Three Days to Never

Whose daughter art thou? tell me, I pray thee: is there room in thy father's house for us to lodge in?

— GENESIS 24: 1 3

Twenty-two

"Could I bum one of those?"

Lepidopt raised his eyebrows, then held out the pack of Camels toward Bennett. "Sure. You decided you need a new vice?"

The two of them stepped across the sidewalk away from the glass doors of the Hollywood West Hospital emergency room. There were spots of blood on Bennett's wilted white shirt and on his jacket, and he looked as if he hadn't slept in days; his fingers were shaking as he pinched a cigarette out of the pack.

Moira had been diagnosed as having a concussion, and at best it would be several hours before she would be released.

"I used to smoke," Bennett said, "but it's a stupid — well, today."

Lepidopt put the briefcase down on the grass while he lit his own cigarette, then he handed the lighter to Bennett. Out here in the warm breeze he couldn't light one without using two hands, one to cup around the flame, and he didn't want to invite remarks about his missing finger.

"That's," Bennett began, then sucked hard on the cigarette. "That's Frank's briefcase," he said, exhaling smoke.

"I picked it up when we got you and Moira out of that empty house. Didn't seem right to leave it there."

"Those people — with the helicopter — they grabbed Frank and Daphne."

Lepidopt sighed. "Evidently," he agreed.

"I should have the briefcase. That is, Moira should have it."

Lepidopt stepped back, then crouched and reached out to pick up the briefcase. "I'm likely to see Frank sooner than you are," he said with a smile as he straightened up. "I'll give it to him."

Bennett scowled, then shrugged.

They walked out of the building's shadow into the late afternoon sunlight, and Bennett slapped his jacket pocket and then just squinted. "Is anybody going to come looking for me, is what I want to know," he said. He waved his cigarette back toward the emergency room. "Or my wife."

Lepidopt could see the white Honda, with Malk behind the wheel, parked idling a dozen yards away. "These people wanted Marrity and his daughter," he told Bennett without looking at him, "and now they've got them. I don't imagine they'll bother with you anymore."

"I should — I should call the police."

"Go ahead."

A man had walked up beside the driver's side of the Honda — a white-haired old fellow, in a dark suit — and Malk was talking to him now. "You should go back inside," Lepidopt said. "Your wife seemed upset."

Bennett's shoulders slumped. "Her father's with that gang," he muttered. "She thinks he had amnesia, all these years. She'll want to try to get in touch with him."

Lepidopt saw the Honda's headlights flash twice, fast, then once. No problem here, that meant. "She won't be able to. Get back inside."

Bennett followed Lepidopt's gaze, then nodded and hurried back to the glass doors and disappeared inside the hospital. They'd yell at him for smoking in the building.

As Lepidopt strode toward the car, he didn't have to pat his waistband over his right hip pocket; he could feel the angular jab of the .22 automatic concealed by his jacket. He had sewn two steel washers into the jacket hem so that it would flip aside quickly.

The old man in the suit saw him coming and smiled, placing both his hands flat on the roof of the car. "Oren," he said, in a voice that carried just far enough across the pavement for Lepidopt to hear it. "I think you've strayed from the established plan." His accent was perfect American newscaster.

It must be the katsa from Prague, Lepidopt thought. But how on earth did he track us here? The finger. They put something in the finger.

And when he had walked up to within a few paces of the car, he realized that he wouldn't need to ask for identification, for he recognized the old man — this was the instructor who had taken the young Halomot students into the desert north of Ramie in 1967, and summoned the Babylonian air devil Pazuzu, which had whirled ferociously around them but had at the same time been profoundly motionless.

Lepidopt wasn't reassured by the man's smile. "Every plan is a basis for change," he said gruffly. That was an old Mossad saying, reflecting the fluid nature of field operations. "New developments indicated—"

"And you can't rely on sevirut," the old man interrupted. Sevirut meant "probability," and after Israel's general staff had used the term to dismiss the likelihood of a surprise attack from Egypt and Syria in 1973 — a surprise attack that had occurred twenty-four hours later — Golda Meir had said she shuddered every time she heard the word.

Lepidopt thought of old Sam Glatzer, and Ernie Bozzaris, and Bozzaris's sayan detective in San Diego. There had been no evident probability that any of them would die. "True," he said, exhaling.

"You through here?" the old man asked, and when Lepidopt nodded, he said, "Let's look at the situation."

Lepidopt got into the backseat, and the katsa walked around to open the passenger-side door. "I understand you've got Einstein's machine," the katsa said as he folded himself into the seat and pulled the door closed, "but you don't know how to work it. I'm Aryeh Mishal, in case you don't remember the name from that day in the desert."

"Get us out of here, Bert," said Lepidopt, "the Bradleys can find their own way home."

He stretched his legs to the side and leaned his head back on the seat, heedless of disarranging his yarmulke-toupee. "And head for the Pico Kosher Deli, I'm starving." To the white-haired head in the front seat, he said, "That's right. The only living person who has worked the machine is now with the other team, whoever they are, and they've captured a source of mine. Two of our sayanim and one of our agents are dead. Altogether it has not been a — a textbook operation." He hefted Marrity's briefcase and set it down on the seat beside him. "We do have some letters Einstein wrote to his daughter. They might be helpful."

"I'll salvage what can be salvaged," said Mishal in a contented tone. "First I want you to—"

He was interrupted by the electronic buzz of the cellular phone. Only one person had the number to that phone, and Lepidopt straightened up and reached between the front seats to lift it out of its case.

He took a deep breath and then switched the telephone on. "Yes."

"You guys were too slow," came Frank Marrity's voice from the earpiece. "They've got my daughter now."

"Where are you now?"

"At the Roosevelt Hotel, in the lobby. They—"

"How did they find the two of you?" Lepidopt asked.

"I'm not sure — apparently my father — who isn't the—"

Lepidopt tensed when he heard fumbling at the other end of the line, but relaxed a little when a woman's voice came on.

"They've got his father's mummified head in a box," the woman said. "It's not quite dead, and it can point to Frank here via an electric Ouija board. We shouldn't stay here."

Marrity's voice came from farther away: "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Put him back on," said Lepidopt. A moment later he could hear heavy breathing. "Frank, who is she, the woman with you?"

"Her name's Charlotte something. She's the woman who tried to shoot me this morning, sunglasses, apparently she's changed sides. Listen, it's crazy to say my father's head is — 'not quite dead'! — in a box, tracking me."

A defector from the other side! thought Lepidopt. He covered the mouthpiece with his palm and whispered to Malk, "The Roosevelt Hotel, now." Lifting his hand away, he said, "Listen, Frank, we can save your daughter. We need to meet. We're only—"

"But that's crazy, isn't it? Daphne's kidnapped and I'm standing here with a crazy woman."

Lepidopt spoke carefully. "Have you experienced supernatural or paranormal events, in the last three days?"

"You know I have. You were there when that thing showed up on the TV last night."

"And you know something about Einstein, and your grandmother's shed. Has this Charlotte woman been involved in this stuff longer than you have? "

"Yes, obviously."

"Then just maybe she's not crazy. Reserve judgment. Will Charlotte talk with us?"

"She wants to, yes."

"Good. We're only ten minutes away — stay there in the lobby. It's public. Okay? Your daughter's life is at stake."

"Okay."

Lepidopt turned off the phone and leaned forward to put it back in its case. "That was the agent I thought had been captured. He's in the lobby at the Roosevelt with a woman who was on the opposing team. Apparently she's switched sides and wants to talk to us."

"All right," said Malk, hunched over the wheel.

"The opposing team," Lepidopt went on, "has — according to the woman — has my man's father's head in a box, and it can lead them to him."

"I can hide him from that," said Mishal, facing forward again. "You're going to have to buy a couple of bottles of whisky, Oren."

Lepidopt pressed his lips together. He remembered how whisky had been used in some of the demonstrations in his training.

"This agent," Mishal went on, "how did you recruit him?"

"I false-flagged him, told him I'm with the NSA. It was a hasty recruitment, but his daughter was about to invite a dybbuk into herself."

"A dybbuk." Lepidopt saw the white head nodding. "How would you guess you'll rate this agent in your eventual Tsiach report? Hardly blue and white, I imagine," the old man added with a chuckle.

Blue and white, the colors of Israel's flag, indicated an agent who was totally committed to the Israeli cause.

"I think he'll work out as a B," Lepidopt said. "Maybe a B minus. He initially lied to us about where he had stashed the Einstein letters, but all agents lie about something."

"And ideally they never find out they were agents," said Mishal. "But at least he imagines he's working for the NSA, albeit an NSA that foils dybbuks. Right?"

"That's right."

In the rearview mirror, Malk gave Lepidopt a sympathetic glance.

"I hope you remember," said Mishal mildly, "that you're — we're — operating outside normal channels here. We have no diplomatic immunity; if we're caught, we go to prison as spies."

"I'd like to know who they'd say we're spying on," said Lepidopt.

Mishal laughed. "I imagine impersonating an NSA officer would suffice to get you arrested. And then they'd look at your American passport. You've played very fast and loose here so far. I'm here to rein you in and save your mutinous hide."

Lepidopt nodded tiredly, though the old man couldn't see it, and he wondered what he might find suitable to eat in the Roosevelt bar. There wouldn't be any glat kosher sandwiches, for sure. Maybe celery and carrot sticks. A lot of them.

"He's actually Mossad," said Charlotte quietly, "not NSA." She held out her hand, and Marrity glanced at the glass-topped table so that she could see where her martini glass was. "Thanks," she said, reaching down and curling her fingers around the stem of it.

The Roosevelt Hotel lobby was enormous, with a second-floor balcony on all four sides and an ornate ceiling high overhead, and it echoed with talk and laughter and the rumble of wheeled luggage. Marrity and Charlotte were seated next to each other on a small tan couch that faced away from the Hollywood Boulevard entrance, not far from where a black stone statue of Charlie Chaplin sat on a bench for tourists to have their pictures taken with. Charlotte had said that with all these eyes moving around, she didn't need to put Marrity in a good vantage point.

"He said you're not crazy," Marrity ventured.

"Good to hear." A brass ashtray lay on the table next to her purse, and she leaned forward and pulled a pack of Marlboros and a lighter out of her purse.

"My father's… mummified head?" Marrity cleared his throat. "They've got?"

"They say they killed him in 1955. I don't know why."

"That's when he disappeared. That's why he never came back to us. That would be why, if it's true." He sat back on the couch, not believing it but considering it. "I've hated him all these years."

How can I let go of that? he thought in bewilderment. Hating him has been the basis of my resolve to be the opposite sort of father to Daphne.

After a moment Charlotte asked, "You on the wagon?"

"Hmm? Oh, no, sorry." Marrity picked up his third beer and took a deep sip. When he put it down again he said, " 'Drink, for you know not whence you came nor why — drink, for you know not why you go nor where.'"

Charlotte laughed and lifted her free arm and draped it over his shoulders. "'A flask of wine, a book of verse, and thou,'" she said. He looked into her face — he could see himself mirrored in the sunglasses — and she quickly leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.

He reached up and touched her cheek, and suddenly he was kissing her in earnest, and she had opened her mouth and her hand was gripping his shoulder. He tasted gin on her tongue. There were hoots from nearby tables, but he didn't care.

A flash of sudden astonishment made him close his lips and lean back.

Her face was still very close. She raised one eyebrow.

"It's Daphne," he said hoarsely.

Charlotte actually blushed as she pulled her arm back and folded her hands in her lap. "Oops! She doesn't need this."

Marrity closed his eyes to concentrate, and he projected an image of himself hugging Daphne; and in return he got a clear impression of… cautious amusement, like a wink through tears.

"It's okay," he told Charlotte. "She didn't mind. We've got to get her back."

"We will. These people aren't stupid." She sighed deeply and gulped her martini. "I didn't mind either."

Marrity could still taste her gin. He was shaky. It had been two years since he had kissed a woman, and a whole lot longer than that since he had kissed a woman he didn't know well. "I didn't either," he said quickly. Then he took a deep breath and changed the subject: "Mossad, you said — that's Israel's secret service?"

"Shoot at you in the morning, kiss you in the afternoon. What's left?" She sighed and he watched her light a cigarette. "Yes, Israel. They've apparently kept close track of all things Einsteinian. Did you know that after the first president of Israel died, in 1952, they asked Einstein if he'd be president? It wasn't just a gesture — the Mossad knew that Einstein had made some unpublished discoveries."

"Like a time machine." Marrity shook his head. "I think you said — Jesus — that that's me, that old guy, that old drunk guy! Who claimed he was my dad? Like, me from the future?"

"One future, not the future. There isn't any the future. He used this machine in your grandmother's shed to come back here to 1987 from 2006. His life—"

"2006? Then he's only… if he's me… fifty-four. He looks older."

Marrity tried to summon skepticism, and found he didn't have any. He believed it, believed that the pouchy-faced old man was in fact himself, and he hated the thought of that querulous old fool walking around and talking to people. Marrity had never been drunk enough to have done and said things he couldn't remember later, but he felt as if it was happening now. What might he be saying, Marrity wondered helplessly, what personal secrets of mine might he be blabbing to these people?

Marrity could feel his face getting hot. "Is Daphne talking to him? "

"I don't imagine he's eager to talk to her," said Charlotte quietly. "He's experienced two lifelines already — one broke somehow, and spilled him into the other. In the original happy one, Daphne died yesterday, in that Italian restaurant. He wants to make sure that in this time line she doesn't grow up — doesn't go on living."

Marrity was dizzy, and couldn't make himself look at Charlotte. "He's not me, I could never want that. What could Daphne ever do—"

He was staring down at his clenched fists, and Charlotte took hold of one of them. "There is no the future," she repeated. "When you get free of this, you and Daphne can do anything you choose to do." She squeezed his hand. "But he told Golze that in his second lifeline, you — he, that is, he and Daphne were both alcoholics, living in a trailer somewhere, and they hated each other. Daphne tried to take his car at one point, and he tried to block her, and she backed it over him."

"Those weren't us. Those weren't us."

"Make them not be."

She was facing him, so he couldn't see her eyes. "What do you—" he began, then halted uncertainly. When she cocked her head, he went on: "It's none of my business, but what do you want to use the time machine for?"

She took a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled a long sigh of smoke. "True," she said, almost absently, "it's none of your business. But none of your life is my business — I am not Daphne's keeper — but somehow I'm knee deep in it anyway." She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. "You've got an advance warning to go easy on the booze, haven't you?"

"Yes, I guess I have."

"Did you plan to start going easy today?"

"No, not today."

She picked up her empty glass and half stood up — then sat back down again. "I want to go back," she said quietly but quickly, "and prevent my younger self from being blinded in 1978. All I've worked for is to save her. I don't even think of that little girl as me anymore, I think of her more as my lost daughter who needs rescuing. If I can save her I can disappear, and she'll be a new person, born out of me like—" She waved her empty glass.

"Like parthenogenesis," said Marrity.

"Exactly. Identical body, but not this person." She took hold of his empty glass in her free hand and straightened gracefully to her feet. "Same again?"

"Same again."

The Roosevelt Hotel was right across the street from the banners and green copper roofs of the Chinese Theater forecourt, and Lepidopt shifted to stare at the ornate old structure as Malk turned off Hollywood Boulevard at Orange and found a parking place at the curb, avoiding the Roosevelt's valet parking.

Do they wonder what's become of their Charlie Chaplin slab? Lepidopt thought, rocking in the abruptly stopped car. Who'd imagine it's in the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino now?

"APAM, gentlemen," said Mishal as they got out of the car and blinked in the heat and late afternoon sun glare of the summer Hollywood sidewalk.

Lepidopt had had enough. APAM, short for Avtahat Paylut Modienit, meant securing operational activity, and it was the first thing a Mossad katsa was required to learn.

"We're katsas," he said shortly.

"Of course you are," said Mishal with a smile.

Mishal had paused in the shadow of a shaggy magnolia that draped its branches over the wall of the Roosevelt Hotel parking lot, and Malk and Lepidopt scuffed to a halt beside him.

"Remember that all we want is information about this opposing group, and any information either of these people might have about Einstein's machine. We will appear to care about this man's daughter, and whatever terms this woman may want, but in fact we will not care about them. Everyone is either target or enemy."

"We're katsas," Lepidopt repeated. "We know this."

"Oh?" Mishal squinted at him. "Wouldn't that dybbuk, articulate in the girl's body, have been more useful than the girl inviolate?" He held up one thin hand. "Well no, since you let the opposing group capture the girl. Point withdrawn."

Malk glanced at Lepidopt and rolled his eyes for a moment before sauntering ahead to do a route of the hotel lobby, identify Marrity and the woman and make sure no one else was watching them.

At a more leisurely pace, Lepidopt and Mishal tapped up the hotel's back steps.

"No offense," said Mishal.

"Of course not," said Lepidopt. In fact he was wondering if the elder katsa's criticism had been valid. Did I, he wondered, jump in to recruit Marrity too quickly, just because the little girl was in danger of being inhabited by that thing?

And he remembered again being in her bedroom, and wondering if she would like his son Louis.

I'm too old for this, he realized; but one way or another I'll be out of it soon.

Malk was on the second-floor balcony on the far side of the lobby when Lepidopt and Mishal walked in; he was holding a newspaper in his right hand, which meant there was no sign that Marrity and the woman were being watched, and then he leaned against the railing and opened the paper, pointing the fold of it downward and slightly to his right. Lepidopt followed the implied line and saw Frank Marrity sitting on a couch with an attractive dark-haired woman on the Hollywood Boulevard side of the lobby.

In any meeting, he recalled, the agent must be there and sitting down before you enter; you never wait for him at a meeting place.

Lepidopt stepped forward across the tile floor while Mishal hung back, and he walked the long way around the fountain to approach Marrity from in front.

Marrity saw him and stood up. "Mr. Jackson," he said. "This is Charlotte, uh..."

"Charlotte S. Webb," said Charlotte, smiling quizzically and not getting up.

Lepidopt grinned, and noticed that Marrity did too. Anybody with a book-loving child, he thought, would recognize that title. He wished he could remember the name of the pig in Charlotte's Web, to be able to make a clever reply.

"Do you have any children?" he asked her.

"With luck a little girl," she said. "Parthenogenesis."

Lepidopt stared at her for a moment, then pulled a metal chair across the tile to the opposite side of their table and sat down, slightly in profile to Charlotte and with the tail of his jacket hanging away from his belt.

