“Remember,” Herb said,
joining the scanner’s telemetry readout and the scissors together with a pair of rubber bands.
“When you arrive, first thing, locate this stuff…and for Christ’s sake hang on to it!
After
that, you look around for your mom.”
“Right.”
I had a sudden horrid thought.
“Holy shit, don’t forget to take off her wedding ring!” I said.
I felt a twinge of regret at its loss, but I’d have given a thousand rings to have my Zoey back; I could always buy her another.
“I won’t,” she assured me.
“Good thing she doesn’t wear earrings or a watch; that’ll save seconds.”
“And listen: the release for that belt is right on top, in front.
You’ll see it: just pull up on it and the belt opens right up.
I suggest you leave it there in space.”
“I will,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“Excuse me,” said a quiet voice from outside the circle.
We turned and there was Field Inspector Ludnyola Czrjghnczl, looking embarrassed but determined.
Now?
I thought.
“Yes, ma’am?” Erin said.
“Do I understand this correctly?
You intend to be exposed to hard vacuum yourself, for the entire twenty seconds of your search window?
Because it seems to me that with your smaller size, decompression would kill you faster than it would her.”
I stared at her.
I should have thought of that.
Erin smiled at her and nodded.
“It would—but no, I won’t be exposed continuously.
I’ll have the IR scanner spinning so that it’ll take it about two seconds to complete a three hundred and sixty degree scan, that’s the fastest it can process the data.
Then I just keep skipping forward two seconds at a time and looking at the readout until I get a hit.
Or don’t.
My total max exposure should be under five seconds.”
“Ah,” said the bureaucrat.
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you,” Erin said.
“Yes, thank you,” I heard myself say.
Ms. Czrjghnczl started to say something in reply, then changed her mind and stepped silently back into the shadows again.
I could feel my heart hammering.
“Okay.
When will you do it?”
“Right now, Daddy,” she said.
“Every second I waste is another nineteen miles I’ll have to Transit.
And I’ll never be any readier.”
I closed my eyes.
A theologian would probably quarrel if I said I prayed, since I wasn’t aiming it at any particular being.
Say I wished real hard, if you like.
“Okay, everybody,” I said, raising my voice, “we’re ready to do this thing.”
More than a hundred voices all wished Erin well at once, and then fell silent.
Time seemed to come to a halt for me.
All my senses became enhanced.
I could hear cicadas, and my friends breathing, and two drunks arguing with a cop up near Duval Street, and some boatman having trouble with his engine somewhere off in the Gulf of Mexico, and a single-prop plane of some kind lining up for its approach to Key West airport, and the hammering of my own heart in my chest.
I could smell the sea, coffee from The Machine behind the bar, islands cooking over in Bahama Village, fried food from Duval, a car with bad exhaust going right by outside, and my own armpits reeking with fear.
I could see all around me over a hundred well-known faces filled with concern and support, and all around them the splendid home Zoey and I had built for them and ourselves down here among the palms and poincianas at the end of the world.
I could feel air rushing down my windpipe, and blood racing through my veins, and feces making its slow way through the middle of me; I could have sworn I felt my hair growing all over me.
I had been frightened every single second since midnight.
Now all at once I was so terrified I wanted to vomit my heart.
I showed my daughter my teeth.
I tried to say, “Go get her, honey,” and discovered I couldn’t trust myself to speak.
Instead I nodded, touched her cheek one last time, and stepped back.
She smiled back.
That smile had only had all its teeth for a few months, now, I recalled.
“Don’t worry, Daddy,” she said.”
“I won’t,” I lied hoarsely.
Pip.
The magic eightball and its remote vanished.
“I’ll be right back.”
Pop.
And of course she was.
Idiotically, I had for some reason expected that there would now be an interval of nerve-racking suspense that, whatever its actual duration, would seem to take years.
Call it proof that I wasn’t thinking clearly.
When she reappeared right where she had just disappeared like the Cheshire Cat changing its mind, the scanner once again at her feet, there was a split second during which I was relieved, grateful to be spared the burden of waiting even one more second on tenterhooks.
Then I saw that she was still alone.
Then the expression on her face registered.
She drew in a gasping, shuddering breath.
“Oh God, Daddy,” she said hoarsely, “
she wasn’t there
.”
*
*
*
I heard a roaring in my ears, and started to faint.
But my sobbing daughter literally climbed up me into my arms, and I knew this was not a good time to drop her on concrete and fall on top of her.
I locked my knees, locked my arms around her, and promised myself that I would become unconscious just as soon as I got a chance.
“Okay, don’t panic,” Acayib called sharply.
“Remember our initial assumptions.
Zoey either jumped one hour, or twenty-four.
We’ve eliminated the first one.
Now we try the other, that’s all.”
Of course!
We’d failed to find Zoey at 8:03 this evening…but for all we knew we might still find her at 7:03
tomorrow
evening.
All was not lost—
Erin’s skin felt feverishly hot against mine.
Moments ago she had been in space, twice as far away as the orbit of Luna.
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“It’s not just a matter of multiplying everything by twenty-four!
