Synopsis:
When 12-year-old Daphne Marrity steals a videotape of
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure from her grandmother's
house, neither she nor her college-professor father,
Frank Marrity, have any idea that the theft has drawn
the attention of both the Israeli Secret Service and an
ancient European organization of occultists -- or that
within hours they'll be visited by her long-lost
grandfather, who also wants that videotape. And when
Daphne's teddy bear is stolen, and a blind assassin
nearly kills her father, and a phantom begins to speak
to her from a switched-off television set, Daphne and
her father find themselves running for their lives
through a southern California in which magic and the
undead past are dangers as great as the guns of living
assassins.
From ancient prophesies about Israel to the secret lives
of Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein, this breathtaking
novel throws a suburban father and daughter into the
midst of an ancient supernatural battle.



   THREE DAYS TO
      NEVER
          Tim Powers
Copyright © 2006 by Tim Powers

 ISBN-13: 978-0-380-97653-9

    ISBN-10: 0-380-97653-6
For Chris and Teresa Arena
And with thanks to Assaf Asheri, Mike
Baches, John Bierer, Jim Blaylock, Didi
Chanoch, Russell Galen, Patricia Geary,
Tom Gilchrist, Rani Graff, Julia Halperin,
John Hertz, Jon Hodge, Varnum Honey, Pat
Hough, Barry Levin, Brian and Cathy
McCaleb, Karen Meisner, Denny Meyer,
Eric Nylund, Aya Shacham, Dave Sandoval,
Bill Schafer, Sunila Sen Gupta, David
Silberstein, Kristine Sobrero, Ed Thomas,
Vered Tochterman, Guy Wiener, Hagit
Wiener, Naomi Wiener, Par Winzell, and
Mike Yanovich.

            Prologue
Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the King my father's wrack,
This music crept by me upon the waters.
-- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST
The ambulance came bobbing out of the Mercy Medical
Center parking lot and swung south on Pine Street, its
blue and red lights just winking dots in the bright noon
sunshine and the siren echoing away into the cloudless
blue vault of the sky. At East Lake Street the
ambulance turned left, avoiding most of the traffic
farther south, where reports of a miraculous angel
appearing on somebody's TV set had attracted
hundreds of the spiritual pilgrims who had come to town
for this weekend.
  At the Everett Memorial Highway the ambulance
turned north, and accelerated; in five minutes it had left
the city behind and was ascending the narrow blacktop
strip through cool pine forests, and when the highway
curved east the white peaks of Shasta and Shastina
stood up high above the timberline.
  Traffic was heavier as the highway switchbacked up
the mountain slope -- Volkswagen vans, campers,
buses -- and the shoulder was dotted with hitchhikers
in jeans and robes and knapsacks.
  The red-and-white ambulance weaved between the
vehicles on the highway, and it was able to speed up
again when the highway straightened out past the
Bunny Flats campgrounds. Three miles farther on, the
parking lot at Panther Meadows was clogged with cars
and vans, but the hospital had radioed ahead and
Forest Service officers had cleared a path to the north
end of the lot, where trails led away among the trees.
  In the clearings around the trailhead, people were
strolling aimlessly or staring up into the sky or sitting in
meditation circles, and the woods were noisy with
ringing bells and the yells of children; two white-clad
paramedics got out of the ambulance and carried a
stretcher through a sea of beards and gray ponytails
and pastel robes, with the tang of patchouli oil spicing
the scent of Douglas fir on the chilly breeze -- but they
didn't have to hike far, because six people had already
made a stretcher of flannel shirts and cherry branches
and had carried the limp body most of the way back
from the high glades of Squaw Meadow; the body was
wrapped in an old brown army blanket and wreathed
with Shasta daisies and the white flowers of wild
strawberry.
   The paramedics lifted the old woman's body onto
their aluminum-and-nylon stretcher, and within minutes
the ambulance was accelerating back down the
mountain, but with no siren now.
   Back in the clearing up on Squaw Meadow, the people
who had not carried the stretcher were dismembering a
swastika-shaped framework of gold wire, having to
bend it repeatedly to break it, since none of them was
carrying a pocketknife.


                  ACT ONE
       I'll Drown My Book
      I have done nothing but in care of thee,
      Of thee my dear one, thee my daughter,
      who Art ignorant of what thou art, not
      knowing Of whence I am...
      -- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST

                        One
"It doesn't look burned."
"No," said her father, squinting and shading his eyes
with his hand. They had paused halfway across the
weedy backyard.
  "Are you sure she said 'shed'?"
  "Yes -- 'I've burned down the Kaleidoscope Shed,'
she told me."
  Daphne Marrity sat down on a patch of grass and
straightened her skirt, peering at the crooked old gray
structure that was visible now under the shadow of the
shaggy avocado tree. It would probably burn up pretty
fast, if anybody was to try to burn it.
  The shingled roof was patchy, sagging in the middle,
and the two dusty wood-framed windows on either side
of the closed door seemed to be falling out of the
clapboard wall; it probably leaked badly in the rain.
  Daphne had heard that her father and aunt had
sometimes sneaked out here to play in the shed when
they were children, though they weren't allowed to. The
door was so low that Daphne herself might have to
stoop to get through, and she was not a particularly tall
twelve-year-old.
  It was probably when they were too young to go to
school, she thought. Or else it's because I was born in
1975, and kids are taller now than they were back then.
  "The tree would have burned up too," she noted.
   "You're going to get red ants all over you. She might
have dreamed it. I don't think it was a, a joke." Her
father glanced around, frowning, clearly irritated. He
was sweating, even with his jacket folded over his arm.
   "Gold under the bricks," Daphne reminded him.
   "And she dreamed that too. I wonder where she is."
There had been no answer to his knock on the front
door of the house, but when they had walked around
the corner and pushed open the backyard gate they had
seen that the old green Rambler station wagon was in
the carport, in the yellow shade of the corrugated
fiberglass roof.
   Daphne crossed her legs on the grass and squinted
up at him against the sun's glare. "Why did she call it
the Kaleidosope Shed?"
   "It--" He laughed. "We all called it that. I don't
know."
   He had stepped on what he'd been about to say. She
sighed and looked toward the shed again. "Let's go in it
and pull up some bricks. I can watch out for spiders,"
she added.
   Her father shook his head. "I can see from here that
it's padlocked. We shouldn't even be hanging around
back here when Grammar's not home." Grammar was
the family name for the old lady, and it had not made
Daphne like her any better.
   "We had to, to see if she really did burn it down like
she said. Now we should see if" -- she thought quickly
-- "if she passed out in there from gasoline fumes.
Maybe she meant, 'I'm about to burn it down.'"
  "How could she have padlocked it from the outside?"
  "Maybe she's passed out behind the shed. She did call
you about the shed, and she doesn't answer the door,
and her car is here."
  "Oh..." He squinted and began to shake his head, so
she went on quickly.
  "'Screw your courage to the sticking place,'" she said.
"Maybe there really is gold under the bricks. Didn't she
have a lot of money?"
  He smiled distractedly. "'And we'll not fail.' She did
get some money in '55, I've heard."
  "How old was she then?" Daphne got to her feet,
brushing down the back of her skirt.
  "About fifty-five, I guess. She's probably about
eighty-seven now. Any money she's got is in the bank."
  "Not in the bank -- she's a hippie, isn't she?" Even
now, at twelve, Daphne was still somewhat afraid of her
chain-smoking great-grandmother, with her white hair,
her grinding German accent, and her wrinkly old cheeks
always wet with the artificial tears she bought in little
bottles at Thrifty. Daphne had never been allowed in
the old woman's backyard, and this was the first time
she'd ever been farther out than the back porch. "Or a
witch," she added.
  Daphne took her father's hand as a tentative prelude
to starting toward the shed.
  "She isn't a witch," he said, laughing. "And she isn't a
hippie either. She's too old to have been a hippie."
  "She went to Woodstock. You never went to
Woodstock."
   "She probably just went to sell her necklaces."
   "As weapons, I bet," Daphne said, recalling the clunky
talismans. The old woman had given Daphne one on her
seventh birthday, a stone thing on a necklace chain,
and before the day was out, Daphne had nearly given
herself a concussion with it, swinging it around; when
her favorite cat had died six months later, she had
buried the object with the cat.
   She tried to project the thought to him: let's check
out the shed.
   "Hippies didn't have weapons. Okay, I'll look around
in back of the shed."
   He began walking forward, leading the way and
holding her hand, stepping carefully through the dry
grass and high green weeds. His brown leather Top-
Siders ground creosote smells out of the bristly green
stalks.
   "Watch where you put your feet," he said over his
shoulder, "she's got all kinds of old crap out here."
   "Old crap," Daphne echoed.
   "Car-engine parts, broken air conditioners, suits of
medieval armor I wouldn't be surprised. I should carry
you, your legs are going to get all scratched."
   "Even skinny I'm too heavy now. You'd get apoplexy."
   "I could carry two girls your size, one under each
arm."
   They had stepped in under the shade of the tree
limbs, and her father handed her his brown corduroy
jacket.
   He shook his head as if at the silliness of all this, then
waded through the rank greenery to the corner of the
shed and disappeared around it. She could hear him
brushing against the shed's far wall, and cussing, and
knocking boards over.
   Daphne had folded his jacket and tucked it under her
left arm, and now she walked up to the shed door and
reached out with her right hand, took hold of the brown
padlock, and pulled. The whole rusted hasp and lock
came away from the wood in one stiff piece.
   A few moments later her father appeared from
around the far corner, red faced and sweating. His
white shirt was streaked with dust and cobwebs.
   "Well, she's not back there," he said, brushing dead
leaves out of his hair. "I don't think she's been out here
in months. Years. Let's get out of here."
   Daphne held out the rusted hasp and padlock for him
to see, then dropped it and brushed her fingers on her
pink blouse.
   "I didn't tear the wood," she said. "The screws were
just sitting in the holes."
   "Good lord, Daph," said her father, "nobody's going to
mind."
   "I know, but I mean the thing was just hung there, in
the holes-somebody else pulled it out, and then hung it
backup." She wrinkled her nose. "And I smell gasoline."
   "You do not."
   "Honest, I do." They both knew her sense of smell
was better than his.
   "You just want to look in there for gold."
   But he sighed and tugged on the purple glass
doorknob, and the door creaked open, sliding easily
over the dead grass.
   "Probably she keeps whisky out here," Daphne said, a
little nervously. "Sneaks out at night to drink it." Her
father said her uncle Bennett kept a bottle of whisky in
his garage, and that's why he kept all his business files
out there.
   "She doesn't drink whisky," her father said absently,
crouching to peer inside. "I wish we had a flashlight --
somebody's pulled up half the floor." He leaned back
and exhaled. "And I smell gasoline too."
   Daphne bent down and looked past her father's elbow
into the dimness. A roughly four-foot-square cement
slab was leaned up against the shelves on the left-side
wall, and seemed to be responsible for that wall's
outward tilt; and a square patch of bare black dirt at
the foot of the slab seemed to indicate where it had
been pried up. The rest of the floor was pale bricks.
   The floor was clear except for a scattering of cigarette
butts and a pair of tire-soled sandals lying on the
bricks.
   The gasoline reek was strong enough to mask
whatever moldy smells the place might ordinarily have;
and Daphne could see a red-and-yellow metal gasoline
can on a wooden shelf against the back wall.
   Her father ducked inside and took hold of the handle
on top of the can and lifted it. She could hear swishing
inside the can as he stepped past her, and it seemed to
be heavy as he carried it outside. She noticed that there
was no cap on it. No wonder the place reeks, she
thought.
   There was a nearly opaque window in the back wall,
and Daphne stepped in across the bricks and stood on
tiptoe to twist the latch on its frame; the latch snapped
off, but when she pushed on the window the entire
thing fell outside, frame and all, thumping in the thick
weeds. Dry summer air puffed in through the ragged
square hole, fluttering her brown bangs. She inhaled it
gratefully.
   "I've got ventilation," she called over her shoulder.
"And some light too."
   A television sat on a metal cart to the left of the door,
with a VCR on top of it. The VCR was flashing 12:00,
though it must be past one by now.
   "The time's wrong," she said to her father, pointing at
the VCR as he ducked his head to step inside again.
   "What?"
   "On her VCR. Weird to have electricity out here."
   "Oh! It's always had electrical outlets. God knows
why. This is the first time I've seen anything plugged in,
out here. Lucky there was no spark." He glanced past
her and smiled. "I'm glad you got that window open."
   Daphne thought he was relieved to learn that her
"time's wrong" remark had been about the VCR. But
before she could think of a way to ask him about it, he
had stepped to the shelf and picked up a green metal
box that had been hidden behind the gasoline can.
   "What's that?" she asked.
   "An ammunition box. I don't think she's ever had a
gun, though." He swung the lid up, then tipped it
sideways so Daphne could see that it was full of old
yellowed papers. He righted it and began flipping
through them.
   Daphne glanced at the nearly upright cement slab --
and then looked at it more closely. It was lumpy with
damp mud, but somebody had cleaned four patches of
it -- two handprints and two shoe prints, clearly pressed
into the cement when it had still been wet. And behind
the undisturbed clumps of mud she could see looping
grooves in the face of the block; somebody had
scrawled something in it too.
   She put her father's jacket on the shelf beside the
ammunition box and then stepped down onto the patch
of sunken dirt next to the block. She pressed her open
right hand into the right-hand print in the block -- and
then quickly pulled her hand away. The cement there
was as smooth and warm as flesh, and damp.
   With the side of her shoe, she scuffed mud off the
bottom of the slab, and then stepped back. Jan 12 --
1928, she read. The writing seemed to have been done
with a stick.
   "Bunch of old letters," her father said behind her.
"New Jersey postmarks, 1933, '39, '55 .. ."
   "To her?"
   Daphne pried off some more mud with her fingers.
There was a long, smooth groove next to the shoe
prints, as if a rod too had been pressed into the wet
cement. She noticed that the shoe prints were awfully
long and narrow, and set at a duck-foot angle.
  "Lisa Marrity, yup," said her father.
  Above the rod indentation was a crude caricature of a
man with a bowler hat and a Hitler mustache.
  "The letters are all in German," her father said. She
could hear him rifling through the stack. "Well, no,
some in English. Ugh, they're sticky, the envelopes!
Was she licking them?"
  Daphne could puzzle out the words at the top of the
block, since the grooves of the writing were neatly filled
in with black mud. To Sid -- Best of Luck. And the last
clump of dirt fell off all at once when she tugged at it.
Exposed now was the carefully incised name, Charlie
Chaplin.
  Daphne looked over her shoulder at her father, who
was holding the metal box and peering into it. "Hey,"
she said.
  "Hmm?"
  "Check this out."
  Marrity looked at her, then past her at the cement
slab; his face went blank. He put the box down on the
shelf. "Is that real? " he said softly.
  She tried to think of a funny answer, then just
shrugged. "I don't know."
  He was staring at the slab. "I mean, isn't the real one
at the Chinese Theater?"
  "I don't know."
  He glanced at her and smiled. "Sony. But this might
be real. Maybe they made two. She says she knew
Chaplin. She flew to Switzerland after he died."
  "Where did he die?"
   "In Switzerland, goof. I wonder if these letters--" He
paused, for Daphne had got down on her hands and
knees and begun prying up the bricks along the edge of
the exposed patch of wet dirt. "What?" he said. "Gold?"
   "She almost burned up the shed," Daphne said
without looking up. "Got the cap off the gas can, at
least."
   "Well -- true." Her father knelt beside her, on the
bricks instead of the mud--which Daphne was pleased
to see, as she didn't want to wash a fresh pair of pants
for him to wear to work tomorrow -- and pulled up a
couple of bricks himself. His dark hair was falling into
his eyes, and he streaked a big smudge of grime onto
his forehead when he pushed it back. Great, Daphne
thought; he looks -- probably we both look -- as if we
just tunneled out of a jail.
   Daphne saw a glint of brightness in the flat mud
where one brick had been, and she rubbed at it; it was
a piece of wire about as thick as a pencil. It was looped,
and she hooked a finger through it to pull it up, but the
rest of the loop was stuck fast under the other bricks.
   "Is this gold?" she asked her father.
   He grunted and rubbed more dirt off the wire. "I can't
say it's not," he said. "Right color, at least, and it's
pliable."
   "She said you should get the gold up from under the
bricks, right? So let's--"
   From outside, on the street, a car horn honked three
times, and then a man's voice called, "Frank?"
   "It's your uncle Bennett," said her father, quickly
slamming back into place the bricks he had moved.
Daphne fit hers back in too, suppressing a giggle at the
idea of hiding the treasure from her dumb uncle.
   The bricks replaced, her father leaped up and
grabbed all the papers in the ammunition box into one
fist and shoved them deep into an inside pocket of his
jacket on the shelf. He wiped his hand on his shirt, and
Daphne remembered that he had said the envelopes
were sticky.
   "Stand back," he said, and Daphne stepped back
beside the television set.
   Then he cautiously put one foot on the square of
black dirt and gripped the cement slab by the top edges
and pulled it toward himself. It swayed forward, and
then he hopped backward out of the way as it
overbalanced and thudded heavily to the floor, breaking
one row of bricks. The whole shed shook, and black
dust sifted down onto the two of them from the rotted
ceiling.
   The block's near edge was visibly canted up, resting
on the row of broken bricks.
   "Both of us," said Daphne, sitting down on the bricks
to set her heels against the raised edge. Her father
knelt on the bricks and braced his hands on the slab.
   "On three," he said. "One, two, three."
   Daphne and her father both pushed, and then pushed
harder, and at last the slab shifted, slid to its original
position and thumped down flush with the bricks. Its
top face was dry and blank.
   Daphne heard the click of the backyard gate, and she
scrambled up and ran two steps to the VCR and hit the
eject button. The machine whirred as her uncle's
footsteps thrashed through the weeds, and then the
tape had popped out and Daphne snatched it and
dropped it into her purse as her father hastily grabbed
his jacket from the shelf, slid his arms into the sleeves
and shrugged it onto his shoulders.
   "Frank!" came Bennett's shout again, this time from
just outside the open door. "I saw your car! Where are
you?"
   "In here, Bennett!" Daphne's father called.
   Her uncle's red face peered in under the sagging door
lintel, and for once his expression was simply wide-eyed
dismay. His mustache was already spiky with sweat,
though he would have had the air conditioner on in his
car.
   "What the fuck's going on?" he yelled shrilly. "Why
the -- bloody hell does it smell like gasoline in here?"
Daphne guessed that he was embarrassed at having
said fuck, and so hurried to cover it with his habitual
bloody -- though he wasn't British. "You've got Daphne
with you!"
   "Grammar left the top off a gas can," her father said.
"We were trying to get some ventilation in here."
   "What was that almighty crash?"
   Her father jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "The
window fell out when I tried to open it."
   "Sash weights," put in Daphne.
  "Why are you even here?" Bennett demanded. He
ducked in under the lintel and stood up inside; the shed
was very crowded with three people in it.
  "My grandmother called me this morning," said
Marrity evenly, "and asked me to come over and look at
the shed. She said she was afraid it was going to burn
down, and with that uncapped gasoline can in here, it
might have."
  Daphne noted the details of her father's half lie; and
she noted his emphasis on my grandmother -- Bennett
had only married into the family.
  "It's a little academic at this point," snapped Bennett,
"and there's nothing valuable out here." He looked more
closely at Daphne and her father, presumably only now
noticing the dust in their hair and the mud on their
hands, and suddenly his eyes widened. "Or is there?"
  His hand darted out and pulled the videocassette
from Daphne's purse. "What's this?"
  Daphne could read the label on it: Pee-wees Big
Adventure. It was a movie she'd seen in a theater two
years ago. "That's mine," she said. "It's about bad
people stealing Pee-wee's bicycle."
  "My daughter's not a thief, Bennett," her father said
mildly. Daphne reflected that right now she was a thief,
actually.
  "I know, sorry." Bennett tossed the cassette, and
Daphne caught it. "But you shouldn't be here," he said
to her father as he bent down to step out of the shed,
"now that she's dead." From outside he called, "Not
unless Moira and I are here too."
  Marrity followed him outside, and Daphne was right
behind him.
  "Who's dead?" asked her father.
  Bennett frowned. "Your grandmother. You don't know
this? She died an hour and a half ago, at Mount Shasta.
The hospital just called me -- Moira and I are to fly up
this afternoon and take care of the funeral
arrangements." He peered at his brother-in-law. "You
really didn't know?"
  "Mount Shasta, at like" -- Marrity glanced at his
watch -- "noon? That's not possible. Why would she be
at Mount Shasta?"
  " She was communing with angels or something --
well, that turned out to be right. She was there for the
Harmonic Convergence."
  Behind the grime and the tangles of dark hair, Frank
Marrity's face was pale. "Where's Moira?"
  "She's at home, packing. Now if we want to avoid
things like restraining orders, I think we should all
agree--"
  "I'm going to call her." He started toward the house,
and Daphne trotted along behind him, clutching her
Pee-wee videocassette.
  "It'll be locked," Bennett called after him.
  Daphne's father didn't answer, but pulled his key ring
out of his pants pocket.
  "You've got a key? You shouldn't have a key!"
  Grammar's house was a white Spanish adobe with a
red-tile roof, and the back patio had a trellis shading it,
tangled with roses and grapevines. Over the back door
was a wooden sign, with hand-carved letters: Everyone
Who Dwells Here Is Safe. Daphne had wondered about
it ever since she had been able to read, and only last
summer she had found the sentence in a Grimm
Brothers fairy tale, "The Maiden Without Hands." The
sentence had been on a sign in front of the house of a
good fairy who had taken in a fugitive queen and her
baby son.
   The air was cooler under the trellis, and Daphne could
smell roses on the breeze. She wondered how her
father was taking the news of his grandmother's death.
He and his sister had been toddlers when they lost their
parents -- their father ran away and their mother died
in a car crash soon after -- and they had been raised
here, by Grammar.
   Her father stopped on the step up to the back door,
and Daphne saw that one of the vertical windows beside
the door was broken; and when her father walked to
the door and twisted the knob, the door swung inward.
None of the locks here are any good, she thought.
   "You've erased fingerprints!" panted Bennett, who
was right behind Daphne now. "It was probably a
burglar that broke the window."
   "A burglar would have reached through and turned
the knob inside," Daphne told him. "My dad isn't going
to touch that one."
   "Daph," said her father. "Wait out here with Bennett."
   Her father stepped into the kitchen, and her uncle at
least waited with her.
   "Probably broke it herself," muttered Bennett.
"Marritys."
   "'Divil a man can say a word agin them,'" said
Daphne. She and her father had recently watched
Yankee Doodle Dandy, and her head was full of George
M. Cohan lyrics.
   Bennett glanced away from the door to give her an
irritable look. "All that Shakespeare won't help you get
a job. Except--" He shook his head and resumed staring
at the kitchen door.
   "It'll help me get a job as a literature professor," she
said blandly, knowing that that was what his except had
referred to. Her father was a literature professor at the
University of Redlands. "Best job there is." Her uncle
Bennett was a location manager for TV commercials,
and apparently made way more money than her father
did.
   Her uncle opened his mouth and then after a second
snapped it shut again, clearly not wanting to get into an
argument with a girl. "You absolutely reek of gasoline,"
he said instead.
   She heard footsteps on linoleum in the house, and
then her father pulled the kitchen door wide open. "If
there was a thief, he's gone," he said. "Let's see if she
has any beers in her 'frigerator."
   "We shouldn't touch anything," said Bennett, but he
stepped in ahead of Daphne. The house was cool, and
the kitchen smelled faintly of bacon and onions and
cigarettes, as usual.
   Daphne couldn't see that anything in the room was
different from the way it had looked at Easter -- the
spotless sink and counter, the garlic-and-dried-
rosemary centerpiece on the kitchen table; the broom
was upside down in the corner, but the old lady always
kept it that way -- to scare off nightmares, according to
her father.
   Bennett picked up a business card from the kitchen
counter. "See?" he said. "Bell Cabs. She must have
taken a taxi to the airport." He set it back down again.
   Her father had lifted the receiver from the yellow
telephone on the wall and was using the forefinger of
the same hand to spin the dial. With his other hand he
pointed at the refrigerator. "Daph, could you see if
there's a beer in there?"
   Daphne pulled open the door of the big green
refrigerator -- it was older than her father, who had
once said that it looked like a 1950 Buick stood on its
nose -- and found two cans of Budweiser among the
jars of nasty black concoctions.
   She put one into her father's hand and waved the
other at her uncle.
   "Not Budweiser, thank you," he said stiffly.
   Daphne put the other can on the counter by her
father, and looked at the cork bulletin board on the
wall. "Her keys are gone," she noted.
   "Probably in her purse," her father said. "Moira?" he
said into the telephone. "Did Grammar die? What? This
is a lousy connection. Bennett told me -- we're at her
house. What? At her house, I said." He popped open the
beer one-handed. "I don't know. Listen, are you sure?"
He took a long sip of the beer. "I mean, could it have
been a prank call?" For several seconds he just listened,
and he put the beer can down on the tile counter to
touch Grammar's electric coffee grinder; he flipped the
switch on it, and the little upright cylinder chattered as
it ground up some beans that must still have been in it.
He switched it off again. "When did the hospital call
you? Talk slower. Uh-huh. And when you called them
back, what was the number?"
   He lifted a pencil from a vase full of pens and pencils
and wrote the number on the back of the Bell Cabs
card.
   "What were the last two numbers? Okay, got it." He
put the card in his shirt pocket. "Yeah, me too kid.
Okay, thanks." He held the receiver out to Bennett.
"She wants to talk to you. Bad connection -- it keeps
getting screechy or silent."
   Bennett nodded impatiently and took the phone, and
he was saying, "I just wanted to see if -- are you there?
-- if there was anything here we'd need to bring along,
birth certificate..." as Frank Marrity led Daphne into the
dark living room.
   Grammar's violin and bow were hanging in their usual
place between two framed parchments with Jewish
writing on them, and in spite of having been scared of
the old woman, Daphne suddenly felt like crying at the
thought that Grammar would never play it anymore.
Daphne remembered her bow skating over the strings
in the first four notes of one of her favorite Mozart violin
concertos.
   A moment later her father softly whistled the next six
notes.
   Daphne blinked. "And!" she whispered, "you're sad
about Grammar, and mad at her too -- and you're very
freaked about her coffee grinder! I... can't see why."
   After a pause, he nodded. "That's right." He looked at
her with one eyebrow raised. "This is the first time you
and I have both had it at the same time."
   "Like turn blinkers on a couple of cars," she said
quietly. "It was bound to match up eventually." She
looked up at him. "What's so weird about her coffee
grinder?"
   "I'll tell you later." In a normal tone he said, over her
shoulder, "I don't think my grandmother ever had a
birth certificate."
   Daphne turned and saw that Bennett had entered the
living room and was frowning at the drawn curtains.
   "I suppose they don't give birth certificates in Oz," he
said. "We should fix that window."
   "I can use her Makita to screw a piece of plywood
over it from the inside. You think we should call the
police?" Her father waved at the violin on the wall. "If
there was a thief, he didn't take her Stradivarius."
   Bennett blinked and started forward. "Is that a
Stradivarius?"
   "I was kidding. No. I don't think anything's been
taken."
   "Very funny. I don't think we need to call the police.
But fix the window now -- we should all leave together,
and only come here all together." He rubbed his
mustache. "I wonder if she left a will."
  "Moira and I are on the deed already. I can't imagine
there's much besides the house."
  "Her car, her books. Some of this... artwork might be
valuable to some people."
  To some weirdos, you mean, thought Daphne. She
was suddenly defensive about the old woman's crystals
and copper bells and paintings of unicorns and eyes in
pyramids and sleepy-looking bearded guys wearing
robes.
  "We'll want to inventory it all, get an appraiser,"
Bennett went on. "She was a collector, and she might
have happened to pick up some valuable items, amid all
the crap. Even a broken clock is right twice a day."
  Daphne could feel that the mention of broken clocks,
in this house, jarred her father. There were a lot of
things she wanted to remember to ask him about, once
they were in their truck again.

                       Two
Outside the vibrating windowpane, the narrow trunks of
palm trees swayed in the hard sun glare over the
glittering traffic on La Brea Avenue. This was south of
Olympic, south of the dressy stores around Melrose with
black or green awnings out front, and way south of
Charlie Chaplin's old studio up at Sunset where you
could see the individual houses on the green Hollywood
hills; down here it was car washes and Chinese fast
food and one-hour photo booths and old apartment
buildings, like this one, with fenced-in front lawns. The
apartment was stuffy, and reeked of coffee and
cigarette smoke.
  Oren Lepidopt had crushed out his latest cigarette in
the coffee cup on the blocky living room table, and he
held the telephone receiver tight to his ear. Answer the
page, he thought. It's a land line, obviously it's
something I don't want broadcast.
  The only sound in the apartment aside from the faint
music at the window was the soft rattle of keystrokes
on an electronic keyboard in the kitchen.
  At last Malk's voice came on the line -- "Hello?" --
and Lepidopt leaned back against the couch cushions.
  "Bert," he said. "It's daylight here."
  There was a pause, then Malk said, "I thought it was
daylight here too."
  "Well I think it's... brighter, here. Now. We got
another installment from the ether. I think more is
going on here than where you were going."
  "I probably can't get a refund on the ticket."
  "Screw the ticket. You need to hear Sam's new tape."
  "Ala bab Allah," sighed Malk.
  Lepidopt laughed at the ironic use of the Arabic
phrase -- it meant, more or less, "What will be will be."
"So get back here now. Full APAM dry-cleaning while
you're driving too -- stops and double backs, watch for
multiple cars, and if you can even see a helicopter,
drive on by and lose the car."
  "Okay. Don't start the John Wayne stuff till I get
there."
   Lepidopt's elbows jerked in against his ribs in a
sudden shudder.
   The line went dead, and Lepidopt's face was cold as
he replaced the receiver in its cradle.
   Don't start the John Wayne stuff till I get there. Bert,
Bert, he thought, so carelessly and unknowingly you
shorten my life! Or show me a new, even closer
boundary of it, anyway.
   He made himself take a deep breath and then let it
out.
   The faint clicking of the keyboard had stopped. "You
were laughing," said young Ernie Bozzaris from the
table in the kitchen, "and then you look as if you saw a
demon. What did he say?"
   Lepidopt waved his left hand in a dismissive gesture.
"I shouldn't have borscht for lunch," he said gruffly.
"He's coming back here, not getting on the plane.
Should be here in half an hour or less." Suddenly self-
conscious, he slid his maimed right hand into his
pocket.
   Bozzaris stared at him for another moment, then
shrugged and returned his attention to his computer
monitor. He was in his late twenties, fresh from the
Midrasha academy; there was no gray in his black hair
yet, and though he shaved several times a day, his lean
jaw always seemed to be dark. "It's not the borscht,"
he said absently, "it's the Tabasco you pour into it."
   With his left hand Lepidopt shook out another Camel
from the pack, then used the same hand to snap his
lighter at it. He inhaled deeply -- it seemed even less
likely now that he would have time to die of cancer. He
had always heard the saying, You're scared until the
first shot. And that had proved true twenty years ago,
in Jerusalem. For a little while, at least.
   He sighed. "Any activity? " he asked as he stood up
and carried his coffee cup to the kitchen. His shoes
were as silent on the kitchen's linoleum floor as they
had been on the carpet in the living room.
   Bozzaris had hung his gray linen sport coat over the
back of the plastic chair and rolled up his sleeves.
   "No unusual activity," he said, not looking away from
the dark green monitor screen and the bright green
lines of type scrolling upward, "But we don't know who
else is out there. The one in New Jersey who tried to
get into the mainframe Honeywell in Tel Aviv an hour
ago uses the Unix disk-operating system on a Vax
machine, and, like everybody else, he doesn't know
about the three built-in accounts the machines always
come with. I got into his machine by logging on to the
'Field' account, default password 'Service.'"
   He paused to knot his long, thin fingers over the
monitor and stretch. "Their e-mails," he went on, "show
nothing but the usual cover-business stuff, assuming it
is a cover business -- the real guys might be covertly
routed through real businesses, like we are. And there's
been no notable increase or decrease in the traffic
during this last hour and a half."
   Bozzaris had insisted that the Institute pay for a new
IBM model 80 computer with a 32-bit processor, and a
Hayes Smartmodem 1200 that could operate at either
300 or 1200 baud. Lepidopt was used to the shoe-type
modems that a telephone receiver had to be fitted into.
   "Are any of the travel messages suspicious?"
   "How should I know? It's a travel agency. A number
of flights here to L.A., which I've copied, but that seems
to be usual for them. And of course any of them could
be codes. But there hasn't been any 'Johnny, this is
your mother, take the casserole out of the oven.'"
   "Any of them could be codes," Lepidopt agreed.
   "I doubt they've got anything more than the
Harmonic Convergence static; a hundred thousand New
Agers standing on mountain-tops, holding hands and
blanking their minds all at once to realign the earth's
soul."
   Static? thought Lepidopt. They're making a
blasphemous Tzimt-zum, is what they're doing. In the
beginning En-Sof, the unknowable Infinite Light,
contracted itself to make space for the creation of the
finite worlds, since without that contraction there would
have been no room for anything besides Itself.
   And now these wretched hippies and mystics have all
contracted their minds at the same time! What sort of
things will spring into existence in this vacuum?
   Bozzaris seemed to answer his thought. "Every sort of
critter is likely to be poking its head through from the
other side," the younger man said, "with that kind of
door open."
   "The New Jersey crowd tried to hack Tel Aviv after
the noon event."
   Bozzaris shrugged. "It's unlikely that they'd have
been listening on that, uh, wavelength," he said. "But I
suppose the event might have registered with other
media. Of course people do try to hack Tel Aviv, for lots
of reasons."
   "Assume it's not a coincidence," said Lepidopt.
   He stepped to the kitchen counter and poured hot
coffee into his cup, then stared at the cigarette butt
floating in it.
   With his left hand he fished the cigarette butt out of
the cup and tossed it into the sink, shaking his fingers
afterward. Then he sighed and took a sip of the coffee.
   Bozzaris typed H-> to hang up the phone line, then
immediately typed in DT and a new telephone number.
The modem's LED lights flickered.
   Lepidopt sipped his coffee and looked nervously
toward the front window while Bozzaris clicked his way
through now familiar passwords and directories. This
telephone line was routed through a number of
locations, and if Bozzaris's intrusions were fingered by
the National Security Agency, there would probably be a
warning soon enough for them to abandon this safe
house.
   And Bozzaris, for all his youth, was meticulous about
security, always checking his computers for
unsuspected "back doors" and intrusions. Only Bozzaris
touched the machine, but he had told Lepidopt about all
sorts of computer perils, such as programs that would
mimic the IBM opening screen and ask for the user's
password, and when the password had been entered
would store it, and then flash "INVALID PASSWORD.
TRY AGAIN," so that the user would assume he had
typed the password wrong, and enter it again, at which
point the real log-in sequence would start, and the user
would never know that the intruder had copied his
password. Bozzaris watched for intrusive programs and
changed his passwords all the time. He even made
allowances for the possibility of microphones in the
room, and made sure to hit each key of his passwords
in a measured pace, not hitting a double letter with two
fast clicks; and, just to make any inquisitive listeners
think his passwords included more characters than they
actually did, he always hit a couple of random keys
after pressing carriage-return.
   Now Bozzaris sat back. "I see no unusual activity
among the 'special Arabic' crowd at the NSA." This was
the NSA euphemism for their Hebrew linguists
monitoring Israel. Lepidopt was relieved to see him hit
H-> again, terminating the phone connection.
   A moment later Bozzaris began typing again, and
Lepidopt sat down on the pebbled gray-steel safe that
sat against the wall next to the stove.
   He got up when the daisy-wheel printer on the
counter beside him started chattering.
   Bozzaris pushed his chair back and stood up, yawning
cavernously. He waved at the printer. "The billing
addresses the New Jersey guys have booked to or from
LAX so far today. Not likely to be anything, and
probably not worth checking out now -- but we can
keep them in the safe and see if they show up in
anything that develops."
  "Compare them against all Los Angeles lists we've
got, of anything. And send a copy to Tel Aviv."
  "To who, in Tel Aviv? Who are we working for? Who
are we, anymore?"
  "To Admoni, as usual."
  Lepidopt wished it were still Isser Harel instead of
Nahum Admoni, though Harel had resigned as director
general of the Mossad in 1963, four years before
Lepidopt had been recruited into the Israeli secret
service. It had been Harel who had instituted this off-
paper "Halomot" division, the agents of which used
target-country passports -- American, in this case --
and didn't work through the Israeli embassies. The
Halomot was even more insulated from the rest of the
Mossad than the Kidon, the assassin division.
  Young Bozzaris had a point, though, when he had
asked, Who are we, anymore? Since 1960 the Halomot
had been concealed as a succession of anonymous
committees in the LAKAM, the Israeli Bureau of
Scientific Liaison; but the LAKAM had been shut down
amid international scandal a year and a half ago after
the FBI arrested Jonathan Pollard, the LAKAM's paid spy
in the U. S. Naval Investigations Service. The LAKAM
had not been part of the Mossad, but its chief had once
been a Mossad agent, and any Mossad activity in the
United States was now potential diplomatic catastrophe.
  The Halomot was left with no cover identity at all, and
Lepidopt was afraid that Nahum Admoni didn't share
Isser Harel's conviction that the Halomot function was
necessary, or even real.
   Lepidopt held up a loop of the continuous sheet that
was ratcheting out of the printer, another inch
appearing every time the spinning printhead reversed
its direction across the paper. The billing addresses
were in Glendale, Santa Ana, Palm Springs...
   Lepidopt walked back into the living room and
crossed to the wide front window. He put his cup down
on the sill and stared down at the afternoon traffic on
La Brea.
   You're scared until the first shot.
   Lepidopt had been twenty years old in early 1967,
working for a plumbing-supply company in Tel Aviv, and
the idea of war had been almost inconceivable.
Throughout May he had followed the news -- U Thant
had capitulated to Nasser's demand that the UN
peacekeepers be pulled out of the Sinai desert, which
was the buffer zone between Egypt and Israel, and
Egyptian forces had taken control of the Gulf of Aqaba
-- but everybody knew that Egyptian troops were too
busy fighting in Yemen to attack Israel.
   Buses in Tel Aviv had been running irregularly
because many of the drivers had been called into
military service; late in May Prime Minister Eshkol had
broadcast to the nation his famous "stammering
speech," in which he had sounded uncertain and
scared; and every Arab radio station from Cairo to
Damascus had been joyfully predicting that all the Jews
would shortly be driven into the sea; but it wasn't until
his own reserve unit was called up that the young
Lepidopt had believed there might actually be a war.
   He had been making a delivery to a kibbutz outside
Tel Aviv, he recalled, unloading lengths of copper pipe
from a truck, sweating in the morning sunlight and
watching a group of young men under the corrugated
steel awning of a grocery store across the street. They
were huddled around a little transistor radio with its
volume turned all the way up; the station was Kol
Ysrael, and the voice from the radio was reading out
call signs -- "Open Window... Ham and Eggs... Top Hat"
-- and every few minutes one of the young men would
jerk, and then step into the sunlight and hurry away.
The voice was echoing from other radios too, and up
and down the street Lepidopt saw men and women
stepping out of shops, taking off aprons and locking
doors; and then he heard his own call sign, and he
dropped the last armload of pipe onto the street so that
he could drive the truck to the army base at Peta Tiqwa.
What he remembered later was how quiet it had all
been -- no weeping or cheering, just the voice on the
radio and the footsteps receding away on the
pavement.
   Forty years old now, he stared at the Marlboro
billboard over the muffler-and-tune-up shop across La
Brea, and he pressed the four fingers of his scarred
right hand against the sun-warmed glass.
   He had been trained in parachuting, and he had found
himself abruptly reassigned to the "red berets," the
55th Parachute Brigade under Colonel Mordecai Gur. For
three days he lived in one of a row of military tents
outside the Lod Airport, halfway between Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem, and then on Sunday the third of June the
brigade had boarded air-conditioned tourist buses and
been driven to the Tel Nov military jet field near
Rehovoth.
  The next morning he saw six of the French-built
Mirage jet fighters take off to the west, the blue Star of
David insignia gleaming on the silvery fuselages, and
then somehow everyone knew that the war had actually
begun. Egypt and Syria were certainly the enemy, and
probably Jordan as well, and France and Britain and the
United States would not help.
  Most of the paratroopers of the 55th were to be
dropped into the desert at the southern tip of the Sinai,
near the Egyptian air base at Sharm el-Sheikh; but
Lepidopt had been in the hastily assembled Fourth
Battalion, and they had been briefed separately from
the other three battalions.
  Standing on the tarmac away from the cargo planes
and the buses, Lepidopt and his companions had been
told that the Fourth Battalion was to be dropped later,
over the town of E-Tur on the east shore of the Gulf of
Suez, there to link up with a unit of General Yoffe's tank
division, which would by then have come down the
shoreline from the north; from there they were to
proceed inland to a site near the ancient Saint
Catherine's Monastery. They were told that their
destination was to be a peculiar stone formation in that
dry wasteland of granite and sand -- the briefing officer
referred to it as the Rephidim, which Lepidopt had
known was the place where Moses had struck a dry rock
with his staff to produce a spring for the mutinous
Israelites.
   Every man in the Fourth Battalion had been given a
cellophane -laminated map and a green plastic film
badge, which several of the men recognized as being
devices to measure the wearer's exposure to radiation;
the badges were heavier than they looked, and bore
only the initials ORNL. They were apparently from the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in the
United States. Lepidopt pinned his onto his khaki shirt,
under his camouflage jacket.
   But at a little past noon, the orders were changed. No
flying would be involved after all -- Sharm el-Sheikh
had already been taken, and the 55th was to proceed
by bus to the Old City of Jerusalem instead, thirty-five
miles away to the southeast.
   That meant Jordan had entered the war against Israel
too, and Lepidopt and his companions would be fighting
the elite British-trained Arab Legion. Equipped with new
maps and having shed their parachutes, they boarded
the buses at 6:00 p.m.
   Only after his bus was under way did Lepidopt learn
that an officer had collected the film badges from the
rest of the men who had been designated as the Fourth
Battalion -- Lepidopt still had his pinned to his shirt.
   Rocking in his bus seat as dusk fell over the ancient
Judaean hills, Lepidopt had discovered that fear felt
very much like grief -- his father had died two years
before, and now he found himself once again unable to
hold on to or even complete a thought, and he clung to
the view of trees moving past outside the window
because staying in one place would be intolerable, and
he was yawning frequently though he wasn't sleepy at
all.
   And in the streets of Mount Scopus that night, still a
day's march north of Jerusalem's walls, he had found a
cold Hieronymus Bosch landscape of domes and towers
lit in silhouette by mortar explosions close behind them,
and skeletons of jeeps and trucks white as bone in the
glare of the Israeli searchlights -- he was stunned by
the ceaseless hammering of .50-caliber machine guns
and tank-turret guns that concussed the night air; and
the crescent moon riding above the veils of smoke
seemed to be an omen for Islam.
   The ringing night had been enormous, and he had
been grateful for the men huddled around him in a
courtyard of the abandoned Hebrew University.
   But still he wasn't at the front. When the bell in the
YMCA tower struck one, the paratroopers began to
advance south through the crashing darkness toward
the walls of the Old City. The dawn came soon, and at
midmorning they regrouped in the wrecked lobby of the
Ambassador Hotel. By now they could see Jerusalem's
walls, and Herod's Gate, but it wasn't until late in the
afternoon that they passed the Rivoli Hotel and saw,
past the burned-out shell of a Jordanian bus, the tall
stone crenellations over the Lion's Gate. The
paratroopers cautiously advanced toward it.
   Visible through the gate was a corner of the gold
Dome of the Rock, where Mohammed was supposed to
have ascended to Heaven-- and from just inside the
gate a .30-caliber machine gun began firing into the
column of paratroopers. Their captain appeared to be
blown out of the jeep he'd been riding in, and all around
Lepidopt, men were spinning and falling as the bullets
tore and punched at them.
   Lepidopt had dived into the gutter, and then he had
his Uzi up and was firing at the flutter of glare that was
the machine-gun muzzle, and seconds later he and a
dozen of his fellows were up and running through the
gate.
   They soon fell back, to wait for reinforcements and
enter the city the following day; but that night, wrapped
in a blanket on the lobby floor of the Rivoli Hotel,
Lepidopt had realized that it was true -- You're scared
until the first shot. After that first machine gun had
begun firing in the Lion's Gate, he had simply been
dealing with each moment as if it were a ball pitched at
him, not looking ahead at all. Fear was the future, and
all his attention had been fixed on grappling with each
new piece of now.
   The next day he had learned that the future could
chop you down too; and that there was no way of
getting around the fear of that.
   "The door light's on," said Bozzaris now from the
kitchen. "That'll be Malk, or the FBI."
   Lepidopt turned away from the window and hurried
across the tan carpet to the kitchen, where he pulled up
the long accordioned sheet from behind the printer and
tore it off; the touch of a cigarette would flash the
paper to ash in a second, and he glanced at the pin in
the side of the computer, which only had to be yanked
out to ignite a thermite charge over the hard drive. As
he quickly lit a cigarette, he mentally rehearsed how he
would do both actions, if he should have to.
  A muffled knock sounded from the door in the living
room.
  It was today's two-and-two recognition knock, but
Lepidopt stepped behind the kitchen wall, reinforced
now with white-painted sheet steel, and he glanced at
the bowl of dry macaroni on the shelf by his left hand;
but when Bozzaris had got the door unbolted, it was
Bert Malk who stepped in, his jacket wrapped around
his fist, his tie loosened over his unbuttoned collar, and
his sandy hair visibly damp.
  "Matzáv mesukán?" he asked quietly. It meant
Dangerous situation?
  "No," Lepidopt said, leaning out from behind the wall.
"Just new information."
  Malk slid a small automatic pistol out of his bundled
jacket and tucked it into a holster behind his hip. "It's
worse in here than on the street," he complained. "I'll
take a cut in pay if you'll get an air conditioner."
  When Bozzaris had closed and rebolted the door,
Lepidopt tossed the stack of printout onto the counter
and stepped out from behind the kitchen wall. "It's not
the cost, it's the constant evaporation."
  "Sam's gotta learn to screen out phase changes,"
Malk said irritably. "Why don't cigarettes bother him?"
  Malk already knew the answer -- smaller scale, and
the fire hides it -- and Lepidopt just said, "Come listen
to this new tape he made."
  He led Malk to the closed door off the kitchen, and
knocked.
  A scratchy voice from the other side of the door said,
"Gimme a minute to get dressed."
  "Sorry, Sam," said Lepidopt around his cigarette as
he opened the door, "time untied waits for no man." He
led Malk into the cluttered room.
  Skinny old Sam Glatzer was sitting up on the bed,
strands of his gray hair plastered to his gleaming
forehead, and in the glare from the unshaded bulb on
the ceiling, his face seemed particularly haggard. The
window in here was covered with aluminum foil, though
Lepidopt could hear the speaker behind it -- violins and
an orchestra; Lepidopt hadn't been a fan of classical
music since 1970, but Sam always brought along
Deutsche Grammophon tapes in preference to whatever
the radio might provide, though there was a strict rule
against bringing any Rimsky-Korsakov. The stale air
smelled of gun oil and Mennen aftershave.
  Sam was wearing only boxer shorts and an
undershirt, and he hooked his glasses onto his nose,
scowled at Lepidopt and then levered himself up off the
bed and began to pull on his baggy wool trousers. A
whirring fan turned slowly back and forth on one of the
cluttered desks, fluttering the fringe of one of Lepidopt's
toupees that sat on a Styrofoam head on another desk.
  "Bert needs to hear the tape," Lepidopt said.
  "Right, right," the old man said, turning away to zip
up his trousers and fasten his belt. "I haven't got
anything since that one burst. I'll wait in the living
room, I don't like to hear myself talk." The old man
caught the "holograph" medallion that was swinging on
a string around his neck -- required equipment for
every Halomot remote viewer -- and tucked it into his
shirt before buttoning it up.
   When he had left and closed the door, Lepidopt sat on
the bed to rewind the little tape recorder. Malk leaned
against the nearest desk and cocked his head, attentive
now.
   The tape stopped rewinding, and Lepidopt pushed the
play button.
   "--on, right," came Sam's reedy old voice, "turn off
the light, I don't want afterimages." There was a pause
of perhaps half a minute. Lepidopt tapped ash onto the
carpet.
   "Okay," came Sam's voice again, "probable AOL gives
me the Swiss Family Robinson tree house in Disneyland,
I don't think that's right, just AOL, analytical overlay --
let me get back to the signal line -- voices, a man is
speaking -- 'And we'll not fail.' Following somebody
saying, 'Screw your courage to the sticking place,'
that's Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth, this may be off track
too -- the man says, 'She's probably about eighty-
seven now.' The house is on the ground, not up in the
tree, little house, it's a shed. Very crapped-out old
shed... 'She doesn't drink whisky,' says the man.
They're inside the little house now, a man and a little
girl, and there's a gasoline smell -- I see a window,
then it's gone, just empty air there -- and a TV set --
'An ammunition box,' says the man, 'I don't think she's
ever had a gun, though.'"
   Sam's voice broke up in a coughing fit at this point,
and Lepidopt's recorded voice said, "Can you see any
locating details? Where are they?"
   After a few seconds Sam's voice stopped coughing
and went on. "No locating details. I see a headstone, a
tombstone. Bas-relief stuff and writing on it, but I won't
even try to read it. There's mud on it, fresh wet mud.
The man says, 'Bunch of old letters, New Jersey
postmarks, 1933, '39, '55 -- Lisa Marrity, yup.' Uh --
and then he says, 'Is that real? ... I mean, isn't the real
one at the Chinese Theater? But this might be real...
She says she knew Chaplin. She flew to Switzerland
after he died.' Now there's someone else, 'It's your
uncle Bennett...' Uh-- 'One, two, three,' and ... a big
crash, he pulled the tombstone down... and sunlight
again -- three people walking toward a house, the back
door, with a trellis over it -- a broken window --
something about fingerprints, and a burglar --
'Marritys,' says the new man, and the little girl says,
'"Divil a man can say a word agin them" '--the first man
is at the back door, sayi, 'If there was a thief, he's
gone.'"
   Lepidopt reached out now and switched off the
recorder. "Sam loses the link at that point," he said
mournfully.
   "Wow," said Bert Malk, who had perched himself on
the corner of a desk in line with one of the fans. "He
said Marity. And Lisa, which is close enough. Did Sam
know that name?"
   "No."
   "We could call the coroner in Shasta, now that we've
got a name, see if a Lisa Marity died there today."
   "For now we can assume she did. We can get Ernie's
detective to call later to confirm it."
   "It wasn't a tombstone," Malk went on thoughtfully.
   "No, pretty clearly it was Chaplin's footprint square at
Grauman's Chinese Theater, and in fact that square
isn't in the theater forecourt anymore, it was removed
in the 1950s when everybody was saying Chaplin was a
communist, and then it got lost. We've already got a
couple of sayanim trying to trace where it went."
   Malk sighed heavily. "She'd be eighty-five this year,
actually. Born in '02." He pulled his sweaty shirt away
from his chest to let the fan cool the fabric. "Why
wouldn't Sam try to read the writing on the stone?"
   "It's like trying to read in dreams, apparently -- if you
engage the part of the brain that knows how to read,
you fall out of the projected state. Ideally we'd have
totally illiterate remote viewers, who could just draw
the letters and numbers they see, with no inclination to
try to read them. But I think it obviously said something
like 'To Sid Grauman, from Charlie Chaplin.
   "I think this is in L.A., not Shasta," Malk said. "The
guy didn't say 'the Chinese Theater in Hollywood,' he
just said the Chinese Theater, like you'd mention a
restaurant in your area."
   " Maybe. "Lepidopt looked at his watch. "This he re
tape is only... fifty-five minutes old. Scoot right now to
the Chinese Theater and see if there's a man and a little
girl there, looking for the Chaplin footprints or asking
about them."
  "Should I yell 'Marity,' and see who looks?"
  Lepidopt paused for a moment with his cigarette lifted
halfway to his mouth. "Uh -- no. There may be other
people around who are aware of the name. And don't
be followed yourself! Go! Now!" He stood up and
opened the bedroom door.
  Malk hurried past him to the apartment's front door
and unbolted it; and when he had left, pulling it closed
behind him, Lepidopt walked over and twisted the dead-
bolt knobs back into the locked positions.
  "One minute," he said to Glatzer and Bozzaris, and he
strode past them into the spare bedroom and closed the
door. The faint music still vibrated in the aluminum foil
over the window.
  Lepidopt crouched by the bedside table, ejected the
new tape and then slotted the cassette they had made
at noon -- the session that had made him send Malk off
on his aborted trip to Mount Shasta -- and pushed the
play button.
  "--goddamn machine," said Glatzer's voice. "I'm
seeing an old woman in a long tan skirt, white hair,
barefoot, she's just appeared on a Navajo-looking
blanket on green grass, beside a tree, lying on her
back, eyes closed; it's cold, she's way up high on a
mountain. There are people around her -- hippies,
they're wearing robes, some of them, and face paint --
beards, beads -- very mystical scene. They're all
surprised, asking her questions; she just appeared in
the meadow, she didn't walk in. They're asking her if
she fell out of the tree. She's -- lying on a swastika! --
made out of gold wire; it was under the blanket, but
they've moved her, and they've seen the swastika. Now
one of the hippies is taking a cellular telephone from his
backpack -- some hippie -- and he's making a call,
probably 911. Uh -- 'unconscious,' he's saying; 'In
Squaw Meadow, on Mount Shasta... ambulance' -- now
she's speaking -- two words? 'Voyo, voyo,' she said,
without opening her eyes. Ach! Her heart is stopping --
she's dead, and I'm out, it's gone."
  Lepidopt pushed the stop button, and slowly stood
up. Yes, he thought, it was her. We found her at last,
just as she died.
  He walked back into the living room.
  "Can I go too? " asked old Sam Glatzer, getting up
from the couch. "I never did get any lunch."
  Lepidopt paused and looked over his shoulder at him.
Glatzer reminded him of the tired old man in the joke,
whose friends arrange for a dazzling prostitute to come
to his room on his birthday-- I'm here to give you super
sex! she exclaims when he opens the door; and he
says, querulously, I'll take the soup.
  But he was a good remote viewer, and one of the
most reliable of the sayanim, the civilian Jews who
would efficiently and discreetly provide their skills to aid
Mossad operations, for the sake of Israel. Sam was a
retired researcher from the CIA-sponsored think tank at
Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, up near San
Francisco, and he was a widower with no children; and
Lepidopt told himself that the old man must enjoy using
again the clairvoyant techniques he had pioneered back
in '72. And over the last several years, Glatzer and
Lepidopt had played many games of chess while sitting
in safe houses like this, and Lepidopt believed the old
man had found them as welcome a break from tension
or boredom as he had.
   "I'm sorry, Sam," said Lepidopt, spreading his hands,
"but I really think we should monitor the 'holograph'
line until it's been twenty-four hours. Till noon
tomorrow. I'll send Ernie out for any food you'd like." I'll
take the soup, he thought.
   "Good idea," said Bozzaris, getting up from his
keyboard. "Pizza?" Bozzaris did not observe the dietary
laws, and ate all sorts of trefe food.
   "Whatever he wants," Lepidopt told Bozzaris. "Get
enough for three -- Bert might be back pretty quick."
Bert Malk didn't bother about kosher food either.
   After Bozzaris left, tacos and enchiladas having been
decided on, Glatzer went to sleep on the couch, and
Lepidopt sat down in a chair against the door-side wall,
for the afternoon sun was slanting in through the front
window, and he stared almost enviously at Glatzer.
   A widower with no children. It occurred to him that
Glatzer could expire there on the couch, and -- though
Lepidopt would lose a friend and chess opponent--
nobody's life would be devastated. Two lines from an
Ivor Winters poem flitted through his head -- By a
moment's calm beguiled, / I have got a wife and child.
   Lepidopt had a wife and an eleven-year-old son in Tel
Aviv. His son, Louis, would be envious if he knew his
father was working in Hollywood. And Deborah would
worry that he'd be seduced by a starlet.
   All katsas, Mossad gathering officers, were married
men with wives back in Israel; the theory was that
married men would be immune to sex traps abroad.
Broad traps a-sex, he thought. To preserve you from
the evil woman, from the smooth tongue of the
adventuress, as the Psalmist said.
   Don't start the John Wayne stuff till I get there, he
thought, then shuddered.
   In that war twenty years ago, Lepidopt's battalion had
stormed the Lion's Gate again at 8:30 the following
morning. Israeli artillery and jet fighters had pounded
the Jordanian defense forces within the city, but
Lepidopt and his fellow soldiers had had to fight for
every narrow street, and the morning was an eternity of
dust exploding from ancient walls, hot shell casings
flying in brassy ribbons from the Uzi in his aching
hands, blood spattering on jeep windshields and pooling
between paving stones, and the shaky effort of
changing magazines while crouched in one or another of
the drainage ditches.
   I see a headstone, a tombstone.
   Lepidopt recalled noticing that the bridges propped
over the narrow ditches had been Jewish gravestones,
and he had learned later that they had been scavenged
from the cemetery on Mount Zion; and now he
wondered if, in the subsequent gathering and burial of
hundreds of dead Israeli and Jordanian soldiers, anyone
had thought to restore the stones to those older graves.
   By midmorning the city had fallen to the Israeli
forces; sniper fire still echoed among the ancient
buildings, but Jordanians were lined up by the gate with
their hands in the air while Israeli soldiers scrutinized
their identity papers to see if any were soldiers who had
changed into civilian clothing; dead bodies were already
being carried out on stretchers, with handkerchiefs over
the faces so that medics would not mistake them for
the many wounded.
  Lepidopt had fought his way through the Moghrabi
Quarter, and he was one of the first to reach the Kotel
ha-Ma-aravi, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount.
  At first he didn't realize what it was -- just a very
high ancient wall along the left side of an alley; clumps
of weeds, far too high to be pulled out, patched its rows
of weathered stones. It wasn't until he noticed other
Israeli soldiers hesitantly touching the uneven old
masonry that it dawned on him what it must be.
  This wall was all that remained of the Second Temple,
built on the site of Solomon's Temple, its construction
completed by Herod at around the time of Christ and
then destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. This was the
place of the Shekinah, the earthly presence of God, to
which Jewish pilgrims had come for nearly two thousand
years until Jordan's borders had enclosed it and
excluded them in 1948.
  Soldiers were on their knees, weeping, oblivious to
the sniper fire; and Lepidopt shuffled up to the craggy,
eroded white masonry, absently unstrapping his helmet
and feeling the breeze in his wet hair as he pulled it off.
He wiped one shaky hand down the front of his
camouflage jacket and then reached out and touched
the wall.
  He pulled his hand back -- and powerfully in his mind
had come the conviction that he would never touch the
wall again.
  He had stepped back in confusion at this sudden,
intrusive certainty; and then, defiantly, had reached his
hand out toward the wall again -- and a blow that
seemed to come from nowhere punched his hand away
and spun him around to kneel on the street, staring at
blood jetting from the ragged edge of his right hand
where his little finger and knuckle had been.
  Several of the other soldiers were firing short bursts
at the source of the shot, and a couple more of them
dragged Lepidopt away. His wound was a minor one on
that day, but within an hour he had been taken to the
Hadassah Hospital, and for him the Six-Day War was
over.
  Four days later it was over for Israel too -- Israel had
beaten the hostile nations to the north, east, and south,
and had taken the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the
Jordan River, and the Sinai desert.
  And eleven times -- twelve times now, thank you,
Bert! -- in the twenty years since then, Lepidopt had
again experienced that certainty about something he
had just done: You will never do this again. In 1970,
three years after he had touched the Western Wall for
the first and last time, he had attended a performance
of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade at the Mann
Auditorium in Tel Aviv, and as the last notes of the
Allegro Molto echoed away, he had suddenly been
positive that he would not ever hear Scheherazade
again.
   Two years after that he had visited Paris for the last
time; not long afterward he had discovered that he
would never again swim in the ocean. After having part
of his hand shot off in testing the premonition about the
Western Wall, he was reluctant to test any of these
subsequent ones.
   Just during this last year he had, for the last time,
changed a tire, eaten a tuna sandwich, petted a cat,
and seen a movie in a theater -- and now he knew that
he would never again hear the name John Wayne
spoken. How soon, he wondered bleakly, until I've
started a car for the last time, closed a door, brushed
my teeth, coughed?
   Lepidopt had gone to the Anshe Emet Synagogue on
Robertson at dawn today for recitation of the Sh'ma and
the Shachrit Tefilah prayer, as usual, but clearly he was
not going to be able to get there for the afternoon
prayers, nor probably the evening ones either. He might
as well say the afternoon Mincha prayer alone, here; he
stood up to go into the other bedroom, where he kept
the velvet bag that contained his tallit shawl and the
little leather tefillin boxes. Every day he shaved the top
of his head so that a toupee could be his head covering,
and the one he wore to pray was in the bedroom too.
He never kept his yarmulke-toupee in the bathroom.
   Rabbi Hiyya bar Ashi had written that a man whose
mind is conflicted should not pray; Lepidopt hoped God
would forgive him for that too.

