08 Illusion (61 page)

At 12:30, Moss and Parmenter availed themselves of microwaved sandwiches from the kitchen and nibbled at them as they watched the monitors showing nothing interesting. One of the staff had brought in a television so they could watch the live broadcast, but right now the station was carrying a network show, six political pundits sitting around a table interrupting each other. When Parmenter turned down the sound, no one complained.

“What are we expecting, anyway?” Moss finally asked.

Parmenter had to think to come up with something. “I suppose we could be seeing the Machine approach its limits. From what I understand, this is going to be one heck of a stunt.”

“Ohhh, that’s for sure.”

Moss’s tone was a bit elevated when he said that. It made Parmenter wonder what he meant.

Moss piped up, “Bigger than what we’re planning in the desert?”

What?
Parmenter put up a hand of caution. “Not here.”

Moss looked at the two staff members finding something to do at another station. “They can’t hear us.”

“We don’t discuss it here.”

“Well … maybe in cloaked terms …”

“Not in any terms!”

“But it does look promising.”

Parmenter answered, if only to end the topic, “Yes. I would say the theory’s working.”

“But”—Moss looked all around the lab—“does it ever bother you? Do you ever consider the cost in terms of the progress we’ve made? We would lose all of this.”

“We’ve already lost it. We can’t contain or control what this is, what it means, what it can do.”

“What it can do. You can imagine how that looks through my eyes.”

Parmenter nodded. “I realize—”

“Do you? I’m dying, and this”—he looked around the room at the amazing Machine—“this could have saved me … and come on, being realistic, of course I have to wonder if there isn’t something we don’t know yet, some tiny, hidden secret yet to be discovered that could change the rules.”

Well,
Parmenter thought,
it’s happened.
“Loren, you do remember all the steps we went through where we talked just as you’re talking now, and how those steps brought us to this pitiful point.
If
we hadn’t stolen Mandy’s body and reverted it without anyone’s permission or knowledge;
if
we’d not tried a cover-up of Watergate proportions instead of admitting our error;
if
we hadn’t, from the start, chosen the Machine over every human life we entangled with it;
if
we hadn’t reached the point where we were actually plotting to retrace and kill an innocent young woman …”

“But you’re fine with letting your own friend and colleague die.”

Parmenter’s heart sank. “It’s more than your life and Mandy’s. It’s the nature of the Machine coupled with the nature of mankind. We’ve already demonstrated the results in this very lab, in our own choices and actions.”

“I see it differently.”

“I can understand that. I was expecting it, to be honest.”

“Is that why you didn’t trust me with Mandy’s reversion data?”

Well, now we’re getting down to it.
“Loren, I would hardly trust myself, and it was an extreme act of trust for Mandy to do so. She trusted me with her life.”

Just then the hallway door opened and several men came into the room. Parmenter recognized Martin DuFresne, Carlson, and three other physicians in DuFresne’s camp—
speak of the devil!
There were three other men he’d seen maybe once before. They were the government interests who stayed deep in the background, unnamed, unseen, making things happen, definitely not to be trusted. Last through the door were two men he’d not seen before: one was dark, Mediterranean, perhaps Middle Eastern, the other blond, with a ruddy, pockmarked face.

He nodded at the men in greeting. They didn’t nod back or say a word as they assembled in a rough line behind the command console, eyes unfriendly, wary.

Parmenter eyed them all, then Moss. “Don’t tell me. You’ve changed sides.”

Moss gave his hand a little turn upward. “It’s my life, Jerry. If we keep going with the Machine recalibrated and Mandy no longer a factor, we might find a way to make a reversion stick.”

“Yours, I take it.”

Moss jerked his head in the direction of DuFresne and company. “They put me first in line.”

Parmenter knew he had little or nothing with which to bargain. “I could never betray Mandy’s trust. I can’t give you the information.”

Moss only smiled. “We have it.”

