Three Days to Never (36 page)

“Whatever happens with this meeting,” said Mishal, “this silly proposed trade of girls, you'll follow your orders today—this morning. I'll try to learn something about this singularity in the tower, and if possible I'll relay it over the radio for you to add to your report, but
you
have to use the machine to jump back to 1967. As soon as I've relayed all I can find out, or at the very first sign of any trouble, you
go.
You heard Einstein's ghost say how to do it. Right?”

“Right,” said Lepidopt.

“And you've got your, your homing device?”

Mishal was referring to Lepidopt's dried finger, which was still in the Flix chocolate box in his pocket. In 1928 Einstein had been guided to his destination in the past by a bullet shell, which struck Lepidopt as a much more dignified sort of talisman.

“Got it.”

“Can you feel your target sites yet, those pieces of glass? They should be set up by now.”

Lepidopt tried to stretch his mind outward, past the haze of the whiskey, to a piece of oily glass on Mount Wilson and another in Death Valley. He didn't get any clear impression. “No,” he said.

“Well, you probably have to be out of your body to sense them. You can still do an astral projection, I hope! You got good marks for that, in your training.”

“I did? I hated it.” Lepidopt shifted uncomfortably in the driver's seat at the memory of hovering weightlessly under some ceiling and seeing his limp body slumped on a couch on the other side of a room.

“Assuming it works,” Lepidopt said, “do you want me to tell Isser Harel in 1967 that we've agreed to change some part of the past for Charlotte Sinclair, in exchange for her help?”

For a moment Mishal was silent. Then, “The thing the
Zohar
predicted,” he said. “The ‘knowledge of the precious supernal wisdom.' You want to use
that
to fix some divorce or childhood trauma or something for that woman?” He shook his head. “You don't throw what's precious to dogs.”

Lepidopt asked, “What's precious to dogs?” Mishal didn't laugh, and Lepidopt flexed his maimed right hand on the gearshift. “I'll be changing the past,” he said. “From 1967 on.”

“Right,” said Mishal. “The Yom Kippur War will certainly go differently in the new time line you'll help initiate. A lot of things will.”

“I, uh, got married in 1972,” said Lepidopt, ashamed to be bringing it up. “My son was born in 1976. He's eleven now.”

“That would follow, yes.” Mishal sniffed. “I hope I don't smell the way this van does, when I meet these people.”

“I wonder—if he'll still be born. That is, if
he'll
still be born. What if something I change—like a whole war—makes my younger self and his wife conceive the boy on a different night? What if the child is a girl, this time around? What if there
is
no child? My younger self in this new time line might die before fathering him.”

“Unlikely—especially with you, the elder you, looking out for his safety. You can tell Harel that that's a condition of your cooperation.”

“But I can't eliminate the
possibility
of my younger self dying. Much less eliminate the possibility that my son won't be conceived exactly as it happened originally.” Lepidopt bared his teeth at the dark freeway lanes under the lightening eastern sky. “The boy I know might turn out never to have existed.”

“All of us are at risk,” said Mishal. “There might be a war six years from now in which your son will be killed, if you don't do this.”

“But if he's killed, he'll at least have
existed
,” Lepidopt said, knowing he was pushing a point Mishal considered settled.

“All our sons and daughters,” said Mishal sternly, “and wives and parents, are at risk every day. Do you know what this thing in the Sinai desert
is
, at the Rephidim stone, that you're to copy out?” He laughed. “Well no, of course you don't. None of us does. But according to old manuscripts that never made it into the
Sepher ha-Bahir
compilation in the twelfth century, it's a way to travel in all the worlds of the
Sephirot
, not just in four or even five dimensions. It could make this time machine look like the Wright brothers's airplane.”

“I see,” said Lepidopt.

Mishal waved a hand, acknowledging Lepidopt's previous point. “God won't lose sight of any of us. Not of
us.
Do you think that machine can change God's memory? It would be disrespectful, as well as wrong, to think so.”

Can I have that in writing? thought Lepidopt; but he simply kept the gas pedal pressed to the floor and watched the taillights of Malk's van.

