Three Days to Never: A Novel

by Tim Powers

  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 great-grandfather 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 un-trackable 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 great-grandfather 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 three 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 ol
d 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 your 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.