"I'm Eugene Jackson," he said. "Shortly we'll be joined by another man, possibly two. We want to get the pair of you away from here to a safe place."

"I want some terms agreed on before I go anywhere with you," said Charlotte. "I've proposed a deal to my former employers, and I'm going to go through with it unless I can make a different deal with you people."

Mishal stepped up to the table, carrying a chair in one hand. He put it down facing away from the table and sat down straddling it, one forearm lying along the chair back. With his other hand he pulled two folded sheets of ragged-edged paper from his inside jacket pocket and laid them on the table.

"What are the deals?" he asked cheerfully. "Would each of you take one of these papers? Don't get them wet. Oren, do you have matches?" Charlotte pointed at her lighter, but he said, "No, we need matches."

"I've got some," said Marrity. He shifted on the couch and pulled a matchbook out of his pocket and tossed it beside the ashtray, then picked up one of the sheets of paper and unfolded it impatiently. It was blank, and felt oddly coarse.

"Handmade," said Mishal.

"If I lead you to my former employers," said Charlotte, "and tell you everything I know about them, you rescue Daphne and I get to use the time machine." She smiled. "And since it's a time machine, I get to use it before I lead you to them."

Mishal laughed and pulled another folded sheet of paper out of his pocket. This one seemed to be plain typing paper, and it had markings on it in black ink. "No, not before. Oren, you remember this exercise, help them get some matches burned. I want each of you to copy onto your sheet of paper the symbols drawn on this." He unfolded the third sheet and laid it out flat on the table.

Lepidopt recognized the curves and circles — they were kolmosin, also known as "angel pens," or "eye-writing" because the arrangements of the figures often made them seem to be childish drawings of eyes. He picked up Marrity's book of matches, tore one out and struck it. The head flared bright purple and yellow.

Marrity was staring at the six lines of complex figures. "Couldn't we just xerox that sheet onto these blank sheets?"

"No," said Mishal, "it's got to be in your own hand, and you've got to use burnt matches to draw it. And note that on this original, none of the lines touch each other! They can't in your copies either."

Lepidopt shook out the match and lit another. "Break the heads off," he said to Marrity. "It's easier to draw with just the cardboard stick." His nose itched with the smell of sulfur.

"What is this," Marrity asked, pushing the burnt match with his finger, "a test of coordination or something?"

"It's an amulet," said Mishal. "Don't sneer, your greatgrandfather invented this one. In 1944 — for the war effort! — he made a handwritten copy of his 1905 paper on relativity, and auctioned it off. Among all the pages of arcane symbols for reference frames and constant acceleration, nobody noticed this sheet of kolmosin, though the FBI was watching him closely. And by the time the manuscript got to the Library of Congress we had lifted the sheet anyway. As he meant us to do." He glanced at Lepidopt. "You didn't lose your remote-viewer's holograph talisman, did you?"

Lepidopt could feel the disk against his chest, with the fragment of Einstein's manuscript sealed inside it. "No," he said. But I'm not the remote viewer Sam Glatzer was, he thought. He struck another match.

"What," said Marrity, "will be different after we've done this than is the case now?"

"Nicely put!" said Mishal.

"He's an English lit professor," said Charlotte smugly, linking her arm through Marrity's.

"Ah." Mishal squinted at Marrity. "These, when you have folded them correctly and put them against your skin, will make you untrackable by the people who have your daughter. We'll be able to sneak up on them. Right now you're both occulted by proximity to me" — he pushed back the jacket and shirtsleeve above his right wrist, and Marrity saw the black lines of part of a tattoo on his forearm — "but you might not always be with me."

"Okay." Marrity freed his arm from Charlotte's and picked up one of the matches Eugene Jackson had laid out for him. Peripherally he saw that Charlotte had picked one up too, but she paused, humming some old half-familiar tune.

Of course, he thought, she can't do it unless someone watches her do it!

"This is some kind of magical stuff," he said, dropping his match. "I'll watch her do it first. See what happens."

He stared at the sheet with the printing on it, and then at Charlotte's blank sheet. She picked up a match and, as he continued to shift his gaze from one sheet to the other and back, she began copying the curves and circles.

"He wants to see if I turn into a toad," she said.

"Well," said Marrity in a tone he tried to make sound defensive, "it's like tasting food. If it's poisoned, better if just one person tries it."

"You also serve who only stand and watch," she said, and Marrity could hear the amusement in her voice as she went on copying the figures. She was already on her third match. Belatedly Marrity recognized the tune she'd been humming — it was "Bye Bye Blackbird."

"We'll talk to both of you at length this evening," said Mishal, "in a safer place, but right now — where are they now, the people you were with until today?"

"In Palm Springs; on their way there, anyway." Charlotte was biting her lower lip as she moved her eyes up and down — which was just for show, Marrity realized. "There's a thing my pal's greatgrandfather made, there — I don't know the whole story, but allegedly you can twist somebody's lifeline right out of existence with it. It uses some energy — having to do with the great-granddad's cosmological constant? It's way bigger in other dimensions, which is why it measures nearly zero from here, to us. Like a big beachball has a footprint that's only the size of a dime on a two-dimensional sheet of paper. The old guy said it was the worst mistake of his life, figuring it out."

Marrity heard old Mishal shift in his chair. "Do you mean," Mishal said, sounding interested for the first time, "they can make someone never have existed at all? No record or memory of that person?"

"Yep." Charlotte finished the final circle and dropped the last match onto the glass tabletop. She turned to Marrity and spread her hands. "No ill effects!" she said cheerfully, though Marrity thought her voice was shriller than she had meant it to be.

"And this is located, somehow, "said Mishal impatiently, "this… tap for the vacuum energy? "

"Yes," said Charlotte. "One of my employers said it was 'a singular object.'"

Lepidopt had struck several more matches, and Marrity picked one up and began copying figures onto his own sheet of paper. He was pleased to see that his scraped palm wasn't leaving blood on the paper — God only knew what effect that would have.

Mishal nodded. "I imagine he said 'singularity.' Einstein made a few oblique references to a thing like this in his notes, and we've wondered for years whether it might have been something he actually figured out. We have to look into this — though I wonder if even I have the math for it." He squinted at Charlotte. "Have they ever used it?"

Charlotte shrugged. "Who'd know?"

"Of course, of course. Where is it, where in Palm Springs?"

"Well, that's my bargaining chip, telling you that," she said. "I'll tell you, in exchange for use of the time machine. We — they — know you've got it. One of their guys got shot this afternoon when you took it out of Frank's grandmother's house."

Marrity was glancing at Lepidopt as she said this, and he thought Lepidopt's eyes narrowed slightly — in satisfaction?

"You said you've proposed a deal to them," said Mishal, "and that you'll go through with it if you can't make a deal with us. What did you propose to them?"

"They want to negate Frank's daughter, so that she won't have burned up their movie and generally made a hash of their plans. But Frank and Daphne have a psychic link, like mental Siamese twins, so these people can't isolate her and erase her while Frank is still alive. Of course they'd like to just kill Frank and get on with it, but the deal I proposed to them is that they negate me, instead."

Marrity had paused from his copying to look at her. She was staring across at Mishal, so Marrity could see her eyes behind the sunglasses; but when he noticed the glitter of tears on her lower lashes, and her impatient blink, he quickly looked back down at his paper.

She went on, "I screwed up their operation badly enough so that if I never existed, they'd have got the time machine, not you fellows. I've proposed a trade — me for Daphne."

"But that won't do," said Mishal, shaking his head, "if this singularity is real. If you're negated you'd never have told us about it."

Lepidopt leaned forward, frowning. "Miss, uh, Webb," he said. "You proposed that they erase your existence? No one remember you, nothing you've ever done leaving any slightest mark — this would be worse than death."

"Or better," said Charlotte. "But if you'll let me use the time machine, then I won't have to follow through with it."

"There's something you did," said Lepidopt quietly, "that needs to be undone."

Marrity had finished his copy of the strange diagram. Mishal took it and Charlotte's and frowned critically over them.

"You can't use the time machine," Mishal said absently. "But if, after I've done some math, this singularity looks plausible — and if the time machine works and we get our priority tasks out of the way— and if the change you want to make meets with our approval — we'll dispatch an operative to make the change for you." He put the papers down, pursing his lips. "These are good enough."

"I don't know if your operative could do it," said Charlotte. "It'll involve getting onto a secret U.S. Air Force base in 1978."

Mishal looked up from the papers and gave her a frosty smile. "Oh, I think we can manage."

He held out his hand, and Charlotte shook it.

"And you'll get my daughter away from those people," said Marrity.

"Yes," said Mishal. "Of course."

Lepidopt caught Marrity's eye and nodded slightly. Then he waved at the papers they'd marked up with the burnt matches. "Fold those in half, top to bottom, with the marks on the outside, without smearing the carbon, and press them against your skin under your shirts, top side outward. They'll smear soon enough, but it's the initial burn that counts. You can make fresh ones again later."

Charlotte took hers and started to get up, but Lepidopt raised his hand. "I'm sorry, Miss Webb, but you've got to do it here. We can't let either of you out of our sight, and I'm not going to escort you to the ladies' room."

Marrity began unbuttoning his shirt. He noticed Lepidopt look up at the balcony over their heads and touch his chin, and then look back down at the table. Signaling a watcher? thought Marrity. I bet we'll be leaving here soon.

When he had pressed the paper against his chest and buttoned his shirt over it, and Charlotte had rearranged her blouse over her own copy, Marrity cocked his head and opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated.

Lepidopt raised an eyebrow.

"Nothing," said Marrity, "I just—" He turned to Charlotte. "Do you get any…?" He waved vaguely at his rebuttoned shirt.

She touched her blouse over the hidden piece of paper. "Yes," she said, "The paper, as if it's…" She giggled, then bit her lip. "I think I'm getting your heartbeat."

Marrity grinned in embarrassment. That was it — the paper was faintly pulsing to a heartbeat that was not his. "And I guess I'm getting yours," he said. "Cheaper than stethoscopes."

Mishal had shifted in his chair to look at the crowd behind him. "That's a common effect," he said to Marrity over his shoulder, "when the papers are prepared at the same time." A sandy-haired man in a business suit was walking toward their table, and Mishal seemed to nod slightly in recognition.

Marrity was aware of curiosity from Daphne, and he was glad that wherever she was she had the leisure to notice things like this. He crossed his arms and then patted the couch on either side of himself, hoping this would show her that he was not actually pressed skin to skin against Charlotte.

Charlotte was looking at him, her eyebrows raised above the frames of her sunglasses.

"Clarifying it for Daphne," he explained.

"Ah! Your chaperone!"

The sandy-haired man had paused by the fountain a dozen feet from their table and was watching the people in the lobby with no apparent interest.

"You'll tell us all you know," said Mishal to Charlotte, confirming it.

"Yes," she said.

"Where is the singularity located?"

"I'll tell you as soon as I know. And I'll know as soon as I call them. Where they propose to do the exchange, that's where it is. They'll want to be ready to negate Daphne instantly if things go wrong."

"Fair enough," said Mishal, getting to his feet. "Right now we're going to take you both to a safe house. Or is it a safe tepee, Oren?"

"Tepee," said Lepidopt. "Well, wigwam."

Twenty-three

The twin-engine Bell helicopter had touched down at a shadowed plateau high in the rocky San Jacinto Mountains southwest of Palm Springs, and when its passengers had climbed or been carried out, it had taken off again, the late afternoon sun lighting up its blue fuselage as it climbed above the level of the peaks.

The plateau was a couple of hundred feet wide, crowded up to the mountain shoulder and slanting down to the northeast, and an old flatbed truck was parked next to a gray wooden cabin on the eastern edge. A new-looking black tent was set up on the truck's bed.

Three young men in olive green park ranger uniforms had wheeled two gurneys and a wheelchair across the dirt, and Golze sank shakily into the wheelchair while the young men lifted the bundle that was Daphne onto one gurney and Rascasse's unconscious blanketed body onto the other. Even at twenty-six thousand feet, the breeze was stiflingly hot, but the cabin at the east end of the plateau had a clattering air-conditioning unit on its shingle roof, and when they had all walked or been lifted up the wooden steps, the air in the big kitchen proved to be cool.

The tape was stripped off Daphne's canvas sack, and she kicked it away and hopped down off the gurney and brushed off her jeans as the other gurney, the one with the blanketed body on it, was wheeled to a corner by the front door. One of the uniformed young men, blond haired and with no expression in his pale blue eyes, bolted the door and then, with a kind of indifference that was scarier than rudeness would have been, marched Daphne across the room and handcuffed her to a rusty vertical water pipe against the east wall.

The cabin was mainly a kitchen, and the white refrigerators were at least as old as Grammar's and the wide stoves had ceramic knobs on them. None of the equipment seemed to be hooked up anymore, and the place smelled faintly of motor oil. A lot of rust-brown utensils hung on the wall over the stoves — bottle openers, spatulas, whisks — and Daphne tried to make out the labels on the dusty boxes and cans that were crowded on a shelf above them.

A door in the far wall opened, and a lean white-haired man in a red flannel shirt scuffed into the room, his hands in the pockets of his faded jeans. Behind him Daphne could see a smaller lamplit room, and she noticed that there were two more doors in that wall. She hoped one of them was a restroom.

"I don't see my favorite girl," the man drawled. His face was very tanned and wrinkled, and he had a bushy white mustache.

"She switched sides," rasped Golze from his wheelchair in the middle of the floor. "Took a car and ran off with the young Marrity, and now she's invisible to Rascasse — she couldn't have done that on her own, she must be dickering with the Mossad."

The white-haired newcomer widened his eyes and laughed, then crossed to where Daphne stood against the far wall, his boots knocking on the floor. "Then I've got to find a new favorite girl! What's your name, sugar pie?"

In the corner on the other side of the door from Rascasse, the old Frank Marrity shook his head and said, "I was told there was liquor here," then began laboriously lowering himself to a sitting position against the wall.

"Daphne Marrity," said Daphne.

"Well, Daphne, I'm Canino, like in canine. I'm the old dog around here. I'm guessing you could use a chair."

"I'd like to be driven to a town, Mr. Canino," said Daphne, "where I could call somebody to pick me up. I've got quarters."

Marrity had managed to sit down on the floor, his right leg extended straight out. "Dream on," he muttered.

Canino's eyes were bracketed with wrinkles that deepened when he squinted sideways at old Marrity. "You'll get your bottle as soon as I'm satisfied you can keep your mouth shut. Right now I've got my doubts." To Daphne he added, "If any of these sumbitches give you any sass, you tell me, hear?" He smiled and patted her on the shoulder. "We'll be turning you loose soon enough, child. But not right now. We need to find out who these people are that you're dad's hooked up with. We got no business with your dad or you, but these people will come after you, and we got to talk to them."

"Can I use the bathroom?"

"Good lord yes! I'm sorry. Fred, free her and take her to the bathroom. Wait outside the door."

The same expressionless young man who had handcuffed her now released her and led her by the elbow across the booming wooden floor to the middle door in the far wall. Daphne went in and closed the door behind her.

It was a narrow room, lit only by the early evening light filtering in through a small cobwebbed window high up in the wall.

The ancient toilet proved to be in working order, and the sink, almost invisible in the dimness, produced a trickle of water. As she dried her hands on her blouse, Daphne looked at the window wall.

Her father had said, I won't let them catch me, and I'll come get you soon. These people aren't planning to hurt you. He had also said, Don't do anything in the helicopter! — meaning, don't try to burn up the engines.

Then her father had kissed that woman Charlotte. Charlotte had told these people that they should not try to kill her father, and that they should "negate" her instead of Daphne.

Daphne hoped the woman wouldn't be killed, if negated meant killed. Sometimes at night, even these two years later, Daphne would be awakened by intrusive images of her mother, and a droning undercurrent of bewildered loss.

I'm not enough, loving him by myself, she thought. I need help.

She opened the door before the Fred man might start knocking on it. Fluorescent lights now glowed whitely below the ceiling in the big room.

The box with the portable phone in it began ringing, and old Canino picked it up from the floor and carried it to Golze. "Here you go, chief," he said, unsnapping the case and lifting the phone out.

Daphne jumped then, and even felt a twitch too in Fred's restraining hand on her upper arm, for a cluster of ancient whisks on the wall over the stove had begun buzzing and vibrating, throwing off a cloud of dust. Old Marrity's bad leg drummed on the floor planks as he made an abortive scramble toward the front door.

A voice came shaking out of the ringing whisks, with a baritone quality provided by the resonance of the wooden wall. "It's Charlotte. Go along with what she says."

Golze nodded irritably and switched the phone on. "Charlotte!" he said. "What's the good word?"

Charlotte's voice was scratchy under crackling static. "Oblivion, Paul," she said. "You know you want it too. Meet me at dawn somewhere and we'll do the switch. Daphne walks out first from your side, then I walk out from mine and you take me in exchange for her."

"Okay, that works for us," said Golze. "El Mirador Medical Plaza, at Tacheva Drive and Indian Canyon Drive. That's, uh, in Palm Springs."

"Duh. I'll be armed, and if anything goes funny, I promise you I'll be able to kill both myself and Daphne, as well as anybody else who might be standing nearby, and you'll be left with nothing. Right?"

"Well, not with nothing," said Golze. "We've got the directions on how to use the time machine. We've debriefed old Marrity thoroughly, and we'll kill him at the first sign of any trouble from your side. So don't let your new pals imagine they can just wipe us all out like the pope did at Carcassonne. You know they have no interest in this exchange."

"I've got no pals. 'But I will go where they are hid who never were begot.' And I don't care about the time machine. You can all fight about that in a world that never included any Charlotte Sinclair."

"I hope they don't negate you!" piped up Daphne.

"You be me, kiddo," came Charlotte's faint voice. "Go easy on the sauce." There was an enormous click, and the line was dead.

Golze turned the phone off, then said to the ceiling, "She's sincere. If the Mossad is running her to get to us, she doesn't know it. Fred, cuff the girl to the pipe."

"She's with them," said the Rascasse voice, sounding to Daphne like a bowling ball rolling over broken glass, "or I'd see her, and I don't. They've given her a masking amulet."

"Speaking of which sort of thing," said Golze, "get the girl's prints."

Canino nodded and touched his forehead, then crossed to the stoves and lifted a foot-square pane of glass from a white enameled pan. Clear oil ran off the corner of the glass in a long, glittering string, and he wiped the front and back surfaces with an ancient towel and then turned to Daphne, holding the square of glass out toward her.

