08 Illusion (57 page)

Parmenter countered, “All of this is theoretical, entirely contingent. Dane seeing you in his house—your house, the house—is one outcome that flashed through given the conditions at the time. Anything could change, any outcome could result.”

“No promises, in other words.”

“No, but if it
did
happen as Dane saw it, then it
could
happen if we can replicate it. Now, admittedly, there are problems. For one thing, the trade would mean the destruction of the Machine, which the other scientists and the government guys will never allow, which is almost moot in light of a bigger problem. The interdimensional mass of the Machine, that part of the Machine actually straddling time dimensions, is”—he scribbled it as he said it—“one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds. And how much do you weigh?”

“A hundred and eight pounds.”

“You see the problem.”

“Not yet.”

“It’s like a pair of scales, like a teeter-totter. If you’re going to trade timelines, the trade has to be weight for weight, mass for mass, the same on both sides, an even trade, and you don’t weigh one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds. That’s a lot of candy bars.” He rested his head on his hand. “Oh, and there’s another problem: in order to force the trade, to make the Machine bump from its timeline to yours, yours would have to be the only other timeline available, which means we would have to dissolve your secondary timeline, the one you’re living on right now, so that you fall back into your original, but of course, should you do that, you’ll immediately retrace the original and come to your original end, the, uh, you’ll perish, uh, in a fire.”

She looked at Dane again. She could tell he was
really
thinking, his fist propped under his nose, his eyes like steel.

“Oh, and there’s still the other problem,” Parmenter continued. “The mental state, the reach, the method you used to generate that momentary linger on the Machine’s timeline—that would be the moment you appeared in Dane’s home as, uh, yourself. Whatever you did, however you felt, whatever method you used, it was an incredible fluke, an accident, but it put you ahead in time.” He scurried over to the command console and came back with a three-ring binder full of notes and computer printouts. “I got the exact time and location of your appearance from Dane and extrapolated backward—well, actually, extrapolated the Machine forward in computer simulation, but at any rate, the readings show a major deflection in the Machine’s timeline at that point, meaning an incursion of another timeline into its own.
If
the theory were sound, and
if
you’d weighed one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds at that point, and
if
you’d occupied only your original timeline, you could have bumped the Machine from its timeline to yours and taken its place. You could have done it—if you had any idea how.” He calmed, looking at his notes. “But, of course, you didn’t weigh one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds, you were occupying multiple timelines at the time and had no idea how you were doing what you were doing, and so … here you sit. Which brings us to the last problem.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. It’s just the last one I can think of at the moment.”

“Go ahead.”

“Your reversion, which we still don’t understand, and all the manipulations you’ve imposed on the Machine since then have rendered it … well, it’s all messed up, okay? We can’t make any of this work until we recalibrate it, and we can’t do that until we know the exact extent of your reversion, where you went and when you got there.”

Dane clarified, “He needs to know where you were when you suddenly appeared in our time, and exactly what time and date it was. Do you remember?”

Of course she remembered. She and Seamus had verified it on site at the fairgrounds. Still, she held her peace, reading their faces.

“Oh!” said Parmenter. “Before you say anything, there’s still one more problem, and it’s only fair to tell you. Once you supply the information and we recalibrate the Machine, it will be fully controllable from this room, meaning anyone with access to the controls can dissolve your secondary timeline and retrace you. They will be able to end your life at will.”

She almost laughed. She did smile at the inescapable cosmic joke being played on her, the pitiful sense of doom coursing through her. If this was sanity, being crazy made a lot more sense.

Parmenter said in conclusion, “So it comes down to whether we have your trust, I suppose.”

She did laugh this time, but her laugh was bitter. “You gotta be kidding.”

Parmenter looked at Dane, so she looked at Dane, and Dane began, “I’ve been working on a plan—”

She signaled stop with her hand. “No, no, just hold on a minute.” Then she looked him over. “First, tell me who you are.”

