by Tim Powers
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 soufflé,” 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 o
n 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 Markstein, 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 Lindemann, 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 ca
refully, “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.