O
ld Frank Marrity was glad to see the last of the flatbed truck as it turned left out of the hospital parking lot, heading south, though when its taillights had disappeared down Indian Canyon Drive he could still for a moment see the foolish chair mounted on the back of it.

He had managed to throw the tent and all the electronic equipment off the truck bed, in painful, sweating haste by the glare of the burning cabin, but that damned chair had been bolted to the wood. Canino had tied Golze's wheelchair to it, and Marrity had had to hang on to it, cursing and several times half sliding off the truck altogether during the bumpy half-hour drive down the mountain road to Palm Springs.

He had barely been able to crawl off the truck bed when they had finally stopped here in the hospital parking lot.

The few cars that whispered past now on the street beyond the sidewalk trees still had their headlights on, and the breeze was pleasantly cool, but the sky was already deep
blue and in half an hour or so the sun would be rising over the distant Santa Rosa Mountains.

Across a sidewalk and a narrow lawn, the square, four-story tower loomed in gray shadow against the cloudless sky. Peering up at it, he could see a corner of the belfry ceiling through the west-facing arch at the top. The low tile-roofed building at its foot was medical offices now, but the tower had reputedly once been the highest structure in this desert village, the crown of the long-gone El Mirador Hotel.

Three Vespers cars had pulled into the lot ten minutes ago, and Marrity was leaning against the left-rear door of one of them, a brown-and-white Chrysler Fifth Avenue that was brand new but looked very old-fashioned and boxy to him. When will I see Saturns again? he thought. Lexuses? Geos?

The driver's-side door was open and the haggard-looking woman who was apparently Rascasse was sitting in the driver's seat, listening to the multiband radio. She smelled like stale bread this morning.

“We, uh, talked our way into the house,” said a voice from the speaker, “and the cement block they had was just a section of sidewalk. Decoy. One of the renters there eventually directed us to a place called the Wigwam Motel, and the people we want had been there but have cleared out. Nothing in the room.”

“Okay,” said Rascasse in her new contralto voice. “Get here as quickly as you can.”

Marrity couldn't see Golze in the passenger seat, but in the predawn quiet he clearly heard his frail voice: “They're working from a mobile base now.”

“Indeed,” said Rascasse, “and they'll be heading this way.” She spoke into the radio again. “Prime.”

“Tierce,” came a tinny reply from the speaker.

“They're bringing Charlotte here to make the trade. But probably there'll be a vehicle accompanying them, a truck or van, that will be visible to human eyes but not to astral sight—not to my mind. Get—oleander.” Marrity saw the old woman lean forward briefly, and then she sat back and went
on, “Get the copter here, and have him circle and describe to me all traffic on the streets. Not models, just…‘a white van, a blue car ahead of it, a red car passing both of them'…like that.”

“Right. Later.”

The man who had driven up in the Chrysler was pacing the sidewalk a hundred feet away; the other two drivers were still sitting in their cars. Marrity wondered irritably what Vespers men did on their days off. Maybe they never got days off.

Marrity took a deep breath and then spoke. “You don't need to do this negation thing with anybody,” he said. “You'll have the machine itself within the hour, and then you'll be able to go back and
fix
things, not just, just—start chronological avalanches! All you've got to do is kill D-Daphne, like you agreed to.” He realized he was nodding like a monkey, and made himself stop. “That was part of our agreement, in the boat on the lake.”

In this situation, he was certain, he was doing all that remained to be done for poor Daphne. If they killed her, she would at least have had a life; but if they negated her, there would never have been any Daphne Marrity at all. And how much of his own memories, his own
identity,
were tied up with her? He himself would become an entirely different person if she were negated, a person unimaginable to him now.

“We haven't got the machine yet,” croaked Golze.

T
he two Mossad vans were parked in shadow at the end of West Tahquitz Canyon Way, in front of a house that was half hidden behind palm trees and honeysuckle and grapevines. A wrought-iron arch with an unlit lantern hanging from its curlicued peak opened on a stone stairway barely visible in the tree shadows beyond, and to the left Lepidopt could make out the two-or three-story house, with doors and windows deeply inset in thick, pale walls. A mailbox was mounted on one pole of the arch and a plastic rake leaned against the other. Mishal said Einstein had stayed
here in 1931 and had hidden attention-deflecting stone amulets in the terraced garden behind the house.