He met her eyes, but then he couldn’t and looked away. The pain she saw all over him took her back to his bedroom when he stopped the dance and backed away … when he didn’t dare look at her as she was leaving. “There’s so much to think about right now, so much we just can’t get wrong—”

“Mr. Collins”—only his last name felt safe—“at least give me that much. I’ve spent every minute of every day trying to figure out who I am, and before I give these guys the ability to fry me if they want, I need to know I’m right. I need to know who you are, and I need to know that
you
know.”

He turned his gaze upon her and let his eyes rest there. They were filling with tears, but he blinked them away and spoke resolutely. “Mandy, I’m your husband. We were married June nineteenth, 1971.”

Speaking of time, that stopped it. She explored his eyes, but in a different way now that she had permission, and for the first time since the county fair her world felt quiet, settled, unmoving. It was a sensation she wouldn’t identify until later, that of her soul dropping anchor. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear the plan.”

chapter

47

D
ane unrolled the drawings on Preston Gabriel’s dining-room table, and the white-haired magician took a long, careful look at his rendering of a cocoonlike pod. It was six feet tall, hexagonal, with six triangular panels at the bottom that opened like a flower and closed to a point. The pod was designed to be suspended—and then dropped—from a crane. The drawing showed a girl stuffed inside, head down.

“Explosive bolts?” Preston asked, pointing to the panels that composed the pod’s lower end.

“We can conceal them in the seams and she can trigger them with her toes.”

“So how do you protect her head and shoulders?”

They looked at a third man in the room, Emile DeRondeau. The designer/builder replied, “It’s all in how the charges are mounted. We position them to blow outward.”

“After which she has … ?”

Dane answered, “One second, two seconds at best. Think it’s doable?”

Preston shook his head trying to fathom it. “You’d better ask Mandy. The timing—”

“She said she’d find out.”

“That’s not the scary part,” said Emile.

“All the parts are scary,” said Preston.

Emile pointed at an escape hatch on the back of the cocoon, the side away from the audience. “For me, the scariest part is this packing bolt that locks her in.”

No man had an argument there.

“But the point,” said Dane, “is to keep her safe from beginning to end.”

“What about the rigging in the costume?”

Dane whooshed a sigh. “We’re going to need Keisha on that—which means she’s in for some staggering news.”

“How long do we have?” asked Preston.

“Mandy premieres in the big room at the Orpheus Friday, the twenty-fifth of March. This stunt happens in the rear parking lot at two that afternoon. That gives us just under three weeks.”

“You could have come up with this a year ago,” said Emile.

“Well,” said Preston, eyebrows arched at the prospects, “that’s why they call it magic.”

“And if it works, it’ll be the biggest stunt Mandy’s ever done,” said Dane.

“The Grand Illusion.”

Dane looked at the drawing. “Not a bad name for it.”

Jack Wright didn’t care much for Vegas people. “I got two thousand acres and barely enough water thanks to you people down there, you and your politics and your money.”

Loren Moss tried to explain that he had nothing to do with that. “I’m not a hotel owner or a developer. I’m a professor of astrophysics,” he explained.

“So what are you doing in Vegas?”

“Well, that’s what I came to talk to you about.”

They were driving in Jack’s old pickup across his ranch to a piece of ground that wasn’t much use for grazing anymore and a safe distance from people, homes, or anything else breakable. When they were out of sight of any sign of mankind in any direction, Jack pulled to a stop, the desert dust blowing from the truck tires. “This what you had in mind?”

Moss climbed from the truck and looked in all directions. In the distance, a jackrabbit bounded out of sight among some rocks. There might have been some rattlesnakes around, maybe some leggy, venomous insects among the scrub brush, but that was all. “Yeah, yeah, Jack, this is just what I had in mind.”

“So what are you doing, testing a bomb or something?”

Moss laughed. “Oh, no, no, it’s just an experiment we didn’t want to do in town. Depending on how things go, there could be an explosion, maybe a little fire.”

Jack took that in stride, surveying the bleak surroundings from under the brim of his hat. “Well, you won’t hurt anything out here.”