Mandy let Seamus walk her to her dressing room—the new one above and behind the big room stage, the one with the rich carpet, mile-long makeup counter, huge, illuminated mirror, full bath with walk-in shower, and separate lounge area where she could relax, do interviews, entertain guests. He seemed particularly pleased to show her her name on the door, just the way she liked it: Mandy Whitacre.

Facing her, his hands on her shoulders, he told her, “This is it, sweetie. But don’t think of this as an arrival; think of it as a beginning. This is where we place the bar and we rise from here.”

“I hope I can do you proud,” she said.

“I have every confidence that you will—”

She cut off his sentence with a kiss, then gave him a look she hoped would show her appreciation. “Gotta get ready.”

He enjoyed the kiss, she could tell. “We’ll all be waiting.” He threw her a little salute and backed down the hall, keeping her in sight until she closed the dressing room door.

Once inside, she rushed into the luxurious, marble-floored bathroom and washed the kiss from her face.

* * *

Parmenter didn’t have to ask; DuFresne seemed nearly bursting to tell him. “Seamus Downey was hired by our friends here, which meant he had all the inroads and connections with the government he could have needed. He got her a new identity so she’d blend into the system unnoticed, be able to work for a living and have as normal a life as possible, and most especially, confide in him when the time came.”

Moss was allowed to finish the revelation. “When she visited the fairgrounds, he was there, taking note of the time, the date, and the exact location. We ran the information through the simulator and with a little finessing we got the numbers to jibe. We can recalibrate.”

Parmenter pushed Moss to say it, maybe think it. “And then?”

“And then we recover full control of the Machine and a space-time fabric free of deflection, a blank slate. From there, we continue to explore, and I promise, we
will
work out the problems.”

“You made no mention of what will happen to Mandy.”

Moss only gave his head a dismissive tilt. “It’s a foregone conclusion.”

Parmenter looked at the gathering. “Or what will happen to me.”

DuFresne spoke. “It would be impossible to ignore your immeasurable value to this project. We can only hope that, in time, you’ll be able to put the greater good above these momentary difficulties. I can assure you, you’ll be kept safe and the process will be painless.”

“As a matter of fact,” Moss added, “this is one way your invention can do you a world of good. When you wake up, you’ll be a year younger, and as far as you’ll remember, all this trouble never happened.”

The thought of fleeing had no sooner entered Parmenter’s head than a lightning bolt shot through his body and every motor nerve seemed to short out. He saw the pockmarked face above him and felt the prick of a needle in his neck, but he could do nothing about it.

At 12:54, Mandy sat alone at the oversize makeup counter where she really had to get going on her showbiz face and her showbiz hair, but had to be sure, had to try things first. Cradling her chin in one hand and keeping the other in her lap, she toyed with the lipsticks, makeup brushes, eyeliner, foundation, and blush, making them scoot about the counter like little bumper cars, each one independently controlled. A tube of mascara, an eyebrow pencil, and a lipstick brush did a drag race, popping wheelies at one end of the counter and zipping down the counter until the mascara spun out, the eyebrow pencil sputtered out, and the lipstick brush won, screeching around a tight victory circle and then dancing in victory. The foundation and a lipstick were doing a figure eight and about to collide in the middle; she made the lipstick jump over the foundation and continue on. She closed her eyes and placed herself aboard each little item as it scurried around the counter. This would have been a load of fun any other day.

As the makeup kept moving around the counter, she eyed a chair, reached invisibly, and lifted it, holding it in space. Beyond the chair, the three aspens jutted up through the floor and disappeared through the ceiling; the white paddock fence divided the room.

Sure would like to be
there
right now.

“Looks like our magician friend is rehearsing,” said Moss, now in charge at the command console as his cohorts observed with unbroken attention. The monitors were showing small deflections as Mandy multiplied herself and made things move. “She is really good at this! She has twelve separate timelines working right now, each one controlling a different object.”