                       Three
The truck cab smelled like book paper and tobacco.
"When we do go," Daphne said, cheerfully enough, "we
can go to Grammar's house again too, and pull up the
bricks. A-zoo-sa," she added derisively, seeing the
Azusa exit through the windshield. And Clairmont and
Montclair were coming up.
   She used to think Azusa was an interesting name for
a city, but recently she had heard that it meant "A-to-Z
USA," and now she classed it with other ridiculous
words, like brouhaha and patty melt.
   She also disapproved of a city called Claremont being
right next to one named Montclair. She thought there
should be a third one, Mairn-Clot.
   Traffic was heavy on the eastbound 10, and an hour
after they had left Pasadena their six-year-old Ford
pickup truck was still west of the 15, with San
Bernardino and their house still twenty miles ahead.
The afternoon sunlight glittered fiercely on the chrome
all around them; brake lights glowed like coals. Daphne
knew the traffic justified her father's decision not to go
look at the Chinese Theater today, and she had stopped
sulking about it.
   "We'd have to split it with Bennett and Moira," her
father said absently, his right foot gunning the
accelerator while his left foot let the clutch out every
few seconds in little surges. The gearshift lever was on
the steering column, and it didn't seem likely that he'd
be reaching up to shift out of first gear anytime soon.
"If there's really gold under the bricks," he added.
   Daphne nodded. "That's right. If you don't want to do
what Grammar wanted you to do with it."
   "As in, she told me about it, and didn't tell them. Why
is everybody going east out of L.A. on a Sunday
afternoon?"
   Daphne nodded. "She knew they've got plenty of
money already, and that's why she told you. Her -- last
wishes." Last wishes was a good phrase.
   "I'll think about it. It might not be gold. Though --
wow, look at that," he said, his finger tapping the
windshield. An old Lockheed Neptune bomber was flying
north over the freeway ahead of them, its piston
engines roaring. Its shadow flickered over a patch of
cars a mile ahead.
   "There must be fires in the mountains," Daphne said.
   "It's the season for it. We'll probably--" He paused,
and glanced at her. "You're worrying about me," he
said. "And it's not to do with money. I -- can't quite get
the reason, just a sort of image of me, and worry like
some kind of steady background music." He peered at
her again. "What about?"
   Daphne shrugged and looked away, embarrassed that
he had caught her thoughts. "Just -- everybody leaves
you. Your dad ran off and then your mom died in a car
crash, and Mom died two years ago, and now
Grammar." She looked at him, but he was watching the
traffic again. "I'm not going to leave you."
   "Thanks, Daph. I won't--" He stopped. "Now you're
shocked. What did you see?"
   "You think your mother killed herself!"
   "Oh." He exhaled, and she sensed that he was finally
near tears, so she looked out the side window at a
railway bridge over a shallow arroyo. "Well, yes," he
said, with evident control, "I -- now you mention it -- I
think she did. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have -- I guess she
just couldn't handle it, foreclosure on the house, got
arrested for being drunk in public -- after my father--"
  Daphne had to stop him or she'd start crying herself.
"Why were you on your guard," she interrupted, "when
Uncle Bennett and I mentioned broken clocks?" Her own
voice was quavering, but she went on, "I said the time
wasn't right on her VCR in the shed, and he said
something about a broken clock, and both times you
thought for a second that we meant something else."
  Her father took a deep breath, and managed a laugh.
"It's hard to explain. Ask your aunt Moira sometime,
she grew up there too."
  Daphne knew he'd say more if she didn't say
anything, so she stared out through the windshield,
looking past the cars surrounding them. This far east of
Los Angeles there weren't housing tracts around the
freeway, just two rows of tall eucalyptus trees. A
railway line paralleled the freeway to the south, and
occasional farmhouse-looking buildings were scattered
across the foothills to the north; the mountains beyond
the foothills were brown outlines in the summer smog.
  "Okay," her father went on at last. "Grammar --
what, had no respect for time. You know the way she
carried on sometimes, as if she was still a teenager, like
going to Woodstock; and she'd plant primroses in
midsummer, and they'd thrive; food got cold real quick
sometimes even though she just took it out of the pan,
and other times it stayed hot for hours; well, a long
time. It never surprised her. Maybe she was just pulling
tricks on us, but time didn't seem to work right, around
her."
   A big blue charter bus swerved into their lane ahead
of them without signaling, and her father hit the brake
and tapped the horn irritably. He didn't mind if people
cut him off, even rudely, as long as they used their
blinkers. "Dipshit," he said.
   "Dipshit," Daphne agreed.
   "I know all this sounds weird," her father said.
"Maybe us kids imagined it."
   "You remember it. Most grown-ups forget all that kind
of stuff."
   "Anyway," he went on, "the Kaleidoscope Shed -- one
time Moira and I, when we were about eight and ten,
found our initials carved in one of the boards of it,
though we hadn't done it; and then a year or so later
we noticed that they were gone -- the board didn't even
show a scratch -- and we'd got so used to them being
there that we carved 'em in again. And when we stood
back and looked at it -- I swear -- what we had carved
was exactly what had been there before. Not copied,
see, but the same exact cuts, around the same bumps
of wood grain. And then a year or so later they were
gone again."
   ""Were they there today?"
   "I honestly forgot to look. I might have, after your
'time's wrong' remark, but then Bennett showed up."
   Daphne was watching the back of the blue bus ahead
of them; it was speeding up and then slowing down.
Under the back window, in a blocky typeface, was
lettered HELIX. "Why did you call it the Kaleidoscope
Shed?" she asked.
   "I should get away from Felix here, he's probably
drunk," her father said. "Okay, sometimes the edges of
the shed, the boundaries from wherever you were
looking -- rippled. And the shed made a noise too at
those times, like a lot of wooden wind chimes or
somebody shaking maracas. And sometimes it just
looked less decrepit, for a while."
   He pressed the brake and signaled for a lane change
to the right, shaking his head. "She couldn't stand it
when my dad left -- the police said she was drunk when
her car went off the highway, and I don't blame her for
that, I don't blame her for killing herself -- my dad
drove her to it, by abandoning her with two little kids
and no money."
   Daphne had known his thoughts were still on his
mother even before he abruptly switched topics. She
tried to blank her mind, but her father picked up her
reflexive thought anyway.
   "True," he said, "she abandoned us too. But she sent
a note to Grammar, asking her to take Moira and me in,
raise us, if anything ever happened to her. A couple of
weeks later was the car crash. See, she entrusted us to
her mother-in-law, she at least made some provision
for us, not -- not like him."
   Daphne couldn't help asking -- her father so seldom
talked about all this. "What became of him?"
   "I think he sent Grammar some money, the year he
left. 1955. She got some, anyway. So he must have
known where we were -- but aside from that money,
nothing. He'd be nearly sixty now." Her father's voice
was hoarse and level. "He -- I'd like to meet him
someday."
  Daphne was dizzy with the vicarious emotion, and she
consciously unclenched her jaw. It was anger as bitter
as vinegar, but Daphne knew that vinegar was what
wine turned into if it was left to lie too long, and she
knew, though her father might not, that his anger was
baffled and humiliated love, longing for a fair hearing.
  "I always--" he began. "Grammar never seemed to
wonder what had become of him, so I always figured
she knew. He was her son, and -- and she did treat me
and Moira as her own children, loved us, after my mom
dumped us on her." He thumped the clutch down and
shifted up to second, though a moment later he had to
pull it back down to first again.
  "It is hard to understand why people kill themselves,"
he went on quietly, as if to himself. "You look at the
ways they do it -- jump off buildings, shoot themselves
in the mouth, pipe carbon monoxide into an idling car in
the garage -- what terrible last moments! I'd just eat a
bunch of sleeping pills and drink a bottle of bourbon,
myself -- which probably shows I'm not a candidate."
  "Portia ate hot coals," Daphne said, relieved that the
cramp of aching anger had passed. "Caesar's wife.
That's pretty dumb -- I always wondered why they
named a car after such a dumb person."
  Her father laughed, and she was pleased that he had
known she was joking.
   "You're looking at it like killing yourself, though," she
said. "The way they do it, real suicides, is like they're
just killing a person. Throwing somebody off a building
is a rotten way to kill yourself, but it's a fine way to kill
a person."
   For a few seconds her father didn't answer. Since
Daphne's mother had died two years ago, he had talked
to Daphne as he would talk to an adult, and often she
felt helplessly out of her depth; she hoped her last
remark hadn't been stupid, or thoughtless. She had
pretty much been talking about his mother, after all.
   But, "That's pretty good, Daph," he said finally, and
she could tell that he meant it.
   "What's so weird about Grammar's coffee grinder?"
she asked.
   "Don't I get a turn? Who's the boy with the glasses
and dark hair? I've been seeing him ever since we left
Pasadena."
   "I don't--" Daphne could feel her face heating up.
"He's just a boy in school. What about the coffee
grinder?"
   Her father glanced sideways at her, and it was clear
that he was considering not telling her. She didn't lower
her eyebrows or look away.
   "Okay," he said at last, returning his attention to the
lane ahead. "Damn, that crazy bus has changed lanes
too, look -- maybe I could pass him now."
   Daphne peered over the dashboard and the rust-
specked white hood beyond the windshield. Though
there were two cars between their truck and the bus,
she thought she could see a face in the bus's tinted high
back window -- but the face seemed to have silver
patches on its forehead, cheeks and chin.
   She pushed herself back in the seat.
   "Don't pass it, Dad," she said quickly. "Slow down,
get off the freeway if you have to."
   He might not have seen the face, but he slowed
down. "No harm getting off at Haven," he said quietly.
The Haven Avenue exit was almost upon them, and he
swung the car through the lane on their right and
directly onto the exit ramp, making the engine roar in
first gear.
   "Her coffee grinder," he said when they had got off
the freeway and turned left onto Haven. It was empty
country around here, and sprawling grapevines made
still-orderly lines across the untended fields, leftovers
from the days when this had all been wine country.
   "Well, somebody's got part of the story confused," he
went on. "See, when Grammar called me today -- what
was it, eleven-thirty?"
   "About that, yeah."
   "Well, when she called me she was using her coffee
grinder. I ran it for a second in her kitchen back there,
and the acoustics are unmistakable. She was still in her
kitchen at -- well, at the earliest! -- eleven o'clock this
morning."
   "And the hospital at Mount Shasta called Aunt Moira
when?"
   "About twelve-thirty."
   "How far away is Mount Shasta?"
   "Five hundred miles, easy. Almost up at the Oregon
border." He shook his head. "Moira must have
misunderstood the time somehow. Or I guess Grammar
could have raced to LAX right after she called me, got
straight onto a plane, direct flight, no layover, and then
died just as she got off the plane..."
   Daphne simply understood that there was no way her
great-grandmother could have got to Shasta, but that
the old lady had done it anyway. And she was sure her
father realized this too.
   "Did she build the Kaleidoscope Shed?" Daphne
asked.
   "Hah. Yes. I don't think she even hired anybody to
help. But her father drew the plans, she said. I never
met him -- she called him Prospero, but as a
nickname."
   "Prospero from The Tempest? What did he do? -- like
for a job?"
   "I got the impression he was a violinist."
   "What's the bit, in The Tempest? About the creepy
music?"
   Her father sighed. " 'Sitting on a bank,'" he recited,
"'Weeping again the King my father's wrack, this music
crept by me upon the waters.'"
   Daphne knew she'd be scared tonight in her bed, but
that would be then -- right now, among familiar fields
and roads, and the hour no later than 3:30, she was
just tense, as if she'd had several fast Cokes in a row.
"I said she was a witch."
   "She was a good mother to us," he said. "But!" he
added, holding up his hand to stop her reflexive
apology, "it looks like she may have been something
like a witch." He turned right onto Foothill, the highway
that used to be Route 66, still dotted with 1950s-era
motels; travel time was predictable on surface streets,
and Daphne knew they should be home by 4:30 at the
latest. Her father added, "I think Grammar killed herself
too."
   Daphne didn't answer; she knew he could tell she
thought so too.
   Another World War II-era bomber roared overhead.
There must be fires in the mountains here as well.



Her father was teaching a summer school class in Twain
to Modern at Cal State San Bernardino tomorrow, and
he had a stack of papers to correct, so when he opened
a beer and shuffled up the hall to his office, Daphne
took a Coke from the refrigerator and walked into the
living room. Two or three cats ran away in front of her,
as usual acting as if they'd never seen her before.
   The kitchen and living room were the oldest parts of
the house, built in 1929, when San Bernardino had
been mostly orange groves. The house was built on a
slope, and the newer sections were uphill-two bedrooms
and two bathrooms that had been added on in the '50s,
and at the top end of the hall was a big second living
room and her father's office, built in the '70s. The walls
of the downhill end of the house were stone behind the
drywall, and this living room by the kitchen was always
the coolest part of the house.
  She fitted the Pee-wee's Big Adventure cassette into
the VCR slot and sat down on the couch across from the
TV set. If her father wanted to watch the movie, she'd
see it again with him, but usually he fretted till bedtime
over his lecture notes.
  Remembered circus music spun behind the credits on
the TV screen, and then the movie opened with a view
of the Eiffel Tower painted on a billboard. This was Pee-
wee's dream, she recalled; he was about to be
awakened by his alarm clock. In the dream a cluster of
bicyclists streaked past the billboard, and Pee-wee was
winning the Tour de France on his crazy red bike,
yapping like a parrot in his too tight gray suit; then he
had ridden past the finish line, breaking the yellow
tape, and all the spectators lifted him off his bike and
carried him to a bandstand in a green field -- and after
some woman had put a crown on his head, she and all
the other people hurried away, leaving Pee-wee alone
on the platform in the middle of the field--
  --and then it was a different movie.
  This was black and white, and it started abruptly, with
no credits. There was jazzy atonal piano music, but
shots of the ocean were accompanied by no surf
sounds, and Daphne knew even before the first dialogue
card appeared that this was a silent movie.
  It was about two sisters, Joan and Magdalen, living in
a house on the California coast. One of the sisters was
engaged to a simple-minded fisherman named Peter,
and the other wasn't; but the actresses seemed to
switch roles from scene to scene, so that Daphne could
only guess that the engaged sister was the one who
met a glossy-haired "playboy novelist" and ran off with
him to some glamorous big city, maybe San Francisco.
Peter seemed upset by it, anyway. Everybody's facial
expressions were exaggerated, even for a silent movie
-- grotesque, almost imbecilic -- and they all seemed to
walk awkwardly.
   Daphne had never heard the sound-track music
before, and it didn't have any recognizable melody, but
she kept being jarred by the absence of certain notes
that the music had seemed to call for, as if she had
tried to step up onto a curb that wasn't there. She had
no sooner wondered if the implied notes formed a
concealed melody than she was sure that they did --
she thought she could remember it and hum it, if she
wanted to, but she didn't want to.
   She was sweating, and she was glad she was sitting
down. The couch, the whole living room, seemed to be
spinning. Once when her mother and father had had a
party, she had sneaked into the kitchen and poured a
splash of each kind of liquor into an empty Skippy
peanut butter jar -- brandy, gin, bourbon, vodka -- and
taken it back to her room. When she had finished the
"cocktail" and lain down on her bed, the bed had
seemed to spin like this. Really, though, this was now
more like teetering -- as if the whole house were
balanced on a pole over a pit without walls or a bottom.
   She was aware of her father's hands -- one hand
holding a sheet of paper and the other holding a pencil
and scribbling something in the margin; and the writing
hand paused, for he was aware of her intrusion. In the
bones of her head, over the jagged piano music, she
heard him say, What's up, Daph?
   She had to keep flexing her right hand to dispel the
impression that another hand was holding it -- a warm,
damp hand, not her father's. Someone standing behind
her...
   Maybe it hadn't been Peter's fiancée who'd run away,
because now in the movie he was marrying the sister
who had stayed. But the wedding was taking place in
some sort of elegant Victorian hotel -- a white-draped
table appeared to be an altar, and a man in black robes
was standing behind it with his arms raised; he was
wearing a crownless white hat that exposed his bald
white scalp, and the brim of the hat had been cut into
triangular points, like a child's cutout of a star. He
leaned down to press his forehead against the
tablecloth, so that his bald head with the ring of
triangles seemed to be a symbol of the sun, and then
the bride was stepping up to the altar with a knife --
there was a quick cut to the other sister, on the
seashore, plunging a knife into the center of a starfish--
   --and suddenly Daphne realized that it had been only
one woman all along, somehow split in two so that one
of her could go away while the other stayed home --
the woman was in two places at once, and so was
Daphne -- Daphne was standing up very tall from her
father's desk, tossing the paper to the floor and saying
in her father's voice, "Daph, who's in the house?"
   And then the house lost its balance and began to tip
over into the pit -- for a moment Daphne couldn't feel
the couch under her, she was falling -- and in a panic
she grabbed with her whole mind.
   The house lurched violently back to level solidity
again, though the curtains in the front window didn't
even sway; and black smoke was jetting out of the vent
slots in the VCR.
   Daphne was sobbing, and her ears were ringing, but
she could hear her father in the hall shout, "Daph, the
fire extinguisher, quick!"
   She got dizzily to her feet and blundered to the
kitchen, and she muscled the heavy red cylinder up
from beside the tool chest. Then her father was there,
yanking it from her arms with a brief "Thanks!" and
turning away -- but instead of going straight across into
the living room, he ran left, up the hall.
   Daphne peered around the corner after him, and saw
smoke billowing out across the hall ceiling from the far-
right-hand doorway -- her bedroom.
   Her father could handle that. Daphne hurried back
into the living room, coughing and blinking in the fumes
of burning plastic, and she tugged the VCR's cord from
the wall and then yanked the still smoking thing down
off the TV set; she gave it a few more jerks, and when
it lay smoking on the rug, free of all connecting cables,
she dragged it through the kitchen and out the door,
onto the grass. She took a couple of deep breaths of
the fresh air before hurrying back inside.
   She ran back through the kitchen and up the hall, and
she stepped wide around the doorway to her room in
case her father might come out fast; smoke made a
hazy layer under the hall ceiling and the air smelled of
burning cloth.
  Her father was shooting her blackened bed with quick
bursts of white fog from the extinguisher, but the fire
seemed to be out. Her pillow was charred, and the blue
wall behind the bed was streaked with soot.
  She was wringing her hands. "What burned?"
  "Rumbold," her father panted. Rumbold was a teddy
bear Daphne's mother had given her years and years
ago. "Was there somebody in the house, at the door?"
  "Oh, I didn't mean to burn Rumbold! No, that was in
Grammar's movie. It wasn't Pee-wee, it was a scary
movie. I'm sorry, Daddy!"
  "Your mattress might be okay. But we'd better drag
your sheets and blankets and pillow outside. And
Rumbold, what's left of him."
  The teddy bear had melted as much as burned, and
Daphne carried him outside on a cushion because he
was still very hot.
  "The VCR too?" her father asked in the fresh air as he
stepped over the charred machine on his way to the
trash cans.
  Trotting along after him, Daphne called, "Yes, it too.
Dad, it was a really scary movie!" Tears blurred her
vision -- she was crying as much about Rumbold as
about all the rest of it. The late afternoon breeze was
chilly in her sweaty hair.
  Stepping around the truck, her father dumped the still
smoking bedding into one of the cans.
  "I want to bury Rumbold," Daphne said.
   Her father crouched beside her, wiping his hands on
his shirt. "Okay. What happened?"
   "It was the movie--it wasn't Pee-wee except for the
first couple of minutes, then it was a black and white, a
silent. And I felt myself falling -- the whole house felt
like it was falling! -- and I grabbed on -- I guess I
grabbed the VCR and Rumbold, both." She blinked at
him through her tears. "I've never been that scared
before. But how could I set stuff on fire?"
   He put his arms around her. "Maybe you didn't.
Anyway, the movie's gone now."
   His kindness, when she had expected to be yelled at,
set her sobbing again. "She was a witch!" she choked.
   "She's dead and gone. Don't--"
   She felt her father shiver through his shirt, and when
she looked up she saw that he was looking past her,
down the driveway.
   Daphne turned around and saw Grammar's old green
Rambler station wagon rocking to a halt on the dirt
driveway, thirty feet away, under the overhanging
boughs of the Paraiso tree.
   Daphne had begun moaning and thrashing in her
father's arms before she heard him saying, "It's not
her! Daph! It's some old guy, it's not her! She's dead
and gone and her movie's burned up! Look, it's just
some guy!"
   Daphne clutched her father's shoulders and blinked
fearfully at the car.
   There was only one person visible in it, a gray-haired
man with a pouchy, frowning face; perhaps he had only
now noticed the child and the crouching man beside the
Ford truck. As she watched, the car quickly reversed
out of the driveway back into the street, and then sped
away east. She lost sight of it behind the fence and the
trunks of the neighbor's eucalyptus trees.
  "That was Grammar's car!" Daphne wailed.
  "Yes it was," her father said grimly, straightening up.
"Probably that guy was the burglar who broke into
Grammar's house. Casing our place now, I bet."
  "Her keys were gone," said Daphne, shivering and
sniffling now. "He must have waited till we were all
gone, then took her car." And followed us, she thought.
  "I'll call the police. We're dealing with thieves here,
Daph, not witches."
  And a girl who can set things on fire in rooms she's
not even in, Daphne thought unhappily. Even things she
doesn't want to burn up. What if I have nightmares
about that movie? Could I set fires in my sleep?
  A shrill screeching from behind her made her jump
and grab her father's leg.
  He ruffled her hair. "It's the smoke alarm, goof. It
just now noticed that there was a fire."



Four blocks away, the green Rambler had pulled over to
the dirt shoulder of Highland Avenue, and a couple of
children on bicycles laughed to see the gray-haired old
driver open the door and lean out to vomit on the
pavement.
                          Four
When Lepidopt unbolted the door and pulled it open,
Malk was startled by how exhausted the man looked --
Malk knew Lepidopt was forty, but at this moment, with
the lines in his hollow cheeks and the wrinkles around
his eyes, and with the stray curls of his prayer-toupee
stuck to his forehead, he looked twenty years older. In
his hand was a piece of white paper that he had clearly
written out as a report, in the strict Mossad format with
the addressee and subject line underlined.
   Malk knew there was no superior officer for Lepidopt
to give it to -- it could only be a copy-to-file letter; a bit
of kastach, covering one's ass.
   "What did I miss?" Malk asked cautiously after he had
stepped inside and Lepidopt had closed and rebolted the
door. The curtains were drawn, and a lamp by the
window had been switched on. "There was no particular
man and girl at the Chinese Theater."
   Young Bozzaris was standing in the kitchen doorway
by the bowl of macaroni this time, silhouetted by the
fluorescent ceiling light, and Sam Glatzer was sitting on
the couch, asleep. The room smelled of salsa and corn
tortillas.
   Lepidopt nodded. "No, they went straight home.
Glatzer received another transmission."
   Malk noticed the tape recorder on the coffee table,
among a litter of greasy waxed paper and cardboard
cups; apparently the transmission had arrived so
suddenly that it had been easier to bring the recorder to
Glatzer than to bring Glatzer to the recorder.
   "Any locators this time?"
   Lepidopt leaned his back against the curtained
window and rubbed his eyes. "No, still no locators." He
lowered his hands. "Glatzer's gamúr."
   Malk looked again at the old man on the couch.
Glatzer's chin was on his chest, and he wasn't moving
at all. The holograph talisman lay on his belt buckle, its
cord curled slackly across his shirt.
   "Oh weh," Malk said softly. "Was it... stressful?"
   "I'll play it back for you. After dark we can drive him
to Pershing Square, sit him at one of those chess
tables, and then call the police to report a body there.
Perishing Square. Poor Sam. Sit down."
   Malk sat down in the chair next to the door, across
from the couch.
   Lepidopt had apparently rewound the tape to the
right place, for when he pushed the play button there
was only a moment of silence and then the abrupt
beginning of a recording.
   Lepidopt's voice began it, a few syllables ending with
"--go!" Then Malk heard Glatzer's frail voice: "The girl,
in a house, with cats. Now the Eiffel Tower -- no, it's
just a picture of it -- a bicycle race, in France -- some
crazy giggling guy in a gray suit is riding in it, passing
everybody -- he's riding a red bicycle, not any kind of
racing bike -- he won, he broke the tape--"
   Bozzaris's recorded voice interjected, "Pee-wee's Big
Adventure is what that is."
   "--crowd is carrying him to a lawn--"
   "What?" said Lepidopt's voice.
   "It's a movie," Bozzaris had explained then,
"somebody's watching it."
   "It's a movie, on a TV set," said Glatzer's voice. "Now
it's a different movie, one woman playing two roles --
no no, two women playing one role--" For several
seconds the old man was as silent on the tape as he
was now on the couch. Malk wished he'd asked for a
cigarette before the tape started; he couldn't shake the
thought that the tape voice was Glatzer talking live
from wherever dead people go.
   A hoarse cry shook out of the machine, and then
Glatzer's voice went on breathlessly, "I can't follow her,
she's falling out of here and now. I almost fell out with
her-- Wait, she's back -- everything's on fire, up the
hall and the TV set -- running through smoke -- I'm
fine, let me get this! -- a man's voice says, 'Was there
somebody in the house, at the door?'"
   Malk kept looking at Glatzer's dead body in its shirt
and tie, half expecting gestures to accompany these
terse, fragmentary impressions.
   From the recorder Glatzer's voice said, "'I didn't mean
to burn Rumbold,' says the little girl."
   The tape recorder was quiet again for a while, though
Malk could hear recorded panting. He made himself look
away from the body.
   Glatzer's voice went on finally, "'I want to bury
Rumbold,' says the girl. 'It was the movie -- it wasn't
Pee-wee except for the first couple of minutes, then it
was a black and white, a silent' -- uh -- 'She was a
witch!' Now -- now a car is pulling into the driveway, an
old guy in it, in a, a green station wagon -- he's -- the
girl is holding on to her father -- I can see the old guy,
he's--"
  Then there was the sound of a sharply indrawn
breath, and blurred exclamations from Lepidopt and
Bozzaris.
  Lepidopt now reached down and switched off the
recorder. "And then he died."



And we lost our remote viewer, Lepidopt thought. Our
psychic eyes are gone. We killed this old man -- and
what did we get for it? Not even any locators.
  Through the curtain he could hear the faint music
from the speaker taped to the living room window:
Madonna's "Who's That Girl?"
  Lepidopt didn't think he had ever been this tired. Malk
and Bozzaris had better not need help walking the dead
body from the car to one of those cement tables in
Pershing Square with a chessboard on it in mosaic tile.
They'd have to remember to take the talisman off the
body.
  He thought of the old man sitting there abandoned in
the night, with no player on the other side of the table;
and he almost asked, Who played Rooster Cogburn in
True Grit?
  Instead he pushed away from the window and said to
Bozzaris, "What have we got right now?"
   "From the noon tape," said Malk, "we've got an old
woman who died on Mount Shasta, and she was
probably the Marity woman: Sam said she just
appeared there, and of course Sam saw her via the
holograph talisman, which would indicate her. What was
it she said, just before she died?"
   "It sounded like 'voyo, voyo,'" said Bozzaris. "Voyou
is French for hoodlum, if that's worth anything. And
then an hour and a half later," he went on, sitting down
in his white plastic chair by the computer, "we have a
man and a little girl who quote Shakespeare. And they
apparently know the Marity woman fairly well -- he said
she doesn't drink, or own a gun."
   "And the guy knew her age, within two years," put in
Malk. "And he says she went to Switzerland after
Chaplin died in '77, and she's got the Chaplin footprints
from the Chinese Theater in this shed."
   Lepidopt was pleased that they were thinking, and let
them go on with it.
   "I still think they're locals, the man and the girl," Malk
went on. "This seems like L.A. to me."
   "But the old woman got mail as Lisa Marity," Bozzaris
reminded him, "and we've checked L.A., past and
present, for any Marity."
   Malk nodded. "And there's no indication that this man
and girl know anything," he said. "They were surprised
by the Chinese Theater slab, and the guy said 'a bunch
of old letters' with no evident informed guessing, and
they assumed it was a plain thief who broke into the
house, not a reconnaissance team. Obviously they
don't--"
   "Hah!" interrupted Bozzaris, springing lithely from his
chair. He grabbed a hefty telephone book from the
kitchen shelf and began flipping through it.
   "What?" asked Lepidopt.
   "The little girl said, 'Divil a man can say a word agin
them,'" Bozzaris said excitedly, "it's a Cohan song. It's
Harrigan in the song, but with Marity it'd be 'M-A-
double R-I,' see? We've been" -- he was tossing his way
through the white pages -- "looking for either the
Serbian Maric or the Hungarianized Marity, with one r,
but what if the old lady added an extra r to make it look
Irish? Nothing in L.A. -- Bert, give me Long Beach, and
you get busy on Pomona or something."
   Lepidopt shambled past Malk and Bozzaris into the
stuffy kitchen and took a telephone book from the shelf.
He thumbed through the pages to the Marriage-
Martinez page, and squinted down the columns.
   "Here's a Marrity, L," he said, "with two rs." He
flipped to the cover. "Pasadena."
   There proved to be no more Marritys at all in the Los
Angeles area.
   "I bet that's her," Malk said. "I knew this was local."
   Lepidopt stared at the telephone book in his hands.
"We should have found this... years ago," he said sadly.
   "Natural oversight, though," said Bozzaris with a
shrug. "If you were looking for M-A-R-I, you'd never see
that solitary Marrity way over there. There's a whole
nation of Marquezes in between -- and Marriots. And
you wouldn't expect to find her listed anyway."
   "Still," said Lepidopt, "there it was, all this time."
  "Hey," Bozzaris said, "nobody's human." It was an old
Mossad line, a confusion of "nobody's perfect" and "I'm
only human."
  Lepidopt nodded tiredly. "Get on the phone," he told
Bozzaris, "and tell your sayan to look up Lisa Marrity
with two rs. Your San Diego detective. Have him check
L.A. and Shasta."
  He sat down on the couch facing Sam, and when Malk
stepped toward him, he waved him off.



When he had returned to Tel Aviv in mid-June of 1967,
unable to work because his hand was still bandaged, he
had brooded, and checked out various books on Hebrew
mysticism from the library, and finally he had visited a
friend who was an amateur photographer.
   Lepidopt had wondered if it had been the Shekinah,
the presence of God, that had given him the prediction
that he would never again touch the Western Wall --
the prediction that he had foolishly tested, at the cost of
his finger and a good bit of his hand -- and he
remembered how the Lord had warned Moses to keep
everyone back from Mount Sinai, in the book of Exodus:
"You shall set bounds for the people round about,
saying, 'Beware of going up the mountain or touching
the border of it. Whosoever touches the mountain shall
be put to death: no hand shall touch him, but he shall
be either stoned or shot; beast or man, he shall not
live.
  To Lepidopt this had sounded like precautions, in
terms a primitive people could follow, against exposure
to radiation; especially the order that anyone who got
too close to the mountain should be killed from a
distance. So he gave his photographer friend the film
badge he had been issued when the Fourth Battalion's
mission had been to find the Rephidim stone in the
southern wastes of the Sinai desert. Lepidopt wanted to
know if the film showed that he had been exposed to
divine radiation.
  The photographer broke open the film badge in his
darkroom and developed the patch of film it contained,
but while it wasn't transparent and unexposed, neither
did it show the graduated fogged bands of radiation
exposure -- instead the negative showed, in white lines
against a black background, a Star of David inside two
concentric rings, with a lot of Hebrew words in all the
spaces and four Hebrew words evenly spaced around
the outer circle. The words in the corners proved to be
the names of the four rivers of Paradise-- Pishon,
Gihon, Prath, and Hiddekel -- and the script inside the
star read, "Your life story be sacrosanct, and all who are
in your train." Between the rings had been various
names such as Adam and Eve and Lilith, and word
fragments in all the diamond-shaped spaces had been
rearrangements of the letters of the Hebrew word for
"unchanged" or "unedited."
  To his own surprise, Lepidopt had not taken this as
evidence of divine intervention; his belief, he
discovered, was that the diagram had been exposed
onto the film and inserted into the ORNL badge before it
was issued to him.
  Perhaps the photographer had mentioned the odd
"photograph" to friends; or perhaps all the men who
had so briefly been assigned to the Fourth Battalion
were monitored; in any case, Lepidopt received postwar
orders to report to the army base in Shalishut, outside
Tel Aviv. There, in a garage that was empty except for
himself and half a dozen white-coated technicians, he
was given a series of peculiar tests -- he was asked to
describe photographs in sealed cardboard envelopes, to
identify playing cards just by looking at the backs of
them, and to heat up coffee in a cup inside a glass box.
To this day he had no idea if his guesses about the
photos and the cards had been accurate, or if the coffee
had heated up at all.
  For the next several months he was called back for
more tests, but these were more mundane -- he was
given a number of thorough physical examinations, and
his reflexes were tested; the medical staff gave him
strict dietary instructions, steering him away from
preservatives, hard liquor, and most meats.
  After three months the program had become more
instruction than testing. If he hadn't been amply paid
for the time all this took, he might have refused to go
on, even though he understood this was part of his
army reserve service. Certainly it was pazam in both
senses of the word: service time, and a longtime too.
Luckily he had still been single in those days.
  The instruction was mostly done in a windowless
trailer that was driven from place to place throughout
the day, perhaps at random; five other students, all
males of about his own age, sat with him at a bolted-
down trestle table that ran the length of the trailer, and
the twenty-one-year-old Lepidopt was soon able to take
readable notes with his left hand, even when the truck
braked or turned unexpectedly. The students seldom
had the same instructor twice, but Lepidopt was
surprised that each instructor was a tanned, fit-looking
man of obviously military bearing, in spite of the
anonymous suits and ties they all wore.
  He would have expected bent old scholars, or
disheveled fanatics -- for the texts the students
analyzed were spiral-bound photocopies of old Hebrew
mystical books. Some had titles -- Sepher Yezirah, Raza
Rabba -- but others just bore headings like British
Museum Ms. 784, or Ashesegnen xvii or Leipzig Ms.
40d.
  Often when the texts were in Hebrew they had to be
copied out in the student's handwriting before they
could be read aloud, and in those cases the students
had also had to fast for twenty-four hours before
beginning, and make sure to write each letter of the
text so that it touched no other letter; and often the
lectures were delivered in whispers--though surely
there could have been no risk of being overheard.
  The texts had largely been antique natural histories
with interesting but outlandish theories, such as Zeno's
paradoxes that appeared to show that physical motion
was impossible; but Lepidopt had been surprised to see
that the fourteenth-century Kabbalist Moses Cordovero,
in his book Pardes Rimmonim, had defined lasers while
describing God and the amplified light that connects
Him with His ten emanations; and that the succession
of these emanations, or sephirot, seemed to be a
stylized but clear presentation of the Big Bang theory;
and that these medieval mystics apparently knew that
matter was a condensed form of energy.
  It had seemed to young Lepidopt that the instructors
emphasized these things a bit defensively, in order to
lend some frail plausibility to the wilder things in the
texts.
  Those wilder things began to have a stark, firsthand
plausibility on the day when the students were taken in
several jeeps out to some ruins in the desert north of
Ramie -- and that night in his own room, having pulled
the curtains closed to block the view of the night sky,
Lepidopt had wondered what sort of action the Fourth
Battalion would have been faced with in the Sinai
desert, at the Rephidim stone, if the orders had not
been changed.
  The instructor that day had been a deeply tanned,
gray-haired old fellow with eyes as pale as spit; he had
taken them into the wilderness to show them a thing
that he claimed was "one of the Aeons" -- specifically
the Babylonian air devil Pazuzu.
  Far out in the desert, half an hour's steep hike from
where they had had to park the jeeps, the students and
the instructor had finally stood at noon in a shadeless,
yards-wide summit ring of carved, weathered stones
under an empty sky, and the old instructor had
meditated for a while and then pressed his right hand
on to an indentation in one of the stones -- and then
they were reeling with vertigo in the center of a
clanging whirlwind, but it had palpably been a living,
sentient whirlwind; and young Lepidopt had known in
his spine and his viscera that it was the world that was
spinning, and the alien creature, the Aeon Pazuzu, that
was holding still. In comparison to it, nothing he had
ever encountered had been motionless.
  Nothing else in the training had been as dramatic as
that, but some things had been more upsetting -- as
when the students had been trained in astral projection.
On the several occasions when Lepidopt's consciousness
had hung in the air, looking down at his own slack body
on a couch, he had always been afraid that he would be
spun away into the whirling honeycomb of the world
and never find his way back to his physical body. Every
time he had pulled himself back into his body, sliding
into it as if he were inching into a tight sleeping bag, it
had been with a profound sense of relief and a
resolution never to leave it again.
  There had always been afternoon prayers in the
truck, and evening ones if the lessons went on that
long, but the Psalms all seemed to Lepidopt to have
been chosen for their apologetic or resentful tone.



Lepidopt realized he'd been staring across the table at
Glatzer's collapsed body. He stood up and crossed to
the wide front window, and leaned his forehead against
the curtained glass, idly listening to the faint music
audible from the speaker taped against the windowpane
-- it was the new U2 song, "I Still Haven't Found What
I'm Looking For."
  Neither have I, Lepidopt thought. We seem to be very
close now, but I wonder if I'll live to find the... the
technique, the technology, the breakthrough that Isser
Harel has been searching for ever since learning of a
nameless little boy who appeared in England in 1935
long enough to leave impossible fingerprints on a water
glass.
  It had opened up a whole new direction of scientific
inquiry. Isser Harel had kept it very secret, but perhaps
not everyone else involved had been as discreet.
  The Iraqis had been pursuing research in the same
direction in the late 1970s; and Lepidopt, working with
a Halomot team on a war-surplus destroyer in the
Persian Gulf in '79, had detected the Iraqi research
station at Al-Tuweitha, a few miles southwest of
Baghdad. The world thought it was simply an Iraqi
nuclear reactor that Israeli F-16s bombed to rubble in
June 1981; only Menachem Begin and a few agents in
the Halomot -- and Saddam Hussein and his top
advisors -- had known what sort of device the Iraqis
had been trying to build behind the cover of installing
the French-built Tammuz reactor.
  How odd, he thought, that Moslems could even get
close! Had they studied the Hebrew Kabbalah?
  The intelligence services of several countries seemed
to be aware of the new possibility, just as they had
vaguely known of "the uranium bomb" in the early '40s;
in 1975 the Soviet premier Brezhnev had asked for an
international ban on weapons "more terrible" than any
the world had yet seen.
  But it had been a Jew who discovered this thing,
twenty years before the establishment of the state of
Israel in 1948; and in the text of the second- century
Zohar was the passage, At the present time this door
remains unknown because Israel is in exile; and
therefore all the other doors are removed from them, so
that they cannot know or commune; but when Israel
will return from exile, all the supernal grades are
destined to rest harmoniously upon this one. Then men
will obtain a knowledge of the precious supernal wisdom
of which hitherto they knew not.
  And Israel wasn't in exile anymore.
  It's all been one war for me, Lepidopt thought -- and
he made a narrow fist with the thumb and three fingers
of his misshapen right hand.



Bozzaris had said something to him. Lepidopt looked
up.
  "What?"
  "I said the dead woman on Mount Shasta was
definitely the woman known as Lisa Marrity. I got my
sayan on the phone, and I had him call police
departments in L.A. and Shasta and ask about a Lisa
Marrity, with two rs. The guy just called back -- a
hospital in Shasta pronounced her dead at 12:20 this
afternoon. Driver's license says she was born in 1902
and lived at 204 Batsford Street in Pasadena. The
Siskiyou County sheriff wants to look into it -- it may
have been suicide, since she had hardly anything but a
note on her with next-of-kin phone numbers -- which
my man got and passed on to us, yes! -- and witnesses
say there was a big gold swastika on the grass under
her body, made out of gold wire, just like Sam saw at
noon. Real gold, they claim, though it was all gone by
the time the cops got there."
  "Some hippies," said Lepidopt, echoing what poor old
Sam had said. He got to his feet. "Airline tickets, gas
receipts?"
  "None, and no keys at all, and no cash or credit cards
at all. And she was barefoot, like Sam said, no shoes
anywhere near her. Way up a hiking trail, and no cuts
on her feet."
  "Huh. So who are these next of kin?"
  "A Frank Marrity -- two rs -- and a Moira Bradley.
Frank's in the 909 area code, that's an hour east of
Pasadena, and Moira's 818, which is Pasadena."
  Bozzaris was in the kitchen with the Pasadena
telephone directory. "Bradley," he read, "Bennett and
Moira, as in 'Uncle Bennett,' note. 106 Almaraz Street.
We haven't got any 909 directories here."
  "Yes, that's got to be the 'Uncle Bennett' that Sam
caught a reference to," said Lepidopt. "Right before
'pulled the tombstone down.' Get your sayan to look up
Frank Marrity. And then you can take Sam to Pershing
Square. Don't forget to take off the holograph
talisman."
   "I won't. But you'd better get Tel Aviv to send us
another remote viewer to hang it on."
   "Yes. Won't be as good as poor old Sam, I'm sure. I'll
send Admoni an e-mail tonight." He wasn't looking
forward to sending the report -- the Mossad strongly
disapproved of letting sayanim get hurt, much less
killed; still, Glatzer had been in his seventies, and a
heart attack had never been unlikely. "What's our safe-
house situation like in the 909 area?"
   "The two apartments are still stocked and paid up, in
San Bernardino and Riverside," said Malk. "But for this
kind of work your best bet is--"
   "I know," said Lepidopt. "The tepee place."
   "The Wigwam Motel on Route 66, right."
   "Book us a room. A tepee. A wigwam."
   I'll start with Frank Marrity, Lepidopt thought. He's
almost certainly the guy Glatzer was reading this
afternoon, the guy with the little girl.

                         Five
Huck Finn is told by Huck Finn himself, from his point of
view."
  Suddenly unwilling to read whatever sentence might
follow that first one, Frank Marrity let the Blue Book test
pamphlet fall into his lap. The stack of similar Blue
Books stood on the table beside him, but he had just
this moment decided to call in sick tomorrow, so they
didn't depress him nearly as much as they had when he
had sat down.
   He was in the uphill living room, in a chair by the cold
fireplace, and Daphne was asleep on the couch in front
of the uphill TV set. She had drifted off during Mary
Poppins, and he had turned the set off. She seemed to
be sleeping peacefully, and he was reluctant to wake
her.
   He tamped his pipe and puffed a cloud of smoke
toward the set of Dickens on the mantel. His hands
weren't trembling now, but he still felt sick to his
stomach.
   Poltergeist? he thought, allowing the morbid,
impossible thought to surface again. It must -- actually
-- have been a poltergeist! A girl in her teens -- well,
close enough -- and sudden breakages or fires in the
house when she was emotionally stressed. Are there
child psychologists who specialize in... poltergeistery?
Maybe it was a one-shot thing, maybe it will have worn
off by morning. We'll be able to forget about the whole
thing.
   One of the cats, a tailless black-and-gray male, was
clawing the back of the couch, which was already
hanging in tatters from the previous attentions of the
cats. "No no, Chaz," said Marrity absently, saying what
Daphne always told the cats, "we don't do that. We've
talked about it, remember?"
   What the hell kind of movie did Grammar leave lying
around, anyway, driving little kids nuts? But apparently
Grammar did mean to burn it. She would never
knowingly hurt a child. Would never have.
   Marrity didn't want to use the word poltergeist in
Daphne's hearing, since she had seen the Steven
Spielberg movie with that title. The little girl in that
movie had been contacted by some kind of ghosts
through a television screen, and he didn't want Daphne
to develop a phobia about TV sets.
   His Encyclopedia Britannica -- admittedly a set
published in 1951 -- seemed to take poltergeist
phenomena seriously. In the article on psychical
research he had also read the section on telepathy and
clairvoyance, but though the writer of the article
seemed credulous of these things too, there was no
mention of the sort of psychic link he and Daphne had.
   Their link had shown up in the two years since Lucy's
death, but until today it had alternated between them
-- for a week or so he would be able to catch occasional
thoughts of Daphne's, and then the ability would fade
out, and a month later Daphne would be able to see
some of his thoughts for six to ten days. Maybe the no-
telepathy periods had been getting longer, the
alternating telepathic periods getting closer together,
until now they had actually overlapped. Would they
stop, now, after having finally occurred together? He
hoped so, even though he was glad he and Daphne had
been linked this afternoon, when the fires had started.
   At dinner Daphne hadn't eaten much of her chili con
came. Twice she had choked, as if she was having
difficulty swallowing; but he had caught an image from
her thoughts -- a brief glimpse of somebody spooning
out brains from a broken bald head with a splayed
crown on it, seen in black and white and therefore
obviously from the damned movie she had watched --
and he had not asked her to say what was wrong.
Maybe he should have.
  More strongly than he had in a long time, he wished
that Lucy had not died, leaving Daphne and him adrift.
Even two parents were hardly enough to raise a child.
He remembered a passage from Chesterton: "Although
this child is much better than I, yet I must teach it.
Although this being has much purer passions than I, yet
I must control it."
  Daphne's fingernails were always bitten down to the
quick; for these last two years, anyway.
  I do my best, he thought, trying the phrase on; and
then he wondered how often he really did do his best,
and for how long at a time.



Since he wouldn't be setting the alarm clock for
tomorrow, he poured more Scotch into his glass, though
the ice had long since melted. He wouldn't be paid for
tomorrow either.
  But there's gold under the bricks in Grammar's shed,
he thought. Possibly.
  Gold, which Grammar could have expected to survive
the shed burning down; and some kind of movie, and
some letters, which would reliably have been destroyed.
Well, the movie was now burned up.
  There had been a message on the telephone
answering machine from Mercy Medical Center in
Shasta when he and Daphne had got home; he had
called them back, and they had confirmed that
Grammar had died on Mount Shasta at about noon.
   He took a sip of the lukewarm whisky, grateful for the
full-orchestra burn of it in his throat, and then reached
into his inside jacket pocket and carefully drew out the
sheaf of letters that he had taken from the ammunition
box in Grammar's shed. Some flecks of broken old
brown paper fell onto the Blue Book on his lap, and he
brushed them and the booklet off onto the rug. The
letters smelled of gasoline, and he laid his pipe carefully
in the ashtray.
   The first envelope he looked into was postmarked
June 10, 1933, from Oxford, but the letter inside was
handwritten in German, and Marrity was only able to
puzzle out the salutation -- Meine liebe Tochter, which
clearly meant "my dear daughter," and the signature,
Peccavit, which he believed was Latin for "I have
sinned."
   He flipped through the stack, poking his fingers into
the envelopes to find one of the English-language
letters he recalled seeing in the shed, and pulled free
the first one he found.
   The postmark was Princeton, New Jersey, August 2,
1939; the printed return address on the envelope was
Fuld Hall, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study; and
under it, in pencil, someone had scrawled Einstein Rm.
215.
   Marrity paused. Had Albert Einstein written Grammar
a letter? That would be worth something!
   Hoping it might be from Einstein, and hoping that a
couple of others in the batch might be too, he carefully
unfolded the yellowed letter. It was typed, and
addressed to "Miranda," though the addressee on the
envelope was Lisa Marrity.
   My dear Miranda, Marrity read, I have sent today a
Letter to the King of Naples, advising him of the
ominous Behavior of Antonio, and advising him to busy
himself in acquiring pre-emptively for Naples the Power
toward which Antonio is looking.
   Marrity recognized these names -- Miranda was the
daughter of the magician Prospero in Shakespeare's
play The Tempest, and Antonio was Prospero's
treacherous brother who had usurped the dukedom of
Milan and driven Prospero and his daughter into exile.
   Grammar had called her father Prospero.
   I did not mention the other Power, the letter went on,
and did not the Caliban who is now your chaste
Incubus. (And whose Fault?) I can assist Naples with
the First, but I will work only to conceal and obliterate
all Records of the Other. Ill break my Staff, and bury it
certain Fathoms in the Earth, and deeper than did ever
Plummet sound I'll drown my Book.
   Caliban was an inhuman monster in the Shakespeare
play, and the break my Staff sentence was a verbatim
quote from the Prospero character.
   The letter ended with, And you should do the Same
also. Forgive yourself about 1933, and then forget even
what it was you did. Starve Caliban with Inattention. I
should never have given him Shelter -- I've learned my
lesson, not to interfere with Suicides! Twice the
Interfering has made Disasters, and so I must somehow
have the Palm Springs Singularity to be destroyed. And
you must burn the verdammter Kaleidoscope Shed!
   Marrity actually lowered the age-yellowed letter and
looked around the dim corners of the room, as if this
were a trick being played on him.
   Then he looked back at the sheet of old paper. The
letter was signed Peccavit, in the same hand as the first
letter he'd looked at.
   Was this Peccavit Grammar's father? And was he
Albert Einstein? Were all these letters from him?
   Marrity realized glumly that he couldn't believe it. It
was inconceivable that Albert Einstein could know about
the shed he and Moira had played in as children. There
were any number of plausible reasons why someone
might write Einstein on an envelope.
   But hadn't Einstein taught at Princeton?
   Marrity flipped through the stack again, peeking into
the envelopes, and saw another in English. He carefully
drew the letter out of the envelope -- which was plain,
postmarked Princeton, New Jersey, April 15,1955. The
letter was handwritten, in the same difficult scrawl as
the Peccavit signatures.
   My dear Daughter, Marrity managed to puzzle out,
Derek was here -- did you know?
   And Marrity stopped reading again, his face suddenly
cold. Derek, he thought. That's my father's name. He
ditched us in '55-- sometime before May, since my
mother killed herself in May. Was he just off visiting his
grandfather? If so, why didn't he ever come back? Did
he die? If he died, why wouldn't Grammar have told
Moira and me?
   Quickly he worked his way through the rest of the
letter.
   I hope you have not told him too much! I said to him
to go Home, I am always watched, can tell him Nothing.
And Derek not knows his own Origin, that he has no
lineal Status. I have spoken to NB when he was here in
October, just enough to assure he has no Inkling of the
Maschinchen. And he has not. I am in Hospital, with a
ruptured Aortic Aneurism, and I know I do not survive. I
wish to have seen you one more Time! We are such
Stuff as Dreams are made on, and our little Life is
rounded with a Sleep.
   It was signed simply, Your Father.
   That last sentence was of course from The Tempest.
   With a shaking hand Marrity laid the letters aside, and
stood up and tiptoed into the hall, where the Britannica
volumes stood on a shelf above head height. He pulled
down the EDWA to EXTRACT volume, blew dust off the
top page edges, and flipped to the article on Einstein.
   It listed his birth year as 1879, but there was no
death date in this 1951 edition. Marrity only skimmed
the accounts of Einstein's discoveries, but noted that
Einstein had become professor of mathematics at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey,
in 1933.
   An image more vivid than a daydream unfocused his
view of the page -- Daphne was dreaming. In her
dream a young man with long hair was tied up and
gagged, lying on his back in some kind of recessed
space in a metal floor between padded, bolted-down
seats, and a hand with a knife hovered over his throat;
then it was Daphne lying on her back on a red-and-
black linoleum floor, and Marrity was crouched over her
with an opened pocketknife in one hand, pushing her
chin up with the other--
   "Daph!" he called, stepping quickly back into the
living room. He was anxious to wake her before the
dream could go any further. "Daph, hey, your movie's
over! Up up up! You can sleep with me tonight, since
your bed's all smoked. Right right?"
   She was sitting up, blinking. "Okay," she said,
apparently mystified by his liveliness. The dream was
clearly forgotten.
   "And I don't have time to correct those papers
tonight," he went on, "so I'm going to call in sick
tomorrow. We can have lunch at Alfredo's."
   "Okay. Did you clean up my bedroom?"
   "Yes. Come on, up."
   "How does it look?"
   "Halbfooshin'." It was a family word that meant pretty
bad, but not near as bad as a little while ago.
   She smiled. "Tomorrow we can flip the mattress and
put the bed different?"
   "Right. You've been east-west -- we'll put you north-
south for a while. The cats will still land on you when
they come in the window."
   She nodded contentedly and followed him down the
hall.
Viewed by the other drivers on the westbound 10
freeway this evening, the bus generally looked black --
its bright blue showed up only when it sped past under
one of the high-arching streetlights -- and a driver
passing it had to squint to make out the word HELIX
along its side.
   The windows along the side of the bus were
gleamingly dark in the back, but the two or three right
behind the driver's seat glowed yellow, and a driver
passing the bus in the fast lane was able to glimpse a
white-haired man sitting as if at a table.
   In the lounge area behind the bus's driver, Denis
Rascasse sat back in one of the two captain's chairs and
with his open hand rolled his Bic pen across the flat
newspaper in front of him.
   "Lieserl Marity came out of hiding in order to die," he
said formally, as if he were dictating a newspaper photo
caption.
   "In effect," agreed Paul Golze. He sighed and audibly
shifted his bulk in the other captain's chair, probably
passing from one ear to the other the telephone that
was connected to the modified CCS scrambler. "A Moira
Bradley called the hospital at twelve forty-five -- she's
one of the next of kin. And at six-ten a cop from San
Diego called too, a detective, asking about Lisa Marrity.
Nobody else, no press."
   By the interior lights glowing over the seats and fold-
out tables at the front of the bus, Rascasse was working
on the Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle. Without
looking up, he said, "I think we should get that cop."
His French accent made the last word into something
like coop or cope.
   The Vespers radar dish at Pyramid Peak near the
Nevada border covertly monitored all telephone
communications that the NSA bounced off the moon,
and swastika and Marity were two of the hundred high-
specificity words the Vespers computer was
programmed to flag. Tonight these two had occurred in
the same conversation, and one of the technicians at
the compound outside Amboy, all of whom had been on
full alert since shortly after noon, had telephoned the
New Jersey headquarters as soon as the correlation was
noted and transcribed, and the New Jersey people had
called Rascasse.
   Paul Golze spoke into the telephone; "Read me the
entire conversation, slowly." He began scribbling on a
yellow legal pad.
   Stretched out on a couch by the dark galley in the
back of the bus, Charlotte Sinclair paid wary attention
to the two men at the tables ten rows forward.
   Charlotte had lost both eyes in an accident, but she
could see through the eyes of anyone near her.
   She was tensely amused whenever one of the two
men looked at the other; they were such opposites,
physically -- Rascasse tall and straight with close-
cropped white hair, Golze slouchy and fat and bearded,
and always pushing his stringy black hair away from his
glasses.
   Charlotte wondered if she would be able to sleep.
   She had lit a cigarette to kill the spicy smell of the
thing they called the Baphomet head, but the smoke
irritated her eyelids, and she crushed it out in the
armrest ashtray.
   Instead she reached under the seat and lifted out of
her bag the bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, still
reassuringly heavy, and twisted out the cork cap. A
mouthful of the warm liquor dispelled the incense-and-
myrrh smell perfectly, so she had another to work on
dispelling the memory of the thing as well, and then
corked the bottle and tucked it beside her under her
coat.
   It had been three years now since Rascasse had
picked her up in a poker club in Los Angeles and she
had begun working for the Vespers, but she still didn't
know much about the organization or its history.
   The thing they were looking for now was apparently
invented in 1928, but the Vespers had supposedly been
pursuing it under other forms for centuries. Before the
advances in physics during the twentieth century, it had
been categorized as magic -- but so had hypnotism,
and transmutation of elements, and ESP.
   Rascasse had told her once that the Vespers were a
secret survival of the true Albigenses, the twelfth-
century natural philosophers of Languedoc whose
discoveries in the areas of time and so-called
reincarnation had so alarmed the Catholic Church that
Pope Innocent III had ordered the entire group to be
wiped out. "The pope knew that we had rediscovered
the real Holy Grail," Rascasse had said, nodding toward
the chalice-shaped copper handles on the black wood
cabinet behind the driver's seat. "We lost it during the
Church's Albigensian Crusade, when Arnold of Citeaux
destroyed all of our possessions at Carcassonne." When
Charlotte had dutifully made some derogatory remark
about the Catholic Church, Rascasse had shrugged.
"Einstein suppressed it too, after rediscovering it in
1928."
   Another time Rascasse had told her that in the 1920s
the Vespers -- called the Ahnenerbe then -- had worked
with Adolf Hitler, and had even provided him with the
swastika as an emblem; though Rascasse had added
that the group's core had never been interested in the
screwy Nazi racial philosophies, but had only hoped to
use Hitler's government to fund their researches. The
association had apparently not worked out, and long
before the Ahnenerbe had been incorporated into the
SS, the core members had stolen the archives and left
Germany and taken on, or possibly reassumed, the
name Vespers. Golze said Vespers was a corruption of
Wespen, the German word for wasps, though Charlotte
liked to think it referred to the French term for evening
prayers. Rascasse himself was French, and probably old
enough to have been active during the war, but she had
never been able to figure out when he had joined the
Vespers.
   Their researches had to do with the nature of time,
and her payment for working with them was going to be
derived from that.
   But "researches" probably wasn't the right word,
except in a historical-detective sense -- they weren't
hoping to discover how to manipulate time, but to
rediscover work that had already been done toward
that, work that had subsequently been lost or hidden or
suppressed.
  In these three years Charlotte had seen them pursue
a number of leads -- clues that took them to private
European libraries, and odd old temples in India and
Nepal, and remote ruins in Middle Eastern deserts -- all
of which had proved to be dead ends. Rumored scrolls
or inscriptions were gone or had been misleadingly
described, alchemical procedures proved to be too
obscure to follow or did nothing, and disembodied
Masters turned out to be disembodied imbeciles, if not
complete fabrications.
  It had been Charlotte herself who had obtained the
one solid lead for them: She had got access to a secret
archive in New Jersey, and had stolen several files of
papers that contained information about a woman who
had been living under a false name in Southern
California as recently as 1955, a woman who had at one
time had possession of some sort of potent artifact.
Charlotte hadn't been told all the details, but it had
been this discovery that had led Rascasse and his team
here to Los Angeles to work with the California branch
of the Vespers.
  A mouthful of bourbon heated her throat now as she
banished the memory of what she had done to get
access to that archive.
  Charlotte didn't think Rascasse and Golze had truly
believed the old woman's device still existed; certainly
they had assumed she must have died years ago. But at
noon all the Vespers electronic Ouija boards had shaken
into activity, with ghosts anxious to know if they still
had identities -- this and a careful study of the day's
seismological charts convinced Rascasse that the device
had been activated and used.
   He had immediately got the Vespers remote viewers
busy trying to triangulate its location; and after an hour
they had narrowed it down to somewhere in the Los
Angeles area.
   Then the old woman's gadget had reportedly moved
east, at about 1:30 -- the viewers couldn't be precise,
since the device had not been activated at the time --
and so Rascasse had rounded up Golze and Charlotte
and set out in the bus toward Palm Springs.
   At one point on that long drive a gong had sounded
from the cabinet behind the driver's seat, and the
cursor on the electronic Ouija board above the cabinet
had been bouncing like the virtual ball on a Pong game,
lighting up random letters and numbers. Charlotte had
faintly heard the thing in the cabinet moaning.
   After a quick, whispered argument with Rascasse,
Golze had opened the cabinet doors with evident
reluctance.
   Charlotte had had to fight down sudden nausea. It
seemed to her that the head always smelled worse --
like hot rum spiced with "blood and honey and the
scrapings of old church bells," as Thurber had once
written -- when it was agitated. And even though it had
no eyes, she always imagined that it was looking at her.
   Golze had gingerly lifted the tarry-black head and its
wooden base out of the cabinet and shuffled around to
the windows with it held out at arm's length, to let the
thing, as he said, "scope the traffic," but though the
head seemed to quiver with more excitement when he
carried it back to the galley and held it up to the back
window, none of the vehicles nor anything in the sky
had seemed unusual.
   Rascasse had curtly told Charlotte to scan the nearby
perspectives, but she got nothing more significant than
a view of the dashboard of a car or truck, and a rust-
flecked white hood. Nothing that looked like opposition.
   Charlotte had tried to avoid seeing the awful black
head, but at one point while she was using Rascasse's
eyes he had looked straight at it.
   Polished black skin clung tightly to the eyeless skull,
and paisley-shaped panels of silver filigree had been
glued or tacked onto the forehead, cheeks, nose and
chin, like metal Maori tattoos -- probably to cover worm
holes, Charlotte thought nervously -- and a slack ribbon
around its neck swung back and forth underneath the
wooden stand. "Charlie Chaplin's hat," Golze and
Rascasse called the ribbon. According to Golze it was
the liner ribbon from a hat that had once belonged to
Chaplin, cut now and fitted with a button and loop.
   Charlotte had hastily switched to the driver's point of
view.
   Golze had eventually put the head back in its cabinet
and closed the doors, wiping his hands afterward. Only
then had Charlotte taken a deep breath.
   At 4:10 P.M., though, the head had begun moaning
again behind its closed doors, and again the electronic
Ouija board had rapidly indicated meaningless numbers
and letters; but, luckily before they could open the
cabinet again, Rascasse had got a frantic call from the
Amboy compound, reporting that the old woman's
gadget had disappeared -- dropped right out of the
perceptions of all the remote viewers.
   Rascasse had immediately made another call to the
seismology lab at Cal Tech, but there had been no
earthquakes within the last half hour. Apparently the
gadget had been briefly activated again-- too briefly to
hope to triangulate it -- but had disappeared without
having been used.
   They were headed back to the L.A. office now, and
Charlotte had long since calmed her nerves with the
bourbon. Rascasse would surely get the device soon,
whatever it was, and there was nothing she could do to
help right now.
   She knew that she could look at the highway ahead,
and see the lights of windows in the darkness -- distant
kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms -- but she
didn't exert herself to look. Right now she didn't want
that heimweh, that homesick longing for strangers'
lives. She was too distressingly close now to getting a
life for herself.
   Golze had said he could never sleep on the bus, but
usually Charlotte could -- the noise and the rocking
took Charlotte back to her childhood.
   From the age of eight until the age of nineteen, when
she had been honorably discharged because of
disability, Charlotte Sinclair had been one of several
children working for the United States Air Force in a
remote string of Minuteman ICBM missile silos in the
Mojave Desert south of Panamint Springs. She and the
other children had spent most of their days and nights
in the underground Launch Control Centers, each of
which was a compact three-story house suspended
inside a concrete sphere on "shock isolators," four huge
compressed-air shock absorbers, and the floor had
constantly tilted one way and then the other as the
Boeing air compressors tried to compensate for
pressure loss in one or another of the shock isolators.
Sometimes the floor would stay tilted for hours before
the compressor came on, and she and the crew would
get used to it -- and then it was always disorienting to
notice that the stationary blast door appeared to be
rotated to one side or the other.
  Golze had hung up the telephone in the slot in its
carrying case and was reading the notes he had made
on the legal pad. "Her next of kin are the Moira Bradley
who called the hospital, and one Frank Marrity, spelled
with two rs. Pasadena and San Bernardino area codes.
We could visit Marrity in San Bernardino tonight. He's
east, and the thing moved east."
  "We won't call on him," said Rascasse, "especially not
at night. Don't want to scare anybody, we don't. We will
call Marrity tomorrow, offer to buy it, if he's got it. Fifty
thousand dollars should be... effective. And in case
there's a hitch, it should be Charlotte that does the
visiting."
  In the darkness at the back of the bus, Charlotte
nodded. Visiting I can do, she thought; and I'm good at
looking. I don't mind if you ask me to do those things.
  Back in the early '60s, someone in Army Intelligence
at Fort Meade had been worried that Soviet psychics
might identify American missile silos, and so he had
designed this secret cluster of silos to confuse any such
remote viewers. The tar-and-gravel runway was
concealed behind a row of gaudy carnival tents and
booths and rides, and the gray walls of the underground
Launch Control Centers were all hung with pictures of
Bozo the Clown and Engineer Bill and Gumby, and the
Launch Control consoles were painted in such garish
stripes and circles that the functional lights and buttons
could hardly be distinguished; and the commander's
launch key had a little clown's head epoxyed to the top
of it. Charlotte and the other children had been required
to play with Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs in the LCCs,
and to accompany maintenance men into the tunnels
and silos, which had been decorated with enormous Dr.
Seuss murals. Any Soviet psychic who managed to view
the missile launch site would, it was hoped, assume
that he was seeing some sort of amusement park or
progressive elementary school instead, and would write
off the session as a miss.
  Charlotte had been the queen of the Silo Rascals,
since she had been able to sense the intrusion when a
distant psychic was using her eyes to look out through;
and it had happened two or three times every year. At
those moments she was trained to begin singing "Bye
Bye Blackbird" as loudly as she could, at which signal all
the air force personnel would drop their official work
and begin dancing or putting on hand puppets or
blowing through cheap tin trumpets. There had been
times -- when a favorite officer was being yelled at, or
when she had been assigned to accompany the
Corrosion Control crew below Level 7 at dawn in the
middle of winter, or even when she had simply been
bored -- when she had begun singing the song without
having sensed any outside monitoring. Even at the time
she had been sure that the crew commanders
sometimes suspected her of raising a false alarm, but
they had apparently been under strict orders not to
question her alerts.
  Eventually she had become able to fix on a remote
viewer who was looking through her eyes, and follow
the link back, and get a glimpse of his surroundings --
generally just some featureless dark room, though on a
couple of occasions she had found herself staring at the
dashboard of a moving car.
  She had never mentioned this emergent homing
ability to her control officers at Fort Meade, though,
because even as a child she had known that they would
immediately reassign her to a site that was reliably
watched by foreign psychics, just so that she could spy
on the psychics. She didn't want to leave the secret
underground kingdom of the Silo Rascals.
  The Launch Control Centers were her home, along
with the stairs and corridors between the entrapment
doors, and the two-hundred-foot cableway with its
infinity of hiding places between the support girders,
and the vast silo itself, ten stories deep with the shiny
bulk of the Minuteman missile filling the infinite volume.
  An exploding battery in the charger bay had blinded
her in 1978, when she was nineteen.
  In the nightmare months that followed -- after the
hospitals and the therapy, and after her extensive
debriefing and eventual honorable discharge -- she had
discovered two things that had made her blindness and
exile bearable. She learned that she could see through
the eyes of anyone who was within about a hundred
feet of her -- the distance varied a bit, depending on
the seasons -- and she discovered alcohol.
   Golze got up from his table now and descended the
tight stairs to the tiny restroom just behind the front
door of the bus; idly Charlotte monitored him, and she
smiled at the way he was careful to do his business at
the urinal by touch alone, staring up at the close plastic
ceiling. He wasn't what anyone would call a gentleman,
so it must be shyness. Men who knew about her ability
always, when they went into a restroom, made a point
of either modestly looking up or arrogantly looking
down. Rascasse always looked down, but with Rascasse
somehow it always seemed to be in surprise.
   She shifted her attention to Rascasse, and she saw
that he was staring at one of the crossword-puzzle
clues: a four-letter word that meant "underground
fence."
   "Haha," she called toward the front of the rocking
bus.
   "What's funny back there?" he called.
   "An underground fence is called a haha," she told
him.
   In the newspaper margin he wrote, Y dont U finish
the bottle and sleep. Bzy day morrow.
   "Haha," she said, and then set about taking his
advice.
                         Six
When Frank Marrity walked down the gravel driveway at
eight the next morning to pick up the Los Angeles
Times, the green Rambler was parked just outside the
chain-link gate.
  He had awakened before Daphne, and slid out from
under the covers without disturbing her, and in his
pajamas and slippers he padded out to the kitchen to
call the college and then make breakfast.
  After he'd explained to the English Department
secretary that he would not be coming in today, he
boiled milk on the stove and poured it into two bowls of
Quaker instant oatmeal, then stirred into each bowl a
tablespoon of Cool Whip and a teaspoon of Southern
Comfort liqueur. Daphne appeared just as he was
carrying the bowls to the kitchen table.
  "I looked in my room just now," she said as she
pulled out a chair.
  "We'll fix it up today," Marrity told her.
  "Crazy day, yesterday," was all she said before
digging into the oatmeal.
  "The craziest," he agreed.
  He was glad that she didn't comment on being served
what was usually her "sick girl" breakfast instead of the
routine cereal or bacon and eggs; but after the choking
she'd experienced last night at dinner, he wanted to put
off giving her anything that required chewing.
  The telephone rang, and he decided to stay where he
was and let the answering machine get it.
   'You're reached the Marritys," said his voice from the
machine, "and we're not able to come to the phone
right now, but leave a message and your number and
we'll get back to you." The beep followed, and two
seconds of silence, and then the dial tone, which soon
shut off.
   He glanced at Daphne. She was frowning, but for a
moment it seemed to him that it was his voice coming
from the other side of the room, and not the hang-up,
that had disturbed her.
   A black-and-white cat jumped up onto the table,
sliding on yesterday's newspaper, and Daphne nudged
him off and then absently stared at the headlines.
"Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Elvis's death,"
she said. "I wonder if ghosts come back on their
anniversaries."
   "I'll get dressed and go fetch today's paper," Marrity
said, pushing his chair back.



