Three Days to Never (16 page)

“Chaplin,” Lepidopt went on, “apparently meant the movie to be a working time machine all by itself, just like he did with his later movie,
City Lights.
He had noticed that movies could evoke tangible energies out of the psyches of their audiences, and in these two movies he tried to direct those energies. He met Einstein in January of '31, and attended some
séances with him, and when Chaplin went to London later in '31 he stood up the prime minister—a dinner to be given in Chaplin's honor at the House of Commons—to run to Berlin and confer with Einstein again. It seems that Einstein didn't so much say it couldn't be done as that it would be a very bad idea.”

“Why did Chaplin want a time machine?” asked Bozzaris.

Lepidopt pursed his lips. “His first son died three days after being born, in 1919. Two weeks later Chaplin started shooting the movie
The Kid,
in which his Tramp character has adopted an orphan boy who the authorities are trying to take away from him. But apparently that…vicarious cinematic resurrection wasn't enough. Chaplin wanted to go back and—somehow—save his actual son.”

Bozzaris had used a water glass to roll a chunk of the blue Play-Doh into a sheet on the tabletop. “Ready for you here.” He looked up and frowned. “Wasn't Chaplin's body dug up again, and held for ransom?”

“Yes,” said Lepidopt, stepping away from the wall. “By two idiots who wanted money to open a garage. They were caught, and Chaplin's coffin was restored to the Vevey Cemetery, but the police never caught the woman who had coerced the two men into it, and of course she got away with the videocassette that had been in the coffin.”

Malk frowned at the sheet of Play-Doh. “If the movie and the footprint slab are improvements Lieserl added,” he said, “what's the basic engine?”

Bozzaris got up from the table, and Lepidopt sat down in his chair, across from Malk.

“It's a machine,” Lepidopt said absently, hefting the cylinders, “small enough to fit into a suitcase, apparently. Einstein referred to it as his
maschinchen,
little machine, and from his papers we gather that part of its function—God knows why—is to measure very tiny voltages. Whatever it is, I think it's in Newport Beach, or was, on Sunday. Tomorrow at dawn Ernie and I will go look for it.”

“The cab,” said Malk. “The card.”

Lepidopt smiled and nodded. “Right. I called the cab
company and pretended to be LAPD, aiming to find out which airport Lieserl went to, which airline. But the cabdriver reported taking an old woman with one suitcase to Newport Beach, not to any airport. Balboa and Twenty-first, right by the Newport Pier. It may still be there, some pieces of it anyway, these thirty-six hours later.”

“That's
this
morning,” said Bozzaris.

“Young people don't need much sleep,” said Lepidopt absently.

Now, carefully, he pressed one of the cylinders into the soft blue surface of the Play-Doh, and then he rolled it slowly away from him, maintaining the pressure. After he had rolled it across four inches, he lifted it away—imprinted on the blue surface now were five sunken bands, with fragments of raised letters visible in them. Then he lined up the other cylinder and just as carefully rolled it across the same area, and its disk edges imprinted the raised lines that had been left untouched by the first cylinder.

When he lifted the second cylinder away, the Play-Doh showed a one-by-four-inch impression with tiny raised characters on it; the top rows of figures were repeated at the bottom, for he had rolled out more than one full turn of the cylinders, to make sure he got everything. The figures were Hebrew letters.

“Do you need a magnifying glass?” asked Bozzaris.

“Yes,” said Lepidopt, though already, squinting, he had managed to make out the Hebrew characters that spelled “1967” and “Rephidim stone” and “change the past.”

The Rephidim stone again, he thought. Where Moses struck the rock to get water for the Israelites, in the Sinai desert—the original destination of the 55th Parachute Brigade, during the Six-Day War in 1967, for which we were issued the radiation-film badges that were actually amulets.

He sighed and flexed his maimed hand. “So get me a magnifying glass, would you, Ernie?” he said.

