to close.

Marrity slammed open the door to the second floor and raced past the nurse's station to Daphne's room; and then he sagged in re -lief when he saw her sitting up in bed and blinking at him in alarm.

"You're — all right?" he said breathlessly. "Nobody's been in here?"

"I'm fine," she said hoarsely. Then she whispered, "Was a woman shooting at you, or did I dream that? No, nobody's been in here."

"Daph," he said, "I think it's time you checked out." He turned to the closet and began yanking her jeans and blouse off the hangers. His face was cold with sweat.

"Right now?" she whispered. "I've got an IV!"

"We'll get a nurse to take it out. Or I will. If I can do a tracheotomy, I can — but we're not—"

Footsteps slapped on the hallway linoleum, and Marrity stepped back to stand in front of Daphne, but it was his father who strode into the room.

"They'll have moved her—" the old man began, and then his eyes focused on Daphne.

"I don't understand," he said clearly.

And then Marrity turned and threw himself across Daphne, for his ears had been concussed by a deafening bang, and his father had collapsed against the door frame and begun to slide to the floor.

No further explosions followed, though over the ringing in his ears Marrity thought he heard a crisp roar, like a TV set on a blank channel with the volume turned way up.

Marrity looked fearfully over his shoulder — but though his father had tumbled apparently unconscious onto the linoleum floor, nobody had appeared behind him. The roaring had stopped, if it had ever been a real external noise. His father's slack face was pale and old.

With trembling fingers Marrity peeled the tape off Daphne's forearm and drew the IV needle out of her wrist. She was probably deafened too, so he just shoved her clothes into her hands.

She started to sit up, then winced and said, "Ribs! Help me up!"

He got an arm behind her shoulders and lifted her to a sitting position, and she quickly slid out of her hospital gown and scrambled into the jeans and blouse with no further hindrance from her cracked ribs. She knelt by the closet to pick up her shoes in one hand, and then nodded at Marrity.

Nurses were shouting questions, but Marrity held Daphne's elbow and marched her toward the far-stairway exit door.

"I'll fetch the truck," Marrity said loudly as they scuffed down the steel-edged cement stairs. "You wait by the door and hop in when I pull up."

Daphne was ahead of him, nimble on her bare feet. In something like her normal voice she asked, "Shouldn't we do something about your father?"

"Like get him to a hospital?"

At the bottom of the stairwell, Marrity pushed open the door and peered out; no one was in sight along the brightly lit carpeted hall, so he led Daphne to the exterior door at the near end of the hall.

"One minute," he told her.

He stepped outside and glanced in both directions, but he didn't see the woman in sunglasses, and so far there were no police or security guards in sight. There were no shadows yet, but the sky was bright blue over the mountains in the east. He took a deep breath of the chilly air and then ran across the parking lot to the Ford pickup truck.

It started on the first twist of the ignition key, and without giving it a moment to warm up he banged it into reverse and swung out of the parking space; then he had pulled the lever down into first and gunned the truck across the empty lanes to the door, and only when Daphne had burst out of the door and hopped up into the passenger seat did he realize that he had been holding his breath.

"What's going on?" asked Daphne, slamming her door.

"Somebody tried to shoot me, a few minutes ago," Marrity said as he made a right turn out of the hospital parking lot. His hands were trembling again, and he gripped the steering wheel tightly. He was panting. "You didn't dream it. Put your seat belt on, and keep it away from your neck. A woman, with sunglasses—"

"The one you told Mr. Jackson about." Daphne pulled the spring-loaded strap across her chest and fumbled beside her for the buckle. "He said don't talk to her. Headlights?"

Marrity pulled out the headlights knob, though it made no difference in visibility. "That's the one. I didn't say a word to her, she just started shooting. And then my father said you were dead, and he was — you saw — real surprised to see that you were alive. He saved my life," he added. "Knocked her gun aside."

"I hope he's not dead."

"I do too, I guess."

"Where do we go?" Daphne hummed a few rising and falling notes. "My voice seems okay."

"I don't know." Marrity looked into the rearview mirror as he made a third right turn, onto westbound Highland Avenue now, and saw no cars at all in the shadowed lanes under the brightening sky, just a couple of big grocery-delivery trucks receding away ahead of him. "Nobody's following us. Yes, you sound like your usual self."

"Maybe home?"

"Maybe. Or — I'm gonna turn south now, and see if that new car back there turns left too."

The light was red at D Street, but he turned left into a doughnut-shop parking lot, drove diagonally right through the lot and made a left onto D Street. The truck rocked on its springs.

Daphne was twisted around under her seat belt, kneeling on the seat to look behind them through the camper shell's back window.

"He turned south too, Dad," she said quietly as she sat down again. "I think there's two people in the car."

"Yes," agreed Marrity, forcing himself to speak calmly. And the passenger, he thought, is wearing sunglasses.

His father had said, She's blind if you don't look at her.

"Don't look at them, Daph," he said tightly.

There was a police station five or six blocks ahead, he remembered.

He could see now that the car behind was a tan Honda — it was gaining on them, clearly meaning to pass. Marrity could believe that the person in the passenger seat would have some kind of full-automatic gun this time. He tromped on the gas and the truck surged forward, but the Honda was still gaining, edging to the left.

There was no way that Marrity would be able outrun it to the police station.

"Daph," he said quickly, "can you picture the radiator of a car?" The truck's engine was roaring, but he didn't want to shift to third because in that gear it tended to slack off for a few moments before regaining power.

"Sure. Are they going to shoot us?"

"Yes. Can you grab the radiator of their car, without looking at it, the way you grabbed Rumbold on Sunday?"

Daphne frowned and screwed her eyes shut, then after a moment opened her eyes and peered uncertainly over her shoulder.

The Honda was nearly even with them, but swinging out wide into the empty oncoming lanes — to prevent Marrity from side-swiping them, presumably, and to have a clear shot even if Marrity braked hard.

Which he did. In the same instant that he straightened his leg to force the brake pedal all the way down, the hood of the Honda exploded up in a huge starburst of white steam.

Marrity had to concentrate on his own vehicle. The truck was shuddering and fishtailing as the tires screamed on the pavement, and even in the confusion Marrity remembered to pull the gearshift lever down into first, so that he was able to let the brake up and steer quickly through the cloud of tire smoke into an alley on the right, and then speed down the alley with his exhaust battering back from a row of closed garage doors.

He glanced sideways at Daphne, but the sudden hard pressure of the seat belt didn't seem to have hurt her ribs, and the stitches in her throat weren't bleeding.

"They had a gun!" she said shrilly. "I had to look! It was pointed right at both of us!"

Smoke swirled under the windshield — the ashtray was on fire.

"Just push it closed," Marrity said, "it'll go out on its own. And don't yell through your patched throat."

At E Street he made a left turn fast enough to set the tires chirruping, and accelerated.

"I had to grab something here to brace against," said Daphne more quietly as she pushed the ashtray closed with her foot. Marrity was glad to see she had managed at some point to pull her sneakers on.

"I think the ashtray's kind of melted," she added.

"That's okay. You were smart to think of grabbing the ashtray."

"I'm sorry I looked, when you said not to."

"I'm glad you did. We've got to ditch the truck." Marrity turned right, into a tree-lined street of quiet old bungalow houses. His mouth was dry, and peripherally he could see the collar of his shirt twitching with his rapid heartbeat. "I think they've got a radio beacon on it somewhere, is how those guys found us."

"Okay," said Daphne. "Anything we need out of it?"

"Just my briefcase." Marrity braked to a stop at the curb in front of an apartment complex and trod on the parking brake. He took a deep breath and exhaled before unclamping his hands from the steering wheel and switching off the ignition. In the sudden quiet, he said, "It's got a bunch of Albert Einstein letters in it, along with my students' Mark Twain papers."

"Really!" Daphne opened her door and hopped down to the sidewalk. "That was smart of you."

Marrity opened his door and shivered at the chilly dawn air in his damp shirt. "Let's find a bus stop."

"Do you have your Versatel card?"

"Yup." He climbed down onto the asphalt and walked around the front of the truck to join her on the sidewalk. "Only about two hundred dollars in the savings, though. And about eighty in my pocket."

"All we need is enough money to get there. Then we'll have a whole lot of gold."

"I'll give you a hundred," he said, taking her hand as they began walking west along the sidewalk, "and then I think I should drop you off at Carla and Joel's. I'll pick you up again once I've been to Grammar's house. Then we—"

"No, I have to go with you."

He looked down at her earnest upturned face and shook his head. "There's people shooting at me, Daph. I can't duck them and watch out for you too, worry about you too."

"They're—" Clearly she was thinking fast. "They're after me as much as you. It was me that the cartoon thing wanted, wasn't it?"

"Yes," he admitted. He was nervously watching the traffic moving back and forth on E Street a hundred feet ahead, hoping not to see the tan Honda.

"And they'd probably find Carla and Joel's place. From your phone book, easy. Everybody we know, they'd be watching their places." She scratched her nose. "And anyway, what if that cartoon guy can tell where I am, the way they can tell where the truck is? " She gripped his hand tighter, and he could tell she had scared herself with the thought.

And it scared him too. I sure can't say that's not possible, he thought.

"And," Daphne went on with a brave show of nonchalance, "Carla and Joel put Velveeta cheese on everything."

"They could make you a Velveeta soufflé," he said, matching her tone. "Let's cross, and go down that alley."

Hand in hand they sprinted across the street, then resumed walking, south now, between backyard fences and little old wooden garages.

"They wouldn't call it a souffle," said Daphne.

"Velveeta Puddle."

"'And it's got Rice Krispies in it!'" she mimicked, pronouncing rice as rahss.

"Okay," he said, "good point. I guess you'd better come along with me at that."

Fourteen

If something's going to be on the radio," said Ernie Bozzaris, "why didn't you save a radio for us?"

"She wouldn't have done it right here, where we're standing," said Lepidopt. "And the only thing that's going to come over the radios — one or two of them, anyway, I hope — is interference fringes, alternating patches of noise and silence."

The early morning sun was already bright on the pastel nylon windbreakers of the fishermen out on the Newport Pier, but Lepidopt and Bozzaris stood in the chilly shadows of a closed Thai restaurant up on the damp, sand-gritty sidewalk. Lepidopt looked enviously at the handful of surfers bobbing in the dark blue swells out beyond the surf line — since his premonition that he would never again swim in the ocean, he didn't even dare go out on the pier. He and Bozzaris were both wearing jeans and sweatshirts and tennis shoes.

Lepidopt felt free to dispense with the earplugs out here. He couldn't even see a pay telephone anywhere.

"This is awful public," said Bozzaris. "Why would Lieserl have come here to work the machine?" They had parked across Balboa Boulevard in the ferry parking lot, and at Bozzaris's insistence they had stepped into a bakery on the walk over here, and now he fished a powdery jelly doughnut out of the paper bag he was carrying. "Is this where she did it before, in 1933?" He was blinking around uneasily. "I don't suppose you want any of these," he added, waving the doughnut bag.

"Peace, youth," said Lepidopt. "This wouldn't have been where she set it up in '33, no — but it would be a reliable place for her to have set it up two days ago, since I believe she did not mean to survive that jump. This is a place where time and space might be reliably kinked, you see." He raised an eyebrow at Bozzaris's doughnut. "No, thank you."

"Kinked," echoed Bozzaris around a mouthful that probably contained lard, from pigs.

Lepidopt nodded and waved at the nearly empty parking lot and the pier. "This — right here — was the epicenter of the 1933 earthquake. March tenth, at five fifty-four in the evening. You notice all the buildings are modern! Einstein was at Cal Tech at that moment, actually discussing seismographs, in fact. We believe he was afraid Lieserl had tried out the maschinchen, the time machine, the day before. There had been a foreshock on the ninth, which probably was Lieserl trying it out.

"But she wouldn't have been here, then," he went on. "Not her physical body, at least. I gather time travel — travel, that is, as opposed to just getting out there and looking around from the perspective of the Yetzirah world — actual time travel is most safely done with two remote astral projections of yourself, one on a mountain, one lower down, with the physical you somewhere between. Sea level is the best for the low one, in the Los Angeles area, unless you wanted to project one all the way out to Death Valley." He glanced up and down the row of seaside shops and rental houses; already, in spite of the morning chill, there were young people in scanty bathing suits riding bicycles along the sidewalk, through the patches of shadow and sunlight.

"But two days ago," he continued, "Lieserl Maric — our Lisa Marrity—wasn't concerned with her safety, I believe. She meant it to kill her. So jumping from sea level would have been fine, and she might well have set up the maschinchen right here. I don't believe it's a very complicated apparatus — she apparently carried it here in a taxi, in a suitcase, after all."

Bozzaris squinted around at the parking lot and the more distant green lawn by the foot of the pier.

"Wouldn't she have needed the movie?" Bozzaris asked. "She left that at home."

Just before dawn Malk had crept into Marrity's yard and silently sifted through the contents of his trash cans, and carried away the VCR with the remains of the tape cassette still in it. As if to make doubly sure the thing was destroyed, Marrity had apparently doused it with gasoline and set it on fire. It was just barely possible to ascertain that the remains of a videocassette were in the ruin.

Lepidopt shrugged. "She added improvements, over the years— the movie, the footprint slab. She might have figured out others, more portable."

"So what will it look like? This maschinchen?"

"A gold-wire swastika, for one thing," Lepidopt said, "about three feet across, laid flat for her to stand on — just like what they found at her arrival site in Shasta. She would have concealed that — with luck she buried it here somewhere, and it's still buried. We need to see the wiring, and ideally the whole construction."

"There wouldn't have been any of the — two days ago, none of the virtual babies would have appeared here, right?"

"No. And apparently they only last a few seconds, so they wouldn't still be around anyway. You can quit worrying about stray babies stuck under the pier."

"Were there reports of… virtual babies, in that meadow on Mount Shasta, on Sunday?"

"No, but she didn't use the maschinchen to travel through time on Sunday — just instantaneously through space, sideways out of the cone of her possible future. Not like when she jumped in 1933. On Sunday I think she was trying to scrape something off of herself, something like a psychic barnacle — jump in a direction it couldn't follow — die clean, without it."

Bozzaris laughed, though he seemed to shudder too. "Psychic barnacle — and the friction of it has caused all the fires in the mountains." Looking out at the water, he asked, "Did Lieserl change the past, when she jumped and returned in 1933?"

Lepidopt spread his hands. "How would we know? If she did, we live in the world as she remade it. Did Einstein change the past when he jumped in 1928? Only Lieserl Marity and Einstein would know the answers to these questions."

His answer didn't seem to cheer Bozzaris. "And they're both dead," he said. "But even in '33, when she'd have returned to '33 from the past, none of the spooky babies would have appeared here — right?" He shook his head. "That's too weird, about the babies."

"No, they wouldn't have appeared here — quit fretting about them. According to Levin at the Technion in Haifa, the virtual infants appear where the physical body arrives, and even then only briefly. When you lose five-dimensional velocity after traveling in time — decelerate back into sequential time, back down to our constricted Asiyah world from moving in the bigger Yetzirah world — the excess energy is thrown off as virtual replicas of yourself, and it's more economical for the universe to throw a lot of very young replicas than a few maturer ones; just as a heated brick throws a lot of low-energy infrared waves rather than anything in the higher-frequency visible range."

Bozzaris rocked his head, clearly not comprehending the metaphysics of it. "Are they real babies, though? When it does happen? Or are they just, like, mirages?"

A blond girl on a bicycle slowed to toss a little red plastic transistor radio to Lepidopt; he caught it with his left hand. "Normal reception, and boring," she said, and accelerated away, her tanned legs flashing as she rode out of the shadow toward the beach.

"Sayanim are getting prettier all the time," noted Bozzaris.

"You are a beast." Lepidopt had not kept the plastic Sears bag the radios had come in, and after he had peered at the tuning dial to verify the frequency, he tucked the radio into the pocket of his sweatshirt.

"What are they tuned to?" asked Bozzaris.

"A hundred and eight megahertz," said Lepidopt, "the highest frequency FM goes to. I believe it's a Christian broadcasting station." He sighed. "If Lieserl did jump from here, less than forty-eight hours ago, the space-time fabric should still be kinked enough to put some wrinkles in high frequencies. The signal should interfere with itself."

He squinted around impatiently at the beach and the parking lot, then went on, "One time an infant was taken out of the reentry field, before the field collapsed. That infant lived at least seven years. So yes, they seem to be real babies."

"Am I allowed to know about this?"

"It's relevant to our business. Lieserl was with her father when he went to Zuoz, in the Swiss Alps, in 1928. She was twenty- six then, and Einstein was forty-nine. Later he told her that he had gone to Zuoz to undo a sin he had committed some years earlier — and that he had wound up committing an even greater sin. Anyway, when his mysterious machine was prepared and he stood on the mountain in Zuoz and… flickered for a moment, I suppose… he immediately collapsed, unconscious, since he had used only one astral projection of himself, which was in the valley below Piz Kesch, and so the shock of reentry was not distributed, not balanced. And Lieserl found herself not only confronted by her unconscious father, but surrounded too by… what, several? dozens? … of naked infants lying in the snow. She snatched up one of the babies and ran to the nearby house of a friend of Einstein's, Willy Meinhardt; there she got people to come help, but when they returned to the spot, only Einstein lay there. All the other infants had disappeared, though the one Lieserl had rescued was still fully present at Meinhardt's house. Before that, Einstein liked mountains — he used to go hiking in the Alps with his wife and Marie Curie. After that he couldn't stand the sight of a mountain."

A teenage boy glided past on a rumbling skateboard and called, "Goofy station but clear reception!" He tossed a green plastic radio, and Lepidopt caught it and waved.

"We know all this," he went on to Bozzaris, "from a Grete Mark-stein, who was an old girlfriend of Einstein's and who took the impossible infant and raised him — it was a boy, of course — for the next seven years. Here, you hold this radio; keep it for your own. Apparently Einstein didn't make child-support payments, so in 1935 Grete went to several colleagues of Einstein's, in Berlin and Oxford, asking them to tell Einstein that she was his daughter and the seven-year-old boy was his grandson, and that she wanted financial help; she told us that she knew Einstein would understand who she really was, and who or what the little boy was. The Oxford man, Frederick Lindermann, happened to give the woman and the boy a drink of water when they visited his office, and after they had left he saved both glasses, for fingerprinting."

Lepidopt paused to look up at half a dozen seagulls sailing in the sunlight overhead, bright white against the still dark blue sky.

"Isser Harel," he went on, "got hold of those two glasses in 1944, four years before he became head of the Shin Bet and six years before he became director general of the Mossad. Harel verified the woman's prints as Markstein's, but of course he was very intrigued by the boy's prints. The secret archive Harel built behind a false wall in his Dov Hoz Street apartment in Tel Aviv, during the days of the British Mandate, was mainly to hide the boy's water glass." He shrugged. "Not that it proved anything — it was just an old glass with a child Einstein's fingerprints on it, and there was no proof that the prints weren't put on the glass in the 1880s — but with its admittedly hearsay provenance it was evidence that Einstein had something Israel needed to know about. Harel concluded that it was time travel, that somehow the young Einstein had been brought forward to 1935; in fact it was time travel, but the boy was only a quantum by-product, not the real Einstein."

"So why are Frank Marrity's fingerprints identical to that old man's, the guy who was driving the Rambler? Is Frank Marrity a surviving duplicate of the old guy?"

Malk had found the Rambler this morning in the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital parking lot, though the old man who'd been driving it had not been seen. Shots had been fired in the hospital lobby, and Marrity and his daughter, both apparently unharmed, had fled.

"That's possible," Lepidopt told Bozzaris, "if the old man at some point time-jumped to 1952; though Marrity has a valid-looking birth certificate from a hospital in Buffalo, New York. One of these virtual babies wouldn't legitimately have a birth certificate."

Lepidopt stared hard at Bozzaris. "It's more likely," Lepidopt went on carefully, "that the old guy is Frank Marrity, having jumped back to here, to 1987, from the future."

Bozzaris blinked. "Wow."

"That's probably what killed Sam Glatzer," Lepidopt added. "When the old Frank Marrity drove the Rambler into his younger self's driveway on Sunday afternoon, Sam found himself seeing the same guy in two places. Remote viewers are out on a wire when they work, precarious, and that might have been a badly disorienting shock."

A young policeman in blue shorts and T-shirt rode up to them on a bicycle and braked to a halt in front of Lepidopt. "No interference anywhere within a hundred yards of the pier," the man said. "I dropped the radio."

Lepidopt waved magnanimously. "No problem. Thank you." After the policeman had nodded and pedaled away, Lepidopt shrugged at Bozzaris.

"We should just grab the old guy," Bozzaris said, "the older version of Marrity, and find out everything he knows about the future! He looks sixty—he must be from about 2012!"

Lepidopt shuffled north along the damp, gritty sidewalk, staring down at his sneakers. Bozzaris stepped after him.

"We'll grab him all right," said Lepidopt quietly. "If necessary we'll kill him to keep the other crowd from getting what he knows. But the future as he's experienced it won't necessarily be relevant, if I carry out the orders that were on the Play-Doh last night."

"Oh, yeah." Bozaris frowned. "And not just the future — nearly my whole life, if you go back and change something that happened in '67. I was born in '61."

"It's unlikely to alter your life story at all," Lepidopt muttered, aware even as he spoke that what he said was a lie.

What if the changes he provoked should alter or somehow prevent the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel by surprise on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when most of the country's reserves were in the synagogues or praying at home? And how could any deliberate change not be aimed to affect that?

Lepidopt had been at the Mossad headquarters in the Hadar Dafna building on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv during that two-week war, overseeing the Mossad remote viewers nearly twenty-four hours a day as they desperately tried to track the Egyptian tank divisions in the Sinai desert. Israel had managed to defeat the Syrian and Egyptian armies — and some opportunistic Iraqi and Jordanian forces too — but in the first week of the war, things had looked very bad indeed for Israel. Many, many lives had been lost. Changing the course of that disastrous war would inevitably change Bozzaris's life, in any number of ways. For all Lepidopt knew, Bozzaris's father was killed in the Yom Kippur War; plenty of men were, in the Sinai, on the Golan Heights, in the skies and at sea. Or maybe he wasn't, but would be killed in a new reality's version of the war.

At least Bozzaris had already been born by 1967. Lepidopt's son, Louis, had not been born until 1976.

He remembered the amulet that had been exposed onto the strip of film in the radiation-exposure badge he'd been given in 1967. Your life story be sacrosanct, and all who are in your train. Unchanged, unedited. He wished it hadn't been taken away from him, and that he had given it to young Louis.

"Which is bullshit," said Bozzaris, smiling as he dug in the bag for another doughnut. "At least — at the very least — you and I will never have had this conversation. I'll never have eaten this doughnut." He took a quick bite, as if the universe might even now try to prevent it.