DuFresne expressed the sentiments of all. “We have got to master this! We need to achieve this level of control.”

“We will—or may I say,
I
will?”

“So what happens when we recalibrate? Will that kill her ability?”

“Now’s when we find out.” Moss entered the vital numbers. “We enter the ending point, 13:05:23, September 12, 1970, and have the Machine reverse-calculate from there back to 10:17:24, September 17, 2010. That should bring the Machine back to its original setting and we can regain control.” He entered some more commands until the cursor blinked on the final field, Initiate. “Hang on to your hats.” He hit the Enter key. The monitors filled with a flurry of numbers and graphic patterns moving faster than the eye could follow.

Clunk! The chair landed on the floor and toppled over. Mandy’s mind went spinning away from the objects on the counter, and she could no longer see herself piloting each one. A lipstick and a makeup brush fell on the floor. The vision of the aspens and the fence dissolved. The room was deathly quiet, and Mandy felt as if she were totally, really there in the room, a solid floor beneath her, solid walls around her, no sense of drifting, no invisible currents and eddies swirling around her.

What happened?

She felt strangely awake, as if she’d been in a trance for the past several months. Was this how normal really felt? She forcefully blinked her eyes and looked about the room, just trying to perceive and understand it.
So this is where I am?
She could smell the newness of the carpet, the sweet smell of the makeup for the first time; there was no burning smell to cover it.

Is this normal? Maybe it is.

But … I can’t have normal, not today.

She looked in the mirror and saw the same Mandy Whitacre she’d been since the county fair. That hadn’t changed.

But something had.

chapter

50

T
he bleachers were filling up: a busload of bald and blue-rinsed retirees making a special stop, moms, dads, and restless kids, younger couples without kids, slightly seasoned couples away from their kids, single guys on a lark, single girls eyeing the single guys, older guys with younger women, tourists with all sizes and types of cameras. The crowd was buzzing, eyeing the stage, the whimsical forest, the volcano intermittently grumbling and burping smoke. The TV crews were setting up their cameras along the top of the bleachers, down on the ground, anywhere they could get a good shot, and Emile was advising them what would be happening and where.

Dane blended with the crowd, sitting on the top row of the bleachers but about to surrender his spot as the crowd pressed in. From here everything looked ready to roll, but he was making sure of the last few items on his checklist: cable cinch, tight; escape hatch packing bolt, removed; release hook, functional; stage clock—the oversize hourglass that ran for one minute—operative. The winds were favorable.

One thing still unchecked: the call he would have to get from Parmenter by 1:30 if, and only if, there was no need to go ahead. He checked his watch: 1:10.

In the makeshift sleeping quarters adjacent to the lab, Parmenter lay on the bed unconscious, his phone in his pocket.

In the lab, as Moss and DuFresne watched and the others wondered, streams and columns of numbers counted down and graphs jittered until finally, with an electronic warble, the Machine rebooted and the original control interface filled the screen, the fields clear.

With one victorious clap of his hands Moss announced, “Gentlemen, we are back online. I’ll keep the fields open for her input and let her have control. We want her confident.”

DuFresne spoke to Mr. Stone and Mr. Mortimer. “Let’s get it done.”

They hurried out the door.

He asked Moss, “So what if she tries to go interdimensional to escape?”

Moss wagged his head. “We won’t give her that. The moment she’s in the pod, we retrace.” He puffed a little sigh of relief. “And with her total weight no more than 112, she won’t have anywhere else she can go.”

“Except the volcano,” DuFresne suggested, amused at his own wit.

“What more could we ask for?”

One of the staff set a video monitor atop the console. “Seamus is sending video.”

The monitor lit up and after some snow and flicker the picture appeared. Seamus was shooting from the parking lot, looking up at the bleachers, panning across the stage.

DuFresne donned a headset. “Seamus, can you hear me?”

Seamus, wireless earpiece in place, kept taking in the scene as he replied, “Loud and clear.”