D
erek Marrity wasn't going to go near Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital—no, sir—even though he knew that's where Frank Marrity would be right now.

He needed to see Frank Marrity one more time, to tell him some things to do—and if Frank paid attention and did even some of what Derek would tell him, it should make the difference between living comfortably, on the one hand, and living in a twenty-four-foot trailer in a chain-link-bordered trailer park, on the other. But tonight would not be the night to approach him about it.

He rolled his left hand on the steering wheel to look at his watch, then with his right hand pushed the stem to light its face. Nearly 1:30 in the morning. Not a good time to be driving drunk, and with no believable driver's license, past the empty floodlit lots and the stray dogs and the dark car-repair garages of Base Line Boulevard in San Bernardino.

The conversation between Daphne and Frank Marrity would have ended at least an hour ago, and Frank Marrity
would be asleep by now in his truck in the hospital parking lot.

Derek knew vividly what had taken place at the hospital. Frank Marrity had fallen asleep over
Tristram Shandy
in a chair in Daphne's room, but he had awakened when a man peeked in at the door of the room; the man had apologized and walked away down the corridor, but by that time Daphne had been awake too.

She had been uncommunicative before she'd gone to sleep, presumably woozy from the anesthetic; but now she had seemed alert, and not happy to see her father in the room.

There was a pad on the desklike table by her bed, Derek knew, and Daphne had written on it,
u cut my throat
in letters that tore the sheet of paper in a couple of places.

Frank Marrity, poor doomed soul, had said something like, “I had to, you were choking.”
coughing,
she wrote. “Daphne,” Marrity had protested, “no, you weren't coughing, you were
choking.
You would have died. I love you, I saved your life.” She'd had to tear off the torn sheet of paper to write more, and then she had written:
I was OK—u cut my throat—dont want to be alone w u.
And of course after he had protested again that he had done it to save her, that he loved her, she had written
I hate you.

At that point, Derek knew, Frank Marrity had stumbled blindly out to his truck and eventually gone to sleep on the seat, with some serious drinking indicated in the near future.

Probably one gang or the other had put microphones in the hospital room, and taped Marrity's half of the conversation. Derek Marrity didn't need to hear a recording of it.

One pair of taillights shone on the dark highway a hundred yards ahead of him, and in his rearview mirror two swaying headlights were coming up fast. It didn't look like a police car—probably a drunk. Good, thought Derek as he steered into the slower right-hand lane, any cops who are out here tonight will go after him, and ignore this sedate old Rambler. If it
is
old. I forget.

Then a new white Honda came up fast from a dark street on the right and rocked into a squealing right turn directly in
front of Derek; he wrenched the wheel to the left, but suddenly the car that had been a hundred yards ahead was braking hard, and looming up fast in front of him in the left lane; and the car speeding up from behind swung wide to the left, as if to pass Derek, but instead of shooting on past in the empty oncoming lanes, its hood dipped as it abruptly slowed.

Derek stamped on the brake and the tires screeched as he braced himself against the wheel. The old Rambler rocked to a halt, shaking on its suspension. His vodka bottle tumbled out from under the seat and rapped his left heel.

His face was cold with sudden sweat. They've got me bracketed, he thought tensely—I could shift to reverse, but I know I wouldn't get away in this old wreck. I can talk to them, I can make a deal with them—they won't be rough, they've got no reason to be rough with an old man—

The Rambler was still shaking, in fact it was shaking so rapidly that the motion was a harsh vibration now, accompanied by a loud rattling hiss like a rain of fine gravel on the roof and the hood and even in the ashtray, though the windshield showed empty black night; only because it moved so fast did he notice the needle on the temperature gauge swing to the right.

And somehow he was getting an electric shock from the plastic steering wheel.

Derek's heart was racing, and he kept his foot pressed on the brake as he would cling to a tree trunk in a hurricane.

Then the shaking and the noise and the electric current were gone, and he almost fell forward against the wheel as if they'd been a pressure he'd been leaning against.