They were seven blocks south of the El Mirador Medical Plaza, about half an hour short of dawn.

During the drive from San Bernardino to Palm Springs, the van had been a moving pocket of warmth and dashboard lights and a pair of glowing cigarettes in the lonely rock-studded hills in the predawn darkness, and the only signs of human habitation in the landscape of jagged ridges and remote, tilted alluvial deltas had been one line of half a dozen trailer trucks pulled off on the shoulder, and the twin red dots of Malk's taillights in the otherwise empty lane ahead. Lepidopt had been glad to turn off the freeway onto State Highway 111 and follow it into the sleeping town of Palm Springs, with its low, plain 1950s-style office buildings, its shops with aluminum foil covering the windows, and its dark ranch houses with gravel yards.

“It's about time to divvy the cargo,” said Mishal now, unsnapping his seat belt. “Handcuff Marrity in here with the Einstein machine, where you can blow both of them to smithereens if worse comes to worse. Then you and Bert just circle around town in it, and try to stay in touch with me via the radio.”

He tucked the Azden microphone-transmitter into his shirt pocket and clipped the microphone under his collar. The trouble with body microphones was that the crystal-controlled transmitters were as big as a deck of cards, and couldn't transmit farther than a few city blocks at the best of times, and a human body tended to block the radio waves.

“If you can't hear me,” said Mishal, “just jump at dawn. You can at least bring Harel the news that the singularity Einstein
appeared
to refer to
may
exist in that tower. Once you've jumped, all of this”—his wave took in the other van too, with Charlotte and Marrity in it, and all of Palm Springs—“won't ever have happened.”

“Different courses for all of us,” Lepidopt agreed in a level voice. He thought of being able to swim in the ocean
again, and listen to Rimsky-Korsakov again, and then he thought of Louis back in Tel Aviv.

“Arm the thing,” said Mishal, opening the passenger-side door. A puff of cool, sage-scented air dispelled the interior smells of cat box and cigarette smoke.

Lepidopt unsnapped his seat belt and stood up in a crouch to shuffle into the back of the van. He switched on the overhead bulb.

The Chaplin handprint slab was now bolted upright next to Einstein's big, dusty glass cylinder, and wires were stapled across the carpeted floor to a yard-wide gold swastika laid flat. On a linoleum counter closer to the back doors were a bottle of brandy, an ashtray already crowded with cigarette butts, and, screwed firmly into the counter, the “pressure-firing device.”

This looked vaguely like a small floor jack, but the disk sticking up from one end of it wouldn't support anything—it was the pressure cap that would set off the bomb.

A copper tube—a nonelectric blasting cap—had been crimped onto the nozzle-like opening at the other end of the device, and the blasting cap was connected to a red plastic adapter that was screwed into the threaded cap well of a long brick of tetrytol explosive wrapped in tarry black paper.

A homely looking blue kitchen timer connected a dry-cell battery to a wire that ran into the tetrytol brick through a groove in the plastic adapter. If it came down to it, Lepidopt could either set the timer and run, or just smack the pressure cap.

A four-inch cotter pin was stuck through the barrel of the pressure-firing device, and Lepidopt now carefully pulled it out and laid it on the counter beside the ashtray.

“It's armed,” he said.

From the pavement outside the van, Mishal called, “Good. I'll send over Malk and Marrity.”

By the dim yellow glow of the overhead bulb, Lepidopt stared at the bomb and the time machine, and he tried to imagine what might go wrong. What if he and Malk and
Marrity were captured, and the bomb didn't work? There was no bowl of dry macaroni here, but a gun available in an unexpected place might be just as comforting a backup here as it had been in the safe-house apartment on La Brea.

S
till lying on the blanket-covered plywood floor of the other van with her arms loosely around Marrity, Charlotte had been alternately looking through the eyes of the three Mossad men; aside from Marrity's here beside her in the darkness, there were no other viewpoints within several hundred feet.