“So we got a deal?”

“Soon’s I get the money.”

Moss handed Jack two thousand dollars in hundreds. “And by the way, you don’t know anything about this.”

“Never heard of you.”

Eighteen days to Mandy’s premiere …

Just standing on the ground harnessed to the hang glider got Mandy’s adrenaline going. The wing quivered and tugged with any breath of wind; she could jump up and feel it grab the air as she came down. It was like Mary Poppins’s umbrella, only for real, big enough to ride on the wind and take her and her instructor with it—which it did.

Hands on the control bar, face down the hill, start running into the breeze, control bar slightly forward …

Ooh! Wow!
It still thrilled her the way the wing picked them up, just like that, and the hillside dropped away.

Feel it, feel it, feel it: pull the control bar from the direction you want to turn, push forward to nose up, pull back to nose down, don’t overcorrect, anticipate where the wing is going, time it out, catch those updrafts …

Sailing through the air wasn’t much different from sailing through time and space. In both environments you rode currents and waves, negotiated through surges and ripples. The mental discipline was exactly the same:
feel it, anticipate, don’t overcorrect, get the rhythm.

Her instructor was impressed with how fast she caught on, as if she’d done it before.
Well …

Move over, birdies, Momma Dove’s on the wing!

At dusk, in the middle of Jack Wright’s most desolate acre, Mandy tried not to fidget as Parmenter affixed sensors to her forehead to monitor her brainwaves and advised her as she affixed some more to herself to monitor her vitals. Wires from the sensors led to an interface, the interface was connected to Parmenter’s laptop computer, the computer was hooked up to a satellite receiver, and back at the lab, Loren Moss was monitoring the data at the Machine’s central console.

This stuff was still mind-boggling.

They were set up under a shade canopy where Dane had neatly stacked exactly 35.76 concrete blocks with a combined weight of 1,520 pounds. They’d brought them in Loren Moss’s pickup truck, each one carefully weighed and labeled, including a block they had to chip down to 0.76 of its original size and weight.

Parmenter checked the readings from the sensors on his computer and nodded satisfaction. “All right. Now, Mandy, if you’ll take a seat on top of the blocks …”

She stepped carefully onto the blocks, holding the wires from the sensors so as not to snag or tangle them. Dane took her chair next to Parmenter’s picnic table workstation to observe.

“Comfortable?” Parmenter asked.

“Just dandy,” Mandy replied, secretly wishing she could sit on a pillow—Parmenter said she could have one, but if she did they would have to chip away some more of the 0.76 concrete block to allow for the added weight.

“All right,” he said, tapping away at the computer keys. “You and your clothing and the concrete blocks should now total one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds. You are wearing exactly the same clothes you wore when we weighed you?”

“Same clothes.”

“Nothing new in your pockets?”

“Nope.”

“Uh, what about that gum?”

“Oh.” He put out his hand and she spit the gum into it.

“Very good.” Parmenter gave the gum to Dane. “Now, according to Dane’s best recollection and the cut of your later costumes, you weighed an additional four pounds at age fifty-nine, so we’ve factored that in.”

She tried not to make a face—her face was always saying things she didn’t mean to, always giving away her thoughts and feelings. How could that guy be so doggone clinical about this? She was not only going to gain four pounds in a matter of minutes if not seconds, she was also going to gain thirty-nine years and, if she couldn’t stir up the magic feelings, thoughts, or vibes needed to pull this off, she was going to burn to death.
But hey, no sweat, no big deal. It might work, it might not, you win some, you lose some, but whatever happens, it’ll be fascinating and educational.

She stole a look at Dane, careful not to look too long, not to let her eyes place any obligation on him. As he tried to say, there were so many things to think about, so many things they couldn’t get wrong. Their love was too big a question to tackle now, and for all they knew, the whole matter of Dane and Mandy and their bond of forty years was meant to end on September 17. So, of course, he was guarded and she understood, but one look, any look at him told her he was the same man, steady as a rock, the only thing she could be sure about.