"If you would press your hands on that, sweetie."

Daphne did, and then accepted the towel from him and managed to wipe most of the oil off her hands on its stiff fabric.

"And," Canino said, "I'll take just the tiniest bit of your hair." He clicked open a switchblade knife and cut off a pinch of her brown hair. "Thankee."

Then Fred took her back to the vertical pipe and ratcheted the handcuff onto her wrist again.

"I think we can assume Charlotte's with them," said Canino, pressing the hairs onto the oily glass and then wiping his hands too and tossing the towel into a corner, "and that they'll come with her, acting like backup but ready to push her aside and take you." He pointed at Golze. "Or Denis. Is he still alive?"

"Fred," said Golze, waving toward the gurney in the corner, "if you would…"

Fred walked to the gurney in the corner and flipped back the blanket.

"Shit!" he exclaimed. "This is a woman!"

Canino burst out with a surprised laugh. "Now where did you clowns leave poor old Denis?"

"That's me, you fools," said Rascasse, managing to make the whisks and the wall almost roar, "I was a woman once." After a pause the voice went on, more quietly, "I see I've now reverted back to that."

"I'm not sure this can be said to be… going well," said Golze thoughtfully.

Daphne was horrified to realize that she was about to start giggling, though not in merriment. She clamped her teeth together hard and didn't look toward Canino.

"Some magical procedures," rang Rascasse's voice from over the stoves, "can't be done by women. I found certain alchemists who reconfigured all my elements, and fixed me in the masculine estate."

Canino shook his head, frowning sympathetically. "Looks like you've come unfixed, old buddy."

Daphne snorted, and then she was laughing hysterically, trying to stifle it by biting her handcuffed fist.

Fred turned to her and, still with no expression, slapped her cheek stingingly hard.

Rascasse's voice went on, "I'm losing my attachment to this place and time. I never quite came back to here, I think, from last night's freeway trip. But I can last until we close this time line out. Paul, radio for reinforcements now. Three cars — we'll want the helicopter too."

Daphne had noticed that he was speaking like someone in Shakespeare, the same cadence. Rubbing her cheek, and with a cautious glance at Fred, she asked, "Why are you speaking in iambic pentameter?"

"I need to keep my thoughts straight, little girl," rattled the whisks, "and meter is an aqueduct for them." After a pause, they went on, "I was a little girl myself, you know."

Daphne just nodded, wide-eyed.

"I sure signed on with the winning team," said Marrity. "Where's that bottle?"

"I'll dig one out for you," said Canino, looking at a watch on his tanned wrist, "as soon as I get back from taking my favorite girl for a little walk."

He signaled Fred to unlock the cuffs, and then Canino unbolted the door and waved Daphne ahead of him, outside. To Fred he said, "Watch us."

As she tapped down the two steps to the dirt, she listened to Canino's steps behind her over the alien buzz of cicadas, and she considered running. The sky was dark blue already, with a few shreds of clouds showing pink over the mountain's shoulder, but the breeze was still warm. Could she outrun Canino and Fred and hide, somewhere among all those rocks up there?

A puff of dust sprang up from the ground a dozen feet ahead of her, simultaneous with a breathy snap from behind her. She spun around.

"I wasted a dart," said Canino, grinning as he lowered a pistol, "but you see it works. Tranquilizer darts, Fred has one too. You'd fall down — bloody nose, torn clothes — we don't want that, do we?"

"No," said Daphne. Mentally she reached out for the gun, but she knew she couldn't get away before Fred could shoot her with a dart. The cicadas sounded like a hundred dentists' drills.

She sighed, and followed Canino around the corner of the cabin to the flatbed truck that had a tent set up on its bed. The tent was hardly bigger than a ticket kiosk at a carnival.

"Now this tent!" said Canino, putting a hand on the edge of the truck bed and lithely vaulting up onto it, his boots knocking on the wood, "is where you're going to be spending the next couple of hours. Girl needs her privacy. Gimme your hand." He leaned over the edge and took hold of Daphne's hand and then lifted her up onto the boards. Up close, Daphne could see that the tent was made of some thick black cloth.

Looking back, she saw that Fred was leaning against the corner of the cabin. She looked the other way and almost gasped — far below the edge of the little plateau, the lights of what must have been Palm Springs lay in lines and squares against the darkness of the desert-valley floor.

Canino pulled the tent flap aside and reached into the darkness; a moment later she heard a click over the rattle of the cabin's air-conditioning unit, and an electric bulb was glowing on the end of a wire swinging from the tent's peak. Below it in the narrow space, a kitchen chair was bolted to the truck-bed boards, and a silvery roll of duct tape lay next to one of the legs. In front of the chair, a section of white plastic pipe was mounted like a telescope on an aluminum pole, and the far end of the pipe stuck outside the tent through a close-fitting hole in the fabric. Behind the chair were stacked a lot of metal boxes with cables connecting them, and at the top were what seemed to be two car headlights.

"This here's sort of a deprivation chamber, though not sensory," said Canino with a squinting smile. "I've got to tape you in, but you'll have fresh air" — he clicked a switch with the toe of his boot, and a motor hummed and air was being blown into the tent — "and music." He touched a dial, and faintly she could hear recorded strings and woodwinds now — vaguely classical in a comfortless "easy-listening" way.

"Deprivation of what?" she asked hoarsely, and in spite of the hot, acid-smelling air her jaw was tingling as if her teeth might start to chatter.

"Trouble," said Canino kindly. "Sit down."

Daphne took what felt like her last look at the world — the rock-crusted mountains against the darkening sky — and then sat down in the chair.

Canino picked up the roll of tape and began pulling off strips, cutting them free with his teeth.

"You ever hear the old rule, 'Love thy neighbor,' Daphne?"

"Sure."

Her right ankle was farthest from him, and he reached in under the chair to loop tape around the cuff of her jeans and the chair leg.

"How are you supposed to do that, really?" He pressed the edge of the tape down firmly. "Lots of neighbors aren't very nice."

"Well, you can love them without liking them, my dad says."

With a ripping sound, he unrolled another length of tape, and she heard his teeth click as he bit it off. He taped her left ankle to the chair leg.

"Your daddy's right. Did you ever have a cat or dog die, that you loved? Well, your mom died, didn't she?"

"Yes." Daphne took a deep breath and let it out.

"But God loves us, right? That's what everybody says." He pulled her right wrist down until it was against a slat of the chair's back, and grunted as he worked a piece of tape between the slats.

"Right," said Daphne. "God loves us."

"But He kills our cats and our dogs and our mothers. Pretty cruelly too, sometimes! Why is He always doing shit like that? I'll tell you a secret."

"I don't want to hear any secrets." Daphne was keeping her voice steady only with an effort.

Now Canino was holding her left wrist against the outside chair-back slat, and he was able to tape it down more quickly.

"It's like neighbors. God loves us, but He doesn't like us. He doesn't like us at all."

Suddenly Daphne was aware of her father's love and urgent concern, and she knew he had been radiating these for at least the last several seconds.

I'm okay, Dad, she thought, hoping he could catch the thought. She told herself not to be afraid, since her father could sense her fear. God might not like her, as Canino had said, but her father did.

Canino straightened up. "I'm going to have to turn off the light," he said, "but you can look through that length of pipe at Palm Springs. See?" He switched off the overhead lightbulb and stepped back, out of the tent.

Daphne peered into the plastic tube, and there were the distant lights of the city, far, far below.

"I'll come out and see how you're doing in a while," Canino said. He let the tent flap fall closed, and then she heard his boots scuff on the truck-bed boards, crunch into the dirt, and recede away.

Daphne stared longingly at the remote lights of restaurants and theaters and homes, and clung to her father's mind.

Fred was leaning against the cabin wall in the gathering darkness. Canino stopped beside him and pulled a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket.

"What with that music and the synchronized lights and all," Canino said, "she'll be pretty dissociated, come dawn. Have a couple of the guys get that piece of oiled glass down the hill. You stay here." He stretched. "I'm gonna get a beer, you want a beer?"

"I don't drink. The plan is to proceed with negating her?" Fred waved toward the truck and the tent.

"Oh shit yes. We can't negate Charlotte — she's been involved too long, we'd lose years. She's stupid, or she thinks we are. Hell, she's the one who fucked over that old guy in New Jersey, to get us the Einstein papers from Princeton! Remember, the old guy killed himself in jail afterward? Would we have got those papers anyway, without Charlotte? Maybe, maybe not. And negating Charlotte wouldn't stop this kid from having burned up the Chaplin movie. Nah, it's gotta be the girl."

"Kill her father?"

"Sure, why not? There's no way he won't be coming along with Charlotte tomorrow morning, so that should be easy. But," he added, laughing softly, "by tomorrow noon he'll be alive again, in a brand-new world. He just won't ever have had a daughter."

Twenty-four

The twelve-sided motel room was crowded. Frank Marrity and Charlotte sat on the double bed with an ashtray on the bedspread between them, Lepidopt and Malk sat on the carpeted floor, and old Mishal was rubbing his eyes at the lamplit desk by the bathroom door. On the far side of the bed, blocking one of the knee-level windows, stood the concrete block Marrity had last seen in his grandmother's shed. Somebody had apparently been shooting at it since then — it was pocked and cracked in the right handprint and in the imprint of the cane, and the S in Sid had almost entirely been chipped off. Alongside the block were stacked four cardboard moving boxes with old cloth-insulated wires trailing out of the tops. The light in the narrow ceiling threw an antiquating sepia radiance over everything.

Marrity's Einstein letters lay on the table in front of Mishal, each page now in a clear plastic sleeve.

"I've read the letters," Mishal said, leaning back from the desktop lamp that had made his face look like a skull. "They're supplemental. Valuable, but Einstein assumed his reader already knew a lot of things we don't know."

"I notice he gives page numbers for something called Grumberg's Fairy Tales, said Lepidopt. "I could look that up."

"His handwriting was no good," said Mishal. "That's 'Grimm bros,' and I know what story he's referring to. It's 'Faithful John,' in which crows are represented as being able to see the past and future. Sequential events are on the ground, along roads the characters have to travel, but the crows live in a higher dimension, and can see what's in the future and past of the characters. He's explaining higher-dimensional perspective to his daughter." He stretched. "Bert, did I see you making coffee?"

Malk leaned forward to look into the bathroom. "It'll be ready any minute."

"We won't be having any for a while yet. And," Mishal went on, "Einstein mentions having told Roosevelt — Einstein calls him the king of Naples in the letters, it's all in terms of characters out of The Tempest — having told him about the atomic bomb, but he says he didn't tell Roosevelt about this other thing he's discovered, which is the time machine. Or maybe it's the singularity you told us about," he said, nodding to Charlotte. "Most likely they're both parts of the same thing. Right before his death in 1955 he writes that he's talked to 'NB,' who visited in October, and he says NB fortunately has no clue about the time-machine possibility inherent in the math. Niels Bohr visited Einstein in October of '54." He squinted at Marrity. "Basically all he does in the letters is tell your grandmother why she should destroy the machine in her shed."

"She tried to," said Marrity, "at the end."

"And he mentions 'the Caliban who is your chaste incubus,'" Mishal said. "That's the thing that showed up on your daughter's hospital-room TV set?"

"Maybe," said Marrity. "It quoted one of Caliban's lines from The Tempest. You heard it," Marrity said to Lepidopt.

Lepidopt nodded. "And it was trying to get your daughter to let it into her mind. It said, 'the mountains are burning,' and 'when the fires are out it will be too late.' It's what your grandmother died to get rid of — she jumped sideways, as it were, across space instead of time, and she scraped the Caliban thing off, like a psychic barnacle." He remembered that poor Bozzaris had been amused by the phrase, when they had talked in Newport Beach — only about twelve hours ago! "And the so to speak friction of it started all these fires in the mountains."

"Caliban," said Marrity. "What is it?"

"It's pretty clearly a dybbuk," said Mishal wearily. "More correctly dybbuk me-ru'ah ra'ah, the cleaving of an evil spirit. More correctly still, it's an ibbur, the spirit of a man who has no proper place in the world, and has to find a host to cling to, to live in." He looked at Lepidopt. "Are the fires still burning in the mountains?"

"They were today."

"Then the dybbuk is still stalking your daughter," Mishal said to Marrity. "But she's in no danger unless she invites him in; he can't penetrate her mind forcibly."

Marrity probed for Daphne's mind, but sensed only her ongoing attention to him, and uneasy boredom. Faintly he thought he could hear Muzak. He tried to project a smile and a clasping hand. "How soon is dawn?" he asked.

"Hours yet," said Malk. "We won't even leave here for hours yet."

"We should go there," said Marrity desperately, clenching his fists. "I should go there."

"Go where?" asked Malk, not unkindly. "They won't be at that hospital until dawn, and they might be anywhere now. They could be holding your daughter in Cathedral City, Indio, Palm Desert — not to mention all the mountains around there. We've got to wait till dawn."

"What do we do in the meantime?" asked Charlotte. Her sunglasses were incongruous in this dimly lit little room, but nobody had commented on them. She was chewing her fingernails — Mishal had said they couldn't smoke tonight because it would repel ghosts.

"We need to know more than we know," said Mishal. "And so we will mine some old science."

Marrity saw Lepidopt frown for a moment.

"Nobody," Mishal said, "saw any use in Richard Hamilton's matrix arrays until Heisenberg used them to work out his uncertainty principle seventy years later, right? And Fitzgerald's crazy guess that an ether headwind compressed objects in the direction they're traveling turned out to be an accurate description of what happened, though his explanation was wrong. The Riemann-Christoffel curvature tensor was considered a useless fantasy until Einstein needed it for General Relativity. In fact," he went on, looking at Marrity, "your great-grandfather renounced the cosmological constant he had originally put into his General Relativity equations — he said including it had been the biggest blunder of his life — but according to Charlotte here, it wasn't nonsense after all. Well, I think he knew that himself, all along. He was simply — justifiably — afraid of it.

"I'm a physicist," Mishal went on, "but I have to say that most physicists aren't comfortable with the reality they're supposed to be mapping. Most of them still start by setting up their problems in terms of Newtonian mechanics, and then only as they proceed do they shove in the quantum-mechanical concepts — like those old 'color' postcards that were black-and-white photographs painted over with watercolors. They should start with the quantum eye, that wider perspective. It's the same with the supernatural factor: We learned not to add it in after the problems were defined, but to have those crayons already in our box from the start, alongside the quantum crayons."

In a whisper Lepidopt asked, "Shouldn't we have been talking in whispers, all this time? And fasting?"

"You were a good student, Oren! But this time," said Mishal, standing up and nodding toward the slab and the boxes on the far side of the bed, "I think we're close enough already."

Charlotte was frowning. "Who'll come to us?"

"Ghosts," said Mishal. "We're going to have a seance. Oren, open the whisky, if you would, and pour each of us a full glass."

"First sensible remark all night," said Charlotte. "Why do we want ghosts to come to us? I've met them, they're pretty useless creatures."

"There's only four cups in the bathroom," said Malk. "Plastic."

"Frank and I can share," said Charlotte.

"I expect the ghosts you've met are the ones that were leaning in from their side," said Mishal, taking a freshly opened bottle of Canadian Club whisky from Lepidopt. "Talking backward and all. They make more sense if we visit them on their side."

Malk had got up to fetch the plastic cups from the bathroom, and now he peeled cellophane off one and handed it to Mishal.

"Thank you." Mishal poured amber whiskey into it and held the filled cup out to Charlotte, and Marrity watched it carefully so that she'd be able to take it without a fumble.

And why am I helping her deceive these people? he asked himself.

The old man filled Lepidopt's and Malk's plastic cups, then filled one for himself and clanked the bottle onto the table. "And," he said, "talking to ghosts on their own turf is much easier if one is not excessively sober." He raised his cup.

Charlotte took a deep sip and handed the cup to Marrity. I guess I'll start cutting back tomorrow, he told himself, and gulped a mouthful of the liquor; and when he had swallowed it and handed the cup back to her, he was grateful that Mishal's procedure, whatever it might be, required this.

Charlotte finished it and held the emptied cup out to Mishal.

"You're a good soldier," the old man said, tilting the bottle over the cup as Marrity made sure to watch.

Daphne was sleepy, but her ribs ached and the air being blown into the tent was colder now, and she wished she'd been wearing a sweater when she and her father had gone to lunch at Alfredo's yesterday. She was as aware of her father as if he'd been standing behind her chair; she tasted every mouthful of whisky that he swallowed, and she even felt that the alcohol was warming her.

The faint music from the speaker behind her seemed to have been lost in the airwaves for decades. It was some kind of brassy swing, but any liveliness in the melodies was dried out by the lifeless performance — she imagined a bandstand painted with glittery musical notes in a club out of an old Fred Astaire movie, with ancient, weary musicians in moth-eaten tuxedos swiveling their heavy saxophones this way and that.

The view of Palm Springs held her attention by default. White car headlights seemed to be streetlights that had come unmoored from their places in the ranks along the boulevards, and after a while she was able to make out the cycling pinpoints of red and green that were traffic signals. Houses were dots of yellow light, tormenting in their hints of families at dinner so far away.

A vocalist was accompanying the music now, and after a few moments Daphne was able to make out the nasally crooning words:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,

And what strength I have's my own,

Which is most faint. Now 'tis true

I must be here confined by you…

Gentle breath of yours my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails.

Let your indulgence blot his sin—

Daphne, speak! And let me in!

Daphne knew it was the thing that had shown itself as a cartoon on her hospital TV set last night. The wind from the blower on her jeans felt like fluttering hands.

"Daddy!" she yelled, but the audible yell was just an involuntary echo of her mental cry.

In the cabin the upright pipe by the stove suddenly split, shooting a burst of steam across the room. Golze screamed weakly as the hot vapor whipped at the hair on the back of his head, and his right hand clawed the wheel to roll his wheelchair forward in a quarter circle across the floor.

He blinked tears from his eyes as he squinted back at the pipe, which was just leaking a trickle of water now from the split section.

"She's doing this," he snarled. "She's a poltergeist, she can set things on fire. You have to trank her."

"Aw, she's just grabbing hold of something, it's a reflex," said Canino, slouching forward to peer at the ruptured length of galvanized steel. "She was cuffed to that pipe, so vertigo made her grab it. It wasn't malicious."