The Rambler was stopped, though the engine was still running. He made himself uncramp his hands from the wheel and focus his eyes out through the windshield, and he saw that his car was positioned diagonally across the center divider lines in the middle of the highway.

No other cars were visible at all, up or down the wide light-pooled lanes; no lighted signs, just an anonymous band of blue neon far away in the dark. The night was perfectly silent except for the grumble of the Rambler's idling engine.
Shakily he reached for the key to turn it off, then noticed that the temperature-gauge needle was back down in its usual ten o'clock position.

Did I pass out? he wondered, his forehead still chilly with sweat. And did the guys in those other cars just
leave
?

Derek started the engine and cautiously lifted his foot from the brake and stepped on the gas pedal, and the car jumped forward. For a moment he thought the stress must have knocked a valve or lifter back into its proper position, and that the car was running uncharacteristically well; then he realized that it was his right leg that was performing smoothly.

His heart was still hammering in his chest, and he tried to take deep breaths. When he had straightened the car in the left lane and got it moving steadily at thirty miles per hour, he reached down and pressed his fist against his right thigh.

It didn't hurt at all.

He steered the Rambler across the right lane to the curb in front of a lightless cinder-block thrift store, clanked the shift lever into park, and cautiously climbed out of the car, leaving the engine running.

In the chilly night air he took two steps out into the street, then two steps back. Then he stood on his right foot and hopped around in a circle.

His teeth were cold, for his mouth was open; he realized that he was grinning like a fool.

He did three deep-knee bends, then crouched and crossed his arms and tried to kick like a dancing Russian. He tumbled over onto his back on the cold asphalt, but he was laughing and bicycling both legs in the air.

At last he rolled lithely to his feet and slid back into the driver's seat.

“I'm as giddy as a drunken man,” he panted, quoting Ebeneezer Scrooge.

He took a deep breath and let it out, staring at the dark low buildings and roadside pepper trees that dwindled with perspective in the big volume of night air in front of him.

But in fact he wasn't drunk. This was sobriety—not the shaky, anxious sobriety of a few hours or days, but the easy clarity of months without the stuff.

She must have died after all, he thought. I can go to the hospital now. And—and I no longer have any reason to hate hospitals! And there are lots and lots of things I've got to tell Frank Marrity—he's going to be a very wealthy, healthy, contented man.

N
orth of the San Bernardino city limits, Waterman Avenue becomes Rim of the World Highway as it curls steeply up into the mountains around Lake Arrowhead. The turns are sharp and the drops below the guardrails are often precipitous; the steep mountain shoulders are furred with towering pine trees, but at 3:00 a.m. the only view was of the lights of San Bernardino, far below to the south, dimmed and reddened now by veils of smoke. Forest fires on the other side of the mountain lit the fumey sky like a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Hell. Aurora Infernalis, thought Denis Rascasse.

The bus was pulled off the highway at Panorama Point, a wide sand-paved rest area, and Rascasse and Golze stood in the smoky darkness outside the bus, a yard back from the knee-high rail. The abyss below the stout railing was called Devil's Canyon, East Fork.

Golze glanced back toward the bus. “How's our boy, Fred?” he called.

From one of the opened windows in the dark bus came the driver's voice: “Breathing, through his nose.”

“No obstruction to closing the lid, if somebody pulls in here?”

“Nothing's in the way,” said Fred. “He's entirely in the bin, and I can close it quietly.”

They had picked the young man up at Foothill and Euclid an hour ago. He was a student at one of the Claremont colleges, and he had stepped up into the bus with no hesitation when Fred had asked him to point out the 210 freeway on a
Thomas Brothers map-book page. Now he was bound and gagged with duct tape.

Golze nodded and peered down at the glowing crisscrossing dotted lines that were San Bernardino's streets. “Where's your focus?” he asked Rascasse.

Rascasse pointed slightly west of south, toward the largely unlighted patch that was the California State University at San Bernardino campus. “Right behind the library.”

