Three Days to Never: A Novel

by Tim Powers

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 hiterto 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 n
ot.”

  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.