"My head is scalded," Golze said. His right hand wavered up as if to feel the back of his head, then just fell to his lap. "She's dangerous."

"You'll be getting a brand-new head soon," Canino told him.

Marrity had choked and sprayed whisky across the carpet and the tan wall, and now, on his feet and coughing, he burst out, "Christ, that thing's after her again, the triffid or whatever it is! You've got to—"

"There's nothing we can — do from here," said Mishal solemnly. "She knows not to admit him."

Marrity closed his eyes and thought, Don't let him in, don't say anything. Don't let him trick you.

He was sweating, and he realized that a big part of his gnawing anxiety was the knowledge that his own older self was out there in Palm Springs, participating in this or at least not stopping it. Daphne's own father was letting this go on.

"Charlotte," he said, "you called them before — call them again. I need to talk to the, the old guy who's me." He focused his gaze on Mishal and made himself speak clearly. "Let her call them again."

Mishal just raised his eyebrows and stared at him owlishly.

"If that triffid thing gets her," Marrity went on, "she'll be linked to it, as well as to me." Or even instead of me, he thought with a shudder. "They don't want that. If I tell them—"

"But they're not going to negate Daphne," said Charlotte, "they agreed to negate me instead—"

"They'll still negate the girl, if they possibly can," pronounced Mishal. "It was the girl who wrecked the movie component of Lieserl's completed machine." He raised a finger at Marrity. "It's a dybbuk, not a tribb — not a triffid. And we need to be about summoning our ghosts."

"It might actually help," said Malk. When the others looked at him, he shrugged. "If we shake up the ghosts first, get their attention, by letting young Marrity call old Marrity, that's likely to help draw them when we do the actual seance. It'll be a curspic — a conspicuous violation of normal reality."

"This Vespers crowd couldn't trace it," Lepidopt said. "The phone line is routed through half a dozen cutouts; and they can't psychically fix on us, especially here." He waved vaguely at the conical room.

After a pause, "B'seder," said Mishal, "let's do it, we can begin the seance with that. We're all drunk enough. Here." He stepped back to the desk and turned the top Einstein letter upside down, and an envelope fell out of the plastic sleeve. Clumsily he shook out four more envelopes and handed them to Lepidopt, who passed one to each of the others. The envelopes were all tan with age, and each had Lisa Marrity's name and address on the front in Einstein's handwriting.

"Oren," said Mishal, "break open your… holograph amulet. And everybody's got to crowd over to the other side of the bed, by the cement block."

Charlotte and Marrity turned around on the bed while the three Mossad men shuffled around the foot of the bed and edged between the mattress and the block.

"One at a time, now," said Mishal, "everybody press your right hand into the handprint in the cement."

"It's cracked," said Charlotte as she leaned forward to spread her fingers in the indentations.

"Your old friends shot at it this afternoon," said Mishal.

Marrity was the last to do it, shifting across the bed to reach it, and he assumed that the warm dampness of the handprint had been imparted by the people who had touched it only moments before. When he lifted his hand away, a quarter-size flake of gray cement clung to his palm, and he closed his hand on it and shoved it into his pocket.

"Now," said Mishal, "everybody lick the glue strip on the Einstein envelope you've got."

"Ugh," said Charlotte after she had licked hers. "It's like French-kissing a guy who's been dead thirty years."

"Yes," said Mishal, grimacing over his own envelope. "It's likely to catch his attention, though."

"The envelopes were sticky," said Marrity, "when I picked them up, Sunday afternoon. My grandmother must have been licking them too."

"That's kind of touching, really," said Mishal. "I guess she wanted to have a last chat with her father."

Charlotte grimaced. "I French-kissed your grandmother too? This is getting revolting." Marrity could hear tension as well as drunkenness in her voice.

"Stop being disgusting, my dear," said Mishal. "Now if you would call your, ah, erstwhile employers again. I think Bert's right, a conversation between Marrity and his older self might also help catch the old fellow's attention."

Charlotte rolled back over the bed and stood up unsteadily. Marrity followed her and stared at the portable telephone case on the little table by the Einstein letters, and she picked it up smoothly. Then he leaned over her shoulder and stared at the keypad so she could punch in the number.

She handed him the phone, and only at that moment did he realize that he was very drunk, and that he had no idea what he wanted to say to his older self.

Mishal stepped up and pushed a button on the side of the telephone, and then the background hiss was clearly audible to everyone in the room.

"I'll let you talk to him," Mishal said, "but not privately."

Marrity nodded and set the phone down on the bedspread.

A moment later a strained voice from the speaker said clearly, "Yes? I'm told that this is Frank Marrity the Lesser."

"Could I talk to myself, please," said Marrity distinctly.

"You don't have to lean over it," said Mishal. "Just stand and talk normally."

The person on the other end of the line laughed weakly and then said, "Why not?" and added, away from the microphone, "It's for you."

Marrity heard some furious whispering, and then heard again the voice of the old man who had spoken to him and Daphne in their kitchen yesterday morning.

"Hello?" the old man said belligerently.

"That dybbuk thing is bothering Daphne," said Marrity. "Go to wherever you've got her and say, 'Go away, Matt.' Don't let her talk at all. It might quote some lines from The Tempest at you — just respond with Prospero's lines. I assume you still remember them."

"I don't have any idea what the hell you're talking about. I've tried very hard to help you—"

"By eliminating my daughter from the universe! Your daughter! You should be puttingy our life on the line to protect her. How can you have got so ... so depraved in twenty years?"

He could hear the older man breathing heavily. "You may very well find out. Don't stand in back of any cars she's behind the wheel of."

Marrity realized that the other man was drunk. Well, so was Marrity. The parallel frightened him. In what sense was the older man the "other" man?

He was aware of puzzlement from Daphne, and tried to project a reassurance he couldn't quite feel.

He said, "I could never decide to get rid of—"

"I couldn't either, at your age, with just the experiences you've had! Who do you think I am? The Harmonic Convergence cracked the continuity of our life, and in the true version of our life there was some, some variant stimulus and so you didn't do a tracheotomy! She died! She was supposed to die! When you get to where I am—"

"I'll never get to where you are. I'll make better choices."

"Choices! You don't get choices, you get… situations that you react to — the actual cumulative you reacts, with whatever half-ass wiring you've got at the time, not some hovering 'soul.' You're a mercury switch — if the spring tilts you to the right degree, you complete a circuit, and if it's got metal fatigue, it tilts you less, and you don't. You don't have free will, sonny."

"Of course I do, of course you do, what kind of excuse—"

"Bullshit. If—" The older Marrity was panting. "If a scientist could know every last detail of your physiology and life experiences, he could predict with absolute accuracy every 'choice' you'd make in any moral quandary."

Quandary! To Marrity the sentence sounded as if it had been prepared ahead of time. Not for talking to me, he thought, this old wretch couldn't have anticipated talking to me — he must have cooked it up for his own solace.

"Laplace's determinist manifesto," came another man's languid voice from the background. "It overlooks Heisenberg's uncertainty."

"Okay," said the older Marrity furiously, "then it's probability and statistics that dictate what we'll do! But it's not—"

"It's a sin," said Marrity, breathing deeply himself. To Daphne he projected a vague cluster of images — hugging her, holding her hand— and he was able to have more confidence in his reassurance now.

"Said the fourth domino to the twenty-first!" exclaimed the older Marrity, laughing angrily. "'Ah, wilt Thou with predestination round / Emesh me and impute my fall to sin?'" The older man audibly took a deep breath. "But listen, you and I need to talk — there are things I've got to tell you — you'll be rich—"

"I wouldn't take them," said Marrity, "from you. What you can do for me is right now go to Daphne and say 'Go away, Matt.'"

"Ahh — go buy crutches now while they're cheap."

The phone clicked, and then there was just a buzz.

Marrity stared at the inert telephone on the bed. He couldn't bring himself to look at any of the others, especially Charlotte, who had volunteered to take oblivion in Dahpne's place. The horrible old man on the phone had been himself.

As if she'd read his mind, Charlotte said, "He's not you. He never was." She smiled, her eyes unreadable behind the sunglasses. "He never met me, for one thing."

Marrity tried to smile back. "He never kissed you, anyway, I'm pretty sure," he said gruffly.

"Tilt the block over onto the bed," said Mishal, "carefully, and then we all stand around it and hold hands."

Marrity shoved the Einstein envelope into his pocket so that he'd have both hands free.

Twenty-five

When the slab was lying across the bed with its anonymous back face upward, Marrity and Charlotte sat cross-legged on the pillows while Lepidopt hunched between the wall and the edge of the block, Malk stood on the door side, and Mishal crouched on the foot of the bed.

Mishal caught Lepidopt's eye and nodded toward the cement surface, and Lepidopt reached into his shirt and pulled a little piece of folded paper from a broken locket. He unfolded the yellowed paper and set it carefully on the cement.

"This is a piece from a letter Einstein wrote in 1948, which was auctioned off to support the Haganah — precursor to the Israel Defense Forces," he added to Marrity and Charlotte. He pulled Marrity's matchbook from his pocket and struck a match.

He held the match to the paper, and a ring of blue flame quickly circled the crabbed words on it.

"Hold hands, all," said Mishal. And when they were linked in a circle, he began reciting words in what must have been Hebrew; Malk and Lepidopt joined in with some formal responses. Twice Marrity caught the syllables of "Einstein."

Suddenly Marrity wished he had not drunk so much of the whiskey — sitting on the bed, leaning back against the headboard in the warm room, he was falling asleep. Oh, let 'em do it without me, he thought. I should rest up anyway, for exertions at dawn. Dawn? Of what day, what year? I'm one of five people holding hands around somebody's gravestone, he thought, and his last blurry thought was, I wonder which of the five I am.

Lepidopt's right hand, clasped in Marrity's left hand, seemed to change — the skin was cooler and looser over the bones, as if it were suddenly an old man's hand — but Marrity didn't have the energy to look to his left. He closed his eyes.

He dreamed about Einstein, his great-grandfather. Einstein was young, with curly dark hair and a neat mustache, and he was sitting on the balcony of a second-floor apartment in Zurich with his friend Friedrich Adler. The sky was gray, and they were bundled up in coats and scarves, and with steaming breath they were discussing philosophy and physics — Schopenhauer and Mach — and Adler was very excited; he kept pushing his round glasses up on his nose, and his cold-reddened ears stuck out to the sides, and his mustache straggled over his mouth as he spoke. Both men were thirty-one years old, and Einstein's son and Adler's daughter were making a snow fort on the sidewalk below; Einstein could hear their happy shouts over the rattle of carriage wheels. Einstein had recently been hired as an associate professor at the University of Zurich, a post he had got because Adler, who had been the first choice of the Directorate of Education, had stepped aside and proclaimed that Einstein was the better man for the job. Adler's father was Victor Adler, leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, and what Friedrich actually hoped to do was follow his father into politics.

It was an idyllic several months, in Zurich in the winter of 1909. Adler and his family lived in the apartment directly below the Einstein family, and on Thursday nights after teaching a class in thermodynamics, Einstein would walk with the students to the Terrase café, and when the café closed he would take them back to his apartment with him, and Adler would join in the coffee-driven discussions.

But in the spring of 1910, Einstein began corresponding with the German University in Prague, which offered him the chair of mathematical physics, which for his sake they would rename the chair of theoretical physics. The Austrian Minister of Education and Instruction, Karl Count Sturgkh, opposed it, but Count Sturgkh's preferred candidate eventually withdrew; and so, after having taught only two semesters at the University of Zurich, Einstein moved his family to Prague in April 1911.

Count Sturgkh eventually became prime minister of Austria, resigning in 1918 and retiring with his family to Innsbruck after the war.

Einstein's friends were baffled by his decision to move — the German University in Prague wasn't one of the great universities, and Prague was divided into German, Czech, and Jewish quarters, mutually resentful. But Einstein had been working on his maschinchen, and had found that he needed to consult certain rabbis at the yeshiva, the Jewish school, in Prague.

Einstein had offered to let Friedrich Adler have the position at the University of Zurich after all, but by this time Adler was editing the Social Democrat paper Volksrecht, and he let the appointment go. But the paper failed to satisfy him, and his political ambitions seemed stalled, and he wrote to Einstein in October 1911, pleading with him to visit him in Zurich.

Einstein wrote back explaining that he could not come anytime soon, since he had committed to attend the Solvay Conference at the Grand Hotel Metropole in Brussels, where he would be meeting with all the great physicists of the world.

When he returned to Prague one evening in November, Einstein learned that Friedrich Adler had fatally shot himself in the head on Halloween. Einstein spent the rest of that night in his office at the German University, staring out at the untended walled cemetery below his windows.

Snow obscured Marrity's dream, and when it blew away in gusts, he saw Einstein again, walking on a mountain path with a dark-haired young woman — and Marrity recognized her as his grandmother. She was frowning and her lips were pursed as she trudged through the snow flurries behind her father, but Marrity thought she looked like Greta Garbo.

Einstein was older than he had been in the first vision — his hair was shaggier and beginning to gray, and the line of his jaw was sagging. Marrity knew it was 1928 now. Einstein was staggering along carrying something cylindrical wrapped in a blanket.

When he set it down and pulled off the blanket, Marrity saw that it was a big glass tube mounted on a board with a car battery.

They stopped, panting plumes of steam, and with gloved hands Einstein pulled a roll of gold wire out of his pocket and began straightening it and bending it, squinting against the wind as he peered down into the valley below.

When Einstein had bent and cut the wire into a swastika, he laid it on the snowy path and knelt to connect it to wires from the glass cylinder; and then he sat down and took off his boots and socks while his daughter, Marrity's grandmother, wrung her gloved hands. Finally the old man stood up barefoot in the snow and stepped onto the swastika. Something gleamed in his hand, and in the moment before he closed it in his fist, Marrity saw that it was a brass bullet shell. Einstein stared into the valley and closed his eyes—

—and for a timeless moment he was rushing through a limitless space where lifetimes were visible as static ropes or sparks arcing across a void—

—and then he was in Zurich again and it was the autumn of 1911, in the remembered attic where he and Adler had spent so many evenings talking by gaslight. Adler was sitting in a chair with a glass in his hand and a nearly empty bottle on the table beside him. Einstein hurried across the room to him, still barefoot, and began talking. They talked all night.

The next morning, comfortable in borrowed boots and confident that he had rid his friend of the idea of suicide, Einstein waited until his young wife had taken their son out for a walk and his younger self had begun his two-hundred-yard walk down the Gloriastrasse toward the University of Zurich buildings. The older Einstein hurried up the stairs, broke the front-door lock, grabbed a gold chain of his wife's, and, snapping it in two, arranged it in a swastika on the balcony; then, taking off the boots and staring at the receding back of his younger self, he closed his eyes.

And the recoil hit him. He was back on the mountain in the gusting snow with Lieserl, but his heart seemed to have clenched shut and a pain like electrocution knocked him to the icy ground. His last sight was insanity — he seemed to see dozens of naked infants scattered across the frozen path.

He woke in the house of the friend he'd been visiting, attended by a doctor who had actually dedicated a book on heart pathology to Einstein; and on a regime of no salt or nicotine, Einstein slowly recovered from what the doctor had diagnosed as acute dilation of the heart.

But Einstein had two sets of memories now — in the original time line Friedrich Adler had shot himself in 1911; but in this new time line Adler had instead lived on, and in 1916 had assassinated the Austrian prime minister — fatally shot him in the head, as if he'd had to shoot somebody that way. And the man he killed, the man who was prime minister in 1916, was the same Count Strugkh who had given Einstein the professorship in Prague in 1911.

In prison Adler wrote an irrational treatise attempting to disprove Einstein's relativity theory.

Einstein, recovering in his sickbed in the Alps, was the only person on earth who remembered the original version of history — and so it was to Einstein that Strugkh's unconceived son came.

In the original time line, Strugkh had had a son in 1918, who would have been ten years old now — but the son's conception and birth were part of the time line that Einstein had canceled. Einstein met the dispossessed waif in his dreams, and, sickened with guilt at what his intervention had done, welcomed the lost creature into his mind.

Lieserl also had found a waif to care for. She had snatched up one of the impossible babies from the snow as she had run to get help for her stricken father, and though the other infants were gone by the time she got back, the little boy she had taken in was healthy — Lieserl said he was too fat, and she told her father that she was worried about the angularity of the back of the baby's head. Einstein felt the back of his own head, but said nothing. Lieserl named the boy Derek.

Einstein began to have terrifying dreams, often a recurrent nightmare in which he felt as if he were falling—not just falling from that Alpine mountain ledge but falling right out of existence, so that Hermann and Pauline Einstein never had a son named Albert. He realized that this was his subconscious applying to himself what had happened to the orphan who now had never existed anywhere but in his head.

In his dreams it said its name was Matt. Desperately Einstein told it stories, confided his mathematical speculations to it, played endless improvisations on his violin for its frail distraction — looked at the sky and told it about the sun and moon and stars.

And then one night it was gone from his dreams, and in the morning Lieserl told her father that all night she had dreamed of a boy named Matt who wanted her to let him in; but she had sensed that he was dead, and had not complied.

In horror Einstein had sent his daughter and the baby she had rescued to live with a woman he knew in Berlin, an old lover of his named Grete Markstein. For a while he sent money for their support.

Marrity snapped awake with an embarrassed grin, but nobody was looking at him. At the foot of the bed, Mishal was speaking softly in German, clearly asking questions and then pausing.

Marrity looked to the left — it was just Lepidopt who was holding his hand and staring at Mishal, but Marrity was sure it had been Einstein, or Einstein's ghost, who had been holding his hand for the last minute or two.

Charlotte squeezed his right hand, and he realized that she didn't have to look at him to know that his eyes had been closed for awhile.

He didn't sense any alarm from Daphne. Maybe one of her captors had gone to her and said, "Go away, Matt!"

Marrity's face went cold, for now he knew what Matt was, what Caliban was. It was the boy whom Einstein had inadvertently negated in 1928, just as the Vespers meant to negate Daphne; and he wanted to tell Charlotte that negation wasn't necessarily the absolute oblivion she had volunteered for.

He tightened his hand on hers — but it wasn't Charlotte's hand. Big knuckles, a blocky ring— Then he was dreaming again — he saw Lieserl and Einstein arguing in the familiar kitchen on Batsford Street in Pasadena. Lieserl was still as beautiful as she'd been in 1928, but Einstein's hair had gone white since then. They were speaking German in what he knew in the dream was a Swabian dialect, and Lieserl wanted her father's help in building another, better version of the machine he had used in the Swiss Alps three years earlier.