Half an hour ago he had carefully laid on the grass down there a square of oiled glass with his handprints and a few of his white hairs pressed onto the slick surface of it.

Soon Rascasse would kneel down by the railing here, step out of his body, and let his astral projection partly assume the sensorium of the Rascasse focus down there behind the college library. At the same time he would still be aware of kneeling up here beside the bus—like a beam of light split by a slanted half-silvered mirror.

Rascasse would then be occupying two finitely different time shells—the minutely slower time three thousand feet below and this infinitesimally accelerated time halfway up the mountain. He would, briefly, be disattached from the confines of the four-dimensional continuum.

Golze would then cut the throat of the young man in the bus, and the fresh-spilled blood—the end-point of one of the lifelines on the freeway, the release of the young man's accumulated mass energy—would in that instant have drawn the hungry attention of one of the Aeons who existed in the five-dimensional continuum; and that creature would be aware of Rascasse, who for the distance of a second or two would be protruding out of the “flat” four-dimensional fabric like a thread pinched up out of a sheet of cloth.

And Rascasse would leap and cling to the bodiless spirit, mind to incomprehensibly alien mind, and look out at the unphysical landscape that he would then perceive surrounding him; and since space and volume didn't exist there, it would be just as accurate to call it the landscape he would be surrounding. Lifescape, fatescape.

He would be out of his body for no more than a second by
his watch, but time didn't pass on the freeway—an hour out of his body, a day, a year, wouldn't give him a better comprehension of that non-space.

For that timeless moment Rascasse's perspective would be freed of things in the way—viewed from this bigger space, nothing in the normal four-dimensional continuum could be in front of anything else, or under it, or hidden inside it; and seeing a man or a car at one moment would not make it impossible for him to see them simultaneously at other moments too. Golze had said once, when he had stepped back down into sequential time, that it was nearly the perspective of God. And he had seemed both wistful and angry to have to say
nearly.

T
he cold wind from over the top of the mountain behind Rascasse smelled of pine sap and wood smoke, and he was shivering when the radio on his belt buzzed softly. He unsnapped it and said, “Prime here.”

“Quarte here,” said a voice from the radio, frail and tinny under the vast night sky. “You said it might get surreal, and not to hesitate to tell you about crazy things happening. Uh, man and superman.”

Rascasse switched the frequency-selector dial on the radio. “Right,” he said into the microphone. “So what happened?”

“I was in the lead car,” came the voice from the radio, “and after the number three car swerved in from the south, number two came up from behind and blocked him on the north. Then in my rearview I saw the Ra—the—”

“The subject car, the quarry, go ahead.”

“Right. It suddenly accelerated toward me faster than…any subject car like that should be able to. And he didn't hit me, he should have, but he didn't, but I heard a huge bang, like an M-80. Uh, Caesar and Cleopatra.”

Rascasse switched the frequency again, impatiently. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, then he was gone. I mean, the car was just gone,
not visible anywhere up or down the highway, and not in any of the lots to the sides. The scanner says the subject car is about three miles northeast of us right now. But the weird thing is, the guys in the number two and three cars got out, and it turns out each of them saw the, the subject car suddenly accelerate toward
him
! Like the subject car split into three cars, each shooting straight at one of us!”

“Arms and the man,” said Rascasse quietly, almost absently.

On the new frequency, Rascasse went on, “Find him again, but this time wait until he's out of the car, and then ghosts.”

Rascasse switched frequencies again, but after several seconds realized that the field man had not caught the cue. “Dammit,” he whispered, and switched back to the previous frequency.

“—try that,” said the field man, and then his signal was gone.

“Shit.” Rascasse switched the dial back to its previous setting, and the man was saying, “Are you here? Was that a cue? There's no ghosts on the list.”

“Never mind,” snapped Rascasse, “we're here now. Hit him with a trank dart when he doesn't know you're on to him.”