Lepidopt thought about the orders the three of them had read in the damp Play-Doh last night at the Wigwam Motel:

Use Einstein's maschinchen to return to 1967 by way of your lost finger. Tell Harel, 'Change the past' — he has been ready for that recognition sign since 1944. Give him a full, repeat full, report. Get to the Rephidim stone and copy out inscription on it (which as things now stand is obliterated in 1970 by Israeli scholar who kills himself immediately afterward). Deliver inscription to Harel, with your full story. You will be returned to Los Angeles in resulting 1987, if desired.

After they'd all read it, Lepidopt had rolled the blue Play-Doh into a ball, and then had filed off all the incised figures on the steel cylinders that had pressed the message into the Play-Doh. And Bozzaris had thrown the defaced cylinders off the end of the pier an hour ago.

I wonder, Lepidopt thought, what the inscription on the Rephidim stone was… or what I'll discover it to be, if I can get back to 1967. I wonder if I'll sympathize with the man who killed himself to make sure it was lost.

He remembered the passage in the second -century Zohar:

… but when Israel will return from exile, all the supernal grades are destined to rest harmoniously upon this one. Then men will obtain a knowledge of the precious supernal wisdom of which hitherto they knew not.

"True," Lepidopt sighed, "it's bullshit."

Bozzaris grinned. "How do you figure you'll go back in time?"

"I have no idea. Ideally the elder Frank Marrity will tell me how. If not, maybe the Einstein letters will explain it; maybe we'll summon ghosts, and ask them; maybe the thirty-five-year-old Frank Marrity knows, and will tell me."

"Not if the sunglasses girl gets near him again."

"I suppose the likeliest outcome is that I won't figure out how to do it at all."

That would be very good, he thought; we did manage to decisively win the Yom Kippur War, after all, and Syria and Egypt had been hugely relieved, as usual, when the UN had finally imposed a cease-fire.

But I must go back if I can, and try to save as many as possible of the Israeli men and women who died in that war.

"How would it be 'by way of your lost finger'?"

"I can't imagine. I suppose my aura still has ten fingers, one of which now contains no actual physical finger. An astral projection would still have ten fingers."

By way of your lost finger.

An enormous thought welled up in Lepidopt's head: What if all my "never agains" — never again touch a cat, never again hear the name John Wayne, never again hear a telephone ring — apply only in this time line? If I go back to 1967 and simply prevent the twenty-year-old Lepidopt from touching the Western Wall, then I won't get that first premonition! And maybe — surely! — in that time line I won't then get any of them!

He seized on the thought. Of course that's been the explanation for them all along, he thought eagerly — they've simply been oracular clues that this is not the time line that's to prevail. This isn't the destined course of my life.

Everything, including that first premonition at the Wall, has been provisional, subject to an eventual revision. When I return here to 1987, having saved the Rephidim inscription in 1967 and given Harel my full report, I'll find myself in the real time line, free of those too close boundaries to my life.

He thought of the uprooted Jewish tombstones he had seen bridging ditches in Jerusalem. Perhaps the tombstone he'd been picturing lately — the one with Lepidopt incised on it, with 1987 as its second date — could be uprooted too.

He looked coolly at Bozzaris. You'll be all right, he thought. You'll be safely born by the time I switch the tracks ahead of history's locomotive—

—but Louis won't be.

He remembered what he had thought, last night in the Wigwam Motel, about Marrity's apparent intention to copy the Einstein letters so that he could sell the originals: If it were my son who was in danger, I would not be thinking first of making money from selling the Einstein letters.

Not of money, no, he thought now. But of a life that extends past the next time a telephone rings in your vicinity?

But Louis would still be born in 1976, as in this present time line, assuming the twenty-five-year-old Oren Lepidopt married Deborah Altmann in 1972, which there was no reason to believe he would not. That was the year before the Yom Kippur War, so nothing would be likely to change it; he'd see to it that nothing impinged on that story.

If that young Lepidopt and Deborah conceived Louis on a different night in 1975, this time, though — would he still be the same boy Lepidopt knew? Would he even be conceived as a boy? What was the biological mechanism that decided whether an embryo was to be a boy or a girl?

What if the Yom Kippur War goes differently, because of this mission, and the young Lepidopt is not assigned to the Mossad headquarters, but instead is sent into combat and killed before he fathers his child? But surely that was very unlikely! Lepidopt recalled that there had been no one else who would have been likely to take charge of the remote viewers.

But would they need remote viewers, this time around, if they had prevented or controlled the war because of forty-year-old Lepidopt's report from the future?

Well, I can make sure my younger self doesn't go into combat before Louis is conceived in '76… or go into any dangerous work, before then. Or step carelessly into traffic, or fail to wear seat belts? Or drive at all, maybe? Can I make the younger Lepidopt see the urgency of all this, for a son he's never seen?

Lepidopt was sweating, though it was still chilly here in the shadows of the beachfront houses.

A tanned boy in swim trunks and with white zinc oxide sunscreen on his nose scampered up to them barefoot and said, "Forgetting him, you see—" and paused, panting. He was holding a cardboard tube of Flix chocolates.

Something from Malk, Lepidopt thought. Something he thinks might be urgent, to send it by bodlim, sayan couriers. This boy looked flighty, but certainly there was an adult nearby who was watching to make sure the handoff took place.

"—means you've forgotten me," said Lepidopt, "like my forgotten man." Bozzaris had chosen their recognition signs from the lyrics of old musicals — Lepidopt hoped Bozzaris's tastes would turn out to include old musicals, again! — and this, he believed, was from Gold Diggers of 1933.

The boy held out the cardboard tube, then ran away when Lepidopt had taken it.

"Could be a bomb," said Bozzaris lightly.

"I bet it's not."

Lepidopt tore away the Scotch tape that sealed it and unfolded the piece of paper crumpled in the top; in Malk's handwriting was the message, Just came, FedEx, from home. Gross.

Lepidopt peered inside, then stared more closely — and he almost dropped it.

"Now that's disgusting," he said hoarsely.

"What is it?"

"It's — I believe it must be my finger."

Bozzaris stepped back, then laughed nervously. "Can I see?"

"No. Shoot off your own finger, you want to look at a finger." With his maimed hand he pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his face. "They — saved it! They knew, even back then—" Lepidopt peered again into the cardboard tube. "There's — a couple of holes in the tip, one through the fingernail — and crossways scratches on the nail! They had a label or something stapled to it!"

Bozzaris shrugged. "Twenty years. Tape would have dried out."

Lepidopt gingerly tucked the tube into his sweatshirt pocket next to the radios. One of the radios fell out and cracked on the sidewalk, and he kicked it out onto the parking lot pavement.

"Business card!" he said harshly. "Cab company! Suitcase!"

Bozzaris stared at him. "Hmm?"

"The time machine isn't here. She didn't do it here. This was a feint, a bluff. Lieserl carried an empty suitcase down here in that cab, or no — more likely paid some other old lady to do it. I don't need to be standing here looking at the fucking ocean."

Bozzaris's eyebrows were raised as he fell into step beside Lepidopt, hurrying toward the short street that led back to Balboa Boulevard. Lepidopt nearly never used bad language.

"She left the card on her kitchen counter, and—" Bozzaris began.

"To waste our time, or the other crowd's time — whoever might be alerted by the psychic noise of her departure — CIA, the press, the Vatican! Listen, she hid out all these years — she was as secretive as her father, she had a child too, she didn't want the thing to be found, and used. She would never have left that card on her counter if she really had come down here to do the jump! The cab company and the old woman with the suitcase, whoever she was, were a move to delay anybody looking for the machine — not stop, just delay. If it was worth the trouble to decoy us away from the search even for just a couple of hours, then a couple of hours must be important, it must make a difference. She must have set up — of course she would have set up! — some chain of events that would destroy the machine after she used it."

Lepidopt was practically running now, and Bozzaris pitched his bag of doughnuts at a trash can as they hurried past it. "So where do we look?"

"We have one clue: The machine isn't here."

Fifteen

Bennett Bradley stood up as the two men nodded to him and halted in the restaurant aisle beside his booth. One was short and pudgy and darkly bearded, and the other was tall and effeminate with a white brush cut, and they both wore dark business suits. And by the morning light shining through the windows across the room, they both looked tired.

"Mr. Bradley," said the white-haired one, bowing sketchily. "You can call me Sturm."

"Drang here," said the bearded one with a smile, blinking behind eyeglasses.

"Please sit down," Bennett said. It was barely nine in the morning, and one of these — Sturm, he thought — had called him at seven this morning. Bennett was tired too — he would have liked to sleep later, after having flown home from Shasta last night, and taken the remote-parking shuttle to the car, and then negotiated the freeways to home.

He had left the house this morning without waking Moira.

The two men sat down in the booth, bracketing Bennett.

"We spoke," said Sturm, on Bennett's right, "to your brother-in-law, Francis Marrity, on the phone this morning; and we told him that we had called you last night. We mentioned that we would have to deal with both of Lisa Marrity's heirs to finalize our sale— that is, you and your wife as well as him. He, ah, said that possession is nine-tenths of the law, and hung up. He has checked his daughter out of the hospital, and they have not returned to their house in San Bernardino."

"Hospital? What was she in the hospital for?"

"A tracheotomy. She choked on some food, apparently."

"Kid eats like a pig," said Bennett. "She'll probably need it again, they should have installed a valve."

"Just coffee, for all of us," said Drang to the waitress who had walked up with a pad. When she had nodded and moved on, he said to Bennett, "The price is fifty thousand dollars, and we would like to consummate this transaction as soon as possible. Today, ideally." The fat man's breath smelled like spearmint Tic Tacs.

"If your brother-in-law absconds with the items," said Sturm, "he could sell them to somebody else; and there's very little we or you could do about it. Afterward he could plausibly claim never to have had them. Total ignorance, stout denial."

Bennett's stomach was cold. "But you could go to the police, couldn't you, with your, your list? Your correspondence with his grandmother? I mean, you know what the items are… as well as I do, better than I do, since you know specifically what the old lady wanted to sell." He wished the coffee would get here. "Right?"

Sturm stared at Bennett for a moment. The man's eyes were very pale blue, and the lashes were white. "It's not really a matter we'd like to get the police involved in," he said at last. "You notice that we haven't identified ourselves to you at all. You have no phone number nor address for us. If the transaction doesn't work out, we'll shrug and… disappear. Keep our money."

Great God, thought Bennett. What was that crazy old woman dealing in? Crates of machine guns? Heroin? Whatever this is — fifty thousand dollars! — no identification! — it's obviously illegal. Suddenly and irrationally he was very hungry, and very aware of the hot smells of bacon and eggs at nearby tables.

"Do you know where Marrity and his daughter might have gone," asked Drang, "after hanging up on us?"

"When would I be paid?" asked Bennett. "And how? Since this is — such an off-paper transaction." I should walk out of here, he thought. I know I should. What good would a check be? And if they gave me cash — how could I know it wasn't counterfeit? I have no business dealing with this sort of people. I'm glad I didn't wake up Moira this morning.

Sturm said, "The Bank of America branch on California Street is holding six cashier's checks, each made out in your name for $8,333.00. That adds up to two dollars short of fifty thousand, actually, but we'll pay for your coffee here. As soon as we have the property, we'll drive you to the bank, pick up the cashier's checks, and hand them to you. You can cash them or deposit them wherever you please, at any time during the next three years."

That would work, thought Bennett. He could feel a drop of sweat running down his ribs under his shirt.

"You could split it with your brother-in-law, if your conscience dictates," said chubby Drang with no expression.

Bennett could feel his mouth tighten in a derisive grin.

"Do you know where Marrity and his daughter might have gone?" Drang asked.

"Yes," said Bennett. "But let's pick up the cashier's checks first."

"We can do that," said Sturm, getting to his feet.

"You can owe me for the coffee," said Bennett, with frail bravado, as he stood up too.

I'm not an old man, I'm a young man something happened to. He believed that was a quote from Mickey Spillane.

The man who called himself Derek Marrity stared at the crystals hanging from the switched-off ceiling light in the increasingly sunlit room, unable to sleep in spite of having been awake for more than twenty-four hours. He was lying on Lisa Marrity's narrow bed, where he had slept Sunday night; he had got up at seven on Monday morning, to go to Marrity's house. Now, on Tuesday morning, he wished he had slept late and not visited the poor Marritys at all.

From the bedside table he picked up a battered cigarette butt with a bit of Scotch tape wrapped around it. The filter had once been tan, but was now faded to nearly white.

Look anywhere but homeward, angel.

He dropped the cigarette butt back onto the table.

The crystals were turning in the breeze coming in through the open window above his head; he could smell Grammar's jasmine flowers, and refracted morning sunlight was making dots of red and blue and green light that raced and paused on the book spines and paintings.

The lace curtains were swaying over him. He recalled that Grammar had used the phrase voio voio, which was from the German word for "curtain," to describe empty pretense, portentous talk with no substance, ambitious plans that were impossible. Useless endeavors.

This whole expedition, he thought as he shifted his twisted and aching right leg to a more comfortable angle on the bedspread, has been voio voio.

I can still give young Frank Marrity investment advice, I suppose, but what could really help him, at this point? Would there be any use in telling him the crucial things? Don't drink ? Don't let Daphne drink? Useless, useless.

The Harmonic Convergence has undone me. Earnest, well-meaning young Frank Marrity has undone me.

Daphne was supposed to choke to death, yesterday, on the floor in Alfredo's.

Marrity reached behind his head to turn the hot pillow over.

He had two recollections — three, now — of that terrible half hour in the restaurant.

Originally he had kept on trying the Heimlich maneuver, and kept on trying it, until he had simply been shaking a pale, dead little girl. He could still remember the cramps in his arms. The paramedics had arrived too late to do anything. He had grieved over Daphne, but he had got through the funeral, and the furtive interviews with various secret organizations, and the horrible lonely months afterward, without "taking the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse," as Omar Khayyam had described alcoholism. Two years later he had married Amber, who had been a student in one of his University of Redlands classes in 1988: that is, who would be in one of Frank Marrity's classes next year. He and Amber had not had any children, but they'd been very happy, and had eventually bought a house in Redlands in the mid-'90s. A good time for it, before the prices of houses went up out of sight for a college teacher and his eBay-dealer wife. By 2005, at the age of fifty-three, he had been thinking about early retirement.

He thought of that life as Life A.

And then in the early months of 2006 he had begun to have vivid hallucinations of a different life, a Life B. In this other life he had not married Amber, and Daphne was still alive, still with him, and the two of them were living in a trailer park on Base Line. Moira, a widow by this time, had long since bought out his share of Grammar's house, and was living in it, and had got restraining orders against both him and Daphne. Daphne was thirty-one, and an alcoholic, and she hated her alcoholic father. And, truthfully, by that time he had hated her, and himself too.

In both lives twelve-year-old Daphne had watched Grammar's movie, helplessly, all the way through, while he had been up the hall in his office grading papers; when he had eventually come down the hall to make dinner he had found Daphne still staring at the blank screen. He had ejected the tape and hidden it. That night Daphne had begun to have difficulty swallowing her food.

And though in his original life, Life A, Daphne had choked to death on the floor of Alfredo's the next day, in the intrusive hallucinatory Life B he had punched a hole in her throat, and she had not died; but when she had recovered from the surgery she had written u cut my throat… i hate you on the pad beside her hospital bed. And from then on she had seemed to be possessed by a spiteful, hateful devil.

He could see now that it had been merciful, in the original story of his life, that she had died on the restaurant floor.

The Life B hallucinations had become so frequent and prolonged that he had had to take a leave from teaching, and eventually he honestly didn't know which life was his real one.

He was the single father of the adult Daphne as often as he was the childless husband of Amber.

Then he was simply living with Daphne in the trailer, and the life with Amber was a less and less frequent dream. And by April 2006 those dreams had stopped. He was stuck in the drink-fogged trailer life with his angry, drunk, adult daughter — though he could still remember his original life.

Why would my past change, in this way? he wondered. Why did this 1987 Frank Marrity do the tracheotomy yesterday, when in my original time line I did not do it?

It must be that the Harmonic Convergence, that sudden drop in worldwide mind pressure, caused a crack in the continuity, allowed a brief gap — like an unstable seam between two pours of cement — in which some new variable could make things resume in a different way.

So in this skewed history, Marrity did not marry Amber; by the time Daphne was twenty-two, she was a dedicated alcoholic, and so was he; and when she was twenty-seven, in 2002, she took his car keys and he blundered out of the trailer to stand behind the battered Ford Taurus to prevent her from taking it.

He shifted his bad leg now to a new position on Grammar's bedspread. Standing behind the car had been a mistake.

And so he had made a desperate bid to save Daphne, and himself — to start an entirely new life, a Life C, a third roll of the dice.

He had remembered the questions the secret agencies had asked him in both previous lifetimes, and those questions had led him to the discovery of who his great-grandfather had been — and had then led him to the study of quantum mechanics and relativity and Kabbalah. He had stolen some Einstein letters from Grammar's house, which by then had been Moira's.

And then he had actually used the machine in Grammar's Kaleidoscope Shed and jumped back in time and intruded on his thirty-five-year-old self and the twelve-year-old Daphne, and pretended to be his own lost father.

Pretending to be his own father had been even more difficult than he had imagined it would be — claiming to be gay had been much easier than claiming to be that evil old man.

Daphne had noted the resemblance between them: the old and young Frank Marritys! He had hoped that Daphne might survive this time, as the sweet child she had been, if there were no choking and therefore no throat cutting. And he had got his younger self to promise not to go to an Italian restaurant on that fateful day.

And of course he had gone to Alfredo's himself, ready to chase them away if they nevertheless tried to eat there — but when they hadn't arrived at noon, as he clearly remembered doing, nor at 12:30 or 12:40, he had relaxed and sat down and had lunch and a few beers. Fate had evaded him by sending them in an hour late.

And then Daphne choked, and her young father did the tracheotomy.

The old Frank Marrity rolled to a new position on Grammar's bed. He should have… broken Marrity's leg, set his truck on fire, called in a bomb threat to the restaurant.

Last night — it tormented him now to remember it — last night he had been certain that Daphne must have died at the hospital — a hemorrhage, error in anesthetic, a mis-prescription, it didn't matter. The feeling of deliverance had been overwhelming.

He had been sure she had died because he had experienced half an hour of restoration, starting when the three cars had bracketed him on Base Line, and the Rambler had behaved so oddly — for a blessed thirty minutes after that, his right leg was strong and free of pain, and he was healthy, not weakened by years of heavy drinking.

After the incident on Base Line, he had found that he was on another street entirely, but he had got his bearings when he'd come to Highland Avenue, and he had driven to the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital full of bubbling optimism.

He had been ready to begin prepping Marrity for the next nineteen years — marry Amber, bet on the winners in the NFL and NBA and the Stanley Cup, buy stock in Dell and Cisco and Microsoft and Amazon, and get out of it all by 1999 and then put the money in T-bills and insured securities — buy many copies of the first edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and don't be in New York City on September 11, 2001. To this 1987 Frank Marrity, 9/11 still meant the emergency phone number.

It wouldn't have been precisely the same as the happy life with Amber that the old man remembered, but it should have been acceptably close. And it would have been affluent.

Of course neither of the Marrity-lives the old man had experienced had included a visit from his long-missing "father." And in neither of the remembered lives had the semiblind woman tried to shoot him!

And there were a couple of other discrepancies too between this young Marrity's life and what the old man remembered. In neither of the time lines he had lived through, the happy one or the miserable one, had Grammar's VHS tape burned up. He had been surprised to see the scorched VCR lying in the grass outside Marrity's kitchen door, yesterday morning. And neither Daphne nor this young Marrity should know anything about a connection with Albert Einstein yet; he had not learned of it until 2006. But somehow Frank and Daphne did already know about it.

And why had they been an hour late for lunch yesterday? Urgent housework that couldn't wait?

And then at the hospital he'd seen that Daphne was still alive after all, and decrepitude had fallen onto him again like a waterlogged plaster ceiling. When he had struggled weakly to his feet, Daphne and Marrity had been gone, Daphne's IV tube swinging free and dripping dextrose and sodium chloride onto the floor, and he had had to curse his way past the shouting nurses and limp out of the hospital.

He hoped to be able to find the foreign crowd, the sunglasses girl and her friends, and make a bargain with them — to get them to leave Marrity alone. He could tell them priceless facts about future events, in exchange for that. Even give them Grammar's time machine, for that.

He could try to do that much for his younger self, at least.

Lying on Grammar's bed now, he sniffed — then hiked himself up on his elbows. The raw reek of gasoline was overpowering the scent of the jasmine, and for a breathless instant he thought some recoil effect was pulling him back to the moment of his arrival in the gasoline-fumey Kaleidoscope Shed — with the dozen impossible infants waving their arms in the weeds outside — and then he heard young Frank Marrity's voice through the open window behind his head.

"There's a cigarette in it!" Marrity said.

Then the old man bared his teeth and winced, for twelve-year-old Daphne said, "What, in the gasoline?"

"Right, see, that's the filter, and that's the paper that used to be around it."

"Who'd throw a cigarette in a gas can?"

"Somebody who thought it would set it on fire. I bet she laid a lit cigarette across the open mouth of the can, figuring when it burned down it'd fall in. Which it did. But then it just went out."

"You shouldn't pour it into the dirt. I think that's illegal. Why didn't the cigarette set the gas on fire?"

"The can was nearly full. I guess there wasn't enough vapor. We can't just leave it sitting here; and we can't take it to a gas station for, for whatever the proper disposal is, on a bus." The old man heard the clang of the empty gas can being put down on the concrete of the patio. "I wouldn't have taken bets on it not catching fire, though," Marrity's voice said. "I can see why she thought she had reliably burned down the shed. She must have left too fast to see that it hadn't worked."

The old man in the bedroom shivered in sudden comprehension — if Grammar's makeshift incendiary device had worked, he would have been jumping straight into the middle of an inferno, at noon on Sunday, instead of just into a heady reek of gasoline fumes. Even the fumes had made him scramble out of the shed as fast as he could.

"Poor old Grammar," said Daphne. "I wonder what was going on."

"I think we've got to figure out what was going on, before somebody else tries to shoot me."

"Let's go look at the shed," said Daphne, her voice moving away from the window.

Old Marrity swung his legs off the bed. In both his previous lifetimes he had eventually dug up the gold wire, and in horrible Life B he had sold his trailer to get gold wire to replace it and rewire the time machine, but he couldn't let them disassemble it now — they might just wreck it, and if the machine was gone, could he still have jumped back here? He couldn't figure out the logic of it, but he didn't want them fooling with the machine.

"Wait!" he shouted, limping toward the bedroom door.

He hobbled past the washing machine and wrenched at the dead bolt on the back door; finally he got it back and pushed the door open, squinting at the bright sunlight in the yard. It occurred to him that he hadn't shaved in two days, and his jowls must be bristling with white stubble.

Daphne and his younger self were standing in the weedy yard gaping back at him.

"Wait," he said again. And then he took a deep breath, not having any idea what he could say next.