She had — Marrity knew with the certainty of dreams — become pregnant, and had abandoned the infant Derek to the care of Grete Markstein, and had then got an abortion in Vienna. But since then she had been having dreams like the ones Einstein had had during his recovery in 1928, and now she wanted to go back in time and persuade her younger self not to have the abortion done.

Einstein was emphatically refusing, and trying to convince her that the very physics of the machine was diabolical… and then the scene shifted, and Marrity saw the two of them and a third man, and they were seated around a table speaking English in what looked to Marrity like a medieval hall, with a beamed ceiling over second-floor arches high in the adobe walls. The third man was trim, full-lipped and handsome under prematurely gray hair, with prominent white teeth, and his gray suit, though it didn't fit perfectly, looked expensive.

The man's first son had died twelve years earlier, in 1919, at the age of three days; the man mentioned bitterly that the undertakers had pressed the baby's face into a smile, though in fact the little boy had never smiled while he'd been alive.

The man was a movie director, apparently, and he had just finished filming a movie that he hoped would summon the boy's ghost so that he could take the ghost into himself and let the boy experience his life, since the boy would never get one of his own.

In 1926 he had made a movie that had been crafted to accomplish this, by using "depth-charge symbols," as he put it, to evoke a powerful psychic response from audiences — but at the movie's only screening, a private one, several of the seats and some cars in the parking lot had burst into flame, and Chaplin — yes, Marrity realized, this was Charlie Chaplin! — had never released that film, A Woman of the Sea, commercially. The potent symbolism in this new movie, titled City Lights, was much less compulsive.

Einstein argued passionately against using this new movie in this way, and he hinted at the effect such an undertaking had had and was still having on himself.

He didn't convince Chaplin, but the premiere wouldn't be for another two weeks, and Einstein and Lieserl took a train to Palm Springs in the Mojave Desert, where they stayed with an old friend of Einstein's, Samuel Untermeyer. Palm Springs was a village scattered across a few dozen acres of the vast springtime desert between the Little San Bernardino Mountains to the northeast and the San Jacinto Mountains to the southwest, and its social center was the Spanish mission-style resort hotel El Mirador, with its square four-story tower that could be seen for miles over the pink sea of wild Desert Verbena blossoms.

Einstein had gone for long walks alone at dawn across the flat mountain-ringed landscape, and Tony Burke of the El Mirador had driven the old physicist far out into the Mojave Desert, as far as the desolate Salton Sea — and when Einstein appeared cheerful in the El Mirador at dinner one evening, even picking up a violin and joining the string trio in the hotel lobby, Lieserl knew why. He had lost Caliban — he imagined that he had exorcised the intrusive spirit in the desert wastes.

But Lieserl knew what had become of that fugitive soul. The thing had come to her in a dream, and in her childless grief she had let it in.

At the premiere of Chaplin's movie, Einstein was able to induce the theater's manager to interrupt the film at the end of the third reel; the house lights were turned up while an announcer asked the audience to pause and admire the theater's architecture. Chaplin lunged from his seat beside Einstein and charged up the aisle to force the resumption of the film, but the escalating chain of symbols — the bald man wearing the star hat, the man throwing himself into the river, the blind flower seller whose sight would be restored — had already been broken, and Chaplin's dead son had not been summoned.

That had been on January 30, 1931. Chaplin didn't again try to use the movie as an invocation, but that was because Lieserl, with the help of the ghost in her mind, was assembling a new version of Einstein's maschinchen in the shed behind her house.

She did an exploratory run with it on March 9, 1933, and dismissed as a coincidence the small earthquake that followed. Then, with Chaplin as a nervous observer, she used it the following day. In her hand she was clasping the broken lens from a pair of reading glasses she had had to replace in 1930.

And she found herself in Berlin, watching her three-years-younger self feeding baby Derek by gaslight in a narrow upstairs kitchen.

Her younger self didn't know yet that she was pregnant, and learning it while feeding a quarrelsome two-year-old in a shabby apartment shouldn't have made the prospect of motherhood look attractive; but the older Lieserl's tearfully passionate description of the postabortion dreams, and the impressive fact of her having come back through time just to deliver this message, proved to be enough to convince the younger Lieserl that she should not abort her child.

When Lieserl had arranged some gold coins on the floor and let the recoil take her back to 1933, she had stepped into noisy confusion.

Chaplin had experienced some kind of involuntary astral time-dislocation himself, and had found himself pressing his hands into the wet cement in front of the Chinese Theater in 1928 — an event that had hitherto been a disquieting blind spot in his memory; this had panicked him, and so had the fact that the ground was still shaking and the power lines still swinging in a major earthquake, and even more so the fact that the yard was now scattered with naked infant girls.

Within seconds the infants had disappeared, but it took half an hour for Lieserl to get Chaplin calmed down, and only afterward was she able to call up the new memories of her revised time line, and remember that the baby she'd been pregnant with had miscarried in the late summer of 1930.

And even in this new time line, she remembered having let Caliban into her head in Palm Springs more than two years ago, in December 1930. In this time line she had had no abortion to atone for, but Caliban had come to her in a dream as a lost child, and she had not been in a state to say no to a child wanting to be let in.

She called Chaplin's chauffeur and got him to pick up his shaken employer. Early radio reports said that more than two hundred people had been killed in the earthquake. She was physically sick with guilt, but in her dreams that night Caliban was giddy and singing.

Marrity was leaning back against the headboard with his eyes shut, but the hand he was clasping was Charlotte's, smooth and warm.

Frankie, came his grandmother's remembered voice in his head. Have I been talking in my sleep?

Yes, Grammar, he thought. Go back to sleep.

Did I burn the shed? It was her voice, but she had no German accent now.

You did your best.

Okay. You take care of that little girl of yours.

The contact was gone, but he thought, I will, Grammar.

Marrity could still hear Mishal asking questions in German — but now Marrity could hear faint answers being spoken between the questions, and again it was Einstein's hand he was holding in his left hand.

Marrity opened his eyes and shifted them to the left. Between himself and Lepidopt was the old man himself, with the resigned pouchy face and the disordered white hair and mustache. Then it was the middle-aged man he had seen on the mountain trail in the snow, and then it was a bright-eyed, dark-haired child sitting beside him. Einstein's ghost was cycling through all the ages he'd ever been. When the figure glanced sideways at him and smiled, it was a young man in his late twenties, and the young man's face was that of Marrity's long-lost father, just as Marrity remembered him from the age of three.

Marrity had reflexively clasped the young man's hand before he remembered that he hated his father, and a moment later recalled that his father had been killed in 1955 — and then he reminded himself that in any case this was Albert Einstein, the original of whom Marrity's father had been a copy deposited on a snowy trail in the Swiss Alps for Lieserl to rescue.

Old and white haired again, Einstein spoke in Marrity's mind, in English. What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?

It was one of Prospero's lines from The Tempest.

I need to rescue my daughter, thought Marrity, from Caliban, the boy you brought back from oblivion.

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, said Einstein. There are yet missing of your company some few odd lads that you remember not.

These too were lines of Prospero's.

How can I save my daughter? thought Marrity desperately.

But he blinked, and he was back at the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs on a cool December evening in 1932. Everyone had climbed out of the green-lit pool or hurried out of the dining room and now stood around the cactus garden below the tower, for a young woman was up in the north arch of the tower's belfry, sobbing and waving a revolver that glittered in the last slanting rays of the sun.

Einstein, puffing and sweating in a rumpled white dress shirt, had climbed the three flights of wooden stairs inside the tower and now stepped up at last to the open fourth-floor belfry.

The girl had been looking down at the crowd on the pavement and the grass, but now she turned to look at him. Her fair hair was blowing around her face and her skirt fluttered in the evening breeze.

"You're Albert Einstein," she said.

"Yes," he panted. "Listen to me, you mustn't—"

"You're too late."

And she stepped out through the arch onto the narrow cornice, and leaned backward with her hips against the railing. Then she put the revolver barrel to her temple and pulled the trigger.

As a dozen voices screamed and the girl's body toppled backward, Einstein rushed to the railing and looked down — but he was not looking at the girl's body but at the chair by the pool where he had hung his dinner jacket.

When he spied the jacket, he projected himself to it, and touched the glossy fabric of it and felt under him the canvas straps and the rubber-tipped legs of the chair on the poolside concrete, and from this difference in height between his two points of view, he launched himself out into the timeless state in which lifetimes were streaks across a blank absence.

From this perspective the tower was a wall that extended into the past in one direction and into the future in the other.

In closer focus he could perceive the girl's lifeline curled up the tower stairs and abruptly dispersed at this point.

One or more of the entities that existed on this plane were now clustered around — had through eternity been clustered around — the end of her lifeline. Einstein couldn't help but be overlapped with the alien thing or things, and though he sensed life in the ridged or droning thoughts, and even something like hunger, he had no basis from which to understand them.

Einstein laid his attention across the girl's lifeline at a point before the dissolution that was her death, and by drawing on the energy latent in the total vacuum of this place, he was able to pry her lifeline out of the four dimensions it occupied — he hoped, in effect, to break off the section of it that was her death.

But instead, to his horror, her lifeline simply disappeared. The static arrangement of vast arching ropes or sparks didn't include her lifeline now, had never included it.

He recoiled back into sequential time.

Einstein was leaning over the balcony, looking down, but there was no crowd below. There had been no dramatic disruption of this evening, and the people in the pool were splashing around and laughing.

Before he collapsed and retracted the astral projection of himself that was still sitting in the chair by the pool, he stepped out again into the fifth-dimensional perspective, and there was a new feature now in the tower wall as it extended into the future: a kink like a ripple in glass in the arch where he had been leaning over the rail, a lens effect that didn't damp out as it receded into the blur of the future. The burst of vacuum energy he had pricked up here would apparently always occupy this volume of space, in the El Mirador tower's western arch. Mercifully it would be imperceptible and unusable by anyone not astrally occupying two time shells at once and focusing on this place.

He inhaled the projection by the pool. In the twilight nobody noticed Einstein up in the tower, and so he slowly trudged back down the stairs, knowing that he had left a blade, in the space back up there in the belfry, by which anybody could be cut right out of existence.

His mind was numb, thinking over and over again, But I was trying to help her.

Who was she?

Nobody, ever — not even imaginary.

What drove her to suicide?

Nothing that ever happened to anybody.

Beside Marrity, the ghost of Einstein sighed. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.

Never born. Derek had never been born either, though he had lived and had children.

Einstein had always avoided the boy Derek, even though — or especially because — the boy was a physical duplicate of himself, created out of excess energy when Einstein had shed fifth-dimensional velocity in returning from 1911 to 1928. Lieserl had eventually adopted the boy from Grete Markstein in 1936, when Derek had been eight years old. By that time Einstein had settled in Princeton, never to return to California.

But Derek visited Einstein, in the Princeton hospital, in April 1955. Einstein was clearly dying then, of a burst aneurysm of the abdominal aorta.

Only days earlier Einstein had met with the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a man from the New York Israeli consulate. The state of Israel was to celebrate its seventh anniversary on April 27, and they feared some attack. Isser Harel, now director general of the Mossad, had not forgotten the water glass with the impossibly young Einstein's fingerprints on it — actually Derek's fingerprints— and wanted once more to ask Einstein about possible tactical uses of time.

Einstein had agreed to discuss it, but then the aorta had burst and he was taken to the hospital.

Derek had got in by claiming to be a son of Einstein's first wife, and after apologizing to the dying old man, he asked Einstein who had been his father and mother.

Einstein simply stared at the young man. "I don't know," he said finally, wearily. "Ask Lieserl. She is the person who found you."

"But I'm related to you," said Derek. He was pleading. "It shows in our faces. I have two children — who were their father's parents?"

"I am watched, all of the time," said Einstein. "The FBI knows I am having more to tell, because Israel wants to hear it, so obviously. Another group, also, which has followed me into this exile of mine from Europe. I have ways, you do not, of pushing them away from myself." He sighed and closed his eyes. "They all have seen you now, and they want to know who you are. Even what you are. If they know you are no connection with me, you are safe — if you know no answers, you have no object in being questioned. Go home to your children."

Did he arrive home in safety? asked Einstein now, his frail hand barely tangible in Marrity's left hand.

No, thought Marrity bleakly. No, he never came home to us.

Oh weh. It was a sigh of despair.

Marrity looked at him, and again it was the dark-haired young man who was identical to Marrity's memories of his father.

Frankie, said this apparition, and Marrity knew that this really was his father, not another appearance of Einstein.

Dad! thought Marrity, squeezing the faintly felt hand in a convulsive grip. Dad, I'm sorry! What did they do to you, why didn't you ever come back—

Frankie, said the phantom of his father, run, don't go to the tower in the desert. I had no birth, but you'll have no birth or death.

Then Marrity found himself blinking tears out of his eyes and staring only at Lepidopt, who was looking back at him bewilderedly.

Mishal had climbed down off the foot of the bed and stood up to dig cigarettes and a lighter out of his pocket, and Lepidopt freed his hand from Marrity's. He was lighting a cigarette too now. Apparently the seance was over.

"We need some sayanim, with a couple of vans or trucks," Mishal was saying to Malk. "We need to get out to that tower, and we've got to bring our whole base; we can't afford to have this" — he gestured at the block and the boxes — "anywhere but with us."

He smiled frostily and added, "And after this is all secure and rolling, make some calls, rent a house somewhere, get a block of sidewalk pulled up and wrapped up tight, and have some unconnected sayanim take the sidewalk block to the rented house. Make it look as if all security measures are being taken with it, but use an open line and say a few keywords like 'Marrity' and 'katsa.' Nothing real obvious like 'Mossad' or 'Einstein.' Right?"

"Right," said Lepidopt, edging his way now between the block and the bed. "I trust we won't be putting these decoy sayanim in danger, guarding a chunk of sidewalk?"

Mishal waved again at the Chaplin slab and the boxes. "Israel needs this. And needs whatever it is that's in that tower too."

"The El Mirador Hotel is still standing?" said Marrity.

Mishal squinted at him through exhaled smoke. "You had a little seance all your own, didn't you? No, I doubt it is. But its tower is still there."

"Einstein was talking to you," said Marrity. "He told you how his machine works?"

"Yes. He always meant to. We're Israel." To Lepidopt he said, "Get a couple of pieces of glass, and some oil, and put your handprints on them. And some of your hair, you heard all that. Right now." To Malk he said, "And likewise right now we need a couple of sayanim to take away the pieces of personalized glass, one up to the top of Mount Wilson and one out to Death Valley." Looking again at Lepidopt, he said, "You're to be ready to make your jump as soon as possible, understood?"

"Understood," said Lepidopt, though Marrity thought he didn't look happy about it.

Twenty-six

Daphne had fallen asleep in her chair in the black tent. An hour ago Canino had walked around the tent, prodding the draped fabric with something that might have been a broom and calling, "Matt! Go away!" and "Scat, Matt!" Daphne had called out to ask what time it was, just to hear a human voice in reply, but Canino had simply trudged back to the cabin. At least the TV cartoon thing hadn't been on the speaker anymore.

But at some point the music had become louder, waking her up. It was an idiotically upbeat and repetitive melody now, like what a 1950s movie would have as the background theme while the lead couple mugged and clowned in a park.

Daphne stared through the plastic pipe at the city in the valley. There were fewer lights in the darkness now, and she wondered who the drivers were behind the few visible headlights, and what errands had them out at this hour.

Abruptly the whole world flared white, blinding after the long period of darkness. The momentary glare had been silent, but so startling that it had seemed to crash in her ears.

And then she was in two places at once; her hands were still taped to the chair legs in the rebounding darkness, but she could feel one sheet of oily glass under all her fingertips, and she was sitting in the chair in the tent on the mountain, but she was also looking out through an airy arch of a tower at palm fronds waving in the night breeze.

She knew what had happened — she had caught a painfully bright beam of light from the city below her in the same instant that the lights mounted behind her chair had flashed. And it had apparently broken her mind in two.

The tower seemed to be falling — or else the truck's parking brake had broken, and the truck with the tent on it had rolled off the plateau's edge and was in midair—

Her wrists were taped to the chair, but without moving them she reached out through the tent fabric and across the expanse of gravelly dirt and grabbed the cabin, hard.

Golze's wheelchair lurched when the cabin rocked on its concrete-block foundations, and in the same instant the windows imploded and jets of orange flame burst upward out of the stoves. Golze's free hand clutched the armrest and he yelled, "Canino, trank her! Get out there, she's doing this!" He couldn't catch his breath again, and he waved at Fred.

Canino yanked the front door open, hesitated in the sudden bright glare of leaping flames, then hurled himself outside. Old Frank Marrity had dropped his bottle and was struggling to his feet.

"Fred," Golze managed to croak, and when the young man looked at him, Golze pointed to himself and then at the door.

Fred shook his head and dove out after Canino.

Already the cabin was full of red-lit smoke, and Golze didn't have the strength to cough, or even breathe. He began trying, with only one working arm, to lever himself out of the wheelchair so that he could try to crawl to the door. He heard Marrity collide with the door frame as he lurched outside.

Golze could hardly see through the smoke and his steamed glasses, but he could tell that it was a tall woman who appeared out of the smoke at the back of the cabin. She strode behind him, and then he felt the shift of strong hands on the grips of the wheelchair.

He nodded — but the woman began running powerfully forward, pushing him so fast that he was rocked back against the seat, and he was whispering, "No!" The wheelchair was moving at twenty miles per hour when the wheels clanked against the threshold and then spun free in midair.

He flew a good five feet and landed facedown in the gravel with the weight of the wheelchair and Rascasse on top of him.

Rascasse rolled off, and Golze tried to get air into his lungs. His face stung with abrasions and he was sure that several of his ribs were broken, but all his attention was centered on his right hand, which with all his determination he was barely able to move; he forced it to burrow under himself and close on the grip of his Army .45.

He heard a voice that was still recognizably Rascasse's say, "The wheelchair — get it off him, Fred. Right now."

The awkward bulk of the wheelchair was lifted away, and then a brusque hand took hold of his right shoulder and rolled him over on the flinty gravel.

