Three Days to Never: A Novel

by Tim Powers

  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, dipshit.”

  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 sens
e 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 24:13

  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 Ramle 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—”