Sixteen

Sturm and Drang had driven Bennett to the Bank of America on California Street and led him inside, and there they really had given him six cashier's checks, each for $8,333; Bennett had tucked the envelope into his inner jacket pocket, feeling dizzy and anxious. The bank happened to be only a couple of blocks from Grammar Marrity's house.

Then they had driven out of that neighborhood, north to the cedar-shaded parking lot at the Holiday Inn by the Civic Auditorium. Sturm had parked next to a big brown Dodge van with a sliding door in the side, which had rolled open when Sturm got out of the car and knocked on it. From the passenger seat of the idling car, Bennett had been able to see three burly young men and a dark-haired woman in sunglasses in the van; white-haired Sturm had conferred with them for a few moments, then had got back into the car and driven out of the lot, eyeing the rearview mirror to make sure the van was following. The air-conditioning was uncomfortably cold, and somehow the car smelled of burnt fabric.

"Where are we going?" Sturm asked now, without looking sideways at Bennett.

"Uh, 204 Batsford," said Bennett. "It's two blocks south of the bank we were just at. What burned in here?"

In the backseat, Drang lifted a shoe box from beside him and held it forward, lifting the cardboard lid.

Bennett hitched around in his seat to look, then recoiled from the little blackened figure inside. "What the hell is that?" he barked. The burnt smell was gagging him now.

"Your niece's teddy bear, we assume," said Drang, clearly pleased with Bennett's reaction. He put the lid back on the box and set it down on the floor by his feet. "It was buried in Marrity's yard. She apparently burned it up."

"When we get there," Sturm went on, "don't mention any of this about the sale of the grandmother's property. Just get Marrity and his daughter, both, to come to the van. Tell them you've got a bicycle for the girl or something."

From the backseat, Drang said cheerfully, "We can take them from there."

Sturm glanced at Drang in the rearview mirror. "When we get there," he told the fat man, "you go back and wait in the van."

Drang raised his eyebrows. "You think I look alarming?"

"Better that they see only one stranger."

Bennett shifted uncomfortably under the front seat's shoulder strap, wishing he could lean forward and put his face into the cold air coming from the dashboard blowers. "Why did you bring the, the burned-up teddy bear?"

Sturm scowled, as if he wished Drang had not shown Bennett the bear. "It might mean something to the girl," he said.

Bennett realized he was nodding, and he made himself stop it. "You could just let me go — I mean, I can get a cab to get back to my car, then. After." He rubbed his hand over his mouth, feeling sweat in his mustache. "When you've—"

"Okay," said Sturm.

It occurred to Bennett that they were now paying him just for the delivery of Marrity and Daphne, and not for the things Grammar had wanted to sell — if in fact these men were going to let him keep the money, or even let him go.

I should have awakened Moira, he thought. She'd have stopped me. Why the hell couldn't she have woken on her own?

Daphne stared at her grandfather, who was standing in the shade of the trellis looking like a bum. His white hair was all shoved up in the back, and she knew that when her father's hair was that way it meant he'd been napping.

She was glad to see that he'd mostly recovered from whatever had happened to him at the hospital this morning. Over the door behind him was the wooden sign that read, Everyone Who Dwells Here Is Safe. She wondered if that sign was why he had come here.

"Wait?" said her father beside her. "Wait for what?"

Her grandfather was swaying in the patchy trellis shade.

"Don't — go," the old man said. "I was asleep, and I heard your voices. I—"

"Who was that woman who shot at me," her father interrupted, "in the hospital lobby?"

"I don't know—"

"You said, 'She's blind if you don't look at her.' Which was true. And she tried to kill Daphne and me an hour ago. Who is she?"

"Ach! She did? She's a — a psychic. I haven't spoken to her in years, I truly can't imagine why she tried to kill you. I saved your life."

Daphne's father shifted his feet in the weeds. "It's true, you did. Thank you. How do you know her? "

"She — she was part of a team that interviewed me once, after a, a bereavement — she's with a secret agency—"

"Not a United States one," said her father. "We talked to a man from the National Security Agency last night, and he told me not to speak to her."

"You did? I never did, not the NSA. I — only want what's best for you."

Daphne noticed that he said it directly to her father. How about what's best for me too? she thought.

"What sort of secret agency?" her father asked.

The old man sat down in a shaded wicker chair against the outside bedroom wall. "They were interested in something a… family member of mine had previously picked up, which didn't belong to her." He waved his spotty old hands inexpressively. "A family member who had in fact just died. I gave it to them, and they went away. They were psychics, they had a head — anyway, I didn't argue with them, so I didn't learn anything about them."

"When was this?"

The look the old man gave her father seemed defiant. "I was thirty-five."

"You're not saying you met that woman then," Daphne's father objected. "She's only about thirty now."

"I've met her," said the old man. "Leave it at that."

Marrity shook his head impatiently, then asked, "What did your family member take, that you gave to these people? "

The old man exhaled. "Call it a book. Call it a photo album. Call it a key." He glanced at Daphne for the first time, then quickly looked away. To her father, he said, "Next time I'm inclined to save your life, remind me of how grateful you were this time."

Her father paused, and Daphne looked up and saw him nodding. "Sorry, sorry. But you need to tell us all these things, not just the things you think we'll believe. Why did you think Daphne was dead, this morning?"

"A nurse, I must have misunderstood what a nurse said. I don't hear very well. Leave me alone."

Marrity relented. "Okay. Do you want a beer?"

"They're gone, if you mean Grammar's."

"Well, I'd like a beer," Marrity said. He put his briefcase down on the cement porch slab to reach into his pocket. "Where's Grammar's car? I can drive it."

"It — broke down. I took a bus here."

Daphne doubted that. She and her father had taken a bus, and had got here a few minutes ago; her grandfather had been here long enough to have taken a nap. What did he do really, she wondered, steal a car? There's an old car parked by the garage with the hood up. Do you need to open the hood to steal a car? Or to stop it, once you've driven it somewhere?

"I want you to know," said the old man abruptly, "that I hate my father too."

"Why do you want me to know that?" asked Marrity.

"It's something you and I have in common. For a father to just leave his poor wife and children — what excuse could there be?"

Marrity laughed in evident surprise. "Well, you tell me, old man. I can't think of one. Not blackmail and the threat of imprisonment, for example. I wouldn't abandon Daphne to avoid those things."

"No, I know you wouldn't. Not even to save your soul. I know you wouldn't."

"To save my—" Her father seemed to consider getting angry, then just relaxed and laughed. "No, not even to do that."

The old man spread his shaky hands and frowned. Daphne wondered if he was quite awake yet, after his nap.

"Eventually it winds up costing everything," he said. "But remember I hate the old man as much as you do."

Marrity was frowning. "Which old man? Your father, or… my father?"

"That one," the old man mumbled, nodding.

Daphne heard the front door slam inside the house, and then there were footsteps coming through the kitchen.

"Who's here?" came her uncle Bennett's voice from the dimness beyond the open back door. "Why is the door unlocked? Frank? Daphne? "

"Out back, Bennett," said her father loudly. He gave Daphne a look, and she knew he meant Good thing we didn't start prying up the bricks.

She imagined the two of them on their knees in the shed — covered with mud and with a treasure chest full of gold coins half exposed in a hole under the bricks, blinking up in confusion at her grandfather and Uncle Bennett — and her father smiled at her before looking back to the back door.

Daphne wondered if her uncle Bennett would yell at her father again about coming here without him and Aunt Moira — but, in fact, he didn't seem upset.

Bennett was standing there on the back step, blinking and smiling nervously. "Well, this is lucky!" he said. "I got a free bicycle from an ad shoot, and I was going to give it to you next time I saw you, Daphne! But I've got it right outside, in a van!"

A van, thought Daphne. A free bicycle. If this was a stranger, I'd run away as fast as I could. She could feel reflexive caution in her father too.

But, "Okay," she said. "Thanks!"

"I'll go look too," her father said, stepping forward. Daphne stared hard at his briefcase on the cement, and he hurried back to pick it up. "Thanks," he muttered.

"Yes," said Bennett eagerly, "you come look too, Frank."

"I'll come too," said her grandfather, and Bennett jumped, clearly noticing the old man in the shadows for the first time.

"Who are you?" Bennett asked.

The old man didn't answer, and didn't seem to want to look at Bennett.

"He's my father," said Marrity.

Bennett frowned at the old man. "Moira's father?"

Marrity nodded. "Probably he inherits the place, actually. All Grammar's stuff."

Bennett touched the lapel of his jacket. He started to say something, then just said, "Fine! Let's go look at the bike!"

Daphne and her father followed Bennett through the musty-smelling kitchen and living room to the front door. As Bennett pushed aside the creaking screen door and stepped out onto the porch, Daphne saw two vehicles parked in the shade of the big old curbside jacaranda: a brown van and a gray compact car. A man with a white brush cut sat in the driver's seat of the compact.

"That's the — producer, in the car," said Bennett, almost babbling. "His name's Sturm."

Daphne's grandfather had followed them out onto the porch. "Sturm?" he said gruffly. "Where's Mr. Drang?"

Daphne knew that Sturm und Drang was some kind of German literary term, but Bennett blinked at the old man in confusion. "How do you know them?" Again he slapped at the lapel of his jacket, as if to be sure something was still in his pocket. "Have you made a deal with them?"

"Relax, Bennett," the old man said, still not looking at him. "Life — trust me — is too short."

As Bennett led the group from the house down the walkway, the Sturm man was getting out of the car, smiling like a chef on a label, and Daphne noted that the man's gray suit looked expensive but didn't really fit his figure. Bennett stepped ahead of the others, apparently wanting to talk to him.

Daphne's grandfather was staring at Sturm, and his mouth was open in evident dismay.

He turned to Daphne and her father. "Run," he said quietly. "This is the crowd that tried to shoot you this morning."

Peering around the old man's shoulder, Daphne saw Sturm squinting at them, ignoring Bennett, and he reached into his jacket and opened his mouth.

Daphne's father had grabbed her hand and yanked her back, but she saw Bennett brace himself and then drive his fist very hard into Sturm's stomach.

"Wait, Dad!" she yelled. She heard her father's heels tear the grass as he halted.

The white-haired man folded and tumbled facedown onto the sidewalk pavement, and Bennett was right on top of him, fumbling inside the man's jacket.

The door to the van rumbled back, and two younger men in T-shirts hopped down to the sidewalk — then stopped. Bennett, crouching above Sturm, was holding a pistol, pointing it at them.

"Get in the car!" Bennett screamed. He hammered the butt of the pistol down onto the back of Sturm's head, and Daphne flinched at the sudden hard pop of a gunshot.

But her father was pulling her toward Sturm's now empty gray car, and Bennett was on his feet and running around toward the driver's side. As if the accidental shot had taken away his inhibitions, Bennett paused before getting into the car and fired the gun three times at the van; Daphne saw dust fly away from the left front tire and then the van sagged on that side.

Her father had yanked open the back door and bundled her and his briefcase into the backseat and slid in behind her. Bennett was in the driver's seat, and without even closing the door he twisted the ignition key and jerked the engine into gear.

The car's back door was still open, and Daphne struggled up to look out at her grandfather, but the old man was backing away, toward the house.

"Wait for my grandfather!" said Daphne. "Get in!" she yelled at him over her father's shoulder.

The old man shook his head. "No," he said clearly.

A slim, dark-haired woman in sunglasses had stepped out of the van and seemed to be staring very hard at the people in the car.

Her grandfather saw the woman too. "Go!" he yelled, waving them on.

The tires screeched as Bennett gunned the engine and steered away from the curb. The back door swung shut.

Though her ribs were aching, Daphne was craning her neck to look out the back window. The woman held up a hand, either waving or signaling the men in the van not to shoot. Daphne didn't wave back.

"Did you make a deal with those people?" Bennett yelled as he pulled his door closed. He turned right onto the wider street at the end of Batsford. "Sell them something Grammar had?"

"No," said Marrity, helping Daphne straighten up on the seat. "Belt, Daph!" he said. Acceleration pressed them both back against the vinyl upholstery. Daphne fumbled for her seat belt, noticing a burnt smell in the air. Maybe it was the tires.

"They paid me," panted Bennett, "they want you and Daph real bad. I think — I saw he had a gun — I think they want to kill you! Shit. Shit. Now they'll want me real bad! Maybe I can just give 'em back the money." Daphne saw his eyes in the rearview mirror, glaring. "What did you do?"

"I don't know," Daphne's father said, tucking his briefcase down in front of his knees and groping to find his own seat belt, "but there's a guy I've got to call. Are you heading for the police station? Take a left on Colorado."

"Yes. No." Bennett was breathing hard. "Do you want to go to the police? Your father's back there."

"He knows them," said Marrity. "And he didn't want to come with us." He bit his lip, and Daphne got a quick vision of the old man pushing the sunglasses lady from behind, in the hospital lobby. "He didn't want to come," he said again. "Actually I should call this guy, before we go to the cops."

There was a familiar shoe box by Daphne's foot, and she kicked the lid off it — and squeaked in surprise. Bennett swerved in the traffic lane, then angrily said, "What now?"

"Rumbold!" she said. "Daddy, they've got Rumbold here!"

Her father peered over her at the open box on the floor, and his face went blank with surprise. "What the hell?"

"You mean the teddy bear?" Bennett's voice was loud. "Burned up?"

"Yes," said Daphne's father, "her teddy bear. We buried it. Why do they have it?"

"They probably saw you bury something." Bennett sped up as they passed a Holiday Inn. "They want something from you."

It took Daphne a moment to realize that her father was picturing the videocassette she'd taken from Grammar's VCR, because she was picturing it too. And her father was also picturing a sheaf of creased yellowed papers. The Einstein letters, she was sure.

"I've got to stop and call Moira," said Bennett as he made a rocking left turn onto Colorado. "Tell her to leave work right now and meet us at the Mayfair Market on Franklin, in Hollywood. We'll be there before she is, we can wait for her. We're all in some real trouble, I hope you know that."

Daphne wondered how he could imagine that they might not know that.

"And then what?" asked Marrity.

"I know a place where we can all hide, and decide what to do. Hollywood Hills, panoramic view with Hollywood sign and easy access." He sighed. "I've still got the keys to the place."

Bennett had turned right, onto a street called Garfield, but now he sped right past the police station and the high red dome of City Hall, and made a left turn onto a broader street.

Daphne stared out the left-side rear window at the white headstones of a cemetery wheeling past. For a moment she thought of asking Bennett to stop so that she could bury Rumbold there, but she just sighed and kept silent.

Charlotte could joggingly see herself standing on the sidewalk, and Rascasse lying facedown on it, as Golze hurried up, staring.

"Backup car says sixty seconds," Golze panted. "Bradley shot him?"

"No," said Charlotte, "he hit him with the butt of the gun, and the gun went off. The bullet went into the tree, I think." Through Golze's downward-staring eyes she noted the red blood trickling down through Rascasse's spiky white hair to puddle on the sidewalk pavement under his chin. She was mildly surprised to find that she didn't feel anything at all about him.

"Have the boys be ready to lift him," Charlotte said.

"I may do that," Golze snapped, "or I may leave him right here. I think he's dead."

Golze's vision shifted to the right, and focused on the old man who had refused to get into Rascasse's hijacked car with the Marrity family.

"Who are you?" Golze asked.

"He's the guy who was driving the Rambler," said Charlotte. "Frank Marrity's father." And he gave me an awful shove, she thought, this morning at the hospital.

The old man smiled, though his face went blank again when Golze said, "Bullshit, we killed Marrity's father in '55, in New Jersey. Who are you?"

The old man licked his lips. "Do you have Frank Marrity's fingerprints?"

"Yes," said Golze.

The old man visibly took a deep breath. "Good, you'll want to check this. I'm Frank Marrity, the same guy who just drove away in that car, but I'm from the year 2006. I want to make a deal with you people."

For several long seconds Golze's gaze was fixed on the old man, and Charlotte stared right along with him. Her face tingled, but she couldn't tell if it was hot or cold.

I knew it was possible, she thought breathlessly, I knew Rascasse and Golze were on the track of something that could be attained. I can save my young self, save her vision, save her soul from all my sins… if this guy isn't lying.

The old man who claimed to be Frank Marrity licked his lips again. "Killed my father? — in 1955! Why?"

Charlotte's view of him was blacked out for a moment: Golze had blinked heavily. "Ask the dead guy on the sidewalk there," Golze said. His gaze swung back toward the van, and one of the men who had been inside it was growing in apparent size as he strode up to them.

The man waved back over his shoulder. "Car's here."

"Frisk this guy," said Golze, nodding toward the old man, "then get Rascasse into the car. Charlotte and Hinch and the old guy come with us in the car, you and Cooper stay with the van. Tell the cops one of those guys was shooting at the other, missed and hit the van's tire. You don't know who they were. Give a bad description of them, and of the car. Say we were just strangers who stopped to help, and drove off with this injured guy to find a hospital. You don't know who anybody was. You're bewildered and angry, right? Toss your guns in the car trunk right now."

Golze turned to the street, where a white four-door Honda was slanting in ahead of the van, so Charlotte switched her attention to the man Golze had been talking to, who now proceeded to pat down the old man.

She was still dizzy. As she watched the hands slap and slide over the potbellied torso and the new-looking clothes, Charlotte wondered if this could really be Frank Marrity from… nineteen years in the future. If he was, the years had not been kind. How was your light spent, Frank? she thought. In what dark world and wide? You're a nice-looking guy in '87 — what happened?

A hand grabbed her elbow from behind, and she reflexively switched attention — Golze was looking at her, pulling her toward the car.

"You in back on the left," Golze said to her, "Marrity in the middle, Rascasse on the right. Hurry."

Rascasse wasn't dead — when he had been hoisted up and was being folded into the Honda, he raised his blood-smeared face and muttered something in French.

"Oh la la," said Golze, shoving the old man's head down to get him into the car, then wiping his hand on the shoulder of Rascasse's suit.

As she hurried around to get in on the other side, Charlotte was thinking about the little girl she had waved to in the fleeing car. Charlotte had seen her through Golze's eyes and then jumped to the girl's viewpoint — and it had been the girl's viewpoint, because Charlotte had seen herself behind the car, on the fast-receding sidewalk — but suddenly she had glimpsed a quick image of the little girl herself, up close, in profile.

It only seems to happen with Frank Marrity and his daughter, thought Charlotte as she slid into the seat next to the old Frank Marrity and pulled the door closed, this falling into one viewpoint from the other. What does that mean?

And why did I wave at her?

Seventeen

Shit," said Bennett shrilly, "a cop."

In the backseat next to Daphne, Marrity didn't look around. "Has he got his lights on?" They were driving north on Fair Oaks Avenue, over the bridge that spanned the 210 freeway.

The stolen car rocked as Bennett hit the brakes.

"No, but he's right behind us! How fast was I going just now? What if he pulls us over? I haven't called Moira yet! And I've got fifty thousand dollars in my pocket! My God, what have you people done to me? You fucking Marritys—"

"Lay off the brake and just drive straight," Marrity said sharply.

"This car is stolen! I've got a gun in my pocket! And it was fired only a few minutes ago! Oh Jesus—" His hands were visibly shaking on the steering wheel.

Beside Marrity, Daphne turned around and knelt on the seat to look out the back window.

A moment later Marrity heard a muffled boom, and with a sudden cold chill in his stomach he guessed what had happened. He twisted around to look, and sure enough there was a car receding behind them, its hood up and billows of steam whipping around it in white veils.

"Make the first—" Marrity began.

"The police car blew up!" interrupted Bennett.

"I know. Make the first right turn you can, and pull over. I'll drive." Marrity smelled burning plastic.

"Jesus, now the car's on fire!"

"It's just your ashtray," said Marrity, feeling ready to vomit. His own hands were shaking now. "It'll—"

"It's the stereo," said Daphne. "There isn't an ashtray."

"Get off this street and park, dammit!" said Marrity loudly.

"Dad, I'm sorry," said Daphne, "I thought I had to!"

"Maybe you did, Daph." They swayed on the seat as Bennett wrenched the car into a right turn. Marrity wasn't sure his anger and dismay were justified, and he tried to keep them out of his mind, where Daphne could sense them. "Are the cops all right?"

Daphne was crying now. "Y-yes, I just grabbed the radiator!"

Bennett had turned right on Villa, and now steered the car to an abrupt stop against the curb. Black smoke was pouring up from the dashboard and curling under the windshield.

"I think we just abandon this car," said Marrity, levering open the right-side door and grabbing his briefcase. "Come on, Daph."

"I've got to bring Rumbold!"

"Sure, bring Rumbold."

Bennett climbed out of the car, and Marrity took Daphne's free hand and began striding away up the sunlit Villa Street sidewalk.

"Did Daphne blow up the cop car?" Bennett demanded breathlessly, catching up with them.

"Bennett, that's crazy," snapped Marrity. "Don't go crazy now." He peered ahead, not wanting to look back at the car. "I see some stores. Is that fifty thousand dollars of yours in cash?"

"Of course not," said Bennett. "But you asked her if the cops were all right, and she said—"

"Then I'll give you a quarter to call Moira with. She still works at the dentist's office in Long Beach, right? I'll give you a couple of quarters. We can stop for a drink after you call and still have plenty of time to get a cab and meet her in Hollywood."

"Or an ice cream," said Daphne humbly, trotting along beside him.

"Or an ice cream," Marrity agreed, squeezing her hand. "There used to be an ice-cream place up here when I was a kid." He cleared his throat. Bennett," he added awkwardly, "I think you saved our lives back there. At Grammar's house."

"And probably got myself killed doing it," said Bennett. "I'm not joking." He slapped his pockets. "I left my sunglasses in the car."

"You can afford another pair. The guy I'm going to call is with the National Security Agency. He'll believe what we tell him, and I think he'll arrest your — Sturm und Drang, and the woman who tried to kill Daphne and me this morning." And I hope they'll rescue my father, he thought, who also saved my life today. Marrity looked at Bennett, for once not focusing on the scowl and the bristly mustache. "I'm— grateful to you for saving me, and for saving my daughter," he said.

"Fuck you and your daughter," said Bennett, hurrying along. "And the NSA can't arrest people, they'd have to get the FBI to do it."

"Do you really have fifty thousand dollars in your pocket?" asked Daphne.

"I think it's two dollars less than fifty thousand," said Bennett gruffly. "I — shouldn't have said 'Fuck you.'"

"That's okay. Anybody who saves my dad's life can say anything he wants."

"Anybody who saves your dad's life should get a checkup from the neck up." He squinted at Marrity. "What does the National Security Agency have to do with all this? And Daphne said she grabbed the radiator — after you asked her if the cops were—"

"Grammar's father was Albert Einstein," interrupted Marrity. He was sweating, and his mouth still felt too full of saliva. "Grammar had something she got from Einstein, some kind of machine, I gather. The NSA wants it, and I imagine this crowd who tried to kidnap us just now wants it too." How much should he tell Bennett about all this? The man deserved to know something about what he had got tangled up in. "Grammar probably used it on Sunday, and that got everybody's attention, got all these people on to… us, her descendants. They all think we have it, or know where it is."