Fred was facing the cabin, and by the orange fire glare Golze was able, even without his glasses, to see the blank expression on the young man's face. As much to change that as for every other reason, Golze tugged the gun free of his waistband, weakly lifted the barrel toward Fred, and pulled the trigger. The jarring explosion hammered his ears and the recoil sent a flash of pain from his wrist to his shoulder.

Fred's boots lifted from the ground and he sat down hard six feet behind where they'd been.

Footsteps scuffed in the dirt, and Golze could hear Canino's voice, though he couldn't make out words. "I told you guys," Golze gasped, though probably no one could hear him, "I told you she could do this."

Then Canino had grabbed him by the lapels and pulled him upright, and the pain in his broken left shoulder drove the consciousness out of him.

Old Frank Marrity stood on the shadowed side of the tent on the truck; the heat of the burning cabin stung his face and hands if he stood anywhere else, and only out of its direct glare could he see what was going on. He had to concentrate to focus his eyes — he had been drinking rum in the cabin, and he was more drunk than he wanted to be.

The Fred fellow was lying on the ground, apparently dead; and Golze, being half-carried and half-dragged toward the truck now by Canino, seemed dead too. Marrity had heard a gunshot over the roar of the fire.

The person who had been Denis Rascasse was moving toward the truck too, behind Canino. The hair was still white and cropped short, but the body in the battered business suit was clearly a woman's now. She stared at the ground as she came through the smoke and orange light, and though her arms and legs swung back and forth, Marrity thought the gravel wasn't disturbed when her feet swept over it.

These are devils, he thought. I should hide up among the rocks, and then hike down to town tomorrow morning.

But I can't hike on this leg, he thought, staring angrily at the tent above him. They can negate Daphne. There's no "psychic link" to get in the way — Charlotte Sinclair made that up so that she could be negated instead.

Canino hoisted the limp body of Golze up into the truck cab, then walked back to the truck bed and hopped up onto it; and he saw Marrity crouching in the long shadow of the tent.

"We can fit four in the cab," Canino told him with a grin — his face gleamed with sweat — "since one's a little girl, but you'll have to hang on back here." He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out what proved to be a switchblade knife when the blade sprang out. He disappeared into the tent, and a few moments later emerged again, carrying Daphne. She appeared to be dead too — her head rolled loosely in the crook of his elbow, and her free arm was swinging like a length of rope.

Marrity's breath caught in his throat. They killed her after all! he thought in confusion. That's good, isn't it? My younger self will be able to live without her—

But the sight of her lifeless body in a stranger's arms took him back nineteen years, to the remembered exertions of doing the Heimlich maneuver on a linoleum restaurant floor, finally watching through tears as one of the paramedics carried the body of his daughter away—

Canino laid her carefully on the far side of the truck bed, then hopped down and lifted her. "She's tranked," he called to Marrity. "She'll be out for an hour." He started toward the open passenger-side door, then paused and looked back over his shoulder. "Knock down the tent and toss all the stuff off onto the ground. And find a rope or a cleat or something you'll be able to hang on to — it's gonna be a bumpy ride."

Charlotte and Marrity were lying in darkness in the back of a roaring, rocking van, their ankles attached by cables and a padlock to a ring in the floor by the back doors. Malk was up front driving. The Chaplin slab and the boxed-up glass cylinder and gold wire from Grammar's shed were in another van with Mishal and Lepidopt, along with a bomb that Mishal assured them was powerful enough to completely destroy the entire Einstein machine, Chaplin slab and all.

Ten minutes earlier Charlotte had been sitting beside Frank Marrity on the Wigwam Motel bed, watching through Lepidopt's eyes as he and Malk draped blankets over the rectangular block of cement, looped canvas straps around it, and then taped two Styrofoam heads with toupees on them onto the top edge of it.

"When the vans get here," Lepidopt had told Malk, "we can walk this out to them. Whatever it looks like we're up to, it won't be smuggling a square from the Chinese Theater."

Malk had nodded. "And if somebody shoots at us, they're as likely to hit those guys as us," he said, nodding at the Styrofoam heads.

Lepidopt's glance had gone to the toupees, then resolutely away.

"You don't need a lot of yarmulkes," Malk had said.

Then Marrity had leaped up from the bed with a smothered yell. "Daphne is falling!" he had said urgently. "No — it's like on Sunday when she watched that movie — wow, she grabbed some building, and it's burning, completely on fire—" His arm had twitched then, and he'd winced. "And now — I can't sense her at all, she's gone! My God, did they kill her?"

"Gave her a tranquilizer," Mishal had said. "In the arm, from the way you jumped. Whatever the building is that she torched, they'll have to get out of there. They're moving. So are we."

And within minutes the vans had arrived and they were moving.

Marrity had asked why he and Charlotte had to be tied to the floor, but Charlotte had answered him. "None of us are really allies."

"What she said," Malk had agreed, snapping the padlock closed, then slamming the back doors and walking around outside to get into the driver's seat.

The interior of the speeding van smelled of potting soil and flowers, and Marrity guessed it was a florist's van when not commandeered for Mossad use. At least someone had thrown a couple of blankets over the plywood floor. It proved more comfortable just to stretch out and lie down than to try to sit up against the walls with their feet moored to the ring.

For Charlotte's sake as much as his own, Marrity craned his neck to look toward the front; the windshield was just a patch of lighter darkness except when a rushing streetlight lit the arched dust streaks on it, and he could just see the top of Malk's head above the driver's-seat headrest. Marrity and Charlotte were effectively restrained — even if Marrity had stretched, he wouldn't have been able to reach the back of the driver's seat.

In order to whisper, it was easiest to lie facing one another, with their arms around each other to keep from rolling back and forth. Marrity could feel the shape of a revolver against the small of Charlotte's back.

"I hope Daphne will be all right till we get there," whispered Marrity. He realized that he had said this already a few times, and grinned apologetically, though it was too dark in the back of the van for her to see, even if she'd been able to see. "And I hope my breath's not too horrible."

Charlotte kissed his lips lightly. "Your breath smells like Canadian Club," she whispered. "I like it. Daphne's fine. It's you they want to kill, and we won't let them do that." He felt her shiver in his arms. "Maybe they will trade me for her."

"We'll rescue her. And the Mossad will do the time-travel errand you want done."

"Right now they've got a bomb sitting next to that time machine. I'll have to decide when we get there whether or not I trust them to do what that Mishal guy promised. He sort of promised, didn't he?"

Marrity nodded in the rocking darkness. "Sort of," he added.

"I'd have a totally different life. I'd never meet you, or Daphne, and that's sad. I'd probably still be in the air force right now. Well, it was the army, really — INSCOM, Intelligence and Security Command, working originally out of Fort Meade in Maryland, though I was a little kid then. And I won't have been blinded in 1978. And I won't have done — she won't, the girl I'll be, won't have any memory of… people I've betrayed. I'd kill myself, but all the things I've done would stay done." She exhaled. Her breath smelled like whiskey too.

Marrity brushed her hair with his fingers, feeling the frames of her sunglasses.

She hugged him and pressed her forehead against his collarbone. "Or maybe," she whispered into his shirt, "I'll decide the Mossad can't or won't fix it for me, and just let the Vespers negate me. I'd never have met you then either."

He opened his mouth, but she put a finger on his lips. Pulling her head back and speaking loudly, she asked, "How much longer to Palm Springs?" Marrity could feel her heartbeat through the piece of damp paper against his stomach.

"Forty minutes," said Malk.

Marrity's hand was still in her hair; when she lowered her head, he kissed her on the lips.

"An hour from now we might all be dead," she whispered into his mouth, "or worse." He felt her lips smile under his. "Your heart is going like crazy."

They kissed again, and for a long time there was no more whispering in the back of the van that raced east down the dark 10 freeway.

Lepidopt was driving the other van, and Mishal was in the passenger seat. The taillights of Malk's van seemed motionless a hundred yards ahead in the freeway lane while the world rushed past, whistling in the wind wing by Lepidopt's left hand on the steering wheel.

The van belonged to a sayan who ordinarily lived in it, with a cat, and the interior smelled sourly of cat box.

"Whatever happens with this meeting," said Mishal, "this silly proposed trade of girls, you'll follow your orders today — this morning. I'll try to learn something about this singularity in the tower, and if possible I'll relay it over the radio for you to add to your report, but you have to use the machine to jump back to 1967. As soon as I've relayed all I can find out, or at the very first sign of any trouble, you go. You heard Einstein's ghost say how to do it. Right?"

"Right," said Lepidopt.

"And you've got your, your homing device? "

Mishal was referring to Lepidopt's dried finger, which was still in the Flix chocolate box in his pocket. In 1928 Einstein had been guided to his destination in the past by a bullet shell, which struck Lepidopt as a much more dignified sort of talisman.

"Got it."

"Can you feel your target sites yet, those pieces of glass? They should be set up by now."

Lepidopt tried to stretch his mind outward, past the haze of the whiskey, to a piece of oily glass on Mount Wilson and another in Death Valley. He didn't get any clear impression. "No," he said.

"Well, you probably have to be out of your body to sense them. You can still do an astral projection, I hope! You got good marks for that, in your training."

"I did? I hated it." Lepidopt shifted uncomfortably in the driver's seat at the memory of hovering weightlessly under some ceiling and seeing his limp body slumped on a couch on the other side of a room.

"Assuming it works," Lepidopt said, "do you want me to tell Isser Harel in 1967 that we've agreed to change some part of the past for Charlotte Sinclair, in exchange for her help?"

For a moment Mishal was silent. Then, "The thing the Zohar predicted," he said. "The 'knowledge of the precious supernal wisdom.' You want to use that to fix some divorce or childhood trauma or something for that woman? " He shook his head. "You don't throw what's precious to dogs."

Lepidopt asked, "What's precious to dogs?" Mishal didn't laugh, and Lepidopt flexed his maimed right hand on the gearshift. "I'll be changing the past," he said. "From 1967 on."

"Right," said Mishal. "The Yom Kippur War will certainly go differently in the new time line you'll help initiate. A lot of things will."

"I, uh, got married in 1972," said Lepidopt, ashamed to be bringing it up. "My son was born in 1976. He's eleven now."

"That would follow, yes." Mishal sniffed. "I hope I don't smell the way this van does, when I meet these people."

"I wonder — if he'll still be born. That is, if he'll still be born. What if something I change — like a whole war — makes my younger self and his wife conceive the boy on a different night? What if the child is a girl, this time around? What if there is no child? My younger self in this new time line might die before fathering him."

"Unlikely — especially with you, the elder you, looking out for his safety. You can tell Harel that that's a condition of your cooperation."

"But I can't eliminate the possibility of my younger self dying. Much less eliminate the possibility that my son won't be conceived exactly as it happened originally." Lepidopt bared his teeth at the dark freeway lanes under the lightening eastern sky. "The boy I know might turn out never to have existed."

"All of us are at risk," said Mishal. "There might be a war six years from now in which your son will be killed, if you don't do this."

"But if he's killed, he'll at least have existed," Lepidopt said, knowing he was pushing a point Mishal considered settled.

"All our sons and daughters," said Mishal sternly, "and wives and parents, are at risk every day. Do you know what this thing in the Sinai desert is, at the Rephidim stone, that you're to copy out?" He laughed. "Well no, of course you don't. None of us does. But according to old manuscripts that never made it into the Sepher ha-Bahir compilation in the twelfth century, it's a way to travel in all the worlds of the Sephirot, not just in four or even five dimensions. It could make this time machine look like the Wright brothers's airplane."

"I see," said Lepidopt.

Mishal waved a hand, acknowledging Lepidopt's previous point. "God won't lose sight of any of us. Not of us. Do you think that machine can change God's memory? It would be disrespectful, as well as wrong, to think so."

Can I have that in writing? thought Lepidopt; but he simply kept the gas pedal pressed to the floor and watched the taillights of Malk's van.

Twenty-seven

Old Frank Marrity was glad to see the last of the flatbed truck as it turned left out of the hospital parking lot, heading south, though when its taillights had disappeared down Indian Canyon Drive he could still for a moment see the foolish chair mounted on the back of it.

He had managed to throw the tent and all the electronic equipment off the truck bed, in painful, sweating haste by the glare of the burning cabin, but that damned chair had been bolted to the wood. Canino had tied Golze's wheelchair to it, and Marrity had had to hang on to it, cursing and several times half sliding off the truck altogether during the bumpy half-hour drive down the mountain road to Palm Springs.

He had barely been able to crawl off the truck bed when they had finally stopped here in the hospital parking lot.

The few cars that whispered past now on the street beyond the sidewalk trees still had their headlights on, and the breeze was pleasantly cool, but the sky was already deep blue and in half an hour or so the sun would be rising over the distant Santa Rosa Mountains.

Across a sidewalk and a narrow lawn, the square, four-story tower loomed in gray shadow against the cloudless sky. Peering up at it, he could see a corner of the belfry ceiling through the west-facing arch at the top. The low tile-roofed building at its foot was medical offices now, but the tower had reputedly once been the highest structure in this desert village, the crown of the long-gone El Mirador Hotel.

Three Vespers cars had pulled into the lot ten minutes ago, and Marrity was leaning against the left-rear door of one of them, a brown-and-white Chrysler Fifth Avenue that was brand new but looked very old-fashioned and boxy to him. When will I see Saturns again? he thought. Lexuses? Geos?

The driver's-side door was open and the haggard-looking woman who was apparently Rascasse was sitting in the driver's seat, listening to the multiband radio. She smelled like stale bread this morning.

"We, uh, talked our way into the house," said a voice from the speaker, "and the cement block they had was just a section of sidewalk. Decoy. One of the renters there eventually directed us to a place called the Wigwam Motel, and the people we want had been there but have cleared out. Nothing in the room."

"Okay," said Rascasse in her new contralto voice. "Get here as quickly as you can."

Marrity couldn't see Golze in the passenger seat, but in the predawn quiet he clearly heard his frail voice: "They're working from a mobile base now."

"Indeed," said Rascasse, "and they'll be heading this way." He spoke into the radio again. "Prime."

"Tierce," came a tinny reply from the speaker.

"They're bringing Charlotte here to make the trade. But probably there'll be a vehicle accompanying them, a truck or van, that will be visible to human eyes but not to astral sight — not to my mind. Get — oleander." Marrity saw the old woman lean forward briefly, and then she sat back and went on, "Get the copter here, and have him circle and describe to me all traffic on the streets. Not models, just… 'a white van, a blue car ahead of it, a red car passing both of them' … like that."

"Right. Later."

The man who had driven up in the Chrysler was pacing the sidewalk a hundred feet away; the other two drivers were still sitting in their cars. Marrity wondered irritably what Vespers men did on their days off. Maybe they never got days off.

Marrity took a deep breath and then spoke. "You don't need to do this negation thing with anybody," he said. "You'll have the machine itself within the hour, and then you'll be able to go back and fix things, not just, just — start chronological avalanches! All you've got to do is kill D-Daphne, like you agreed to." He realized he was nodding like a monkey, and made himself stop. "That was part of our agreement, in the boat on the lake."

In this situation, he was certain, he was doing all that remained to be done for poor Daphne. If they killed her, she would at least have had a life; but if they negated her, there would never have been any Daphne Marrity at all. And how much of his own memories, his own identity, were tied up with her? He himself would become an entirely different person if she were negated, a person unimaginable to him now.

"We haven't got the machine yet," croaked Golze.

The two Mossad vans were parked in shadow at the end of West Tahquitz Canyon Way, in front of a house that was half hidden behind palm trees and honeysuckle and grapevines. A wrought-iron arch with an unlit lantern hanging from its curlicued peak opened on a stone stairway barely visible in the tree shadows beyond, and to the left Lepidopt could make out the two- or three-story house, with doors and windows deeply inset in thick, pale walls. A mailbox was mounted on one pole of the arch and a plastic rake leaned against the other. Mishal said Einstein had stayed here in 1931 and had hidden attention-deflecting stone amulets in the terraced garden behind the house.

They were seven blocks south of the El Mirador Medical Plaza, about half an hour short of dawn.

During the drive from San Bernardino to Palm Springs, the van had been a moving pocket of warmth and dashboard lights and a pair of glowing cigarettes in the lonely rock-studded hills in the predawn darkness, and the only signs of human habitation in the landscape of jagged ridges and remote, tilted alluvial deltas had been one line of half a dozen trailer trucks pulled off on the shoulder, and the twin red dots of Malk's taillights in the otherwise empty lane ahead. Lepidopt had been glad to turn off the freeway onto State Highway 111 and follow it into the sleeping town of Palm Springs, with its low, plain 1950s-style office buildings, its shops with aluminum foil covering the windows, and its dark ranch houses with gravel yards.

"It's about time to divvy the cargo," said Mishal now, unsnapping his seat belt. "Handcuff Marrity in here with the Einstein machine, where you can blow both of them to smithereens if worse comes to worse. Then you and Bert just circle around town in it, and try to stay in touch with me via the radio."

He tucked the Azden microphone-transmitter into his shirt pocket and clipped the microphone under his collar. The trouble with body microphones was that the crystal-controlled transmitters were as big as a deck of cards, and couldn't transmit farther than a few city blocks at the best of times, and a human body tended to block the radio waves.

"If you can't hear me," said Mishal, "just jump at dawn. You can at least bring Harel the news that the singularity Einstein appeared to refer to may exist in that tower. Once you've jumped, all of this" — his wave took in the other van too, with Charlotte and Marrity in it, and all of Palm Springs — "won't ever have happened."

"Different courses for all of us," Lepidopt agreed in a level voice. He thought of being able to swim in the ocean again, and listen to Rimsky-Korsakov again, and then he thought of Louis back in Tel Aviv.

"Arm the thing," said Mishal, opening the passenger-side door. A puff of cool, sage-scented air dispelled the interior smells of cat box and cigarette smoke.

Lepidopt unsnapped his seat belt and stood up in a crouch to shuffle into the back of the van. He switched on the overhead bulb.

The Chaplin handprint slab was now bolted upright next to Einstein's big, dusty glass cylinder, and wires were stapled across the carpeted floor to a yard-wide gold swastika laid flat. On a linoleum counter closer to the back doors were a bottle of brandy, an ashtray already crowded with cigarette butts, and, screwed firmly into the counter, the "pressure-firing device."

This looked vaguely like a small floor jack, but the disk sticking up from one end of it wouldn't support anything — it was the pressure cap that would set off the bomb.