The sun in the east was throwing shadows across the
gravel driveway from the lemon and peach trees, and
the sky to the south was a deep, cold blue. Tiny white
flakes of ash glittered as they fell silently through the
sunlit air, for the northern sky over the mountains was
a white haze of smoke.
   The newspaper was lying on the gravel just inside the
gate, but Marrity had seen the green Rambler now and
he slowly walked past the newspaper and unhooked the
padlock from the chain, not taking his eyes off the car.
Behind the wheel, staring back at him, was the same
gray-haired man who had driven the car into their
driveway yesterday afternoon, and had then reversed
out and driven away.
   Marrity pulled the gate back enough to step through,
and then walked out into the street to approach the
driver's-side window. It was rolled down.
   Before Marrity could speak, the man in the car said,
"She called me yesterday, early. She said I could have
her car."
   Marrity stared at the lined, slack face under the
combed gray hair, wondering where he'd seen it before.
"So you broke her kitchen window to get the keys," he
said. "Who are you? Why are you here?"
   "I'm here because--" The old man appeared to try the
door handle, and then give up on getting out. He leaned
back in the seat. "There's no easy way to say this." His
voice was rough, as if from decades of cigarettes and
liquor. "I'm Derek Marrity."
   Marrity was dizzy, and his stomach was suddenly
cold. He took a step back to catch his balance, but he
made his voice steady when he said, "You're my
father?"
   "That's right. Your grandmother -- my mother --
listen, youngster -- she said I should -- she said it
would be best for everybody if I just went away. Back in
'55. Now that she's dead she can't blackmail me
anymore. I could have killed her, and stayed -- maybe I
should have-but how can you kill your own mother?"
   "You killed my mother."
  The man exhaled through clenched teeth.
"Goddammit, boy, I didn't know that. I sent money to
your grandmother, to give to Veronica. And letters too.
I guess your grandmother just kept the money and
trashed the letters. Typical."
  "You left your children with her."
  "Would you rather have been in a foster home? Was
Grammar a bad parent to you? Remember, she didn't
know Veronica would kill herself."
  Marrity wanted to tell the old man about Veronica's
drunken, hopeless last days, before the car-crash
suicide -- and he wanted to hear, very much wanted to
hear the old man's replies-- but he didn't want to do it
out here on the street.
  "Who was Grammar's father?" he asked instead.
"What was Prospero's actual name?"
  The gray-haired man shook his head. "No concern of
yours, boy. Prosper 0. will do fine."
  "Albert Einstein," said Daphne from the shadows
behind the half-opened gate.
  "Daph--" snapped Marrity in alarm, stepping toward
her, "you shouldn't be out here. This man is--"
  "Your father," Daphne finished for him. She was still
in her pajamas, and barefoot on the gravel. "That was
Albert Einstein you were picturing, wasn't it, Dad? The
crazy-haired old scientist?" She stepped through the
gate into the chilly, slanting sunlight and walked up to
Marrity and took hold of his hand. "Why was Grammar
blackmailing you?" she asked the man in the car.
   "Daph," said Marrity desperately, "we don't know who
this man is. Go wait for me inside."
   "Okay. But he must be your father -- he looks just
like you." Daphne let go of his hand and scampered
back through the gate and up the driveway.
   Marrity couldn't help glancing at the man in the car,
though the glance must clearly have shown that he had
found Daphne's statement unflattering.
   But his father's eyes were tightly shut, and he was
frowning, as if with sudden indigestion.
   "Are you okay?" asked Marrity.
   The old man opened his eyes and blotted them on the
sleeve of his nylon jacket. He took a deep breath and
let it out. "I hope to be, I hope to be. What did she
say?"
   "She said you look like me."
   "The Marrity jaw," said his father, smiling now, a little
sourly. "And I think there's something about the eyes
and the bridge of the nose. Look at some photos of
Einstein, back when he was in his thirties."
   "I thought -- we were Irish."
   "My father might have been, whoever was Ferdinand
to my mother's Miranda. His name wasn't Marrity,
though -- that was your grandmother's maiden name,
with an extra R added to make it look Irish. It's
Serbian, originally, by way of Hungary. I guess fathers
tend to be delinquent, in our family. Though I had -- I
really believe I had -- no choice." He opened his mouth
and closed it, then said, "But I'm sorry -- sorrier than I
can say."
  Marrity gave him a brittle smile. "Maybe you are. No
help at this point, of course."
  After a pause, his father shook his head. "I suppose it
isn't. Can I come in?"
  Marrity blinked at him. "Of course not! We can meet
sometime -- give me your phone number -- in fact,
when you leave here, you, you'd better walk -- I've got
the license number of that car now, and I'm going to
report it as stolen."
  "Can I come in?" the man repeated. "My mother --
your grandmother -- died yesterday."
  Marrity frowned. He wouldn't be able to ask his father
about unpleasant things around Daphne; but maybe
they shouldn't start with the unpleasant things anyway.
And if he sent the old man away right now, he might
never reappear, and that would be intolerable, again.
  Marrity sighed heavily. "Of course you can come in.
But -- you have to promise to leave with no scene as
soon as I say it's time for you to go."
  "Fair enough."



Bert Malk was leaning in under the open hood of a
rented Ford LTD on the opposite side of the street half a
block away, and he didn't dare straighten up to peer
after Marrity and the old man who had been sitting in
the station wagon, though he noticed that the old man
limped; but it was a fair guess that they were going into
Marrity's house. Malk had seen the little girl come out in
pajamas and say something to them before going back
in.
   Malk had laid an open toolbox on the radiator and
was pretending to assemble or disassemble the clamp
on the positive battery terminal. He had been standing
here for ten minutes now, alternately bending over the
engine and sitting behind the wheel as if trying to start
the car, and he would have to leave soon.
   This neighborhood was in an unincorporated area
outside the San Bernardino city limits, and there were
no streetlights or sidewalks; Malk was standing on a
patch of grass flattened and rutted by tires. The house
he was parked in front of had plywood bolted over the
windows and doors, and a brown steel Dumpster nearly
as big as the house sat in the driveway.
   At the east end of the street a blue BMW appeared,
and drove slowly toward him. He bent over the battery,
as if looking very closely for any corrosion on the
terminal.
   The BMW passed him, and the brake lights flashed
briefly as it passed the Marrity house, and then it had
gone on past, its rear window a featureless block of sun
glare. It paused at the stop sign at the west end of the
block, then made a right turn.
   Malk's face was cold, and he began tossing the tools
back into the box. Get out now, he thought.
   The woman sitting beside the driver had also been in
the passenger seat of a Honda Prelude that had passed
him here four minutes ago, also driving slowly east to
west. He made mental notes: shoulder-length dark hair,
slim, thirtyish, with sunglasses; blue short-sleeve
blouse. A real pzaza, he thought, a dark-haired beauty.
In both passes she had appeared to be looking straight
ahead, not toward the Marrity house, and she might
just be a local resident; but she had passed the house
twice in different cars, and the cars had had different
drivers.
  He snapped the toolbox closed and unhooked the
support rod from the hood. It was time to get out of
here.



"I remember the fires," Marrity's father said, looking
over the top of the house at the white northern sky.
   "Tenderly the haughty day fills his blue urn with fire,'"
said Marrity, randomly quoting Emerson as he strode up
the driveway. He was impatient to get inside now, and
it irked him to wait for his limping father to catch up.
   As Marrity pushed open the kitchen door, his father
nodded toward the blistered VCR that still lay on the
grass.
   "That's an unfamiliar sight," he said.
   "The machine burned up," said Marrity shortly. "Bad
wiring, I guess." He pulled the door closed behind him
when the old man had limped unsteadily inside. "Daph!
We've -- got company."
   When Daphne appeared in the kitchen doorway she
had changed out of her pajamas and was wearing green
corduroy overalls over a white T-shirt; clearly she had
expected her father to ask the old man in. "I was just
explaining," Marrity went on, "that a short circuit in the
VCR burned it up yesterday. Did you shut your bedroom
door to keep the cats out?"
   She nodded, and then told her grandfather, "Burnt up
the movie in it too."
   "Really?" said Marrity's father. "What movie?" He
unzipped his olive green Members Only jacket, and
Marrity noticed that it was still stiffly pressed, and the
long-sleeved red-and-white-striped shirt under it was
stiff too, and creased where it had been folded. Marrity
wondered if Grammar had had any cash lying around at
her house.
   "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," Daphne said.
   Marrity's father seemed to have some trouble draping
his jacket over the back of a chair. "I--" he began
hoarsely; then he cleared his throat and went on, "I
hope it wasn't a rental."
   "No, one of ours," Marrity told him. "Can I get you
some coffee?"
   "Coffee," echoed his father absently. "Coffee." He
blinked at his son. "No, I've been up for so long it's near
lunchtime for me. A glass of that Southern Comfort on
the rocks would be bracing."
   It occurred to Marrity that the man's odd smell was a
mix of Juicy Fruit gum, cigarette smoke, and vodka.
Vodka before eight, he thought, and Southern Comfort
as a chaser? If a cop pulls him over and gives him a
502, when he drives away from here, am I liable, for
having served him the alcohol? Marrity discovered that
he didn't care, and poured a generous slug of the
amber liquor into a water glass.
   "Ice in the freezer," he said as he handed it to him.
"Help yourself."
   "Can I have a bracing drink?" asked Daphne.
   "No!" said the old man.
   Marrity smiled at her. "No. Sit down and be seen and
not heard."
   "Aye aye."
   Daphne had sat down at the table, so Marrity did too;
and as soon as his father had fumbled a couple of ice
cubes into his glass, he settled into the chair with his
new jacket on it.
   The old man was leaning back and looking around the
kitchen, and Marrity found himself resenting his father
looking at the things he and Lucy and Daphne had
assembled over the years -- the Kliban coffee cups and
dish towels, the cat calendar on the pantry door, the
collection of cartoony salt-and-pepper shakers on the
high shelves. But maybe the old man was envious of a
settled home -- certainly he seemed rootless.
   Finally the old man looked at Marrity. "It's a very bad
idea to give children alcohol," he said earnestly.
   "How did you hurt your leg?" Daphne asked him.
   "A car ran over me," the old man said. He seemed
angry at Daphne for asking.
   "Grammar called you yesterday?" Marrity said. "How
did you know she's dead?"
   The old man shifted his gaze to Marrity. "I got worried
and called the police in Shasta," he said. "When she
called me from there, she was talking as if she thought
she would die soon, giving me the car and all. Even
calling me."
   Marrity realized that he didn't believe him. Maybe, he
thought, he did kill her! Well no, he couldn't have got
back from Shasta in time to break Grammar's window
and take her keys.
   "You asked," the old man said, apparently to Daphne,
though he was staring into his drink, "why she was
blackmailing me. A man died, and some money was
absconded with, and she knew of evidence that would
implicate me in it. She might even have believed I was
the guilty party. But she didn't blackmail me for money,
she only wanted me to go away and not contact any of
you again. I'd have gone to prison, almost certainly -- it
was a very good circumstantial case. I even wondered if
she--" He stopped, and groped clumsily for his glass;
after closing his hand on empty air a few inches short of
it, he managed to get hold of it and take a deep sip of
the liquor.
   Marrity could see that Daphne was anxious to ask a
question, so he asked it for her. "Why did she want you
to go away, to disappear?"
   "It's not -- really a subject for a little girl to hear,"
said Marrity's father haltingly. "Uh-- I married your
mother, to some extent, just a little bit, to prove to
myself that I -- could love a woman. In the 1950s there
was no other option, really. It -- wasn't entirely a
success." The old man's face was red, and he gulped
some more of the liquor and exhaled through his teeth
in a near whistle.
   "So was your grandfather Albert Einstein?" asked
Marrity quickly. "My great-grandfather?"
   "You seem to know it already," old Marrity said
cautiously.
   "Why is it such a secret? I never got a hint of it till
yesterday. The Britannica doesn't mention Grammar,
and she never said a word about it."
   "Grammar was born in 1902, before Einstein and her
mother were married. Uh -- too much of a scandal. He
wanted to be a professor, and this was really still
nineteenth-century Switzerland. After a while the lie,
and the little girl's new identity, were too established to
change."
   "Huh. Why did you visit him in '55, right after leaving
my mother? "
   His father stared at him with no expression. "I don't
think you have the story entirely correct," he said. "We
can go over all the old history later."
   "Were you going to blackmail Einstein?" asked
Marrity. "About his daughter?"
   "Can I smoke?" his father asked, reaching behind him
to fumble in the pocket of his jacket.
   "Sure. Daph, would you get an ashtray?" Daphne
nodded and pushed her chair back.
   "You don't know me at all," the old man went on, "so
I can't take any offense at that remark. But no, I didn't
try to blackmail him. My mother may have."
   "To get what?" asked Marrity.
   Daphne laid a glass ashtray on the table at the man's
elbow, but he didn't look at her as he tugged out of his
pocket an opened pack of Marlboros and shook one out.
"The same thing she extorted from me, maybe.
Absence. He never came back to California after '33."
He looked at Daphne at last. "I bet your movie wasn't
wrecked. Did you pull it out?"
   "It sure smoked," she said cautiously. "And it's been
outside all night. Snails probably ate it."
   The old man tore off two matches and lost hold of
both of them, then with evident care tore off another
and managed to strike it alight and hold it to the end of
his cigarette. "I've got," he said as he puffed on the
cigarette and blew out the match, "a friend who
restores all kinds of electromagnetic hardware --
computer disks, cassette tapes. You give it to me and
I'll show it to him."
   "No," said Marrity. "I'm going to -- fix it myself."
   "Right," said Daphne.
   His father stared at Marrity. "You know about that
stuff, do you?"
   "For all you know, that's what I do for a living,"
Marrity said.
   The old man frowned in evident puzzlement. "I
suppose that's true. I've got some errands to run, but
I'd like to take the two of you to lunch." He dropped the
burnt match into the ashtray. "On me!" he added.
   "We've got a lunch date already," Marrity said.
   His father nodded, as if he'd expected the answer.
"Uh-- tomorrow?"
   "I'll be working," said Marrity. Reluctantly he added,
"Maybe dinner tomorrow? "
   "Dinner's good. Seven?"
   "'Kay. Have you got a phone number?"
   "Not, not right at the moment. You're listed -- I'll call
you at six, to make sure we're still on. Let's make it
Italian -- so don't have Italian today, okay?"
   "Okay."
   "Promise?" The old man seemed anxious.
   "Yes, I promise." Marrity stood up. "Well, it's been --
distressing." He didn't hold out his hand.
   "Bound to be, just at first," the old man said, pushing
back his chair. "Probably we'll get more friendly. I truly
hope so. Daphne, a -- pleasure to meet you. I wish you
well."
   "Thanks," said Daphne, staring down at the table.
   "No Italian today, remember," said Marrity's father as
he got laboriously to his feet. "Tomorrow night we'll do
it all -- lasagna, pizza -- antipasto--"
   As Marrity and his father walked out the kitchen door,
Marrity stood between the old man and the wrecked
VCR, and when his father had hobbled away down the
driveway, he bent down to pick it up.
   "Daph," he called into the kitchen, "would you get the
gas can for the lawn mower? I'm going to just plain
incinerate this thing."
   And, he thought, I believe I'll keep those letters of
Grammar's with me, in my briefcase.
"The old guy's walking out," said Golze as he drove by
the Marrity house for the fourth time, in a white Toyota
now; "limping, to be more precise. The guy who was
fixing his car on the other side of the street is gone."
   "Our man didn't answer his phone," said Rascasse's
voice from the radio clipped to the dashboard. "He let
the machine take it. Charlotte, did you get anything?
You never give me your money," he added.
   Golze reached out and clicked the radio's channel
selector to the next frequency in their agreed-on
sequence -- they were using titles from the Beatles'
Abbey Road album as cues.
   "That house is set awful far back from the road,"
Charlotte said. "I was able to see through a child, a bit
-- must have been the little girl. Two men at a kitchen
table, one clearly her father: thirty-five, dark haired, six
foot, thin; the other was this old guy who just got into
the -- oh! darling." After Golze had switched channels
again, she went on, "just got into the green Rambler.
They're clearly related, the two men, strong
resemblance. Old guy was smoking a cigarette, and
drinking whiskey or brandy, brown stuff. That's all."
   Golze made a slow right turn, eyeing his mirrors. The
yards around here all seemed to be scattered with
wrecked trucks or live goats.
   "No help with the floor plan?" asked Rascasse's voice
from the radio.
   "Not much. The kitchen is about ten by twenty,
narrow ends at north and south; doorway at the north
end of the east wall, a step up to a landing, I don't
know what's past it."
   "Okay. You didn't see -- mean Mr. Mustard." Again
Golze reached out and clicked the channel selector, "--
see a videocassette, or some round, flat film cans--"
   "No, but aside from the kitchen, all I saw was the
bottom half of the driveway." So, thought Charlotte, the
dead old woman's magical device was a movie?
   She suppressed a nervous smile -- she'd been
imagining something more like a candelabra made from
a mummified hand, at least.
   "Charlotte," said the voice from the speaker, "I may
want you to approach the girl's father, Maxwell's silver
hammer." Click, "--assuming we get a chance to get
into his house and work up a profile. Preliminary, just
establish a relationship, no questions yet. Come
together." Click. "Very accidental meeting, you know,
the sort of thing that even in retrospect he won't think
could have been planned. Be charming. Right?"
   "Right," she said.
   Since first hearing of him last night, the Vespers had
found out that Francis Thomas Marrity was a widower
with one twelve-year-old daughter, Daphne; his wife,
Lucy, had died in '85 of pancreatic cancer, when the
child was ten. Marrity was a college literature professor,
with a thirty-thousand-dollar mortgage, life insurance
through the Automobile Club, and no criminal record at
all.
   She wasn't going to mention it to Rascasse or Golze,
but while she'd briefly been looking through the little
girl's eyes, she had momentarily got a flicker image of
the little girl herself, though there hadn't been a mirror
nearby -- it was as if the girl had for an instant been
sharing the perspective of one of the men on the other
side of the table. She was a pretty little thing,
apparently, with big eyes and brown bangs.
  Charlotte had decided way back in her missile-silo
days that there was no gain in mentioning details that
might complicate settled arrangements. Do what's best
for little Charlotte, she thought.
  Through Golze's eyes now Charlotte saw a woman
pause from hanging T-shirts and jeans in a fenced-in
yard to glance at the white Toyota, and for a moment
Charlotte shifted her viewpoint to the woman; and she
eyed her own silhouette critically as the car drove past.
Still cheerleader pretty, as always, she thought. And
ideally I won't need it much longer.



"Opus is always looking for his mother," said Daphne,
sitting at the kitchen table. She was belatedly reading
the comics, and clearly had got to the Bloom County
strip. "I suppose she's a penguin too."
   "I suppose," agreed Marrity, standing at the sink.
   Daphne pushed the newspaper away. "It must be
weird," she said, "to suddenly have a real father, sitting
in your kitchen smoking a cigarette."
   "It is," said Marrity. He was washing his hands with
dishwashing detergent. "He's got a good explanation,
hasn't he?" He dried his hands on a paper towel and
smelled them -- the gasoline reek was hardly
detectable. My life stinks of gasoline lately, he thought.
   "Did he mean he's gay?" asked Daphne.
   "Um, yes."
   "He's not gay," she said.
   Marrity walked back to the table and sat down. "How
do you know?" he asked her.
   "Paul and Webster, at your college, they're gay. And
some of Uncle Bennett's friends. They're -- it's not like
they're always joking, or always sad, but -- they're not
like your father."
   "Well, that's a small sample, and this father guy
wasn't anything like relaxed."
   She shrugged, clearly not conceding the point. "We
can't go to Alfredo's?"
   "Sure we can."
   "You promised not to."
   "Actually I'd--" Marrity paused, then laughed
uncertainly. "I think I'd like a chance to break a promise
to him. He deserves a lot of broken promises." He
shrugged. "We can tell him we had Mexican."
   "Okay. And can we fix up my room this morning? Can
I paint the walls?"
   "Sure, if you don't mind that Swiss Coffee color we
used in the hall. In fact, I should paint over the smoke
marks on the hall ceiling." Marrity picked up the glass
his father had used and swirled the diminished ice
cubes in it. "What do you think of him? Short
acquaintance, I admit."
   "He wants something. From us."
   "That video?"
   "I think so! But even with it gone, something." She
pushed her cold bowl of oatmeal away. "What do you
think of him?"
   "I'm embarrassed by him. I feel sorry for him. I think
he's an alcoholic. And just telling me why he abandoned
Moira and me and our mother doesn't change the
math." He shook his head. "I don't think he'll... ever be
more than a stranger to me."
   Tears stood in Daphne's eyes. "This is worse than
before, isn't it?"
   Marrity took a breath to answer, paused, and then let
it out. "I guess it is," he said finally. "No more hundreds
of possibilities, just this one old drunk cranking around
in Grammar's car."

                       Seven
As Marrity held open the tinted glass door of Alfredo's
for her, Daphne asked him, "What are you going to
have besides beer?"
  The air was cooler inside the dark restaurant, and
smelled of fennel and garlic.
  "Two for lunch, please, smoking or nonsmoking
doesn't matter," Marrity said to the hostess behind the
cash-register counter. They had missed the lunch crowd
because of having painted Daphne's room and the hall
ceiling, and he could see several empty booths with
fresh silverware and red-and-white paper place mats on
the tables.
   "It's a hot day," he told Daphne as they followed a
waitress to a booth against the west wall. "I'm thinking
about a beer because that's what I want first. I don't
know why sausage and bell peppers looks so good to
you on a day like this."
   "I haven't absolutely made up my mind."
   "It's all I see in there," he said as he sat down across
from her. "The young lady will have a--" Marrity said to
the waitress, "--don't tell me -- a lemon in it, that's an
iced tea. And could I have a Coors, please."
   "You were picturing two," Daphne said after the
waitress had walked away.
   "And I'm going to have two," Marrity told her, "but
not both at once."
   "You should get the chicken and broccoli. You don't
eat enough vegetables."
   "Onions and potatoes are vegetables."
   "They're not green. You don't eat right. Your guts are
probably all creepy looking."
   "You've got paint in your hair."
   She looked dismayed, and glanced back toward the
cashier's counter as she patted her bangs. "A lot?"
   "No. Here." He reached across the table, pinched a
strand of her brown hair and drew the fleck of paint
down to the ends, where it slid off. "Only somebody
sitting right across from you under this light could have
seen it."
   "Thank God for that."
Charlotte Sinclair strolled from the back of the parking
lot toward the entrance to Alfredo's, trailing the fingers
of her right hand along the brick wall for balance. She
had changed into black jeans and a burgundy short-
sleeved blouse, and her dark brown hair was now pulled
back in a ponytail, though her sunglasses were the
same. She carried a purse in her left hand, letting the
strap swing free. She lingered at one section of the wall
for a full thirty seconds, then moved on, rounding the
building's northwest corner and shuffling carefully right
past the entry door. By the coolness of the air, she
knew she was in shadow now. At the northeast corner
she turned right again and made her way along the
restaurant's eastern wall, again trailing her fingers
along the brick surface.
   She turned around and walked back to the curb, and
when she heard a car squeak to a stop in front of her,
she looked out of the driver's eyes and saw herself
standing in the sunlight beyond the open passenger-
side window; with that view to guide her, she was able
to put her hand on the door handle and lean down to
speak to the driver.
   "Mirror," she said.
   "I always forget." The man bent sideways to look at
himself in the rearview mirror, and Charlotte recognized
the lean, white-mustached face of Roger Canino, the
Vespers security chief at the Amboy compound.
Charlotte opened the door and got into the passenger
seat.
   "How's my favorite girl?"
  "Fine, Roger."
  As the car began moving, she groped in her purse --
no sense in asking old Canino to look in there for her --
and by touch found the radio and switched it on. In a
moment she heard Rascasse's voice say, "Prime here."
He pronounced it preem.
  Leaning down over the purse and pressing the send
button, she said, "Seconde here. The old guy from the
green Rambler, octopus's garden" -- she switched the
frequency up one notch -- "is sitting way in the back on
the east side, by the restrooms; it's the smoking
section, there are ashtrays on the tables. He's got a
couple of empty beer bottles and the remains of
spaghetti in a white sauce in front of him, but he's done
eating and it looks cold to me, polythene Pam." Again
she clicked the dial. "Our man and his daughter are in a
booth against the west wall, toward the front, north, on
the other side of the kitchen. They're just ordering
now."
  "Got it, thanks," came Rascasse's voice.
  "Can I be one of the parties?" she said. "I'm hungry."
Actually she wanted to monitor Marrity and his daughter
from a closer vantage point, without the restaurant wall
between her and them; for a moment there, as she had
been looking at Daphne through Marrity's eyes, she had
found herself seeing Marrity's face, and she
remembered the same skipping-across phenomenon
happening this morning when she had been monitoring
Daphne from the car.
  I've never slipped from one viewpoint to another
accidentally before today, she thought. Am I losing my
grip? Will I start seeing everybody's viewpoint at once?
  "No, Charlotte," came the voice from the speaker,
"because."
  The radio was silent. "That was a cue, sweetie," said
Canino without looking away from the traffic.
  "What," said Charlotte, " 'Because'? Shit." She
switched the frequency dial again.
  "--bumper-beeper on his Ford--" Rascasse was
saying.
  "Again, from the bridge," said Charlotte.
  "Oh," came Rascasse's voice. "Okay, You can't go in
because you're going to cute-meet him later,
remember? If we don't find the artifact in his house or
truck. We're doing research in the house right now, to
prep you for it. And we've got a bumper-beeper on his
Ford pickup -- if we need you, we should be able to
make an opportunity before sundown."
  "Right."
  "Any clues about who the old fellow is? She came in
through the bathroom window."
  "That one I get," Charlotte muttered, switching the
frequency again. "No," she said. "Strong family
resemblance with our man, as you've seen. His father,
maybe."
  "Probably in town for the funeral," said Rascasse.
"Obviously he is supposed to meet them in the
restaurant."
  Charlotte didn't correct him, but it seemed to her that
neither Marrity nor the old man expected the other to
be there.



"Who are these guys?" whispered Bert Malk to himself
as he drove past Alfredo's in the opposite direction. He
had just seen the dark-haired girl in the sunglasses
climb into a car that then sped away with her; she had
probably been a lookout -- probably another one had
stepped up. And she was pretty definitely the same girl
he had seen this morning cruising twice past Marrity's
house.
   Bozzaris would probably already be in the restaurant.
Malk had stopped at a 7-Eleven parking lot pay phone
to call the relay sayan, and had got a message from
Lepidopt: Crew of three entered M's house as soon as
father and daughter drove away. You two prevent any
kidnap. Daylight.
   "Daylight" meant "highest state of alert."
   This was a full-scale operation by somebody.
   Malk was aware of the angular shape of the Beretta
Model 70S against his hip. It held nine .22 long-rifle
rounds -- a small caliber, but it was the Mossad
standard, and the theory was that it didn't need a
silencer since the report of a .22 round, though loud,
didn't exactly sound like a gunshot. It was more a loud
snap than the deafening pop of bigger calibers. And the
long-rifle .22s were plenty deadly if they were put in the
right places.
  He steered left onto E Street to check for alternate
exits from the parking lot and any back doors of the
restaurant.



When Malk had finally parked and walked into the
restaurant, Bozzaris was already inside, waiting on a
vinyl couch by the west-side nonsmoking dining room,
and he stood up and jerked his head in that direction.
  "Yo, Steve," he said. "Table's waiting."
  Any name that began with "S" meant I haven't had
time to do a route, to be sure I'm not being followed.
  Swell, thought Malk as he followed the younger man
to a table only a couple of yards away from a booth
occupied by a preteen girl and a dark-haired man of
about his own age, mid-thirties. That's our quarry, he
thought, not letting himself look directly at Frank and
Daphne Marrity. He noticed that Frank had lasagna, and
Daphne was eating some kind of pasta with sausage
and bell peppers on it.
  Malk and Bozzaris sat at adjoining sides of the square
table, more or less between the Marritys and everyone
else. Malk was mentally rehearsing the old training on
how to throw himself backward in his chair and shoot
under the table.
  When he had sat down, he pulled his Chap Stick out
of his pocket and nervously twisted off the cap; then,
reflecting that it was probably bad manners to use it in
a restaurant, he snapped the cap back on. He looked
more closely at it.
   "Shit," he said absently to Bozzaris, "this isn't Chap
Stick -- it's... 'Nose Soother'! There's a picture of a red
nose on it. I've been putting it on my mouth!"
   "Oh boy," said Bozzaris. "They test those things in the
factory, you know. Guys that test 'em, they can't get
any other jobs."
   "Shut up," said Malk, shoving the tube back into his
pocket.
   "Some big old retard had that up his nose." Bozzaris
looked at his watch and then toward the door, as if they
were expecting a third person, and then he looked
around at the tables and booths. "Bailey did say one
o'clock, didn't he?"
   "That's what the message on my machine said," Malk
agreed, looking around himself. Waiting impatiently for
an imaginary third person was a good excuse to check
out the surrounding people; he memorized the other
diners -- a man and a woman in the booth south of the
Marritys, three older women toward the north end, and
three college-looking boys in T-shirts against the inner
wall, under a shelf full of pasta boxes and Italian cookie
cans. At least one party, he told himself, must be
operatives of the other force, whatever it is, and they'll
be speculatively noting Bozzaris and me. At least we're
talking spontaneously, what with the Nose Soother and
all.
   "What are you going to have?" Malk asked.
   "I don't know. A beer, a sandwich."
   Because he was listening for it, Malk could hear
Bozzaris suppressing his Israeli accent, pronouncing the
r at the front of his mouth and flattening the emphases;
somehow the cadence of American English wasn't as
sociable as the Israeli cadence.
  "Me too, I guess," said Malk.
  "I'm gonna hit the head first," said Bozzaris, pushing
his chair back. "A Budweiser, if the lady comes by."
  Malk nodded, and when Bozzaris strode away he took
a ball point pen from his pocket and began doodling on
the paper place mat so that he could keep his eyes in
an unfocused stare that took in the periphery --
absently he drew a dog wearing a bowler hat and a
snail with a mustache and pince-nez glasses.
  "No," Marrity was saying six feet away, "I imagine the
funeral will be down here. I guess Bennett and Moira
will arrange to have the body flown down from Shasta. I
should have called them this morning."
  Malk noted that Marrity was apparently not aware of
any need for secrecy. As he'd told Bozzaris last night,
Marrity didn't seem to know anything about his
grandmother's history.
  From the corner of his eye, he saw the girl nod.
  Bozzaris came back and sat down. "You should go to
the head too," he said, very quietly. "Check out an old
party sitting in the last booth by the east wall."
  Malk nodded, guessing that he meant the old man
who had visited the Marritys five hours ago. What the
hell did that mean? "Bailey can do it or not," he said in
a normal tone, "doesn't matter to us." He pushed back
his chair.
  "Daph?" said Marrity urgently, and Malk looked over
at them.
  The girl was holding her throat with one hand, and
her face was blank.
  "Daph, can you talk?"
  She shook her head, her eyes showing alarm now;
and Marrity slid out of the booth and stood up, pulling
her to her feet. He grabbed her by the shoulders and
turned her around, then he crouched and linked his fists
over her abdomen from behind.
  "Relax, Daph," he said. "Heimlich."
  He jerked his fists back and up, ramming the inner
one into her stomach just below the ribs; her hands
gripped her thighs, but apparently no food was
dislodged.
  "Hang on," Marrity said hoarsely, "one more time,
harder." Again he drove his fist upward into her
abdomen, but again there was no result.
  Malk had tensed, and his hands were tingling, but he
was sure he couldn't do any better than the girl's father
was.
  "Somebody call 911," Marrity shouted, and then
yanked his fist powerfully into Daphne one more time.
His shirt was already dark with sweat.
  A gray-haired man in a green Members Only jacket
had shuffled in from the other dining room, and now
stood by Malk's table, looking on in evident horror; and
he was indeed the man who had driven the green
Rambler and spoken to Marrity this morning.
  Malk looked back at the girl and her father, and
gripped the edge of his table. He realized that he was
praying.
  The couple in the booth behind Marrity had got to
their feet, but were only staring at the man holding the
girl, and the three old women had all put down their
forks and were blinking in evident confusion. Malk's
training overrode his horrified fascination, and it
occurred to him that this conspicuous emergency would
probably wreck any kidnap plans.
  Daphne opened her mouth and Malk could see her
abdomen tighten as she tried uselessly to expel the
blockage.
  One of the college boys had a cellular phone out, and
the cashier was anxiously looking their way and
speaking into a telephone at the counter.
  "And another, Daph," said Marrity in a voice that was
nearly a sob. This time her knees folded after the
forceful upward thrust, and Marrity sat down hard on
the linoleum, holding her in his lap now.
  He looked up desperately, and clearly noticed the old
man in the green jacket. Marrity opened his mouth as if
to say something to him, then just closed his eyes and
jerked his fists up again. Malk heard the girl's teeth
snap shut as the thrust rocked her head back.
  Four minutes until brain damage, Malk thought. How
quickly can the paramedics get here?
  He noted that everyone in the restaurant seemed to
have crowded in the doorway to watch. A distraction
not to be wasted, he thought. Choose your moment.
Marrity could only think of how humiliated Daphne must
be by this public spectacle. He would not permit himself
to imagine that she might die here.
  He loosened his cramped hands and reached forward
to roll her head back; she was unconscious now, her
face white, her lips and half-closed eyelids shadowed
with a bluish tint. Of course she was not breathing.
  The Heimlich maneuver was not working, would not
work; it dawned on him finally that very soon he would
be uselessly pummeling a limp corpse. "Dammit,
Daphne," he whispered, "why couldn't you chew?"
  He looked up at his father. The old man was nodding
in evident sympathy.
  Marrity lifted Daphne's limp body off his lap and laid
her faceup on the black-and-red linoleum.
  "A sharp knife," he said, holding out his right hand.
"Quick!"
  The older of the two men who had been at the
nearest table flicked open a flat stainless-steel
pocketknife and slapped the grip into Marrity's hand.
  Marrity's father stepped forward. "No, Frank!" he
shouted. "You'll kill her! Somebody stop him!"
  The man who had given Marrity the knife stood up
and threw an arm across the old man's chest, and one
of the college boys from the farther booth gripped his
upper arm.
  "It's all he can do," the boy said.
  "Hold him," said the man who had provided the knife,
and then he pushed his way through the crowd in the
doorway.
  One of the old women in the north-wall booth shouted
something in German, and was shushed by her
companions; and peripherally Marrity was aware that
his father was struggling very hard with the college
boys, who were holding him back; but Marrity's
attention was fixed on Daphne.
  He pushed her chin up and back, then felt her throat.
The larynx muscles were convulsing weakly under his
hand, and he felt for the rings of cartilage in her throat.
  The younger man from the nearest table had
crouched beside him and was holding something in
Marrity's field of vision -- it was the clear barrel of a Bic
pen, with the ink tube pulled out. Marrity nodded, sweat
dripping from his face onto Daphne's blouse.
  His heart was pounding so hard that he was twitching
with it.
  Gripping the knife by the blade like a pencil so that
only three-quarters of an inch of steel protruded below
his thumb, Marrity pushed the point of it into Daphne's
throat below the thyroid cartilage, denting the skin and
then, as he despairingly pushed harder, puncturing it.
  A bloody spray followed the knife blade when he
pulled it out, and he snatched the Bic pen barrel from
the outstretched hand and pushed it into the makeshift
incision.
  Air whistled out through the clear plastic tube that
now stood up out of Daphne's throat like a dart, and
Marrity held the tube in place with his trembling thumb
and forefinger.
    "Goddammit, stop him!" roared his father.
    "Shut up, man," said somebody else. "It's working."
    Now air was being sucked into the tube, and a
moment later Daphne's legs shifted on the floor and her
hands flexed.
    The man crouched beside Marrity gave one bark of
tense laughter. "You've saved her," he said.
    Daphne's eyes fluttered open.
    "Don't move, Daph," Marrity said, feeling the smile
tugging at his face. "You're fine, just lie still." He sat
down more comfortably next to her on the floor.
    She managed a slight nod. Her hands floated up
toward her throat, but Marrity pushed them back with
his free hand. "Don't move, kid, just lie still. Trust me."
    She nodded again, and even managed a flickering,
uncertain smile, and relaxed. As Marrity watched, the
healthy pink color was returning to her face like sunlight
filling in shadow.
    Marrity glanced at the man beside him; he looked to
be in his late twenties, with a dark brush cut, and he
needed a shave; he wore a gray linen sport coat with
no tie.
    "Th-thank you," Marrity said. His hands were
trembling and his ears were ringing. He leaned back
carefully against a table leg.
    "My pleasure," the young man said. "Keep the pen."
  Marrity nodded, then tried with one hand to wipe the
blade of the knife off on his shirt. The man gently took
the knife from Marrity's shaking hands.
  "Give that back to your friend," Marrity said.
  "Right."
  Marrity looked up at his father, who was still gaping
down at Daphne in dismay. "She's breathing," Marrity
told him. He nodded toward the tube he was still
holding in Daphne's throat. "That's a -- a tracheotomy."
  "I know," the old man said. "I've done one. The
results were bad." He blinked a couple of times. "I told
you not to have Italian, didn't I?"
  "Yes." I think he's more upset by this than Daphne is,
Marrity thought. "We should have listened to you."
  Three men in white paramedics' uniforms shouldered
through the front door and into the dining room now,
one of them rolling a folded gurney and the other two
carrying aluminum cases and a green oxygen cylinder;
they visibly relaxed when they took in the scene, but
one of them crouched by Daphne, murmuring
reassurances as he shined a penlight into one of her
eyes and then the other, while another man was
unstringing an IV bag and line from one of the cases.
The third man was talking into a radio.
  The man who was crouched on the floor gently
opened Daphne's mouth and peered down her throat
with his light, then shook his head. "They better get it
out in ER." He looked over at Marrity. "You okay?"
  "Sure," Marrity said. He took a deep breath and let it
out. "Tired."
  "How long was she unconscious?"
  "Not more than a minute," Marrity said.
  "How old is she?"
  "Twelve."
  "Is she on any medications, or allergic to any?"
  "No, and no."
  "Okay, we'll get an IV going, mainly to get some
glucose into her, and we'll run her to St. Bernardine's to
get the blockage out and suture her throat. Probably
they'll keep her overnight, observation and antibiotics.
But this looks good. Who did the tracheotomy?"
  "I did," said Marrity.
  "You do good work."
  "That's what they told me too," muttered Marrity's
father.
  "I think dinner's off, tomorrow," Marrity told him.



Standing on the shaded sidewalk outside the
restaurant, old Derek Marrity watched the paramedics
slide the folding stainless-steel gurney with Daphne on
it into the back of their white-and-red van, and then
Frank Marrity climbed in the back too. A moment later
the doors had been slammed shut and the ambulance
van had steered out into the sunlight and sped away
down Base Line Street to the east, its lights flashing.
   The old man was still dizzy, and his ears were still
ringing. He had been staring at Frank Marrity's haggard
face so intently that now he could still see the
afterimage of the straight jaw, the squinting eyes, the
compressed mouth.
  He looks just like you, Daphne had said.
  "What was that you gave him, when he cut her
throat?" said an overweight old woman standing behind
him; he turned, but saw that she was speaking to the
younger man who had been sitting at the table nearest
Marrity's booth. He had been with another man, who
had disappeared while Daphne was choking.
  "A Bic pen," the man said, "with the ink cartridge
taken out of it."
  "Not very sterile," said Derek Marrity.
  "Least of the worries, at that point," the man said
shortly. "He's her father?"
  "Yes." Yes, Derek Marrity thought, he's her father.
I'm a stranger in this picture, soon to disappear. An
ineffective, useless stranger, as it turns out.
  The young man didn't say anything, just kept looking
at Derek Marrity; but Marrity wouldn't fall for that old
cop trick of prompting a fuller answer by appearing to
expect it. This guy's tipped his hand right here, the old
man thought with nervous defiance; he and the guy he
was with are from one of the secret outfits, the Mossad,
the NSA, whoever, whoever. But what could I tell any of
them now? I have no idea at all.
  They'll probably follow me. They've probably already
bugged the Rambler, with some clunky "state-of-the-
art" devices.
   His smile was brief and twitchy as he imagined big
metal boxes with lights on them, and antennae like
sections of polished rebar. Man from U.N.C.L.E stuff.
   He found that he was limping rapidly east down the
sunny Base Line Street sidewalk, past the grand yellow
stucco arch of a car-repair garage and then a couple of
faded bungalow-style houses looking shackled behind
chain-link fencing and black iron window bars, and he
couldn't remember how he had left the young spy and
the fat old woman. The Rambler was parked on a side
street up ahead; he had stashed a fifth of vodka under
the seat, and he would need a bit of its vitamin
supplement before he considered what to do now, today
having gone so badly wrong. Frank and Daphne must
think I'm crazy now, he thought.
   Soon to disappear, he thought again.
   When he had stepped barefoot out of the
Kaleidoscope Shed yesterday, a good hour before Frank
and Daphne had arrived, he had seen naked infants
lying among the tall weeds, their waving pink limbs
stark against the black dirt and the green stalks; the
dozen? -- half dozen? -- tiny wailing forms had flickered
out of existence when he had blinked at them in
astonishment.
   Delirium tremens, he thought; still mild, really. But in
fact we're all just sparks arcing across the vacuum left
by God when He withdrew, none of us any more
substantial than those alcohol-conjured infants. What's
one wasted life?
   He's her father. Yes. Not me, damn my soul, not me.
I had a daughter once, but she died. She will not come
back to life. She will not, and I mustn't imagine
anymore that she could.
  I have... another daughter. She'll grow up, God help
her, and God help me.
  Through his mind flickered the quickly dismissed
image of a dark-haired little girl frowning in
concentration over a book; and then, just as quickly
dismissed, another image: of a drunken woman
resolutely climbing into the driver's seat of a Ford LTD
and slamming the door.
  He turned right at the next street, his bad leg aching
now, and he could see the green Rambler parked in the
shade of a pepper tree at the curb ahead of him -- but
he saw it blurrily, through tears.
  By the rivers of Babylon, he thought, I sat down, yea,
weeping again the King my father's wrack.
  But he knew he was weeping for Daphne.



Bozzaris watched the old man hobble away, reflecting
that he hadn't seemed quite sane. But Lepidopt had
sayanim to follow him; any of the people on the street
now might be one of them.
  He turned to the old woman. "You said something in
German, inside. Are you German?"
  The question seemed to nettle her. "My mother was
German," she said. "That was part of a prayer she used
to say."
  Bozzaris was about to ask her what it meant, but her
two companions came bustling and chattering out of the
restaurant then, and a moment later a boxy white Dial-
A-Ride bus pulled up at the curb, and when the doors
had hissed open the three of them clambered aboard.
  Bozzaris waved cheerfully at the bus's opaque tinted
glass, then turned to go back into the restaurant; but
Malk stepped out onto the pavement and told him,
"Lunch hour's over. To hell with Bailey."
  "Right," said Bozzaris, falling into step beside the
older man as he walked around the west corner to the
parking lot. They both squinted in the direct sunlight.
  Quietly, Malk told him, "Grab the bag by the
Dumpster outside the back door; you'll probably have
to jump a fence, but do it. I took the beer bottles from
the old guy's table, replaced them with a couple of
bottles from another table. Fingerprints."
  "Got you."



Paul Golze was driving the Dial-A-Ride bus, and
Charlotte Sinclair was sitting on the corrugated rubber
floor in the back.
   "That guy met up with the one he was with before,"
she said as the van speeded up, "and they're walking
out to the parking lot, talking -- and I'm out of range."
   "Okay," Golze said. "We'll play the tapes soon," he
went on, scowling into the rearview mirror, "but Tina,
why did you speak German?"
   Tina Iyana-Kurtycz closed her eyes and shook her
head. "How should I know? I don't even know German."
  "Schneid mal die Kehle auf," repeated the gaunt
woman in the seat next to her, staring out the window.
  "What you said means 'Cut open her throat,'" Golze
said. "It was involuntary, yes?"
  "Yes. I wouldn't voluntarily interfere in a, an area of
measurement."
  Golze seemed almost pleased. He looked down and
clenched one fist in front of his chest, where only
Charlotte could see, if she happened to be paying
attention to him.

                        Eight
While Daphne was in surgery, Marrity blundered outside
for a much needed cigarette. The glow of self-
satisfaction at having saved her life was beginning to
fade into shadows of worry. What if she does this
again? he asked himself as he plodded across the glossy
brown-tile floor of the hospital lobby to the electric-eye
doors.
  Should I start making sure I've always got a knife and
a Bic pen on me? Give the sitter instructions on how to
do a tracheotomy?
  He was only aware of how chilly the hospital air was
when the doors swung open and he stepped out into
the the dry, sage-scented breeze. I wonder if I can go
back to work tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow is
Modern Novel, and I should prepare a lecture tonight.
My briefcase is in the truck at the Alfredo's parking lot
-- I'll take a cab there, drive the truck back, and then
put the lecture together in the lobby here.
  A slim, dark-haired woman in sunglasses was
standing by the planter to the left of the door, and as
he fumbled a pack of Dunhill cigarettes out of his coat
pocket, she dropped a smoking cigarette butt onto the
pavement and stepped on it and then took a pack of
Dunhills out of her black leather purse.
  "If they're going to kill us, we may as well smoke the
best, right?" he said, holding up his pack.
  She frowned at him, then tucked her own pack back
into her purse and hurried past him into the lobby.
  "Good, Frank, good," he muttered to himself, feeling
his face heat up. "Always break the ice with a remark
about dying. Especially to somebody standing in front of
a hospital." But maybe she didn't speak English. He
noticed half a dozen identical flattened cigarette butts
on the pavement where she'd been standing.
  He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag on it, then
exhaled and leaned back against the pebbled-stone
planter. Passing cars glinted in the afternoon sun on
Twenty-first Street just beyond the iron fence at the
edge of the hospital lawn, and he envied the drivers
whatever concerns were theirs.
  She's just got to be meticulous about chewing
everything very thoroughly, he thought. Every swallow
should be a careful, conscious action. Probably after this
she won't even need reminding. I'm glad we painted
her bedroom today. I wonder what that damned movie
was, and why my father seemed to be interested in it.
  And why was he at Alfredo's today? He must have
followed us. That's unpleasant. I think we'd be better
off having no further contact with him; to hell with why
he visited Einstein in '55. Maybe the letters will give me
a clue, before I sell them.
  "I'm sorry," said a woman's voice behind him; he
turned and saw that it was the woman in the
sunglasses.