"Bullshit her father was Einstein."

Marrity blinked at him. "Does that really strike you as the most… today, the most implausible thing you've…" He waved and let the sentence go unfinished.

"Did Daphne use this machine to blow up the police car?"

"No. I don't know." Marrity spat into a hedge, and for a moment thought he would have to crouch behind the hedge to be sick. "In a way, maybe," he added hoarsely, taking a deep breath and stepping forward into the breeze.

His briefcase was getting heavy, and he could sense the ache in Daphne's arm from carrying Rumbold in the shoe box. She was about to explain, and he decided not to stop her.

"I watched that movie that I stole from Grammar's shed," she said, looking down at the sidewalk as she skipped to keep up with her father. "Pee-wee's Big Adventure, except it was actually another movie, an old silent movie." She blinked up at Bennett, squinting against the sun. "The movie scared me so bad that I burned up the VCR and my bed. Rumbold was on my bed."

"Poltergeist," said Bennett.

Oh that's all we needed, thought Marrity.

"Poltergeist?" asked Daphne in dismay. "Like the ghosts that came out of the TV, in that movie?"

"No, Daph," Marrity said, trying to project reassurance, "real poltergeist stuff isn't like the stuff in that movie at all. Poltergeist is when a teenage girl sets things on fire, at a distance, when she's upset. Nothing to do with ghosts or TV sets."

"Well," said Bennett, "it's supposed to be children around puberty, both boys and girls, though admittedly most recorded cases involve girls; and it's not just starting fires, by any—"

"Bennett," said Marrity. "It's a girl this time. And it's fires, this time."

"I was only—"

"There's a phone booth," interrupted Marrity, nodding ahead. "And there's a drive-in burger stand that probably sells ice cream."

It wasn't the place he remembered from his childhood — he and Moira had ridden their bicycles to an A&W root-beer stand that used to be here, in the early '60s. But this was the place that time had left them, and it looked as if it would do.

"I'm only going to eat the ice cream," said Daphne, "not the cone."

Bennett, and then Marrity, had talked to Moira on the pay phone, and had managed to convince her to leave work at once and drive to the Mayfair Market on Franklin, in Hollywood. Marrity had then phoned for a taxi, and had been told that one would pick them up in half an hour. Now they were at a picnic table in the roofed patio behind the hamburger stand, not visible from the street.

"Why not the cone?" asked Marrity. "Did he touch it?"

"Yes! He's supposed to take it from the bottom of the package, with the little paper holder, but he took it out of the top, with his fingers."

"His hands are probably clean."

"He handles money."

"Oh, yeah — good point."

Bennett had ordered a cup of coffee, but pushed it aside on the picnic table after one sip. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his white shirt, since all the paper napkins Daphne had pulled out of the dispenser had blown away when her father moved Rumbold's box, which had been holding them down.

"Those Sturm and Drang guys," said Bennett, "told me they were in negotiation with you to buy something Grammar had — this machine, apparently. They said you were going to keep the money, even though Moira should get half."

"That was a lie," said Marrity, sipping a cup of coffee of his own. "I've never spoken to Sturm und Drang, and I only met the sunglasses girl yesterday afternoon. We just talked about Milton, but then this morning she tried to shoot me, and a few minutes after that she tried to shoot me and Daphne both."

"Are you serious? Shoot you? Did she have a gun?"

"Yes, Bennett," said Marrity patiently, "and she fired it too. Several times. At me."

Bennett frowned and shook his head. Then he asked, "Who's Milton?"

"A poet," said Daphne. "Dead for a longtime."

Bennett waved impatiently. He was squinting fiercely at the cars in the shopping-center parking lot. "Why would your father have stayed with that crowd?" he asked Marrity.

"He knows them, I gather," said Marrity. "I don't know anything about him — we only met him yesterday."

"Moira hates him."

"So do I, probably. Though he saved my life this morning, at the hospital."

"You didn't tell us Daphne was in the hospital," said Bennett. "I had to find out from Sturm and Drang, this morning."

"It was very sudden," said Marrity.

"My dad did a tracheotomy on me, on the floor of Alfredo's restaurant," said Daphne proudly, "on Base Line. With a knife."

"They gave you fifty thousand dollars?" asked Marrity.

"I guess so. You did a tracheotomy yourself? An emergency tracheotomy? Wow." He wiped his mouth on his sleeve again. "Originally the fifty thousand was for whatever it was that your grandmother had, this machine, I guess. But then it was just for handing over you and Daphne."

Marrity shuddered. "I'm glad you didn't hand us over to them." He didn't ask Bennett whether he had intended to split the money with him.

Daphne had by now eaten all the ice cream off the cone. "Don't you think the germs would be dead by now?"

"What germs?"

"From the ice-cream man's hands. Wouldn't the open air kill them?"

"I suppose it might."

She held the cone up and blew on it, turning it to catch all sides. "They'd blow off, wouldn't they? Germs?"

"Yeah, I bet they would. Be sure to chew it, thoroughly."

"You're supposed to say, 'Absolutely.'"

"Absolutely."

"Well don't say it if you don't mean it."

"Daph, I have no idea whether they'd blow off or not."

"Well, he didn't touch the tip," she said judiciously, and bit the point off the end, and melted ice cream spilled down her chin and onto her blouse.

She dropped the cone onto the table. "I need clean clothes," she said. "So do you, Dad. We've been wearing these since yesterday. And toothbrushes."

"There's our taxi," said Marrity, getting to his feet.

"I think there's a washing machine at this house we're going to hide out in," said Bennett.

Charlotte was looking out through the eyes of the old fellow who claimed to be Frank Marrity from the future.

In the rearview mirror she could see the blue eyes of young Hinch, who she recalled had been a theology student at a Bay Area seminary before his progressive, urbanely skeptical instructors had driven him to look elsewhere for a true supernatural power. The Vespers had picked him up with the promise, as she privately thought of it, that "ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat the fruit thereof, then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

Denis Rascasse, slumped unconscious now on the far side of the Marrity guy, would probably have said something like efficiency rather than evil. And cowardice rather than good.

Over the headrest of the passenger seat she could see a few curls of Golze's disordered dark hair.

The radio on the dashboard clicked and hissed, and then a voice said, "Tierce."

Golze picked up the microphone. "Seconde."

"We found Prime's car, guns of Navarone." Golze impatiently switched frequencies, and the voice went on, "On Yucca. Nobody relevant visible in the neighborhood. The stereo was burned up, car full of smoke."

"Does it run?"

"Yes, runs fine."

"Meet us at Santa Monica and Moby Dick." Click. "And Van Ness. We'll switch cars, you take this one."

"Gotcha," said the voice, and Golze hung the microphone on its hook.

"Take us to Santa Monica and Van Ness," he said to Hinch.

Charlotte wondered why the stereo of Rascasse's car should have caught fire.

Abruptly she found herself seeing her own right-side profile; she was alarmed by the stress lines around her mouth and eyes. She turned to look toward the Marrity man, and was glad to see that in the full-face view, the sunglasses hid the crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes.

"Why the hell," he asked her, "did you try to kill Frank Marrity — my younger self — this morning?" She wished she could see his expression.

"I think," said Golze quickly, "that we've all been working under some misunderstandings." He shifted his bulk to peer back around the headrest at the old Marrity.

From the constriction at the top of Marrity's vision, Charlotte guessed that he was frowning.

"Soon enough," Golze said, "we'll all be able to ask and answer all the questions." Golze's eyes were blinking behind his glasses, and Charlotte saw him glance to the far right side of the rear seat, toward the slumped figure of Rascasse. "I think Rascasse is dead," he added. "Dying, anyway." He turned and looked ahead again.

Charlotte tried switching to Rascasse's point of view — and found herself seeing Golze and Hinch head-on, and old Marrity in the rear seat behind them; apparently her viewpoint now was from the dashboard, looking backward. Faces and hands were unnaturally bright, as if this image were seen by infrared radiation. Rascasse was evidently out of his body, but not far out of it.

She switched back to the Marrity view. "I don't think so," she said.

On her right, the old Frank Marrity cleared his throat, jiggling her vision. "Really, why did you kill him?"

"It was that Bradley guy," said Golze, "he hit him on the head with a gun butt. Your brother-in-law, if you really are Frank Marrity."

"I mean my father, in 1955. I — that doesn't make any sense."

"How do you know it doesn't make any sense? You were what, three years old? Anyway, I don't know, I wasn't even born yet. Rascasse said your father was more useful to us dead than alive, whatever that might mean, if anything." Golze hitched around in the seat again and smiled back at Marrity. "So give us a sample. What's some news from the future?"

"Are you sure you killed him, then?"

Golze shrugged. "Rascasse says we did. He seemed pretty sure. Why, did you hear from him after '55?"

"No — that's been my — we hated him for that, my sister and I. For leaving and not ever getting in touch with us."

"Well," said Golze, "any hate is good practice, even if it's baseless, as in this case. Better, in fact, more pure. So tell us something that happens in the future."

Frank Marrity blinked several times. "Uh, the Soviet Union collapses in '91. The Berlin Wall comes down before that, in '89. No war, the whole Communist thing just collapsed from inside, like a rotten pumpkin." He took a deep breath, and after several seconds let it out again. "I want to make a deal with you people. Something I can do for you, something you can do for me. But first you need to buy me a bottle of vodka."

"Vodka after talk," said Golze.

"No," said Marrity. "You people killed my father, and… and I don't know where that leaves me. I've hated him all my life for what he did, and now he's gone, and he didn't do it — and I'm afraid—"

He broke off and laughed weakly, and for a moment, before he blinked his eyes again, Charlotte could see the blur of tears around the edges of his vision. His voice was flat when he went on, "So I insist on a bottle of vodka before we proceed."

Charlotte saw Golze shrug. "Okay," he said. "Charlotte, the guy who's driving Rascasse's car will take you home in this one." Knowing her ways, he stared straight into Marrity's eyes as he added, "You haven't slept in thirty hours, and I don't think we'll catch up with our fugitives within the next ten hours. Get a shower, get some sleep, eat something."

You don't want me to hear you interview the Marrity guy, she thought. But in fact her eyelids and eye sockets were stinging, and she could smell her own sweat.

"Okay," she said.

To her right, she could feel old Marrity relax. He's afraid of me, she thought, and she wondered whether to be amused or annoyed.

She leaned back in the seat, her left elbow on the door's armrest, and again she reached out mentally for the unconscious Rascasse's view — and then she smothered a gasp, though her fingernails reflexively scrabbled at the door and her right hand gripped Marrity's knee, doubtless to his alarm.

Rascasse was fifty feet above Colorado Boulevard — his astral projection was, anyway. Only after a bewildered moment did Charlotte realize that the motionless streamlined train in the lane below them was simply the car their bodies were in — it looked like an impossibly long limousine, stretched from one block to another, right through an intersection — and at the intersection, other elongated vehicles were stuck perpendicularly right through it.

We're a bit outside our time slot, she told herself firmly. We're looking at several seconds at once. The black strings of pearls hanging in the air are probably flapping birds, crows.

Then either Rascasse descended, or he narrowed his focus; she could see Golze in the front passenger seat head-on, nearly level with her and only a foot or so away, and his blurred head became clear, frozen, grinning in a candid moment.

Then she could see inside Golze, by God knew what light; she could see his ribs, the slabs of his lungs, and the veiny sack that was his motionless heart; somehow in this impossible light it appeared to be black.

Then Rascasse's gaze entered the heart, with such a tight focus that the motionless valves were mouths caught pursed or stopped in midsyllable.

Charlotte switched back to Marrity's view, and involuntarily let out a sharp sigh of relief to see the back of Golze's head rocking in the passenger seat in front of her, and brake lights flashing through the windshield.

Golze turned around again to look at her, his eyebrows raised.

"I'm going to sleep right here," Charlotte said, speaking too loudly. "You know the way you think you're falling, right as you go to sleep?"

"Jactitations," said Golze, returning his attention to the traffic ahead. "Common in alcoholics."

Oh yeah? thought Charlotte, genuinely too tired to take offense. But I bet my heart will outlast yours.

Eighteen

When the taciturn young man dropped her off at the corner of Fairfax and Willoughby, Charlotte waited until she heard him drive away and then, since no one was looking at her, she listened to the traffic. Vehicles were growling from left to right in front of her, so she waited until that noise stopped and engines were accelerating back and forth to her right. She stepped confidently off the curb, and used the engine volume to keep herself from slanting out of the crosswalk that she couldn't see.

Stepping off the curb, she thought. I did that, all right. That experience with Rascasse's viewpoint in the car might not have been all the way out to what those boys call the freeway, but it was… pretty far up an on-ramp, at least! A good distance above the surface streets I live in.

Her hands were shaking, and she clenched them into fists.

There was bourbon in her apartment, but she wasn't sure about cigarettes, and right now she needed a cigarette. Up the far curb, she shuffled tentatively across the 7-Eleven parking lot, listening for cars suddenly turning in or backing out of parking spaces, and finally someone was looking at her.

She saw herself from a viewpoint inside the store, through the tinted window, but it was clear enough for her to walk briskly. She smiled and waved toward the viewpoint, just to keep the person looking at her until she reached the doors.

The action reminded her of having waved at Daphne, possibly half an hour ago. What was that all about? she wondered again. Hello? Here I am? Daphne Marrity is not my younger self!

Once inside, she switched to the point of view of the clerk behind the counter, without even having seen if it was a man or a woman. The clerk didn't look at her wallet as the pack of Marlboros slid across the counter between the displays of Bic lighters and little cans of cold-sore balm, so she had to feel for two one-dollar bills — she kept ones folded into squares, to distinguish them from the fives that were folded twice lengthwise, the tens that were folded once lengthwise, and the twenties that were not folded at all. She could see the two quarters the clerk gave her in change, so she didn't have to feel for the milled edges of the coins to know what they were.

Outside again, she paused in the hot, smoggy breeze, scanning the nearby viewpoints for a view of herself; over the years she had become very good at picking herself out even in very crowded scenes. And after a few seconds she located herself in the view of a man — she could see the edges of a mustache at the bottom of the view field — at the roofed RTD bus-stop bench across Willoughby, and he obligingly watched her as she walked the dozen yards to the gate of her apartment building. He even kept her in view as she stepped along the grass-bordered pavement to the front door of her apartment, so she didn't have to drag the fingers of one hand along the walls and windows of the other ground-floor apartments, as she sometimes did.

By touch she fitted the key into the front-door lock, and bolted the door behind her once she was inside. Through the eyes of the man across the street, she could dimly see her silhouette inside the apartment through the always uncurtained windows, but that view was of no use, and she let it go.

Her apartment was chilly with air-conditioning, and the faint smells of upholstery and damp plant soil were a relief after the aggressive exhaust-and-salsa smells of the street.

She hung her keys on the hook by the door and took three strides forward across the carpet, and with the fourth step her left rubber-soled Rockport tapped the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor.

She peeled the cellophane off the pack of Marlboros and tapped one out. Several lighters were in the drawer under the counter, glasses in the cupboard above, the bottle of Wild Turkey on the Formica-top table, and in ten seconds she had sat down at the table and poured a couple of inches of bourbon into the glass and was waving the fingers of one hand over the lighter to be sure it had lit; then she slowly brought it toward the end of the cigarette, puffing until she could taste the smoke.

She inhaled, then put the lighter down to take a sip of the bourbon; a moment later she exhaled smoke and bourbon fumes, and a lot of the tension in her shoulders went with them.

But her heart was still going faster than usual, and she knew it was because of her brief vicarious experience of being outside the boundaries of one-second-at-a-time. It's actually true, she thought cautiously, trying out the shape of the idea; you really can get into a higher dimension, from which the four dimensions we ordinarily live in can be viewed from outside. She had taken their word for it before, but now she'd actually seen what Rascasse and Golze had been talking about all along.

If one of them's got to kill the other, she thought, I hope it's my poor old Rascasse who survives. Especially if he goes along with Golze's evident decision that I no longer need to kill the young Frank Marrity. Obviously the situation's changed since I was given that order. This crapped-out old Marrity, who has information we need to have, might just evaporate if I were to kill his younger self. Who knows? It all seems to be real, the old guy seems actually to be a visitor from the future.

As I will be.

She took another drag on the cigarette and another mouthful of the whiskey, and as she swallowed she let the shiver shake through her all the way to her fingertips, probably throwing the ash off her cigarette. And she realized that the nervousness she felt was relief and anticipation.

This is going to work, she thought. I don't have to kill Marrity, and this thing is going to work. I'll be able to ditch this life, like a paper towel you cleaned up some nasty mess with. Throw it away and then wash every particle of memory off your hands.

She recalled helping Golze lure a young man aboard the bus in Pasadena last night. Golze had used a stun gun on him once he was inside, and then had duct-taped his mouth, wrists, and ankles. She had been dropped off at the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital in San Bernardino about half an hour later, and in all that time the young man had not moved. Perhaps Golze's stun gun had killed him — Golze hadn't referred to the incident today.

She drained the remaining couple of ounces of bourbon in one swallow, and welcomed the depth-charge effect, the unfocusing warmth spreading through her whole body.

She stood up and crossed to the sink, where she put down the empty glass and ran water over the cigarette, afterward dropping the soggy filter in the wastebasket.

As she walked back across the living room carpet, she was remembering Ellis, her last boyfriend; he had said that Elizabeth Taylor didn't seem attractive to him in old movies like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Butterfield 8 because the image of her present-day self kept getting in the way.

She stepped sideways onto the linoleum of the bathroom floor, into the faint smells of Lysol and rust. She opened the medicine cabinet and took down a hand-size plastic bottle of baby shampoo and squirted some into her palm and began washing her hands, rubbing her fingertips. Before the shampoo had been entirely washed from her fingers, she several times brushed warm water over her eyelashes, from the bridge of her nose outward.

She had only seen the young Frank Marrity twice, briefly, both times through the eyes of his twelve-year-old daughter: yesterday at 1:00 P.M., when he had been sitting across from the daughter at the Italian restaurant, and five hours before that, when he had been sitting at his kitchen table next to the old version of himself. The old one had been drinking something brown, brandy or whiskey.

Did the young Marrity imagine that the older man was his father, as Charlotte had? Would that be what the old man had told him?

Charlotte called up young Marrity's face — lean and kind and humorous under the disordered dark hair, very different from the defeated, pouchy face of the old guy. And the voices had nothing in common — young Marrity's was a clear tenor, while the old guy's was hoarse and raspy. She didn't see them as the same guy — no perceptible Elizabeth Taylor effect.

She lowered her chin as if to whistle a deep bass note, opening her eyelids wide; then drew her left forefinger along her lower eyelid until she could feel the bottom edge of the plastic scleral shell. And with a gently gouging push, she popped it right off the coral sphere implant and onto the palm of her hand.

A moment later she had done the same with the right eye. She rinsed the prosthetic eye shells, rolling the flexible plastic between her still slick fingers.

When they were clean, she dried them on a towel and carefully laid them in a silk-lined glasses case and snapped it shut and slid it onto the shelf above the toilet.

She kept her eyelids open wide to let the coral spheres air out. Of her eyes are coral made, she thought.

She was aware of a viewpoint not far away, and she focused on it. The young student in the next apartment was staring at his television screen, on which Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh were sitting on a veranda, watching a little girl riding a horse sidesaddle; and Charlotte had taken a step toward the living room, to turn on her own television set and get audio to go with the clairvoyant picture, but then she noticed that the lights were glowing on the student's VCR, on top of the television set — Gone With the Wind wasn't being shown on a TV channel, he had rented a tape of it.

The student always watched the news on Channel 7 at 7:00 A.M., and sometimes Charlotte set her alarm so that she could watch it through his eyes, listening to the sound on her own set. Usually, though, she would rather sleep.

Ellis had been good with movies, generally paying pretty close attention. She had made a show of keeping her eyes pointed toward the screen to encourage him to do the same. And he had been a great reader, never skimming or skipping pages — often she had just sat beside him on the couch, her eyes closed, reading along through his eyes. He had liked John D. MacDonald and Dick Francis mysteries, which were fine, but she wished she could meet a man who liked the Bronte sisters. Charlotte had only read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre before being blinded. Frank Marrity probably liked the Brontes.

She sighed and picked up her purse and the towel and counted her steps into the bedroom. She sat down on the bed, spread out the towel across the bedspread, and then pulled her .357 Smith & Wesson revolver out of her purse.

With her finger outside the trigger guard and the gun pointed into the corner of the room, she pushed the cylinder-release button and swung the cylinder out to the side. She tilted the gun up and pushed the ejector rod; one heavy cartridge fell into her palm, along with five empty brass shells.

Five shots! she thought with a shiver. And apparently all I did was break a window. She was glad now that she had not killed him.

If Marrity had looked at her, she had planned to see herself facing him squarely and pointing the gun a bit below his eyes, so that she would not quite be able to see down the barrel. That ought to have had the gun aimed at his chest. And then squeeze the trigger. She had wondered if he would look down at the wound in himself or keep staring at her.

In spite of her intimacy with Ellis, her recollections of him were nearly all of his profile at restaurants, as people at other tables had glanced over at him and Charlotte.

When they had made love he had hardly ever looked at himself — not surprisingly, she thought; he wasn't a narcissist — and so all her recollections of their passion were views of her own naked body. And of his hands.

She had had perhaps half a dozen lovers during the nine years since the exploding battery had blinded her in the missile silo in the Mojave Desert; and her memory of every one of them was of her own body and a pair of hands.

It still seemed odd to her that she and Denis Rascasse had never been lovers, not even when he had first recruited her three years ago.

Involuntarily she found herself recalling old Robert Jerome, the Fuld Hall custodian at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, in New Jersey. She had seduced the amiable old man in order to get access to the restricted Einstein archives — and then had convinced him that she loved him, to get his help in robbing the extra-sensitive files still kept in the basement of Einstein's old house on Mercer Street.

Even with Robert Jerome, all she could remember was her own face and body, and his wrinkled, spotty hands.

The pebbled-plastic gun-cleaning kit was in the bedside table drawer, and she lifted it out carefully and opened it on the blanket, by touch separating the rods and brushes and sharp-smelling bottles of solvent and oil.

Was she a narcissist? If so, it was by default. She couldn't help but always wind up looking at herself, through someone else's eyes.

But no, that wasn't the way it was — she didn't care about this blinded body, nor even about the twenty-eight-year-old woman who animated it.

If I'm a narcissist, she thought, it's in the same way that the crapped-out old-man Marrity probably is. We want to go back and rescue our younger, more innocent selves from some bad thing that threatens them. I have done nothing but in care of thee. We're willing to throw ourselves away — make ourselves into things that ought to be thrown away — if by doing so we can save that one precious person who by our disgraceful actions will be spared our disgraces.

She looks like I used to.

According to Rascasse, it's possible to leave now and go back and change your past, then return in Newtonian recoil to now again, with your memories intact — with, in effect, two sets of recollections: memories of the original-issue life and memories of the revised one too. Einstein apparently did that in 1928, and Lieserl Marity probably did it in 1933. But I won't do it that way, Charlotte thought. I won't come back.