A copper tube — a nonelectric blasting cap — had been crimped onto the nozzle-like opening at the other end of the device, and the blasting cap was connected to a red plastic adapter that was screwed into the threaded cap well of a long brick of tetrytol explosive wrapped in tarry black paper.

A homely looking blue kitchen timer connected a dry-cell battery to a wire that ran into the tetrytol brick through a groove in the plastic adapter. If it came down to it, Lepidopt could either set the timer and run, or just smack the pressure cap.

A four-inch cotter pin was stuck through the barrel of the pressure-firing device, and Lepidopt now carefully pulled it out and laid it on the counter beside the ashtray.

"It's armed," he said.

From the pavement outside the van, Mishal called, "Good. I'll send over Malk and Marrity."

By the dim yellow glow of the overhead bulb, Lepidopt stared at the bomb and the time machine, and he tried to imagine what might go wrong. What if he and Malk and Marrity were captured, and the bomb didn't work? There was no bowl of dry macaroni here, but a gun available in an unexpected place might be just as comforting a backup here as it had been in the safe-house apartment on La Brea.

Still lying on the blanket-covered plywood floor of the other van with her arms loosely around Marrity, Charlotte had been alternately looking through the eyes of the three Mossad men; aside from Marrity's here beside her in the darkness, there were no other viewpoints within several hundred feet.

Malk was just sitting in the driver's seat in front of them, peering into the shadows through the windshield and the rearview mirrors. Mishal and Lepidopt had been talking inside the other van, though of course she could not hear what they had said, and now Mishal had got out and was walking up toward this van. That other van was more interesting, though, with the Chaplin block and what looked like a bomb, so she kept on looking through Lepidopt's eyes.

She saw him open a black plastic box and pull a small-caliber automatic pistol out of the foam-rubber padding inside; his glance swept the narrow interior of the van, then focused on a plastic pan full of well-used cat litter in the corner. The cat box became larger in his perspective as he approached it, and then she saw his hands push the gun in under the gray sand. His gaze narrowed a little, as if he were wincing.

Charlotte put her mouth to Marrity's ear. "In the other van," she whispered, "there's a gun under the sand in the cat box in the corner." She felt him nod.

"You two awake?" asked Malk as he saw Mishal approaching in the rearview mirror.

"Yes," said Marrity, stretching beside Charlotte. Mishal was unlocking the back doors, and Marrity kissed Charlotte quickly in the moment before the doors swung open and the dawn breeze cooled her face and arms.

Then Mishal was unsnapping the padlock that moored their ankles to the floor. "I'll be driving this van," he said, "and Charlotte, you'll be sitting up front with me. Frank, you go with Malk to the other one."

Charlotte groped her way forward, found the passenger seat and slid into it. She heard Mishal get in beside her, but she was looking through Marrity's eyes now as he was led to the back of the other van; he stepped up into the back of it, and as Mishal clanked the gearshift she saw Lepidopt handcuff Marrity's left wrist to a spare-tire bracket against the van's left wall, away from the machine and the bomb. She saw Lepidopt smile and say something, and Marrity's vision moved up and down in a nod. And as she felt the van she was in move slowly forward in a tight curve, Marrity's gaze fell on the cat box in the corner of that van.

That's it, she thought, and she let herself switch to Mishal's viewpoint so she could see where they were going.

The blue helicopter was visible in the south now, pursuing its endless rotating figure eight over the city. "Fourteen minutes till dawn," said Golze.

His wheelchair was stopped on flagstones by the entrance to the clinic building at the foot of the tower. Old Frank Marrity peered at him — the bearded man's face was gray, and sweaty even in the dawn chill, and Marrity wondered if he was putting off taking another shot of morphine in order to stay alert.

I'm in more pain, thought Marrity defiantly, and not just the considerable throbbing ache in my abused leg. After all, I'm going to disappear from here within half an hour, and I don't know whether I'll reappear as a childless married man whose only daughter died nineteen years ago, or as a total stranger — a stranger who might even have other children! I've had enough of offspring, thank you.

Marrity had to step back to make way for an elderly man in a three-piece suit pushing an aluminum walker like, Marrity thought, Sisyphus pushing his boulder. It took nearly a minute for the man to hobble past on his way to the hospital entrance, which was another hundred feet away. Luckily the hospital didn't seem to be very busy yet at this hour.

"You might still get shot, in this fresh time line," Marrity told Golze.

"Go have another drink, hero," said Golze.

Marrity hesitated for a moment, then limped across the grass and the pavement to the car Rascasse sat in.

The driver's-side door was still open, and Rascasse was listening to the radio, which was droning its endless list: "… city bus, green station wagon, motorcycle, white van, white van, red car…"

"I'm just gonna get—" Marrity began.

"Shut up, you idiot," snapped the Rascasse woman as she lurched forward in the seat. "Prime," she said; "was that two white vans or only one? Repeat it please."

"Tierce," said the voice on the radio, "two white vans, the northern one looks newer. The southern one just turned east on Alejo, the other is continuing north on Indian Canyon, toward you."

"Curare," said Rascasse. She adjusted something on the radio, and then went on, "Keep that eastbound van in sight."

"Got it." The radio clicked into silence at last.

Rascasse tapped the horn ring, and the man who had been pacing the street sidewalk came sprinting back to the brown-and-white Chrysler.

"You're looking for a white van," Rascasse told him, "now it's on Alejo, moving east. Take all three cars, and let the helicopter tell you where it is. And capture it and bring it here."

"—the bottle," said Marrity, opening the back door. The rum bottle was still on the backseat, and he picked it up.

"I don't sense any second van," said Rascasse, apparently to herself. "It must be them, and Einstein's time machine as well." She frowned back at him. "Don't take the bottle with you. Drink some here."

Rascasse stepped out of the car and stood up, and apparently caught Golze's eye, for she just raised a thumb and nodded. Marrity noticed that her feet seemed to slide slightly on the asphalt, like the bottom edge of a beaded curtain that just touches the floor.

"Nine minutes till dawn," said Malk, rolling one hand on the steering wheel to glance at his watch. The ridgeline of the Santa Rosa Mountains to their right shone white with the imminent sun.

The van's windows were rolled down, and the breeze cooled Lepidopt's sweaty face. The soles of his bare feet were picking up grit from the van floor.

"Mishal will let us know when he's ready to go," he said. Assuming we can pick up his radio signal, he thought. And even if he does tell me to wait for some kind of report on the singularity, I doubt that'll take long. I suppose Mishal isn't too worried about getting killed here, since this morning's events are slated never to have happened. Probably within this next half hour I'll be doing the astral projection trick, and then — as if that weren't bad enough — jumping right out of 1987.

He thought of his first parachute jump, in 1965, from an old two-engine British Dakota circling over a patch of the Negev desert south of Beersheba — stepping out of the plane into nothing. The rip cord had been pulled automatically; and this time the rip cord would be his own dried finger, which was now under his shirt, taped against his sweaty chest.

He yawned, but not from tiredness.

"You okay back there?" called Malk.

"So far so good," came Marrity's voice from the back of the van.

"Stay away from La Bamba."

"I can't even reach it from here. Okay if I smoke?"

"Sure, fire won't hurt anything."

Malk had been keeping the van in the right lane, and now he said, "Fast boy coming up on the left." He had made a dozen similar remarks on the surrounding traffic during the last twenty minutes. Lepidopt once again braced his bare feet.

Then the white compact in front of them braked sharply and another car was braking right next to Malk's head in the left lane. As Lepidopt levered himself to his feet, he heard a pair of loud pops and saw dust spray from two spots on the asphalt ahead.

The van was shuddering to a halt. In the back of it, Lepidopt placed his bare feet on the gold swastika and leaned forward to press his hands into the handprints in the Chaplin slab.

Marrity was staring at him wide-eyed.

Two car doors slammed outside, and then a man's voice called, "Step out of the van, everybody."

Malk whispered, "Jump, goddammit!" and then said loudly, "We have a bomb aboard that will wreck your cars too. Dead-man switch. Nobody's getting out."

Lepidopt's heart was pounding in his chest. Almost more clearly than he could see the scrawls in the cement slab in front of his eyes, he could see Louis's face, and the boy seemed to be staring at him earnestly, as he had so often in the past.

"One of us will ride with you," said the voice outside.

"Nope," said Malk. "Bomb."

"Then we escort you, two of us behind and one leading. If this isn't acceptable, I advise you to detonate your bomb."

"We'll go with you," said Malk. The car doors slammed again, and then the van was moving forward. After a moment Lepidopt could hear the turn-signal indicator clicking.

"Are you still there?" asked Malk furiously. "Marrity, is he still there?"

"I'm here," said Lepidopt, blinking sweat out of his eyes.

"Doesn't it work? If it—"

"I don't know if it works or not," said Lepidopt. The Chaplin handprints felt as slick as the oiled glass had last night. "I haven't stepped out of my body yet."

"Well step out, man! We're captured!"

"I need to," began Lepidopt. Speaking words was like pushing broken teeth out of his mouth. "Think about it — a little more."

The van sped up, swinging the lightbulb overhead. "Then don't jump," said Malk hoarsely, "listen, scratch that altogether. Just hit the bomb." The van slowed, and again Lepidopt heard the turn signal. "Blow us up, Oren! We can't let these people get hold of Einstein's machine!"

"I'll jump!" shouted Lepidopt angrily. "Or I'll blow us up. But— not this second."

Sunlight gleamed on the white weather vane and the zigzag patterns of blue and yellow tiles on the pyramid roof of the tower.

Aryeh Mishal stepped out of the van that he had parked in the hospital lot, walked around to the other side and took Charlotte's elbow as she slid down from the seat to the pavement. Momentarily covered by Charlotte and the van, Mishal reached into his shirt pocket and switched on the transmitter.

"I guess the time machine didn't work?" she said. Her expression was blank, her eyes hidden behind her constant sunglasses.

"He's waiting in case I have a report about the thing in the tower," said Mishal with a smile. "In the meantime, we might as well walk through this exchange." He let go of her elbow. "Let's keep our hands spread and empty." They stepped out from behind the van.

But we shouldn't still be here! thought Mishal tensely as he and Charlotte began walking toward the tower with their hands open and held slightly away from their sides. God knows what I'd be doing right now if Lepidopt had delivered his message to Harel in 1967 and got the inscription from the Rephidim stone — but I wouldn't be doing this.

It didn't work, he thought as he stepped slowly across the painted white lines on the asphalt. Or this Vespers crowd caught them — no, I'd have heard the explosion in this quiet morning air, even a mile or two away.

Squinting ahead, he could see figures in the shade under a trellis by the entryway of the building below the tower — a bearded man in a wheelchair, and a white-haired man holding a little girl's limp body in his arms, and another man or two in the shadows behind them. They were about fifty feet away, with a curb and a couple of olive trees on a strip of lawn in between. None of them looked particularly out of place in this hospital setting; as he and Charlotte slowly walked closer, Mishal saw two white-clad nurses walk unconcerned right past the group.

Mishal smiled sideways at Charlotte so that his mouth was over the microphone in his shirt collar. "Jump," he said, "or run back to L.A."

She nodded. "You said it."

The man carrying the limp girl stepped forward out of the trellis shadow into the gathering daylight, and then paused.

Mishal and Charlotte stopped. "I think I go on from here alone," said Charlotte.

"I guess you do," Mishal said. "Uh — good luck."

"You too." She smiled bleakly at him, then turned toward the tower and resumed the careful pace.

Mishal heard several vehicles bouncing up the driveway into the lot a dozen yards behind him, and he slowly turned his head; and suddenly his chest was cold and empty, for the three compact cars turning into the lot were clearly escorting the familiar florist's van. Mishal could see Malk's stark face behind the windshield.

A man in a sport coat and jeans got out of one of the escorting cars and pointed to an empty parking space directly in line with the lot entrance; and Malk drove the van ahead, into that space.

Two of the escort cars pulled into the parking spaces on either side of the van, and a driver got out of each and simply stood by his car, watching the van. The third car carefully backed up to block the van from behind.

Mishal stood still, isolated on the pavement between the cars and the people at the clinic entry. His hands were still empty, but he was intensely aware of the gun under his jacket.

Though his left wrist was handcuffed to the spare-tire rack, Marrity could lean past the trembling, barefoot Lepidopt and see out through the front windshield, and the cigarette smoke caught in his throat at the sight of a white-haired man carrying Daphne's limp body across a sidewalk toward Charlotte, who was slowly walking to meet him. Marrity could only see Charlotte's back.

"I don't think I can move without getting shot from both sides," said Malk tensely from the front seat. "Oren, will you jump?"

Marrity stepped back, put his cigarette in his mouth, then knelt and thrust his right hand into the cat box. He got hold of the gun and lifted it out, shaking sand off it.

He pointed it squarely at the big glass cylinder, then spoke around the cigarette. "Hey."

Lepidopt turned his haggard face to him, and his eyebrows went up. "What are you going to do?" he asked.

"I'm going to wreck your time machine unless you uncuff me and let me go to Daphne."

"They'll just shoot you if you step out," said Malk. Marrity could see his narrowed eyes in the rearview mirror. "They want to shoot you, remember? But you're safe in here, they don't want to risk damaging the machine. Let Mishal get your girl. As long as you're in here, she's safe."

Marrity was shaking, and he forced his hand to hold the gun steady. "How's this trade supposed to work?" he demanded. "Look at them, there's nobody to carry Daphne back here! Obviously she can't walk!"

Smoke stung his eyes, but he didn't have a hand free to take the cigarette, and he didn't really dare spit it out in a confined space with a bomb.

"Mishal can—" began Malk.

"I'll shoot your damn machine, I swear. Uncuff me. They want the machine way more than they want Daphne. They won't start shooting till they're sure they can get it."

"Shit," burst out Malk, "uncuff him, let him get out of here, take his chances — you're going to have to hit the bomb, Oren. Or I will, even if they shoot me as I get up to do it. Marrity, you can leave by the passenger-side door." Marrity saw Malk's profile as he said out the driver's-side window, "We're letting our hostage go. He's a civilian, and that's his daughter over there, the little girl. If you kill him or take him out of our sight, we'll blow up the machine. Are we clear?" Marrity met his eyes in the rearview mirror, and Malk said to him, "Yes. Go. Get well clear of this van, if you can."

Marrity kept the gun trained on the glass cylinder as Lepidopt stepped barefoot away from the Chaplin slab and dug in his pocket for the keys; then he crouched and opened the cuff from around Marrity's left wrist.

"Thanks," said Marrity. He crushed his cigarette out in the ashtray on the counter, carefully avoiding touching the bomb mechanism, then hurried past the cylinder and the Chaplin slab to the front seats.

"Leave the gun, for God's sake!" whispered Malk. "And move slow!"

Marrity hesitated, then pulled up his pants leg with his left hand and tucked the gun partway down inside his sock. With both hands he tugged the elastic sock all the way up over the bulk and pulled his pants cuff down over it.

He grinned nervously up at Malk, who just shook his head.

"Nobody survives this, I guess," Malk said.

Marrity levered open the door and slowly stepped down. Immediately two of the men who had captured the van were beside him, gripping his upper arms tightly. They marched him a few steps away from the van and toward the tower, then halted, clearly not having any idea what to do with him. What had been predawn dimness was now long streaks of blue shadow across the parking lot. The air was chilly on Marrity's damp shirt.

Charlotte's straight back was still moving away, and the man carrying Daphne was still advancing toward her — Marrity could see that Daphne was struggling weakly in his arms — and now Charlotte called out, "We'll meet in the middle. You put her down there, and take me."

Marrity started forward, and was yanked back by the two men holding his arms.

"I'm getting my daughter," he told them, "since she can't walk. Come along if you want, but I'm going to her."

"You stay here," said the young man on his right, sounding nervous. "Somebody will fetch her."

Marrity just leaned forward with all his weight, and his captors took an involuntary step forward to catch their balance.

"I'm the one who'll fetch her," Marrity said.

"Let him go," said the man on Marrity's left, "they can all see him. We're supposed to be watching the van, anyway."

"Okay." The other man began patting Marrity's shirt and pants, but his companion said, "They'll have frisked him. Come on."

As they stepped away behind him, Marrity began cautiously walking toward where Charlotte and the man carrying Daphne were about to meet, and he hoped the bulge on his ankle wasn't conspicuous. His hands were raised.

Charlotte stopped when she was facing the white-haired man, and Marrity heard him say, "Good to see you again, sweetie!" as he crouched and carefully set Daphne down in a sitting position on the dew-dark asphalt; and Daphne braced herself with her hands to stay upright, and looked around, blinking.

"I've got her, Charlotte," Marrity called, stepping forward more briskly, his hands still up. He hoped to get Charlotte as well as Daphne out of this, though he had no idea how to accomplish it.

Charlotte looked back over her shoulder in evident alarm. "Frank!" she said. "How the — oh God — be very careful." The man who had been carrying Daphne took Charlotte's arm and led her off to the north, to Marrity's left.

"Daddy?" said Daphne, raising her knees as if to get to her feet.

Marrity was just shuffling toward her around one of the olive trees on the strip of grass when, ten yards behind Daphne and to the right of her, a figure stepped forward out of the shadow of the trellis. Marrity recognized the twisted face — it was the old man he had thought was his father, and who turned out to be his own shameful self. Then Marrity saw that the old man was raising a gun, and that it was pointed at Daphne.

Marrity's left hand was snatching up his cuff even as he yanked his knee up, and his right hand pulled the gun from his sock as the old man's first shot exploded a patch of asphalt a foot away from Daphne's hand and rang away to Marrity's left in ricochet.

And then Marrity had put the front sight of his little automatic on the old man's torso and he was pulling the trigger over and over again as the gun thudded against his abraded palm and the spent shells spun away to the side, and he was killing his own cowardice as much as he was protecting Daphne, and at last in the ringing silence he was just standing there in the chilly breeze tugging at the unyielding trigger. The slide was locked back, the gun emptied.

Abruptly a hard impact to his left shoulder spun Marrity around, and in the moment before four more rapid-fire shots punched into his chest and abdomen and flung him back against the olive tree, he saw the white-haired man who had carried Daphne squinting at him over the barrel of a revolver. Another rending shot to the abdomen doubled Marrity over and he pitched to the grass, rolling onto his back and then lying still.

Canino had violently pushed Charlotte ahead when he turned to face Marrity, and with no eyes looking at her, she stumbled and went to her knees on the asphalt as, through Canino's eyes, she watched Frank Marrity hammered to the ground beyond the jumping barrel of the .45 revolver.