"I was distracted," said Charlotte Sinclair. "You were
talking about the cigarettes. You're right, we may as
well kill ourselves with the best."
   So far so good, she thought, and she checked herself
out through Francis Marrity's eyes: black jeans, loose
burgundy short-sleeved blouse, and dark brown hair
pulled back in a ponytail; she noted a strand of stray
hair dangling above one eyebrow and smoothed it back.
   They were alone on this breezy strip of shaded
sidewalk, and she wished she could see Marrity's face.
   "That was my last, in fact," she added, assessing her
rueful smile.
   "Would you like one of mine?" he said, and he held
his pack out in front of himself.
   "Thanks," she said, watching her own fingers to guide
them as she reached out and picked a cigarette from
the pack. "I owe you."
   Denis Rascasse's Vespers research gang had reported
that Marrity smoked Dunhills, so they had found a
liquor store that carried the British cigarettes; on the
drive here one of the Vespers men had broken several
of the cigarettes and lit them and instantly ground them
out, so that Charlotte could scatter the butts around
where she'd stand.
   Marrity's field of vision shifted from her to the lawn,
so she said, "Are you visiting somebody? "
   Again she saw herself in his vision. "Yes, my
daughter's having her throat stitched up. Uh --
tracheotomy." He paused, and then his left hand was
holding out his wallet, tilted toward her. "Daphne," he
said. "She's twelve."
   Apparently he was showing Charlotte a photograph of
his daughter. She took off her sunglasses and lowered
her eyes until she seemed to be staring at the wallet.
"Very pretty girl," Charlotte said.
   "Yes." Marrity glanced at the picture himself before
putting the wallet away.
   She looks like I used to, Charlotte thought, and then
thrust the thought away.
   After a pause in which he might have smiled, Marrity
went on, "You too? I mean, not a daughter with a
tracheotomy--"
   "A neighbor of mine. They won't let me see her yet,
but -- 'We also serve who only stand and wait.'"
   "'When I consider how my light is spent,'" Marrity
said, quoting the beginning of the poem, " 'ere half my
days in this dark world and wide--"
   This one she hadn't been prompted with on the drive
over here; it was Milton's sonnet "On His Blindness,"
and years ago she had got someone to read it onto a
tape and had memorized it. "'And that one Talent which
is death to hide, lodged with me useless,'" she said,
keeping the usual bitterness out of her voice. "You don't
meet a lot of Milton fans in San Bernardino."
  "My excuse is that I teach literature at Redlands."
  "Ah. I was a career English major. I quote poetry the
way Christians quote the Bible." Time for one of the
Housman bits she'd been primed with: "'And starry
darkness paces the land from sea to sea, and blots the
foolish faces of my poor friends and me.'" That was
adequately placed, she thought, and Rascasse said it
was underlined in Marrity's copy.
  "Housman!" she heard him exclaim. "My favorite! My
name's Frank Marrity. And you are...?"
  "Libra Nosamalo Morrison." She held out her right
hand. "My parents were Catholic, with an odd sense of
humor."
  "Libera nos a malo, deliver us from evil." She watched
him reach out and take her hand. "Well, it's
unforgettable."
  She smiled, admiring her white teeth.
  "I've got to say I'll be ready for a drink," she said,
"not too long after the sun goes down." She leaned
back against the planter and closed her eyelids to check
the eyeshadow through Marrity's gaze. It looked fine,
and she raised her eyelids and swiveled the plastic eyes
until Marrity saw the carbon pupils seeming to look
straight at him. "A scotch on the rocks -- Laphroaig,
ideally."
  He let go of her hand, and his voice was cautious
when he said, "Yes, that's good scotch. I'd love to join
you, but I can't."
  Charlotte wished someone would walk by so that she
could see Marrity's face -- were his eyebrows up in
surprise? lowered in a suspicious frown? -- for she was
suddenly sure that she had pushed it too far. You were
doing fine without the Laphroaig, she told herself
furiously; just because Rascasse's crew found several
bottles of it in Marrity's cupboard didn't mean you had
to go and mention it right away. What must Rascasse
be thinking, listening to the transmission of this
conversation?
  She found that she was reflexively thinking of the
song "Bye Bye Blackbird" --no one here can love or
understand me--and she recalled that it had been her
old eavesdropper-warning signal in the missile -- silo
days of her childhood. But of course Marrity doesn't
even know that the song was a code, she thought; and
why should I want to warn Marrity, anyway?
  She put her sunglasses back on.
  "Another time?" she asked, watching her face to be
sure she kept the expression cheerful. "I'd trust my
phone number to anybody who knows Milton and
Housman."
  "Yes, thanks. I just can't really think about anything
but my daughter right now."
  "Of course." By touch she found a card in her purse,
and held it out to him. She read it through his eyes:
Libra Nosamalo Morrison, Veterinary Medicine, (909)
JKL-HYDE.
  "A Stevenson fan too," she heard him say.
  The hastily printed card seemed idiotically clumsy
now. "Well," she stammered, "like Heckyll and Jeckyll --
those crows, in the cartoons -- and hide--"
  "And I bet you specialize in cats." The card
disappeared from his view, and she hoped he had put it
in his pocket and not just dropped it. "I'd better go back
and see if she's out of surgery yet," he said. "It's been
nice meeting you, uh, Libra!"
  "You too, Frank! Give me a call!"
  His view was of the opening doors now, and the
reception desk and gift-shop counter in the lobby; she
turned away, so that when he looked back at her he
wouldn't hesitate to stare; but he looked only straight
ahead, at the corridor leading to the elevators.
  When he had rounded the corner and pushed one of
the elevator buttons, she raised her right hand, wide
open, and heard a car accelerating toward the curb
where she stood.
  "I'm a viewer, not a spy," she muttered into the
microphone at her throat.
  The driver of the car that had now stopped in front of
her craned his neck to peer into the rearview mirror,
and she saw it was Rascasse himself.
  She groped till she felt the door, then found the
handle and opened it.
  "You knew his birth date too," said Rascasse. "Why
did you not tell him you had the same birthday? You
could have shouted it after him, as he was leaving." His
French accent was more pronounced when he was
angry, and higher in pitch. Charlotte could imagine it
was a woman speaking.
   "So what do we do now," she asked dully as she
pulled the door closed.
   "If this... debacle just now was enough to let him
know somebody's trying to approach him covertly,
probably we will have to kill him, and then get
somebody less clumsy to approach Moira and Bennett
Bradley, and the daughter."
   She looks like I used to, thought Charlotte again.
   She settled back in the seat and fastened the
shoulder strap. It was good meeting you, Frank, she
thought as Rascasse steered the car out of the hospital
driveway and clicked the turn-signal lever for a right
turn onto Waterman. You seem like a good man, a
widower doing his best with a young daughter -- you
even saved her life today! -- and you're the first guy
I've met who's known what the Milton line was from.
But I'm afraid I've killed you by mentioning your
favorite scotch.
   And I won't try to stop it. I'm not a good person, you
see. I used to be, and soon -- if Rascasse succeeds in
this and keeps his promises -- I'll get another chance to
be one, starting over again.
   I'll get a better life then; or she will, anyway -- the
girl I used to be, my "little daughter," who looks so
much like your Daphne. I have done nothing but in care
of thee. And she won't know about any of this terrible
stuff I do to get it for her. And she won't be blind. She
won't be blind.
Oren Lepidopt stood on the carpet in Frank Marrity's
now dark living room, looking around at the shapes that
were the table and the television and the rows of
shelved books whose titles he couldn't read now. He
had studied them when there had still been light,
though -- lots of Stevenson and the Brontes and
Trollope in this room, while poetry and drama and
encyclopedias lined the shelves that hung above head
height up the hall, and history and philosophy and
modern novels filled the shelves in the uphill living
room. Poetry, history, and philosophy were in
chronological order, novels alphabetical.
   The girl's room had been painted today -- the bed
had been moved to the center of the linoleum floor, and
a little desk and a couple of bookcases had been shoved
up against it, with a rolled-up rug and a couple of
wicker baskets stacked right on the bed, everything
covered by a brown paper drop cloth. When he had
peered under it, Lepidopt had seen The Wind in the
Willows and Watership Down among the books in one of
the bookcases; the baskets contained recent rock tapes
and albums, with a lot of Queen. A black shellac jewelry
box with blue-velvet-covered dividers and slits for rings
held two gold bracelets, some earrings, and a wedding
ring -- presumably her mother's.
   Lepidopt thought of his son's disorderly room, in their
apartment on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. Louis was
only a year younger than Daphne, and he liked Queen
too. Lepidopt's wife, Deborah, had been uneasy about
the fact that the group's lead singer appeared to be a
homosexual, but young Louis already liked girls.
Lepidopt wondered if the two children would be friends,
if they could impossibly meet; surely they would be;
surely Daphne would like the curly-haired Jewish boy
with his father's intense brown eyes.



Standing in the dark living room now, Lepidopt
wondered if the house was at all psychically flexed by
his presence, his inappropriateness. Certainly he was
aware of it, standing here with latex gloves on his
hands, a Polaroid camera around his neck and a Beretta
automatic tucked into the back of his pants.
   Twice before in his career he had broken into people's
houses when they were absent, and again he felt the
sense that the house was poised, like a tennis player
who has just sent the ball flying back over the net and
is catching his balance to see how it will return;
Lepidopt imagined he could hear echoes of the last
conversations that had taken place here, and could
nearly hear the tones of the next to come.
   Being alone in a stranger's house didn't so much
convey an acquaintance with the absent owner as give
a wide-angle snapshot. Marrity smoked Balkan Sobranie
number 759 pipe tobacco, which wasn't the usual
sweet-smelling stuff, but Lepidopt didn't know if he was
one of those pipe smokers who always had the thing in
his mouth and talked around the stem, or one of the
ones who was always fiddling with it in his hands,
tamping it and relighting it and shoving a pipe cleaner
down it; they were different sorts of men. Marrity
apparently drank single-malt scotch and Southern
Comfort, but Lepidopt couldn't guess, within a very
wide range, what sort of drinker he was.
  Who are you, Frank Marrity? he thought. Who are
you, Daphne Marrity?
  The snapshot impression was of a happy father and
daughter, comfortable with each other. Books
everywhere, a disorder of clothes on the washing
machine, cats scuffling in the hall. Marrity kept the
house at about 20 degrees Celsius or 70 degrees
Fahrenheit; twice Lepidopt had heard the rooftop air
conditioner whisper into activity. He probed his mind for
the familiar envy of normal lives, and found that it was
there as usual.
  He was glad the cat or cats were shy of him, for a
year ago he had petted one, and a moment later had
experienced the certainty that he would never again
touch a cat.
  Lepidopt had taken Polaroid photographs of the
Marrity waste-baskets and then picked through their
contents -- without much optimism, since the previous
intruders had certainly done it too-- afterward
consulting the photographs to replace the trash exactly
as it had been. He had found Marrity's box of paid bills
and photographed the telephone bills, again sure that
he was the second person in six hours to do it.
  If the movie and the machine had been findable, the
other crowd had found them. But maybe they had not
been findable. Assume the ball is still in play, thought
Lepidopt.
  Lepidopt had been careful to move quietly throughout
the house, assuming that the preceding crew, whoever
they were, had left microphones; and he had left some
too.
  He had stayed away from the telephones -- one in
Marrity's bedroom, one in the downhill living room and
one in Marrity's uphill office -- because of the likelihood
that the other crowd would already have attached
infinity transmitters or keep-alive circuits to the wiring,
effectively making microphones out of the telephone
receivers even when they were resting in the cradles,
apparently hung up.
  Lepidopt had left three electret microphones disguised
as empty Bic cigarette lighters -- one on a high kitchen
shelf, one in a gap between two books in the living
room, and one inside a dusty spiderweb on the office
windowsill. They were tuned from 100 to 120
megahertz, which spanned the high end of the
commercial FM band and the low end of the aircraft
voice-communication band, but the range of their
transmission was no more than five hundred yards, and
Lepidopt had rented a house at the west end of the
block and set up receivers and tape recorders. The
alkali AA batteries in the transmitters should be good
for a week or two, at least.
  He had also left, in the back of a kitchen drawer full
of dusty chopsticks and parts to an old coffee
percolator, two little teraphim statues made of fired tan
clay, each with the names of the four rivers of Paradise
carefully inscribed into their bases; and on top of the
refrigerator he had tucked a postage-stamp-size scrap
of leather with a Star of David inked on one side, and
on the other a Hebrew inscription that said "and it
dwindled" -- the phrase was from Numbers 11:2, when
a fire had broken out among the tents of the Israelites,
and had then subsided when Moses prayed.
   And now, before leaving, he was trying to guess what
the other gang might have missed.
   Here in the dark living room there was a faint reek of
burnt plastic under the smells of tobacco and book
paper and cat box; up the hall the air was just heavy
with the cake -frosting smell of fresh paint.
   Yesterday's newspapers are still on the kitchen table,
he thought. Somebody had oatmeal and Southern
Comfort for breakfast. There must be at least one cat,
but I don't see him right now, thank God. There are two
TV sets, one in the north living room and one in here,
and neither one seems to have burned. But,
everything's on fire, Sam Glatzer had said, moments
before he died, up the hall and the TV set...
   The girl's bedroom was up the hall, and Marrity had
painted it today.
   Lepidopt stepped toward the TV set, though it meant
approaching the unshaded window, and he took the
penlight from his pocket. He clicked it on, and then
crouched to play its narrow beam over the top surface
of the television set. It showed no particle of dust,
though earlier he had noted that the table and all the
bookshelves were faintly frosted with it. He clicked the
light off again and tucked it back into his pocket.
   He pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and
wrapped it around his latex-gloved forefinger and drew
it across the top of the television set -- he would look at
it later in a bright light, but he sniffed it now, and
smelled burnt plastic.
   He backed away from the window. If my amulets had
been in place yesterday, he thought, the little teraphim
statues and the fire-extinguishing Star of David, I bet
there would be a working VCR sitting on top of this
television set now. And they might very well provide
protection in the future.
   But he knew the thought was sophistry. It was wrong
to use magic, wrong to try to compel God's will.
   Next month would be Selichot, beginning on the first
Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah, and Lepidopt --
if he were still alive-- would pray for God's forgiveness
through the following two weeks and would finally be
restored to holiness on October third, Yom Kippur. As,
often in the past, the duties of his job would be
prominent among the things he would ask forgiveness
for.
   It was time to leave. Marrity might come home at any
time. Admoni's brief radio message had said that a
senior katsa from Prague was being dispatched and
would arrive at LAX tomorrow afternoon to take over
the operation; Lepidopt was to leave the Marritys and
the Bradleys alone until then, and never mind the rival
team, whoever they might be.
   But Lepidopt paused, and for the second time he laid
three pennies at the edges of the paperback book that
lay open and facedown on the living room table, and
then he carefully lifted the book. When he had picked it
up an hour and a half ago there had still been enough
light in the living room to read by, but now he took it to
the lighted hall.
   The paperback was Shakespeare's The Tempest, and
when he'd first looked at it he had noted that it was a
mess of inked underlining and margin notations, as
would be expected from a literature professor. Lepidopt
had photographed the two facing pages that the book
was opened to, but he hadn't bothered to photograph
every marked-up page. He doubted that the other
crowd had either.
   Now, up the landing and standing under the hall light,
he flipped through the pages. It had been opened to the
last page of the play, and one sentence from the
Caliban character had been deeply underlined: What a
thrice-double ass / Was I to take this drunkard for a
god / And worship this dull fool! Now Lepidopt turned
back through the text, looking at every page.
   Marrity's inked notes were all clearly written:
obviously not just hasty thoughts of a moment, but
points that he would want to be reminded of every time
he taught the play in a class.
   And so Lepidopt paused when he came to a couple of
nearly illegible words scribbled vertically in the margin
of page 110, next to a doubly underlined speech in
which the Prospero character said, I'll break my staff /
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than
did ever plummet sound / I'll drown my book.
   The inked phrase in the margin was scrawled in such
evident haste that the pen had not at any point lifted
from the paper, but when Lepidopt squinted at it he saw
that it was probably, and then certainly, Peccavit to LM.
   Peccavit. Lepidopt's heart had begun thumping in his
chest.
   Break my staff, drown my book -- Peccavit -- Marrity
must know who his great-grandfather was, and must
know something of the man's work too. Not the public
work, relativity and the photoelectric effect and the
1939 letter to Roosevelt about the atomic bomb, but
the secret work, the weapon Einstein had not told
Roosevelt about.
   The LM must be Lisa Marrity, or Lieserl Marity. Frank
Marrity must know something about it all.
   Quickly Lepidopt flipped through the rest of the
pages, but found only one more hasty scrawl of Peccavit
to LM, on page 104, next to another twice-underlined
sentence: We are such stuff / As dreams are made on,
and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.
   Lepidopt was sweating as he hurried back to the
living room to put the book back exactly the way it had
been and retrieve his pennies. He didn't have enough
film or time to photograph every page of the book now,
and he prayed that Marrity wouldn't move it too far
before somebody could come back and photograph the
entire text.
   And -- in spite of Admoni's order -- Lepidopt clearly
had to keep the rival group away from Marrity.
   He was padding back up the hall toward the laundry-
room door, which fortunately faced trees and an empty
yard next door, when the telephone rang in Marrity's
bedroom, loud in the silent house. He paused; the
phone rang three times and then stopped, not enough
rings to trigger the answering machine.
   And a moment later Lepidopt had to force his legs to
go on supporting him, and not let him collapse against
the wall; for in the instant that the phone had stopped
ringing, he had been forcibly convinced that he would
never again hear a telephone bell ring.
   And surely I will never see Deborah again, he
thought; and surely I will never see Louis again.
   He clenched his narrow, maimed right hand and
thumped the misshapen fist once, very softly, against
the wall.



Bennett Bradley pulled open his desk drawer and lifted
out the bottle of Christian Brothers brandy, and he was
glaring at the white plastic telephone-answering
machine.
   His office was in what had been the garage, but he
had put in a hardwood floor and pale paneling, and
fluorescent tubes glowed behind frosted sheets of
plastic set into the ceiling. Gray metal filing cabinets full
of contracts and photographs stood against the west
wall, and a long blond-wood table ran down the middle
of the room. Right now there were dozens of four-by-
six-inch color photographs laid out on the table, taped
together into long strips, but he would have to be
putting them away now, with no recompense.
   Now they were just on-spec samples, to be folded
into a file and labeled "Hollywood Hills, Panoramic View
w. Hollywood Sign & Easy Access," and tucked away
with all the others: "Laguna Cliff & Sea, w. Easy
Parking," and "Eaglerock Typical Middle-class 1960s
House," and "15,000 sf French Chateau in Brentwood,
Shooting-Friendly." And a thousand others, and
probably a quarter of them were obsolete by now: torn
down or renovated, or owned by uncooperative people,
or with inappropriate freeways visible behind them.
   Bennett unscrewed the bottle's cap and took a drink
right from the neck of it, grimacing at the sting of the
lukewarm brandy; and then he set it on the desk and
stood up to put away the photographs.
   The Subaru agent had originally said they wanted the
thirty-second commercial to have an "old Hollywood"
feel.
   Bennett had driven up to his proposed site half a
dozen times last week, starting north on Beachwood
from Franklin, just a block up from modern Hollywood
Boulevard but fifty years backward in architecture and
atmosphere, with neoclassical apartment buildings
shaded by shaggy carob trees along cracked and canted
sidewalks; farther up the hill he had stopped to take
pictures of the Beachwood Gates, two towering
stonework pillars on either side of the street, and he
had taken a picture of the brass plaque on the eastern
pillar, with its raised letters that spelled
HOLLYWOODLAND 1923.
   He had followed Beachwood up to the left, and the
street wound up Beachwood Canyon between old
Spanish houses with red-tile roofs and brown-painted
wooden balconies and old double-doored garages that
were crowded right up to the street. There was no level
ground -- the roof of one house blocked the view of the
foundations of another, and stairs and arched windows
could be seen anywhere among the trees.
   Beachwood Drive was too narrow for trucks to pass
easily, and at the top of the hill the road curled sharply
to the right into Hollyridge Drive, which was so narrow
that one car would have to pull to the curb for an
oncoming car to get by -- but right at the top, a pair of
iron gates opened to the left onto a wide dirt lot.
   That was Griffith Park land, with an unobstructed view
down the north slopes to Forest Lawn Memorial Park
and the Ventura Freeway, with Burbank and Glendale
beyond, and the Mulholland Highway could provide
access for any sort of trucks from that direction. He had
drawn a map of the unpaved hilltop lot, showing where
the trucks could be parked and lunch tables set up.
   And on Hollyridge Drive he had found a vacant house
with a wide balcony overlooking Beachwood Canyon and
-- at the same height as the balcony and so close that
the cross girders were clearly visible -- the nine huge
white letters of the Hollywood sign standing on the hill
right across the canyon. Quickly he had contacted the
Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks and
the owner of the vacant house, and he had already
begun the work of arranging all the permissions and
insurance coverage.
   He tipped the stack of pictures vertical now, and
rapped them on the polished tabletop to get the edges
straight.
   And with his new Nikon RF he had taken these
photographs of the site. From the house's balcony he
had taken two panoramic series of shots, of the skyline
and of the road below, and he had stood at the top of
Beachwood Drive and slowly turned on his heel and
taken fourteen level shots -- a full 180 degrees -- to
show the Subaru people that there would be no
billboards or other inappropriate structures behind the
camera to be reflected in the polished bodywork of the
car as it drove past; there was a big mirror mounted on
the canyon wall where Beachwood looped into
Hollyridge, but they could hang a camouflage cloth over
it. He had even got down on his hands and knees and
photographed the street surface, to indicate what sort
of dolly moves would be possible for the cameraman.
   And then sometime this afternoon, while Bennett had
been on the plane back from Shasta, the Subaru agent
had called and left a message -- they had decided to
film the car on the Antelope Valley Highway east of
Agua Dulce, way out north in the desert, and to hell
with the "old Hollywood" idea. They'd pay Bennett for
the days he had put into the project, but he would have
no further part in it.
   All the on-site emergencies, the unforseen shadow
patches or glare spots, the traffic and parking screwups,
the crises with the available voltage and amperage,
would be dealt with by another location manager. And
that guy would get all the on-location pay too.
   Several thousand dollars that Bennett had been
counting on-gone. Before the end of the month, he
thought, we'll be hurtin' for certain.
   The telephone rang, and he hurried to the desk to
answer it, thinking the Subaru people might have
reconsidered.
  "Bradley Locations," he said.
  A man's voice said, "I'd like to speak to Bennett or
Moira Bradley, please." It wasn't the Subaru agent.
  "This is Bennett Bradley."
  "Mr. Bradley, I represent a company that's always
actively trying to expand its database, and we're now in
negotiation with a Francis Marrity for some items that
belonged to his grandmother, a Ms. Lisa Marrity. There
will probably be a substantial amount of money
involved, and our research department has just
established that Mr. Marrity is not the sole heir of Ms.
Marrity."
  "That's true, my wife is coheir." Son of a bitch!
thought Bennett. "What items? Uh, in particular?"
  "I'm not involved in acquisitions, I'm afraid. But it's
probably papers, floppy disks, or films; even electrical
machinery or precious metals, possibly."
  Bennett had seized a pen and begun scrawling
meaningless spirals on a legal pad. "What is your
company?"
  "The remuneration would be greater if I didn't say.
Anonymity is our policy."
  "How did -- Mr. Marrity -- approach you? -- and
when?"
  "We've been in negotiation with Lisa Marrity for some
time. Yesterday we learned that she had died, and the
only contact she had provided us with was Francis
Marrity. We called him, and he expressed interest in
consummating the sale we had arranged with Lisa
Marrity."
   "Well you definitely need to talk to my wife too. She's
coheir. As I said. As you know." Bennett was breathing
hard. "Now."
   "Are you aware of the nature of the items to be sold?"
   "Of course I am," Bennett said. What on earth could
they be? he wondered -- what papers, what precious
metals? What electrical machinery? "My wife and I were
in Shasta yesterday afternoon and today, making
funeral arrangements -- for, uh, Ms. Marrity -- and we
just got back from the airport half an hour ago. I'm sure
Frank meant to get in touch with my wife before
concluding any deal," he said. "With my wife and I.
Because no sale could be finalized without our
cooperation."
   "Who currently has physical possession of the items
in question?"
   "Well, they're -- divvied up. Some here, some there.
I'd need to see a list of which particular -- items--are
being discussed. The--" Bennett considered, and then
dismissed, the idea of sneaking another drink from the
bottle. "The old lady had a lot of valuable things. What's
your phone number?"
   "We'll get in touch with you, probably tomorrow.
Good night."
   Bennett heard a click, and then the dial tone.
   He hung up the telephone, had another mouthful of
the brandy, and then banged out through the door that
led to the kitchen of his house, yelling, "Moira! Your
bloody damned brother--!"
                         Nine
"He doesn't know what I was talking about," said
Rascasse, pushing his chair back from the telephone on
the folding desk and standing up, gripping an overhead
rail to steady himself as the bus rocked around a sharp
housing-tract corner in the evening darkness. To the
young man driving the bus he said, "But pull up in front
of his house anyway, so Charlotte can take a look."
  "He was just up in Shasta," said Golze hopefully.
  Through Rascasse's eyes Charlotte Sinclair looked
down at herself and the chubby figure of Golze sitting
on the first bus seat aft of the cleared rubber-tiled floor,
both of them leaning forward to hear the radio speaker.
She lifted her chin and pushed a wing of dark hair back
from her face.
  From the speaker they could now dimly hear Bennett
Bradley shouting at his wife.
  "Lousy signal," said Rascasse.
  "I think they're in the hall," said Golze. "I didn't put a
mike in the hall."
  "Yes," said Charlotte, leaning back in her seat with
her eyes closed, "they're in a hall."
  The bus was close enough to the Bradley house now
for her to be able to see through the eyes of the people
inside -- and she saw a tanned blond woman in jeans,
standing in a lighted hallway, with suitcases visible
beside a door behind her; Charlotte switched to the
woman's view, and found herself looking at a man
shouting; he had styled reddish hair, and a bristling
mustache, and he was wearing a white shirt with the
sleeves rolled back on his forearms.
   Charlotte felt the bus jolt to a stop, presumably at the
curb in front of the Bradley house, but she kept her
attention on Moira Bradley's field of vision.
   The man was walking backward into a brightly lit
kitchen, and the woman's viewpoint followed, and all at
once the sound from the speaker in the bus became
clearer, and Charlotte had words to go with the man's
moving lips.
   "--that he doesn't like you, it's that he doesn't like
me," Bennett Bradley was saying. "He's always been
jealous of me."
   "Jealous? He likes teaching," said the woman
Charlotte was monitoring; Charlotte's field of vision
bobbed slightly at the syllables.
   "Out in the middle of nowhere?" said Bennett.
Charlotte saw him wave a hand in the air. "With a dead
wife and a bratty kid? And a million cats? He knows he's
rotting out there -- he'd move west to L.A. or south to
Orange County in a second, if he could, but that house
of his is probably worth about a hundred dollars. Look
at that joke truck he drives! And I drive a Mercedes and
I'm on a first-name basis with Richard Dreyfuss!"
   "Frank wouldn't try to gyp us out of any money," said
Moira. "I'm sure he--"
   "There were no messages on the machine from him,
just from that damned Subaru agent. You think your
brother wouldn't try to keep this for himself?
'Substantial amount of money,' this guy said--"
   Charlotte's view rocked as Moira's voice from the
speaker said, "For -- what was it? Machinery? That
doesn't make any--"
   "Or papers, or gold. She knew Charlie Chaplin! Your
grandmother--" Bennett backed into some decorative
glass candleholders on the counter by the sink, and
clattering sounded from the speaker. "What is all this
trash?" He shoved the jars that hadn't fallen into the
sink back against the wall, breaking at least one more.
   Bennett shifted out of Charlotte's line of sight as
Moira looked into the sink instead of at her husband;
but his voice on the speaker said, "Your grandmother
might have letters, manuscripts, even lost Chaplin
films."
   "Well, they're trash now," said Moira's voice as
Charlotte saw Bennett swing into view again. "The
candles, I mean. So now you believe she knew
Chaplin."
   "Well obviously she had something. Maybe her violin
is a Stradivarius."
   "Frank will tell us. He'll tell me, anyway. Unless this
was a crank phone call. 'Anonymity policy'! It's certainly
made trouble."
   "Call him. Ask him. Or I will."
   Charlotte's field of vision swung away from Bennett to
a calendar above a telephone on the wall, and then
back. "We'll see him Thursday."
   Bennett shook his head. "This money guy wants to
meet me tomorrow. And Frank won't want to talk at his
grandmother's funeral, with Daffy underfoot. Call him."
   "Okay."
   Charlotte watched the telephone bob closer, and then
she saw one of Moira's hands lift the receiver while the
other spun the dial. Charlotte read the number out loud
as she watched Moira dial it -- while from the speaker
she heard the clicking of the dial being turned, and the
hiss of it spinning back -- and she felt Golze shift beside
her on the bus seat. "That's Marrity's number, all right,"
Golze said.
   Charlotte could smell tobacco smoke; evidently Golze
had lit a cigarette.
   Charlotte watched the telephone receiver swing closer
and then disappear beyond her right-side peripheral
vision; of course she couldn't hear anything from the
phone. Then after about twenty seconds it appeared
again, receding, and Moira's hand hung it back in the
cradle with a loud clatter from the speaker. The
microphone must be very near the phone, Charlotte
thought.
   "'You've reached the Marritys,'" quoted Moira's voice,
"'and we're not able to come to the phone right now.'"
   "You should have left a message," grumbled Bennett.
"'We're onto your filthy tricks.'"
   Bennett's frowning face swung back into Charlotte's
sight, and Moira laughed. "Or, 'You're not fooling
anyone.'"
   Bennett laughed too, though he was still frowning.
"Do it in a disguised voice," he said. Then, growling in a
Bronx accent, "'I know what you been doin', an' you
better stop it.'"
  "He'd lock the gate," said Moira, "and never answer
the phone again."
  "Right, and then we'd find out this was a joke call,
and your crazy grandmother didn't own anything but
old Creedence records. But-- he'd never dare go to
another X-rated movie."
  "Frank doesn't go to X-rated movies. You go to X-
rated movies."
  "I have to, sometimes, it's business. Anyway, that's
why he's jealous of me."
  "Drive on," said Rascasse to the young man in the
driver's seat. "No use having the bus get noticed for
this."
  Moira was saying something back, but Golze said, "He
mentioned lost Charlie Chaplin films."
  The bus surged forward with no more noise than a car
would have made; the Vespers had replaced its diesel
engine with a Chevrolet 454 V-8, and put disk brakes
on instead of noisy air brakes.
  "He was just choosing random examples," said
Rascasse. "It was an obvious thing to say, after I
mentioned films in my call to him. He doesn't know
anything about it. Neither does she, probably."
  Bennett Bradley's voice was coming out of the
speaker now, talking about the Subaru deal that
Rascasse had managed to get taken away from him,
but already the bus was too far away from the house
for Charlotte to see any more. She shifted her attention
to Rascasse, who was still standing and looking down at
her and Golze. Charlotte took the opportunity to check
her lipstick, but it was still fine.
    "The artifact moved east, yesterday," Rascasse went
on, "and Francis Marrity and his daughter are in a, a
crisis. It's got to be Marrity who took it. We should have
been at that hospital, not wasting our time here."
    But I've soured the approach to Francis Marrity,
Charlotte thought, bracing herself for reminders of it;
but then the soft gong sounded from the cabinet behind
the driver's seat, and in sudden fright Charlotte's vision
bounced several times between the driver and Golze
and Rascasse, so that in rapid succession she was
seeing the empty curbside cars and pools of streetlight
ahead of them and two views of her own face -- lips
pinched and brown eyes wide -- one in profile and one
head-on.
    "See -- what it wants," said Rascasse to Golze.
    Charlotte thought she could already hear the
filigreed-silver jaw hinges snapping inside the cabinet.
    "Right," said Golze.
    He stood up from beside Charlotte and swayed
forward toward the cabinet, and Rascasse stared after
him, so Charlotte fixed her attention on the driver, a
humorless physics student from UC Berkeley, and
watched the cars ahead of the bus through his eyes.
They had left the housing tract and were on East
Orange Grove Boulevard, passing a Pizza Hut and a
Shell station.
    She heard the cabinet lock snap, and then she really
could hear the Baphomet's jaws clicking; and though
she was staring at the dashboard and the taillights
beyond the windshield, she could smell the head now,
the spicy shellac reek.
   She heard several voices whispering -- and she had
never heard the thing form words before. Reluctantly
she let herself share Rascasse's perspective.
   The cabinet doors were swung open and the shiny
head inside was gleaming in the yellow overhead light;
its black jaw, with the chin capped in silver like the toe
of a cowboy boot, was wagging up and down rapidly,
but it was not synchronized with the whispering.
   Golze had switched on the Ouija-board monitor over
the cabinet: The cursor on the screen was motionless,
but there were several breathy voices huffing out
between the Baphomet head's crooked ivory teeth.
   "Call me flies in summer," hissed one.
   "Eighty cents," whispered another. "Can I bum one of
your smokes, at least?"
   Charlotte swallowed. "What -- who the hell are they?"
she managed to ask in a level voice.
   "Ghosts," said Rascasse in disgust. "The Harmonic
Convergence has brought them out like... flies in
summer, and the head attracts them when it's not
properly occupied. I think it's worse when we're moving
-- the head is a psychic charge moving through the
Harmonic Convergence field. If we weren't smoking
cigarettes right now, we'd draw hundreds of them --
probably condensed enough for us to see them."
   Charlotte shuddered and reached into her purse for
the pack of Dunhills.
  The feathery-frail ghost voices were coming faster
now, overlapping one another:
  "Why will you do it? "
  "One, nineteen, twenty-four, twenty-seven, thirty-
eight, nineteen."
  "Will you show me your tits if I can guess how much
money you've got in your pocket?"
  "Two whole days."
  "Why don't you try a real man? "
  "Hello, pretty lady! I can tell you what lottery
numbers are gonna win!"
  Charlotte cleared her throat. "Should I say hello
back? It seems rude to snub a ghost." She was still
holding her unlit cigarette -- neither Golze nor Rascasse
had looked at her, and she didn't want to light it just by
touch with her shaking fingers.
  Golze answered, "You already snubbed him. They run
backward in time. But you could say, 'Hello, ghost!' and
then his remark would be a reply to that, not an
unprompted salutation."
  "Hello, ghost!" she said.
  Golze glanced at her, and Charlotte saw her nervous
smile through his eyes. Quickly she used his perspective
to snap her lighter below the tip of her cigarette. "Is he
going to tell us the winning lottery numbers?" she said,
exhaling smoke.
  "He did already," said Golze. "And he guessed you've
got eighty cents in your pocket. No use showing him
your tits now, it would be before he asked. I don't think
they can actually see anyway."
   "Nineteen... twenty-four," said Charlotte quickly. "You
should have written down the numbers!"
   "They're lying," Golze said. "They don't know which
lottery numbers are going to win."
   "If they're moving backward in time," said Charlotte,
"how come they talk forward? They don't sound like
records played backward."
   "Very good!" said Golze. "They're mostly on the
freeway, just dabbling their toes in here for a few
seconds at a time. While they're down here with us,
they're carried along with the stream in the same
direction we are. So each sentence is beginning-first,
end-last, but the next remark for us is the previous
remark to them."
   "Lock it up," Rascasse said to Golze. "But leave the
monitor on."
   "Two days," whispered one last ghost, "I sat beside
my body, staring at the holes in my chest."
   Charlotte kept her attention on Golze, and watched
his pudgy hands close the cabinet. The copper handles
were miniature reproductions of the Vespers emblem:
the Grail cup -- two plain, smooth cones joined at the
tips, one cone opening upward, the other downward,
like a double-jigger measure in a Bauhaus bar.
   Charlotte used Golze's brief glance to focus hungrily
on the little copper chalices. Then he had straightened
up and was looking at her.
   "How does the Harmonic Converence bring out
ghosts?" she asked, and Golze helpfully looked toward
Rascasse.
  "It's like Gargamelle," said Rascasse.
  "What, Gargantua's mother? -- in Rabelais?"
  "No -- or maybe they named it after that, what you
said -- Gigantor's mother -- no, it's the name of a big
bubble chamber at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland.
Ten tons of liquid is kept very near its boiling
temperature, but under high pressure; then they
suddenly release the pressure, and any invisible
particles shooting through the liquid form lines of
bubbles. They become actual, manifest, rather than
unseen potential."
  Rascasse waved out at the night. "All these mystics
on the mountaintops, emptying their minds all at once,
have suddenly dropped the pressure in the common
psychic water-table, and things are becoming actual
that should only be low-probability potentials."
  Charlotte dug coins out of the pocket of her jeans and
held them out on her palm. Golze looked, and so she
was able to see that it was three quarters and a nickel.
  "I do have eighty cents," she said.
  "If it was five coins they'd have been stumped," Golze
said. "They're like some primitive culture, with five
numbers: one, two, three, four, and countless."
  Rascasse was leaning on the folded-down desk to
look outside through one of the starboard bus windows.
Charlotte shifted to his perspective, and was able to see
the dots of orange light on the mountains.
  "Fires all the way up from here to Humboldt and
Trinity and Siskiyou," Rascasse said softly. "All started
from lightning strikes at about noon yesterday."
  "Well," said Golze, "A .50-caliber bullet will rip up
dust under it as it goes by. And Lieserl Marity was
moving a whole hell of a lot faster."



"A lot of rest you'll be getting in here," said Marrity.
   He had pushed the heavy door nearly closed, but the
voices and squeaking wheeled carts outside the room
were still just as audible. The hospital hallways had a
scent like the chlorophyll wood shavings at the bottom
of a hamster's cage, but this room still smelled of lemon
custard and beef gravy, even though a nurse had taken
away Daphne's tray of pureed brown and white and
yellow stuff half an hour ago. On the wall behind
Daphne's bed was taped a page of typescript headed
"Swallowing Instructions." There seemed to be a dozen
crucial points. Daphne couldn't see it from where she
lay.
   A gauze pad was taped across her throat. Two of her
ribs had been cracked during the useless Heimlich
maneuver, but they hadn't required any tape or
bandage.
   Daphne picked up the pencil on the wheeled table
beside her bed and wrote sleep pill probly on the top
page of the pocket notebook he had fetched from the
truck. Ask fr you too. The clear plastic bag on the IV
pole swayed when she wrote; fortunately the tube was
taped to her arm above her wrist where the needle was
inserted, so it wasn't likely to be pulled out.
   Marrity glanced at the blue canvas cot the nurse had
brought in for him to sleep on after he had turned down
the offer of a "cardiac chair," which had seemed to be a
half-size hospital bed, complete with an electric motor
bolted to the underside of it.
   "I'll be fine," he told Daphne. He was sitting in one of
the two plain wooden chairs in this half of the room; the
other chair had a cotton square like a diaper laid across
its seat, and he hadn't wanted to ask why.
   St. Bernardine's Hospital had transferred Daphne
here to the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital after her
emergency throat surgery, and Marrity was pleased that
his frantic knife cut of this afternoon had only required
four stitches in the skin of her throat. The surgeon had
done "undermining," put in a row of sutures under the
skin, to leave a negligible scar while still keeping the
wound securely closed.
   Marrity had called Cal State San Bernardino to cancel
his Modern Novels class for tomorrow, and he was
planning to sleep in his own bed as soon as Daphne was
released in the morning. Sleep all day.
   There was another bed in this room, farther from the
door, but it was empty at the moment and Marrity
hoped it would stay that way. The emergency room at
St. Bernardine's had seemed to be full of hoboes who
just wanted painkillers, and he didn't want another
stranger imposed on his daughter when she was so
helpless -- she looked very frail in this up-tilted hospital
bed, with the thin sheets and threadbare blankets
tumbled around her. He would have fetched Rumbold
for her, if Rumbold had not been burned up and buried.
  She was idly drawing spirals on the pad, and his
spirits fell further at the familiar sight of her bitten-
down fingernails -- then he saw that she had written
more words.
  Yr father was at Alfredo's?
  "Yes," Marrity said. He didn't want to make her write
more, so he added, "I guess he probably followed us."
  She drew two dots with a V between them: frowning
eyes.
  "I agree." Marrity shifted in his chair. "He did seem to
be very upset by... it all."
  Daphne wrote some more: You saved my life. She
didn't look up from the paper.
  "Um -- yes. I was glad to be able to."
  must have been hard to do -- cut me
  He nodded, though her head was still lowered and her
face was hidden behind her brown bangs.
  "Yes," he said. "Yes, it was very hard to do."
  A spot appeared on the paper; and then another. I
love you
  "I love you too, Daph," he said. He wanted to get up
out of the chair and try to hug her, but he knew it
would embarrass her; they never talked this way
ordinarily. Marrity had always assumed that their
avoidance of sentiment was an Irish thing, but today he
had learned that they were not Irish. A Serbian thing,
then.
  "I'm -- proud of you," she whispered, still looking
down. "I hope it leaves a scar -- excuse to brag about
you."
  "Don't stretch your voice box. They say it won't leave
much of a scar at all. But -- thanks."
  She nodded and sat back against the sloping mattress
and smiled at him, and when she closed her eyes she
didn't open them again; and after a few moments
Marrity took from his coat pocket a beat-up paperback
copy of Tristram Shandy that he always kept in the
truck. His briefcase was in the truck too, but he wasn't
in the mood to read student papers and he didn't want
to look at Grammar's old Peccavit letters in here.
  He stood up to switch off the fluorescent tube over
her bed, noting the spotty horizontal line of chips in the
wall plaster at the height of the bed frame -- what did
they do, play bumper cars with the things? -- and then
he pulled the bed curtain closed on the hall side and
resumed his seat, reading by the light from the hallway.
  The book's chapters were short, and when he came to
the black page at the end of Chapter Seven he found
himself staring into the blackness, and exhaustion gave
the page a faint green border. Vaguely he wondered if
there might be words hidden in the black field.
  He only realized that he had gone to sleep in the chair
when he began to drift back into wakefulness. He could
hear voices from a television -- he knew it was
television because he recognized the show that was
playing. It was... some cartoon that used to come on
very late at night when he and Moira had been in early
grade school; irritatingly 1950s-style animation, blocky
characters with huge square heads and barrel bodies
and tiny pointed feet. Both eyes on the same side of
their nose, like in dumb old Picasso pictures.
  One character was named Matt, and was always
coming home drunk, with his hair spiky and his shirt
untucked, and he'd bang on his own locked front door
and yell, "Can I come in? Say I can come in!"
  Grammar had caught them watching it one night,
long after bedtime, and told them that they couldn't
watch it anymore. Marrity had assumed it was the late
hour, rather than the show itself, that had prompted the
ban.
  Matt was saying it now: "Can I come in? Say I can
come in, Daphne!"
  That made Marrity open his eyes. Had Matt's wife
been named Daphne?
  Daphne was awake in her hospital bed; Marrity could
see the gleam of her eyes staring at the far end of the
dark room, where the glowing television was mounted
high on the wall. Marrity blinked at it himself -- it was
showing the same program he remembered, the
sketchy black-and-white figures who moved only in
precisely repetitive gestures. Probably to save
animation work.
  Marrity noticed that the curtain around Daphne's bed
had been pulled all the way open, though he hadn't
heard the rollers move in the track on the ceiling.
  Then, "Daphne, don't say it!" came a man's voice
from behind him, and Marrity came fully awake with a
start.
  A man was silhouetted against the now open door,
with one hand gripping the door frame and the other
hand pulling something out of his ear.
   Marrity scrambled to his feet, and the paperback book
smacked on the linoleum floor.
   "Why not?" said Daphne in a hoarse voice, and
Marrity realized that she was only half awake. He
couldn't see her expression in the dim light from the TV.
   "Say I can come in, Daphne!" repeated the cartoon
voice from the television. "The mountains are burning!"
   "Why shouldn't she let him in?" Daphne asked the
figure in the doorway. She turned back to the
television, and by the gleam of her teeth Marrity knew
that she had opened her mouth.
   "No, Daph," said Marrity loudly. He was suddenly sure
that it had not been the late hour that had made
Grammar forbid them to watch this show; and,
irrationally, he suspected now that it had not appeared
on any TV set except for Grammar's. "Don't say
anything. Don't -- strain your voice box."
   Daphne stared at her father, and didn't speak.
   "Daphne!" called the voice from the television. "Just
nod, if I can come in! When the fires are out it will be
too late."
   "Daph, don't move," said Marrity, stepping toward the
television set. He wasn't at all sure he believed that this
animated cartoon was actually talking to his daughter,
but he could feel the hairs standing up on his forearms.
   "You can't turn it off," said the man in the doorway,
speaking quickly, "it's not turned on. Tell Matt to go
away."
   Marrity swayed with sudden vertigo, but he clung to
the urgency in the stranger's disorienting words.
   "Go away -- Matt," he said hoarsely to the blunt
outlines of the face on the screen.
   For a moment the eyes that were just black circles on
the featureless white face seemed to stare at him from
the screen, and Marrity felt sweat chilling his forehead
as he helplessly stared back. Then the pen slash of a
mouth began opening and closing, and the
unsynchronized voice said, "When thou cam'st first,
thou strok'st me and made much of me."
   It was a line from The Tempest -- The Tempest
again! -- and Marrity automatically responded with
Prospero's reply to Caliban: " 'Hence, hagseed!'" The
jagged outlines of the figure shifted, so Marrity went on
dizzily, "'Shrugg'st thou, malice? So, slave; hence!'"
   "Schneid mal die Kehle auf," the thing said, and then
its already minimal face sprang apart into random lines.
   The screen went dark -- and Marrity backed away
from it fast. He suspected that if he could stand on
something and feel the top of the television set, it
would be cold.
   Or maybe very hot.
   "Exit Caliban," he said in a whispery exhalation. Then
he turned to face the man in the doorway. "What was
that?" His voice shook. "And who are you?" He crossed
to Daphne's bed and switched on the fluorescent light
over her.
   The man stepped into the room. He was wearing a
dark suit and tie, and gray leather gloves, and he
appeared to be in his forties. "My name is Eugene
Jackson," he said. "I'm with the National Security
Agency." He was shifting his weight from one foot to
the other, apparently impatient.
   Marrity squinted at him. "And what was that cartoon?
It was -- it was talking to my daughter! What did it
mean about the fires? How could it talk to her?" He
forced himself to gather his routed thoughts. "National...
Do you have some identification?"
   Daphne was clearly wide awake now, clutching the
bleach-paled blankets around her shoulders and
blinking unhappily at the stranger.



"Yes, it was talking to your daughter." Lepidopt reached
into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a badge
wallet and showed Marrity his plastic NSA card; it was
the current configuration -- not that Marrity would know
-- with the blue band at the top edge that indicated a
field agent, and the pattern of computer punch holes
along the left side that would provide a scanner with the
name "Eugene Jackson," and a null identification
number.
   He was far, far beyond the bounds of ordinary caution
here. This was not how or where he would have
preferred to approach Marrity-- but when he'd seen the
figure on the television screen, he'd had to pull out his
earplugs and jump in. He gripped the little rubber plugs
in his narrow right fist, aching to screw them back into
his ear canals, but he was paying very close attention to
the man and the girl.
   Clearly Marrity had not expected the dybbuk on the
television, nor anything like it. That was good and bad
-- it meant Marrity wasn't committed, but it also meant
he didn't know very much about what he was playing
with.
   "What... was it?" asked Marrity.
   Lepidopt pushed the heavy door almost closed, and
stood next to it so as not to be seen from the hall. He
wished he could close it all the way, and make it
impossible for the sounds of the nearest nursing station
to reach him. What would happen, in the moment
before a ringing telephone would be audible here?
Would he simply drop dead of a massive stroke?
   "We're hoping," he said, "that you'll be able to help us
figure out what that was. We know it has to do with
Peccavit."
   "Einstein," said Marrity blankly.
   "Yes, Einstein. And your grandmother, and Charlie
Chaplin."
   Marrity took a deep breath and let it out. "How is it --
you're a government agency, right? Like the FBI? How
is this something you'd be involved with?"
   Get what you can here and now, thought Lepidopt.
And quick. Marrity won't leave the girl alone to talk
somewhere else, and fortunately he's only half awake
now.
   "Einstein," Lepidopt said, forcing himself not to speak
too quickly, "was involved in paranormal research,
contacting the dead. This sounds incredible, I know --
but remember that cartoon thing you just saw on the
television. He, Einstein, was very secretive about it, but
we want to know what he discovered." Lepidopt waved
his free hand. "There are dead people we'd like to
interview. And pioneers are careless -- Humphrey Davy
poisoned himself with fluorine, and Madame Curie killed
herself by handling radium. Only later on did people
discover precautions that those pioneers should have
taken. Einstein exposed himself and his children to" --
he glanced at Daphne, who was listening avidly -- "to
dangers. Your grandmother took a lot of precautions,
but it may be that some of the consequences of her
father's work caught up with her yesterday. And we can
detect paranormal events; we believe, in fact, that one
occurred yesterday afternoon at four-fifteen, in San
Bernardino, within a small area that includes your
house. Did you experience any kind of" -- he waved his
gloved fist toward the dark television set in the corner
-- "intrusion at that time?"
  "Does paranormal mean witchy?" asked Daphne.
  "Yes," said Lepidopt. He kept his eyes on Daphne, but
she was looking at her father.



"Can you," said Marrity, "make it stop?"
  "If we can reproduce Einstein's work, I believe we
can, yes. We can save -- we can make this intrusion
stop now, before it -- goes any further."
  Marrity was sure the man was being euphemistic
because Daphne was listening. We can save your
daughter's life, he had probably been going to say; or
at least, your daughter's sanity. And before it's too late.
   "I may have to -- leave, abruptly," Jackson was
saying now, and he pulled a business card out of his
pants pocket. "Take this, and call us if you think of
anything later, or -- need anything."
   Marrity took it -- the only thing printed on it on either
side was an 800 telephone number. He tucked it into
his shirt pocket. "Do you speak German?" Marrity
asked.
   "Yes."
   "What was the German thing the cartoon said, at the
end?"
   The NSA man appeared to consider not answering;
then he said, "It meant 'Cut open her throat.'"
   Daphne touched the stitches below her chin. "Again? "
she whispered.
   "No," said Jackson, "that was an echo of something it
said this afternoon, when you were choking."
   "An old woman said it," said Marrity, "in the
restaurant. Were you there? What is all this? Was the
old woman that thing on the TV? Tell me what's going
on."
   "I can't, until I know what's gone on. Did you have
some kind of intrusion yesterday afternoon?"
   "Yes," whispered Daphne.
   "Yes," echoed Marrity. He rubbed his eyes. "Did you
have a woman approach me, a couple of hours ago?
Primed with... knowledge of my tastes in books and
liquor, to question me?"
  "No," said the NSA man. "Where did this happen?"
  "Outside St. Bernardine's, the first hospital we were
at. She even smoked the same cigarettes I do."
  "What did she look like?"
  "Audrey Hepburn." He realized that he was describing
her more to Daphne than to Jackson; they had watched
Breakfast at Tiffany's not long ago. "Slender, that is,
with dark brown hair in a ponytail. Sunglasses.
Burgundy shirt, black jeans. About thirty."
  "You have a pen and paper," said Jackson. "Let's
conduct this conversation in writing, shall we?"
  "You mean -- not out loud," said Marrity.
  "Right. I find it's easier to keep track of topics that
way."
  Marrity was surprised to see Jackson hurriedly twist a
pair of earplugs into his ears. But probably they're
miniature spy speakers, he told himself.
  Marrity crossed to Daphne's table and tore off the top
sheet of the pad and put it in his pocket.

                         Ten
Rascasse was snapping the fingers of his free hand as
he listened to the scrambler telephone. He stopped in
order to put his hand over the mouthpiece and bark at
the driver, "Ralentissez, we are too late." The roaring of
the bus's engine went down in pitch.
  Finally he replaced the receiver in its box. To Golze,
he said, "We should have put Charlotte at the second
hospital, compromised though she was. Shaved her
head and given her a fake mustache. Not wasted her on
foolish Bradley."
   "What happened?"
   "An NSA man, or some fellow claiming to be of the
NSA, talked to Marrity and the daughter at the
hospital."
   He sighed and dragged his fingers across his scalp,
making his close-cropped white hair even spikier. "The
dybbuk appeared on the TV set in her chambre, her
room," Rascasse went on, "trying to get her to let it into
her mind. The NSA fellow and her father stopped her
from consenting. An NSA man, knowing about dybbuks!
We'll be getting a fax of the transcription of their talk,
but Marrity mentioned Einstein, and the NSA man gave
him a bunch of nonsense about wanting Einstein's work
in order to talk to dead people. He hinted that Marrity's
daughter is in big danger if Marrity doesn't cooperate."
   "Well," said Golze, "she would be."
   "He'd have dropped the hint in any case, to open
Marrity up. And Marrity said he and his daughter
experienced some kind of 'intrusion' yesterday at four-
fifteen, which is precisely when we registered the
Chaplin device as having been activated."
   Rascasse had been looking at Golze, but now
Charlotte saw her own face swing into his view. "Then
Marrity asked if the NSA had set a woman onto him,
primed with his tastes in books and liquor!" He paused,
no doubt making some sort of face. "And he gave the
fellow a good description of you too. And then the NSA
man said they should conduct the rest of their question-
and-answer session in writing! All we got was the sound
of a pen scratching on paper! Luckily Marrity made the
man leave after about five minutes. We should have
had you in the room next to the girl's."
   "True," said Charlotte in a level tone. She was one of
the very few remote viewers who could read text while
looking out of someone else's eyes -- possibly because
if she couldn't read that way, she wouldn't be able to
read anything at all.
   The scrambler phone buzzed, and Rascasse opened
the case again and lifted the receiver. After thirty
seconds he said, "'Kay." He replaced the receiver and
shut the case.
   "The San Diego detective who called the Shasta
hospital yesterday is dead," he told Golze and Charlotte.
"Before he died, our people asked him who told him to
track down Lisa Marrity. The detective, who was Jewish,
said he was doing a favor for a friend -- and under
duress admitted that he believed his friend was with the
Mossad."
   Beside Charlotte, Golze gulped audibly. "Then that
wasn't an NSA man in the girl's hospital room -- he
didn't sound like NSA, what with the dybbuk and all."
Behind the disordered tangle of his black hair, his
glasses winked in the overhead light. "Could the Mossad
be on to us, here, because of the New Jersey branch's
pass at the Tel Aviv mainframe on Saturday?"
   "They're here for the same reason we are," said
Rascasse. "They want the thing Lieserl Maric had."
   After a moment of bafflement, Charlotte remembered
that Lieserl Maric was Lisa Marrity's real, Serbian name.
  "We've got to get the thing, both pieces of it, and
close this down," said Rascasse. "We're on alien turf
here, our strength is all in Europe. This is still Einstein's
defended exile island. Tomorrow," he said, staring at
Charlotte so that she had a good view of her own face,
"early morning, you kill Marrity. Gunshot."
  Charlotte watched her eyebrows and mouth, keeping
them in straight lines.
  "He's the Mossad's source now," Rascasse went on,
"and we don't want them to get any more out of him
than they did tonight. This will isolate the daughter, and
we might be able to work on her with help from the
dybbuk and our tęte friend in the cabinet."
  Her face swung out of Rascasse's view as he looked
out the window at cars in other lanes. "You've been due
to kill someone for a while, you know, Charlotte,"
Rascasse went on, not unkindly. "Can't get favors from
the Devil unless you do some favors for him."
  "Okay," she said flatly. She thought about her
younger self, the pre-1978 Charlotte who could still see.
I have done nothing but in care of thee, she thought
forlornly.
  "Paul," Rascasse went on to Golze, "tell the field men
to bring in that old man who has been driving the green
Rambler. He hasn't done anything worth watching yet,
but we need to prevent the Mossad from getting hold of
him too. And I think we need to take another look at
the Einstein cluster on the freeway."
  Charlotte was estimating how many steps it would
take her to get to her coat and purse at the back of the
bus, and the bottle of Wild Turkey.
  "The freeway" was the Vespers term for the five-
dimensional state outside of time, the region where the
ghosts existed and where a person's whole lifetime
could supposedly be seen as something like a long rope
curling through a vacuum abyss; though sometimes
they described the lifetimes as sparks arcing across a
vast gap, or as standing waves ringing some
inconceivable nucleus.
  From any point on a person's lifeline, such as right
now, the person's future was contained in an invisible
cone expanding away forward in time. Like everybody,
the Vespers could largely control their futures; but
Charlotte knew that they hoped to work in the other
direction too, so that even their pasts would be
expanding cones of changeable possibilities, opening
out backward.
  Charlotte needed it to be true.
  They were hardly the first natural philosophers to
hope to do this -- the Holy Grail was a picture of their
ambition: a chalice made of two opposite-facing cones,
one opening upward and the other opening downward.
  Already they could project their astral awarenesses
"onto the freeway," out into the bigger space of the fifth
dimension, but they could only hang in one place out
there and look around. They couldn't do anything that
could by analogy be called moving. And they could do
even just this much only by summoning the beings that
existed in that region, and... paying them.
  With the device Lieserl Maric had possessed, they
believed they would be able to travel through the fifth
dimension, into the past and the future -- and they
would probably be able to dispense with the diabolical
escorts.
   And they would be able to change the past, with
surgical precision.
   Right now the Vespers were pretty sure they knew
how to "short out" a person's lifeline, how to make
someone never have existed. Einstein had supposedly
left a device in a tower in Palm Springs that could
delete a person's lifeline from the universe, but among
the Vespers it was generally believed that the device
had never been used since Einstein created it in 1932.
   They couldn't be certain, because in the resulting
world -- the world in which the shorted-out person had
never existed -- only the person who had performed the
"erasure" would have any memory of the erased person
or the world that had included him or her. And so far no
one had claimed to have done it.
   Charlotte had heard Golze joke about a person known
as Nobo-daddy, who was evidently the mythical founder
of the Vespers. According to the story, at some point
the Vespers had shorted out the founder's lifeline,
erasing him from the memories of everyone in the
world except the one person who had done the erasure,
and leaving the Vespers as an organization that nobody
had founded.
   "We should call it a tollway, not the freeway," said
Rascasse through closed teeth. "Fred!" he called to the
driver. "Pull over when you see somebody walking alone
-- tell him you need to know how to get to the 210
freeway. Get the person to come aboard the bus to
show you on your map. Charlotte can do a scan to
make sure nobody's watching, and when she says go,
we'll subdue the person."
  Charlotte could see her own face squarely in the
center of Golze's vision; probably he was smiling at her.
"People who would never get in a stranger's car will get
into a bus," he said. "Everybody trusts bus drivers."

                      Eleven
What intrusion? yesterday my daughter watched a
video, an old b&w -- I was in other room -- reading
d'ter's mind -- and the video scared her so bad that she
set the VCR & her bedroom on fire. Just with her mind,
no matches
  wheres the video from?
  my grandmother's house, labeled Pee-wees Big
Adv'ture, but only first 5 min were Pee-wee -- after,
this b&w. Very old movie, a silent-something about a
woman eating the brains out of a bald guy's head
  by the ocean?
  Dunno -- ask her?
  later -- video where now?
  burned up
  G'mother Lisa Marrity?
  yes
  what did she know about Einstein?
  he was her father. She had letters from him
  letters where now?
  stashed. I cn make copies
  need them now.
  tomorrow. Bank safe deposit
  What d u know about Einstein & yr g'mother? &
Chaplin?
  Einstein, nada, she ne'r mentioned him. Said she
knew Chap in 30s, went t Switzerland in 77 after he
died
  G'ma ever refer to electric machine she &/or Einstein
made?
  No
  Where was yr g'mother last, in Calif?
  ?Airport, I guess?
  Any certain reason to think so?
  She took cab. Card here. Who was the woman who
talked t me? -- books, liquor, cig'ts?
  Not sure. Don't talk to her. Meet tomorrow -- here,
noon? We'll compensate for time off work.