Throw it away and then wash every particle of memory off your hands.

Robert Jerome had used those old hands she remembered to make a noose out of his own shirt, not very long after Charlotte had impatiently explained to him that she had never loved him, that she had only seduced him to get the papers she had stolen. He had been in jail for being an accessory to burglary, his job and pension lost, when he had killed himself.

He had also been guilty of perjury, in absolving Charlotte of all blame; through a Vespers decoy address she had eventually received a letter that he had written to her from the jail, but she had never asked anybody to read it for her.

I won't impose these memories on the redeemed Charlotte Sinclair, she thought as she began screwing the .38-caliber brush onto one of the rods. I'll save her and then just go away, with all my sins unshared.

Nymph, she thought, reflexively misquoting Hamlet, in your orisons be all my sins forgotten.

Bennett and Moira had walked ahead as the four of them made their way up the steep curves of Hollyridge Drive, with Marrity and Daphne trudging along behind, all of them crowding against a fence or garage door whenever a car slowly moved up or down the narrow lane. Marrity couldn't imagine what happened when two cars needed to pass each other.

Mockingbirds made sneering calls from the aromatic eucalyptus trees overhanging the embankment to their right, and the one resident who noticed the four of them — a blond woman who was hovering with a watering can over a row of tomato plants in red clay pots — stared at them with evident unease. Pedestrians who weren't jogging or walking dogs were apparently unusual. Marrity wasn't surprised — the noon sun was a weight on his shoulders, and this hike would have been strenuous even if he were not carrying his jacket and his briefcase and Rumbold's shoe box. Bennett was holding a paper bag that had a bottle of scotch whisky in it — he'd bought it at the Mayfair Market on Franklin, one block north of Hollywood Boulevard.

Moira had finally driven into the market parking lot about an hour after Bennett had called her. They had all got into another taxi then, while Bennett and Marrity both tried at once to explain to Moira why they were all fugitives, even she; and then, when they had driven no more than half a mile up through the narrow, twisting lanes that curled like shaded streams down the Hollywood Hills, Bennett had told the driver to stop.

Now Moira halted and kicked off her shoes, so Bennett stopped too, and they waited for Marrity and Daphne to catch up.

"So are these spies, Frank? " Moira asked, standing on one foot to rub the sole of the other. "Soviets, KGB?"

"I don't know," Marrity said, pausing to switch his briefcase to his left hand and cradle his jacket and Rumbold in his right arm. "I guess if the NSA's after them, they probably are."

"Bennett says they… shot at you and Daphne?"

"Shot at me, aimed a gun at me and Daph. Serious both times." He lifted his briefcase to wipe his forehead on his shirtsleeve. "This is all true, Moira."

"Bennett says you told him Grammar's father was Albert Einstein." She smiled at him. "I could lose my job over this, not going back after lunch."

Marrity was tempted to open his briefcase and show her the Einstein letters; but he still didn't trust Bennett with knowing about them. "The NSA man we met last night said her father was Einstein," Marrity told her. "So did our father, yesterday morning."

Beside him Daphne nodded solemnly.

Moira's smile had disappeared. "Our father? Who do you mean?"

Marrity looked at Bennett, who shrugged and rolled his eyes. Clearly he had not told Moira about seeing their father.

"My father. Your father. He's back. He—"

"Our father? "Her shoes fell out of her hands and clattered on the asphalt.

"Yes, Moira," said Marrity patiently, "he came back because he heard Grammar died, and he wants to make a deal with these—"

"You've talked to him? Where is he?"

Daphne crouched to pick up Moira's shoes.

"He's with these people who are after us," said Marrity, "who shot at me. He—"

"Where?" She swayed on the narrow black pavement, and Marrity and Bennett each reached out to grab one of her arms. Marrity dropped his jacket.

"I don't know where he is now!" said Marrity. "He was standing on Grammar's lawn when we drove away, an hour and a half ago. We wanted him to come with us, but he waved us off, said, 'Go!' We couldn't wait."

"He had amnesia," said Moira, "all these years. I'm sure of it." Very slowly, supported by Marrity and Bennett, she sat down on the asphalt. The skirt of her brown linen suit was knee length, and she had to sit with her legs stretched out in front of her. Daphne frowned and crouched again to press her palm against the street surface, and Marrity knew she was checking to see if the tar was sticky.

"You can't just sit here," said Bennett anxiously. "Get up, it's only a few steps to this house I have the key to."

"Come on, Moira," said Marrity.

Daphne was crouched beside Moira, her face level with the woman's. "We should get in out of the sun," Daphne said. "We'll all get skin cancer."

Moira blinked at her. "Of course, dear," she said, and let Marrity and her husband help her back onto her feet.

Daphne picked up her father's jacket and carried it and Moira's shoes the rest of the way. They were nearly at the top of the hill, where Hollyridge made a hairpin turn to the left to become Beach-wood, and the street was narrow and steep between the eucalyptus trees.

Bennett waved at a shaded one-story house that was crowded up to the street pavement on their left. Red bougainvillea blossoms clustered over the door and two windows. "This is it," he said tiredly, pulling a set of keys from the pocket of his slacks.

Entering the house was stepping out of shadow into sunlight, for the entire west side of the house was windows facing the Beach-wood canyon. Frank Marrity and Daphne followed Bennett and Moira inside, blinking around at the blank white walls of the spacious interior; they had entered at street level, but stairs led down to a lower floor with a balcony outside the glass. The afternoon sunlight gleamed on polished wood floors, and Marrity noticed that the faces of his companions were underlit, as if by reflecting water. He put down his briefcase and the shoe box by the door.

"Lock it, Dad," said Daphne.

"Right," said Marrity, twisting the door's dead-bolt knob.

"This would have been perfect for filming," muttered Bennett. "Camera on the balcony and on the street out front, lots of room inside for everybody's gear."

The kitchen was on the upper, entry level, and Marrity noticed a telephone on the wall by the counter.

"The phone work?" he asked, starting toward it. His footsteps echoed in the empty house.

"It's supposed to," said Bennett, following him as Moira and Daphne moved to the rail to look down into the broad lower level. "I think Subaru is paying the bill. Let me see your man's card."

Marrity was already tugging his wallet from his hip pocket, and when he pulled the card out he handed it to Bennett.

Bennett looked at the phone number, which was all that was printed on one side of the card, and then at the other side, which was blank.

"Who says this guy is with the NSA?" he asked. "Besides him?" He clunked his bagged bottle down on the counter. "I should have bought plastic cups," he said, his voice lower. "We'll have to drink from the bottle."

"I don't really care if he's NSA or not," said Marrity, taking the card back. He was speaking more quietly too — the echoes seemed to amplify volume. "He's against the crowd who keeps trying to shoot us, which makes him somebody I approve of."

Daphne had joined her father by the counter. "Eugene Jackson was a nice man," she said.

Moira turned around and leaned back against the rail, so that she was just a silhouette against the brightness behind her. "Why not just call the police, Frank?"

Marrity remembered the cartoon thing that had spoken to Daphne from the turned-off television at the hospital, late last night. The Jackson person had appeared to know how to handle it— and Marrity was certain the police would not.

And he remembered Bennett's fifty thousand dollars. Was Bennett anxious to talk to the police?

"We'll probably call the police," he told her. "But I want to call this NSA guy first, and then you need to hear the full story. Then, if you like, we can call the police."

"Can I call my office?" Moira went on. "Tell them I'll be late coming back?"

"You should have done it from a pay phone down the hill," said Bennett. "You haven't seen these guys, Moira, they're scary."

Moira laughed incredulously and stepped away from the railing, into the kitchen area. "You think they've tapped the phone at the dentist's office?"

"Let's see what our NSA man says about you calling your office," said Marrity. He laid the card down on the tile counter with a faint slap, and then took a deep breath and flexed his fingers.

They all stared at him.

"Who," Bennett asked, squinting, "was the Greek philosopher who practiced rhetoric by putting pebbles in his mouth?"

"Demosthenes, I think," said Marrity.

"They probably didn't have scotch, in those days." Bennett pulled the bottle of Ballantine's out of the paper bag. "You want a mouthful before you call?"

Moira muttered, "Oh for God's sake," but Daphne nodded at her father as solemnly as if she were advising sunscreen or seat belts.

"Good idea," Marrity said. Bennett twisted off the cap and took a generous sip of the liquor before passing the bottle to Marrity.

Marrity took several scorching swallows, then handed it back.

Bennett nodded. "Damn good idea," he said breathlessly.

"We didn't get any Cokes," said Daphne.

"Sorry, Daph," Marrity said, exhaling, "we'll get some later. But you can't have warm scotch right out of a bottle."

"Nor even in a glass with ice and soda, I hope!" said Moira.

"No, no," agreed Marrity, who in fact had been thinking that if they'd had glasses he could have given Daphne a very watered-down drink. "Here goes," he said, picking up the telephone receiver and dialing the number.

The phone at the other end rang only once, and then a man's voice said, "Yes."

"This is—"

"I know who it is," interrupted the voice.

"Okay. I think we need rescue."

"Yes you do. I gather you and your daughter weren't injured this morning? Let's not use names."

"Okay. No, that's right, neither of us was injured. But two hours ago that crowd tried to kidnap us in front of my grandmother's house. It's the woman with the sunglasses and her friends, I mentioned her to you last night."

"Yes, we're aware of them. Where's the last place your grandmother was standing, on Sunday, in Pasadena? As far as you know? I don't think she went to Newport Beach, do you?"

"No, she didn't go to Newport Beach. Who said she did? She went to the airport. We have information you need, and if you don't rescue us this crowd will find us again."

"And kill us," added Daphne. Marrity frowned and touched his forefinger to his lips.

"We'll pick you up immediately," said the man on the phone, "and you'll be safe. Did you use a radio, or the telephone, at your grandmother's house, Sunday or today?"

"No." Marrity frowned impatiently. "Yes, on Sunday, I called my sister from there. Why, was it tapped?"

"How was the connection?"

"It was a bad connection, it kept fading out, with static. We can tell you all this—"

"But where's the last place your grandmother was standing in Pasadena? To the best of your knowledge?"

Marrity reminded himself that this man was their only hope. "At the curb, waiting for the cab. Or on the porch."

"No, I mean while she was still in the house."

"How could I possibly — in her kitchen, I imagine, or in the shower, or in her shed. How should I know? Listen, my father is with these people, the people who tried to kidnap—"

"Voluntarily?"

"My father? Yes, he could have driven away with us, but he decided to stay with them. He says he's met them before, when he was thirty-five, though most of this crowd is too young for him to have met them then."

"I daresay. Why her shed? What's in the shed?"

"Uh — lawn mowers."

"Plural?"

Marrity was sweating. Actually there wasn't even one lawn mower in Grammar's shed; it had just seemed like a plausible answer.

The man went on: "Is there any unusual machinery in her shed? Is this the decrepit old shed in her backyard?"

"Yes, that shed." Marrity saw Moira raise her eyebrows. "Well, she's got a VCR out there."

"A VCR. Is there a gold-wire swastika on the floor? Maybe under the floor?"

Marrity opened his mouth, but couldn't think of an answer to give the man.

"I'll take your silence as a yes," said the man's voice. "And I bet she was barefoot."

Marrity remembered the tire-soled sandals he and Daphne had seen on the brick floor of the Kaleidoscope Shed. "Uh…" he began.

"Stay right where you are, I'll send somebody to pick you up. For right now just tell me your nearest big cross streets — call this number again in half an hour to give me your exact location."

"Nearest…?" said Marrity, trying to remember. "Uh, Franklin and Beachwood, I guess. We're up in the hills." He glanced at Moira. "Can we call the — what do you think of the idea of us calling the police? Or my sister's employer?"

"Don't call anyone else. Repeat, do not. Just sit still and call me again in half an hour."

Daphne was tugging at Marrity's sleeve. "Something you've got to tell him!" she whispered.

"One second," said Marrity into the phone; then he covered the mouthpiece and said, "What, Daph?"

"They've got to feed the cats!"

Marrity nodded and took his hand off the phone. "You still there?" he asked.

"Yes."

"We have one condition, for our cooperation. A… gesture of good faith, on your part."

"What is it?"

"You people need to put a twenty-pound bag of Purina Cat Chow in my kitchen. Lay it down flat, like a pillow, and then cut the whole top surface off. It's stiff paper, there're knives in the drawer to the right of the sink. They'll be all right for water, they all drink out of the toilets."

"Your house is certainly under hostile surveillance."

"That's why I'm asking a pro to do it, not one of the neighbors."

The voice laughed. "Fair enough. We'll do it. Talk to you in thirty minutes."

Nineteen

Lepidopt switched off his portable telephone and tucked the bulky thing into its carrying case. He shifted in the passenger seat to look around; they were on Fairfax, not far south of Hollywood Boulevard.

"Ernie," he said to Bozzaris, "get to Lieserl's house right now — 204 Batsford Street, in Pasadena — take the 101 south to the northbound Pasadena freeway, it ends very close to her place."

Bozzaris visibly decided on the quickest way to the 101, then made a fast right turn onto Santa Monica Boulevard.

"And when we get there," Lepidopt went on, "you go into the shed in the backyard and find the gold swastika on the floor. It might be under whatever the floor is, which I hope isn't concrete. Photograph the swastika, trace any wiring or machinery and photograph that, and then take it all out; we'll want to reassemble it at the Wigwam Motel. That other crowd has got the old twenty-first-century Frank Marrity. He's with them voluntarily — he'll probably want to delay telling them about the machine in the old lady's shed until he's made some deal, got some assurances, but they might abbreviate that. So be quick."

"The old guy knows this stuff about the shed?"

"It's got to be how he came back here, from the future."

"Ah. You'll want me to drop you off somewhere."

"No, I'll wait in the car, outside her house. None of that crowd has seen me before. If they arrive in the middle of your work, I think we'll kill them."

The portable phone buzzed again, and Lepidopt thought Marrity must have thought of some other task like feeding the cats; but it was an old man's voice on the line.

"What?" said the reedy old voice.

Lepidopt's chest was suddenly cold, for he thought he recognized the voice. Easy enough, he thought, to make the phone ring again. Just push some electrons around, reactivate the circuitry that was activated a moment ago.

"Uh," said Lepidopt hoarsely, "Sam?"

Peripherally he could see Bozzaris glance sharply at him.

"I don't know what it is," said Sam Glatzer's voice. "But it's in a cement tepee. And it's also in a truck. This thing."

"What is, Sam?" A moment later Lepidopt bared his teeth, belatedly remembering that it's no use asking ghosts questions before they've given the answers.

He was sweating. He had talked to a ghost only once before, and that had been during his training in Tel Aviv in 1968, in the trailer, with an instructor and other students — and the ghost hadn't been anyone he had known.

Another ghost voice intruded on the phone line now — a younger man, possibly drunk: "Two days I sat beside my body, staring at the holes in my chest." Looking out the car window, Lepidopt noted that they were driving past the gray stone walls of the Hollywood Cemetery.

"Not that," said Sam, "but a place that looks like that."

"Okay," said Lepidopt helplessly.

"I went to my grandfather," said the other man's voice; a moment later the voice added, "to find out who I am, where I came from."

Lepidopt gritted his teeth. The intruding voice was certainly a ghost too, so there was no point in telling him to be quiet.

"And it's in the Swiss Family Robinson tree house at Disneyland," said Glatzer's voice, "in a manner of speaking."

"Right," Lepidopt said. What is, Sam? he thought. He tried to remember everything Sam had said so far.

"At the Chinese Theater," Glatzer went on. "It's in a lot of places."

"But I have no mother, really," interjected the other voice, "Only children."

"You know what a capacitor is, right?" said Glatzer. "Put the hand in when the cement was wet. It's more like a capacitor."

"My mother will hide them," said the other ghost voice, "or try to. Everyone who dwells here is safe."

"The thing I thought was a gravestone," said Glatzer.

Lepidopt sighed and wiped his forehead.

"Tell me about it, Sam," he said, to pave the way for the things the old man's ghost had already said; for he had it now.

"They'll try to find my children," said the other voice unhappily.

"Oren," said Glatzer, "listen…"

Oren Lepidopt held the phone to his ear, but neither of the ghosts said anything more.

Lepidopt supposed that was the last thing he would ever hear Sam Glatzer say: Listen…

Lepidopt switched off the phone. "That was Sam Glatzer," he told Bozzaris. "His ghost. He says we've got to get the Charlie Chaplin footprint slab too. It's apparently part of the machine, and it's apparently in the shed too. It's a capacitor, he said." He began punching numbers into the phone. "I'd better get some sayanim with a truck."

Bozzaris's eyebrows were up, and he was nodding as he watched the glittering lanes ahead of him. "How did Sam sound?"

Lepidopt laughed harshly. "Good. Rested."

Denis Rascasse's body was stretched across one of the bunks at the back of the parked bus. He was breathing through his open mouth, in ragged snores. The gash in his scalp had been rubbed with Neosporin and bandaged, but he was still unconscious and there were no plans to take him to a hospital. Young Hinch sat up front in the driver's seat, twisting a Rubik's Cube on each square of which he had painted a Hebrew letter.

Rascasse's attention was several miles away, at Echo Park. He had long since lost the body habit of seeing from two close-set points as if he were using organic eyes, and his perspective was broad — sunlight was gleaming off the lake in a million directions like a fire, and at the same time the lake was a placid jade green with no reflections at all; he could see all sides of every one of the trees around the lake and the undersides of the lotus lillies on the western shore. Nothing was "in front of" anything else.

But he couldn't focus on one of the rental boats on the lake.

He knew why. Golze and the elderly Frank Marrity were in that boat, and Golze must have removed the Chaplin's-hat ribbon from the Baphomet head and buttoned it around his own neck — almost certainly with a twist to make a Moebius strip of it.

Chaplin had made a lot of movies at Echo Park for Keystone Studios, back in the nineteen-teens. Chaplin had been a magician who took extensive masking precautions, and his lifeline was a tangle here; every time a director had said, "Cut!" there was a jig in his line, and in 1914 Chaplin had even made a movie in which he had completely submerged in the lake, as if in a baptism. Lots of kinks and false stops.

And Golze had now lit up that old spiderweb camouflage pattern by wearing Chaplin's hat ribbon. Whenever Rascasse tried to focus on the boat, he found that he was instead looking away from the boat, in all directions at once. Even for a person as experienced in out-of-body perspectives as Rascasse, it was jarring and disorienting.

The elderly Frank Marrity squinted around in the sunlight at the palm and yellow-flowered acacia trees that ringed the little lake. From the boat on the water, he could see here and there a homeless person sleeping in the shade beside a shopping cart, and children and ducks on the asphalt walk that ringed the lake.

"Last time we talked," he said, "it was on a bus. Do you still have that bus?" He leaned forward as he spoke, to be heard over the clanging and squeaking of the mechanical toy animals Golze had set into motion on the curved boards below their feet.

"Yes." Golze rested on the oars, having propelled the orange-painted rowboat a good ten yards out from the shade of the roofed rental dock. He had loosened his tie and laid his tweed jacket across the blue vinyl cushion on the thwart between them, but his white shirt was already dark with sweat. For some reason the fat man was wearing a black ribbon choker, barely visible below his beard.

"When was this?" Golze asked.

A tin ape with a pair of cymbals had run down, and Golze picked it up and wound the key in its back. Luckily most of the toys were battery operated.

The old Frank Marrity shrugged as Golze set the rackety toy back down among its fellows. "It might have been right now, this date and this hour," Marrity said. "I don't recall, exactly. For me, subjectively, it was quite a while ago — I was thirty-five years old." He took a sip from his can of 7-Up, to which he had added enough vodka to dispel its coldness, and shuddered. The lake smelled like moss and algae and the breeze smelled like roof tar.

"I see," said Golze. "Things, events have deviated, from the way they originally happened? You can help keep these toys wound up."

"Of course they've deviated." Marrity carefully set his 7-Up on the thwart and then bent to pick up a dog with brown-and-white nylon fur and begin twisting its key. He wished he'd brought a hat; the sun overhead was hot on his scalp through his thinning gray hair. "For one thing, in my original experience of August 1987 my elderly father didn't visit me. That's who I've told my younger self that I am. My father. Our father. He believes it — I'm close enough to the right age, and of course I look like him, and I know the family history."

"So he hates you?"

Marrity frowned as he put the dog down. "I think he does. Though he's more civil than I would be, if I met the old man." Then with a shiver of loss he remembered that his father had been killed in 1955. "But of course the old man turns out not to be the bad guy we always thought he was." And who is now? he asked himself rhetorically. Got to have a bad guy.

"What did we talk about," Golze asked, "in the bus, when you were thirty-five?"

Marrity thought: You wanted Grammar's VHS movie, and I sold it to you. But the movie is gone, this time. And you also asked about Einstein's machine, which I didn't know about, then. Aloud he said, "You said you wanted to buy a machine my grandmother had, which had been designed by Albert Einstein."

"And?"

"And I sold it to you, for fifty thousand dollars." Close enough, he thought — I sold him the movie that time. "I want something else, besides money, this time."

Golze smiled, obviously pleased. "And there was the movie too."

"You mentioned a movie, but I didn't have that, whatever it was." He picked up a big red plastic ant that had stopped moving.

Golze's good cheer was gone. "The movie, it was watched at your house at four-fifteen P.M. two days ago! Before there were any divergences between your lifeline and your younger self's!"

That's right, thought Marrity, forcing himself not to reach for the 7-Up can. Instead he nervously twisted the key in the ant's belly. "Daphne — may have watched a movie — I was working—"

"Why are you lying? Your younger self has described it as a paranormal 'intrusion' that occurred at four-fifteen on Sunday." He leaned forward across the oars and smiled at Marrity, widening his eyes and showing his yellow teeth. "Why are you lying?"

Marrity exhaled. "Because it's gone, the movie's destroyed," he said, relieved to be admitting the truth. "In my original life nineteen years ago, I sold it to you, but in this time line the VCR burned up with the movie in it when Daphne was watching it."

"Burned up? You know it was burned up?"

"I saw the VCR in my, his, front yard. It was charred." The ant had begun writhing mechanically in his hands, and he hastily set it down.

"And her teddy bear was burned too," said Golze quietly. "And the stereo in Rascasse's car! Was this poltergeist? Telekenesis? Did she grab these things psychically?"

"I don't know. I wasn't there. She didn't have any psychic powers when she was my daughter."

"Poltergeist!" Golze shouted it like a curse.

The fat man picked up the oar handles and rowed furiously to a spot several yards farther out. Then he let go of them and rubbed his red face with both chubby hands as the boat surged on for a yard or two and then rocked to a stop on the green water.

Marrity peered around at the distant new apartment buildings beyond Alvarado Boulevard, and in the other direction at the rental dock's little lighthouse, which looked as if it dated from the 1920s. And a man from the twenty-first century sitting in a boat between them, he thought.