Slippage we could neglect for a span of one hour, effects we could safely ignore, get too big to ignore over that long a time—and too slippery to pin down precisely.”
“So we’ll do another brain orgy,” I said.
She shook her head.
“Even if we could get everyone back in rapport now that we’re all this agitated—and I doubt we could—it wouldn’t help.”
She looked up at me with those huge eyes.
“It’s just not the kind of thing that more calculating time will improve.
It’s…it’s indeterminacy.
The part that can’t be computed.”
“But you’re gonna
try
.”
“Of course I am, Daddy!
And it may work.”
“It may,” Doug agreed.
“But the odds are way lousier than they were for a one-hour jump.”
“They are,” said Doug.
I felt a powerful impulse to rip my beard out of my face.
Instead I sighed deeply and looked at my watch. “Okay, 7:03 PM this evening is more than twelve hours away, pumpkin.
Do you want to take a break before you try again?
Use the toilet?
Eat something?
Nap a few hours?”
She shook her head.
“Let’s just do it.
Put me in my chair.”
Deep breath.
“Okay.”
I set her down before her two computers, and her fingers flew over the keys for a minute or so.
Then she looked at the figures on the screens for ten long seconds, took in a long deep breath, and shut off both machines.
The crowd quieted down.
“Okay, everybody,” she said, standing up on her chair.
“This is my last shot.
Keep your fingers crossed.”
Universal murmurs of support, encouragement, confidence, love.
She glanced over at me, and smiled.
“I’m really scared, Daddy,” she whispered.
I tried to smile back, and couldn’t.
“You’ll get her this time.”
She nodded, faced forward, took a deep breath.
Pip
.
For the second time, the IR scanner vanished.
Pop
.
So did Erin.
Pop
.
She was back.
Alone.
Crying her eyes out.
12
God's idea of slapstick
In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.
—Dag Hammarskjold
“I simply have
got
to stop killing wives,” I said.
“They spot you the first one, anybody can fuck up once—but two in thirty years is just sloppy performance.
It’s starting to cause talk.
Hear it?”
One of my eyelids was peeled up, and the other rose halfway to join it.
Doc Webster, inches away, held up something that ignited and became a star.
“Oh hi, Sam.
Deja vu all over again, huh?
What are you gonna do for me
this
time—send me to a bar called Callahan’s Place?
I think you’re a little late.”
I giggled.
“I think we’re all a little late.”
The sun died.
He put a handcuff on me.
No, took my pulse, more likely.
Possibly my blood pressure.
“You must think I’m crazy, huh?
You’d probably give anything to have another year—even a bad one.
Zoey would have given anything for five more minutes.
Thirty more seconds.
And here I am pissing and moaning because I probably have another couple of decades of good health to spend feeling sorry for myself.”
“Tragedy has no pecking order, Jacob,” the Doc said.
“Pain is pain, and all pain is infinite and eternal.”
“You’ve got stuff that will put me out,” I said dreamily.
“Yes.
You can’t have any.”
“I
can’t
?”
“Not yet.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“I want you to have a debate with your daughter, first.”
“Huh?”
“Sit up.”
I was so irritated I let him help me do so.
I was on a lounge chair at poolside.
Erin sat in a deck chair on my immediate right.
Doc stood to my left.
A few other people stood around solicitously but I didn’t even bother to register who.
“What debate?”
“Which one of you killed Zoey?”
“I did,” Erin and I said simultaneously, and at once we were yelling at each other.
“—if I’d gotten the goddam calculations right—”
“—if I hadn’t opened my stupid moron mouth and
suggested
using the fucking belt to her—”
“—if I’d just had the sense to Transit straight home instead of—”
“—if I hadn’t been too lazy to find a goddam
telephone in the city of Miami
—”
“—if I hadn’t been careless enough to let that gorilla get cuffs on me—”
“—if I hadn’t decided to let my little girl fight my battles for me—”
By now we were both at the top of our lungs, but Doc Webster has a superior instrument; he overrode us both easily.
“—if Zoey hadn’t done something uncharacteristically
stupid
—”
We both shut up, shocked.
“If I hadn’t been silly enough to ignore classic early warning diagnostic clues of brain tumor—a subject I’ve
lectured
on, for Christ’s sake…”
He dropped his volume back.
“People make a hundred mistakes a day.
Every once in awhile the punishment is wildly disproportionate.
No invisible hand makes it just or fair.
Jake, a few seconds ago you referred to the circumstances of our meeting.”
“Yeah.”
Over a quarter of a century ago, now.
I’d been in a car wreck.
The brakes had failed.
Trapped in my seat, I had watched my first wife Barbara and our daughter Jessica burn to death.
Sam Webster had been the ER resident who treated me for attempted suicide that night.
His prescription—a visit to Callahan’s Place—had saved my life, and changed it forever.
“Whose fault was that crash?”
The day before the accident, I’d done my own brake job at home, using one of those Chilton auto repair books.
I’d saved almost enough money to buy my daughter a birthday present.
“How many
years
did you walk around believing the crash was your fault?”
I shrugged.
“Ten.
A hundred.
A thousand.
One of those.”