  "Well," said Malk, slapping the sheet of paper onto
the wooden table, "he didn't put those letters in any
safe-deposit box. No bank was open yesterday, and we
followed him all day today."
  "We followed him yesterday," said Bozzaris. "It's
Tuesday now." He was crouched on the floor at the
shadowed opposite end of the little twelve-sided motel
room, dialing the telephone that was mounted on the
low vertical section of the white wall; above elbow
height the walls slanted inward to a flat ceiling panel.
   The ringer coil and clapper had been taken out of the
telephone, and the two brass bells themselves had been
carefully wrapped in tissue paper and stashed in
separate places. Lepidopt wasn't worried about the
cellular phone, which Marrity would reach if he called
the number on the card Lepidopt had given him -- the
premonition had palpably been about telephone bells,
not the electronic tone of a Motorola cellular phone.
   "The letters must be at his house," said Malk. "We
could go look for them right now."
   "No," said Lepidopt, who was sitting on the bed.
"There's a thousand places in that house to hide letters;
and he's being cooperative, considering his crash
recruitment. Incidentally, Bert, I want you to go
through his trash cans, before dawn, and find that
burned-up VCR and videocassette."
   "Okay. Does he believe his daughter's in big danger,
and that you can save her?"
   "Partly. Mostly."
   "Odd that he wouldn't give you the letters right away.
Why does he want to make copies of them?"
   "So he can sell the originals, I imagine," said
Lepidopt. If it were my son who was in danger, he
thought, I would not be thinking first of making money
from selling the Einstein letters.
   It's afternoon in Tel Aviv right now, he thought; Louis
is probably with Deborah, maybe having lunch. If I were
there he would want to go to Burger Ranch for lunch,
and get one of those disgusting Spanish burgers, with
the watery tomato sauce on it.
   Lepidopt remembered riding on the old Vespa scooter
with Louis through the quiet evening streets of Tel Aviv,
stopping to feed the many stray cats and watch lights
come on behind the shutters and awnings and planter
boxes that residents had hung all over the balconies of
the 1920s Bauhaus apartment buildings, breaking up
and humanizing the once stark architectural lines.
   He pushed the tormenting thoughts away.
   Lepidopt and Malk and Bozzaris were in one of the
tepee rooms of the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino,
on what had been Route 66 until two years ago but was
only Foothill Boulevard now. The neighborhood, right
across the highway from the train yards and the
towering Santa Fe smokestack, had already begun to
deteriorate. Luckily the Wigwam Motel was still in
business -- nineteen conical cement tepees arranged
irregularly across three weedy acres, each tepee twenty
feet tall and painted white with a pastel zigzag line
around the middle. To see their cars, Lepidopt would
have to get down on his hands and knees and peer out
through one of the two diamond-shaped windows.
   The safe-house apartments were more conveniently
located, and had garages and closets, and were
certainly much bigger, but these concrete tepees, with
steel-pipe "lodge poles" crossed at the narrow top, had
the virtue of being largely free of right angles -- a
hostile remote viewer would find it difficult to get
preliminary reference bearings.
   And Lepidopt was in no danger from telephones in
nearby rooms!
  "My sayan is dead," said Bozzaris harshly, hanging up
the telephone. "The detective in San Diego. The police
down there found his body an hour ago. Apparently he
was tortured."
  Lepidopt's face was cold. Another sayan dead, he
thought. "How could our, our adversaries have found
out about him?" he asked.
  "He called the LAPD about Lisa Marrity yesterday,"
said Bozzaris. "And then he called the hospital in
Shasta. Probably the adversaries were monitoring calls
to the hospital. Fuck." He was still crouched beside the
telephone, his head lowered and a lock of his black hair
hanging across his face.
  Malk shifted in his chair at the little table. "You figure
the 'adversaries' is the crowd with the dark-haired
sunglasses girl?"
  "For now I figure that." Lepidopt stood up from the
bed and leaned against the slanted wall beside the front
door. He dug a pack of Camels out of his pocket and
shook one loose. "And clearly they're not just Einstein
scholars, or Charlie Chaplin fans. We should have roped
in the old guy in the Rambler when we had the chance.
They're likely to get him next, whoever he is." He struck
a match and puffed rapidly on the cigarette.
  Two sayanim dead, he thought. Sam Glatzer was a
heart attack, but this one sounds like plain execution.
Tel Aviv would not be pleased -- sayanim were
sacrosanct. There would have to be retribution for this.
  "Bert," said Bozzaris, straightening up and stepping
away from the wall to stretch, "at the Italian restaurant,
you did pick up those two beer bottles from the old
man's table, right? The Rambler
  "Yes," said Malk.
  "Then Frank Marrity must have approached him in the
restaurant, shortly after he and his daughter arrived.
The fingerprints on the bottles are all Frank Marrity's."
  Lepidopt could feel the skin tighten on his face. He
exhaled a stream of smoke, and then said, "For sure?"
  Lepidopt's voice had been strained, and Bozzaris
stared at him curiously. "Yes."
  "Bert," said Lepidopt, feeling again the tension he had
felt in the wrecked lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in
Jerusalem, on the night before they had besieged the
Lion's Gate in June 1967, twenty years ago now.
"You've got your half of the orders?"
  Malk looked startled. "Yes."
  "Haul it out." He dug a set of car keys from his pocket
and tossed them to Bozzaris. "Ernie, get the can of
Play-Doh out of my car."
  Bozzaris also looked disconcerted, but only said,
"Right, Oren."
  "Tel Aviv told us not to do anything," said Malk as
Bozzaris unbolted the door and stepped outside, letting
in a lot of chilly night air that smelled faintly of
sagebrush and diesel exhaust. Lepidopt could briefly
see a diamond-shaped lozenge of yellow light from a
tepee in the middle distance. "That would include
reading those orders now."
  "This supercedes what Tel Aviv said." And I'm glad it
does, Lepidopt thought; I want to see what we're
supposed to do, before the arrival of the Prague katsa,
who outranks me.
  "What, all our sayanim dying?"
  "That too."
  "Does Tel Aviv know about your 'never again'
premonitions? "
  Malk and Bozzaris hadn't known, until the necessity of
insulating himself from all telephone bells had made
Lepidopt explain it to them.
  And I must not hear the name of the actor who
starred in True Grit. Don't say it!
  For members of the Halomot branch of the Mossad,
they had seemed very skeptical.
  "Yes," Lepidopt answered. Tel Aviv took it seriously,
he thought. Now Admoni probably intends this new
katsa to replace me, if he didn't intend that already.
  Lepidopt heard a car trunk slam shut, and then
Bozzaris hurried back inside and closed and bolted the
door. In his hand was a yellow can of Play-Doh with a
blue plastic lid.
  "Don't open it yet," Lepidopt told him, "it starts to dry
out pretty quick." He reached into his shirt and pulled
up the inch-wide steel cylinder that he always wore on a
cord around his neck, while Malk was doing the same.
Each of the cylinders was lathed to resemble a stack of
disks, with the gaps between each precisely as wide as
the disks, and the edges of the disks were visibly
engraved with tiny figures.
   Lepidopt held out his hand for Malk's, and Malk lifted
the chain off over his head and stood up to pass it
across to him.
   "This is premature," said Malk.
   Lepidopt shook his head decisively. "Should have
done it Sunday."
   He held the two cylinders up next to each other, with
their top and bottom faces exactly parallel -- the disk
edges of one precisely matched the grooves of the
other, and it looked as if he could have pushed them
together to some extent, like meshing two combs.
   "The engineering branch seems capable of precision
machining, anyway," Lepidopt said. "Let's hope they
remembered to do the text in mirror image." He pulled
the cord off over his head, untied the knot in it, and slid
it out through the ring in the top of the cylinder.
   Malk had sat down again and was lighting a cigarette
of his own, with shaky fingers. "Even if they didn't," he
said impatiently, "there's a mirror in the bathroom."
   "True, true. Okay, Ernie," Lepidopt told Bozzaris as he
unsnapped the chain on Malk's cylinder and drew it free
of the ring, "open the can and roll me out a flat sheet of
the stuff."
   As Bozzaris was prying open the can's lid, Malk asked,
"What's the movie, that the girl watched? That made
her burn up the VCR?"
   "Almost certainly it's a thing called A Woman of the
Sea," said Lepidopt, "filmed in 1926 by Josef von
Sternberg. There were a couple of versions, and this
would be the one edited by Charlie Chaplin, with scenes
Chaplin shot. The brain-eating bit is supposed to have
been only implied, subliminally. This Daphne is
obviously a sensitive girl; and tough -- I wouldn't want
to watch it." He looked at Malk and shrugged. "And I
guess I won't. It was never shown in theaters, and
Chaplin burned all the prints and negatives in '33, on
June 21, the first day of summer. Three years ago there
were still two people living who had seen the film, but
Paul Ivano died in '84, and Georgia Hale died in '85."
  "Obviously Chaplin didn't burn every copy," said Malk.
  "True. This was certainly his own copy, secretly kept
in spite of Einstein's advice."
  Bozzaris blinked at him. "Einstein said burn 'em all?"
  "Right," said Lepidopt. "This one was buried with
Chaplin, but Lieserl got it anyhow. You remember
Marrity said she went to Switzerland after Chaplin died.
I'm sure it's gone for good now, though-- Chaplin would
have destroyed the original film reels when he'd got it
transferred onto VHS tape."
  "Dangerous thing to leave lying around, apparently,"
said Malk.
  "Very."
  Malk spread his hands. "So what's it... good for? What
was it good for?"
  Lepidopt stared from fortyish Malk to late-twenties
Bozzaris. Twentieth-century men, he thought; Jews, at
least, so they know about more centuries and
perspectives and philosophies than just the local ones
they were born into, but still men who grew up
swimming in the complacent default assumptions of the
twentieth century.
  "You're Halomot," he reminded them. "Call to mind
your training, call to mind some of the things you've
seen."
  Bozzaris grinned. "We expect it to be weird."
  Lepidopt nodded, frowning. "Chaplin meant it to be a
device that would let a person travel in space-time. It's
not, quite, just by itself, but it apparently turns out to
be -- to have been -- a useful component of such a
device. Like a catapult to help get jets up to speed
coming off an aircraft carrier. The movie by itself would
get you up to speed but wouldn't provide an airplane.
It--"
  "Is that like a time machine?" interrupted Bozzaris.
  "The complete device that Lieserl had would be more
than that. But yes, it would be a time machine too."
  There was no expression on Bozzaris's face. "You
mean like so a person could go into the future or the
past."
  "Yes," said Lepidopt levelly, "and change things. In
1928 Einstein built the prototype, which could only
travel up and down, to points in the operator's future
and past, not sideways to points outside of his future
and past. And it was primitive -- apparently Einstein
almost killed himself when he used it in 1928 -- but
over the years Lieserl added expansions and
improvements, some of which were apparently provided
by the movie. The Chinese Theater slab was probably a
supplemental component of it too."
   Malk nodded and waved his hand for Lepidopt to
continue.
   "Chaplin," Lepidopt went on, "apparently meant the
movie to be a working time machine all by itself, just
like he did with his later movie, City Lights. He had
noticed that movies could evoke tangible energies out
of the psyches of their audiences, and in these two
movies he tried to direct those energies. He met
Einstein in January of '31, and attended some seances
with him, and when Chaplin went to London later in '31
he stood up the prime minister -- a dinner to be given
in Chaplin's honor at the House of Commons -- to run
to Berlin and confer with Einstein again. It seems that
Einstein didn't so much say it couldn't be done as that it
would be a very bad idea."
   "Why did Chaplin want a time machine?" asked
Bozzaris.
   Lepidopt pursed his lips. "His first son died three days
after being born, in 1919. Two weeks later Chaplin
started shooting the movie The Kid, in which his Tramp
character has adopted an orphan boy who the
authorities are trying to take away from him. But
apparently that... vicarious cinematic resurrection wasn't
enough. Chaplin wanted to go back and -- somehow --
save his actual son."
   Bozzaris had used a water glass to roll a chunk of the
blue Play-Doh into a sheet on the tabletop. "Ready for
you here." He looked up and frowned. 'Wasn't Chaplin's
body dug up again, and held for ransom?"
   "Yes," said Lepidopt, stepping away from the wall.
"By two idiots who wanted money to open a garage.
They were caught, and Chaplin's coffin was restored to
the Vevey Cemetery, but the police never caught the
woman who had coerced the two men into it, and of
course she got away with the videocassette that had
been in the coffin."
   Malk frowned at the sheet of Play-Doh. "If the movie
and the footprint slab are improvements Lieserl added,"
he said, "what's the basic engine?"
   Bozzaris got up from the table, and Lepidopt sat down
in his chair, across from Malk.
   "It's a machine," Lepidopt said absently, hefting the
cylinders, "small enough to fit into a suitcase,
apparently. Einstein referred to it as his maschinchen,
little machine, and from his papers we gather that part
of its function -- God knows why -- is to measure very
tiny voltages. Whatever it is, I think it's in Newport
Beach, or was, on Sunday. Tomorrow at dawn Ernie and
I will go look for it."
   "The cab," said Malk. "The card."
   Lepidopt smiled and nodded. "Right. I called the cab
company and pretended to be LAPD, aiming to find out
which airport Lieserl went to, which airline. But the
cabdriver reported taking an old woman with one
suitcase to Newport Beach, not to any airport. Balboa
and Twenty-first, right by the Newport Pier. It may still
be there, some pieces of it anyway, these thirty-six
hours later."
   "That's this morning," said Bozzaris.
   "Young people don't need much sleep," said Lepidopt
absently.
   Now, carefully, he pressed one of the cylinders into
the soft blue surface of the Play-Doh, and then he rolled
it slowly away from him, maintaining the pressure. After
he had rolled it across four inches, he lifted it away --
imprinted on the blue surface now were five sunken
bands, with fragments of raised letters visible in them.
Then he lined up the other cylinder and just as carefully
rolled it across the same area, and its disk edges
imprinted the raised lines that had been left untouched
by the first cylinder.
   When he lifted the second cylinder away, the Play-
Doh showed a one-by-four-inch impression with tiny
raised characters on it; the top rows of figures were
repeated at the bottom, for he had rolled out more than
one full turn of the cylinders, to make sure he got
everything. The figures were Hebrew letters.
   "Do you need a magnifying glass?" asked Bozzaris.
   "Yes," said Lepidopt, though already, squinting, he
had managed to make out the Hebrew characters that
spelled "1967" and "Rephidim stone" and "change the
past."
   The Rephidim stone again, he thought. Where Moses
struck the rock to get water for the Israelites, in the
Sinai desert -- the original destination of the 55th
Parachute Brigade, during the Six-Day War in 1967, for
which we were issued the radiation-film badges that
were actually amulets.
   He sighed and flexed his maimed hand. "So get me a
magnifying glass, would you, Ernie?" he said.
                  ACT TWO
  Ye Shall Not Surely Die
      And he walked in all the sins of his father,
      which he had done before him...
      -- 1 KINGS 1 5:3

                     Twelve
Derek Marrity wasn't going to go near Arrowhead
Pediatric Hospital -- no, sir -- even though he knew
that's where Frank Marrity would be right now.
   He needed to see Frank Marrity one more time, to tell
him some things to do -- and if Frank paid attention
and did even some of what Derek would tell him, it
should make the difference between living comfortably,
on the one hand, and living in a twenty-four-foot trailer
in a chain-link-bordered trailer park, on the other. But
tonight would not be the night to approach him about it.
   He rolled his left hand on the steering wheel to look
at his watch, then with his right hand pushed the stem
to light its face. Nearly 1:30 in the morning. Not a good
time to be driving drunk, and with no believable driver's
license, past the empty floodlit lots and the stray dogs
and the dark car-repair garages of Base Line Boulevard
in San Bernardino.
   The conversation between Daphne and Frank Marrity
would have ended at least an hour ago, and Frank
Marrity would be asleep by now in his truck in the
hospital parking lot.
   Derek knew vividly what had taken place at the
hospital. Frank Marrity had fallen asleep over Tristram
Shandy in a chair in Daphne's room, but he had
awakened when a man peeked in at the door of the
room; the man had apologized and walked away down
the corridor, but by that time Daphne had been awake
too.
   She had been uncommunicative before she'd gone to
sleep, presumably woozy from the anesthetic; but now
she had seemed alert, and not happy to see her father
in the room.
   There was a pad on the desklike table by her bed,
Derek knew, and Daphne had written on it, u cut my
throat in letters that tore the sheet of paper in a couple
of places.
   Frank Marrity, poor doomed soul, had said something
like, "I had to, you were choking." coughing, she wrote.
"Daphne," Marrity had protested, "no, you weren't
coughing, you were choking. You would have died. I
love you, I saved your life." She'd had to tear off the
torn sheet of paper to write more, and then she had
written: I was OK -- u cut my throat -- dont want to be
alone w u. And of course after he had protested again
that he had done it to save her, that he loved her, she
had written I hate you.
   At that point, Derek knew, Frank Marrity had
stumbled blindly out to his truck and eventually gone to
sleep on the seat, with some serious drinking indicated
in the near future.
  Probably one gang or the other had put microphones
in the hospital room, and taped Marrity's half of the
conversation. Derek Marrity didn't need to hear a
recording of it.
  One pair of taillights shone on the dark highway a
hundred yards ahead of him, and in his rearview mirror
two swaying headlights were coming up fast. It didn't
look like a police car -- probably a drunk. Good, thought
Derek as he steered into the slower right-hand lane,
any cops who are out here tonight will go after him, and
ignore this sedate old Rambler. If it is old. I forget.
  Then a new white Honda came up fast from a dark
street on the right and rocked into a squealing right
turn directly in front of Derek; he wrenched the wheel
to the left, but suddenly the car that had been a
hundred yards ahead was braking hard, and looming up
fast in front of him in the left lane; and the car speeding
up from behind swung wide to the left, as if to pass
Derek, but instead of shooting on past in the empty
oncoming lanes, its hood dipped as it abruptly slowed.
  Derek stamped on the brake and the tires screeched
as he braced himself against the wheel. The old
Rambler rocked to a halt, shaking on its suspension. His
vodka bottle tumbled out from under the seat and
rapped his left heel.
  His face was cold with sudden sweat. They've got me
bracketed, he thought tensely -- I could shift to
reverse, but I know I wouldn't get away in this old
wreck. I can talk to them, I can make a deal with them
-- they won't be rough, they've got no reason to be
rough with an old man--
   The Rambler was still shaking, in fact it was shaking
so rapidly that the motion was a harsh vibration now,
accompanied by a loud rattling hiss like a rain of fine
gravel on the roof and the hood and even in the
ashtray, though the windshield showed empty black
night; only because it moved so fast did he notice the
needle on the temperature gauge swing to the right.
   And somehow he was getting an electric shock from
the plastic steering wheel.
   Derek's heart was racing, and he kept his foot
pressed on the brake as he would cling to a tree trunk
in a hurricane.
   Then the shaking and the noise and the electric
current were gone, and he almost fell forward against
the wheel as if they'd been a pressure he'd been leaning
against.
   The Rambler was stopped, though the engine was still
running. He made himself uncramp his hands from the
wheel and focus his eyes out through the windshield,
and he saw that his car was positioned diagonally
across the center divider lines in the middle of the
highway.
   No other cars were visible at all, up or down the wide
light-pooled lanes; no lighted signs, just an anonymous
band of blue neon far away in the dark. The night was
perfectly silent except for the grumble of the Rambler's
idling engine. Shakily he reached for the key to turn it
off, then noticed that the temperature-gauge needle
was back down in its usual ten o'clock position.
   Did I pass out? he wondered, his forehead still chilly
with sweat. And did the guys in those other cars just
leave?
   Derek started the engine and cautiously lifted his foot
from the brake and stepped on the gas pedal, and the
car jumped forward. For a moment he thought the
stress must have knocked a valve or lifter back into its
proper position, and that the car was running
uncharacteristically well; then he realized that it was his
right leg that was performing smoothly.
   His heart was still hammering in his chest, and he
tried to take deep breaths. When he had straightened
the car in the left lane and got it moving steadily at
thirty miles per hour, he reached down and pressed his
fist against his right thigh.
   It didn't hurt at all.
   He steered the Rambler across the right lane to the
curb in front of a lightless cinder-block thrift store,
clanked the shift lever into park, and cautiously climbed
out of the car, leaving the engine running.
   In the chilly night air he took two steps out into the
street, then two steps back. Then he stood on his right
foot and hopped around in a circle.
   His teeth were cold, for his mouth was open; he
realized that he was grinning like a fool.
   He did three deep-knee bends, then crouched and
crossed his arms and tried to kick like a dancing
Russian. He tumbled over onto his back on the cold
asphalt, but he was laughing and bicycling both legs in
the air.
  At last he rolled lithely to his feet and slid back into
the driver's seat.
  "I'm as giddy as a drunken man," he panted, quoting
Ebeneezer Scrooge.
  He took a deep breath and let it out, staring at the
dark low buildings and roadside pepper trees that
dwindled with perspective in the big volume of night air
in front of him.
  But in fact he wasn't drunk. This was sobriety -- not
the shaky, anxious sobriety of a few hours or days, but
the easy clarity of months without the stuff.
  She must have died after all, he thought. I can go to
the hospital now. And -- and I no longer have any
reason to hate hospitals! And there are lots and lots of
things I've got to tell Frank Marrity -- he's going to be a
very wealthy, healthy, contented man.



North of the San Bernardino city limits, Waterman
Avenue becomes Rim of the World Highway as it curls
steeply up into the mountains around Lake Arrowhead.
The turns are sharp and the drops below the guardrails
are often precipitous; the steep mountain shoulders are
furred with towering pine trees, but at 3:00 a.m. the
only view was of the lights of San Bernardino, far below
to the south, dimmed and reddened now by veils of
smoke. Forest fires on the other side of the mountain lit
the fumey sky like a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Hell.
Aurora Infernalis, thought Denis Rascasse.
   The bus was pulled off the highway at Panorama
Point, a wide sand-paved rest area, and Rascasse and
Golze stood in the smoky darkness outside the bus, a
yard back from the knee-high rail. The abyss below the
stout railing was called Devil's Canyon, East Fork.
   Golze glanced back toward the bus. "How's our boy,
Fred?" he called.
   From one of the opened windows in the dark bus
came the driver's voice: "Breathing, through his nose."
   "No obstruction to closing the lid, if somebody pulls in
here?"
   "Nothing's in the way," said Fred. "He's entirely in the
bin, and I can close it quietly."
   They had picked the young man up at Foothill and
Euclid an hour ago. He was a student at one of the
Claremont colleges, and he had stepped up into the bus
with no hesitation when Fred had asked him to point
out the 210 freeway on a Thomas Brothers map-book
page. Now he was bound and gagged with duct tape.
   Golze nodded and peered down at the glowing
crisscrossing dotted lines that were San Bernardino's
streets. "Where's your focus?" he asked Rascasse.
   Rascasse pointed slightly west of south, toward the
largely unlighted patch that was the California State
University at San Bernardino campus. "Right behind the
library."
   Half an hour ago he had carefully laid on the grass
down there a square of oiled glass with his handprints
and a few of his white hairs pressed onto the slick
surface of it.
   Soon Rascasse would kneel down by the railing here,
step out of his body, and let his astral projection partly
assume the sensorium of the Rascasse focus down
there behind the college library. At the same time he
would still be aware of kneeling up here beside the bus
-- like a beam of light split by a slanted half-silvered
mirror.
   Rascasse would then be occupying two finitely
different time shells -- the minutely slower time three
thousand feet below and this infinitesimally accelerated
time halfway up the mountain. He would, briefly, be
disattached from the confines of the four-dimensional
continuum.
   Golze would then cut the throat of the young man in
the bus, and the fresh-spilled blood -- the end-point of
one of the lifelines on the freeway, the release of the
young man's accumulated mass energy-would in that
instant have drawn the hungry attention of one of the
Aeons who existed in the five-dimensional continuum;
and that creature would be aware of Rascasse, who for
the distance of a second or two would be protruding out
of the "flat" four-dimensional fabric like a thread
pinched up out of a sheet of cloth.
   And Rascasse would leap and cling to the bodiless
spirit, mind to incomprehensibly alien mind, and look
out at the unphysical landscape that he would then
perceive surrounding him; and since space and volume
didn't exist there, it would be just as accurate to call it
the landscape he would be surrounding. Lifescape,
fatescape.
   He would be out of his body for no more than a
second by his watch, but time didn't pass on the
freeway -- an hour out of his body, a day, a year,
wouldn't give him a better comprehension of that non-
space.
   For that timeless moment Rascasse's perspective
would be freed of things in the way -- viewed from this
bigger space, nothing in the normal four-dimensional
continuum could be in front of anything else, or under
it, or hidden inside it; and seeing a man or a car at one
moment would not make it impossible for him to see
them simultaneously at other moments too. Golze had
said once, when he had stepped back down into
sequential time, that it was nearly the perspective of
God. And he had seemed both wistful and angry to have
to say nearly.



The cold wind from over the top of the mountain behind
Rascasse smelled of pine sap and wood smoke, and he
was shivering when the radio on his belt buzzed softly.
He unsnapped it and said, "Prime here."
   "Quarte here," said a voice from the radio, frail and
tinny under the vast night sky. "You said it might get
surreal, and not to hesitate to tell you about crazy
things happening. Uh, man and superman."
   Rascasse switched the frequency-selector dial on the
radio. "Right," he said into the microphone. "So what
happened?"
   "I was in the lead car," came the voice from the
radio, "and after the number three car swerved in from
the south, number two came up from behind and
blocked him on the north. Then in my rearview I saw
the Ra -- the--"
   "The subject car, the quarry, go ahead."
   "Right. It suddenly accelerated toward me faster
than... any subject car like that should be able to. And
he didn't hit me, he should have, but he didn't, but I
heard a huge bang, like an M-80. Uh, Caesar and
Cleopatra."
   Rascasse switched the frequency again, impatiently.
"Go on," he said.
   "Well, then he was gone. I mean, the car was just
gone, not visible anywhere up or down the highway,
and not in any of the lots to the sides. The scanner says
the subject car is about three miles northeast of us
right now. But the weird thing is, the guys in the
number two and three cars got out, and it turns out
each of them saw the, the subject car suddenly
accelerate toward him! Like the subject car split into
three cars, each shooting straight at one of us!"
   "Arms and the man," said Rascasse quietly, almost
absently.
   On the new frequency, Rascasse went on, "Find him
again, but this time wait until he's out of the car, and
then ghosts."
   Rascasse switched frequencies again, but after
several seconds realized that the field man had not
caught the cue. "Dammit," he whispered, and switched
back to the previous frequency.
  "--try that," said the field man, and then his signal
was gone.
  "Shit." Rascasse switched the dial back to its previous
setting, and the man was saying, "Are you here? Was
that a cue? There's no ghosts on the list."
  "Never mind," snapped Rascasse, "we're here now.
Hit him with a trank dart when he doesn't know you're
onto him."
  "Okay. What was it about ghosts?"
  "It's--a Shaw play that wasn't on your list. Never
mind. Just bring him to me. That's all."
  " Kay. Later." And the signal was gone again.
Rascasse hooked the radio back onto his belt and took a
deep breath of the cold, smoke-spicy air.
  "Ghosts is by Ibsen," said Golze.
  "I know, I know. Shut up."
  "I guess that old guy in the Rambler isn't just some
relative in town for the funeral."
  "Shut up, I said." Rascasse exhaled, almost whistling.
"What happened there? When our fellows tried to grab
him, and his car disappeared."
  "It wasn't bilocation," said Golze. "Trilocation, that is
-- because the car went in three directions too, not just
the man... assuming the man was in the car; he might
have 'ported away an instant before. I would have, if I
was him, if I'd had that option. But that wouldn't
explain three apparent cars."
   "Does it sound as if he's used the Einstein-Maric
artifact?"
   "That wouldn't explain the multiple cars either, or at
least I can't see how it would. Maybe Charlotte
shouldn't kill Marrity. He could know some things."
   "A decision made is a debt unpaid," said Rascasse.
"And the Mossad will have briefed him, with
compulsions, on what to tell other agencies. The
daughter will be more valuable to us isolated. And," he
added, waving at the bus behind them, "it wants this
offering from each of us -- our dues -- and Charlotte
has been in arrears."
   "Our souls."
   Rascasse shrugged. "Anything that would interfere
with our chosen polarity."
   "Does it really count as binding payment if you're
drunk when you pay it?" Golze asked. "The rest of us
don't drink alcohol. Charlotte does."
   "For some people, and Charlotte's one of them, drink
is a valuable disassembly factor. But once it's
disassembled her, she'll have to leave it behind too."
   "That'll be a day. You were kind of sweet on her once,
weren't you?"
   "Irrelevantly."
   Golze pulled a lock-back knife from his pocket and
opened the blade. "She thinks she'll be allowed to go
back, remake her life."
   "Do you care what she imagines?"
  Golze laughed fondly. "Care? No. Note." He waved the
knife toward the bus. "My dues are paid up. Fred!" he
added, speaking louder.
  "Yo," came Fred's voice through the open bus
window.
  "Ask your boy if he's a Christian."
  "He nods," called Fred after a moment.
  "Aw, too bad. Tell him he's gift-wrapped for the
Devil."
  "Cruelty is another good disassembly factor,"
remarked Rascasse. "But it will eventually have to be
given up too."
  "Don't anthropomorphize me," said Golze with a
laugh. "Have to be given up? 'Man can't will what he
wills.' I'm a roulette ball."
  Rascasse shook his head. "Schopenhauer. Philosophy
will be left behind too. Even rational thought,
eventually."
  "Can't wait."
  "You'll go far. It's time for you to get aboard the bus."
  Golze laughed softly and trudged away across the
packed sand and disappeared around the lightless front
of the bus. A few moments later the bus shifted
perceptibly as he stepped aboard on the far side.
  We need to succeed at this soon, Rascasse thought as
he began taking deep breaths in anticipation of stepping
outside his body. I need access to the bottom half of
the chalice.
  He shuffled to the guardrail and knelt in front of it. It
was a horizontal wooden pole supported at every ten
feet by a steel stanchion, and he leaned his chest
against it, draping his arms over the far side.
   He had been twelve, the first time he had left his
body; he had simply got out of bed one morning and
looked back and seen his body still lying in the bed.
Terror had driven him back into it, and for the first time
he had experienced reentering his body: like a tight bag
being pulled over his head and sliding down his arms
and legs and eventually closing over his toes. A few
years later he had experienced it again, while breathing
through the ether-sprinkled mask during a dental
operation. And by the time he was twenty, he had been
able to step out of his body at will, with only the
faintest reflexive twitch of vertigo.
   He felt a flash of cold now, and then he was standing
beside his kneeling body, carefully noting that it was
balanced and leaning firmly against the guardrail. He
flexed the fingers of his right hand, and saw the
kneeling body's fingers spread wide.
   He leaped forward into empty space, and then he
could not only still feel the guardrail against his chest,
but also smell the grass of the college lawn and feel oily
glass under his fingers -- and then he was rocked by
the explosion of energy sweeping through higher
dimensions as the young man on the bus gave up the
ghost, and Rascasse was on the freeway.
   Here time was distance, and he was unable to move
anything but his attention.
   By a perception that did not involve light he could see
the bus, and Golze and Fred and the dead boy inside it
-- and he could see them from all sides at once. Even
their organs and arteries, and the valves and crankshaft
of the bus, and the secret sap and inner bark of the
surrounding trees, were as clearly visible as the
mountain. And he could see all sides of the mountain,
the fires on the northern slopes and the compacted
gravel under the asphalt of the roads.
   He moved away from this close perspective, and saw
the men now as zigzagging lines, their recent actions
and their future actions laid out like rows of tipped
dominoes, blurring out of focus at the far ends; the
moon was a long white blade in the sky. Golze was
beside Rascasse's body, telling him "Ibsen," and Golze
was also climbing into the bus, and cutting the young
man's throat, and leaving the bus and talking to
Rascasse again, and the bus itself was driving out of the
Panorama Point rest area, making a loop with the trail
of earlier versions of itself driving in.
   This was the perspective of the crows in the Grimm
brothers's fairy tale "Faithful John" -- flying high above
the surface-bound characters and able to see things
previously encountered and things still to be met.
   The young man in the bus was a line of blended
figures like Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a
Staircase, and the line ended at the point where the
young man's astral body made a turbulence that spread
into the sky.
   It was a motionless shock wave, and Rascasse's
attention followed it outward, away from the precise
time and place of the young man's death.
   And Rascasse wasn't alone. A living thing that
seemed to consist of buzzing or corrugations was with
him, its thoughts as evident to him as the inner
workings of the bus but far more alien to him than the
courses of the stars or the repetitive patterns of cracks
in the stone of the mountains.
   Rascasse knew at least that it was summoned by the
human sacrifice.
   The living thing occupied a region that extended far in
a dozen directions from the early morning hours of
August 18, 1987, and Rascasse's disembodied self
overlapped the thing's self.
   Lines like arcing sparks or woven threads stretched
across a vast vacuum, and he could discern the thread
that was his own time line, with several exploded
segments along its extent; he was occupying the cloud
around one of the ruptured sections now, just as he was
occupying the others in his previous and future
excursions onto the freeway.
   Just as a photograph of lunar craters can seem to
show domes and ridges until the eye's perspective shifts
to see craters and cracks, the arcs or threads were also
visible as tiny, tightly wound coils, like knots in an
infinitely tall and wide stack of carpets.
   In the shorter wavelengths of his attention, the
lifeline of Albert Einstein was discernible -- extending
from the band that included Ulm, Germany, in the
region of 1879 to the band encompassing New Jersey in
1955.
   Rascasse had paid attention to the Einstein line
before, and knew what he would see. Even viewed as a
stretched-out arc rather than a coil, the Einstein line
was a tangled mess; it intersected with a number of
other lines, one of which showed branches near the
intersections -- looked at from another perspective,
these branching lines could be seen as two lines
merging into one, but Rascasse was imposing time's
futureward arrow onto the vista -- and so the branches
were childbirths, offspring.
  Einstein's second wife was his first cousin, whose
maiden name was Einstein, and their lifelines from 1919
through her death in 1936 were a hopelessly
interconnected hall of mirrors; and from the midst of
that confusion a third thread emerged in 1928, in the
region of the Swiss Alps, though it didn't seem to arise
from one of those branchings that indicated a childbirth.
  Rascasse's attention was on that spontaneously
arising thread. It went on to intersect with another
thread at several points, and showed two offspring
branches -- close focus indicated that these two were
the lifelines of Frank Marrity and Moira Bradley -- and
then the strange thread ended in 1955, in New Jersey,
so close to the end of the Einstein thread that they
almost seemed to have merged. They were, in fact,
extraordinarily similar.
  Rascasse shifted his attention forward in the direction
of increasing entropy, to Frank Marrity's adulthood.
  Marrity's thread intersected with another in 1974, and
the daughter's resulting branch was distinct for a
distance of a dozen years; but in 1987 a new thread
was in their cluster too, and Rascasse's attention
couldn't make out where that new thread had come
from either. Whatever it was, whoever it was, it made a
confusion of Marrity's lifeline--just as the cousin-wife's
line had made a confusion of Einstein's. There appeared
to be a rupture in Marrity's lifeline there in 1987, or
perhaps the rupture was in the newly intruding thread;
they were so close and so similar that Rascasse couldn't
be sure.
   Rascasse occupied the tight-focus end of his
attention, and he saw the Marritys' newcomer as a
zigzagging line in San Bernardino in a narrow section of
1987; and, sampled at several points, the newcomer's
line was in a sequence of cars that were all the green
Rambler station wagon. But even in the car the
newcomer was hard to follow -- at least once the
Rambler seemed to end and then begin again in a
different place.
   None of this was easy to perceive. The whole 1987
region was chaotic, with thousands of lifelines blurring
into a cloudy unity, especially at the bands that were
Mount Shasta and Taos, New Mexico. This haze was the
Harmonic Convergence, turbulent with virtual
personalities that arose as points in the psychic fog but
that extended no farther in time.
   Lieserl Maric's time line bent impossibly in this cloud:
Instead of moving forward in the direction of time, it
bent sharply sideways, perpendicular, and
simultaneously occupied miles and acres of space, and
then ended in the static tornado around Mount Shasta.
She had jumped out of the four-dimensional fabric, but
to move through space instead of through time.
   Somehow it seemed that she had ridden a golden
helix from Pasadena to Mount Shasta; and Rascasse
realized that in cross section the helix would be a
swastika shape.
   Rascasse's focus on the 1987 maelstrom had tilted
him back toward that time, and he could feel his
attention losing scope, narrowing down. The bus was a
looping track through the area that was late summer,
like a particle of dust enacting Brownian motion in a
glass of water, and he could see the little loop in its
track that was its stop halfway up the mountain at
Panorama Point.
   He let himself fall back into specific spatial locality
and the conveyor belt of sequential time.
   He was on his knees, and his arms were clinging to
the railing post. He had been in this position for so
short a time that his knees didn't yet ache from
pressing against the hard, sandy surface.
   He got to his feet, and was standing, staring out at
the lights of San Bernardino when Golze came trudging
up from behind.
   "Did you see my tattoo?" Golze asked.
   "I saw our man in the green Rambler," said Rascasse
shortly. "He doesn't appear to have been born -- he
simply showed up here and now within the last few
days."
   Golze whistled, all flippancy gone. "Now that could be
the old lady's device at work. I thought he was Frank
Marrity's father."
   "No, he's not. I can't imagine who he is. But speaking
of Marrity's father, he also doesn't show a mother or a
birth -- it looks as if he simply appeared in 1928, in the
Swiss Alps -- but he died in New Jersey in 1955. I
remember it. We killed him."
  "So Derek Marrity's dead? Been dead for thirty-two
years?"
  "Right."
  "And he had no mother or birth? I thought he was
Lisa Marrity's son. Lieserl Maric's. Einstein's grandson."
  "No, Lieserl... adopted him."
  "So why did you kill him, in '55? You keep killing all
these interesting people, rather than talking to them.
You sure you don't want to call off Charlotte?"
  "Yes, I'm sure. We did talk to him. We concluded that
he would be more use to us dead than alive -- though
in fact he has not been much use so far."
  "How did we think he would be of use to us dead?"
  "As a guide, an oracle, because of his origin. And he
might yet serve as that." Rascasse turned and started
back toward the bus. He paused in front of the folded-
open door. "I think we should dump the body of our...
toll, right here."
  "Sure," said Golze, grinning, "we leave a trail of
corpses. Like Hansel and Gretel, so we can find our way
back."

                     Thirteen
Frank Marrity awoke in the hospital-room chair when
the aluminum-framed window had just begun to pale
with dawn. Daphne was asleep under the thin-looking
blankets, the IV tube still taped to her elbow, and he
was impatient to get her out of here.
  He reached into his shirt pocket for the NSA man's
business card, and pulled out two cards. One was the
NSA man's, blank except for the 800 telephone number,
and the other was Libra Nosamalo Morrison's.
Veterinary Medicine.
  I should have given her card to Jackson, he thought,
along with the taxi company's card. Or maybe I should
give Jackson's card to her. Who are any of these
people? Libra Nosamalo -- deliver us from evil.
  He stood up and stretched, then crossed to Daphne's
table and wrote on the top sheet of her pad, Went for a
smoke--back in five. He laid the pad on her blanket.
  He walked past the nurse's station to the elevators,
and as he was crossing the carpeted ground-floor lobby,
nodding to the bored-looking woman behind the desk,
he already had a pack of Dunhills and a Bic lighter in his
hands -- and he was surprised to see Libra Nosamalo
Morrison herself, outside the window glass, standing
beside a blocky concrete bench and smoking again. She
was looking away from him, out toward the still dark
parking lot.
  He shuffled to a stop.
  She was at St. Bernardine's yesterday afternoon, he
thought. What is she doing at this hospital now, this
children's hospital? Well-- Dunhills, Milton, Housman,
Laphroaig scotch -- obviously she's here to talk to me.
At about five in the morning.
  Don't talk to her, Jackson had said.
  Marrity took two steps backward, then turned to go
back to the elevators.
  But behind him he heard her voice call, "Frank?" and
he stopped, and then turned around.
  She had stepped inside, and as soon as he looked
squarely at her she turned her head toward him and
waved, smiling. She was still wearing her sunglasses --
in fact she was still wearing the black jeans and the
burgundy blouse. Her right hand was in her purse,
possibly groping for a pack of cigarettes. Was she going
to ask him to go outside and smoke with her?
  A man was pushing through the door behind her, but
Marrity's attention was on the woman, who now pulled
a big steel revolver out of her purse.
  As Marrity watched, the gun was raised to point at his
face.
  "Frank!" screamed the man behind her, lunging
forward and apparently punching her in the back; her
arm swung wide in the instant that Marrity's ears were
shocked by the hard pop of a gunshot. Glass broke and
clattered behind him.
  The man behind her was his father, and the old man
was staring hard at the blue carpet. "Don't look at her,
Frank!" the old man yelled, nearly as loud as before.
"She's blind if you don't look at her!" Derek Marrity
spun to face the woman behind the reception desk. "Get
down!" he shouted at her.
  Marrity crouched and looked toward the hallway that
led back to the elevators.
  "Frank!" called the woman in sunglasses. "Look at
me!"
  It reminded Marrity of what the cartoon figure had
said to Daphne a few hours ago--Say I can come in,
Daphne! -- and he looked instead at one of the dozen
blue couches and dove behind it.
  She fired two shots anyway, and one of them made
the couch jump.
  "Somebody look at me!" she yelled.
  "You're facing the elevators!" shouted Derek Marrity,
apparently at the Libra Nosamalo woman. "We're
behind you!"
  "Liar," she said, and two more shots shook the lobby
air.
  If she steps around this couch, she'll have a clear
shot at me, Marrity thought. He braced himself to sprint
for the hallway, but in that instant he heard the doors
clack open, and then his father called, "She left. She
couldn't see. Go to the elevator hallway without looking
back."
  Marrity got to his feet and made himself look only
toward the elevator doors as he hurried out of the
lobby. His father was beside him, hardly panting. He
seemed much less sickly now than he had yesterday.
  "And out the back," the old man said. He even had a
suntan now.
  Marrity hit the 2, button. "No, I've got to get
Daphne."
  "Frank, she's dead, there's nothing you can do for
her. You've got to get out of here."
  ... she's dead...
  Marrity's heart froze, and the next thing he was
consciously aware of was jumping up the stairs two at a
time. Behind and below him he heard his father bang
aside the stairway door, which hadn't had time to close.
  Marrity slammed open the door to the second floor
and raced past the nurse's station to Daphne's room;
and then he sagged in re -lief when he saw her sitting
up in bed and blinking at him in alarm.
  "You're -- all right?" he said breathlessly. "Nobody's
been in here?"
  "I'm fine," she said hoarsely. Then she whispered,
"Was a woman shooting at you, or did I dream that?
No, nobody's been in here."
  "Daph," he said, "I think it's time you checked out."
He turned to the closet and began yanking her jeans
and blouse off the hangers. His face was cold with
sweat.
  "Right now?" she whispered. "I've got an IV!"
  "We'll get a nurse to take it out. Or I will. If I can do a
tracheotomy, I can -- but we're not--"
  Footsteps slapped on the hallway linoleum, and
Marrity stepped back to stand in front of Daphne, but it
was his father who strode into the room.
  "They'll have moved her--" the old man began, and
then his eyes focused on Daphne.
  "I don't understand," he said clearly.
  And then Marrity turned and threw himself across
Daphne, for his ears had been concussed by a
deafening bang, and his father had collapsed against
the door frame and begun to slide to the floor.
   No further explosions followed, though over the
ringing in his ears Marrity thought he heard a crisp roar,
like a TV set on a blank channel with the volume turned
way up.
   Marrity looked fearfully over his shoulder -- but
though his father had tumbled apparently unconscious
onto the linoleum floor, nobody had appeared behind
him. The roaring had stopped, if it had ever been a real
external noise. His father's slack face was pale and old.
   With trembling fingers Marrity peeled the tape off
Daphne's forearm and drew the IV needle out of her
wrist. She was probably deafened too, so he just
shoved her clothes into her hands.
   She started to sit up, then winced and said, "Ribs!
Help me up!"
   He got an arm behind her shoulders and lifted her to
a sitting position, and she quickly slid out of her hospital
gown and scrambled into the jeans and blouse with no
further hindrance from her cracked ribs. She knelt by
the closet to pick up her shoes in one hand, and then
nodded at Marrity.
   Nurses were shouting questions, but Marrity held
Daphne's elbow and marched her toward the far-
stairway exit door.
   "I'll fetch the truck," Marrity said loudly as they
scuffed down the steel-edged cement stairs. "You wait
by the door and hop in when I pull up."
  Daphne was ahead of him, nimble on her bare feet.
In something like her normal voice she asked,
"Shouldn't we do something about your father?"
  "Like get him to a hospital?"
  At the bottom of the stairwell, Marrity pushed open
the door and peered out; no one was in sight along the
brightly lit carpeted hall, so he led Daphne to the
exterior door at the near end of the hall.
  "One minute," he told her.
  He stepped outside and glanced in both directions,
but he didn't see the woman in sunglasses, and so far
there were no police or security guards in sight. There
were no shadows yet, but the sky was bright blue over
the mountains in the east. He took a deep breath of the
chilly air and then ran across the parking lot to the Ford
pickup truck.
  It started on the first twist of the ignition key, and
without giving it a moment to warm up he banged it
into reverse and swung out of the parking space; then
he had pulled the lever down into first and gunned the
truck across the empty lanes to the door, and only
when Daphne had burst out of the door and hopped up
into the passenger seat did he realize that he had been
holding his breath.
  "What's going on?" asked Daphne, slamming her
door.
  "Somebody tried to shoot me, a few minutes ago,"
Marrity said as he made a right turn out of the hospital
parking lot. His hands were trembling again, and he
gripped the steering wheel tightly. He was panting. "You
didn't dream it. Put your seat belt on, and keep it away
from your neck. A woman, with sunglasses--"
  "The one you told Mr. Jackson about." Daphne pulled
the spring-loaded strap across her chest and fumbled
beside her for the buckle. "He said don't talk to her.
Headlights?"
  Marrity pulled out the headlights knob, though it
made no difference in visibility. "That's the one. I didn't
say a word to her, she just started shooting. And then
my father said you were dead, and he was -- you saw
-- real surprised to see that you were alive. He saved
my life," he added. "Knocked her gun aside."
  "I hope he's not dead."
  "I do too, I guess."



"Where do we go?" Daphne hummed a few rising and
falling notes. "My voice seems okay."
   "I don't know." Marrity looked into the rearview
mirror as he made a third right turn, onto westbound
Highland Avenue now, and saw no cars at all in the
shadowed lanes under the brightening sky, just a
couple of big grocery-delivery trucks receding away
ahead of him. "Nobody's following us. Yes, you sound
like your usual self."
   "Maybe home?"
   "Maybe. Or -- I'm gonna turn south now, and see if
that new car back there turns left too."
   The light was red at D Street, but he turned left into a
doughnut-shop parking lot, drove diagonally right
through the lot and made a left onto D Street. The truck
rocked on its springs.
  Daphne was twisted around under her seat belt,
kneeling on the seat to look behind them through the
camper shell's back window.
  "He turned south too, Dad," she said quietly as she
sat down again. "I think there's two people in the car."
  "Yes," agreed Marrity, forcing himself to speak
calmly. And the passenger, he thought, is wearing
sunglasses.
  His father had said, She's blind if you don't look at
her.
  "Don't look at them, Daph," he said tightly.
  There was a police station five or six blocks ahead, he
remembered.
  He could see now that the car behind was a tan
Honda -- it was gaining on them, clearly meaning to
pass. Marrity could believe that the person in the
passenger seat would have some kind of full-automatic
gun this time. He tromped on the gas and the truck
surged forward, but the Honda was still gaining, edging
to the left.
  There was no way that Marrity would be able outrun it
to the police station.
  "Daph," he said quickly, "can you picture the radiator
of a car?" The truck's engine was roaring, but he didn't
want to shift to third because in that gear it tended to
slack off for a few moments before regaining power.
  "Sure. Are they going to shoot us?"
   "Yes. Can you grab the radiator of their car, without
looking at it, the way you grabbed Rumbold on
Sunday?"
   Daphne frowned and screwed her eyes shut, then
after a moment opened her eyes and peered uncertainly
over her shoulder.
   The Honda was nearly even with them, but swinging
out wide into the empty oncoming lanes -- to prevent
Marrity from side-swiping them, presumably, and to
have a clear shot even if Marrity braked hard.
   Which he did. In the same instant that he
straightened his leg to force the brake pedal all the way
down, the hood of the Honda exploded up in a huge
starburst of white steam.
   Marrity had to concentrate on his own vehicle. The
truck was shuddering and fishtailing as the tires
screamed on the pavement, and even in the confusion
Marrity remembered to pull the gearshift lever down
into first, so that he was able to let the brake up and
steer quickly through the cloud of tire smoke into an
alley on the right, and then speed down the alley with
his exhaust battering back from a row of closed garage
doors.
   He glanced sideways at Daphne, but the sudden hard
pressure of the seat belt didn't seem to have hurt her
ribs, and the stitches in her throat weren't bleeding.
   "They had a gun!" she said shrilly. "I had to look! It
was pointed right at both of us!"
   Smoke swirled under the windshield -- the ashtray
was on fire.
   "Just push it closed," Marrity said, "it'll go out on its
own. And don't yell through your patched throat."
   At E Street he made a left turn fast enough to set the
tires chirruping, and accelerated.
   "I had to grab something here to brace against," said
Daphne more quietly as she pushed the ashtray closed
with her foot. Marrity was glad to see she had managed
at some point to pull her sneakers on.
   "I think the ashtray's kind of melted," she added.
   "That's okay. You were smart to think of grabbing the
ashtray."
   "I'm sorry I looked, when you said not to."
   "I'm glad you did. We've got to ditch the truck."
Marrity turned right, into a tree-lined street of quiet old
bungalow houses. His mouth was dry, and peripherally
he could see the collar of his shirt twitching with his
rapid heartbeat. "I think they've got a radio beacon on
it somewhere, is how those guys found us."
   "Okay," said Daphne. "Anything we need out of it?"
   "Just my briefcase." Marrity braked to a stop at the
curb in front of an apartment complex and trod on the
parking brake. He took a deep breath and exhaled
before unclamping his hands from the steering wheel
and switching off the ignition. In the sudden quiet, he
said, "It's got a bunch of Albert Einstein letters in it,
along with my students' Mark Twain papers."
   "Really!" Daphne opened her door and hopped down
to the sidewalk. "That was smart of you."
   Marrity opened his door and shivered at the chilly
dawn air in his damp shirt. "Let's find a bus stop."
   "Do you have your Versatel card?"
   "Yup." He climbed down onto the asphalt and walked
around the front of the truck to join her on the
sidewalk. "Only about two hundred dollars in the
savings, though. And about eighty in my pocket."
   "All we need is enough money to get there. Then we'll
have a whole lot of gold."
   "I'll give you a hundred," he said, taking her hand as
they began walking west along the sidewalk, "and then
I think I should drop you off at Carla and Joel's. I'll pick
you up again once I've been to Grammar's house. Then
we--"
   "No, I have to go with you."
   He looked down at her earnest upturned face and
shook his head. "There's people shooting at me, Daph. I
can't duck them and watch out for you too, worry about
you too."
   "They're--" Clearly she was thinking fast. "They're
after me as much as you. It was me that the cartoon
thing wanted, wasn't it?"
   "Yes," he admitted. He was nervously watching the
traffic moving back and forth on E Street a hundred feet
ahead, hoping not to see the tan Honda.
   "And they'd probably find Carla and Joel's place. From
your phone book, easy. Everybody we know, they'd be
watching their places." She scratched her nose. "And
anyway, what if that cartoon guy can tell where I am,
the way they can tell where the truck is? " She gripped
his hand tighter, and he could tell she had scared
herself with the thought.
   And it scared him too. I sure can't say that's not
possible, he thought.
   "And," Daphne went on with a brave show of
nonchalance, "Carla and Joel put Velveeta cheese on
everything."
   "They could make you a Velveeta soufflé," he said,
matching her tone. "Let's cross, and go down that
alley."
   Hand in hand they sprinted across the street, then
resumed walking, south now, between backyard fences
and little old wooden garages.
   "They wouldn't call it a souffle," said Daphne.
   "Velveeta Puddle."
   "'And it's got Rice Krispies in it!'" she mimicked,
pronouncing rice as rahss.
   "Okay," he said, "good point. I guess you'd better
come along with me at that."

                   Fourteen
If something's going to be on the radio," said Ernie
Bozzaris, "why didn't you save a radio for us?"
   "She wouldn't have done it right here, where we're
standing," said Lepidopt. "And the only thing that's
going to come over the radios -- one or two of them,
anyway, I hope -- is interference fringes, alternating
patches of noise and silence."
   The early morning sun was already bright on the
pastel nylon windbreakers of the fishermen out on the
Newport Pier, but Lepidopt and Bozzaris stood in the
chilly shadows of a closed Thai restaurant up on the
damp, sand-gritty sidewalk. Lepidopt looked enviously
at the handful of surfers bobbing in the dark blue swells
out beyond the surf line -- since his premonition that he
would never again swim in the ocean, he didn't even
dare go out on the pier. He and Bozzaris were both
wearing jeans and sweatshirts and tennis shoes.
   Lepidopt felt free to dispense with the earplugs out
here. He couldn't even see a pay telephone anywhere.
   "This is awful public," said Bozzaris. "Why would
Lieserl have come here to work the machine?" They had
parked across Balboa Boulevard in the ferry parking lot,
and at Bozzaris's insistence they had stepped into a
bakery on the walk over here, and now he fished a
powdery jelly doughnut out of the paper bag he was
carrying. "Is this where she did it before, in 1933?" He
was blinking around uneasily. "I don't suppose you want
any of these," he added, waving the doughnut bag.
   "Peace, youth," said Lepidopt. "This wouldn't have
been where she set it up in '33, no -- but it would be a
reliable place for her to have set it up two days ago,
since I believe she did not mean to survive that jump.
This is a place where time and space might be reliably
kinked, you see." He raised an eyebrow at Bozzaris's
doughnut. "No, thank you."
   "Kinked," echoed Bozzaris around a mouthful that
probably contained lard, from pigs.
   Lepidopt nodded and waved at the nearly empty
parking lot and the pier. "This -- right here -- was the
epicenter of the 1933 earthquake. March tenth, at five
fifty-four in the evening. You notice all the buildings are
modern! Einstein was at Cal Tech at that moment,
actually discussing seismographs, in fact. We believe he
was afraid Lieserl had tried out the maschinchen, the
time machine, the day before. There had been a
foreshock on the ninth, which probably was Lieserl
trying it out.
  "But she wouldn't have been here, then," he went on.
"Not her physical body, at least. I gather time travel --
travel, that is, as opposed to just getting out there and
looking around from the perspective of the Yetzirah
world -- actual time travel is most safely done with two
remote astral projections of yourself, one on a
mountain, one lower down, with the physical you
somewhere between. Sea level is the best for the low
one, in the Los Angeles area, unless you wanted to
project one all the way out to Death Valley." He glanced
up and down the row of seaside shops and rental
houses; already, in spite of the morning chill, there
were young people in scanty bathing suits riding
bicycles along the sidewalk, through the patches of
shadow and sunlight.
  "But two days ago," he continued, "Lieserl Maric --
our Lisa Marrity--wasn't concerned with her safety, I
believe. She meant it to kill her. So jumping from sea
level would have been fine, and she might well have set
up the maschinchen right here. I don't believe it's a
very complicated apparatus -- she apparently carried it
here in a taxi, in a suitcase, after all."
  Bozzaris squinted around at the parking lot and the
more distant green lawn by the foot of the pier.
   "Wouldn't she have needed the movie?" Bozzaris
asked. "She left that at home."
   Just before dawn Malk had crept into Marrity's yard
and silently sifted through the contents of his trash
cans, and carried away the VCR with the remains of the
tape cassette still in it. As if to make doubly sure the
thing was destroyed, Marrity had apparently doused it
with gasoline and set it on fire. It was just barely
possible to ascertain that the remains of a videocassette
were in the ruin.
   Lepidopt shrugged. "She added improvements, over
the years-- the movie, the footprint slab. She might
have figured out others, more portable."
   "So what will it look like? This maschinchen?"
   "A gold-wire swastika, for one thing," Lepidopt said,
"about three feet across, laid flat for her to stand on --
just like what they found at her arrival site in Shasta.
She would have concealed that -- with luck she buried
it here somewhere, and it's still buried. We need to see
the wiring, and ideally the whole construction."
   "There wouldn't have been any of the -- two days
ago, none of the virtual babies would have appeared
here, right?"
   "No. And apparently they only last a few seconds, so
they wouldn't still be around anyway. You can quit
worrying about stray babies stuck under the pier."
   "Were there reports of... virtual babies, in that
meadow on Mount Shasta, on Sunday?"
   "No, but she didn't use the maschinchen to travel
through time on Sunday -- just instantaneously through
space, sideways out of the cone of her possible future.
Not like when she jumped in 1933. On Sunday I think
she was trying to scrape something off of herself,
something like a psychic barnacle -- jump in a direction
it couldn't follow -- die clean, without it."
   Bozzaris laughed, though he seemed to shudder too.
"Psychic barnacle -- and the friction of it has caused all
the fires in the mountains." Looking out at the water, he
asked, "Did Lieserl change the past, when she jumped
and returned in 1933?"
   Lepidopt spread his hands. "How would we know? If
she did, we live in the world as she remade it. Did
Einstein change the past when he jumped in 1928? Only
Lieserl Marity and Einstein would know the answers to
these questions."
   His answer didn't seem to cheer Bozzaris. "And
they're both dead," he said. "But even in '33, when
she'd have returned to '33 from the past, none of the
spooky babies would have appeared here -- right?" He
shook his head. "That's too weird, about the babies."
   "No, they wouldn't have appeared here -- quit fretting
about them. According to Levin at the Technion in
Haifa, the virtual infants appear where the physical
body arrives, and even then only briefly. When you lose
five-dimensional velocity after traveling in time --
decelerate back into sequential time, back down to our
constricted Asiyah world from moving in the bigger
Yetzirah world -- the excess energy is thrown off as
virtual replicas of yourself, and it's more economical for
the universe to throw a lot of very young replicas than a
few maturer ones; just as a heated brick throws a lot of
low-energy infrared waves rather than anything in the
higher-frequency visible range."
   Bozzaris rocked his head, clearly not comprehending
the metaphysics of it. "Are they real babies, though?
When it does happen? Or are they just, like, mirages?"
   A blond girl on a bicycle slowed to toss a little red
plastic transistor radio to Lepidopt; he caught it with his
left hand. "Normal reception, and boring," she said, and
accelerated away, her tanned legs flashing as she rode
out of the shadow toward the beach.
   "Sayanim are getting prettier all the time," noted
Bozzaris.
   "You are a beast." Lepidopt had not kept the plastic
Sears bag the radios had come in, and after he had
peered at the tuning dial to verify the frequency, he
tucked the radio into the pocket of his sweatshirt.
   "What are they tuned to?" asked Bozzaris.
   "A hundred and eight megahertz," said Lepidopt, "the
highest frequency FM goes to. I believe it's a Christian
broadcasting station." He sighed. "If Lieserl did jump
from here, less than forty-eight hours ago, the space-
time fabric should still be kinked enough to put some
wrinkles in high frequencies. The signal should interfere
with itself."
   He squinted around impatiently at the beach and the
parking lot, then went on, "One time an infant was
taken out of the reentry field, before the field collapsed.
That infant lived at least seven years. So yes, they
seem to be real babies."
   "Am I allowed to know about this?"
  "It's relevant to our business. Lieserl was with her
father when he went to Zuoz, in the Swiss Alps, in
1928. She was twenty- six then, and Einstein was forty-
nine. Later he told her that he had gone to Zuoz to
undo a sin he had committed some years earlier -- and
that he had wound up committing an even greater sin.
Anyway, when his mysterious machine was prepared
and he stood on the mountain in Zuoz and... flickered
for a moment, I suppose... he immediately collapsed,
unconscious, since he had used only one astral
projection of himself, which was in the valley below Piz
Kesch, and so the shock of reentry was not distributed,
not balanced. And Lieserl found herself not only
confronted by her unconscious father, but surrounded
too by... what, several? dozens? ... of naked infants lying
in the snow. She snatched up one of the babies and ran
to the nearby house of a friend of Einstein's, Willy
Meinhardt; there she got people to come help, but when
they returned to the spot, only Einstein lay there. All
the other infants had disappeared, though the one
Lieserl had rescued was still fully present at Meinhardt's
house. Before that, Einstein liked mountains -- he used
to go hiking in the Alps with his wife and Marie Curie.
After that he couldn't stand the sight of a mountain."
  A teenage boy glided past on a rumbling skateboard
and called, "Goofy station but clear reception!" He
tossed a green plastic radio, and Lepidopt caught it and
waved.
  "We know all this," he went on to Bozzaris, "from a
Grete Mark-stein, who was an old girlfriend of Einstein's
and who took the impossible infant and raised him -- it
was a boy, of course -- for the next seven years. Here,
you hold this radio; keep it for your own. Apparently
Einstein didn't make child-support payments, so in 1935
Grete went to several colleagues of Einstein's, in Berlin
and Oxford, asking them to tell Einstein that she was
his daughter and the seven-year-old boy was his
grandson, and that she wanted financial help; she told
us that she knew Einstein would understand who she
really was, and who or what the little boy was. The
Oxford man, Frederick Lindermann, happened to give
the woman and the boy a drink of water when they
visited his office, and after they had left he saved both
glasses, for fingerprinting."
  Lepidopt paused to look up at half a dozen seagulls
sailing in the sunlight overhead, bright white against
the still dark blue sky.
  "Isser Harel," he went on, "got hold of those two
glasses in 1944, four years before he became head of
the Shin Bet and six years before he became director
general of the Mossad. Harel verified the woman's
prints as Markstein's, but of course he was very
intrigued by the boy's prints. The secret archive Harel
built behind a false wall in his Dov Hoz Street
apartment in Tel Aviv, during the days of the British
Mandate, was mainly to hide the boy's water glass." He
shrugged. "Not that it proved anything -- it was just an
old glass with a child Einstein's fingerprints on it, and
there was no proof that the prints weren't put on the
glass in the 1880s -- but with its admittedly hearsay
provenance it was evidence that Einstein had something
Israel needed to know about. Harel concluded that it
was time travel, that somehow the young Einstein had
been brought forward to 1935; in fact it was time
travel, but the boy was only a quantum by-product, not
the real Einstein."
  "So why are Frank Marrity's fingerprints identical to
that old man's, the guy who was driving the Rambler?
Is Frank Marrity a surviving duplicate of the old guy?"
  Malk had found the Rambler this morning in the
Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital parking lot, though the old
man who'd been driving it had not been seen. Shots
had been fired in the hospital lobby, and Marrity and his
daughter, both apparently unharmed, had fled.
  "That's possible," Lepidopt told Bozzaris, "if the old
man at some point time-jumped to 1952; though
Marrity has a valid-looking birth certificate from a
hospital in Buffalo, New York. One of these virtual
babies wouldn't legitimately have a birth certificate."
  Lepidopt stared hard at Bozzaris. "It's more likely,"
Lepidopt went on carefully, "that the old guy is Frank
Marrity, having jumped back to here, to 1987, from the
future."
  Bozzaris blinked. "Wow."
  "That's probably what killed Sam Glatzer," Lepidopt
added. "When the old Frank Marrity drove the Rambler
into his younger self's driveway on Sunday afternoon,
Sam found himself seeing the same guy in two places.
Remote viewers are out on a wire when they work,
precarious, and that might have been a badly
disorienting shock."
  A young policeman in blue shorts and T-shirt rode up
to them on a bicycle and braked to a halt in front of
Lepidopt. "No interference anywhere within a hundred
yards of the pier," the man said. "I dropped the radio."
  Lepidopt waved magnanimously. "No problem. Thank
you." After the policeman had nodded and pedaled
away, Lepidopt shrugged at Bozzaris.
  "We should just grab the old guy," Bozzaris said, "the
older version of Marrity, and find out everything he
knows about the future! He looks sixty--he must be
from about 2012!"
  Lepidopt shuffled north along the damp, gritty
sidewalk, staring down at his sneakers. Bozzaris
stepped after him.
  "We'll grab him all right," said Lepidopt quietly. "If
necessary we'll kill him to keep the other crowd from
getting what he knows. But the future as he's
experienced it won't necessarily be relevant, if I carry
out the orders that were on the Play-Doh last night."
  "Oh, yeah." Bozaris frowned. "And not just the future
-- nearly my whole life, if you go back and change
something that happened in '67. I was born in '61."
  "It's unlikely to alter your life story at all," Lepidopt
muttered, aware even as he spoke that what he said
was a lie.
  What if the changes he provoked should alter or
somehow prevent the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when
Egypt and Syria attacked Israel by surprise on Yom
Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when most of the
country's reserves were in the synagogues or praying at
home? And how could any deliberate change not be
aimed to affect that?
   Lepidopt had been at the Mossad headquarters in the
Hadar Dafna building on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv
during that two-week war, overseeing the Mossad
remote viewers nearly twenty-four hours a day as they
desperately tried to track the Egyptian tank divisions in
the Sinai desert. Israel had managed to defeat the
Syrian and Egyptian armies -- and some opportunistic
Iraqi and Jordanian forces too -- but in the first week of
the war, things had looked very bad indeed for Israel.
Many, many lives had been lost. Changing the course of
that disastrous war would inevitably change Bozzaris's
life, in any number of ways. For all Lepidopt knew,
Bozzaris's father was killed in the Yom Kippur War;
plenty of men were, in the Sinai, on the Golan Heights,
in the skies and at sea. Or maybe he wasn't, but would
be killed in a new reality's version of the war.
   At least Bozzaris had already been born by 1967.
Lepidopt's son, Louis, had not been born until 1976.
   He remembered the amulet that had been exposed
onto the strip of film in the radiation-exposure badge
he'd been given in 1967. Your life story be sacrosanct,
and all who are in your train. Unchanged, unedited. He
wished it hadn't been taken away from him, and that he
had given it to young Louis.
   "Which is bullshit," said Bozzaris, smiling as he dug in
the bag for another doughnut. "At least -- at the very
least -- you and I will never have had this conversation.
I'll never have eaten this doughnut." He took a quick
bite, as if the universe might even now try to prevent it.
  Lepidopt thought about the orders the three of them
had read in the damp Play-Doh last night at the
Wigwam Motel:

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

   After they'd all read it, Lepidopt had rolled the blue
Play-Doh into a ball, and then had filed off all the
incised figures on the steel cylinders that had pressed
the message into the Play-Doh. And Bozzaris had
thrown the defaced cylinders off the end of the pier an
hour ago.
   I wonder, Lepidopt thought, what the inscription on
the Rephidim stone was... or what I'll discover it to be, if
I can get back to 1967. I wonder if I'll sympathize with
the man who killed himself to make sure it was lost.
   He remembered the passage in the second -century
Zohar:
      ... but when Israel will return from exile, all
      the supernal grades are destined to rest
      harmoniously upon this one. Then men will
      obtain a knowledge of the precious
      supernal wisdom of which hitherto they
      knew not.