Finally Golze said, "I believe you," through his fingers. "All our remote viewers reported that it simply disappeared; not just stopped being used, but dropped out of their perceptions entirely." He lowered his hands and stared at Marrity. "Why would she have poltergeist powers in this time line?"

"I can't imagine. It's new to me."

"Tell me the truth about our meeting nineteen years ago."

"I can give you the machine."

"The meeting."

"Well, the blind girl was there, and after I gave you the movie, she stopped bothering to pretend she could see out of her own eyes. There were some vulgar jokes, when one of the men would go to the bathroom. She was pretty drunk, as I recall! And you had — I'm glad not to see it here — you had a mummified human head, which appeared to be alive." He squinted at Golze, but the fat man didn't seem surprised, so they must have it in this time line too. "It made noises and wiggled its jaw, anyway." He picked up the ape with the cymbals, which had run down again. "Like one of these toys. Why didn't you get all battery-operated ones?"

I'm talking too much, he thought as he wound it up. He put the ape down and took another sip of the lukewarm, fortified 7-Up and shifted on the blue vinyl cushion. He wondered if the cushions were supposed to serve as life preservers if the boat sank.

"The wind-up ones provide discontinuity," Golze said shortly. "So you gave us the Chaplin movie, when you were thirty-five."

"Right. A videocassette, labeled Pee-wee's Big Adventure, though that's not what the movie in the cassette was."

"Had you watched the movie?"

"No. My daughter did. Practically put her in a coma."

"I can imagine. And we asked you about the machine too?"

"Yes, but at that time I didn't know anything about it. This is the truth. I only learned about it years later, from hints you dropped about Einstein and my grandmother. I had to read up on quantum mechanics, and consult Ouija boards and spiritualists, all sorts of screwy research. I still don't exactly know how it works."

"But you figured out how to work it. You came back in time by means of it."

Marrity smiled smugly. "Right."

"Then we can use it to go back in time from here, and prevent the destruction of the movie."

It seemed to Marrity that Golze was acting as if the movie was the important thing, and discounting what Marrity had to offer. "What do you even need the movie for?" Marrity asked. "The machine lets you go into the past and future, all by itself."

"You sound like Rascasse," said Golze. For a moment he was silent, staring out at the water. Then, "Yes," he went on irritably, "the machine would let me go into the past and future—the past and future from wherever I am, from whatever specific little volume of cubic space the universe has permitted me to occupy. But I — we — want to be able to travel in now."

"Now?" asked Marrity in bewilderment. "You can already travel in now. Anybody can."

"I can be in one compressed, predestined point of it, not travel in it. My whole possible future is contained in a cone that expands into the future from here, this constricted now point. And my past is locked into a cone that extends backward in time from now. That's the Grail, those two cones, and Einstein's machine will let me travel in them. But all the time and space outside those cones is an extension of now, it's every place and time general relativity says I can't get to. Getting out there would be… moving sideways in the time-space hypercube; your grandmother did it, to get to Mount Shasta— she got there instantaneously.

"But — obviously I've read up on this — the bits that are outside the cones right now will be included in the widening cone of your possible past, if you just wait. And anyway, the boundaries are expanding at the speed of light, and the entire earth can't be more than one light second from end to end! What's the big deprivation, what are you afraid you'll be excluded from?"

Golze wasn't looking at him, and Marrity wondered if the fat man somehow aspired to eventually be in all places and moments at once. Would that, Marrity wondered, make him God?

If it did, he would always have been God — he would have been occupying every place in every moment since the beginning of time.

Marrity forced himself not to smile at the thought; then he remembered the twitching black head he had seen nineteen years ago, and the hateful woman little Daphne had grown up to be, and the babies he had seemed to see in the weeds two days ago; and he considered the nature of any God that could have created this world — "This dreary agitation of the dust, and all this strange mistake of mortal birth," as Omar Khayyam had written — and the impulse to smile was gone.

Golze had been looking at the water, but now looked directly at Marrity. "So where is the machine now?"

Marrity sat back, to put as much distance as possible between their faces. "That's my merchandise, telling you that. But first you've got to pay me."

"Okay." The black steel oarlocks clanked as Golze pulled on one oar and pushed on the other, and the boat rocked on the jade water as the bow began to move to the left. "What payment do you want?"

Marrity took a deep breath and let it out, glad of the breeze in his sweaty hair. "Why are we doing this in a boat?" he asked. He looked around at the grassy banks and the arching red wooden footbridge. "This is where a scene in Chinatown was filmed, right?"

Golze frowned, either at the evasion or at the question itself; and at first it seemed he wouldn't reply. Then, "Yes, Jake Gittes was in a boat here, in that movie, photographing Hollis Mulwray and Mrs. Mulwray's daughter."

Golze opened his mouth to go on, but Marrity impulsively said, "Jake didn't get the daughter away in the end, did he?"

"No," said Golze with exaggerated patience, "the horrible old man took her away. But this is a relatively good spot for this particular confidential conversation. The jangling toys, and the fact that the boat keeps turning, make it difficult for anyone on the shore with a shotgun microphone to monitor our talk."

He bent to fetch up the dog again, and he squinted at Marrity as he slowly ratcheted the spring tight. At last he put it down and scratched at the black ribbon choker around his neck. "And the lake's got associations with Charlie Chaplin. In certain ways it's a deflection, for any psychic trying to track us. What payment do you want?"

That was a short delay, Marrity thought forlornly.

"Three things," he said at last. "First, you leave Frank Marrity, the younger one, alone. No more shooting at him, no more anything at all, ever. You just forget about him and let him live to a ripe, untroubled old age."

"Okay. I don't know how we can prove we've done that until he has died of old age, but I can tell you that I don't know why we bothered to try to kill him in the first place. And I suppose if we killed him, your younger self, you might just disappear! I'm not sure of the physics on that." He tugged at one oar, and the boat jostled around to the right, swaying in the water. "What's the second thing?"

"You let me use the… time-travel procedure to return to 2006, where I can resume my life. Oh, and there's a house you've got to buy."

"A house? Okay, after we put you through a very thorough series of interviews, probably under narcohypnosis. What's the third thing?"

There was a long pause before Marrity answered, and Golze shifted the boat again.

"I could tell you in three words," Marrity said finally. "Two. And I certainly don't care what you think of me. But I want to explain what it is, anyway."

"Fine. What is it?"

"It's the way the universe originally played out, the way my real life played out. I had a life, and I want it back."

"What took it from you? "

"The damned Harmonic Convergence took it from me. An incident in this year, here in 1987, changed, even though it was in my past — imagine having something in your past change on you, so for instance you and some friends were shooting a gun when you were seventeen, and nothing went wrong, and you've grown up to happy middle age — but now suddenly you find yourself in a life in which you've been a quadriplegic since the age of seventeen because one of your friends accidentally shot you in the neck, way back then!" He mopped his face with the sleeve of his windbreaker. "And you still remember the original happy life! You'd want to go back, right? — and tell your seventeen-year-old self not to go shooting with those friends."

"How did the Harmonic Convergence do this?"

"All these zombies — blanking their minds on the mountain-tops — pressure drop — they've made a crack in the space-time continuity. Things resume on the future side of the crack, but not quite the same, a bit of quantum randomness has seeped in, like groundwater into a cracked foundation. Hell, you might soon get a visit from your future self, trying to put your life back on its original track."

"You're not a quadriplegic. What is it you want us to prevent from happening?"

"Well, it already happened. Yesterday. And I want you people to undo the change, undo the error, put my life back into its original… configuration."

"Okay. What happened yesterday that shouldn't have happened?"

For a few seconds the only sound was of some children playing around the snow-cone vendors on the north shore. Marrity stared out across the lake surface, with its patches of tiny, fine-hatched ripples among the glassy low swells.

"My younger self… Frank Marrity ..." Marrity was dizzy, and wondered if he was going to vomit. "He saved my daughter's life, at that restaurant, yesterday. He did a tracheotomy on her. She was supposed to choke to death, she died there, in my original lifeline. In the real world."

Golze's eyes were wide behind his steamy glasses and a smile was baring his yellow teeth and pulling his beard up on the sides. The choker ribbon was fully visible around his fat neck.

"You want us to kill your daughter?" he said. "What is she, twelve?"

"Yes, she's twelve. But by the time she's thirty, she's a monster. And no wonder — she's unnatural, living past yesterday; like a dead body walking around and talking."

"But you told her to run, this afternoon. We'd have her now, maybe, if you hadn't told her to run."

"I wasn't telling her, I was telling my younger self! This morning you people tried to kill him! Which… obviously isn't what I want."

Golze bent down to pick up the red ant. "You get the ape," he said. And when the toys were buzzing and clattering away again, he slouched back on his seat and said, "So you want us to kill your daughter."

Marrity felt hollow, a frail shell around a vacuum, as if he might implode into himself. Why did the fat man have to ask for a yes or no answer? he thought. I can't say yes to him. The horrible old man took her away.

But all I want is justice! My real life, not the nightmare life that grew out of the crack in reality, like a weed, like a nest of scorpions. What I'm saying yes to is reality!

Marrity opened his mouth — but he was sure that if he said yes here, now, he would not ever be able to go back to being the man who had not said it.

But I want the life the universe originally gave me. It's mine.

He took a deep breath.

Twenty

Yes," Marrity said hoarsely. The boat seemed very unsteady, and he gripped the hot orange-painted wood of the gunwales.

Golze was staring at him curiously. "Not just — kidnap her, sell her to Arab slave traders in Cairo? Get the duck."

"No, I think there's a… a Law of Conservation of Reality, that would bring her back." Marrity was sweating — drops were running down his forehead and he could feel them crawling over his ribs under his shirt as he obediently bent over and picked up the toy duck. "We'd still wind up in that twenty-four-foot trailer, and she'd still back the Ford over me in 2002. I can't risk her coming back. And killing her would be" — he was panting with the effort of trying to believe what he was saying — "would be more merciful."

"Okay, we'll do it. So where's the machine?"

"You don't have her. She's escaped from you. And as far as I can tell, your blind woman still means to kill Frank Marrity."

Golze jerked the oars in opposite directions, splashing drops of water into the air and jarring the boat. "Where is the machine?"

"I'd need some assurances—"

"We'll give you what you want if you tell me now. If you don't tell me now, we'll give you what you don't want, abundantly. Where is the machine?"

Marrity's shoulders slumped and he shook his head. "It's at my grandmother's house. In her backyard shed."

"Can we move it? Get it into the car?"

"No!" Marrity involuntarily looked at his hands, to be sure they were still solid enough to twist the key in the duck. "If you move it, how will I use it in 2006?"

"We'll move it back later, don't worry. We need you to have come back to tell us all this, after all. We don't want to screw up your time line. But we need to move it now, because other people are going to try to take it, and they won't care if it interferes with you or not."

"Okay, right." I've lost all control, Marrity thought. "No, you can't get it in the car. Part of it is the cement slab from the Chinese Theater, with Charlie Chaplin's footprints and handprints on it."

"Good lord. That's part of it? But she didn't have that in 1933, did she?"

"No, the slab was still out in front of the theater then. My grandmother had Chaplin himself, in '33, and he wound up getting temporally dislocated too, at least an accidental astral projection of him did, though he meant to just be a, a nonparticipating observer. It scared the daylights out of him — well, there was the earthquake too— and that summer he burned all but one of the prints of A Woman of the Sea."

"And we'll get that back," Golze said. "Burned up by a twelve-year-old girl! But we'll get it back." He had begun rowing strongly toward the dock. "Got to get to a radio," he panted. His glasses were opaque white, reflecting the sun. "We're going to need some help, and a truck."

The elderly Frank Marrity gripped the edges of the car seat and wondered if he was going to be sick. Golze was driving Rascasse's car, too fast around corners, and the car reeked of melted plastic. What had been the stereo was a blackened crater in the middle of the dashboard.

They were nearly at Grammar's house, and Golze had driven up the 110 to get here, so they were approaching from the south, and Marrity's excursions during these last three days had been by way of California Street, to the north; he hadn't seen these streets for many years, and there was more of his childhood than of his adulthood clinging to these old trees and pavements.

Moira and I rode our bicycles up and down Marengo Avenue, he thought, in the 1950s and '60s. The old bungalow houses were rushing past in a blur now, but he remembered each one; there's where we used to jump from roof to roof with the Edgerly boys, he thought, and there's where Moira fell off her bike and cracked her head and I had to carry her all the way home, three blocks.

Golze made a leaning right turn onto Batsford Street, and Marrity could see Grammar's house ahead on the left — and he remembered riding his bicycle up the sidewalk here on many late afternoons in the winter rain, his canvas newspaper bags empty and slapping wetly against the front wheel fork, and the olive oil taste of Brylcreem in his mouth from the rain running down his face.

It was tears he tasted now, and he quickly cuffed them away.

Grammar's old gray wood-frame house was on the northwest corner of Batsford and Euclid, and Golze turned left onto Euclid— but he drove straight on past Grammar's back fence and garage.

Golze was saying, "Fuck fuck fuck," in a quiet monotone.

"You passed it," Marrity said.

"I know," snapped Golze, peering into the rearview mirror. "There's a U-Haul truck parked at the curb." He was biting his lip. "Our truck won't be here for another couple of minutes, at least."

"You think these guys are here to take the stuff out of her shed?"

"Maybe." Golze drove past half a dozen houses, then slowly turned into an old two-strip driveway and backed out again, facing south now. He pulled in to the curb and put the engine in park, but didn't turn it off. Fifty yards ahead they could see the truck and the cars by Grammar's back fence.

"They may just be family," Golze said, "getting furniture out of the house. But we can't go in while they're there. Give me the binoculars from the glove compartment."

Marrity opened the glove compartment and handed Golze a pair of heavy olive green binoculars. "They don't look like my family," Marrity said. They must not take the machine away, he thought.

"Hired movers, maybe." Golze lifted the binoculars. "Shut up."

The gate in the fence opened, and two men in overalls walked out holding faded lawn chairs. Behind them several men were carrying a flat tarpaulin-draped square with table legs visible under it.

Marrity noticed that the men with the draped table took short steps, planting their feet carefully, and that the table didn't swing at all.

"Stop them," he said, leaning forward, "they are taking the machine."

Golze lowered the binoculars to squint at him. "It's chairs and a table."

"They've got the Chaplin slab on a table, dammit! If they set it down, the legs would collapse — look how heavy it is!"

The radio was mounted below the dashboard, and had apparently survived the fire that had wrecked the stereo above it. Golze lifted the microphone.

"Seconde," he said.

"Tierce," came the reply from the speaker.

"Come north on Euclid, and when you're just past the house, I want you to park on the wrong side of the street, north of a U-Haul truck you'll see there. Kix." He adjusted the setting of a dial on the radio, then went on, "Let the guys out to run alongside, and then I want you to drive south, in reverse, and ram the U-Haul truck as hard as you can, Wheaties."

"No," said Marrity loudly, "part of it's glass! They'll break it!"

"Frosted Flakes." Golze changed the frequency again. "Never mind that, do not ram them," Golze said into the microphone. "Do not ram the truck, understand?"

"We won't ram it. Just park where you said? Special K."

The men down the street had carried the tarpaulin-covered object to the rear of their U-Haul truck, and had laid it on its side on the hydraulic lift.

Golze changed the frequency again. "Right. Guns ready. I'll be right behind you. How soon?"

"I'm just passing Dodger Stadium," came the reply. "Five minutes if I crank."

"Crank."

Golze hung up the microphone.

"I guess these guys will run if they see guns," ventured Marrity. He clasped his hands between his knees; he wasn't shivering, but all his muscles felt poised to start.

"If they're Mossad," said Golze, "they'll have guns of their own. Our only chance would be to surprise them."

"I hope they realize there were some gunshots fired here just a couple of hours ago," Marrity went on. His mouth was dry. "The cops are likely to respond extra quick if there's any more."

"If they're Mossad, they know and don't care." Golze was staring through the soot-smeared windshield at the men down the street. He exhaled and hitched around on the seat as if to reach into his pocket for his wallet; but what he pulled out was a heavy stainless-steel .45 automatic, and with his thumb he clicked down a little lever on the side of it. "Busy day," he said.

Marrity was just narrowly glad that he was still able to see, and clasp his hands, and make a dent in the car seat. Can I continue to exist, he wondered, if these people make it impossible for me to use the machine in 2006?

The hydraulic lift at the back of the U-Haul truck had risen to the level of the truck bed, and the four men were now wrestling the tarpaulin-covered square into the shaded interior. Another man, dark haired and wearing a blue sweatsuit, closed the gate to the old woman's yard and trudged toward the passenger side of the truck cab.

"Got to follow them," snapped Golze, "can't wait for our guys. The slab was obviously the last of it." He jerked the gearshift lever into drive, but slammed it back into park again when the man by the truck fifty yards ahead scattered a couple of handfuls of glittering objects across the asphalt of the street behind the truck.

"Ach!" exclaimed Golze.

He opened the driver's-side door and crouched behind it, bracing his right forearm in the V between the door and the slanting doorpost. Sunlight gleamed on the .45 in his chubby fist.

The bang of the gunshot was stunning, and the ejected shell spun across the empty driver's seat and landed in Marrity's lap; it was very hot, and he brushed it away with a shudder.

Golze fired three more shots, hammering the air inside the car, and Marrity batted away the hot brass shells as they spun toward him — then Golze paused, and only then did Marrity think to look through the windshield toward the truck.

The man who had been walking toward the truck was lying down now, mostly on the grass but with one arm draped over the curb onto the street. All Marrity could see inside the truck's back compartment was the square tarpaulin-draped bulk that must be the Chaplin slab. On the other side of the street, across from the truck, a man had stepped out of a white Honda that had been parked at the curb.

Then the car Marrity was sitting in was thumping and quivering as flashes winked around the edges of the draped square in the truck and a staccato popping echoed between the old bungalows on either side of the street. The loudest noise was a sharp smack as tiny bits of glass stung Marrity's cheek and the windshield was suddenly a glowing white grid, and as he ducked he heard Golze tumble back into the driver's seat.

There was bright red blood spattered on the fat man's hand as he shoved the gearshift lever into reverse, and then Marrity was flung forward against the diagonal constriction of the seat belt as the car accelerated backward, the engine roaring. Golze was twisted around to look out the back windshield, which was still clear. Marrity managed to raise his head, and he saw that the left shoulder of Golze's jacket had a pencil-size hole in it; the white shirt underneath was already blotting with red.

Something crunched under the back wheels and thumped under the car, and Marrity saw a section of chrome handlebar with a green rubber grip on the end spin away to the curb as the car's front end jumped briefly — then they were on past, and Golze had backed the car to the far curb and slammed the gearshift lever into drive, and after punching out a section of the opaque windshield with his right fist, he was driving rapidly north up Euclid. Marrity was as stunned as if he'd been shot himself, and he could not shake the idea that Golze had run over a phantom of Marrity's childhood, preserved and projected by these unchanged streets until now. He clasped his hands together more tightly.

"Caltrops," said Golze, speaking loudly to be heard over the headwind that was blowing his beard around his ears. His face behind the beard was so pale that it seemed almost green. "This hurts — a lot."

"I—beg your pardon?" Marrity said.

"My shoulder hurts!" With his right hand Golze slapped the wheel around in a right turn onto California Boulevard.

"I meant — 'caltrops'?"

"What that guy scattered on the street. Like jacks that little girls play with—but bigger and with pointed ends. They don't brush aside, they dig in, you gotta pick 'em up one at a time — I couldn't follow — not on flat tires." He was breathing fast, almost whistling with each exhalation. "They got the machine — we gotta get the Chaplin movie."

But it's burned up, thought Marrity, and you can't go back in time to rescue it, now that those guys took the machine. He was feeling nauseated himself; it was just beginning to dawn on him that Golze had probably run over a child a few moments ago.

"The movie isn't burned up," said Golze, "if Daphne Marrity never existed."

With conscious care and deliberation, Oren Lepidopt reversed into a driveway and followed the U-Haul truck as it lumbered south on Euclid Street. It would be his job to divert any further attempts to interfere, whether they came from this rival crowd or from the police.

His ears were ringing. Ernie Bozzaris was dead.

Lepidopt had been standing in the street, still holding his little .22 automatic, when he had caught the eye of one of the sayanim who had picked up Bozzaris's body from the curb; and just before sliding the body into the back of the truck and climbing in to pull down the sliding door, the man had given Lepidopt a thumbs-down.

Lepidopt watched the traffic in all directions as he drove. There didn't seem to be any cars, police or otherwise, speeding up toward the truck from ahead or from side streets, and Lepidopt let his aching fingers relax on the steering wheel.

Bozzaris was dead, but Lepidopt had to concentrate on driving. He would think later about his young friend who now would not see today's sunset.

Baruch Dayan Emet, Lepidopt thought. Blessed is the Righteous Judge.

The katsa from Vienna would be landing at LAX in — he rolled his wrist to see his watch — in about an hour. Lepidopt had lost two sayanim and one agent, and had disobeyed the order to do nothing until the senior katsa's arrival. But he had got Einstein's machine.

His telephone buzzed, and he pried the receiver away from its case and switched it on.

He took a deep breath and let it out, then checked his mirrors and made sure he was following the truck closely. "Yes," he said.

"It's me," said Frank Marrity's voice. "You said to call after half an hour."

"Good," said Lepidopt. "Now call again a half hour from now."

"How long are we supposed to—"

"You'll be picked up soon," interrupted Lepidopt. "Be patient. Call me again in half an hour."

He had to hang up because he needed a free hand to wipe his eyes.

Rocking in the passenger seat as Golze drove, old Frank Marrity had to remind himself to breathe.

The movie isn't burned up if Daphne Marrity never existed.

Golze was speeding east on California, passing cars. Marrity could hear him breathing, deep and wheezing, over the battering flutter of the headwind through the broken windshield. After a couple of blocks, he cut across the right lane into another residential street, and slowed down.

"But Daphne does exist," said Marrity, talking loudly even though the headwind had now diminished.

"And you and I are having this discussion," said Golze impatiently. "In your previous lifetime — lifetimes, I guess — we never did, did we? Nothing's… written in stone."

"You'll go back in time and kill her as a baby you mean? But you don't have the machine."

"We don't need the machine to do this. This is Einstein's other weapon, the one he couldn't bring himself to tell FDR about. The atom bomb was within Einstein's conscience, but he couldn't tell Roosevelt how to… unmake people, delete them from reality entirely. Not even if it was to be Nazis." Golze started a laugh, but choked it off with a fierce scowl after one syllable. "Einstein was okay with ending people's lives, but he had qualms about making them never have had lives at all — never born, never conceived."

Marrity's eyes were squinting and watering, and he wished he'd brought sunglasses. The car was still moving slowly down the block, passing old houses and lawns that stirred his memories.

Can these people do that? wondered Marrity. If Daphne never existed…

But even as of 1987, twelve years of Marrity's life had been tied up with her; even in his previous good life, he had been her father. Who would he be, if he had never had a daughter?

