Three Days to Never

by Tim Powers

  “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 long time.”

  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.”

&nb
sp; “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 m
idsyllable.

  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.