   "True," Lepidopt sighed, "it's bullshit."
   Bozzaris grinned. "How do you figure you'll go back in
time?"
   "I have no idea. Ideally the elder Frank Marrity will
tell me how. If not, maybe the Einstein letters will
explain it; maybe we'll summon ghosts, and ask them;
maybe the thirty-five-year-old Frank Marrity knows, and
will tell me."
   "Not if the sunglasses girl gets near him again."
   "I suppose the likeliest outcome is that I won't figure
out how to do it at all."
   That would be very good, he thought; we did manage
to decisively win the Yom Kippur War, after all, and
Syria and Egypt had been hugely relieved, as usual,
when the UN had finally imposed a cease-fire.
   But I must go back if I can, and try to save as many
as possible of the Israeli men and women who died in
that war.
   "How would it be 'by way of your lost finger'?"
   "I can't imagine. I suppose my aura still has ten
fingers, one of which now contains no actual physical
finger. An astral projection would still have ten fingers."
   By way of your lost finger.
   An enormous thought welled up in Lepidopt's head:
What if all my "never agains" -- never again touch a
cat, never again hear the name John Wayne, never
again hear a telephone ring -- apply only in this time
line? If I go back to 1967 and simply prevent the
twenty-year-old Lepidopt from touching the Western
Wall, then I won't get that first premonition! And maybe
-- surely! -- in that time line I won't then get any of
them!
   He seized on the thought. Of course that's been the
explanation for them all along, he thought eagerly --
they've simply been oracular clues that this is not the
time line that's to prevail. This isn't the destined course
of my life.
   Everything, including that first premonition at the
Wall, has been provisional, subject to an eventual
revision. When I return here to 1987, having saved the
Rephidim inscription in 1967 and given Harel my full
report, I'll find myself in the real time line, free of those
too close boundaries to my life.
   He thought of the uprooted Jewish tombstones he had
seen bridging ditches in Jerusalem. Perhaps the
tombstone he'd been picturing lately -- the one with
Lepidopt incised on it, with 1987 as its second date --
could be uprooted too.
   He looked coolly at Bozzaris. You'll be all right, he
thought. You'll be safely born by the time I switch the
tracks ahead of history's locomotive--
   --but Louis won't be.
   He remembered what he had thought, last night in
the Wigwam Motel, about Marrity's apparent intention
to copy the Einstein letters so that he could sell the
originals: If it were my son who was in danger, I would
not be thinking first of making money from selling the
Einstein letters.
  Not of money, no, he thought now. But of a life that
extends past the next time a telephone rings in your
vicinity?
  But Louis would still be born in 1976, as in this
present time line, assuming the twenty-five-year-old
Oren Lepidopt married Deborah Altmann in 1972, which
there was no reason to believe he would not. That was
the year before the Yom Kippur War, so nothing would
be likely to change it; he'd see to it that nothing
impinged on that story.
  If that young Lepidopt and Deborah conceived Louis
on a different night in 1975, this time, though -- would
he still be the same boy Lepidopt knew? Would he even
be conceived as a boy? What was the biological
mechanism that decided whether an embryo was to be
a boy or a girl?
  What if the Yom Kippur War goes differently, because
of this mission, and the young Lepidopt is not assigned
to the Mossad headquarters, but instead is sent into
combat and killed before he fathers his child? But surely
that was very unlikely! Lepidopt recalled that there had
been no one else who would have been likely to take
charge of the remote viewers.
  But would they need remote viewers, this time
around, if they had prevented or controlled the war
because of forty-year-old Lepidopt's report from the
future?
   Well, I can make sure my younger self doesn't go into
combat before Louis is conceived in '76... or go into any
dangerous work, before then. Or step carelessly into
traffic, or fail to wear seat belts? Or drive at all, maybe?
Can I make the younger Lepidopt see the urgency of all
this, for a son he's never seen?
   Lepidopt was sweating, though it was still chilly here
in the shadows of the beachfront houses.
   A tanned boy in swim trunks and with white zinc
oxide sunscreen on his nose scampered up to them
barefoot and said, "Forgetting him, you see--" and
paused, panting. He was holding a cardboard tube of
Flix chocolates.
   Something from Malk, Lepidopt thought. Something
he thinks might be urgent, to send it by bodlim, sayan
couriers. This boy looked flighty, but certainly there was
an adult nearby who was watching to make sure the
handoff took place.
   "--means you've forgotten me," said Lepidopt, "like
my forgotten man." Bozzaris had chosen their
recognition signs from the lyrics of old musicals --
Lepidopt hoped Bozzaris's tastes would turn out to
include old musicals, again! -- and this, he believed,
was from Gold Diggers of 1933.
   The boy held out the cardboard tube, then ran away
when Lepidopt had taken it.
   "Could be a bomb," said Bozzaris lightly.
   "I bet it's not."
   Lepidopt tore away the Scotch tape that sealed it and
unfolded the piece of paper crumpled in the top; in
Malk's handwriting was the message, Just came, FedEx,
from home. Gross.
   Lepidopt peered inside, then stared more closely --
and he almost dropped it.
   "Now that's disgusting," he said hoarsely.
   "What is it?"
   "It's -- I believe it must be my finger."
   Bozzaris stepped back, then laughed nervously. "Can
I see?"
   "No. Shoot off your own finger, you want to look at a
finger." With his maimed hand he pulled a handkerchief
out of his back pocket and wiped his face. "They --
saved it! They knew, even back then--" Lepidopt peered
again into the cardboard tube. "There's -- a couple of
holes in the tip, one through the fingernail -- and
crossways scratches on the nail! They had a label or
something stapled to it!"
   Bozzaris shrugged. "Twenty years. Tape would have
dried out."
   Lepidopt gingerly tucked the tube into his sweatshirt
pocket next to the radios. One of the radios fell out and
cracked on the sidewalk, and he kicked it out onto the
parking lot pavement.
   "Business card!" he said harshly. "Cab company!
Suitcase!"
   Bozzaris stared at him. "Hmm?"
   "The time machine isn't here. She didn't do it here.
This was a feint, a bluff. Lieserl carried an empty
suitcase down here in that cab, or no -- more likely paid
some other old lady to do it. I don't need to be standing
here looking at the fucking ocean."
   Bozzaris's eyebrows were raised as he fell into step
beside Lepidopt, hurrying toward the short street that
led back to Balboa Boulevard. Lepidopt nearly never
used bad language.
   "She left the card on her kitchen counter, and--"
Bozzaris began.
   "To waste our time, or the other crowd's time --
whoever might be alerted by the psychic noise of her
departure -- CIA, the press, the Vatican! Listen, she hid
out all these years -- she was as secretive as her
father, she had a child too, she didn't want the thing to
be found, and used. She would never have left that card
on her counter if she really had come down here to do
the jump! The cab company and the old woman with
the suitcase, whoever she was, were a move to delay
anybody looking for the machine -- not stop, just delay.
If it was worth the trouble to decoy us away from the
search even for just a couple of hours, then a couple of
hours must be important, it must make a difference.
She must have set up -- of course she would have set
up! -- some chain of events that would destroy the
machine after she used it."
   Lepidopt was practically running now, and Bozzaris
pitched his bag of doughnuts at a trash can as they
hurried past it. "So where do we look?"
   "We have one clue: The machine isn't here."

                     Fifteen
Bennett Bradley stood up as the two men nodded to
him and halted in the restaurant aisle beside his booth.
One was short and pudgy and darkly bearded, and the
other was tall and effeminate with a white brush cut,
and they both wore dark business suits. And by the
morning light shining through the windows across the
room, they both looked tired.
   "Mr. Bradley," said the white-haired one, bowing
sketchily. "You can call me Sturm."
   "Drang here," said the bearded one with a smile,
blinking behind eyeglasses.
   "Please sit down," Bennett said. It was barely nine in
the morning, and one of these -- Sturm, he thought --
had called him at seven this morning. Bennett was tired
too -- he would have liked to sleep later, after having
flown home from Shasta last night, and taken the
remote-parking shuttle to the car, and then negotiated
the freeways to home.
   He had left the house this morning without waking
Moira.
   The two men sat down in the booth, bracketing
Bennett.
   "We spoke," said Sturm, on Bennett's right, "to your
brother-in-law, Francis Marrity, on the phone this
morning; and we told him that we had called you last
night. We mentioned that we would have to deal with
both of Lisa Marrity's heirs to finalize our sale-- that is,
you and your wife as well as him. He, ah, said that
possession is nine-tenths of the law, and hung up. He
has checked his daughter out of the hospital, and they
have not returned to their house in San Bernardino."
  "Hospital? What was she in the hospital for?"
  "A tracheotomy. She choked on some food,
apparently."
  "Kid eats like a pig," said Bennett. "She'll probably
need it again, they should have installed a valve."
  "Just coffee, for all of us," said Drang to the waitress
who had walked up with a pad. When she had nodded
and moved on, he said to Bennett, "The price is fifty
thousand dollars, and we would like to consummate this
transaction as soon as possible. Today, ideally." The fat
man's breath smelled like spearmint Tic Tacs.
  "If your brother-in-law absconds with the items," said
Sturm, "he could sell them to somebody else; and
there's very little we or you could do about it. Afterward
he could plausibly claim never to have had them. Total
ignorance, stout denial."
  Bennett's stomach was cold. "But you could go to the
police, couldn't you, with your, your list? Your
correspondence with his grandmother? I mean, you
know what the items are... as well as I do, better than I
do, since you know specifically what the old lady
wanted to sell." He wished the coffee would get here.
"Right?"
  Sturm stared at Bennett for a moment. The man's
eyes were very pale blue, and the lashes were white.
"It's not really a matter we'd like to get the police
involved in," he said at last. "You notice that we haven't
identified ourselves to you at all. You have no phone
number nor address for us. If the transaction doesn't
work out, we'll shrug and... disappear. Keep our
money."
   Great God, thought Bennett. What was that crazy old
woman dealing in? Crates of machine guns? Heroin?
Whatever this is -- fifty thousand dollars! -- no
identification! -- it's obviously illegal. Suddenly and
irrationally he was very hungry, and very aware of the
hot smells of bacon and eggs at nearby tables.
   "Do you know where Marrity and his daughter might
have gone," asked Drang, "after hanging up on us?"
   "When would I be paid?" asked Bennett. "And how?
Since this is -- such an off-paper transaction." I should
walk out of here, he thought. I know I should. What
good would a check be? And if they gave me cash --
how could I know it wasn't counterfeit? I have no
business dealing with this sort of people. I'm glad I
didn't wake up Moira this morning.
   Sturm said, "The Bank of America branch on
California Street is holding six cashier's checks, each
made out in your name for $8,333.00. That adds up to
two dollars short of fifty thousand, actually, but we'll
pay for your coffee here. As soon as we have the
property, we'll drive you to the bank, pick up the
cashier's checks, and hand them to you. You can cash
them or deposit them wherever you please, at any time
during the next three years."
   That would work, thought Bennett. He could feel a
drop of sweat running down his ribs under his shirt.
   "You could split it with your brother-in-law, if your
conscience dictates," said chubby Drang with no
expression.
   Bennett could feel his mouth tighten in a derisive
grin.
  "Do you know where Marrity and his daughter might
have gone?" Drang asked.
  "Yes," said Bennett. "But let's pick up the cashier's
checks first."
  "We can do that," said Sturm, getting to his feet.
  "You can owe me for the coffee," said Bennett, with
frail bravado, as he stood up too.



I'm not an old man, I'm a young man something
happened to. He believed that was a quote from Mickey
Spillane.
   The man who called himself Derek Marrity stared at
the crystals hanging from the switched-off ceiling light
in the increasingly sunlit room, unable to sleep in spite
of having been awake for more than twenty-four hours.
He was lying on Lisa Marrity's narrow bed, where he
had slept Sunday night; he had got up at seven on
Monday morning, to go to Marrity's house. Now, on
Tuesday morning, he wished he had slept late and not
visited the poor Marritys at all.
   From the bedside table he picked up a battered
cigarette butt with a bit of Scotch tape wrapped around
it. The filter had once been tan, but was now faded to
nearly white.
   Look anywhere but homeward, angel.
   He dropped the cigarette butt back onto the table.
   The crystals were turning in the breeze coming in
through the open window above his head; he could
smell Grammar's jasmine flowers, and refracted
morning sunlight was making dots of red and blue and
green light that raced and paused on the book spines
and paintings.
  The lace curtains were swaying over him. He recalled
that Grammar had used the phrase voio voio, which
was from the German word for "curtain," to describe
empty pretense, portentous talk with no substance,
ambitious plans that were impossible. Useless
endeavors.
  This whole expedition, he thought as he shifted his
twisted and aching right leg to a more comfortable
angle on the bedspread, has been voio voio.
  I can still give young Frank Marrity investment
advice, I suppose, but what could really help him, at
this point? Would there be any use in telling him the
crucial things? Don't drink ? Don't let Daphne drink?
Useless, useless.
  The Harmonic Convergence has undone me. Earnest,
well-meaning young Frank Marrity has undone me.
  Daphne was supposed to choke to death, yesterday,
on the floor in Alfredo's.
  Marrity reached behind his head to turn the hot pillow
over.
  He had two recollections -- three, now -- of that
terrible half hour in the restaurant.
  Originally he had kept on trying the Heimlich
maneuver, and kept on trying it, until he had simply
been shaking a pale, dead little girl. He could still
remember the cramps in his arms. The paramedics had
arrived too late to do anything. He had grieved over
Daphne, but he had got through the funeral, and the
furtive interviews with various secret organizations, and
the horrible lonely months afterward, without "taking
the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse," as Omar Khayyam
had described alcoholism. Two years later he had
married Amber, who had been a student in one of his
University of Redlands classes in 1988: that is, who
would be in one of Frank Marrity's classes next year. He
and Amber had not had any children, but they'd been
very happy, and had eventually bought a house in
Redlands in the mid-'90s. A good time for it, before the
prices of houses went up out of sight for a college
teacher and his eBay-dealer wife. By 2005, at the age
of fifty-three, he had been thinking about early
retirement.
  He thought of that life as Life A.
  And then in the early months of 2006 he had begun
to have vivid hallucinations of a different life, a Life B.
In this other life he had not married Amber, and
Daphne was still alive, still with him, and the two of
them were living in a trailer park on Base Line. Moira, a
widow by this time, had long since bought out his share
of Grammar's house, and was living in it, and had got
restraining orders against both him and Daphne.
Daphne was thirty-one, and an alcoholic, and she hated
her alcoholic father. And, truthfully, by that time he had
hated her, and himself too.
  In both lives twelve-year-old Daphne had watched
Grammar's movie, helplessly, all the way through, while
he had been up the hall in his office grading papers;
when he had eventually come down the hall to make
dinner he had found Daphne still staring at the blank
screen. He had ejected the tape and hidden it. That
night Daphne had begun to have difficulty swallowing
her food.
   And though in his original life, Life A, Daphne had
choked to death on the floor of Alfredo's the next day,
in the intrusive hallucinatory Life B he had punched a
hole in her throat, and she had not died; but when she
had recovered from the surgery she had written u cut
my throat... i hate you on the pad beside her hospital
bed. And from then on she had seemed to be possessed
by a spiteful, hateful devil.
   He could see now that it had been merciful, in the
original story of his life, that she had died on the
restaurant floor.
   The Life B hallucinations had become so frequent and
prolonged that he had had to take a leave from
teaching, and eventually he honestly didn't know which
life was his real one.
   He was the single father of the adult Daphne as often
as he was the childless husband of Amber.
   Then he was simply living with Daphne in the trailer,
and the life with Amber was a less and less frequent
dream. And by April 2006 those dreams had stopped.
He was stuck in the drink-fogged trailer life with his
angry, drunk, adult daughter -- though he could still
remember his original life.
   Why would my past change, in this way? he
wondered. Why did this 1987 Frank Marrity do the
tracheotomy yesterday, when in my original time line I
did not do it?
   It must be that the Harmonic Convergence, that
sudden drop in worldwide mind pressure, caused a
crack in the continuity, allowed a brief gap -- like an
unstable seam between two pours of cement -- in which
some new variable could make things resume in a
different way.
   So in this skewed history, Marrity did not marry
Amber; by the time Daphne was twenty-two, she was a
dedicated alcoholic, and so was he; and when she was
twenty-seven, in 2002, she took his car keys and he
blundered out of the trailer to stand behind the battered
Ford Taurus to prevent her from taking it.
   He shifted his bad leg now to a new position on
Grammar's bedspread. Standing behind the car had
been a mistake.
   And so he had made a desperate bid to save Daphne,
and himself -- to start an entirely new life, a Life C, a
third roll of the dice.
   He had remembered the questions the secret
agencies had asked him in both previous lifetimes, and
those questions had led him to the discovery of who his
great-grandfather had been -- and had then led him to
the study of quantum mechanics and relativity and
Kabbalah. He had stolen some Einstein letters from
Grammar's house, which by then had been Moira's.
   And then he had actually used the machine in
Grammar's Kaleidoscope Shed and jumped back in time
and intruded on his thirty-five-year-old self and the
twelve-year-old Daphne, and pretended to be his own
lost father.
   Pretending to be his own father had been even more
difficult than he had imagined it would be -- claiming to
be gay had been much easier than claiming to be that
evil old man.
   Daphne had noted the resemblance between them:
the old and young Frank Marritys! He had hoped that
Daphne might survive this time, as the sweet child she
had been, if there were no choking and therefore no
throat cutting. And he had got his younger self to
promise not to go to an Italian restaurant on that
fateful day.
   And of course he had gone to Alfredo's himself, ready
to chase them away if they nevertheless tried to eat
there -- but when they hadn't arrived at noon, as he
clearly remembered doing, nor at 12:30 or 12:40, he
had relaxed and sat down and had lunch and a few
beers. Fate had evaded him by sending them in an hour
late.
   And then Daphne choked, and her young father did
the tracheotomy.
   The old Frank Marrity rolled to a new position on
Grammar's bed. He should have... broken Marrity's leg,
set his truck on fire, called in a bomb threat to the
restaurant.
   Last night -- it tormented him now to remember it --
last night he had been certain that Daphne must have
died at the hospital -- a hemorrhage, error in
anesthetic, a mis-prescription, it didn't matter. The
feeling of deliverance had been overwhelming.
   He had been sure she had died because he had
experienced half an hour of restoration, starting when
the three cars had bracketed him on Base Line, and the
Rambler had behaved so oddly -- for a blessed thirty
minutes after that, his right leg was strong and free of
pain, and he was healthy, not weakened by years of
heavy drinking.
   After the incident on Base Line, he had found that he
was on another street entirely, but he had got his
bearings when he'd come to Highland Avenue, and he
had driven to the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital full of
bubbling optimism.
   He had been ready to begin prepping Marrity for the
next nineteen years -- marry Amber, bet on the
winners in the NFL and NBA and the Stanley Cup, buy
stock in Dell and Cisco and Microsoft and Amazon, and
get out of it all by 1999 and then put the money in T-
bills and insured securities -- buy many copies of the
first edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,
and don't be in New York City on September 11, 2001.
To this 1987 Frank Marrity, 9/11 still meant the
emergency phone number.
   It wouldn't have been precisely the same as the
happy life with Amber that the old man remembered,
but it should have been acceptably close. And it would
have been affluent.
   Of course neither of the Marrity-lives the old man had
experienced had included a visit from his long-missing
"father." And in neither of the remembered lives had
the semiblind woman tried to shoot him!
   And there were a couple of other discrepancies too
between this young Marrity's life and what the old man
remembered. In neither of the time lines he had lived
through, the happy one or the miserable one, had
Grammar's VHS tape burned up. He had been surprised
to see the scorched VCR lying in the grass outside
Marrity's kitchen door, yesterday morning. And neither
Daphne nor this young Marrity should know anything
about a connection with Albert Einstein yet; he had not
learned of it until 2006. But somehow Frank and
Daphne did already know about it.
   And why had they been an hour late for lunch
yesterday? Urgent housework that couldn't wait?
   And then at the hospital he'd seen that Daphne was
still alive after all, and decrepitude had fallen onto him
again like a waterlogged plaster ceiling. When he had
struggled weakly to his feet, Daphne and Marrity had
been gone, Daphne's IV tube swinging free and dripping
dextrose and sodium chloride onto the floor, and he had
had to curse his way past the shouting nurses and limp
out of the hospital.
   He hoped to be able to find the foreign crowd, the
sunglasses girl and her friends, and make a bargain
with them -- to get them to leave Marrity alone. He
could tell them priceless facts about future events, in
exchange for that. Even give them Grammar's time
machine, for that.
   He could try to do that much for his younger self, at
least.
   Lying on Grammar's bed now, he sniffed -- then
hiked himself up on his elbows. The raw reek of
gasoline was overpowering the scent of the jasmine,
and for a breathless instant he thought some recoil
effect was pulling him back to the moment of his arrival
in the gasoline-fumey Kaleidoscope Shed -- with the
dozen impossible infants waving their arms in the
weeds outside -- and then he heard young Frank
Marrity's voice through the open window behind his
head.
   "There's a cigarette in it!" Marrity said.
   Then the old man bared his teeth and winced, for
twelve-year-old Daphne said, "What, in the gasoline?"
   "Right, see, that's the filter, and that's the paper that
used to be around it."
   "Who'd throw a cigarette in a gas can?"
   "Somebody who thought it would set it on fire. I bet
she laid a lit cigarette across the open mouth of the
can, figuring when it burned down it'd fall in. Which it
did. But then it just went out."
   "You shouldn't pour it into the dirt. I think that's
illegal. Why didn't the cigarette set the gas on fire?"
   "The can was nearly full. I guess there wasn't enough
vapor. We can't just leave it sitting here; and we can't
take it to a gas station for, for whatever the proper
disposal is, on a bus." The old man heard the clang of
the empty gas can being put down on the concrete of
the patio. "I wouldn't have taken bets on it not catching
fire, though," Marrity's voice said. "I can see why she
thought she had reliably burned down the shed. She
must have left too fast to see that it hadn't worked."
   The old man in the bedroom shivered in sudden
comprehension -- if Grammar's makeshift incendiary
device had worked, he would have been jumping
straight into the middle of an inferno, at noon on
Sunday, instead of just into a heady reek of gasoline
fumes. Even the fumes had made him scramble out of
the shed as fast as he could.
  "Poor old Grammar," said Daphne. "I wonder what
was going on."
  "I think we've got to figure out what was going on,
before somebody else tries to shoot me."
  "Let's go look at the shed," said Daphne, her voice
moving away from the window.
  Old Marrity swung his legs off the bed. In both his
previous lifetimes he had eventually dug up the gold
wire, and in horrible Life B he had sold his trailer to get
gold wire to replace it and rewire the time machine, but
he couldn't let them disassemble it now -- they might
just wreck it, and if the machine was gone, could he still
have jumped back here? He couldn't figure out the logic
of it, but he didn't want them fooling with the machine.
  "Wait!" he shouted, limping toward the bedroom
door.
  He hobbled past the washing machine and wrenched
at the dead bolt on the back door; finally he got it back
and pushed the door open, squinting at the bright
sunlight in the yard. It occurred to him that he hadn't
shaved in two days, and his jowls must be bristling with
white stubble.
  Daphne and his younger self were standing in the
weedy yard gaping back at him.
  "Wait," he said again. And then he took a deep
breath, not having any idea what he could say next.
                    Sixteen
Sturm and Drang had driven Bennett to the Bank of
America on California Street and led him inside, and
there they really had given him six cashier's checks,
each for $8,333; Bennett had tucked the envelope into
his inner jacket pocket, feeling dizzy and anxious. The
bank happened to be only a couple of blocks from
Grammar Marrity's house.
  Then they had driven out of that neighborhood, north
to the cedar-shaded parking lot at the Holiday Inn by
the Civic Auditorium. Sturm had parked next to a big
brown Dodge van with a sliding door in the side, which
had rolled open when Sturm got out of the car and
knocked on it. From the passenger seat of the idling
car, Bennett had been able to see three burly young
men and a dark-haired woman in sunglasses in the van;
white-haired Sturm had conferred with them for a few
moments, then had got back into the car and driven out
of the lot, eyeing the rearview mirror to make sure the
van was following. The air-conditioning was
uncomfortably cold, and somehow the car smelled of
burnt fabric.
  "Where are we going?" Sturm asked now, without
looking sideways at Bennett.
  "Uh, 204 Batsford," said Bennett. "It's two blocks
south of the bank we were just at. What burned in
here?"
  In the backseat, Drang lifted a shoe box from beside
him and held it forward, lifting the cardboard lid.
   Bennett hitched around in his seat to look, then
recoiled from the little blackened figure inside. "What
the hell is that?" he barked. The burnt smell was
gagging him now.
   "Your niece's teddy bear, we assume," said Drang,
clearly pleased with Bennett's reaction. He put the lid
back on the box and set it down on the floor by his feet.
"It was buried in Marrity's yard. She apparently burned
it up."
   "When we get there," Sturm went on, "don't mention
any of this about the sale of the grandmother's
property. Just get Marrity and his daughter, both, to
come to the van. Tell them you've got a bicycle for the
girl or something."
   From the backseat, Drang said cheerfully, "We can
take them from there."
   Sturm glanced at Drang in the rearview mirror.
"When we get there," he told the fat man, "you go back
and wait in the van."
   Drang raised his eyebrows. "You think I look
alarming?"
   "Better that they see only one stranger."
   Bennett shifted uncomfortably under the front seat's
shoulder strap, wishing he could lean forward and put
his face into the cold air coming from the dashboard
blowers. "Why did you bring the, the burned-up teddy
bear?"
   Sturm scowled, as if he wished Drang had not shown
Bennett the bear. "It might mean something to the
girl," he said.
  Bennett realized he was nodding, and he made
himself stop it. "You could just let me go -- I mean, I
can get a cab to get back to my car, then. After." He
rubbed his hand over his mouth, feeling sweat in his
mustache. "When you've--"
  "Okay," said Sturm.
  It occurred to Bennett that they were now paying him
just for the delivery of Marrity and Daphne, and not for
the things Grammar had wanted to sell -- if in fact
these men were going to let him keep the money, or
even let him go.
  I should have awakened Moira, he thought. She'd
have stopped me. Why the hell couldn't she have woken
on her own?



Daphne stared at her grandfather, who was standing in
the shade of the trellis looking like a bum. His white
hair was all shoved up in the back, and she knew that
when her father's hair was that way it meant he'd been
napping.
  She was glad to see that he'd mostly recovered from
whatever had happened to him at the hospital this
morning. Over the door behind him was the wooden
sign that read, Everyone Who Dwells Here Is Safe. She
wondered if that sign was why he had come here.
  "Wait?" said her father beside her. "Wait for what?"
  Her grandfather was swaying in the patchy trellis
shade.
   "Don't -- go," the old man said. "I was asleep, and I
heard your voices. I--"
   "Who was that woman who shot at me," her father
interrupted, "in the hospital lobby?"
   "I don't know--"
   "You said, 'She's blind if you don't look at her.' Which
was true. And she tried to kill Daphne and me an hour
ago. Who is she?"
   "Ach! She did? She's a -- a psychic. I haven't spoken
to her in years, I truly can't imagine why she tried to
kill you. I saved your life."
   Daphne's father shifted his feet in the weeds. "It's
true, you did. Thank you. How do you know her? "
   "She -- she was part of a team that interviewed me
once, after a, a bereavement -- she's with a secret
agency--"
   "Not a United States one," said her father. "We talked
to a man from the National Security Agency last night,
and he told me not to speak to her."
   "You did? I never did, not the NSA. I -- only want
what's best for you."
   Daphne noticed that he said it directly to her father.
How about what's best for me too? she thought.
   "What sort of secret agency?" her father asked.
   The old man sat down in a shaded wicker chair
against the outside bedroom wall. "They were
interested in something a... family member of mine had
previously picked up, which didn't belong to her." He
waved his spotty old hands inexpressively. "A family
member who had in fact just died. I gave it to them,
and they went away. They were psychics, they had a
head -- anyway, I didn't argue with them, so I didn't
learn anything about them."
   "When was this?"
   The look the old man gave her father seemed defiant.
"I was thirty-five."
   "You're not saying you met that woman then,"
Daphne's father objected. "She's only about thirty now."
   "I've met her," said the old man. "Leave it at that."
   Marrity shook his head impatiently, then asked,
"What did your family member take, that you gave to
these people? "
   The old man exhaled. "Call it a book. Call it a photo
album. Call it a key." He glanced at Daphne for the first
time, then quickly looked away. To her father, he said,
"Next time I'm inclined to save your life, remind me of
how grateful you were this time."
   Her father paused, and Daphne looked up and saw
him nodding. "Sorry, sorry. But you need to tell us all
these things, not just the things you think we'll believe.
Why did you think Daphne was dead, this morning?"
   "A nurse, I must have misunderstood what a nurse
said. I don't hear very well. Leave me alone."
   Marrity relented. "Okay. Do you want a beer?"
   "They're gone, if you mean Grammar's."
   "Well, I'd like a beer," Marrity said. He put his
briefcase down on the cement porch slab to reach into
his pocket. "Where's Grammar's car? I can drive it."
   "It -- broke down. I took a bus here."
   Daphne doubted that. She and her father had taken a
bus, and had got here a few minutes ago; her
grandfather had been here long enough to have taken a
nap. What did he do really, she wondered, steal a car?
There's an old car parked by the garage with the hood
up. Do you need to open the hood to steal a car? Or to
stop it, once you've driven it somewhere?
   "I want you to know," said the old man abruptly,
"that I hate my father too."
   "Why do you want me to know that?" asked Marrity.
   "It's something you and I have in common. For a
father to just leave his poor wife and children -- what
excuse could there be?"
   Marrity laughed in evident surprise. "Well, you tell
me, old man. I can't think of one. Not blackmail and the
threat of imprisonment, for example. I wouldn't
abandon Daphne to avoid those things."
   "No, I know you wouldn't. Not even to save your soul.
I know you wouldn't."
   "To save my--" Her father seemed to consider getting
angry, then just relaxed and laughed. "No, not even to
do that."
   The old man spread his shaky hands and frowned.
Daphne wondered if he was quite awake yet, after his
nap.
   "Eventually it winds up costing everything," he said.
"But remember I hate the old man as much as you do."
   Marrity was frowning. "Which old man? Your father,
or... my father?"
   "That one," the old man mumbled, nodding.
   Daphne heard the front door slam inside the house,
and then there were footsteps coming through the
kitchen.
   "Who's here?" came her uncle Bennett's voice from
the dimness beyond the open back door. "Why is the
door unlocked? Frank? Daphne? "
   "Out back, Bennett," said her father loudly. He gave
Daphne a look, and she knew he meant Good thing we
didn't start prying up the bricks.
   She imagined the two of them on their knees in the
shed -- covered with mud and with a treasure chest full
of gold coins half exposed in a hole under the bricks,
blinking up in confusion at her grandfather and Uncle
Bennett -- and her father smiled at her before looking
back to the back door.
   Daphne wondered if her uncle Bennett would yell at
her father again about coming here without him and
Aunt Moira -- but, in fact, he didn't seem upset.
   Bennett was standing there on the back step, blinking
and smiling nervously. "Well, this is lucky!" he said. "I
got a free bicycle from an ad shoot, and I was going to
give it to you next time I saw you, Daphne! But I've got
it right outside, in a van!"
   A van, thought Daphne. A free bicycle. If this was a
stranger, I'd run away as fast as I could. She could feel
reflexive caution in her father too.
   But, "Okay," she said. "Thanks!"
   "I'll go look too," her father said, stepping forward.
Daphne stared hard at his briefcase on the cement, and
he hurried back to pick it up. "Thanks," he muttered.
  "Yes," said Bennett eagerly, "you come look too,
Frank."
  "I'll come too," said her grandfather, and Bennett
jumped, clearly noticing the old man in the shadows for
the first time.
  "Who are you?" Bennett asked.
  The old man didn't answer, and didn't seem to want
to look at Bennett.
  "He's my father," said Marrity.
  Bennett frowned at the old man. "Moira's father?"
  Marrity nodded. "Probably he inherits the place,
actually. All Grammar's stuff."
  Bennett touched the lapel of his jacket. He started to
say something, then just said, "Fine! Let's go look at
the bike!"
  Daphne and her father followed Bennett through the
musty-smelling kitchen and living room to the front
door. As Bennett pushed aside the creaking screen door
and stepped out onto the porch, Daphne saw two
vehicles parked in the shade of the big old curbside
jacaranda: a brown van and a gray compact car. A man
with a white brush cut sat in the driver's seat of the
compact.
  "That's the -- producer, in the car," said Bennett,
almost babbling. "His name's Sturm."
  Daphne's grandfather had followed them out onto the
porch. "Sturm?" he said gruffly. "Where's Mr. Drang?"
  Daphne knew that Sturm und Drang was some kind
of German literary term, but Bennett blinked at the old
man in confusion. "How do you know them?" Again he
slapped at the lapel of his jacket, as if to be sure
something was still in his pocket. "Have you made a
deal with them?"
  "Relax, Bennett," the old man said, still not looking at
him. "Life -- trust me -- is too short."
  As Bennett led the group from the house down the
walkway, the Sturm man was getting out of the car,
smiling like a chef on a label, and Daphne noted that
the man's gray suit looked expensive but didn't really fit
his figure. Bennett stepped ahead of the others,
apparently wanting to talk to him.
  Daphne's grandfather was staring at Sturm, and his
mouth was open in evident dismay.
  He turned to Daphne and her father. "Run," he said
quietly. "This is the crowd that tried to shoot you this
morning."
  Peering around the old man's shoulder, Daphne saw
Sturm squinting at them, ignoring Bennett, and he
reached into his jacket and opened his mouth.
  Daphne's father had grabbed her hand and yanked
her back, but she saw Bennett brace himself and then
drive his fist very hard into Sturm's stomach.
  "Wait, Dad!" she yelled. She heard her father's heels
tear the grass as he halted.
  The white-haired man folded and tumbled facedown
onto the sidewalk pavement, and Bennett was right on
top of him, fumbling inside the man's jacket.
  The door to the van rumbled back, and two younger
men in T-shirts hopped down to the sidewalk -- then
stopped. Bennett, crouching above Sturm, was holding
a pistol, pointing it at them.
  "Get in the car!" Bennett screamed. He hammered
the butt of the pistol down onto the back of Sturm's
head, and Daphne flinched at the sudden hard pop of a
gunshot.
  But her father was pulling her toward Sturm's now
empty gray car, and Bennett was on his feet and
running around toward the driver's side. As if the
accidental shot had taken away his inhibitions, Bennett
paused before getting into the car and fired the gun
three times at the van; Daphne saw dust fly away from
the left front tire and then the van sagged on that side.
  Her father had yanked open the back door and
bundled her and his briefcase into the backseat and slid
in behind her. Bennett was in the driver's seat, and
without even closing the door he twisted the ignition
key and jerked the engine into gear.
  The car's back door was still open, and Daphne
struggled up to look out at her grandfather, but the old
man was backing away, toward the house.
  "Wait for my grandfather!" said Daphne. "Get in!" she
yelled at him over her father's shoulder.
  The old man shook his head. "No," he said clearly.
  A slim, dark-haired woman in sunglasses had stepped
out of the van and seemed to be staring very hard at
the people in the car.
  Her grandfather saw the woman too. "Go!" he yelled,
waving them on.
  The tires screeched as Bennett gunned the engine
and steered away from the curb. The back door swung
shut.
  Though her ribs were aching, Daphne was craning her
neck to look out the back window. The woman held up a
hand, either waving or signaling the men in the van not
to shoot. Daphne didn't wave back.
  "Did you make a deal with those people?" Bennett
yelled as he pulled his door closed. He turned right onto
the wider street at the end of Batsford. "Sell them
something Grammar had?"
  "No," said Marrity, helping Daphne straighten up on
the seat. "Belt, Daph!" he said. Acceleration pressed
them both back against the vinyl upholstery. Daphne
fumbled for her seat belt, noticing a burnt smell in the
air. Maybe it was the tires.
  "They paid me," panted Bennett, "they want you and
Daph real bad. I think -- I saw he had a gun -- I think
they want to kill you! Shit. Shit. Now they'll want me
real bad! Maybe I can just give 'em back the money."
Daphne saw his eyes in the rearview mirror, glaring.
"What did you do?"
  "I don't know," Daphne's father said, tucking his
briefcase down in front of his knees and groping to find
his own seat belt, "but there's a guy I've got to call. Are
you heading for the police station? Take a left on
Colorado."
  "Yes. No." Bennett was breathing hard. "Do you want
to go to the police? Your father's back there."
   "He knows them," said Marrity. "And he didn't want to
come with us." He bit his lip, and Daphne got a quick
vision of the old man pushing the sunglasses lady from
behind, in the hospital lobby. "He didn't want to come,"
he said again. "Actually I should call this guy, before we
go to the cops."
   There was a familiar shoe box by Daphne's foot, and
she kicked the lid off it -- and squeaked in surprise.
Bennett swerved in the traffic lane, then angrily said,
"What now?"
   "Rumbold!" she said. "Daddy, they've got Rumbold
here!"
   Her father peered over her at the open box on the
floor, and his face went blank with surprise. "What the
hell?"
   "You mean the teddy bear?" Bennett's voice was loud.
"Burned up?"
   "Yes," said Daphne's father, "her teddy bear. We
buried it. Why do they have it?"
   "They probably saw you bury something." Bennett
sped up as they passed a Holiday Inn. "They want
something from you."
   It took Daphne a moment to realize that her father
was picturing the videocassette she'd taken from
Grammar's VCR, because she was picturing it too. And
her father was also picturing a sheaf of creased
yellowed papers. The Einstein letters, she was sure.
   "I've got to stop and call Moira," said Bennett as he
made a rocking left turn onto Colorado. "Tell her to
leave work right now and meet us at the Mayfair Market
on Franklin, in Hollywood. We'll be there before she is,
we can wait for her. We're all in some real trouble, I
hope you know that."
  Daphne wondered how he could imagine that they
might not know that.
  "And then what?" asked Marrity.
  "I know a place where we can all hide, and decide
what to do. Hollywood Hills, panoramic view with
Hollywood sign and easy access." He sighed. "I've still
got the keys to the place."
  Bennett had turned right, onto a street called
Garfield, but now he sped right past the police station
and the high red dome of City Hall, and made a left turn
onto a broader street.
  Daphne stared out the left-side rear window at the
white headstones of a cemetery wheeling past. For a
moment she thought of asking Bennett to stop so that
she could bury Rumbold there, but she just sighed and
kept silent.



Charlotte could joggingly see herself standing on the
sidewalk, and Rascasse lying facedown on it, as Golze
hurried up, staring.
  "Backup car says sixty seconds," Golze panted.
"Bradley shot him?"
  "No," said Charlotte, "he hit him with the butt of the
gun, and the gun went off. The bullet went into the
tree, I think." Through Golze's downward-staring eyes
she noted the red blood trickling down through
Rascasse's spiky white hair to puddle on the sidewalk
pavement under his chin. She was mildly surprised to
find that she didn't feel anything at all about him.
   "Have the boys be ready to lift him," Charlotte said.
   "I may do that," Golze snapped, "or I may leave him
right here. I think he's dead."
   Golze's vision shifted to the right, and focused on the
old man who had refused to get into Rascasse's
hijacked car with the Marrity family.
   "Who are you?" Golze asked.
   "He's the guy who was driving the Rambler," said
Charlotte. "Frank Marrity's father." And he gave me an
awful shove, she thought, this morning at the hospital.
   The old man smiled, though his face went blank again
when Golze said, "Bullshit, we killed Marrity's father in
'55, in New Jersey. Who are you?"
   The old man licked his lips. "Do you have Frank
Marrity's fingerprints?"
   "Yes," said Golze.
   The old man visibly took a deep breath. "Good, you'll
want to check this. I'm Frank Marrity, the same guy
who just drove away in that car, but I'm from the year
2006. I want to make a deal with you people."
   For several long seconds Golze's gaze was fixed on
the old man, and Charlotte stared right along with him.
Her face tingled, but she couldn't tell if it was hot or
cold.
   I knew it was possible, she thought breathlessly, I
knew Rascasse and Golze were on the track of
something that could be attained. I can save my young
self, save her vision, save her soul from all my sins... if
this guy isn't lying.
  The old man who claimed to be Frank Marrity licked
his lips again. "Killed my father? -- in 1955! Why?"
  Charlotte's view of him was blacked out for a
moment: Golze had blinked heavily. "Ask the dead guy
on the sidewalk there," Golze said. His gaze swung back
toward the van, and one of the men who had been
inside it was growing in apparent size as he strode up to
them.
  The man waved back over his shoulder. "Car's here."
  "Frisk this guy," said Golze, nodding toward the old
man, "then get Rascasse into the car. Charlotte and
Hinch and the old guy come with us in the car, you and
Cooper stay with the van. Tell the cops one of those
guys was shooting at the other, missed and hit the
van's tire. You don't know who they were. Give a bad
description of them, and of the car. Say we were just
strangers who stopped to help, and drove off with this
injured guy to find a hospital. You don't know who
anybody was. You're bewildered and angry, right? Toss
your guns in the car trunk right now."
  Golze turned to the street, where a white four-door
Honda was slanting in ahead of the van, so Charlotte
switched her attention to the man Golze had been
talking to, who now proceeded to pat down the old
man.
  She was still dizzy. As she watched the hands slap
and slide over the potbellied torso and the new-looking
clothes, Charlotte wondered if this could really be Frank
Marrity from... nineteen years in the future. If he was,
the years had not been kind. How was your light spent,
Frank? she thought. In what dark world and wide?
You're a nice-looking guy in '87 -- what happened?
   A hand grabbed her elbow from behind, and she
reflexively switched attention -- Golze was looking at
her, pulling her toward the car.
   "You in back on the left," Golze said to her, "Marrity
in the middle, Rascasse on the right. Hurry."
   Rascasse wasn't dead -- when he had been hoisted
up and was being folded into the Honda, he raised his
blood-smeared face and muttered something in French.
   "Oh la la," said Golze, shoving the old man's head
down to get him into the car, then wiping his hand on
the shoulder of Rascasse's suit.
   As she hurried around to get in on the other side,
Charlotte was thinking about the little girl she had
waved to in the fleeing car. Charlotte had seen her
through Golze's eyes and then jumped to the girl's
viewpoint -- and it had been the girl's viewpoint,
because Charlotte had seen herself behind the car, on
the fast-receding sidewalk -- but suddenly she had
glimpsed a quick image of the little girl herself, up
close, in profile.
   It only seems to happen with Frank Marrity and his
daughter, thought Charlotte as she slid into the seat
next to the old Frank Marrity and pulled the door
closed, this falling into one viewpoint from the other.
What does that mean?
   And why did I wave at her?
                  Seventeen
Shit," said Bennett shrilly, "a cop."
  In the backseat next to Daphne, Marrity didn't look
around. "Has he got his lights on?" They were driving
north on Fair Oaks Avenue, over the bridge that
spanned the 210 freeway.
  The stolen car rocked as Bennett hit the brakes.
  "No, but he's right behind us! How fast was I going
just now? What if he pulls us over? I haven't called
Moira yet! And I've got fifty thousand dollars in my
pocket! My God, what have you people done to me? You
fucking Marritys--"
  "Lay off the brake and just drive straight," Marrity
said sharply.
  "This car is stolen! I've got a gun in my pocket! And it
was fired only a few minutes ago! Oh Jesus--" His
hands were visibly shaking on the steering wheel.
  Beside Marrity, Daphne turned around and knelt on
the seat to look out the back window.
  A moment later Marrity heard a muffled boom, and
with a sudden cold chill in his stomach he guessed what
had happened. He twisted around to look, and sure
enough there was a car receding behind them, its hood
up and billows of steam whipping around it in white
veils.
  "Make the first--" Marrity began.
  "The police car blew up!" interrupted Bennett.
   "I know. Make the first right turn you can, and pull
over. I'll drive." Marrity smelled burning plastic.
   "Jesus, now the car's on fire!"
   "It's just your ashtray," said Marrity, feeling ready to
vomit. His own hands were shaking now. "It'll--"
   "It's the stereo," said Daphne. "There isn't an
ashtray."
   "Get off this street and park, dammit!" said Marrity
loudly.
   "Dad, I'm sorry," said Daphne, "I thought I had to!"
   "Maybe you did, Daph." They swayed on the seat as
Bennett wrenched the car into a right turn. Marrity
wasn't sure his anger and dismay were justified, and he
tried to keep them out of his mind, where Daphne could
sense them. "Are the cops all right?"
   Daphne was crying now. "Y-yes, I just grabbed the
radiator!"
   Bennett had turned right on Villa, and now steered
the car to an abrupt stop against the curb. Black smoke
was pouring up from the dashboard and curling under
the windshield.
   "I think we just abandon this car," said Marrity,
levering open the right-side door and grabbing his
briefcase. "Come on, Daph."
   "I've got to bring Rumbold!"
   "Sure, bring Rumbold."
   Bennett climbed out of the car, and Marrity took
Daphne's free hand and began striding away up the
sunlit Villa Street sidewalk.
   "Did Daphne blow up the cop car?" Bennett
demanded breathlessly, catching up with them.
   "Bennett, that's crazy," snapped Marrity. "Don't go
crazy now." He peered ahead, not wanting to look back
at the car. "I see some stores. Is that fifty thousand
dollars of yours in cash?"
   "Of course not," said Bennett. "But you asked her if
the cops were all right, and she said--"
   "Then I'll give you a quarter to call Moira with. She
still works at the dentist's office in Long Beach, right?
I'll give you a couple of quarters. We can stop for a
drink after you call and still have plenty of time to get a
cab and meet her in Hollywood."
   "Or an ice cream," said Daphne humbly, trotting
along beside him.
   "Or an ice cream," Marrity agreed, squeezing her
hand. "There used to be an ice-cream place up here
when I was a kid." He cleared his throat. Bennett," he
added awkwardly, "I think you saved our lives back
there. At Grammar's house."
   "And probably got myself killed doing it," said
Bennett. "I'm not joking." He slapped his pockets. "I left
my sunglasses in the car."
   "You can afford another pair. The guy I'm going to
call is with the National Security Agency. He'll believe
what we tell him, and I think he'll arrest your -- Sturm
und Drang, and the woman who tried to kill Daphne and
me this morning." And I hope they'll rescue my father,
he thought, who also saved my life today. Marrity
looked at Bennett, for once not focusing on the scowl
and the bristly mustache. "I'm-- grateful to you for
saving me, and for saving my daughter," he said.
  "Fuck you and your daughter," said Bennett, hurrying
along. "And the NSA can't arrest people, they'd have to
get the FBI to do it."
  "Do you really have fifty thousand dollars in your
pocket?" asked Daphne.
  "I think it's two dollars less than fifty thousand," said
Bennett gruffly. "I -- shouldn't have said 'Fuck you.'"
  "That's okay. Anybody who saves my dad's life can
say anything he wants."
  "Anybody who saves your dad's life should get a
checkup from the neck up." He squinted at Marrity.
"What does the National Security Agency have to do
with all this? And Daphne said she grabbed the radiator
-- after you asked her if the cops were--"
  "Grammar's father was Albert Einstein," interrupted
Marrity. He was sweating, and his mouth still felt too
full of saliva. "Grammar had something she got from
Einstein, some kind of machine, I gather. The NSA
wants it, and I imagine this crowd who tried to kidnap
us just now wants it too." How much should he tell
Bennett about all this? The man deserved to know
something about what he had got tangled up in.
"Grammar probably used it on Sunday, and that got
everybody's attention, got all these people on to... us,
her descendants. They all think we have it, or know
where it is."
  "Bullshit her father was Einstein."
   Marrity blinked at him. "Does that really strike you as
the most... today, the most implausible thing you've..."
He waved and let the sentence go unfinished.
   "Did Daphne use this machine to blow up the police
car?"
   "No. I don't know." Marrity spat into a hedge, and for
a moment thought he would have to crouch behind the
hedge to be sick. "In a way, maybe," he added
hoarsely, taking a deep breath and stepping forward
into the breeze.
   His briefcase was getting heavy, and he could sense
the ache in Daphne's arm from carrying Rumbold in the
shoe box. She was about to explain, and he decided not
to stop her.
   "I watched that movie that I stole from Grammar's
shed," she said, looking down at the sidewalk as she
skipped to keep up with her father. "Pee-wee's Big
Adventure, except it was actually another movie, an old
silent movie." She blinked up at Bennett, squinting
against the sun. "The movie scared me so bad that I
burned up the VCR and my bed. Rumbold was on my
bed."
   "Poltergeist," said Bennett.
   Oh that's all we needed, thought Marrity.
   "Poltergeist?" asked Daphne in dismay. "Like the
ghosts that came out of the TV, in that movie?"
   "No, Daph," Marrity said, trying to project
reassurance, "real poltergeist stuff isn't like the stuff in
that movie at all. Poltergeist is when a teenage girl sets
things on fire, at a distance, when she's upset. Nothing
to do with ghosts or TV sets."
   "Well," said Bennett, "it's supposed to be children
around puberty, both boys and girls, though admittedly
most recorded cases involve girls; and it's not just
starting fires, by any--"
   "Bennett," said Marrity. "It's a girl this time. And it's
fires, this time."
   "I was only--"
   "There's a phone booth," interrupted Marrity, nodding
ahead. "And there's a drive-in burger stand that
probably sells ice cream."
   It wasn't the place he remembered from his childhood
-- he and Moira had ridden their bicycles to an A&W
root-beer stand that used to be here, in the early '60s.
But this was the place that time had left them, and it
looked as if it would do.



"I'm only going to eat the ice cream," said Daphne, "not
the cone."
   Bennett, and then Marrity, had talked to Moira on the
pay phone, and had managed to convince her to leave
work at once and drive to the Mayfair Market on
Franklin, in Hollywood. Marrity had then phoned for a
taxi, and had been told that one would pick them up in
half an hour. Now they were at a picnic table in the
roofed patio behind the hamburger stand, not visible
from the street.
   "Why not the cone?" asked Marrity. "Did he touch it?"
   "Yes! He's supposed to take it from the bottom of the
package, with the little paper holder, but he took it out
of the top, with his fingers."
   "His hands are probably clean."
   "He handles money."
   "Oh, yeah -- good point."
   Bennett had ordered a cup of coffee, but pushed it
aside on the picnic table after one sip. He wiped his
mouth on the sleeve of his white shirt, since all the
paper napkins Daphne had pulled out of the dispenser
had blown away when her father moved Rumbold's box,
which had been holding them down.
   "Those Sturm and Drang guys," said Bennett, "told
me they were in negotiation with you to buy something
Grammar had -- this machine, apparently. They said
you were going to keep the money, even though Moira
should get half."
   "That was a lie," said Marrity, sipping a cup of coffee
of his own. "I've never spoken to Sturm und Drang, and
I only met the sunglasses girl yesterday afternoon. We
just talked about Milton, but then this morning she tried
to shoot me, and a few minutes after that she tried to
shoot me and Daphne both."
   "Are you serious? Shoot you? Did she have a gun?"
   "Yes, Bennett," said Marrity patiently, "and she fired
it too. Several times. At me."
   Bennett frowned and shook his head. Then he asked,
"Who's Milton?"
   "A poet," said Daphne. "Dead for a longtime."
  Bennett waved impatiently. He was squinting fiercely
at the cars in the shopping-center parking lot. "Why
would your father have stayed with that crowd?" he
asked Marrity.
  "He knows them, I gather," said Marrity. "I don't
know anything about him -- we only met him
yesterday."
  "Moira hates him."
  "So do I, probably. Though he saved my life this
morning, at the hospital."
  "You didn't tell us Daphne was in the hospital," said
Bennett. "I had to find out from Sturm and Drang, this
morning."
  "It was very sudden," said Marrity.
  "My dad did a tracheotomy on me, on the floor of
Alfredo's restaurant," said Daphne proudly, "on Base
Line. With a knife."
  "They gave you fifty thousand dollars?" asked Marrity.
  "I guess so. You did a tracheotomy yourself? An
emergency tracheotomy? Wow." He wiped his mouth on
his sleeve again. "Originally the fifty thousand was for
whatever it was that your grandmother had, this
machine, I guess. But then it was just for handing over
you and Daphne."
  Marrity shuddered. "I'm glad you didn't hand us over
to them." He didn't ask Bennett whether he had
intended to split the money with him.
  Daphne had by now eaten all the ice cream off the
cone. "Don't you think the germs would be dead by
now?"
  "What germs?"
  "From the ice-cream man's hands. Wouldn't the open
air kill them?"
  "I suppose it might."
  She held the cone up and blew on it, turning it to
catch all sides. "They'd blow off, wouldn't they?
Germs?"
  "Yeah, I bet they would. Be sure to chew it,
thoroughly."
  "You're supposed to say, 'Absolutely.'"
  "Absolutely."
  "Well don't say it if you don't mean it."
  "Daph, I have no idea whether they'd blow off or
not."
  "Well, he didn't touch the tip," she said judiciously,
and bit the point off the end, and melted ice cream
spilled down her chin and onto her blouse.
  She dropped the cone onto the table. "I need clean
clothes," she said. "So do you, Dad. We've been
wearing these since yesterday. And toothbrushes."
  "There's our taxi," said Marrity, getting to his feet.
  "I think there's a washing machine at this house
we're going to hide out in," said Bennett.