And Marrity hated Daphne, the one he knew best, the one he had known since 1987, the one who had backed the car over him, but did he really want to condemn her to… never having existed at all? Not remembered by anyone? Did the little girl he had seen on Grammar's back porch this morning deserve that?

And even though Lucy, Daphne's mother, was dead, he'd be depriving her of Daphne too. Suddenly Lucy's terminated life would never have included a child, that particular little girl.

What would become of Daphne's soul? he thought.

What will become of mine?

"It's risky," said Golze, his eyes half closed, possibly talking to himself. "Even with a twelve-year-old who hasn't ever done much of anything. These past three days, at least, will turn out to have happened differently, since she'll never have been a player. Risky. But ahh—" He exhaled gingerly. "I'm shot, Rascasse is probably dead, the movie's burned, the Mossad has the machine — if there was ever time for a re-deal, this is it."

The radio sputtered. "Prime," said a voice. It was oddly flat, with no resonance behind it.

Golze's white face jerked toward the radio, and though he instantly looked back at the street ahead of him, his hand moved only very slowly toward the receiver.

At last he lifted it off the hook. "Seconde," he said.

"Get back here to the bus," said Rascasse's synthesized voice. "We need to get — the Daphne child right now, which only can — be done from here." The voice became louder, as if a volume knob had been turned up: "And bring the hatband too. Don't lose it! And get Charlotte here as well. And — mother's little helper — do it fast."

Golze peevishly leaned forward and changed the frequency setting and didn't take his hand off it. "I can't get Charlotte. You get her. I need a doctor, I've been shot, sympathy for the Devil." He switched to the next frequency and leaned back, clearing his throat gingerly. The car was moving at barely five miles an hour now.

"Take off the — hatband," said the depthless voice on the radio.

"I'm driving, I can't—"

"Take it off. Or have — the old man take it off, if you cannot."

"For Chrissakes—" Golze reached up behind his ear and tugged the black choker, and with a snap it came loose. He tossed it into the backseat. "I wasn't getting blood on it," he began, but Rascasse's voice cut him off.

"Be quiet now," Rascasse said; then, "The shoulder blade itself is fractured; but the artery below — subclavian — is fine. Infection is of course a likely outcome, but before that happens, all this time line will be gone."

Golze paused, his mouth open as he stared at the street through the hole in the windshield. Then he smiled, exposing yellow teeth. "Well, good point. It'll be a long drive to — can't always get what you want." After changing the frequency again, he said, "To Palm Springs. But you have to pick up me and my companion, this car isn't driveable. I'm at—"

"Don't bother changing frequency, my sight includes you. Park the car. We'll pick you up."

Golze hung up the microphone and squirmed on the seat, his face gray. "I hate it when he looks inside me," he muttered. "I swear I feel heat when he does it." He steered the car to the curb in front of a house with a real estate sign in the front yard, and shifted into neutral. "He doesn't have a French accent when he's not speaking through his actual mouth, did you notice? Odd phrasing still, but American pronunciation. Accent must have to do with the tongue muscles."

The car was stopped. Marrity clasped his hands to keep them from trembling. "If Daphne—" he began.

"You won't have to worry about her anymore," Golze said, wincing as he leaned back in the seat. "And we won't need to bother you at all — in this new time line, you'll never meet us."

"Won't you still need to learn about the machine?" asked Marrity. "From me?"

"Rascasse will manage to interrogate you somehow before we do it, and he'll remember this time line, even after it's collapsed to nonexistence. He'll be the only one who does. I think he's the one who erased Nobodaddy, if there ever really was such a person, in any time line. Though how an organization can exist if its founder didn't is a puzzle."

"I — won't remember her?"

Golze was sweating, and his face was gray, but he stared at Marrity with evident curiosity.

"Not a bit," he said. "Not even as much as a hard drive remembers what was on it after a magnet gets rubbed on it. You'll be a, a whole new hard drive." He started to reach his right hand toward his wounded left shoulder, but let it fall back onto his lap after getting no more than halfway. "And so will I. I won't even appreciate not getting shot, since this experience won't be part of my lifeline. Today is a Tuesday in the August of Never."

Marrity relaxed in the car seat, and he realized that he had not relaxed since using Grammar's device to come back to 1987; in fact, it seemed to him now that he hadn't been really relaxed for years.

He ran a word in his head, and then permitted himself to say it out loud: "Good."

"Better than the Catholics' Confession, isn't it? You just snip off the sinful yards of tape and start over. No repentance required."

"Nobodaddy," said Marrity, to get past that subject. "Like in Blake?"

"Who's Blake?"

"Poet. Late eighteenth century, mostly."

"Oh, William Blake, sure. He wrote a poem about somebody called Nobodaddy? I thought it was beatnik slang, like Daddy-O."

"It was Blake's name for the demiurge, the crazy god who created the universe. Not the eternal God — that one's too remote to have anything to do with the universe."

Golze's sweaty face was expressionless, and his mouth opened and closed without speech. At last, "Rascasse," he said hoarsely. "That's who Rascasse kills?"

Marrity remembered wondering, in the boat on the lake in Echo Park half an hour ago, if Golze aspired to be in all places and moments at once, and if achieving that would make the fat man God.

Marrity shrugged, an action Golze couldn't perform. "If it was the Nobodaddy that Blake was talking about. Where did you get that term?"

"I think Rascasse was the first to use it." Golze looked around at the street and the houses and the old eucalyptus trees along the curbs in the sunlight, and Marrity thought he seemed to be frightened of the whole landscape.

"August of Never," Golze said, weakly but defiantly. "He's still… monitoring my vital signs, I can feel his attention inside my chest. It's as if Mr. A. Square of Flatland had somebody leaning down over him with a flashlight, peering at his innards. Worse than being naked. How does it work?"

Marrity thought it was a rhetorical question, but a moment later Golze shifted to peer at him irritably.

"How does it work?" said Marrity. "I don't know. I guess if he's working in a bigger group of dimensions—"

"Not Rascasse," Golze said. "I know how that works, don't I, Denis?" he added, addressing the headliner above him. "He can hear all of this. No, I meant how does the time machine work? Do you need to kill somebody, to get past the Aeons?"

"Well, I hardly traveled aeons—"

"I mean living things, living categories, called Aeons, didn't you study this stuff? Didn't you read the Pistis Sophia? All the old Gnostic and Kabbalist literature talks about the Aeons, time and space as demons. And they are demons, believe me."

Marrity blinked at him. "Well, I didn't have to kill anybody," he said.

Golze shifted on his seat as he tried to peer down at his wound. "It's gonna be a long drive to Palm Springs," he said tightly. "Maybe you become one of the Aeons, when you can travel in time. Maybe I sacrificed a guy to you last night. August of Never. So how does it work? "

"You — use up your accumulated mass energy, you spend it, to propel yourself right out of your predestined time line. Einstein said that gravitation and acceleration are the same thing — there's no difference between us sitting in this car with gravity pulling us down against the seats, on the one hand, and being away from any gravitating body in a car that's accelerating upward through space at thirty-two feet per second per second, on the other hand. Let go of a pencil, and it doesn't make any difference whether you say it rushes down to the floor or the floor rushes up to it."

Golze made an impatient beckoning gesture with the blood-spotted fingers of his right hand.

"So every person on earth," said Marrity, "has been accelerating at thirty-two feet per second per second all his life. Before he was a year old he would have exceeded the speed of light, if that were possible; but of course he can't quite do that, so he's been accumulating mass energy instead. I spent all my accumulated momentum when I broke out of sequential time."

And it has left me feeling empty, he thought.

For several seconds Golze didn't speak, then, "I hope California still exists, nineteen years in the future," he said slowly. "It sounds as if you might have blown it off the continent, releasing that kind of energy."

"It was a, a shaped charge, it all went outward, out of our four dimensions — strike a match on a painting and you haven't really hurt the painting — with me riding it like a guy fired out of a cannon." Marrity smiled nervously. "Switzerland still existed when Einstein came back to it, after having exited this way, in 1928."

Golze seemed to have forgotten his gunshot wound. "You came back nineteen years. How far back could you have gone?"

"I don't know. Not farther back than my birth in 1952, I think, unless I could jump over to my mother's lifeline." His leg was aching, and he tried to shift to a more comfortable position in the passenger seat. "Certainly no farther back than whatever date it was when that configuration was assembled — the Chaplin slab and the maschinchen itself. I think Grammar put the machine together in 1931, and added the Chaplin slab in the 1950s."

The radio hummed, and then Rascasse's unaccented and unechoing voice said, "How did you work it, the maschinchen thing?"

Marrity reached for the microphone, but Golze shook his head. "Just talk," the fat man said. "He's just using the radio speaker now, he's not actually on the air."

"It's a—" Marrity sighed deeply, but he still felt empty. He took a deep breath and started again. "Among other things, it's a very sensitive voltmeter," he said, "and it amplifies tiny voltage differences. It's ten rotating condensors set up in series, so that each beefs up the voltage into the next, up to where you can feel the current, if you're standing barefoot on the two tiny gold posts that stick up through the bricks. They're set flush with the bricks on the floor, no bigger than nail heads. This is in Grammar's shed I'm talking about, and the condensors themselves are in a big dusty glass cylinder under the workbench — though I suppose those guys have it now! It was dusty in 2005, anyway, maybe Lieserl was Windexing it back here in 1987. And it looks fragile — the condensor plates apparently hang from a glass thread."

"And we could build this," said the flat voice on the radio. "Not so difficult."

Marrity shook his head. "I said 'among other things.' Anyway, what you do is, you press your hands into the chaplin handprints and then you send two astral projections of yourself to targets you've set up — one on a mountain, one at sea level or lower, while your body stays in the middle ground somewhere, standing barefoot on the gold electrodes. You guys know about astral projections, right? That way you're existing in three time shells at once — they're only slightly different, but the maschinchen amplifies tiny differences and imposes a combined-wave signal through the electrodes in the floor. You're not in any one time shell anymore at this point, see, you're smeared across three of them. And for your safety you need three of, of 'you' — to spread out the recoil that's coming up soon. Einstein only had two, in 1928: himself on a mountain in the Alps and a projection in the valley below him. It was enough to spread him across some time shells, but the recoil still nearly killed him."

Through the ragged hole in the windshield Marrity could see a sidewalk shaded by jacaranda trees. It all seemed a lot farther away than it could really be.

"'Among other things,'" said the Rascasse voice. "What other things?"

Marrity wished he could get out of the car. In spite of the fresh air blowing in through the torn windshield, the smell of burnt plastic was making him sick, and his bent leg ached all the way up to the hip.

"In 2006 I wiped some of the dust off the glass cylinder the condensors are in," he said hoarsely, "and looked in it with a flashlight. Einstein, or Lieserl, had painted Hebrew letters on the ten condensor plates. I couldn't rotate them, or see the letters in toward the axis, but in several places I saw the Hebrew word Din, which is the name of one of the ten Sephirot, the ten world emanations of God. In his letters to Lieserl, Einstein seems to have equated Din with determinism. Judgment with no mercy mixed in, I gather. No indeterminacy, no uncertainty. Anyway, I couldn't have copied out all the letters on the plates without taking the thing apart."

"And now the Mossad has it," said Golze. His voice was frail, and when Marrity looked at the fat man in the driver's seat beside him, he wondered if Rascasse's optimistic diagnosis was correct; Golze appeared to be dying. Perhaps Rascasse knew he was, and wanted him to die. Maybe Rascasse won't need to have killed Nobodaddy, Marrity thought — maybe he can just prevent him.

"And," Marrity went on, "you couldn't build the Chaplin slab."

"Are you close?" wheezed Golze irritably. "We're sitting in a parked car with the windshield — fuck — broken out."

"Five minutes since we left from Echo Park," said Rascasse's voice, which seemed to be just shaking the air now, independent of the radio's speaker. "We're on the 101 now, soon to hit the Pasadena freeway junction. Just a few more minutes. What's the Chaplin slab? Why wouldn't… Shirley Temple's do as well?"

Marrity realized what had been nagging him about the way Rascasse was speaking — it was all in iambic pentameter.

"The slab," he said, "is a sort of kink in time — in conjunction with the machine, it works like a catalyst, it makes it easier to get out of the time stream. My sister, Moira, took out a restraining order against me, in 2003—claimed I was a dangerous drunk! — but one day when she wasn't home, I broke into her stupid house and found some letters from Chaplin to Grammar, written in 1933 and '34." He smirked, distracted by the memory. "They may have been romantically involved! Grammar would only have been thirty-one in '33, and Chaplin—"

"Goddammit," said Rascasse's voice, "how's the slab a kink in time?"

"Right, right." Marrity frowned but went on, "Well, Chaplin was with Grammar in '33, when she jumped back in time, and he got dislocated too, for a moment. He found himself occupying his 1928 body, kneeling next to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in the Chinese Theater forecourt, pressing his hands into wet cement. A moment later he was back in the Kaleidoscope Shed and it was 1933 again, but" — Marrity shrugged — "it was the 1933 Chaplin who made those handprints in 1928. The slab, just by existing, is a violation of sequential time."

"We're on the Pasadena freeway now," said Rascasse's disembodied voice.

Still in iambic pentameter, Marrity noted. His hands were trembling, and he clasped them together as if in prayer.

Twenty-one

After the bus had pulled up alongside the battered car and Marrity had helped Golze climb aboard, Rascasse's voice from the bus radio had told the driver to go back to Hollywood and pick up Charlotte Sinclair; and again Marrity had noticed that Rascasse spoke in iambic pentameter.

Now the bus was parked in streaky palm-tree shade in a remote corner of the Alpha Beta parking lot at Pico and La Cienega, idling with the air-conditioning running, and Charlotte was sprawled across the left-side seats just behind the Baphomet head's cabinet, blinking sleepily and seeing through old Marrity's eyes on the other side of the aisle. Golze was slumped next to Marrity, against the window frame, and when Marrity glanced at him she saw that the fat man's face was deadly pale behind his sparse beard. She assumed that Rascasse's body was still lying on a bunk in the back of the bus, but nobody had looked there and she hadn't the energy to ask.

She was about to feel in her purse for the half-pint of Wild Turkey when, through old Marrity's eyes, she saw the pointer on the electronic Ouija board swoop up to the letter T in the upper-right corner. Nobody remarked on it.

Rascasse's voice rang out of the empty air behind the driver. "Paul's right. We need to take the Daphne girl."

Charlotte had jumped in surprise and now she wished someone would look around. Take it easy, she told herself — if Rascasse can project his awareness, it should be no trick for him to project his voice. She took a deep breath and let it out.

Today the bus smelled like a slum restroom: bleach and excrement. She didn't let herself think about the young man she had helped lure aboard, last night; instead she recalled what the bodiless voice had just said.

"Why the child?" she asked.

Nobody answered her, and then Marrity's view swiveled around to her. She couldn't tell if she needed lipstick — nobody had looked squarely at her when they'd picked her up, and now her head was just a silhouette against the bright window at her back.

"Daphne," Marrity said, "burned up the Chaplin movie." His voice was a hollow monotone, and she wished Golze would look at him.

But Golze was just staring at his curled hands in his lap. "We need the damn movie," he said. "We need sideways too, not just up and down."

"These two are going to take her to Palm Springs," Marrity went on, "and somehow cause her never to have existed. I won't remember her, or any of this, after."

Charlotte just said, "Ah." And neither will I, she thought. I suppose that's another thing that's actually possible — deleting people from the universe.

She looks like I used to.

Charlotte recalled the stories she'd heard about the anomaly Einstein had supposedly left in a tower in Palm Springs — an anomaly that could short out a person's lifeline, so that person had never existed.

And I waved at her, this afternoon, because she looked like my… my "little daughter": my uncorrupted younger self. Two little girls—one to disappear, literally without a trace, the other to finally get a life.

"Now, Mr. Marrity," said the disembodied voice from the air, "if you would please just open up the cabinet you see in front of you." Rascasse's voice didn't really sound organic — it was like someone using a violin bow to play a xylophone. "Go on, it isn't locked."

"Damn head never knows anything," muttered Golze from beside Marrity. "How many times did we ask it to find Einstein's daughter?"

Marrity's viewpoint ascended jerkily as he got to his feet and focused on the pairs of opposed brass cones that were the cabinet's handles.

"Last time I was here," Marrity said, sounding shaky, "nineteen years ago by my watch, this is where you kept that black head."

"It still is," said Charlotte, and she shifted her perspective to the driver, who was metronomically switching his gaze back and forth between the rearview mirrors and the empty pavement in front of the parked bus. It was much more restful than seeing the damned head.

But the cabinet behind the driver was still right in front of her, and she heard the latch snap and the doors creak open, and she caught the shellac and spice and old shoes smell of the thing.

"Thank you," said Rascasse's ringing voice. "And would you now say 'Find me,' please."

"Find me," said Marrity in a baffled tone.

And Charlotte could hear the head whispering again. It was only one voice this time: "Two days I sat beside my body, staring at the holes in my chest."

It had said this before, she recalled.

"Thank you for letting us know where they are," said Rascasse's voice. Charlotte frowned in puzzlement, then remembered that ghosts existed backward; presumably Rascasse was trying to get an answer to a question before asking it.

She sighed and switched to Marrity's perspective.

Through it she could see the afternoon sunlight glinting on the polished black brows, and on the silver plates tacked to the cheek and jaw. From the height of Marrity's vision she could tell that he was still standing.

Surreptitiously she felt in her purse for the bottle.

Marrity took solace in the faith that he would soon forget all of this. No, not forget it — never have experienced it.

"I went to my grandfather," came the whisper from the forever slightly parted coal lips, "to find out who I am, where I came from."

"Thank you for telling us where they are now," said Rascasse again. If he was impatient, his high-pitched inorganic voice didn't reflect it.

"But I have no mother, really," came the whisper, more faintly now. "Only children."

"You've told us where your children are," said Rascasse, like a hypnotist. "Where are your children now? Thank you for telling us."

Your children? thought Marrity; but he had to strain to hear the whisper now: "My mother will hide them," it said, "or try to. Everyone who dwells here is safe."

Everyone who dwells here is safe.

Marrity's breath had stopped. That was the sign over Grammar's back door. What else had the thing said? I went to find my grandfather… holes in my chest… children… my mother will hide them…

Abruptly the skin on his arms tingled and his vision narrowed to include only the glittering black-and-silver head, as his body understood before his mind permitted itself to.

A moment later he was out of his seat and halfway down the aisle, gripping the bar on the back of one of the seats, gasping for breath and ready to vomit.

"That's my father!" he yelled hoarsely. He was facing the back of the bus and blinking rapidly. "That's — what am I — that's my father's head."

"Shit!" muttered Golze at the front of the bus.

"Turn it off!" Marrity shouted. "Can he see me?"

Rascasse's voice seemed to come from right in front of Marrity. "The ghost is gone. The imbecilic thing gave us no clue to where to find your self — your younger self. I'd hoped that when you asked, it might tell us — I guess it doesn't know."

"It did tell us," came Golze's weak voice. "The Ouija board pointer moved before Marrity said, 'Find me.' Before is after, for ghosts. Hinch, back the truck around to face south."

"It pointed to the letter T," said the woman in sunglasses, whose real name was apparently Charlotte.

"No," grated Golze, "it pointed in a direction."

The bus vibrated as Hinch started the engine, and then the shadows and light moved across the seats as the bus backed around in a wide circle in the parking lot, and Marrity saw the supermarket swing past outside the left-side windows. The bus slowed to a halt, facing south now.

The Ouija board pointer now rested on the pin at the letter A.

"The young Frank Marrity," said Golze distinctly, "is now behind us. Northeast of here."

"He's in the hills, I'll bet," chimed Rascasse. "This vehicle is far too big and slow. Hinch, radio to Amboy — tell them we need full support."

There's no towels," said Daphne meekly.

Frank Marrity was sitting on the floor against the kitchen cabinet, next to Bennett, and he looked up and saw Daphne shivering in the hall entry in her old jeans and blouse, which were now visibly wet.

He got to his feet, leaving the bottle beside Bennett. "Not even any curtains," he agreed. "Sorry, Daph, I should have thought of that before I said you could take a shower. You could sit downstairs by the windows, it's sunny there."

His voice echoed in the empty house. Until Daphne had spoken, the only sounds had been from outside: birdcalls, faint sounds of car motors, a helicopter thudding over the hills.

"It's been half an hour again," said Moira. She was leaning against the rail, her back to the sloped ceiling of the living room on the lower level.

Marrity peered at his watch. Sure enough, it was 12:35. He turned to the telephone as Daphne pattered barefoot down the stairs.

As soon as he had dialed the number, the Jackson man said, "Hello?" apparently before the phone had even rung.

"It's me, it's been—"

"Right. Where are you?"

Daphne's voice echoed up from the living room behind and below Moira: "Dad, can I lay out on the deck? You can see the Hollywood sign real close!"

"It's inaccessible," said Bennett, still sitting on the floor. "And the only street it overlooks is across the canyon."

"Go with her, would you, Moira?" said Marrity. Into the phone he said, "We're at the top of—" And then he paused to ask Bennett, "Where are we?"

Moira sighed and pushed herself away from the rail.

"Go up — give me that." Bennett stood up and took the phone. "Go up Beachwood till it loops sharp to the right and becomes Hollyridge, which heads back downhill. I'm his brother-in-law. The sister, correct. We're the third house downhill after the Hollyridge dogleg, on your right." He paused, listening. "Yes, I'll turn it on." He hung up the phone. "The porch light. He wants us to turn it on."

"Do you know where the switch is?"

Bennett turned toward the door. "Gotta be by the — hey!"

Marrity had grabbed the pockets of Bennett's coat and yanked the pistol free and then lunged down the stairs, mostly sliding along the banister.

His attention had been caught by a sharp pain in Daphne's cracked ribs, and in the same instant he had experienced her sensory impressions of a cloth pressed over her mouth and the breath driven out of her nose from hard constriction around her arms as she was abruptly lifted up backward; Daphne's jerky field of view was only of the converging treetops overhead, but she heard Moira grunt sharply. Marrity felt Daphne's bare heels kick at the aluminum-pole railing as she was hoisted over it.

When Marrity burst out onto the sunlit deck, a young man in a sweatshirt was outside the northside railing, facing him but leaning away; the man's tan-gloved hands gripped a rope moored to the railing, and he was clearly about to slide down to the dark slope below. Moira was sprawled on the deck planks behind Marrity, her hair over her face.

Daphne was gone.

Marrity lifted the pistol and fired it straight into the man's chest.

Marrity saw the man jerk his blond head forward and fall away from the balcony, and as the ejected shell flew through the open door into the living room, Marrity sprang to the rail and swung one leg over it, tucking the hot pistol behind his belt and grabbing the rope with both hands as the echoes of the shot rapped back from the far side of the canyon. The sound of the helicopter was louder out here.