Even before Canino had fired all six shots, she had reached around to the back of her waistband and snatched out her .38 and cocked it. And she was aiming it toward where Canino stood, so that when he turned his gaze toward her she only had to move the revolver slightly to see right down the barrel of it, and then she pulled the trigger.

Canino's halved viewpoint showed a fast spin of sky and parked cars and then was gone.

The parking lot echoed now with screams and running footsteps, and the only steady viewpoint Charlotte could fix on showed Daphne sobbing and still trying to get to her feet out in the middle of the pavement. Charlotte could see herself crouched beyond the girl, and so she stood up and sprinted forward.

"The two Frank Marritys are dead," came Rascasse's oddly high-pitched shout from up high — he must be in the tower, Charlotte thought as she ran. "Get hold of Daphne," the shrill voice went on loudly, "hold her, don't let her get hurt!"

Charlotte grabbed Daphne under the arms and yanked her upright, and she was sure now that the helpful gaze that was letting her see what she was doing was Mishal's — he had moved off to the south side of the parking lot, and nobody else had gone that way.

By Mishal's field of vision, she began dragging Daphne back toward the two Mossad vans, and she tried to hold Daphne to the other side as they neared the strip of grass where Frank Marrity's blood-splashed body lay — but now Mishal was seeing her and Daphne over the lined-up back and front sights of a pistol.

The stubby front sight edged down and to the right and centered on Daphne's chest.

Charlotte spun to block it, and the gun barrel wavered, and then Daphne's brown-haired head was visible by Charlotte's waist, and the barrel dove that way. Charlotte grabbed Daphne in a bear hug, turning so that Mishal could see only Charlotte's back. You'll have to shoot her right through me, Charlotte thought dizzily.

And he evidently decided to; the front and back sights lined up again, centered this time on the small of Charlotte's back, when several more shots concussed the dawn air — and Charlotte was still standing, unhurt — and through Mishal's eyes she saw the gun barrel disappear, replaced by a rapidly expanding view of damp pavement.

Twenty-eight

Frank Marrity's vision had narrowed as if he were looking down a tunnel at the distant morning world. He was aware of his right hand, and he made its fingers pry up the blood-soaked edge of his pants pocket and slide in.

His whole torso was a glass wrapped in a napkin and then stomped — the pieces were still loosely held together, but broken beyond hope of repair. Blood bubbled from his lips and he couldn't move anything in his shattered chest to get air in or out. Dimly he realized that he was drowning in his own blood, and he could feel arterial blood surging out through the rips in his belly.

His hand came back out of his pocket, clutching the crumpled Einstein envelope and the chip from the Chaplin slab. He managed to raise his forearm straight up, and then topple it the other way, toward his face; and he licked the Einstein envelope and clutched the chip of cement in his wet fist, and he stared up at bright spatters of his blood on the trunk of the olive tree.

I'm all the way up there, he thought dimly, four or five feet off the ground, and I'm way down here too.

The fact of dying made it easy for him to step out of his body.

And though the physical contacts with Einstein and Chaplin didn't summon those ghosts again, the contacts did tug Marrity's disembodied self in the direction of those specific moments in the past, and amplified the effects of the bloodstains in freeing it from strictly sequential time.

He could see the parking lot at some distance, as if below, though there was no up and down in this non-space. His body was the end-point in a line that trailed out of one of the vans. In their entries and exits the cars and vans made a static tangle of intersecting metal tubes in the lot, looking more like an air-conditioning system on the roof of a big building than anything else, but it was all receding as his focus expanded.

Arcs like jet contrails spanned the blank nothingness out here, and he knew they were lifelines. He could see his own, which ended in an exploded-looking rope-end very nearby, and he could see two others, at the distance of a few seconds in the direction of the past, which also ended in ragged bursts. Something native to this non-space was clinging — had always clung — to those ragged lifeline ends, and Marrity's attention was overlapping the thing. It was in some sense alive, and Marrity hoped that his own extended viewpoint was not a result of his sharing in the alien thing's consumption of the two recently ended lives.

Parallel with his viewpoint he could perceive Daphne's lifeline, and he found that his attention extended to it. And her attention extended to his — closer to her lifeline he could feel her awareness of him. In a point that had no location in space or time, they clung wordlessly to each other.

What Einstein had done with the lifeline of the suicide in the tower in 1932, Marrity was trying to do in reverse with Daphne. Einstein had pried the woman's lifeline up out of the four-dimensional fabric, and Marrity was now blocking Daphne's lifeline from moving in that extra-dimensional direction. In this timeless view he had always been here blocking it.

Their linked attentions amplified each other, occupied a wider focus — and Marrity was aware of a vast wall, or shear, or towering gap in the direction that was future. It was not just the ends of lifelines — it seemed to eclipse all lifelines, and whatever it was, it was no more than the distance of two minutes away.

Marrity hoped their attentions would widen in a perpendicular direction to get them "over the top" of it — and he tried to convey Climb, climb! to Daphne, and he projected the image of an airplane taking off on a short runway, desperately clawing the air to get altitude before it reached the boundary of trees.

Together, boosting each other, their attentions soared until even the woven lifelines were far away, and the world itself was just a far-ranging helix around the curving pillar of the sun, and then in spite of their tininess they even glimpsed the vast dazzling crown or blazing flower of galaxies moving apart through space that uncurled around them—

Their attentions fled, recoiled, narrowed sharply toward their little world again, like a rocket that comes back down only after the world has turned all the way around under it.

In the sunlit tower, the woman who was Rascasse projected her attention to the oiled glass that lay on the backseat of one of the cars in the lot below, and somehow for a moment it seemed to be a dinner jacket draped over a chair by a swimming pool at twilight. But she concentrated, and when she could feel the slick glass under her fingers as well as the tower's gritty cornice railing, and smell the car's upholstery as clearly as she smelled the morning breeze, she stepped back, out of her body, into the volume of space Einstein had been occupying in 1932.

And in the wall that was the tower extending in both directions through time, she could see the persistent ripple where Einstein had gathered up the vacuum energy, for God knew what purpose.

The hungry denizens of this state were present very close by, attached to the several newly chopped-off lifelines — this time Rascasse didn't need to kill anybody to pay her way onto the freeway. She let her attention overlap theirs.

On this bigger scale, she perceived the lifelines that stood out like comets in this non-sky, and Daphne's was there.

Rascasse's attention extended in the direction of Daphne's lifeline, but somehow Frank Marrity blocked her way, even though Marrity was dead. Both versions of Marrity were dead! Her father had somehow blocked Daphne's lifeline with his identity, so that focusing on her simply deflected Rascasse into the past direction, to where Marrity's lifeline hung truncated.

Rascasse became aware of something like a cliff, or static waterfall, in the future direction, and all perceptible lifelines disappeared from view where they met it. It was only seconds distant, and in panic she fell back into her four-dimensional body.

She was draped like a towel over the railing, and had to thrash and flail her limbs to get upright again.

Mishal's down," yelled Malk. He reached his right arm across and fired two shots out the open van window and then opened the door and leaped out. Lepidopt heard him yell, "Blow it up!" as he scrambled away.

From the back of the van, Lepidopt peered through the windshield and gritted his teeth. Charlotte was rapidly dragging the Daphne girl in this direction, though it was a wonder nobody had shot her yet, and beyond her he could see two sprawled bodies, Marrity's on the grass straight ahead and Mishal's on the pavement off to the right.

Do it, he told himself.

Lepidopt tore open his shirt and yanked off the tape that held his dried finger against his skin, and he threw the tape with the finger still clinging to it into the far corner.

We did win the Yom Kippur War, he thought, even without help from the future.

He turned to the ashtray and quickly picked up Marrity's recently crushed-out Dunhill filter, and he gripped it between the first two fingers of his left hand as he positioned his bare feet on the gold swastika, pressed his hands into the sweaty Chaplin handprints, and projected his consciousness out to the beacons on Mount Wilson and in Death Valley.

He was aware of two different breezes, and the smells of pine and weathered wood, and he felt a faint electric tingle in the soles of his bare feet—

For a moment it was the remembered out-of-body weightlessness, and he choked with vertigo — but then he was spinning down through darkness, and the cigarette filter between his fingers was vibrating as if he were dragging it fast along a finely corrugated wall, and he let himself step gratefully back into his body as a gust of energy whipped past him and rushed away downward.

He was still in the van, and in the first instant, he thought the bomb had gone off — a man holding a set of keys was knocked off his feet and the sand in the cat box in the corner was blown up against the van wall. The lightbulb overhead was swinging back and forth.

"What the hell was that? " snapped Malk from the driver's seat, his voice sounding strained to the breaking point. "The blasting cap?"

Lepidopt noted that Malk was still in the front seat. He had not yet got out of the van.

The man with the keys sat up on the van floor and blinked up at Lepidopt. Lepidopt stared down at him and dizzily recognized his own two-minutes-younger self.

A single infant wailed on the floor by the back doors, and both of them jumped and stared at it. As he instinctively started toward it, Lepidopt noted wispy dark hair, and little fists and feet waving—

I can't get it out of the field in time, he thought, and even as he reached for the baby — the infant duplicate of himself — it winked out of existence.

At some point Malk had turned around in the driver's seat, and now his eyes were wide at the sight of the two identical Oren Lepidopts.

In the still quiet dawn air Lepidopt heard Charlotte Sinclair, outside, say, "Frank! How the — oh God — be very careful."

While Malk and Lepidopt's own younger self gaped at him, Lepidopt twisted the dial on the kitchen timer beside the bomb. "One minute," he said. "We've got to get out of here."

The other Lepidopt scrambled up from the floor. "Because of Louis?" he asked.

"Because of everybody," Lepidopt told him.

Malk was trying to say something, but Lepidopt cut him off with a wave as he slid between the front seats and grabbed the passenger-side doorhandle. "Later. Fifty-six seconds."

At that moment the morning stillness was shaken by rapid-fire shooting, and the two Vespers men who had been watching the van whirled to look back toward the tower.

Frank Marrity was standing beside an olive tree and emptying his pistol into his older self.

Lepidopt flung himself out of the passenger-side door and, braced against the flanking car, aimed his .22 automatic across the parking lot at the head of the white-haired man who had stepped away to the left with Charlotte, and as the man shoved Charlotte away and drew his big revolver, Lepidopt shot him through the head.

The two Vespers men only a few yards away spun at the sound of the shot, and one of them managed to fire twice before they were punched backward by several fast shots from the driver's side of the van; one sat down hard and then tipped over, but the other fired once more before Lepidopt put a final bullet into his forehead.

Lepidopt was suddenly dizzy, and he thought he knew why. Here it ends, he thought. Baruch Dayan Emet, Blessed is the Righteous Judge.

Civilians were screaming and running, and Lepidopt hoped they were running away from this area, not into it. He shook his head to clear it and shifted his bare feet on the asphalt, making himself scan the scene over the barrel of his gun.

Marrity was crouched over Daphne out in the middle of the pavement, and Charlotte was hurrying toward them from the left; Mishal was was running up to them too, from the right, and he was pointing a gun at them.

He can't let the Vespers have Daphne and her father both, Lepidopt realized. He's got to kill Daphne. Lepidopt remembered the Queen albums in the little girl's bedroom.

"Get hold of Daphne!" yelled an old woman from up in the tower belfry. "Don't let her get hurt!"

Mishal fired once, but he was running and the bullet struck beside Daphne's knee.

Charlotte paused, raised a revolver and yelled, "Mishal!" and when the old katsa glanced at her, she shot him in the face.

Lepidopt found that he was looking at Charlotte over the sights of his own gun, and even as his finger found the trigger, she had turned and pointed her own gun unerringly straight at him.

He lowered the barrel, perhaps simply too tired to shoot her— and then a shot from the portico beyond her clubbed him in the chest, and he rocked and knelt down, the gun spilling from his four-fingered right hand onto the pavement.

Louis, he thought — this disobedience has been for you.

Looking up from under his eyebrows, he saw Charlotte aim at the portico and fire several times at a wheelchair that jerked and jiggled under the impacts, and then she and Marrity were running this way, half-carrying and half-marching Daphne.

When they were still a couple of yards away, Charlotte jerked in evident surprise, then released Daphne's arm and reached over her to shove Marrity's head down, even as a bullet punched the pavement in front of him.

"Denis." Charlotte's breathless gasp was almost a sob.

She turned back toward the tower and aimed her revolver at the figure silhouetted up there in the western belfry arch.

For a moment neither she nor the figure in the tower moved.

Then they both fired at the same time, but though Charlotte remained standing while a ricochet spanged away next to her foot, the old woman flapped like a sail, then rolled over the cornice railing and drifted down through the slanted sunlight until she got tangled in the upper branches of one of the olive trees.

Lepidopt's sight was dimming, but he could see Malk crouching next to him. "Your other self caught it in that first exchange," Malk said. "I just pulled him inside the van. He's dying."

"I could tell," said Lepidopt. "So am I." He looked at his watch. "Fifteen seconds. Go."

"Right." Malk stood up.

Distantly he heard Charlotte call, "It wasn't me who shot you!"

Lepidopt managed a wave in acknowledgment before darkness took him.

Malk bellowed, "Bomb, everybody get back!" And then Marrity simply picked Daphne up in his arms and jogged after Charlotte and Malk to the florist's van, which was parked several spaces south of the van that was evidently about to explode.

He felt ready to vomit from tension and stark immediate memories, and he was anxious about Daphne, but every exertion was a physical pleasure; when Malk held the passenger door open, he bounded up into the van with Daphne still in his arms, and he stretched to step into the back of the van and lay her down on the carpet he and Charlotte had so recently lain on. His lungs pumped fresh air in and out, and his arms weren't fatigued from carrying Daphne, and he could still remember lying shattered and dying under the bloody olive tree, only moments ago.

Charlotte and Malk were in the front seats, and Malk had started the van and was backing out of the parking space.

"We went far up, didn't we, Dad?" said Daphne softly.

"Yes," he told her.

The van was gunning south through the parking lot, and Marrity put out a hand to brace himself on the floor.

"And we didn't come back down to exactly the same world, did we?"

The floor shivered under them as a jarring boom shook the air. The van kept speeding south through the lot.

"While we were up there," said Marrity, and he realized he was talking too loudly because of the ringing in his ears, "somebody changed the events under us," he finished more quietly.

They both jumped when something banged against the van roof, denting it, and a few moments later Malk made a left turn around a corner and braked to a halt.

"Out, all of you, now." His face was stiff in the rearview mirror, and his voice had the harshness of a man fighting back tears. "I've got to go back there before police get here."

Charlotte hopped out and took Daphne from Marrity.

"Go back why?" asked Marrity as he got out and closed the door.

Malk called, "To get your old body, mainly," and then the van sped off and made a left turn around the other side of the clinic building.

Charlotte and Daphne sat down on a curb, and after a dizzy moment Marrity let himself collapse beside Daphne. "We've got to get out of here," he said breathlessly.

He tried to focus his eyes on the sunlit palm trees and parked cars at this far south end of the parking lot.

"I—" he began, then cleared his throat. "I guess we walk to a gas station," he said. "Find a pay phone, call a taxi? Can't stay here." He looked at Daphne. "Can you walk, Daph? I can carry you. I could carry two girls your size."

"I can walk," said Daphne. "Slow."

The three of them got to their feet and began trudging across the asphalt. Where it ended they strode over a grassy hump to the sidewalk, and then slowly made their way east on Tacheva Way, in the opposite direction from Indian Canyon Drive. Marrity had to squint against the rising sun, but the breeze was still cool.

"Your old body," said Daphne.

"It's like the initials Moira and I carved in the Kaleidoscope Shed," Marrity told her. "I'll explain it when we, I don't know, get something to eat."

Sirens wailed from south to north behind them — lots of sirens, and under them the roar of big engines throttled wide open. None of the three looked back.

Then to Marrity's surprise his arms and legs were trembling, and he clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering. He sat down on the sidewalk and then just huddled there, hugging himself and breathing deeply. He realized that he still had the gun he'd taken from the cat box, jabbing him painfully now behind his belt buckle. "S-sorry," he said. "I'm okay, just—"

Daphne and Charlotte were both crouched beside him.

"It's only delayed reaction," said Charlotte.

Daphne pushed his sweaty hair back from his forehead. "You've had — terrible things, Dad," she said, and Marrity was belatedly appalled to realize that she must have shared his experiences of killing and being killed.

Daphne might have sensed his sudden guilt, for she draped one arm over her father's shoulders and the other over Charlotte's.

Charlotte took off her sunglasses, and Marrity saw her eyes meet Daphne's when Daphne looked at her. "So have you, kid," Charlotte said.

"I only had a couple of bad times," said Daphne. "And like you said, Dad, none of them tried to hurt me." Marrity felt her shudder. "But then everybody killed everybody."

"I think I'll be able to get up in a minute," said Marrity. I wonder if any bars are open yet, he thought. I could use a fast glass of scotch — and then he remembered the old man he had shot and shot and shot, actually less than five minutes ago. I guess a cigarette would do, he thought cautiously. We can get a pack when we find a gas station and a pay phone.

"I should call the college again," he said, just to break the silence, "there's no way I'll be teaching Twain to Modern today. Excuse me, Daph," he added, and he got shakily to his feet and brushed off the seat of his pants. "Three days now I won't get paid for."

"And our truck might be stolen," said Daphne, straightening up with Charlotte's help. "But there's still gold in Grammar's shed."

That's right, thought Marrity numbly, our truck. God knows if it's still on that street south of Highland where I left it yesterday morning.

"Well no, Daph," he said. "They took the gold. It was in that van back there, that blew up."

"Oh. So — we're just left with what we're left with?"

"That's it," said Charlotte. Marrity was looking at her, and so she put her sunglasses back on, but not before he had seen a glitter of tears in her eyes. To Marrity she said, "None of us got our new lives. The old you, Lepidopt, Paul Golze, me. 'Nor all your piety nor wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, / Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.'" She ran her fingers through her dark hair. "There's an old letter I guess I'll want you to read for me sometime," she said. "From a, an old boyfriend I — did wrong to."

"Okay," said Marrity. He started forward down the sidewalk, and the other two followed. "At least we still have lives." He breathed in and out deeply, still savoring it.

"And tears," added Daphne, "even if they don't wash away anything."