Charlotte was looking out through the eyes of the old
fellow who claimed to be Frank Marrity from the future.
  In the rearview mirror she could see the blue eyes of
young Hinch, who she recalled had been a theology
student at a Bay Area seminary before his progressive,
urbanely skeptical instructors had driven him to look
elsewhere for a true supernatural power. The Vespers
had picked him up with the promise, as she privately
thought of it, that "ye shall not surely die: for God doth
know that in the day ye eat the fruit thereof, then your
eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing
good and evil."
  Denis Rascasse, slumped unconscious now on the far
side of the Marrity guy, would probably have said
something like efficiency rather than evil. And
cowardice rather than good.
  Over the headrest of the passenger seat she could
see a few curls of Golze's disordered dark hair.
  The radio on the dashboard clicked and hissed, and
then a voice said, "Tierce."
  Golze picked up the microphone. "Seconde."
  "We found Prime's car, guns of Navarone." Golze
impatiently switched frequencies, and the voice went
on, "On Yucca. Nobody relevant visible in the
neighborhood. The stereo was burned up, car full of
smoke."
  "Does it run?"
  "Yes, runs fine."
  "Meet us at Santa Monica and Moby Dick." Click. "And
Van Ness. We'll switch cars, you take this one."
  "Gotcha," said the voice, and Golze hung the
microphone on its hook.
  "Take us to Santa Monica and Van Ness," he said to
Hinch.
   Charlotte wondered why the stereo of Rascasse's car
should have caught fire.
   Abruptly she found herself seeing her own right-side
profile; she was alarmed by the stress lines around her
mouth and eyes. She turned to look toward the Marrity
man, and was glad to see that in the full-face view, the
sunglasses hid the crow's-feet at the corners of her
eyes.
   "Why the hell," he asked her, "did you try to kill Frank
Marrity -- my younger self -- this morning?" She
wished she could see his expression.
   "I think," said Golze quickly, "that we've all been
working under some misunderstandings." He shifted his
bulk to peer back around the headrest at the old
Marrity.
   From the constriction at the top of Marrity's vision,
Charlotte guessed that he was frowning.
   "Soon enough," Golze said, "we'll all be able to ask
and answer all the questions." Golze's eyes were
blinking behind his glasses, and Charlotte saw him
glance to the far right side of the rear seat, toward the
slumped figure of Rascasse. "I think Rascasse is dead,"
he added. "Dying, anyway." He turned and looked
ahead again.
   Charlotte tried switching to Rascasse's point of view
-- and found herself seeing Golze and Hinch head-on,
and old Marrity in the rear seat behind them;
apparently her viewpoint now was from the dashboard,
looking backward. Faces and hands were unnaturally
bright, as if this image were seen by infrared radiation.
Rascasse was evidently out of his body, but not far out
of it.
   She switched back to the Marrity view. "I don't think
so," she said.
   On her right, the old Frank Marrity cleared his throat,
jiggling her vision. "Really, why did you kill him?"
   "It was that Bradley guy," said Golze, "he hit him on
the head with a gun butt. Your brother-in-law, if you
really are Frank Marrity."
   "I mean my father, in 1955. I -- that doesn't make
any sense."
   "How do you know it doesn't make any sense? You
were what, three years old? Anyway, I don't know, I
wasn't even born yet. Rascasse said your father was
more useful to us dead than alive, whatever that might
mean, if anything." Golze hitched around in the seat
again and smiled back at Marrity. "So give us a sample.
What's some news from the future?"
   "Are you sure you killed him, then?"
   Golze shrugged. "Rascasse says we did. He seemed
pretty sure. Why, did you hear from him after '55?"
   "No -- that's been my -- we hated him for that, my
sister and I. For leaving and not ever getting in touch
with us."
   "Well," said Golze, "any hate is good practice, even if
it's baseless, as in this case. Better, in fact, more pure.
So tell us something that happens in the future."
   Frank Marrity blinked several times. "Uh, the Soviet
Union collapses in '91. The Berlin Wall comes down
before that, in '89. No war, the whole Communist thing
just collapsed from inside, like a rotten pumpkin." He
took a deep breath, and after several seconds let it out
again. "I want to make a deal with you people.
Something I can do for you, something you can do for
me. But first you need to buy me a bottle of vodka."
   "Vodka after talk," said Golze.
   "No," said Marrity. "You people killed my father, and...
and I don't know where that leaves me. I've hated him
all my life for what he did, and now he's gone, and he
didn't do it -- and I'm afraid--"
   He broke off and laughed weakly, and for a moment,
before he blinked his eyes again, Charlotte could see
the blur of tears around the edges of his vision. His
voice was flat when he went on, "So I insist on a bottle
of vodka before we proceed."
   Charlotte saw Golze shrug. "Okay," he said.
"Charlotte, the guy who's driving Rascasse's car will
take you home in this one." Knowing her ways, he
stared straight into Marrity's eyes as he added, "You
haven't slept in thirty hours, and I don't think we'll
catch up with our fugitives within the next ten hours.
Get a shower, get some sleep, eat something."
   You don't want me to hear you interview the Marrity
guy, she thought. But in fact her eyelids and eye
sockets were stinging, and she could smell her own
sweat.
   "Okay," she said.
   To her right, she could feel old Marrity relax. He's
afraid of me, she thought, and she wondered whether
to be amused or annoyed.
   She leaned back in the seat, her left elbow on the
door's armrest, and again she reached out mentally for
the unconscious Rascasse's view -- and then she
smothered a gasp, though her fingernails reflexively
scrabbled at the door and her right hand gripped
Marrity's knee, doubtless to his alarm.
   Rascasse was fifty feet above Colorado Boulevard --
his astral projection was, anyway. Only after a
bewildered moment did Charlotte realize that the
motionless streamlined train in the lane below them
was simply the car their bodies were in -- it looked like
an impossibly long limousine, stretched from one block
to another, right through an intersection -- and at the
intersection, other elongated vehicles were stuck
perpendicularly right through it.
   We're a bit outside our time slot, she told herself
firmly. We're looking at several seconds at once. The
black strings of pearls hanging in the air are probably
flapping birds, crows.
   Then either Rascasse descended, or he narrowed his
focus; she could see Golze in the front passenger seat
head-on, nearly level with her and only a foot or so
away, and his blurred head became clear, frozen,
grinning in a candid moment.
   Then she could see inside Golze, by God knew what
light; she could see his ribs, the slabs of his lungs, and
the veiny sack that was his motionless heart; somehow
in this impossible light it appeared to be black.
   Then Rascasse's gaze entered the heart, with such a
tight focus that the motionless valves were mouths
caught pursed or stopped in midsyllable.
  Charlotte switched back to Marrity's view, and
involuntarily let out a sharp sigh of relief to see the
back of Golze's head rocking in the passenger seat in
front of her, and brake lights flashing through the
windshield.
  Golze turned around again to look at her, his
eyebrows raised.
  "I'm going to sleep right here," Charlotte said,
speaking too loudly. "You know the way you think
you're falling, right as you go to sleep?"
  "Jactitations," said Golze, returning his attention to
the traffic ahead. "Common in alcoholics."
  Oh yeah? thought Charlotte, genuinely too tired to
take offense. But I bet my heart will outlast yours.

                     Eighteen
When the taciturn young man dropped her off at the
corner of Fairfax and Willoughby, Charlotte waited until
she heard him drive away and then, since no one was
looking at her, she listened to the traffic. Vehicles were
growling from left to right in front of her, so she waited
until that noise stopped and engines were accelerating
back and forth to her right. She stepped confidently off
the curb, and used the engine volume to keep herself
from slanting out of the crosswalk that she couldn't see.
   Stepping off the curb, she thought. I did that, all
right. That experience with Rascasse's viewpoint in the
car might not have been all the way out to what those
boys call the freeway, but it was... pretty far up an on-
ramp, at least! A good distance above the surface
streets I live in.
   Her hands were shaking, and she clenched them into
fists.
   There was bourbon in her apartment, but she wasn't
sure about cigarettes, and right now she needed a
cigarette. Up the far curb, she shuffled tentatively
across the 7-Eleven parking lot, listening for cars
suddenly turning in or backing out of parking spaces,
and finally someone was looking at her.
   She saw herself from a viewpoint inside the store,
through the tinted window, but it was clear enough for
her to walk briskly. She smiled and waved toward the
viewpoint, just to keep the person looking at her until
she reached the doors.
   The action reminded her of having waved at Daphne,
possibly half an hour ago. What was that all about? she
wondered again. Hello? Here I am? Daphne Marrity is
not my younger self!
   Once inside, she switched to the point of view of the
clerk behind the counter, without even having seen if it
was a man or a woman. The clerk didn't look at her
wallet as the pack of Marlboros slid across the counter
between the displays of Bic lighters and little cans of
cold-sore balm, so she had to feel for two one-dollar
bills -- she kept ones folded into squares, to distinguish
them from the fives that were folded twice lengthwise,
the tens that were folded once lengthwise, and the
twenties that were not folded at all. She could see the
two quarters the clerk gave her in change, so she didn't
have to feel for the milled edges of the coins to know
what they were.
   Outside again, she paused in the hot, smoggy breeze,
scanning the nearby viewpoints for a view of herself;
over the years she had become very good at picking
herself out even in very crowded scenes. And after a
few seconds she located herself in the view of a man --
she could see the edges of a mustache at the bottom of
the view field -- at the roofed RTD bus-stop bench
across Willoughby, and he obligingly watched her as she
walked the dozen yards to the gate of her apartment
building. He even kept her in view as she stepped along
the grass-bordered pavement to the front door of her
apartment, so she didn't have to drag the fingers of one
hand along the walls and windows of the other ground-
floor apartments, as she sometimes did.
   By touch she fitted the key into the front-door lock,
and bolted the door behind her once she was inside.
Through the eyes of the man across the street, she
could dimly see her silhouette inside the apartment
through the always uncurtained windows, but that view
was of no use, and she let it go.
   Her apartment was chilly with air-conditioning, and
the faint smells of upholstery and damp plant soil were
a relief after the aggressive exhaust-and-salsa smells of
the street.
   She hung her keys on the hook by the door and took
three strides forward across the carpet, and with the
fourth step her left rubber-soled Rockport tapped the
linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor.
   She peeled the cellophane off the pack of Marlboros
and tapped one out. Several lighters were in the drawer
under the counter, glasses in the cupboard above, the
bottle of Wild Turkey on the Formica-top table, and in
ten seconds she had sat down at the table and poured a
couple of inches of bourbon into the glass and was
waving the fingers of one hand over the lighter to be
sure it had lit; then she slowly brought it toward the
end of the cigarette, puffing until she could taste the
smoke.
   She inhaled, then put the lighter down to take a sip of
the bourbon; a moment later she exhaled smoke and
bourbon fumes, and a lot of the tension in her shoulders
went with them.
   But her heart was still going faster than usual, and
she knew it was because of her brief vicarious
experience of being outside the boundaries of one-
second-at-a-time. It's actually true, she thought
cautiously, trying out the shape of the idea; you really
can get into a higher dimension, from which the four
dimensions we ordinarily live in can be viewed from
outside. She had taken their word for it before, but now
she'd actually seen what Rascasse and Golze had been
talking about all along.
   If one of them's got to kill the other, she thought, I
hope it's my poor old Rascasse who survives. Especially
if he goes along with Golze's evident decision that I no
longer need to kill the young Frank Marrity. Obviously
the situation's changed since I was given that order.
This crapped-out old Marrity, who has information we
need to have, might just evaporate if I were to kill his
younger self. Who knows? It all seems to be real, the
old guy seems actually to be a visitor from the future.
   As I will be.
   She took another drag on the cigarette and another
mouthful of the whiskey, and as she swallowed she let
the shiver shake through her all the way to her
fingertips, probably throwing the ash off her cigarette.
And she realized that the nervousness she felt was
relief and anticipation.
   This is going to work, she thought. I don't have to kill
Marrity, and this thing is going to work. I'll be able to
ditch this life, like a paper towel you cleaned up some
nasty mess with. Throw it away and then wash every
particle of memory off your hands.
   She recalled helping Golze lure a young man aboard
the bus in Pasadena last night. Golze had used a stun
gun on him once he was inside, and then had duct-
taped his mouth, wrists, and ankles. She had been
dropped off at the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital in San
Bernardino about half an hour later, and in all that time
the young man had not moved. Perhaps Golze's stun
gun had killed him -- Golze hadn't referred to the
incident today.
   She drained the remaining couple of ounces of
bourbon in one swallow, and welcomed the depth-
charge effect, the unfocusing warmth spreading through
her whole body.
   She stood up and crossed to the sink, where she put
down the empty glass and ran water over the cigarette,
afterward dropping the soggy filter in the wastebasket.
   As she walked back across the living room carpet, she
was remembering Ellis, her last boyfriend; he had said
that Elizabeth Taylor didn't seem attractive to him in old
movies like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Butterfield 8
because the image of her present-day self kept getting
in the way.
   She stepped sideways onto the linoleum of the
bathroom floor, into the faint smells of Lysol and rust.
She opened the medicine cabinet and took down a
hand-size plastic bottle of baby shampoo and squirted
some into her palm and began washing her hands,
rubbing her fingertips. Before the shampoo had been
entirely washed from her fingers, she several times
brushed warm water over her eyelashes, from the
bridge of her nose outward.
   She had only seen the young Frank Marrity twice,
briefly, both times through the eyes of his twelve-year-
old daughter: yesterday at 1:00 P.M., when he had
been sitting across from the daughter at the Italian
restaurant, and five hours before that, when he had
been sitting at his kitchen table next to the old version
of himself. The old one had been drinking something
brown, brandy or whiskey.
   Did the young Marrity imagine that the older man was
his father, as Charlotte had? Would that be what the old
man had told him?
   Charlotte called up young Marrity's face -- lean and
kind and humorous under the disordered dark hair, very
different from the defeated, pouchy face of the old guy.
And the voices had nothing in common -- young
Marrity's was a clear tenor, while the old guy's was
hoarse and raspy. She didn't see them as the same guy
-- no perceptible Elizabeth Taylor effect.
   She lowered her chin as if to whistle a deep bass
note, opening her eyelids wide; then drew her left
forefinger along her lower eyelid until she could feel the
bottom edge of the plastic scleral shell. And with a
gently gouging push, she popped it right off the coral
sphere implant and onto the palm of her hand.
   A moment later she had done the same with the right
eye. She rinsed the prosthetic eye shells, rolling the
flexible plastic between her still slick fingers.
   When they were clean, she dried them on a towel and
carefully laid them in a silk-lined glasses case and
snapped it shut and slid it onto the shelf above the
toilet.
   She kept her eyelids open wide to let the coral
spheres air out. Of her eyes are coral made, she
thought.
   She was aware of a viewpoint not far away, and she
focused on it. The young student in the next apartment
was staring at his television screen, on which Clark
Gable and Vivien Leigh were sitting on a veranda,
watching a little girl riding a horse sidesaddle; and
Charlotte had taken a step toward the living room, to
turn on her own television set and get audio to go with
the clairvoyant picture, but then she noticed that the
lights were glowing on the student's VCR, on top of the
television set -- Gone With the Wind wasn't being
shown on a TV channel, he had rented a tape of it.
   The student always watched the news on Channel 7
at 7:00 A.M., and sometimes Charlotte set her alarm so
that she could watch it through his eyes, listening to the
sound on her own set. Usually, though, she would
rather sleep.
   Ellis had been good with movies, generally paying
pretty close attention. She had made a show of keeping
her eyes pointed toward the screen to encourage him to
do the same. And he had been a great reader, never
skimming or skipping pages -- often she had just sat
beside him on the couch, her eyes closed, reading along
through his eyes. He had liked John D. MacDonald and
Dick Francis mysteries, which were fine, but she wished
she could meet a man who liked the Bronte sisters.
Charlotte had only read Wuthering Heights and Jane
Eyre before being blinded. Frank Marrity probably liked
the Brontes.
   She sighed and picked up her purse and the towel
and counted her steps into the bedroom. She sat down
on the bed, spread out the towel across the bedspread,
and then pulled her .357 Smith & Wesson revolver out
of her purse.
   With her finger outside the trigger guard and the gun
pointed into the corner of the room, she pushed the
cylinder-release button and swung the cylinder out to
the side. She tilted the gun up and pushed the ejector
rod; one heavy cartridge fell into her palm, along with
five empty brass shells.
   Five shots! she thought with a shiver. And apparently
all I did was break a window. She was glad now that
she had not killed him.
   If Marrity had looked at her, she had planned to see
herself facing him squarely and pointing the gun a bit
below his eyes, so that she would not quite be able to
see down the barrel. That ought to have had the gun
aimed at his chest. And then squeeze the trigger. She
had wondered if he would look down at the wound in
himself or keep staring at her.
   In spite of her intimacy with Ellis, her recollections of
him were nearly all of his profile at restaurants, as
people at other tables had glanced over at him and
Charlotte.
   When they had made love he had hardly ever looked
at himself -- not surprisingly, she thought; he wasn't a
narcissist -- and so all her recollections of their passion
were views of her own naked body. And of his hands.
   She had had perhaps half a dozen lovers during the
nine years since the exploding battery had blinded her
in the missile silo in the Mojave Desert; and her
memory of every one of them was of her own body and
a pair of hands.
   It still seemed odd to her that she and Denis
Rascasse had never been lovers, not even when he had
first recruited her three years ago.
   Involuntarily she found herself recalling old Robert
Jerome, the Fuld Hall custodian at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton, in New Jersey. She had
seduced the amiable old man in order to get access to
the restricted Einstein archives -- and then had
convinced him that she loved him, to get his help in
robbing the extra-sensitive files still kept in the
basement of Einstein's old house on Mercer Street.
   Even with Robert Jerome, all she could remember
was her own face and body, and his wrinkled, spotty
hands.
   The pebbled-plastic gun-cleaning kit was in the
bedside table drawer, and she lifted it out carefully and
opened it on the blanket, by touch separating the rods
and brushes and sharp-smelling bottles of solvent and
oil.
   Was she a narcissist? If so, it was by default. She
couldn't help but always wind up looking at herself,
through someone else's eyes.
   But no, that wasn't the way it was -- she didn't care
about this blinded body, nor even about the twenty-
eight-year-old woman who animated it.
   If I'm a narcissist, she thought, it's in the same way
that the crapped-out old-man Marrity probably is. We
want to go back and rescue our younger, more innocent
selves from some bad thing that threatens them. I have
done nothing but in care of thee. We're willing to throw
ourselves away -- make ourselves into things that
ought to be thrown away -- if by doing so we can save
that one precious person who by our disgraceful actions
will be spared our disgraces.
   She looks like I used to.
   According to Rascasse, it's possible to leave now and
go back and change your past, then return in
Newtonian recoil to now again, with your memories
intact -- with, in effect, two sets of recollections:
memories of the original-issue life and memories of the
revised one too. Einstein apparently did that in 1928,
and Lieserl Marity probably did it in 1933. But I won't
do it that way, Charlotte thought. I won't come back.
  Throw it away and then wash every particle of
memory off your hands.
  Robert Jerome had used those old hands she
remembered to make a noose out of his own shirt, not
very long after Charlotte had impatiently explained to
him that she had never loved him, that she had only
seduced him to get the papers she had stolen. He had
been in jail for being an accessory to burglary, his job
and pension lost, when he had killed himself.
  He had also been guilty of perjury, in absolving
Charlotte of all blame; through a Vespers decoy address
she had eventually received a letter that he had written
to her from the jail, but she had never asked anybody
to read it for her.
  I won't impose these memories on the redeemed
Charlotte Sinclair, she thought as she began screwing
the .38-caliber brush onto one of the rods. I'll save her
and then just go away, with all my sins unshared.
  Nymph, she thought, reflexively misquoting Hamlet,
in your orisons be all my sins forgotten.



Bennett and Moira had walked ahead as the four of
them made their way up the steep curves of Hollyridge
Drive, with Marrity and Daphne trudging along behind,
all of them crowding against a fence or garage door
whenever a car slowly moved up or down the narrow
lane. Marrity couldn't imagine what happened when two
cars needed to pass each other.
   Mockingbirds made sneering calls from the aromatic
eucalyptus trees overhanging the embankment to their
right, and the one resident who noticed the four of them
-- a blond woman who was hovering with a watering
can over a row of tomato plants in red clay pots --
stared at them with evident unease. Pedestrians who
weren't jogging or walking dogs were apparently
unusual. Marrity wasn't surprised -- the noon sun was a
weight on his shoulders, and this hike would have been
strenuous even if he were not carrying his jacket and
his briefcase and Rumbold's shoe box. Bennett was
holding a paper bag that had a bottle of scotch whisky
in it -- he'd bought it at the Mayfair Market on Franklin,
one block north of Hollywood Boulevard.
   Moira had finally driven into the market parking lot
about an hour after Bennett had called her. They had all
got into another taxi then, while Bennett and Marrity
both tried at once to explain to Moira why they were all
fugitives, even she; and then, when they had driven no
more than half a mile up through the narrow, twisting
lanes that curled like shaded streams down the
Hollywood Hills, Bennett had told the driver to stop.
   Now Moira halted and kicked off her shoes, so
Bennett stopped too, and they waited for Marrity and
Daphne to catch up.
   "So are these spies, Frank? " Moira asked, standing
on one foot to rub the sole of the other. "Soviets, KGB?"
   "I don't know," Marrity said, pausing to switch his
briefcase to his left hand and cradle his jacket and
Rumbold in his right arm. "I guess if the NSA's after
them, they probably are."
  "Bennett says they... shot at you and Daphne?"
  "Shot at me, aimed a gun at me and Daph. Serious
both times." He lifted his briefcase to wipe his forehead
on his shirtsleeve. "This is all true, Moira."
  "Bennett says you told him Grammar's father was
Albert Einstein." She smiled at him. "I could lose my job
over this, not going back after lunch."
  Marrity was tempted to open his briefcase and show
her the Einstein letters; but he still didn't trust Bennett
with knowing about them. "The NSA man we met last
night said her father was Einstein," Marrity told her. "So
did our father, yesterday morning."
  Beside him Daphne nodded solemnly.
  Moira's smile had disappeared. "Our father? Who do
you mean?"
  Marrity looked at Bennett, who shrugged and rolled
his eyes. Clearly he had not told Moira about seeing
their father.
  "My father. Your father. He's back. He--"
  "Our father? "Her shoes fell out of her hands and
clattered on the asphalt.
  "Yes, Moira," said Marrity patiently, "he came back
because he heard Grammar died, and he wants to make
a deal with these--"
  "You've talked to him? Where is he?"
  Daphne crouched to pick up Moira's shoes.
   "He's with these people who are after us," said
Marrity, "who shot at me. He--"
   "Where?" She swayed on the narrow black pavement,
and Marrity and Bennett each reached out to grab one
of her arms. Marrity dropped his jacket.
   "I don't know where he is now!" said Marrity. "He was
standing on Grammar's lawn when we drove away, an
hour and a half ago. We wanted him to come with us,
but he waved us off, said, 'Go!' We couldn't wait."
   "He had amnesia," said Moira, "all these years. I'm
sure of it." Very slowly, supported by Marrity and
Bennett, she sat down on the asphalt. The skirt of her
brown linen suit was knee length, and she had to sit
with her legs stretched out in front of her. Daphne
frowned and crouched again to press her palm against
the street surface, and Marrity knew she was checking
to see if the tar was sticky.
   "You can't just sit here," said Bennett anxiously. "Get
up, it's only a few steps to this house I have the key
to."
   "Come on, Moira," said Marrity.
   Daphne was crouched beside Moira, her face level
with the woman's. "We should get in out of the sun,"
Daphne said. "We'll all get skin cancer."
   Moira blinked at her. "Of course, dear," she said, and
let Marrity and her husband help her back onto her feet.
   Daphne picked up her father's jacket and carried it
and Moira's shoes the rest of the way. They were nearly
at the top of the hill, where Hollyridge made a hairpin
turn to the left to become Beach-wood, and the street
was narrow and steep between the eucalyptus trees.
  Bennett waved at a shaded one-story house that was
crowded up to the street pavement on their left. Red
bougainvillea blossoms clustered over the door and two
windows. "This is it," he said tiredly, pulling a set of
keys from the pocket of his slacks.
  Entering the house was stepping out of shadow into
sunlight, for the entire west side of the house was
windows facing the Beach-wood canyon. Frank Marrity
and Daphne followed Bennett and Moira inside, blinking
around at the blank white walls of the spacious interior;
they had entered at street level, but stairs led down to
a lower floor with a balcony outside the glass. The
afternoon sunlight gleamed on polished wood floors,
and Marrity noticed that the faces of his companions
were underlit, as if by reflecting water. He put down his
briefcase and the shoe box by the door.
  "Lock it, Dad," said Daphne.
  "Right," said Marrity, twisting the door's dead-bolt
knob.
  "This would have been perfect for filming," muttered
Bennett. "Camera on the balcony and on the street out
front, lots of room inside for everybody's gear."
  The kitchen was on the upper, entry level, and
Marrity noticed a telephone on the wall by the counter.
  "The phone work?" he asked, starting toward it. His
footsteps echoed in the empty house.
  "It's supposed to," said Bennett, following him as
Moira and Daphne moved to the rail to look down into
the broad lower level. "I think Subaru is paying the bill.
Let me see your man's card."
  Marrity was already tugging his wallet from his hip
pocket, and when he pulled the card out he handed it to
Bennett.
  Bennett looked at the phone number, which was all
that was printed on one side of the card, and then at
the other side, which was blank.
  "Who says this guy is with the NSA?" he asked.
"Besides him?" He clunked his bagged bottle down on
the counter. "I should have bought plastic cups," he
said, his voice lower. "We'll have to drink from the
bottle."
  "I don't really care if he's NSA or not," said Marrity,
taking the card back. He was speaking more quietly too
-- the echoes seemed to amplify volume. "He's against
the crowd who keeps trying to shoot us, which makes
him somebody I approve of."
  Daphne had joined her father by the counter.
"Eugene Jackson was a nice man," she said.
  Moira turned around and leaned back against the rail,
so that she was just a silhouette against the brightness
behind her. "Why not just call the police, Frank?"
  Marrity remembered the cartoon thing that had
spoken to Daphne from the turned-off television at the
hospital, late last night. The Jackson person had
appeared to know how to handle it-- and Marrity was
certain the police would not.
  And he remembered Bennett's fifty thousand dollars.
Was Bennett anxious to talk to the police?
   "We'll probably call the police," he told her. "But I
want to call this NSA guy first, and then you need to
hear the full story. Then, if you like, we can call the
police."
   "Can I call my office?" Moira went on. "Tell them I'll
be late coming back?"
   "You should have done it from a pay phone down the
hill," said Bennett. "You haven't seen these guys, Moira,
they're scary."
   Moira laughed incredulously and stepped away from
the railing, into the kitchen area. "You think they've
tapped the phone at the dentist's office?"
   "Let's see what our NSA man says about you calling
your office," said Marrity. He laid the card down on the
tile counter with a faint slap, and then took a deep
breath and flexed his fingers.
   They all stared at him.
   "Who," Bennett asked, squinting, "was the Greek
philosopher who practiced rhetoric by putting pebbles in
his mouth?"
   "Demosthenes, I think," said Marrity.
   "They probably didn't have scotch, in those days."
Bennett pulled the bottle of Ballantine's out of the paper
bag. "You want a mouthful before you call?"
   Moira muttered, "Oh for God's sake," but Daphne
nodded at her father as solemnly as if she were
advising sunscreen or seat belts.
   "Good idea," Marrity said. Bennett twisted off the cap
and took a generous sip of the liquor before passing the
bottle to Marrity.
   Marrity took several scorching swallows, then handed
it back.
   Bennett nodded. "Damn good idea," he said
breathlessly.
   "We didn't get any Cokes," said Daphne.
   "Sorry, Daph," Marrity said, exhaling, "we'll get some
later. But you can't have warm scotch right out of a
bottle."
   "Nor even in a glass with ice and soda, I hope!" said
Moira.
   "No, no," agreed Marrity, who in fact had been
thinking that if they'd had glasses he could have given
Daphne a very watered-down drink. "Here goes," he
said, picking up the telephone receiver and dialing the
number.
   The phone at the other end rang only once, and then
a man's voice said, "Yes."
   "This is--"
   "I know who it is," interrupted the voice.
   "Okay. I think we need rescue."
   "Yes you do. I gather you and your daughter weren't
injured this morning? Let's not use names."
   "Okay. No, that's right, neither of us was injured. But
two hours ago that crowd tried to kidnap us in front of
my grandmother's house. It's the woman with the
sunglasses and her friends, I mentioned her to you last
night."
   "Yes, we're aware of them. Where's the last place
your grandmother was standing, on Sunday, in
Pasadena? As far as you know? I don't think she went
to Newport Beach, do you?"
   "No, she didn't go to Newport Beach. Who said she
did? She went to the airport. We have information you
need, and if you don't rescue us this crowd will find us
again."
   "And kill us," added Daphne. Marrity frowned and
touched his forefinger to his lips.
   "We'll pick you up immediately," said the man on the
phone, "and you'll be safe. Did you use a radio, or the
telephone, at your grandmother's house, Sunday or
today?"
   "No." Marrity frowned impatiently. "Yes, on Sunday, I
called my sister from there. Why, was it tapped?"
   "How was the connection?"
   "It was a bad connection, it kept fading out, with
static. We can tell you all this--"
   "But where's the last place your grandmother was
standing in Pasadena? To the best of your knowledge?"
   Marrity reminded himself that this man was their only
hope. "At the curb, waiting for the cab. Or on the
porch."
   "No, I mean while she was still in the house."
   "How could I possibly -- in her kitchen, I imagine, or
in the shower, or in her shed. How should I know?
Listen, my father is with these people, the people who
tried to kidnap--"
   "Voluntarily?"
   "My father? Yes, he could have driven away with us,
but he decided to stay with them. He says he's met
them before, when he was thirty-five, though most of
this crowd is too young for him to have met them then."
  "I daresay. Why her shed? What's in the shed?"
  "Uh -- lawn mowers."
  "Plural?"
  Marrity was sweating. Actually there wasn't even one
lawn mower in Grammar's shed; it had just seemed like
a plausible answer.
  The man went on: "Is there any unusual machinery in
her shed? Is this the decrepit old shed in her
backyard?"
  "Yes, that shed." Marrity saw Moira raise her
eyebrows. "Well, she's got a VCR out there."
  "A VCR. Is there a gold-wire swastika on the floor?
Maybe under the floor?"
  Marrity opened his mouth, but couldn't think of an
answer to give the man.
  "I'll take your silence as a yes," said the man's voice.
"And I bet she was barefoot."
  Marrity remembered the tire-soled sandals he and
Daphne had seen on the brick floor of the Kaleidoscope
Shed. "Uh..." he began.
  "Stay right where you are, I'll send somebody to pick
you up. For right now just tell me your nearest big cross
streets -- call this number again in half an hour to give
me your exact location."
  "Nearest...?" said Marrity, trying to remember. "Uh,
Franklin and Beachwood, I guess. We're up in the hills."
He glanced at Moira. "Can we call the -- what do you
think of the idea of us calling the police? Or my sister's
employer?"
   "Don't call anyone else. Repeat, do not. Just sit still
and call me again in half an hour."
   Daphne was tugging at Marrity's sleeve. "Something
you've got to tell him!" she whispered.
   "One second," said Marrity into the phone; then he
covered the mouthpiece and said, "What, Daph?"
   "They've got to feed the cats!"
   Marrity nodded and took his hand off the phone. "You
still there?" he asked.
   "Yes."
   "We have one condition, for our cooperation. A...
gesture of good faith, on your part."
   "What is it?"
   "You people need to put a twenty-pound bag of
Purina Cat Chow in my kitchen. Lay it down flat, like a
pillow, and then cut the whole top surface off. It's stiff
paper, there're knives in the drawer to the right of the
sink. They'll be all right for water, they all drink out of
the toilets."
   "Your house is certainly under hostile surveillance."
   "That's why I'm asking a pro to do it, not one of the
neighbors."
   The voice laughed. "Fair enough. We'll do it. Talk to
you in thirty minutes."

                    Nineteen
Lepidopt switched off his portable telephone and tucked
the bulky thing into its carrying case. He shifted in the
passenger seat to look around; they were on Fairfax,
not far south of Hollywood Boulevard.
   "Ernie," he said to Bozzaris, "get to Lieserl's house
right now -- 204 Batsford Street, in Pasadena -- take
the 101 south to the northbound Pasadena freeway, it
ends very close to her place."
   Bozzaris visibly decided on the quickest way to the
101, then made a fast right turn onto Santa Monica
Boulevard.
   "And when we get there," Lepidopt went on, "you go
into the shed in the backyard and find the gold swastika
on the floor. It might be under whatever the floor is,
which I hope isn't concrete. Photograph the swastika,
trace any wiring or machinery and photograph that, and
then take it all out; we'll want to reassemble it at the
Wigwam Motel. That other crowd has got the old
twenty-first-century Frank Marrity. He's with them
voluntarily -- he'll probably want to delay telling them
about the machine in the old lady's shed until he's
made some deal, got some assurances, but they might
abbreviate that. So be quick."
   "The old guy knows this stuff about the shed?"
   "It's got to be how he came back here, from the
future."
   "Ah. You'll want me to drop you off somewhere."
   "No, I'll wait in the car, outside her house. None of
that crowd has seen me before. If they arrive in the
middle of your work, I think we'll kill them."
   The portable phone buzzed again, and Lepidopt
thought Marrity must have thought of some other task
like feeding the cats; but it was an old man's voice on
the line.
   "What?" said the reedy old voice.
   Lepidopt's chest was suddenly cold, for he thought he
recognized the voice. Easy enough, he thought, to
make the phone ring again. Just push some electrons
around, reactivate the circuitry that was activated a
moment ago.
   "Uh," said Lepidopt hoarsely, "Sam?"
   Peripherally he could see Bozzaris glance sharply at
him.
   "I don't know what it is," said Sam Glatzer's voice.
"But it's in a cement tepee. And it's also in a truck. This
thing."
   "What is, Sam?" A moment later Lepidopt bared his
teeth, belatedly remembering that it's no use asking
ghosts questions before they've given the answers.
   He was sweating. He had talked to a ghost only once
before, and that had been during his training in Tel Aviv
in 1968, in the trailer, with an instructor and other
students -- and the ghost hadn't been anyone he had
known.
   Another ghost voice intruded on the phone line now
-- a younger man, possibly drunk: "Two days I sat
beside my body, staring at the holes in my chest."
Looking out the car window, Lepidopt noted that they
were driving past the gray stone walls of the Hollywood
Cemetery.
   "Not that," said Sam, "but a place that looks like
that."
   "Okay," said Lepidopt helplessly.
   "I went to my grandfather," said the other man's
voice; a moment later the voice added, "to find out who
I am, where I came from."
   Lepidopt gritted his teeth. The intruding voice was
certainly a ghost too, so there was no point in telling
him to be quiet.
   "And it's in the Swiss Family Robinson tree house at
Disneyland," said Glatzer's voice, "in a manner of
speaking."
   "Right," Lepidopt said. What is, Sam? he thought. He
tried to remember everything Sam had said so far.
   "At the Chinese Theater," Glatzer went on. "It's in a
lot of places."
   "But I have no mother, really," interjected the other
voice, "Only children."
   "You know what a capacitor is, right?" said Glatzer.
"Put the hand in when the cement was wet. It's more
like a capacitor."
   "My mother will hide them," said the other ghost
voice, "or try to. Everyone who dwells here is safe."
   "The thing I thought was a gravestone," said Glatzer.
   Lepidopt sighed and wiped his forehead.
   "Tell me about it, Sam," he said, to pave the way for
the things the old man's ghost had already said; for he
had it now.
  "They'll try to find my children," said the other voice
unhappily.
  "Oren," said Glatzer, "listen..."
  Oren Lepidopt held the phone to his ear, but neither
of the ghosts said anything more.
  Lepidopt supposed that was the last thing he would
ever hear Sam Glatzer say: Listen...
  Lepidopt switched off the phone. "That was Sam
Glatzer," he told Bozzaris. "His ghost. He says we've got
to get the Charlie Chaplin footprint slab too. It's
apparently part of the machine, and it's apparently in
the shed too. It's a capacitor, he said." He began
punching numbers into the phone. "I'd better get some
sayanim with a truck."
  Bozzaris's eyebrows were up, and he was nodding as
he watched the glittering lanes ahead of him. "How did
Sam sound?"
  Lepidopt laughed harshly. "Good. Rested."



Denis Rascasse's body was stretched across one of the
bunks at the back of the parked bus. He was breathing
through his open mouth, in ragged snores. The gash in
his scalp had been rubbed with Neosporin and
bandaged, but he was still unconscious and there were
no plans to take him to a hospital. Young Hinch sat up
front in the driver's seat, twisting a Rubik's Cube on
each square of which he had painted a Hebrew letter.
  Rascasse's attention was several miles away, at Echo
Park. He had long since lost the body habit of seeing
from two close-set points as if he were using organic
eyes, and his perspective was broad -- sunlight was
gleaming off the lake in a million directions like a fire,
and at the same time the lake was a placid jade green
with no reflections at all; he could see all sides of every
one of the trees around the lake and the undersides of
the lotus lillies on the western shore. Nothing was "in
front of" anything else.
   But he couldn't focus on one of the rental boats on
the lake.
   He knew why. Golze and the elderly Frank Marrity
were in that boat, and Golze must have removed the
Chaplin's-hat ribbon from the Baphomet head and
buttoned it around his own neck -- almost certainly with
a twist to make a Moebius strip of it.
   Chaplin had made a lot of movies at Echo Park for
Keystone Studios, back in the nineteen-teens. Chaplin
had been a magician who took extensive masking
precautions, and his lifeline was a tangle here; every
time a director had said, "Cut!" there was a jig in his
line, and in 1914 Chaplin had even made a movie in
which he had completely submerged in the lake, as if in
a baptism. Lots of kinks and false stops.
   And Golze had now lit up that old spiderweb
camouflage pattern by wearing Chaplin's hat ribbon.
Whenever Rascasse tried to focus on the boat, he found
that he was instead looking away from the boat, in all
directions at once. Even for a person as experienced in
out-of-body perspectives as Rascasse, it was jarring
and disorienting.
The elderly Frank Marrity squinted around in the
sunlight at the palm and yellow-flowered acacia trees
that ringed the little lake. From the boat on the water,
he could see here and there a homeless person sleeping
in the shade beside a shopping cart, and children and
ducks on the asphalt walk that ringed the lake.
  "Last time we talked," he said, "it was on a bus. Do
you still have that bus?" He leaned forward as he spoke,
to be heard over the clanging and squeaking of the
mechanical toy animals Golze had set into motion on
the curved boards below their feet.
  "Yes." Golze rested on the oars, having propelled the
orange-painted rowboat a good ten yards out from the
shade of the roofed rental dock. He had loosened his tie
and laid his tweed jacket across the blue vinyl cushion
on the thwart between them, but his white shirt was
already dark with sweat. For some reason the fat man
was wearing a black ribbon choker, barely visible below
his beard.
  "When was this?" Golze asked.
  A tin ape with a pair of cymbals had run down, and
Golze picked it up and wound the key in its back.
Luckily most of the toys were battery operated.
  The old Frank Marrity shrugged as Golze set the
rackety toy back down among its fellows. "It might
have been right now, this date and this hour," Marrity
said. "I don't recall, exactly. For me, subjectively, it was
quite a while ago -- I was thirty-five years old." He took
a sip from his can of 7-Up, to which he had added
enough vodka to dispel its coldness, and shuddered.
The lake smelled like moss and algae and the breeze
smelled like roof tar.
  "I see," said Golze. "Things, events have deviated,
from the way they originally happened? You can help
keep these toys wound up."
  "Of course they've deviated." Marrity carefully set his
7-Up on the thwart and then bent to pick up a dog with
brown-and-white nylon fur and begin twisting its key.
He wished he'd brought a hat; the sun overhead was
hot on his scalp through his thinning gray hair. "For one
thing, in my original experience of August 1987 my
elderly father didn't visit me. That's who I've told my
younger self that I am. My father. Our father. He
believes it -- I'm close enough to the right age, and of
course I look like him, and I know the family history."
  "So he hates you?"
  Marrity frowned as he put the dog down. "I think he
does. Though he's more civil than I would be, if I met
the old man." Then with a shiver of loss he remembered
that his father had been killed in 1955. "But of course
the old man turns out not to be the bad guy we always
thought he was." And who is now? he asked himself
rhetorically. Got to have a bad guy.
  "What did we talk about," Golze asked, "in the bus,
when you were thirty-five?"
  Marrity thought: You wanted Grammar's VHS movie,
and I sold it to you. But the movie is gone, this time.
And you also asked about Einstein's machine, which I
didn't know about, then. Aloud he said, "You said you
wanted to buy a machine my grandmother had, which
had been designed by Albert Einstein."
   "And?"
   "And I sold it to you, for fifty thousand dollars." Close
enough, he thought -- I sold him the movie that time.
"I want something else, besides money, this time."
   Golze smiled, obviously pleased. "And there was the
movie too."
   "You mentioned a movie, but I didn't have that,
whatever it was." He picked up a big red plastic ant that
had stopped moving.
   Golze's good cheer was gone. "The movie, it was
watched at your house at four-fifteen P.M. two days
ago! Before there were any divergences between your
lifeline and your younger self's!"
   That's right, thought Marrity, forcing himself not to
reach for the 7-Up can. Instead he nervously twisted
the key in the ant's belly. "Daphne -- may have
watched a movie -- I was working--"
   "Why are you lying? Your younger self has described
it as a paranormal 'intrusion' that occurred at four-
fifteen on Sunday." He leaned forward across the oars
and smiled at Marrity, widening his eyes and showing
his yellow teeth. "Why are you lying?"
   Marrity exhaled. "Because it's gone, the movie's
destroyed," he said, relieved to be admitting the truth.
"In my original life nineteen years ago, I sold it to you,
but in this time line the VCR burned up with the movie
in it when Daphne was watching it."
   "Burned up? You know it was burned up?"
   "I saw the VCR in my, his, front yard. It was
charred." The ant had begun writhing mechanically in
his hands, and he hastily set it down.
   "And her teddy bear was burned too," said Golze
quietly. "And the stereo in Rascasse's car! Was this
poltergeist? Telekenesis? Did she grab these things
psychically?"
   "I don't know. I wasn't there. She didn't have any
psychic powers when she was my daughter."
   "Poltergeist!" Golze shouted it like a curse.
   The fat man picked up the oar handles and rowed
furiously to a spot several yards farther out. Then he let
go of them and rubbed his red face with both chubby
hands as the boat surged on for a yard or two and then
rocked to a stop on the green water.
   Marrity peered around at the distant new apartment
buildings beyond Alvarado Boulevard, and in the other
direction at the rental dock's little lighthouse, which
looked as if it dated from the 1920s. And a man from
the twenty-first century sitting in a boat between them,
he thought.
   Finally Golze said, "I believe you," through his
fingers. "All our remote viewers reported that it simply
disappeared; not just stopped being used, but dropped
out of their perceptions entirely." He lowered his hands
and stared at Marrity. "Why would she have poltergeist
powers in this time line?"
   "I can't imagine. It's new to me."
   "Tell me the truth about our meeting nineteen years
ago."
  "I can give you the machine."
  "The meeting."
  "Well, the blind girl was there, and after I gave you
the movie, she stopped bothering to pretend she could
see out of her own eyes. There were some vulgar jokes,
when one of the men would go to the bathroom. She
was pretty drunk, as I recall! And you had -- I'm glad
not to see it here -- you had a mummified human head,
which appeared to be alive." He squinted at Golze, but
the fat man didn't seem surprised, so they must have it
in this time line too. "It made noises and wiggled its
jaw, anyway." He picked up the ape with the cymbals,
which had run down again. "Like one of these toys. Why
didn't you get all battery-operated ones?"
  I'm talking too much, he thought as he wound it up.
He put the ape down and took another sip of the
lukewarm, fortified 7-Up and shifted on the blue vinyl
cushion. He wondered if the cushions were supposed to
serve as life preservers if the boat sank.
  "The wind-up ones provide discontinuity," Golze said
shortly. "So you gave us the Chaplin movie, when you
were thirty-five."
  "Right. A videocassette, labeled Pee-wee's Big
Adventure, though that's not what the movie in the
cassette was."
  "Had you watched the movie?"
  "No. My daughter did. Practically put her in a coma."
  "I can imagine. And we asked you about the machine
too?"
  "Yes, but at that time I didn't know anything about it.
This is the truth. I only learned about it years later,
from hints you dropped about Einstein and my
grandmother. I had to read up on quantum mechanics,
and consult Ouija boards and spiritualists, all sorts of
screwy research. I still don't exactly know how it
works."
  "But you figured out how to work it. You came back in
time by means of it."
  Marrity smiled smugly. "Right."
  "Then we can use it to go back in time from here, and
prevent the destruction of the movie."
  It seemed to Marrity that Golze was acting as if the
movie was the important thing, and discounting what
Marrity had to offer. "What do you even need the movie
for?" Marrity asked. "The machine lets you go into the
past and future, all by itself."
  "You sound like Rascasse," said Golze. For a moment
he was silent, staring out at the water. Then, "Yes," he
went on irritably, "the machine would let me go into the
past and future--the past and future from wherever I
am, from whatever specific little volume of cubic space
the universe has permitted me to occupy. But I -- we --
want to be able to travel in now."
  "Now?" asked Marrity in bewilderment. "You can
already travel in now. Anybody can."
  "I can be in one compressed, predestined point of it,
not travel in it. My whole possible future is contained in
a cone that expands into the future from here, this
constricted now point. And my past is locked into a cone
that extends backward in time from now. That's the
Grail, those two cones, and Einstein's machine will let
me travel in them. But all the time and space outside
those cones is an extension of now, it's every place and
time general relativity says I can't get to. Getting out
there would be... moving sideways in the time-space
hypercube; your grandmother did it, to get to Mount
Shasta-- she got there instantaneously.
   "But -- obviously I've read up on this -- the bits that
are outside the cones right now will be included in the
widening cone of your possible past, if you just wait.
And anyway, the boundaries are expanding at the speed
of light, and the entire earth can't be more than one
light second from end to end! What's the big
deprivation, what are you afraid you'll be excluded
from?"
   Golze wasn't looking at him, and Marrity wondered if
the fat man somehow aspired to eventually be in all
places and moments at once. Would that, Marrity
wondered, make him God?
   If it did, he would always have been God -- he would
have been occupying every place in every moment
since the beginning of time.
   Marrity forced himself not to smile at the thought;
then he remembered the twitching black head he had
seen nineteen years ago, and the hateful woman little
Daphne had grown up to be, and the babies he had
seemed to see in the weeds two days ago; and he
considered the nature of any God that could have
created this world -- "This dreary agitation of the dust,
and all this strange mistake of mortal birth," as Omar
Khayyam had written -- and the impulse to smile was
gone.
  Golze had been looking at the water, but now looked
directly at Marrity. "So where is the machine now?"
  Marrity sat back, to put as much distance as possible
between their faces. "That's my merchandise, telling
you that. But first you've got to pay me."
  "Okay." The black steel oarlocks clanked as Golze
pulled on one oar and pushed on the other, and the
boat rocked on the jade water as the bow began to
move to the left. "What payment do you want?"
  Marrity took a deep breath and let it out, glad of the
breeze in his sweaty hair. "Why are we doing this in a
boat?" he asked. He looked around at the grassy banks
and the arching red wooden footbridge. "This is where a
scene in Chinatown was filmed, right?"
  Golze frowned, either at the evasion or at the
question itself; and at first it seemed he wouldn't reply.
Then, "Yes, Jake Gittes was in a boat here, in that
movie, photographing Hollis Mulwray and Mrs.
Mulwray's daughter."
  Golze opened his mouth to go on, but Marrity
impulsively said, "Jake didn't get the daughter away in
the end, did he?"
  "No," said Golze with exaggerated patience, "the
horrible old man took her away. But this is a relatively
good spot for this particular confidential conversation.
The jangling toys, and the fact that the boat keeps
turning, make it difficult for anyone on the shore with a
shotgun microphone to monitor our talk."
   He bent to fetch up the dog again, and he squinted at
Marrity as he slowly ratcheted the spring tight. At last
he put it down and scratched at the black ribbon choker
around his neck. "And the lake's got associations with
Charlie Chaplin. In certain ways it's a deflection, for any
psychic trying to track us. What payment do you want?"
   That was a short delay, Marrity thought forlornly.
   "Three things," he said at last. "First, you leave Frank
Marrity, the younger one, alone. No more shooting at
him, no more anything at all, ever. You just forget
about him and let him live to a ripe, untroubled old
age."
   "Okay. I don't know how we can prove we've done
that until he has died of old age, but I can tell you that
I don't know why we bothered to try to kill him in the
first place. And I suppose if we killed him, your younger
self, you might just disappear! I'm not sure of the
physics on that." He tugged at one oar, and the boat
jostled around to the right, swaying in the water.
"What's the second thing?"
   "You let me use the... time-travel procedure to return
to 2006, where I can resume my life. Oh, and there's a
house you've got to buy."
   "A house? Okay, after we put you through a very
thorough series of interviews, probably under
narcohypnosis. What's the third thing?"
   There was a long pause before Marrity answered, and
Golze shifted the boat again.
  "I could tell you in three words," Marrity said finally.
"Two. And I certainly don't care what you think of me.
But I want to explain what it is, anyway."
  "Fine. What is it?"
  "It's the way the universe originally played out, the
way my real life played out. I had a life, and I want it
back."
  "What took it from you? "
  "The damned Harmonic Convergence took it from me.
An incident in this year, here in 1987, changed, even
though it was in my past -- imagine having something
in your past change on you, so for instance you and
some friends were shooting a gun when you were
seventeen, and nothing went wrong, and you've grown
up to happy middle age -- but now suddenly you find
yourself in a life in which you've been a quadriplegic
since the age of seventeen because one of your friends
accidentally shot you in the neck, way back then!" He
mopped his face with the sleeve of his windbreaker.
"And you still remember the original happy life! You'd
want to go back, right? -- and tell your seventeen-year-
old self not to go shooting with those friends."
  "How did the Harmonic Convergence do this?"
  "All these zombies -- blanking their minds on the
mountain-tops -- pressure drop -- they've made a crack
in the space-time continuity. Things resume on the
future side of the crack, but not quite the same, a bit of
quantum randomness has seeped in, like groundwater
into a cracked foundation. Hell, you might soon get a
visit from your future self, trying to put your life back
on its original track."
  "You're not a quadriplegic. What is it you want us to
prevent from happening?"
  "Well, it already happened. Yesterday. And I want you
people to undo the change, undo the error, put my life
back into its original... configuration."
  "Okay. What happened yesterday that shouldn't have
happened?"
  For a few seconds the only sound was of some
children playing around the snow-cone vendors on the
north shore. Marrity stared out across the lake surface,
with its patches of tiny, fine-hatched ripples among the
glassy low swells.
  "My younger self... Frank Marrity ..." Marrity was
dizzy, and wondered if he was going to vomit. "He
saved my daughter's life, at that restaurant, yesterday.
He did a tracheotomy on her. She was supposed to
choke to death, she died there, in my original lifeline. In
the real world."
  Golze's eyes were wide behind his steamy glasses and
a smile was baring his yellow teeth and pulling his
beard up on the sides. The choker ribbon was fully
visible around his fat neck.
  "You want us to kill your daughter?" he said. "What is
she, twelve?"
  "Yes, she's twelve. But by the time she's thirty, she's
a monster. And no wonder -- she's unnatural, living
past yesterday; like a dead body walking around and
talking."
  "But you told her to run, this afternoon. We'd have
her now, maybe, if you hadn't told her to run."
  "I wasn't telling her, I was telling my younger self!
This morning you people tried to kill him! Which...
obviously isn't what I want."
  Golze bent down to pick up the red ant. "You get the
ape," he said. And when the toys were buzzing and
clattering away again, he slouched back on his seat and
said, "So you want us to kill your daughter."



Marrity felt hollow, a frail shell around a vacuum, as if
he might implode into himself. Why did the fat man
have to ask for a yes or no answer? he thought. I can't
say yes to him. The horrible old man took her away.
   But all I want is justice! My real life, not the
nightmare life that grew out of the crack in reality, like
a weed, like a nest of scorpions. What I'm saying yes to
is reality!
   Marrity opened his mouth -- but he was sure that if
he said yes here, now, he would not ever be able to go
back to being the man who had not said it.
   But I want the life the universe originally gave me.
It's mine.
   He took a deep breath.

                      Twenty
Yes," Marrity said hoarsely. The boat seemed very
unsteady, and he gripped the hot orange-painted wood
of the gunwales.
   Golze was staring at him curiously. "Not just --
kidnap her, sell her to Arab slave traders in Cairo? Get
the duck."
   "No, I think there's a... a Law of Conservation of
Reality, that would bring her back." Marrity was
sweating -- drops were running down his forehead and
he could feel them crawling over his ribs under his shirt
as he obediently bent over and picked up the toy duck.
"We'd still wind up in that twenty-four-foot trailer, and
she'd still back the Ford over me in 2002. I can't risk
her coming back. And killing her would be" -- he was
panting with the effort of trying to believe what he was
saying -- "would be more merciful."
   "Okay, we'll do it. So where's the machine?"
   "You don't have her. She's escaped from you. And as
far as I can tell, your blind woman still means to kill
Frank Marrity."
   Golze jerked the oars in opposite directions, splashing
drops of water into the air and jarring the boat. "Where
is the machine?"
   "I'd need some assurances--"
   "We'll give you what you want if you tell me now. If
you don't tell me now, we'll give you what you don't
want, abundantly. Where is the machine?"
   Marrity's shoulders slumped and he shook his head.
"It's at my grandmother's house. In her backyard
shed."
   "Can we move it? Get it into the car?"
  "No!" Marrity involuntarily looked at his hands, to be
sure they were still solid enough to twist the key in the
duck. "If you move it, how will I use it in 2006?"
  "We'll move it back later, don't worry. We need you to
have come back to tell us all this, after all. We don't
want to screw up your time line. But we need to move it
now, because other people are going to try to take it,
and they won't care if it interferes with you or not."
  "Okay, right." I've lost all control, Marrity thought.
"No, you can't get it in the car. Part of it is the cement
slab from the Chinese Theater, with Charlie Chaplin's
footprints and handprints on it."
  "Good lord. That's part of it? But she didn't have that
in 1933, did she?"
  "No, the slab was still out in front of the theater then.
My grandmother had Chaplin himself, in '33, and he
wound up getting temporally dislocated too, at least an
accidental astral projection of him did, though he meant
to just be a, a nonparticipating observer. It scared the
daylights out of him -- well, there was the earthquake
too-- and that summer he burned all but one of the
prints of A Woman of the Sea."
  "And we'll get that back," Golze said. "Burned up by a
twelve-year-old girl! But we'll get it back." He had
begun rowing strongly toward the dock. "Got to get to a
radio," he panted. His glasses were opaque white,
reflecting the sun. "We're going to need some help, and
a truck."
The elderly Frank Marrity gripped the edges of the car
seat and wondered if he was going to be sick. Golze
was driving Rascasse's car, too fast around corners, and
the car reeked of melted plastic. What had been the
stereo was a blackened crater in the middle of the
dashboard.
   They were nearly at Grammar's house, and Golze had
driven up the 110 to get here, so they were
approaching from the south, and Marrity's excursions
during these last three days had been by way of
California Street, to the north; he hadn't seen these
streets for many years, and there was more of his
childhood than of his adulthood clinging to these old
trees and pavements.
   Moira and I rode our bicycles up and down Marengo
Avenue, he thought, in the 1950s and '60s. The old
bungalow houses were rushing past in a blur now, but
he remembered each one; there's where we used to
jump from roof to roof with the Edgerly boys, he
thought, and there's where Moira fell off her bike and
cracked her head and I had to carry her all the way
home, three blocks.
   Golze made a leaning right turn onto Batsford Street,
and Marrity could see Grammar's house ahead on the
left -- and he remembered riding his bicycle up the
sidewalk here on many late afternoons in the winter
rain, his canvas newspaper bags empty and slapping
wetly against the front wheel fork, and the olive oil
taste of Brylcreem in his mouth from the rain running
down his face.
  It was tears he tasted now, and he quickly cuffed
them away.
  Grammar's old gray wood-frame house was on the
northwest corner of Batsford and Euclid, and Golze
turned left onto Euclid-- but he drove straight on past
Grammar's back fence and garage.
  Golze was saying, "Fuck fuck fuck," in a quiet
monotone.
  "You passed it," Marrity said.
  "I know," snapped Golze, peering into the rearview
mirror. "There's a U-Haul truck parked at the curb." He
was biting his lip. "Our truck won't be here for another
couple of minutes, at least."
  "You think these guys are here to take the stuff out of
her shed?"
  "Maybe." Golze drove past half a dozen houses, then
slowly turned into an old two-strip driveway and backed
out again, facing south now. He pulled in to the curb
and put the engine in park, but didn't turn it off. Fifty
yards ahead they could see the truck and the cars by
Grammar's back fence.
  "They may just be family," Golze said, "getting
furniture out of the house. But we can't go in while
they're there. Give me the binoculars from the glove
compartment."
  Marrity opened the glove compartment and handed
Golze a pair of heavy olive green binoculars. "They
don't look like my family," Marrity said. They must not
take the machine away, he thought.
  "Hired movers, maybe." Golze lifted the binoculars.
"Shut up."
  The gate in the fence opened, and two men in
overalls walked out holding faded lawn chairs. Behind
them several men were carrying a flat tarpaulin-draped
square with table legs visible under it.
  Marrity noticed that the men with the draped table
took short steps, planting their feet carefully, and that
the table didn't swing at all.
  "Stop them," he said, leaning forward, "they are
taking the machine."
  Golze lowered the binoculars to squint at him. "It's
chairs and a table."
  "They've got the Chaplin slab on a table, dammit! If
they set it down, the legs would collapse -- look how
heavy it is!"
  The radio was mounted below the dashboard, and
had apparently survived the fire that had wrecked the
stereo above it. Golze lifted the microphone.
  "Seconde," he said.
  "Tierce," came the reply from the speaker.
  "Come north on Euclid, and when you're just past the
house, I want you to park on the wrong side of the
street, north of a U-Haul truck you'll see there. Kix." He
adjusted the setting of a dial on the radio, then went
on, "Let the guys out to run alongside, and then I want
you to drive south, in reverse, and ram the U-Haul
truck as hard as you can, Wheaties."
  "No," said Marrity loudly, "part of it's glass! They'll
break it!"
  "Frosted Flakes." Golze changed the frequency again.
"Never mind that, do not ram them," Golze said into the
microphone. "Do not ram the truck, understand?"
  "We won't ram it. Just park where you said? Special
K."
  The men down the street had carried the tarpaulin-
covered object to the rear of their U-Haul truck, and
had laid it on its side on the hydraulic lift.
  Golze changed the frequency again. "Right. Guns
ready. I'll be right behind you. How soon?"
  "I'm just passing Dodger Stadium," came the reply.
"Five minutes if I crank."
  "Crank."
  Golze hung up the microphone.
  "I guess these guys will run if they see guns,"
ventured Marrity. He clasped his hands between his
knees; he wasn't shivering, but all his muscles felt
poised to start.
  "If they're Mossad," said Golze, "they'll have guns of
their own. Our only chance would be to surprise them."
  "I hope they realize there were some gunshots fired
here just a couple of hours ago," Marrity went on. His
mouth was dry. "The cops are likely to respond extra
quick if there's any more."
  "If they're Mossad, they know and don't care." Golze
was staring through the soot-smeared windshield at the
men down the street. He exhaled and hitched around
on the seat as if to reach into his pocket for his wallet;
but what he pulled out was a heavy stainless-steel .45
automatic, and with his thumb he clicked down a little
lever on the side of it. "Busy day," he said.
  Marrity was just narrowly glad that he was still able to
see, and clasp his hands, and make a dent in the car
seat. Can I continue to exist, he wondered, if these
people make it impossible for me to use the machine in
2006?



The hydraulic lift at the back of the U-Haul truck had
risen to the level of the truck bed, and the four men
were now wrestling the tarpaulin-covered square into
the shaded interior. Another man, dark haired and
wearing a blue sweatsuit, closed the gate to the old
woman's yard and trudged toward the passenger side of
the truck cab.
   "Got to follow them," snapped Golze, "can't wait for
our guys. The slab was obviously the last of it." He
jerked the gearshift lever into drive, but slammed it
back into park again when the man by the truck fifty
yards ahead scattered a couple of handfuls of glittering
objects across the asphalt of the street behind the
truck.
   "Ach!" exclaimed Golze.
   He opened the driver's-side door and crouched behind
it, bracing his right forearm in the V between the door
and the slanting doorpost. Sunlight gleamed on the .45
in his chubby fist.
   The bang of the gunshot was stunning, and the
ejected shell spun across the empty driver's seat and
landed in Marrity's lap; it was very hot, and he brushed
it away with a shudder.
   Golze fired three more shots, hammering the air
inside the car, and Marrity batted away the hot brass
shells as they spun toward him -- then Golze paused,
and only then did Marrity think to look through the
windshield toward the truck.
   The man who had been walking toward the truck was
lying down now, mostly on the grass but with one arm
draped over the curb onto the street. All Marrity could
see inside the truck's back compartment was the square
tarpaulin-draped bulk that must be the Chaplin slab. On
the other side of the street, across from the truck, a
man had stepped out of a white Honda that had been
parked at the curb.
   Then the car Marrity was sitting in was thumping and
quivering as flashes winked around the edges of the
draped square in the truck and a staccato popping
echoed between the old bungalows on either side of the
street. The loudest noise was a sharp smack as tiny bits
of glass stung Marrity's cheek and the windshield was
suddenly a glowing white grid, and as he ducked he
heard Golze tumble back into the driver's seat.
   There was bright red blood spattered on the fat man's
hand as he shoved the gearshift lever into reverse, and
then Marrity was flung forward against the diagonal
constriction of the seat belt as the car accelerated
backward, the engine roaring. Golze was twisted around
to look out the back windshield, which was still clear.
Marrity managed to raise his head, and he saw that the
left shoulder of Golze's jacket had a pencil-size hole in
it; the white shirt underneath was already blotting with
red.
   Something crunched under the back wheels and
thumped under the car, and Marrity saw a section of
chrome handlebar with a green rubber grip on the end
spin away to the curb as the car's front end jumped
briefly -- then they were on past, and Golze had backed
the car to the far curb and slammed the gearshift lever
into drive, and after punching out a section of the
opaque windshield with his right fist, he was driving
rapidly north up Euclid. Marrity was as stunned as if
he'd been shot himself, and he could not shake the idea
that Golze had run over a phantom of Marrity's
childhood, preserved and projected by these unchanged
streets until now. He clasped his hands together more
tightly.
   "Caltrops," said Golze, speaking loudly to be heard
over the headwind that was blowing his beard around
his ears. His face behind the beard was so pale that it
seemed almost green. "This hurts -- a lot."
   "I--beg your pardon?" Marrity said.
   "My shoulder hurts!" With his right hand Golze
slapped the wheel around in a right turn onto California
Boulevard.
   "I meant -- 'caltrops'?"
   "What that guy scattered on the street. Like jacks
that little girls play with--but bigger and with pointed
ends. They don't brush aside, they dig in, you gotta pick
'em up one at a time -- I couldn't follow -- not on flat
tires." He was breathing fast, almost whistling with each
exhalation. "They got the machine -- we gotta get the
Chaplin movie."
  But it's burned up, thought Marrity, and you can't go
back in time to rescue it, now that those guys took the
machine. He was feeling nauseated himself; it was just
beginning to dawn on him that Golze had probably run
over a child a few moments ago.
  "The movie isn't burned up," said Golze, "if Daphne
Marrity never existed."