He tried to go down the rope hand over hand but mostly slid, with the bristly rope burning the skin off his palms, his legs flailing uselessly in the rushing, empty air. He landed jarringly, sitting down on the body of the man he had shot, and rolled off and began crawling up the leafy slope even before he could suck air into his shocked lungs. His vision was dimmed, but he could see figures scrambling up the slope above him.

"You said the girl and the woman were safely out of sight of the men," said Hinch, opening the driver's-side door of the black BMW and swinging his legs out. "This is a mess." The drone of the Bell helicopter that had landed on the cleared ground beyond the fence a hundred feet behind the car was louder now, and hot, dusty air blew away the car's air-conditioned chill.

The driver's-side door slammed and Hinch was gone before Charlotte could answer. Through his eyes as he ran forward she saw three of Rascasse's men scramble up from the shadowed slope to the sunlit street pavement, carrying a flexing canvas bundle that would be the little girl.

Daphne was wrapped up, but Charlotte knew what she looked like.

The men with the bundle, squinting in the rotor wind, hurried up the sloping road past where Charlotte sat in the idling BMW. Through Hinch's eyes she had glimpsed herself in the passenger seat, and then he had run on past; now she saw the open gate on the far side of the road's crest, and the open door in the helicopter's bright blue fuselage, and a man inside waving. The tail rotor was a silvery blur, and the helicopter was bobbing on its landing-gear dampers.

When the men had tumbled Daphne into the cabin of the helicopter and slid the door shut, Hinch turned back toward Charlotte — and so she could see, beyond the front of the car, a man come clambering up the slope and then stand shielding his eyes from the glare and the rotor wind. He was holding a handgun and he was the thirty-five-year-old Frank Marrity, and Hindi's view was suddenly jolting as the back end of the black BMW increased in apparent size.

When I consider how my light is spent—

Blindly Charlotte lifted her feet and slid them under the steering wheel; her right foot hit the gas pedal, and the engine roared for a moment, then she had slid over into the driver's seat and by touch pulled the gearshift lever from park down into drive.

Through Hinch's fast-approaching perspective from the rear, she could see that the car was aimed at the slope beyond the road, and she pulled the wheel to the right and was glad to see that she would miss the edge. Hinch saw Marrity step in front of the car, so she hit the brake. She banged her head against the closed driver's-side window, then impatiently opened the door and yelled, "Get in if you want to save your daughter!"

Through Marrity's eyes now, she saw the BMW's headlights and bumper, and her own face leaning out above the slant of the opened door, and Hinch sprinting up from behind.

"Last chance!" she yelled.

She heard the drone of the helicopter increase in pitch, and knew it must be taking off.

Marrity saw the helicopter tilt and lift from the clear patch beyond the fence at the crest of the narrow road, and he guessed that Daphne was in it. A man was running toward the BMW in front of him, clearly meaning to stop the driver; and now an orange compact car nosed around the bend at the top of the road, probably allied with these people.

Last chance! the woman had yelled.

All he sensed from Daphne was fright and constriction and blackness.

Marrity threw himself forward across the pavement and pulled open the passenger-side door — he tumbled in and yanked the door closed just as the man caught up with the car and opened the right-rear door.

The woman behind the wheel stepped on the gas and the car shot forward; the sudden headwind blew the back door closed.

Marrity looked back, and then was jolted forward against the dashboard as the right fender grated against a parked car.

"Look ahead!" the woman screamed.

Marrity turned and blinked out through the windshield at the green Porsche they had sideswiped, and at the clear blacktop lane stretching away on the left, and she straightened the wheel and stepped on the gas again. He could still hardly get breath into his lungs, and his abraded hands stung.

"Look at the road, don't look away," she said, a little more calmly. "I can't see except through you."

Marrity ached to look back and try to see which way the helicopter went. "Can you," he gasped, "follow that helicopter? Is my daughter — on it?"

"Yes, she's on it. I know where they're going. Keep watching the road or we're dead."

"You're… Libra Nosamalo." Marrity stared wide-eyed at the curving asphalt lane ahead of them. He thought about groping for the seat belt, then tensely decided it might momentarily interfere with his view.

"Charlotte Sinclair," she said. "The other name was to be cute. Tilt the rear view mirror so you can see behind us through it."

"Okay, but — slow down a second." Without looking away from the rushing road, Marrity felt for the rearview mirror with trembling fingers and then bent it around to a likely-feeling position. He darted a glance at it, bent it some more, and then glanced at it again. Back at the crest of the hill he could see the man who had tried to get into the car sprinting back now toward the orange car.

"The orange car—" he said.

"I see everything you see," Charlotte Sinclair said. "They'll try to catch us."

He managed to take a deep breath. "Where's the helicopter going?" The gun was jabbing painfully against his lower ribs.

"Palm Springs. Eyes front, dammit!" She wrenched the car back onto the road, but not before it had run up onto the shoulder and snapped off a post with a birdhouse mailbox on it. "Here's a curve, up ahead," she said, though in fact she speeded up. "Rearview."

Marrity flicked a look up at the mirror; the orange car was behind them now, only a hundred feet back and gaining fast.

"Thanks," she said. "Hang on."

The road curved to the left around a steep, rocky outcrop, and as soon as the BMW was around the bend, Charlotte stomped on the brake; the car came to a shuddering halt almost instantly, with no screeching of tires. "Look back!" she yelled, and then she clicked the gearshift to reverse and floored the gas pedal.

Marrity pushed himself away from the dashboard and shifted around in the seat just in time to see the pursuing orange car flash into view around the rocky shoulder — and then with an almighty slam the cars smashed into each other and he was nearly pitched into the backseat.

The black trunk lid was buckled and the orange car's hood was folded up so sharply that he couldn't see the windshield. Both cars were stopped, still rocking.

"Front, front!" Charlotte was yelling, so he wrenched himself around to look ahead. She clicked the engine into low and pressed the accelerator, and the car quivered for a second and then pulled free. Metal and plastic clattered on the asphalt.

She clicked it into drive and sped on down the road. Marrity couldn't hear any bad noises from the car. "Antiskid brakes," she said. "Standard on the new BMW Sixes."

For several seconds they drove downhill in a ringing silence. Marrity kept his eyes in a wide, unfocused stare through the windshield and concentrated on getting breath in and out of his lungs.

"Aren't you with these people?" he asked finally, forcing his voice to stay level. "Is Daphne a hostage?"

The BMW was swerving smoothly down the canyon road, flashing in and out of the shadows of overhanging trees.

"Rearview," she said.

Marrity glanced up at the mirror; there were no cars visible behind them. He reminded himself that he didn't have to tell her that.

"I'm not with them anymore," Charlotte said, "I guess. God help me. Probably they wouldn't have given me a new life anyway. I guess I knew that." She exhaled, almost whistling, and Marrity was sure that if he could look at her he would see tears in her eyes. "You have some kind of overlap with your daughter's mind, is that right? A link? You screwed up the smooth snatch back there, though I know they're blaming me."

"Where in Palm Springs?"

"Dammit," said Charlotte, leaning into a turn while Marrity stared tensely at the road, "this is what might save her. When I look through one of you I get a bleed through from the other. Have you got some kind of psychic connection with her or not?"

Marrity glanced at her, and he did see a glistening line down her right cheek, and a moment later the off-side wheels were thumping on dirt. "Watch the road!" she yelled.

He looked up to see a shaggy green oleander bush with white flowers rushing at them; Charlotte stood on the brake and the car stopped short of it, half on the shoulder. Dust swirled around the windows.

"You can drive now," she said, opening the door on her side and stepping out. "Watch me."

Marrity kept his eyes on her as he slid across the seat, and when she had shuffled around the front of the car to the passenger side and climbed in, and he had steered the car back into the lane and begun driving too fast down the road, he said, "Yes, for the past couple of days Daphne and I have been able to see into each other's minds. It's happened before. Usually lasts about a week. Where in Palm Springs?"

"That's good," she said, feeling for the seat belt. "I don't know where. I've got to call them, my former employers back there. What a mess that operation turned out to be." Having fastened the seat belt, she leaned back in the passenger seat and closed her eyes. "Did somebody get shot?"

The backs of Marrity's hands tingled, and he gripped the wheel more tightly, ignoring the sting of his scraped palms. "I shot a guy. One of the guys who grabbed Daphne."

"Shot dead?"

Marrity remembered firing the gun directly into the man's chest, and remembered the man falling. "I — I imagine so."

"Steady, slow down!" Charlotte said, her eyes still closed.

Marrity hastily took his foot off the accelerator. They were down out of the hills now, and the street was two lanes each way, but there were more cars to watch.

He tried to estimate what emotion killing that man had roused in him — it wasn't triumph, certainly, but it wasn't guilt or remorse either. He could hardly separate his own feelings from the tolling misery he sensed in Daphne's mind.

"Tell me the truth," he said. "Do they mean to kill her?"

"No," said Charlotte. "And there isn't any information they want out of her either. And they're going to find out that what they do mean to do with her can't happen while you're still alive."

"What do they mean to do with her? "

"They want to make her never have existed. Short out her lifeline. You'd never have had a daughter."

Marrity realized what emotion the shooting had left him with: depression. He thought of asking Charlotte, Why? but it seemed too hard; instead he said, "They can't do it unless they kill me first, though. You say."

"Right. You're her psychic Siamese twin right now. To, to unmake her, they'd have to isolate her, and they can't isolate her from you." She flinched, though her eyes were still closed. "Watch it."

He had been coming up fast on a station wagon that was moving too slowly in the left lane, and now he swerved around it to the right. "If you saw it," he said irritably, "you know I saw it."

"I'm paying better attention. We've got to—"

"My sister's back there, unconscious. Will they hurt her?"

"They don't care about her, or her husband, now. He can call paramedics. But we've got to figure out a way to hide from the — from your father. He can track us on this electric Ouija board they've got. It's in one of their other cars now, not the orange one we just smashed."

The helicopter, Marrity told himself, the guy you shot, the NSA man, the cartoon creature that talked to Daphne from the hospital television last night. Daphne setting Rumbold on fire. Serious people are taking this stuff seriously. Electric Ouija boards.

"My father saved my life. From you."

"That's not your father. We need a drink. Do you know—"

"Oh, bullshit. Excuse me."

"He's not. Now—"

"If he's not my father, who is?" Marrity shrugged impatiently. "You said we've got to hide from my father."

He glanced sideways at her and saw her frown. "Your father is somebody else, okay?" she said. "Do you know where the Roosevelt Hotel is? The lobby bar there has a million exits, and it's generally crowded, lots of eyes, I can monitor the whole place."

The next big street ahead of them was Hollywood Boulevard. To get to the Roosevelt Hotel he would turn right. "We should go straight to Palm Springs," he said. To get to Palm Springs he would turn left, and get onto the 101 south.

"I've got to call the guys who have your daughter. They don't know yet that they've got to kill you before they can do anything to her, and I've got to point that out to them. And I need three fast drinks. In vino immortalitas."

He sighed and clicked the turn signal up, for a right turn. "Can you remember a phone number?" he said. "I can remember it right now, but I might not remember it when we've got to a phone."

Racing east, the twin-engine Bell 212 helicopter had skimmed between Mount Hollywood and the domes of the Griffith Park Observatory and over the dry-brush hills of Eagle Rock and was now following its shadow along Colorado Boulevard, a few hundred feet below.

Denis Rascasse's body lay stretched out on the rearmost bench seat, right over the fuel tank. He was still breathing, though his consciousness was now focused in a couple of giant pink banksia flowers and an orange-glowing rocket-shaped lava lamp, all belted into a bracket on the starboard bulkhead.

Gray-haired Frank Marrity sat in a forward-facing seat, across from Golze, who was looking sleepy and red-faced since giving himself a shot of morphine from the bus's first-aid kit. The air inside the cabin smelled of something like burnt peanut butter.

On the floor between them was the duct-taped canvas bundle that contained Daphne.

Nobody had spoken in the minutes since the helicopter had lifted away from the cleared area at the top of Beachwood Canyon, but now the banksia blossoms vibrated, and Rascasse's voice rang out over the drone of the turbine engines on the helicopter's roof: "Now Mr. Marrity, you'll please explain — exactly how you worked the time machine."

In apparent response to the voice, Daphne's knees and head dented the canvas, and Marrity heard her muffled voice.

"Open the canvas at the head end," said Golze. "We don't want it smothering."

Marrity shook his head. "Soon," he whispered, "she won't exist anyway!"

"If it smothers," said Golze, shifting uncomfortably on his rear-facing seat, "it'll exist forever as a corpse. Open the package, dip-shit."

Marrity's face was hot. It seemed to him that he must somehow protest dipshit — that if he didn't, there would be ground lost that he would never recover.

"We're taping this," said Rascasse's voice. "What were the steps you took?"

"Uh…" Marrity began, but Golze scowled and pointed at the canvas bundle.

Marrity had to unbuckle his seat belt to lean down over the bundle, and with shaking hands he tore away the duct tape over Daphne's head, then unfolded the grommeted edges of the canvas.

In the shadows between the seats, Daphne's face seemed to be just wide green eyes and disordered brown hair.

"You!" she said, blinking up at him. "Where's my father?" Then she was looking past him at the quilted silver fabric that lined the ceiling and at the fiberglass bulkhead panels with their inexplicable inset round and oval holes. The cabin swung like a bell, and then extra weight told Marrity that they were ascending. "Are we in an airplane?" asked Daphne.

"Helicopter," said Golze, staring out the port window at the San Gabriel Mountains. "So don't do anything."

"Oh." She seemed to let out her breath.

"You're the dipshit," said Marrity to Golze, belatedly.

"What did you do," said Rascasse's voice, "to make the damn thing work? How do you stop at one specific time?"

Marrity glanced at the bracket and saw that the flowers were shaking and the red blobs in the lava lamp's tapered cylinder were all clustered at the top.

"How I did it — I was improvising, but it worked — was to tape right against my skin a thing that had undergone a decisive change at the time I wanted to get to. I found one of my grandmother's old cigarette butts between the bricks of the shed floor, and used that. It wasn't precise to the minute, but it landed me in the right day, at least."

"Your grandmother?" said Daphne.

Marrity just kept staring at the flowers. He could feel sweat rolling down his chest under his shirt.

"A cigarette butt?" said the silvery voice. "Nothing more than that?"

"That was it," said Marrity hoarsely. "It sort of shivered and got hot when I had slid back in time along the gold swastika — which looks like a quadruple helix in that perspective — to the right day. And then you just sort of — stretch, flex, step out of your astral projections. You can feel the rest of your momentum go rushing on without you, into the past."

After a pause, Daphne asked Golze, "Where's my father?"

"Dead, I suppose," said Golze, still looking out the window. "Probably wrapped around a tree in the Hollywood Hills. He took off down the canyon in a car driven by a blind woman."

For a moment Marrity thought of telling her that he was her father, but the banksias were shaking their narrow petals.

"But you can still go back?" said Rascasse. "It's not one way?"

"You can go back," said Marrity, speaking to the flowers and the lamp. "The return — and both my great-grandfather and my grandmother did it — is apparently prepaid. Plain Newtonian recoil, in a lot more dimensions. If I stand on the gold swastika again, I think I'll shoot straight back to where I was in 2006. Though I'll be arriving," he added, careful to keep looking at the flowers and not at Daphne, "in a very different life."

"How much came back here with you," said Rascasse's voice. "Clothes, the air?"

Marrity was glad of the distraction of the questions. "It's apparently everything within the boundaries of the aura that goes," he said. "I thought it would be a bigger volume; a lot of stuff I was going to bring along got left behind in 2006 — my Palm Pilot, an iPod, a Blackberry."

"Sounds like a salad," said Golze.

Glancing down at Daphne peripherally, Marrity noticed that she hadn't reacted to Golze's statement about her father probably being dead — she was still glancing around at the interior of the helicopter. Already she doesn't care about her father, he thought. Just as I remember.

A shrill buzzing sounded from below Golze's seat. "Could you get that?" said Golze. "It's the cell phone."

"It's my father," said Daphne.

Marrity's shirt clung to his sweaty skin as he leaned down across Daphne to lift the telephone case. He unsnapped it and pulled out the bulky telephone, then raised his eyebrows at Golze.

"The button at the top," Golze sighed, "puts it on speaker. Then just set it down on the seat."

"Modern ones are no bigger than a bar of soap," said Marrity defensively. He pushed the button and laid the brick-size thing on the vinyl seat.

"Hello," called Daphne.

"Hello," came a woman's voice, loud enough for everyone in the cabin to hear, even over the steady whistle of the turbine engines overhead.

"Hello, Charlotte," said Golze. "You're lucky this time line is about to be canceled."

"Put my dad on," said Daphne from the floor.

"He's not here, Daphne," said Charlotte's voice from the mobile telephone on the seat, "but he should be back anytime. Now I want to talk to the grown-ups alone, can we—"

"He's standing right beside you," Daphne interrupted, "I can hear you through him. Oof! And his mouth's full of beer."

For a moment there was silence from the phone. "Who believes that?" asked Charlotte finally.

"I do," said Golze.

Marrity nodded sourly.

"I'll know it soon enough," said Rascasse's voice from the flowers. "Your signal's clear."

"Okay, dammit, yes, he's right here," Charlotte said, "and young Daphne brings me to my point. I'm holding a gun on him—"

The flowers in the wall bracket shook. "You're not," said the metallic voice. "It's in your purse. I don't see him."

"What else you got, Charlotte?" asked Golze wearily, leaning back and closing his eyes.

Rascasse's voice said, "I look for him, but see this girl instead." For once the artificial voice seemed to express an emotion-bafflement.

"Dad!" called Daphne from her cocoon on the floor plates. "Don't let them catch you!"

The young Frank Marrity's voice came out of the phone's speaker now: "I won't, Daph, and I'll come get you soon. These people aren't planning to hurt you. "After a moment he added, "It smells like peanut butter there. Don't eat or drink anything they give you, Daph."

"That's just how this helicopter smells," said Daphne.

"We bought it from the Comision Federal de Electricidad," said Golze, "in Mexico City. Maybe they use peanut butter for insulation."

Marrity's voice from the phone said, "Don't do anything in the helicopter, Daph!"

"I already told her," said Golze.

"Denis," said Charlotte's voice, "I bet you could sense the Marrity I'm with if you look at the girl there."

Old Marrity noticed that the blobs in the lava lamp were breaking up into strings.

"It's true," said Rascasse's violin voice, "I sense him there — but not enough to see him. I can hardly see this girl."

"Okay," said Charlotte, "I'm not bluffing now, here's some truth: The young Frank Marrity and that girl have a psychic link — as Denis says, their minds overlap. They'll look like an X from the freeway, not separate lines. You can't negate her, you can't isolate her time line, while he's still alive."

"This is bullshit," said old Marrity quickly, rocking on the seat as the helicopter swayed under the rotors. "I never had any, any psychic link with her, in either of my lifetimes." He wiped a hand across his mouth. "I'm not telling you another thing until my younger self's safety is… assured."

Frank Marrity found that he had leaned back against the brown tile wall of the telephone alcove. A moment ago he had been leaning in over the pay phone with his ear to the receiver Charlotte held, but now he felt as if he were wrapped in some coarse fabric and rocking supine on a hard floor, and he realized that in his shock he had mentally fled his physical situation and retreated to Daphne's.

That's no help, he told himself, and he took a deep breath of the smoky gin-scented air that was actually around him and looked out at the fountain and balconies of the Roosevelt Hotel lobby. The tables on the tile floor around the fountain were crowded even at this afternoon hour, and he made himself hear the babble of voices and clink of glasses rather than the drone of the helicopter's engines.

"If we do this my way," said Charlotte into the phone, "his safety will be assured. Denis, if you try to stop his heart, you're just as likely to kill the girl."

Marrity pushed away from the wall and stepped up beside Charlotte again. On the little wooden counter below the pay phone was the pad on which she had written Eugene Jackson's number, and now Marrity picked up the hotel pen and scribbled, MY YOUNGER SELF? and then, THE YOUNG FRANK M?

Charlotte covered the mouthpiece. "I told you he wasn't your father," she said impatiently. "The thing that was in your grandmother's shed is a time machine."

Marrity was still holding a glass of beer, and he drained it in one long swallow now. And he looked again at all the people sitting in the lobby.

He could feel Daphne in his mind — it wasn't a sensation or a thought, just the mental equivalent of holding his hand. He returned the psychic pressure. You and I will come out of this okay, he tried to project to her. The rest of these can go their own ways, whoever they are.

"I'll tell you," said Charlotte into the phone, "if you'll shut up."

He looks like me, thought Marrity, an older version of me. Daphne said so, right away. He told us not to go to an Italian restaurant. He claims to have met this crowd when he was thirty-five; I'm thirty-five. On Grammar's back porch this morning he said, I hate the old man as much as you do, and when I asked him if he meant his father or mine, he nodded and said, That one.

He believes it, at least, thought Marrity, and so do these people, apparently—

—and they don't seem to be fools—

—but I can simply acknowledge that they all believe it, and work from there.

"Okay," said Charlotte. "With Frank's help, I wrote out a letter and xeroxed it, and got envelopes and stamps here, and we just got done dropping three copies in different mailboxes. The envelopes are addressed to the FBI, and the Mossad care of the Israeli embassy, and to the LAPD — all Los Angeles addresses — and the letter includes an account of your murders of that San Diego detective and that kid last night, the two shootouts today on Batsford Street, your passport numbers, the New Jersey and Amboy locations, and the license-plate number of the bus." She paused, clearly listening. "You've both used your passports when I've been with you. You know me, I didn't exactly have to lean over your shoulders."

After another pause, she went on, "So listen, listen! The plan is the same as before, except that it's me you short out, my lifeline that you erase from the universe. No, dammit, think about it — without me in the picture, Frank Marrity wouldn't have got spooked so you decided we had to kill him, and without me he wouldn't have fled the hospital this morning and told the Mossad about the thing in his grandmother's shed. You only missed getting the machine today by a couple of minutes — do it this way and you'll be at least a day ahead of the Mossad. And without me, this letter wouldn't exist, wouldn't be in the mail right now."

Charlotte was leaning in close over the phone. Marrity remembered seeing tears in her eyes during the wild drive down the canyon. She had said, Probably they wouldn't have given me a new life anyway. I guess I knew that.

And he remembered the name she had originally given him: Libra Nosamalo. Libera nos a malo. Deliver us from evil.

"Denis," she said now, "it'll take you forever to track Frank Marrity, the young one, with his — with your horrible head, if Marrity knows to get away from me and keep running and changing direction. With those letters in the mail, you don't have the time. I'll call you back and arrange a trade — me for the girl."

She hung up the telephone. Without looking around, she reached one hand back toward Marrity. "Got another quarter?" she asked.

"Uh, yes," he said, digging into his pocket with his free hand. "Thank you for saving my daughter. Do you have to — can they really short out—"

"They really can," she said, taking the quarter, "and I'll do it if that's all that's left. I can't let all the things I've done stay done much longer. But let's see what your NSA man has to say — he's got the time machine now."