Malk was just sitting in the driver's seat in front of them, peering into the shadows through the windshield and the rearview mirrors. Mishal and Lepidopt had been talking inside the other van, though of course she could not hear what they had said, and now Mishal had got out and was walking up toward this van. That other van was more interesting, though, with the Chaplin block and what looked like a bomb, so she kept on looking through Lepidopt's eyes.

She saw him open a black plastic box and pull a small-caliber automatic pistol out of the foam-rubber padding inside; his glance swept the narrow interior of the van, then focused on a plastic pan full of well-used cat litter in the corner. The cat box became larger in his perspective as he approached it, and then she saw his hands push the gun in under the gray sand. His gaze narrowed a little, as if he were wincing.

Charlotte put her mouth to Marrity's ear. “In the other van,” she whispered, “there's a gun under the sand in the cat box in the corner.” She felt him nod.

“You two awake?” asked Malk as he saw Mishal approaching in the rearview mirror.

“Yes,” said Marrity, stretching beside Charlotte. Mishal was unlocking the back doors, and Marrity kissed Charlotte quickly in the moment before the doors swung open and the dawn breeze cooled her face and arms.

Then Mishal was unsnapping the padlock that moored
their ankles to the floor. “I'll be driving this van,” he said, “and Charlotte, you'll be sitting up front with me. Frank, you go with Malk to the other one.”

Charlotte groped her way forward, found the passenger seat and slid into it. She heard Mishal get in beside her, but she was looking through Marrity's eyes now as he was led to the back of the other van; he stepped up into the back of it, and as Mishal clanked the gearshift she saw Lepidopt handcuff Marrity's left wrist to a spare-tire bracket against the van's left wall, away from the machine and the bomb. She saw Lepidopt smile and say something, and Marrity's vision moved up and down in a nod. And as she felt the van she was in move slowly forward in a tight curve, Marrity's gaze fell on the cat box in the corner of that van.

That's it, she thought, and she let herself switch to Mishal's viewpoint so she could see where they were going.

T
he blue helicopter was visible in the south now, pursuing its endless rotating figure eight over the city.

“Fourteen minutes till dawn,” said Golze.

His wheelchair was stopped on flagstones by the entrance to the clinic building at the foot of the tower. Old Frank Marrity peered at him—the bearded man's face was gray, and sweaty even in the dawn chill, and Marrity wondered if he was putting off taking another shot of morphine in order to stay alert.

I'm in more pain, thought Marrity defiantly, and not just the considerable throbbing ache in my abused leg. After all, I'm going to disappear from here within half an hour, and I don't know whether I'll reappear as a childless married man whose only daughter died ninteteen years ago, or as a total stranger—a stranger who might even have other children! I've had enough of
offspring,
thank you.

Marrity had to step back to make way for an elderly man in a three-piece suit pushing an aluminum walker like, Marrity thought, Sisyphus pushing his boulder. It took nearly a
minute for the man to hobble past on his way to the hospital entrance, which was another hundred feet away. Luckily the hospital didn't seem to be very busy yet at this hour.

“You might still get shot, in this fresh time line,” Marrity told Golze.

“Go have another drink, hero,” said Golze.

Marrity hesitated for a moment, then limped across the grass and the pavement to the car Rascasse sat in.

The driver's-side door was still open, and Rascasse was listening to the radio, which was droning its endless list: “…city bus, green station wagon, motorcycle, white van, white van, red car…”

“I'm just gonna get—” Marrity began.

“Shut up, you idiot,” snapped the Rascasse woman as she lurched forward in the seat. “Prime,” she said; “was that two white vans or only one? Repeat it please.”

“Tierce,” said the voice on the radio, “two white vans, the northern one looks newer. The southern one just turned east on Alejo, the other is continuing north on Indian Canyon, toward you.”

“Curare,” said Rascasse. She adjusted something on the radio, and then went on, “Keep that eastbound van in sight.”

“Got it.” The radio clicked into silence at last.