With conscious care and deliberation, Oren Lepidopt
reversed into a driveway and followed the U-Haul truck
as it lumbered south on Euclid Street. It would be his
job to divert any further attempts to interfere, whether
they came from this rival crowd or from the police.
   His ears were ringing. Ernie Bozzaris was dead.
   Lepidopt had been standing in the street, still holding
his little .22 automatic, when he had caught the eye of
one of the sayanim who had picked up Bozzaris's body
from the curb; and just before sliding the body into the
back of the truck and climbing in to pull down the
sliding door, the man had given Lepidopt a thumbs-
down.
   Lepidopt watched the traffic in all directions as he
drove. There didn't seem to be any cars, police or
otherwise, speeding up toward the truck from ahead or
from side streets, and Lepidopt let his aching fingers
relax on the steering wheel.
  Bozzaris was dead, but Lepidopt had to concentrate
on driving. He would think later about his young friend
who now would not see today's sunset.
  Baruch Dayan Emet, Lepidopt thought. Blessed is the
Righteous Judge.
  The katsa from Vienna would be landing at LAX in --
he rolled his wrist to see his watch -- in about an hour.
Lepidopt had lost two sayanim and one agent, and had
disobeyed the order to do nothing until the senior
katsa's arrival. But he had got Einstein's machine.
  His telephone buzzed, and he pried the receiver away
from its case and switched it on.
  He took a deep breath and let it out, then checked his
mirrors and made sure he was following the truck
closely. "Yes," he said.
  "It's me," said Frank Marrity's voice. "You said to call
after half an hour."
  "Good," said Lepidopt. "Now call again a half hour
from now."
  "How long are we supposed to--"
  "You'll be picked up soon," interrupted Lepidopt. "Be
patient. Call me again in half an hour."
  He had to hang up because he needed a free hand to
wipe his eyes.



Rocking in the passenger seat as Golze drove, old Frank
Marrity had to remind himself to breathe.
   The movie isn't burned up if Daphne Marrity never
existed.
   Golze was speeding east on California, passing cars.
Marrity could hear him breathing, deep and wheezing,
over the battering flutter of the headwind through the
broken windshield. After a couple of blocks, he cut
across the right lane into another residential street, and
slowed down.
   "But Daphne does exist," said Marrity, talking loudly
even though the headwind had now diminished.
   "And you and I are having this discussion," said Golze
impatiently. "In your previous lifetime -- lifetimes, I
guess -- we never did, did we? Nothing's... written in
stone."
   "You'll go back in time and kill her as a baby you
mean? But you don't have the machine."
   "We don't need the machine to do this. This is
Einstein's other weapon, the one he couldn't bring
himself to tell FDR about. The atom bomb was within
Einstein's conscience, but he couldn't tell Roosevelt how
to... unmake people, delete them from reality entirely.
Not even if it was to be Nazis." Golze started a laugh,
but choked it off with a fierce scowl after one syllable.
"Einstein was okay with ending people's lives, but he
had qualms about making them never have had lives at
all -- never born, never conceived."
   Marrity's eyes were squinting and watering, and he
wished he'd brought sunglasses. The car was still
moving slowly down the block, passing old houses and
lawns that stirred his memories.
   Can these people do that? wondered Marrity. If
Daphne never existed...
   But even as of 1987, twelve years of Marrity's life had
been tied up with her; even in his previous good life, he
had been her father. Who would he be, if he had never
had a daughter?
   And Marrity hated Daphne, the one he knew best, the
one he had known since 1987, the one who had backed
the car over him, but did he really want to condemn her
to... never having existed at all? Not remembered by
anyone? Did the little girl he had seen on Grammar's
back porch this morning deserve that?
   And even though Lucy, Daphne's mother, was dead,
he'd be depriving her of Daphne too. Suddenly Lucy's
terminated life would never have included a child, that
particular little girl.
   What would become of Daphne's soul? he thought.
   What will become of mine?
   "It's risky," said Golze, his eyes half closed, possibly
talking to himself. "Even with a twelve-year-old who
hasn't ever done much of anything. These past three
days, at least, will turn out to have happened
differently, since she'll never have been a player. Risky.
But ahh--" He exhaled gingerly. "I'm shot, Rascasse is
probably dead, the movie's burned, the Mossad has the
machine -- if there was ever time for a re-deal, this is
it."
   The radio sputtered. "Prime," said a voice. It was
oddly flat, with no resonance behind it.
   Golze's white face jerked toward the radio, and
though he instantly looked back at the street ahead of
him, his hand moved only very slowly toward the
receiver.
   At last he lifted it off the hook. "Seconde," he said.
   "Get back here to the bus," said Rascasse's
synthesized voice. "We need to get -- the Daphne child
right now, which only can -- be done from here." The
voice became louder, as if a volume knob had been
turned up: "And bring the hatband too. Don't lose it!
And get Charlotte here as well. And -- mother's little
helper -- do it fast."
   Golze peevishly leaned forward and changed the
frequency setting and didn't take his hand off it. "I can't
get Charlotte. You get her. I need a doctor, I've been
shot, sympathy for the Devil." He switched to the next
frequency and leaned back, clearing his throat gingerly.
The car was moving at barely five miles an hour now.
   "Take off the -- hatband," said the depthless voice on
the radio.
   "I'm driving, I can't--"
   "Take it off. Or have -- the old man take it off, if you
cannot."
   "For Chrissakes--" Golze reached up behind his ear
and tugged the black choker, and with a snap it came
loose. He tossed it into the backseat. "I wasn't getting
blood on it," he began, but Rascasse's voice cut him off.
   "Be quiet now," Rascasse said; then, "The shoulder
blade itself is fractured; but the artery below --
subclavian -- is fine. Infection is of course a likely
outcome, but before that happens, all this time line will
be gone."
  Golze paused, his mouth open as he stared at the
street through the hole in the windshield. Then he
smiled, exposing yellow teeth. "Well, good point. It'll be
a long drive to -- can't always get what you want."
After changing the frequency again, he said, "To Palm
Springs. But you have to pick up me and my
companion, this car isn't driveable. I'm at--"
  "Don't bother changing frequency, my sight includes
you. Park the car. We'll pick you up."
  Golze hung up the microphone and squirmed on the
seat, his face gray. "I hate it when he looks inside me,"
he muttered. "I swear I feel heat when he does it." He
steered the car to the curb in front of a house with a
real estate sign in the front yard, and shifted into
neutral. "He doesn't have a French accent when he's
not speaking through his actual mouth, did you notice?
Odd phrasing still, but American pronunciation. Accent
must have to do with the tongue muscles."
  The car was stopped. Marrity clasped his hands to
keep them from trembling. "If Daphne--" he began.
  "You won't have to worry about her anymore," Golze
said, wincing as he leaned back in the seat. "And we
won't need to bother you at all -- in this new time line,
you'll never meet us."
  "Won't you still need to learn about the machine?"
asked Marrity. "From me?"
  "Rascasse will manage to interrogate you somehow
before we do it, and he'll remember this time line, even
after it's collapsed to nonexistence. He'll be the only
one who does. I think he's the one who erased
Nobodaddy, if there ever really was such a person, in
any time line. Though how an organization can exist if
its founder didn't is a puzzle."
   "I -- won't remember her?"
   Golze was sweating, and his face was gray, but he
stared at Marrity with evident curiosity.
   "Not a bit," he said. "Not even as much as a hard
drive remembers what was on it after a magnet gets
rubbed on it. You'll be a, a whole new hard drive." He
started to reach his right hand toward his wounded left
shoulder, but let it fall back onto his lap after getting no
more than halfway. "And so will I. I won't even
appreciate not getting shot, since this experience won't
be part of my lifeline. Today is a Tuesday in the August
of Never."
   Marrity relaxed in the car seat, and he realized that
he had not relaxed since using Grammar's device to
come back to 1987; in fact, it seemed to him now that
he hadn't been really relaxed for years.
   He ran a word in his head, and then permitted himself
to say it out loud: "Good."
   "Better than the Catholics' Confession, isn't it? You
just snip off the sinful yards of tape and start over. No
repentance required."
   "Nobodaddy," said Marrity, to get past that subject.
"Like in Blake?"
   "Who's Blake?"
   "Poet. Late eighteenth century, mostly."
   "Oh, William Blake, sure. He wrote a poem about
somebody called Nobodaddy? I thought it was beatnik
slang, like Daddy-O."
   "It was Blake's name for the demiurge, the crazy god
who created the universe. Not the eternal God -- that
one's too remote to have anything to do with the
universe."
   Golze's sweaty face was expressionless, and his
mouth opened and closed without speech. At last,
"Rascasse," he said hoarsely. "That's who Rascasse
kills?"
   Marrity remembered wondering, in the boat on the
lake in Echo Park half an hour ago, if Golze aspired to
be in all places and moments at once, and if achieving
that would make the fat man God.
   Marrity shrugged, an action Golze couldn't perform.
"If it was the Nobodaddy that Blake was talking about.
Where did you get that term?"
   "I think Rascasse was the first to use it." Golze looked
around at the street and the houses and the old
eucalyptus trees along the curbs in the sunlight, and
Marrity thought he seemed to be frightened of the
whole landscape.
   "August of Never," Golze said, weakly but defiantly.
"He's still... monitoring my vital signs, I can feel his
attention inside my chest. It's as if Mr. A. Square of
Flatland had somebody leaning down over him with a
flashlight, peering at his innards. Worse than being
naked. How does it work?"
   Marrity thought it was a rhetorical question, but a
moment later Golze shifted to peer at him irritably.
   "How does it work?" said Marrity. "I don't know. I
guess if he's working in a bigger group of dimensions--"
   "Not Rascasse," Golze said. "I know how that works,
don't I, Denis?" he added, addressing the headliner
above him. "He can hear all of this. No, I meant how
does the time machine work? Do you need to kill
somebody, to get past the Aeons?"
   "Well, I hardly traveled aeons--"
   "I mean living things, living categories, called Aeons,
didn't you study this stuff? Didn't you read the Pistis
Sophia? All the old Gnostic and Kabbalist literature talks
about the Aeons, time and space as demons. And they
are demons, believe me."
   Marrity blinked at him. "Well, I didn't have to kill
anybody," he said.
   Golze shifted on his seat as he tried to peer down at
his wound. "It's gonna be a long drive to Palm Springs,"
he said tightly. "Maybe you become one of the Aeons,
when you can travel in time. Maybe I sacrificed a guy to
you last night. August of Never. So how does it work? "
   "You -- use up your accumulated mass energy, you
spend it, to propel yourself right out of your predestined
time line. Einstein said that gravitation and acceleration
are the same thing -- there's no difference between us
sitting in this car with gravity pulling us down against
the seats, on the one hand, and being away from any
gravitating body in a car that's accelerating upward
through space at thirty-two feet per second per second,
on the other hand. Let go of a pencil, and it doesn't
make any difference whether you say it rushes down to
the floor or the floor rushes up to it."
   Golze made an impatient beckoning gesture with the
blood-spotted fingers of his right hand.
   "So every person on earth," said Marrity, "has been
accelerating at thirty-two feet per second per second all
his life. Before he was a year old he would have
exceeded the speed of light, if that were possible; but
of course he can't quite do that, so he's been
accumulating mass energy instead. I spent all my
accumulated momentum when I broke out of sequential
time."
   And it has left me feeling empty, he thought.
   For several seconds Golze didn't speak, then, "I hope
California still exists, nineteen years in the future," he
said slowly. "It sounds as if you might have blown it off
the continent, releasing that kind of energy."
   "It was a, a shaped charge, it all went outward, out of
our four dimensions -- strike a match on a painting and
you haven't really hurt the painting -- with me riding it
like a guy fired out of a cannon." Marrity smiled
nervously. "Switzerland still existed when Einstein came
back to it, after having exited this way, in 1928."
   Golze seemed to have forgotten his gunshot wound.
"You came back nineteen years. How far back could you
have gone?"
   "I don't know. Not farther back than my birth in
1952, I think, unless I could jump over to my mother's
lifeline." His leg was aching, and he tried to shift to a
more comfortable position in the passenger seat.
"Certainly no farther back than whatever date it was
when that configuration was assembled -- the Chaplin
slab and the maschinchen itself. I think Grammar put
the machine together in 1931, and added the Chaplin
slab in the 1950s."
   The radio hummed, and then Rascasse's unaccented
and unechoing voice said, "How did you work it, the
maschinchen thing?"
   Marrity reached for the microphone, but Golze shook
his head. "Just talk," the fat man said. "He's just using
the radio speaker now, he's not actually on the air."
   "It's a--" Marrity sighed deeply, but he still felt
empty. He took a deep breath and started again.
"Among other things, it's a very sensitive voltmeter," he
said, "and it amplifies tiny voltage differences. It's ten
rotating condensors set up in series, so that each beefs
up the voltage into the next, up to where you can feel
the current, if you're standing barefoot on the two tiny
gold posts that stick up through the bricks. They're set
flush with the bricks on the floor, no bigger than nail
heads. This is in Grammar's shed I'm talking about, and
the condensors themselves are in a big dusty glass
cylinder under the workbench -- though I suppose
those guys have it now! It was dusty in 2005, anyway,
maybe Lieserl was Windexing it back here in 1987. And
it looks fragile -- the condensor plates apparently hang
from a glass thread."
   "And we could build this," said the flat voice on the
radio. "Not so difficult."
   Marrity shook his head. "I said 'among other things.'
Anyway, what you do is, you press your hands into the
chaplin handprints and then you send two astral
projections of yourself to targets you've set up -- one
on a mountain, one at sea level or lower, while your
body stays in the middle ground somewhere, standing
barefoot on the gold electrodes. You guys know about
astral projections, right? That way you're existing in
three time shells at once -- they're only slightly
different, but the maschinchen amplifies tiny differences
and imposes a combined-wave signal through the
electrodes in the floor. You're not in any one time shell
anymore at this point, see, you're smeared across three
of them. And for your safety you need three of, of 'you'
-- to spread out the recoil that's coming up soon.
Einstein only had two, in 1928: himself on a mountain
in the Alps and a projection in the valley below him. It
was enough to spread him across some time shells, but
the recoil still nearly killed him."
   Through the ragged hole in the windshield Marrity
could see a sidewalk shaded by jacaranda trees. It all
seemed a lot farther away than it could really be.
   "'Among other things,'" said the Rascasse voice.
"What other things?"
   Marrity wished he could get out of the car. In spite of
the fresh air blowing in through the torn windshield, the
smell of burnt plastic was making him sick, and his bent
leg ached all the way up to the hip.
   "In 2006 I wiped some of the dust off the glass
cylinder the condensors are in," he said hoarsely, "and
looked in it with a flashlight. Einstein, or Lieserl, had
painted Hebrew letters on the ten condensor plates. I
couldn't rotate them, or see the letters in toward the
axis, but in several places I saw the Hebrew word Din,
which is the name of one of the ten Sephirot, the ten
world emanations of God. In his letters to Lieserl,
Einstein seems to have equated Din with determinism.
Judgment with no mercy mixed in, I gather. No
indeterminacy, no uncertainty. Anyway, I couldn't have
copied out all the letters on the plates without taking
the thing apart."
   "And now the Mossad has it," said Golze. His voice
was frail, and when Marrity looked at the fat man in the
driver's seat beside him, he wondered if Rascasse's
optimistic diagnosis was correct; Golze appeared to be
dying. Perhaps Rascasse knew he was, and wanted him
to die. Maybe Rascasse won't need to have killed
Nobodaddy, Marrity thought -- maybe he can just
prevent him.
   "And," Marrity went on, "you couldn't build the
Chaplin slab."
   "Are you close?" wheezed Golze irritably. "We're
sitting in a parked car with the windshield -- fuck --
broken out."
   "Five minutes since we left from Echo Park," said
Rascasse's voice, which seemed to be just shaking the
air now, independent of the radio's speaker. "We're on
the 101 now, soon to hit the Pasadena freeway
junction. Just a few more minutes. What's the Chaplin
slab? Why wouldn't... Shirley Temple's do as well?"
  Marrity realized what had been nagging him about the
way Rascasse was speaking -- it was all in iambic
pentameter.
  "The slab," he said, "is a sort of kink in time -- in
conjunction with the machine, it works like a catalyst, it
makes it easier to get out of the time stream. My sister,
Moira, took out a restraining order against me, in
2003--claimed I was a dangerous drunk! -- but one day
when she wasn't home, I broke into her stupid house
and found some letters from Chaplin to Grammar,
written in 1933 and '34." He smirked, distracted by the
memory. "They may have been romantically involved!
Grammar would only have been thirty-one in '33, and
Chaplin--"
  "Goddammit," said Rascasse's voice, "how's the slab
a kink in time?"
  "Right, right." Marrity frowned but went on, "Well,
Chaplin was with Grammar in '33, when she jumped
back in time, and he got dislocated too, for a moment.
He found himself occupying his 1928 body, kneeling
next to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in the
Chinese Theater forecourt, pressing his hands into wet
cement. A moment later he was back in the
Kaleidoscope Shed and it was 1933 again, but" --
Marrity shrugged -- "it was the 1933 Chaplin who made
those handprints in 1928. The slab, just by existing, is a
violation of sequential time."
  "We're on the Pasadena freeway now," said
Rascasse's disembodied voice.
  Still in iambic pentameter, Marrity noted. His hands
were trembling, and he clasped them together as if in
prayer.

                 Twenty-one
After the bus had pulled up alongside the battered car
and Marrity had helped Golze climb aboard, Rascasse's
voice from the bus radio had told the driver to go back
to Hollywood and pick up Charlotte Sinclair; and again
Marrity had noticed that Rascasse spoke in iambic
pentameter.



Now the bus was parked in streaky palm-tree shade in
a remote corner of the Alpha Beta parking lot at Pico
and La Cienega, idling with the air-conditioning running,
and Charlotte was sprawled across the left-side seats
just behind the Baphomet head's cabinet, blinking
sleepily and seeing through old Marrity's eyes on the
other side of the aisle. Golze was slumped next to
Marrity, against the window frame, and when Marrity
glanced at him she saw that the fat man's face was
deadly pale behind his sparse beard. She assumed that
Rascasse's body was still lying on a bunk in the back of
the bus, but nobody had looked there and she hadn't
the energy to ask.
  She was about to feel in her purse for the half-pint of
Wild Turkey when, through old Marrity's eyes, she saw
the pointer on the electronic Ouija board swoop up to
the letter T in the upper-right corner. Nobody remarked
on it.
   Rascasse's voice rang out of the empty air behind the
driver. "Paul's right. We need to take the Daphne girl."
   Charlotte had jumped in surprise and now she wished
someone would look around. Take it easy, she told
herself -- if Rascasse can project his awareness, it
should be no trick for him to project his voice. She took
a deep breath and let it out.
   Today the bus smelled like a slum restroom: bleach
and excrement. She didn't let herself think about the
young man she had helped lure aboard, last night;
instead she recalled what the bodiless voice had just
said.
   "Why the child?" she asked.
   Nobody answered her, and then Marrity's view
swiveled around to her. She couldn't tell if she needed
lipstick -- nobody had looked squarely at her when
they'd picked her up, and now her head was just a
silhouette against the bright window at her back.
   "Daphne," Marrity said, "burned up the Chaplin
movie." His voice was a hollow monotone, and she
wished Golze would look at him.
   But Golze was just staring at his curled hands in his
lap. "We need the damn movie," he said. "We need
sideways too, not just up and down."
   "These two are going to take her to Palm Springs,"
Marrity went on, "and somehow cause her never to
have existed. I won't remember her, or any of this,
after."
   Charlotte just said, "Ah." And neither will I, she
thought. I suppose that's another thing that's actually
possible -- deleting people from the universe.
   She looks like I used to.
   Charlotte recalled the stories she'd heard about the
anomaly Einstein had supposedly left in a tower in Palm
Springs -- an anomaly that could short out a person's
lifeline, so that person had never existed.
   And I waved at her, this afternoon, because she
looked like my... my "little daughter": my uncorrupted
younger self. Two little girls--one to disappear, literally
without a trace, the other to finally get a life.
   "Now, Mr. Marrity," said the disembodied voice from
the air, "if you would please just open up the cabinet
you see in front of you." Rascasse's voice didn't really
sound organic -- it was like someone using a violin bow
to play a xylophone. "Go on, it isn't locked."
   "Damn head never knows anything," muttered Golze
from beside Marrity. "How many times did we ask it to
find Einstein's daughter?"
   Marrity's viewpoint ascended jerkily as he got to his
feet and focused on the pairs of opposed brass cones
that were the cabinet's handles.
   "Last time I was here," Marrity said, sounding shaky,
"nineteen years ago by my watch, this is where you
kept that black head."
   "It still is," said Charlotte, and she shifted her
perspective to the driver, who was metronomically
switching his gaze back and forth between the rearview
mirrors and the empty pavement in front of the parked
bus. It was much more restful than seeing the damned
head.
   But the cabinet behind the driver was still right in
front of her, and she heard the latch snap and the doors
creak open, and she caught the shellac and spice and
old shoes smell of the thing.
   "Thank you," said Rascasse's ringing voice. "And
would you now say 'Find me,' please."
   "Find me," said Marrity in a baffled tone.
   And Charlotte could hear the head whispering again.
It was only one voice this time: "Two days I sat beside
my body, staring at the holes in my chest."
   It had said this before, she recalled.
   "Thank you for letting us know where they are," said
Rascasse's voice. Charlotte frowned in puzzlement, then
remembered that ghosts existed backward; presumably
Rascasse was trying to get an answer to a question
before asking it.
   She sighed and switched to Marrity's perspective.
   Through it she could see the afternoon sunlight
glinting on the polished black brows, and on the silver
plates tacked to the cheek and jaw. From the height of
Marrity's vision she could tell that he was still standing.
   Surreptitiously she felt in her purse for the bottle.



Marrity took solace in the faith that he would soon
forget all of this. No, not forget it -- never have
experienced it.
   "I went to my grandfather," came the whisper from
the forever slightly parted coal lips, "to find out who I
am, where I came from."
   "Thank you for telling us where they are now," said
Rascasse again. If he was impatient, his high-pitched
inorganic voice didn't reflect it.
   "But I have no mother, really," came the whisper,
more faintly now. "Only children."
   "You've told us where your children are," said
Rascasse, like a hypnotist. "Where are your children
now? Thank you for telling us."
   Your children? thought Marrity; but he had to strain
to hear the whisper now: "My mother will hide them," it
said, "or try to. Everyone who dwells here is safe."
   Everyone who dwells here is safe.
   Marrity's breath had stopped. That was the sign over
Grammar's back door. What else had the thing said? I
went to find my grandfather... holes in my chest...
children... my mother will hide them...
   Abruptly the skin on his arms tingled and his vision
narrowed to include only the glittering black-and-silver
head, as his body understood before his mind permitted
itself to.
   A moment later he was out of his seat and halfway
down the aisle, gripping the bar on the back of one of
the seats, gasping for breath and ready to vomit.
   "That's my father!" he yelled hoarsely. He was facing
the back of the bus and blinking rapidly. "That's -- what
am I -- that's my father's head."
   "Shit!" muttered Golze at the front of the bus.
   "Turn it off!" Marrity shouted. "Can he see me?"
   Rascasse's voice seemed to come from right in front
of Marrity. "The ghost is gone. The imbecilic thing gave
us no clue to where to find your self -- your younger
self. I'd hoped that when you asked, it might tell us -- I
guess it doesn't know."
   "It did tell us," came Golze's weak voice. "The Ouija
board pointer moved before Marrity said, 'Find me.'
Before is after, for ghosts. Hinch, back the truck around
to face south."
   "It pointed to the letter T," said the woman in
sunglasses, whose real name was apparently Charlotte.
   "No," grated Golze, "it pointed in a direction."
   The bus vibrated as Hinch started the engine, and
then the shadows and light moved across the seats as
the bus backed around in a wide circle in the parking
lot, and Marrity saw the supermarket swing past outside
the left-side windows. The bus slowed to a halt, facing
south now.
   The Ouija board pointer now rested on the pin at the
letter A.
   "The young Frank Marrity," said Golze distinctly, "is
now behind us. Northeast of here."
   "He's in the hills, I'll bet," chimed Rascasse. "This
vehicle is far too big and slow. Hinch, radio to Amboy --
tell them we need full support."



There's no towels," said Daphne meekly.
   Frank Marrity was sitting on the floor against the
kitchen cabinet, next to Bennett, and he looked up and
saw Daphne shivering in the hall entry in her old jeans
and blouse, which were now visibly wet.
   He got to his feet, leaving the bottle beside Bennett.
"Not even any curtains," he agreed. "Sorry, Daph, I
should have thought of that before I said you could take
a shower. You could sit downstairs by the windows, it's
sunny there."
   His voice echoed in the empty house. Until Daphne
had spoken, the only sounds had been from outside:
birdcalls, faint sounds of car motors, a helicopter
thudding over the hills.
   "It's been half an hour again," said Moira. She was
leaning against the rail, her back to the sloped ceiling of
the living room on the lower level.
   Marrity peered at his watch. Sure enough, it was
12:35. He turned to the telephone as Daphne pattered
barefoot down the stairs.
   As soon as he had dialed the number, the Jackson
man said, "Hello?" apparently before the phone had
even rung.
   "It's me, it's been--"
   "Right. Where are you?"
   Daphne's voice echoed up from the living room
behind and below Moira: "Dad, can I lay out on the
deck? You can see the Hollywood sign real close!"
   "It's inaccessible," said Bennett, still sitting on the
floor. "And the only street it overlooks is across the
canyon."
   "Go with her, would you, Moira?" said Marrity. Into
the phone he said, "We're at the top of--" And then he
paused to ask Bennett, "Where are we?"
   Moira sighed and pushed herself away from the rail.
   "Go up -- give me that." Bennett stood up and took
the phone. "Go up Beachwood till it loops sharp to the
right and becomes Hollyridge, which heads back
downhill. I'm his brother-in-law. The sister, correct.
We're the third house downhill after the Hollyridge
dogleg, on your right." He paused, listening. "Yes, I'll
turn it on." He hung up the phone. "The porch light. He
wants us to turn it on."
   "Do you know where the switch is?"
   Bennett turned toward the door. "Gotta be by the --
hey!"
   Marrity had grabbed the pockets of Bennett's coat
and yanked the pistol free and then lunged down the
stairs, mostly sliding along the banister.



His attention had been caught by a sharp pain in
Daphne's cracked ribs, and in the same instant he had
experienced her sensory impressions of a cloth pressed
over her mouth and the breath driven out of her nose
from hard constriction around her arms as she was
abruptly lifted up backward; Daphne's jerky field of
view was only of the converging treetops overhead, but
she heard Moira grunt sharply. Marrity felt Daphne's
bare heels kick at the aluminum-pole railing as she was
hoisted over it.
   When Marrity burst out onto the sunlit deck, a young
man in a sweatshirt was outside the northside railing,
facing him but leaning away; the man's tan-gloved
hands gripped a rope moored to the railing, and he was
clearly about to slide down to the dark slope below.
Moira was sprawled on the deck planks behind Marrity,
her hair over her face.
   Daphne was gone.
   Marrity lifted the pistol and fired it straight into the
man's chest.
   Marrity saw the man jerk his blond head forward and
fall away from the balcony, and as the ejected shell flew
through the open door into the living room, Marrity
sprang to the rail and swung one leg over it, tucking the
hot pistol behind his belt and grabbing the rope with
both hands as the echoes of the shot rapped back from
the far side of the canyon. The sound of the helicopter
was louder out here.
   He tried to go down the rope hand over hand but
mostly slid, with the bristly rope burning the skin off his
palms, his legs flailing uselessly in the rushing, empty
air. He landed jarringly, sitting down on the body of the
man he had shot, and rolled off and began crawling up
the leafy slope even before he could suck air into his
shocked lungs. His vision was dimmed, but he could see
figures scrambling up the slope above him.



"You said the girl and the woman were safely out of
sight of the men," said Hinch, opening the driver's-side
door of the black BMW and swinging his legs out. "This
is a mess." The drone of the Bell helicopter that had
landed on the cleared ground beyond the fence a
hundred feet behind the car was louder now, and hot,
dusty air blew away the car's air-conditioned chill.
   The driver's-side door slammed and Hinch was gone
before Charlotte could answer. Through his eyes as he
ran forward she saw three of Rascasse's men scramble
up from the shadowed slope to the sunlit street
pavement, carrying a flexing canvas bundle that would
be the little girl.
   Daphne was wrapped up, but Charlotte knew what
she looked like.
   The men with the bundle, squinting in the rotor wind,
hurried up the sloping road past where Charlotte sat in
the idling BMW. Through Hinch's eyes she had glimpsed
herself in the passenger seat, and then he had run on
past; now she saw the open gate on the far side of the
road's crest, and the open door in the helicopter's bright
blue fuselage, and a man inside waving. The tail rotor
was a silvery blur, and the helicopter was bobbing on its
landing-gear dampers.
   When the men had tumbled Daphne into the cabin of
the helicopter and slid the door shut, Hinch turned back
toward Charlotte -- and so she could see, beyond the
front of the car, a man come clambering up the slope
and then stand shielding his eyes from the glare and
the rotor wind. He was holding a handgun and he was
the thirty-five-year-old Frank Marrity, and Hindi's view
was suddenly jolting as the back end of the black BMW
increased in apparent size.
   When I consider how my light is spent--
   Blindly Charlotte lifted her feet and slid them under
the steering wheel; her right foot hit the gas pedal, and
the engine roared for a moment, then she had slid over
into the driver's seat and by touch pulled the gearshift
lever from park down into drive.
   Through Hinch's fast-approaching perspective from
the rear, she could see that the car was aimed at the
slope beyond the road, and she pulled the wheel to the
right and was glad to see that she would miss the edge.
Hinch saw Marrity step in front of the car, so she hit the
brake. She banged her head against the closed driver's-
side window, then impatiently opened the door and
yelled, "Get in if you want to save your daughter!"
   Through Marrity's eyes now, she saw the BMW's
headlights and bumper, and her own face leaning out
above the slant of the opened door, and Hinch sprinting
up from behind.
   "Last chance!" she yelled.
   She heard the drone of the helicopter increase in
pitch, and knew it must be taking off.



Marrity saw the helicopter tilt and lift from the clear
patch beyond the fence at the crest of the narrow road,
and he guessed that Daphne was in it. A man was
running toward the BMW in front of him, clearly
meaning to stop the driver; and now an orange
compact car nosed around the bend at the top of the
road, probably allied with these people.
  Last chance! the woman had yelled.
  All he sensed from Daphne was fright and constriction
and blackness.
  Marrity threw himself forward across the pavement
and pulled open the passenger-side door -- he tumbled
in and yanked the door closed just as the man caught
up with the car and opened the right-rear door.
  The woman behind the wheel stepped on the gas and
the car shot forward; the sudden headwind blew the
back door closed.
  Marrity looked back, and then was jolted forward
against the dashboard as the right fender grated
against a parked car.
  "Look ahead!" the woman screamed.
  Marrity turned and blinked out through the windshield
at the green Porsche they had sideswiped, and at the
clear blacktop lane stretching away on the left, and she
straightened the wheel and stepped on the gas again.
He could still hardly get breath into his lungs, and his
abraded hands stung.
  "Look at the road, don't look away," she said, a little
more calmly. "I can't see except through you."
  Marrity ached to look back and try to see which way
the helicopter went. "Can you," he gasped, "follow that
helicopter? Is my daughter -- on it?"
  "Yes, she's on it. I know where they're going. Keep
watching the road or we're dead."
  "You're... Libra Nosamalo." Marrity stared wide-eyed
at the curving asphalt lane ahead of them. He thought
about groping for the seat belt, then tensely decided it
might momentarily interfere with his view.
   "Charlotte Sinclair," she said. "The other name was to
be cute. Tilt the rear view mirror so you can see behind
us through it."
   "Okay, but -- slow down a second." Without looking
away from the rushing road, Marrity felt for the
rearview mirror with trembling fingers and then bent it
around to a likely-feeling position. He darted a glance at
it, bent it some more, and then glanced at it again.
Back at the crest of the hill he could see the man who
had tried to get into the car sprinting back now toward
the orange car.
   "The orange car--" he said.
   "I see everything you see," Charlotte Sinclair said.
"They'll try to catch us."
   He managed to take a deep breath. "Where's the
helicopter going?" The gun was jabbing painfully against
his lower ribs.
   "Palm Springs. Eyes front, dammit!" She wrenched
the car back onto the road, but not before it had run up
onto the shoulder and snapped off a post with a
birdhouse mailbox on it. "Here's a curve, up ahead,"
she said, though in fact she speeded up. "Rearview."
   Marrity flicked a look up at the mirror; the orange car
was behind them now, only a hundred feet back and
gaining fast.
   "Thanks," she said. "Hang on."
   The road curved to the left around a steep, rocky
outcrop, and as soon as the BMW was around the bend,
Charlotte stomped on the brake; the car came to a
shuddering halt almost instantly, with no screeching of
tires. "Look back!" she yelled, and then she clicked the
gearshift to reverse and floored the gas pedal.
   Marrity pushed himself away from the dashboard and
shifted around in the seat just in time to see the
pursuing orange car flash into view around the rocky
shoulder -- and then with an almighty slam the cars
smashed into each other and he was nearly pitched into
the backseat.
   The black trunk lid was buckled and the orange car's
hood was folded up so sharply that he couldn't see the
windshield. Both cars were stopped, still rocking.
   "Front, front!" Charlotte was yelling, so he wrenched
himself around to look ahead. She clicked the engine
into low and pressed the accelerator, and the car
quivered for a second and then pulled free. Metal and
plastic clattered on the asphalt.
   She clicked it into drive and sped on down the road.
Marrity couldn't hear any bad noises from the car.
"Antiskid brakes," she said. "Standard on the new BMW
Sixes."
   For several seconds they drove downhill in a ringing
silence. Marrity kept his eyes in a wide, unfocused stare
through the windshield and concentrated on getting
breath in and out of his lungs.
   "Aren't you with these people?" he asked finally,
forcing his voice to stay level. "Is Daphne a hostage?"
   The BMW was swerving smoothly down the canyon
road, flashing in and out of the shadows of overhanging
trees.
   "Rearview," she said.
   Marrity glanced up at the mirror; there were no cars
visible behind them. He reminded himself that he didn't
have to tell her that.
   "I'm not with them anymore," Charlotte said, "I
guess. God help me. Probably they wouldn't have given
me a new life anyway. I guess I knew that." She
exhaled, almost whistling, and Marrity was sure that if
he could look at her he would see tears in her eyes.
"You have some kind of overlap with your daughter's
mind, is that right? A link? You screwed up the smooth
snatch back there, though I know they're blaming me."
   "Where in Palm Springs?"
   "Dammit," said Charlotte, leaning into a turn while
Marrity stared tensely at the road, "this is what might
save her. When I look through one of you I get a bleed
through from the other. Have you got some kind of
psychic connection with her or not?"
   Marrity glanced at her, and he did see a glistening
line down her right cheek, and a moment later the off-
side wheels were thumping on dirt. "Watch the road!"
she yelled.
   He looked up to see a shaggy green oleander bush
with white flowers rushing at them; Charlotte stood on
the brake and the car stopped short of it, half on the
shoulder. Dust swirled around the windows.
  "You can drive now," she said, opening the door on
her side and stepping out. "Watch me."
  Marrity kept his eyes on her as he slid across the
seat, and when she had shuffled around the front of the
car to the passenger side and climbed in, and he had
steered the car back into the lane and begun driving too
fast down the road, he said, "Yes, for the past couple of
days Daphne and I have been able to see into each
other's minds. It's happened before. Usually lasts about
a week. Where in Palm Springs?"
  "That's good," she said, feeling for the seat belt. "I
don't know where. I've got to call them, my former
employers back there. What a mess that operation
turned out to be." Having fastened the seat belt, she
leaned back in the passenger seat and closed her eyes.
"Did somebody get shot?"
  The backs of Marrity's hands tingled, and he gripped
the wheel more tightly, ignoring the sting of his scraped
palms. "I shot a guy. One of the guys who grabbed
Daphne."
  "Shot dead?"
  Marrity remembered firing the gun directly into the
man's chest, and remembered the man falling. "I -- I
imagine so."
  "Steady, slow down!" Charlotte said, her eyes still
closed.
  Marrity hastily took his foot off the accelerator. They
were down out of the hills now, and the street was two
lanes each way, but there were more cars to watch.
   He tried to estimate what emotion killing that man
had roused in him -- it wasn't triumph, certainly, but it
wasn't guilt or remorse either. He could hardly separate
his own feelings from the tolling misery he sensed in
Daphne's mind.
   "Tell me the truth," he said. "Do they mean to kill
her?"
   "No," said Charlotte. "And there isn't any information
they want out of her either. And they're going to find
out that what they do mean to do with her can't happen
while you're still alive."
   "What do they mean to do with her? "
   "They want to make her never have existed. Short
out her lifeline. You'd never have had a daughter."
   Marrity realized what emotion the shooting had left
him with: depression. He thought of asking Charlotte,
Why? but it seemed too hard; instead he said, "They
can't do it unless they kill me first, though. You say."
   "Right. You're her psychic Siamese twin right now.
To, to unmake her, they'd have to isolate her, and they
can't isolate her from you." She flinched, though her
eyes were still closed. "Watch it."
   He had been coming up fast on a station wagon that
was moving too slowly in the left lane, and now he
swerved around it to the right. "If you saw it," he said
irritably, "you know I saw it."
   "I'm paying better attention. We've got to--"
   "My sister's back there, unconscious. Will they hurt
her?"
   "They don't care about her, or her husband, now. He
can call paramedics. But we've got to figure out a way
to hide from the -- from your father. He can track us on
this electric Ouija board they've got. It's in one of their
other cars now, not the orange one we just smashed."
   The helicopter, Marrity told himself, the guy you shot,
the NSA man, the cartoon creature that talked to
Daphne from the hospital television last night. Daphne
setting Rumbold on fire. Serious people are taking this
stuff seriously. Electric Ouija boards.
   "My father saved my life. From you."
   "That's not your father. We need a drink. Do you
know--"
   "Oh, bullshit. Excuse me."
   "He's not. Now--"
   "If he's not my father, who is?" Marrity shrugged
impatiently. "You said we've got to hide from my
father."
   He glanced sideways at her and saw her frown. "Your
father is somebody else, okay?" she said. "Do you know
where the Roosevelt Hotel is? The lobby bar there has a
million exits, and it's generally crowded, lots of eyes, I
can monitor the whole place."
   The next big street ahead of them was Hollywood
Boulevard. To get to the Roosevelt Hotel he would turn
right. "We should go straight to Palm Springs," he said.
To get to Palm Springs he would turn left, and get onto
the 101 south.
   "I've got to call the guys who have your daughter.
They don't know yet that they've got to kill you before
they can do anything to her, and I've got to point that
out to them. And I need three fast drinks. In vino
immortalitas."
  He sighed and clicked the turn signal up, for a right
turn. "Can you remember a phone number?" he said. "I
can remember it right now, but I might not remember it
when we've got to a phone."



Racing east, the twin-engine Bell 212 helicopter had
skimmed between Mount Hollywood and the domes of
the Griffith Park Observatory and over the dry-brush
hills of Eagle Rock and was now following its shadow
along Colorado Boulevard, a few hundred feet below.
   Denis Rascasse's body lay stretched out on the
rearmost bench seat, right over the fuel tank. He was
still breathing, though his consciousness was now
focused in a couple of giant pink banksia flowers and an
orange-glowing rocket-shaped lava lamp, all belted into
a bracket on the starboard bulkhead.
   Gray-haired Frank Marrity sat in a forward-facing
seat, across from Golze, who was looking sleepy and
red-faced since giving himself a shot of morphine from
the bus's first-aid kit. The air inside the cabin smelled of
something like burnt peanut butter.
   On the floor between them was the duct-taped
canvas bundle that contained Daphne.
   Nobody had spoken in the minutes since the
helicopter had lifted away from the cleared area at the
top of Beachwood Canyon, but now the banksia
blossoms vibrated, and Rascasse's voice rang out over
the drone of the turbine engines on the helicopter's
roof: "Now Mr. Marrity, you'll please explain -- exactly
how you worked the time machine."
  In apparent response to the voice, Daphne's knees
and head dented the canvas, and Marrity heard her
muffled voice.
  "Open the canvas at the head end," said Golze. "We
don't want it smothering."
  Marrity shook his head. "Soon," he whispered, "she
won't exist anyway!"
  "If it smothers," said Golze, shifting uncomfortably on
his rear-facing seat, "it'll exist forever as a corpse.
Open the package, dip-shit."
  Marrity's face was hot. It seemed to him that he must
somehow protest dipshit -- that if he didn't, there would
be ground lost that he would never recover.
  "We're taping this," said Rascasse's voice. "What
were the steps you took?"
  "Uh..." Marrity began, but Golze scowled and pointed
at the canvas bundle.
  Marrity had to unbuckle his seat belt to lean down
over the bundle, and with shaking hands he tore away
the duct tape over Daphne's head, then unfolded the
grommeted edges of the canvas.
  In the shadows between the seats, Daphne's face
seemed to be just wide green eyes and disordered
brown hair.
  "You!" she said, blinking up at him. "Where's my
father?" Then she was looking past him at the quilted
silver fabric that lined the ceiling and at the fiberglass
bulkhead panels with their inexplicable inset round and
oval holes. The cabin swung like a bell, and then extra
weight told Marrity that they were ascending. "Are we in
an airplane?" asked Daphne.
   "Helicopter," said Golze, staring out the port window
at the San Gabriel Mountains. "So don't do anything."
   "Oh." She seemed to let out her breath.
   "You're the dipshit," said Marrity to Golze, belatedly.
   "What did you do," said Rascasse's voice, "to make
the damn thing work? How do you stop at one specific
time?"
   Marrity glanced at the bracket and saw that the
flowers were shaking and the red blobs in the lava
lamp's tapered cylinder were all clustered at the top.
   "How I did it -- I was improvising, but it worked --
was to tape right against my skin a thing that had
undergone a decisive change at the time I wanted to
get to. I found one of my grandmother's old cigarette
butts between the bricks of the shed floor, and used
that. It wasn't precise to the minute, but it landed me in
the right day, at least."
   "Your grandmother?" said Daphne.
   Marrity just kept staring at the flowers. He could feel
sweat rolling down his chest under his shirt.
   "A cigarette butt?" said the silvery voice. "Nothing
more than that?"
   "That was it," said Marrity hoarsely. "It sort of
shivered and got hot when I had slid back in time along
the gold swastika -- which looks like a quadruple helix
in that perspective -- to the right day. And then you
just sort of -- stretch, flex, step out of your astral
projections. You can feel the rest of your momentum go
rushing on without you, into the past."
   After a pause, Daphne asked Golze, "Where's my
father?"
   "Dead, I suppose," said Golze, still looking out the
window. "Probably wrapped around a tree in the
Hollywood Hills. He took off down the canyon in a car
driven by a blind woman."
   For a moment Marrity thought of telling her that he
was her father, but the banksias were shaking their
narrow petals.
   "But you can still go back?" said Rascasse. "It's not
one way?"
   "You can go back," said Marrity, speaking to the
flowers and the lamp. "The return -- and both my
great-grandfather and my grandmother did it -- is
apparently prepaid. Plain Newtonian recoil, in a lot more
dimensions. If I stand on the gold swastika again, I
think I'll shoot straight back to where I was in 2006.
Though I'll be arriving," he added, careful to keep
looking at the flowers and not at Daphne, "in a very
different life."
   "How much came back here with you," said
Rascasse's voice. "Clothes, the air?"
   Marrity was glad of the distraction of the questions.
"It's apparently everything within the boundaries of the
aura that goes," he said. "I thought it would be a bigger
volume; a lot of stuff I was going to bring along got left
behind in 2006 -- my Palm Pilot, an iPod, a Blackberry."
   "Sounds like a salad," said Golze.
   Glancing down at Daphne peripherally, Marrity
noticed that she hadn't reacted to Golze's statement
about her father probably being dead -- she was still
glancing around at the interior of the helicopter. Already
she doesn't care about her father, he thought. Just as I
remember.
   A shrill buzzing sounded from below Golze's seat.
"Could you get that?" said Golze. "It's the cell phone."
   "It's my father," said Daphne.
   Marrity's shirt clung to his sweaty skin as he leaned
down across Daphne to lift the telephone case. He
unsnapped it and pulled out the bulky telephone, then
raised his eyebrows at Golze.
   "The button at the top," Golze sighed, "puts it on
speaker. Then just set it down on the seat."
   "Modern ones are no bigger than a bar of soap," said
Marrity defensively. He pushed the button and laid the
brick-size thing on the vinyl seat.
   "Hello," called Daphne.
   "Hello," came a woman's voice, loud enough for
everyone in the cabin to hear, even over the steady
whistle of the turbine engines overhead.
   "Hello, Charlotte," said Golze. "You're lucky this time
line is about to be canceled."
   "Put my dad on," said Daphne from the floor.
   "He's not here, Daphne," said Charlotte's voice from
the mobile telephone on the seat, "but he should be
back anytime. Now I want to talk to the grown-ups
alone, can we--"
   "He's standing right beside you," Daphne interrupted,
"I can hear you through him. Oof! And his mouth's full
of beer."
   For a moment there was silence from the phone.
"Who believes that?" asked Charlotte finally.
   "I do," said Golze.
   Marrity nodded sourly.
   "I'll know it soon enough," said Rascasse's voice from
the flowers. "Your signal's clear."
   "Okay, dammit, yes, he's right here," Charlotte said,
"and young Daphne brings me to my point. I'm holding
a gun on him--"
   The flowers in the wall bracket shook. "You're not,"
said the metallic voice. "It's in your purse. I don't see
him."
   "What else you got, Charlotte?" asked Golze wearily,
leaning back and closing his eyes.
   Rascasse's voice said, "I look for him, but see this girl
instead." For once the artificial voice seemed to express
an emotion-bafflement.
   "Dad!" called Daphne from her cocoon on the floor
plates. "Don't let them catch you!"
   The young Frank Marrity's voice came out of the
phone's speaker now: "I won't, Daph, and I'll come get
you soon. These people aren't planning to hurt you.
"After a moment he added, "It smells like peanut butter
there. Don't eat or drink anything they give you, Daph."
   "That's just how this helicopter smells," said Daphne.
   "We bought it from the Comision Federal de
Electricidad," said Golze, "in Mexico City. Maybe they
use peanut butter for insulation."
   Marrity's voice from the phone said, "Don't do
anything in the helicopter, Daph!"
   "I already told her," said Golze.
   "Denis," said Charlotte's voice, "I bet you could sense
the Marrity I'm with if you look at the girl there."
   Old Marrity noticed that the blobs in the lava lamp
were breaking up into strings.
   "It's true," said Rascasse's violin voice, "I sense him
there -- but not enough to see him. I can hardly see
this girl."
   "Okay," said Charlotte, "I'm not bluffing now, here's
some truth: The young Frank Marrity and that girl have
a psychic link -- as Denis says, their minds overlap.
They'll look like an X from the freeway, not separate
lines. You can't negate her, you can't isolate her time
line, while he's still alive."
   "This is bullshit," said old Marrity quickly, rocking on
the seat as the helicopter swayed under the rotors. "I
never had any, any psychic link with her, in either of
my lifetimes." He wiped a hand across his mouth. "I'm
not telling you another thing until my younger self's
safety is... assured."



Frank Marrity found that he had leaned back against the
brown tile wall of the telephone alcove. A moment ago
he had been leaning in over the pay phone with his ear
to the receiver Charlotte held, but now he felt as if he
were wrapped in some coarse fabric and rocking supine
on a hard floor, and he realized that in his shock he had
mentally fled his physical situation and retreated to
Daphne's.
  That's no help, he told himself, and he took a deep
breath of the smoky gin-scented air that was actually
around him and looked out at the fountain and
balconies of the Roosevelt Hotel lobby. The tables on
the tile floor around the fountain were crowded even at
this afternoon hour, and he made himself hear the
babble of voices and clink of glasses rather than the
drone of the helicopter's engines.
  "If we do this my way," said Charlotte into the phone,
"his safety will be assured. Denis, if you try to stop his
heart, you're just as likely to kill the girl."
  Marrity pushed away from the wall and stepped up
beside Charlotte again. On the little wooden counter
below the pay phone was the pad on which she had
written Eugene Jackson's number, and now Marrity
picked up the hotel pen and scribbled, MY YOUNGER
SELF? and then, THE YOUNG FRANK M?
  Charlotte covered the mouthpiece. "I told you he
wasn't your father," she said impatiently. "The thing
that was in your grandmother's shed is a time
machine."
  Marrity was still holding a glass of beer, and he
drained it in one long swallow now. And he looked again
at all the people sitting in the lobby.
  He could feel Daphne in his mind -- it wasn't a
sensation or a thought, just the mental equivalent of
holding his hand. He returned the psychic pressure. You
and I will come out of this okay, he tried to project to
her. The rest of these can go their own ways, whoever
they are.
   "I'll tell you," said Charlotte into the phone, "if you'll
shut up."
   He looks like me, thought Marrity, an older version of
me. Daphne said so, right away. He told us not to go to
an Italian restaurant. He claims to have met this crowd
when he was thirty-five; I'm thirty-five. On Grammar's
back porch this morning he said, I hate the old man as
much as you do, and when I asked him if he meant his
father or mine, he nodded and said, That one.
   He believes it, at least, thought Marrity, and so do
these people, apparently--
   --and they don't seem to be fools--
   --but I can simply acknowledge that they all believe
it, and work from there.
   "Okay," said Charlotte. "With Frank's help, I wrote out
a letter and xeroxed it, and got envelopes and stamps
here, and we just got done dropping three copies in
different mailboxes. The envelopes are addressed to the
FBI, and the Mossad care of the Israeli embassy, and to
the LAPD -- all Los Angeles addresses -- and the letter
includes an account of your murders of that San Diego
detective and that kid last night, the two shootouts
today on Batsford Street, your passport numbers, the
New Jersey and Amboy locations, and the license-plate
number of the bus." She paused, clearly listening.
"You've both used your passports when I've been with
you. You know me, I didn't exactly have to lean over
your shoulders."
   After another pause, she went on, "So listen, listen!
The plan is the same as before, except that it's me you
short out, my lifeline that you erase from the universe.
No, dammit, think about it -- without me in the picture,
Frank Marrity wouldn't have got spooked so you decided
we had to kill him, and without me he wouldn't have
fled the hospital this morning and told the Mossad about
the thing in his grandmother's shed. You only missed
getting the machine today by a couple of minutes -- do
it this way and you'll be at least a day ahead of the
Mossad. And without me, this letter wouldn't exist,
wouldn't be in the mail right now."
   Charlotte was leaning in close over the phone. Marrity
remembered seeing tears in her eyes during the wild
drive down the canyon. She had said, Probably they
wouldn't have given me a new life anyway. I guess I
knew that.
   And he remembered the name she had originally
given him: Libra Nosamalo. Libera nos a malo. Deliver
us from evil.
   "Denis," she said now, "it'll take you forever to track
Frank Marrity, the young one, with his -- with your
horrible head, if Marrity knows to get away from me
and keep running and changing direction. With those
letters in the mail, you don't have the time. I'll call you
back and arrange a trade -- me for the girl."
   She hung up the telephone. Without looking around,
she reached one hand back toward Marrity. "Got
another quarter?" she asked.
   "Uh, yes," he said, digging into his pocket with his
free hand. "Thank you for saving my daughter. Do you
have to -- can they really short out--"
   "They really can," she said, taking the quarter, "and
I'll do it if that's all that's left. I can't let all the things
I've done stay done much longer. But let's see what
your NSA man has to say -- he's got the time machine
now."


                  ACT THREE
       Baruch Dayan Emet
       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."

                     Epilogue
           Green Pastures
      ... to sigh
      To th' winds, whose pity, sighing back
      again,
      Did us but loving wrong.
      -- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST

Juniper and cypress trees, tall and shaggy with age,
threw shadows on the flat stones set in rows across
Lawn S. The faucets sticking up out of the grass all had
signs on them that said Don't Drink This Water, and
steel disks set flush with the grass were vases for
flowers when lifted out and inverted.
   Marrity had been surprised to learn that Grammar
had joined the Episcopal church a few years before her
death, but it was an Episcopal priest who was now
speaking beside her casket at Mountain View Cemetery
in Pasadena. A dozen elderly people Marrity didn't know
sat under a wheeled green awning near the grave, on
folding chairs made more dignified by green velour
slipcovers. Marrity and Daphne and Charlotte stood off
to the side, with Bennett and Moira.
   Strips of livid green AstroTurf were laid around all
four sides of the open grave, and Grammar's turquoise
fiberglass casket rested on two aluminum bars above
the "vault," a copper-painted cement box that the
casket would fit into. Marrity had noticed the domed lid
of the vault lying on the grass a dozen feet away. The
vault itself was suspended in the top of the open grave
on steel saddle bars.
   At the mortuary on California Street, the priest had
given a generic sort of eulogy for Lisa Marrity -- "our
sister Lisa, loving wife, mother, and grandmother" --
and had then played a tape of a woman singing "On
Eagles' Wings" on a portable stereo. Now at the
graveside he began, inevitably, to recite the Twenty-
third Psalm.
   Out among the older upright gravestones at the older
southwest end of the cemetery, Marrity had seen a
solitary walking man pause to look toward the funeral
party, and Marrity had thought it might be Bert Malk,
but the man had turned and begun trudging away.
Marrity had glanced at Charlotte, who would of course
have seen the man too, and she had shrugged.
   It occurred to Marrity that Malk must have succeeded
in taking the body of Marrity's older self away from the
El Mirador Medical Plaza yesterday morning. If he had
not, and the police had found a dead body with the
fingerprints of Francis Thomas Marrity, they would
probably have come around to tell the next of kin by
now. Bennett and Moira had had plenty of questions
this morning, but at least they had not asked why
Marrity had been reported dead.
   Though still shaky, Moira had recovered from her
concussion of the day before, and in the mortuary
parking lot she had told Marrity that Bennett had some
money to divide with him. Bennett had gruffly said he
didn't know how much it would be, after deductions for
Sunday's air travel to Shasta, and the cost of the casket
and the funeral, and the emergency-room charge.
Marrity had just nodded, and gone on giving vague and
reassuring answers to their questions about the last
three days.
   Marrity and Daphne and Charlotte had eaten a vast
breakfast at a Denny's in Palm Springs yesterday
morning, and then taken a 10:00 A.M. Trailways bus
from Palm Springs to San Bernardino. They had walked
from the bus station to the street on which Marrity had
left his pickup truck, and the truck had still been parked
there, and had started up at Marrity's first twist of the
key in the ignition. He had been able to feel Daphne's
profound, weary relief; he thought he had even caught
actual words -- home soon.
   He knew now why he and Daphne had been
experiencing their "psychic link" for the last couple of
years, and why it had peaked and synchronized during
these last several days, and why they would probably
share it for a few more years before it faded away. And
he knew why the 2006 version of himself had not had
any such link with his version of Daphne.
   It had been the moment, yesterday at dawn, when
Marrity had projected his astral self out of his bullet-
riddled body and then used himself to block Daphne's
lifeline from Rascasse. Marrity's disembodied attention
-- his soul? -- and Daphne's had clung together in that
timeless non-space, and the connection they had
established had extended in both directions, into the
past as well as the future.
   The old drunk Marrity had never done that, in either
of his lifelines.
  Daphne had not yet referred to the time line the two
of them had climbed away from then -- the time line in
which Marrity had been killed. Lepidopt had saved
Marrity by using the time machine to set the world back
just a minute or so, but Marrity and Daphne had been
"away" while he had done it, and so they had carried
back down to the four-dimensional world the memories
of the way it had been before Lepidopt's salvific jump.
  Daphne had taken a long shower as soon as Marrity
had driven the three of them back to the house, and
she had used up all the hot water. But Charlotte, and
then Marrity, had showered without caring what the
water temperature was. Daphne was pleased to have
towels and clean clothes.
  Daphne had then slept until sundown, and at dusk
Marrity had made a pot of Trader Joe's chili. He and
Charlotte had been talking all afternoon, and after the
chili the two adults sleepily sat through Mary Poppins as
Daphne watched it again, since she had fallen asleep
before it had ended on Sunday night. Marrity had felt
free to doze during the movie, since Daphne was
watching avidly and Charlotte could see it through her
eyes if she wanted to.
  Then they had all got twelve hours of sleep -- Daphne
in her own bed, Charlotte in Marrity's bed, and Marrity
on the uphill living room couch.
  In the morning Daphne wouldn't hear of them missing
Grammar's funeral today.
  Along with his keys, Marrity had put the crumpled
Einstein envelope and the chip from the Chaplin slab
into the pockets of his fresh slacks. He had had some
idea of tucking them into the casket, but the casket had
been closed at the mortuary. Marrity could come back
sometime and shallowly bury the things under the
grass.
  As he touched them in his pocket now, he thought of
the ghosts that should now all be put to rest. Lisa
Marrity, or Lieserl Marity or Maric, who had come a long
way to be buried in this California cemetery. Marrity's
father, killed thirty-two years ago in New Jersey and
unjustly hated since then. Oren Lepidopt, who had
saved Marrity and Daphne by losing his own life.
Einstein himself, who had watched helplessly as his
discoveries, one after another, caused nothing but ruin.
  Marrity was touching the still damp envelope in his
pocket, and in his head the priest's words over
Grammar's casket blended into Einstein's voice: You will
dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Thou art inclined
to sleep. 'Tis a good dullness, and give it way. I know
thou canst not choose.
  Marrity recognized the last three sentences; they
were lines of Prospero's, addressing his daughter
Miranda. For the last time, Marrity thought.
  Good-bye, Grammar. Thank you for raising the two
orphans my drunk, suicidal mother thrust into your
hands. Thank you for trying to do the right thing, even
when it was not the right thing -- like not telling us the
dangerous facts about our father, and not destroying
the Kaleidoscope Shed when your father told you to.
  The northern horizon was still gray with smoke over
the mountains, but Marrity sensed an absence there.
The Einstein voice was fading, and its last words were,
This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. Then it was
gone, and Marrity was sure Matt was gone too.
  Daphne had taken his right hand now, and Charlotte
his left. The priest had closed his Bible, and workmen
were lifting the casket and pulling the aluminum bars
out from under it and lowering it into the suspended
concrete vault, and a muddy yellow backhoe was
trundling across the lawn, puffing diesel fumes.
  "It's over, Dad," whispered Daphne, tugging him
away.



         Also by Tim Powers

      Last Call Series:

      1. Last Call (1992)
      2. Expiration Date (1995)
      3. Earthquake Weather (1997)

      Novels:

      Epitaph in Rust (1976)
      The Skies Discrowned (1976)
      aka Forsake the Sky
      The Drawing of the Dark (1979)
      The Anubis Gates (1983)
      Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985)
      On Stranger Tides (1987)
The Stress of Her Regard (1989)
Declare (2000)