“Of course, why you have to dress like a goyisher teenager to come look for me is another matter.”
He was joking—mostly. But her eyebrow quirked, as if to say, Ah, there you are!
And then another thought hit him. “And, while I’m thrilled, light of my life, to see you, and I would be honored to have you share every detail of what’s happened with me, my rose of Sharon, my helpmate, frankly, it is a little worrying that you have thrown yourself in the path of danger. After all, we have three children. I’m sure they would be put out to lose their mother. Does Norowitz know you’re here? Do you know U.S. agents are just down the road in that house? What are you doing driving a car around in the middle of the woods in the dark of the night, Hannah?”
But she only got that look—that rebellious look—and crooked a devious smile. “Could we get back to the ‘I love you’ part?”
And then… well, what excuse could he possibly have? A rabbi, a man in his forties, and not even alone, and he was behaving like a… like a goyisher teenager himself, kissing his wife right there and not caring.
“Rabbi Handalman?” Denton’s voice, loud.
Aharon broke from his wife, cheeks heated. “A man has been away from his wife for three months, what do you expect?”
“Three months?” Hannah asked, confused.
Wyle was jumping up and down. “Hey, I wish you raptures, but could we possibly get out of the cold? I mean, I realize you’re not exactly cold at the moment, but there’s me, Jill, Nate, and an unconscious guy, and we’re all turning into Popsicles.”
“Oh!” Hannah said, as if remembering something. “My god, Aharon, we have to get you out of here! There are American agents just down the road and the Mossad is here, too.”
“Thank you, Hannah. I’m so glad you’re up on all this.”
Hannah was staying in a tiny hospice in the town of Monowice, a short distance away. By cramming into the car and spreading Farris out over the legs of the three people in the backseat they made it there in one piece. It was the off-season, and they were soon in possession of the entire upstairs of the house, consisting of three guest rooms. The hospice owner was not interested in anything but his TV, and they were able to carry Farris upstairs without being observed.
Jill was exceedingly grateful to be out of the cold. She and Nate quietly shared their amazement over such a benevolent spike of the one pulse as running into Hannah. A coincidence like that might be normal on the seventy-thirty world, but here it was more than they could have hoped for. At least, that was the way Jill figured it. Nate only smiled thoughtfully and kept his opinion to himself.
Upstairs, Hannah bustled around getting them blankets and towels and fussing over all of them with a maternal warmth. Jill liked her at once. She was efficient and outspoken, with a sharp intelligence glittering in her eyes, and she listened to Aharon’s suggestions only when it suited her to do so. Despite this, Aharon appeared to be deeply in love. It softened Jill’s opinion of him considerably.
They put Farris in the smallest bedroom and left the door cracked open so they could hear if he got up. The rest of them bundled into Hannah’s room, sitting on the floor in blankets around the heating duct and sharing a package of fruit cookies. It was the first moment of peace they’d had, and as Jill looked around at the faces she could tell that all of them were in shock to one degree or another. She was having a hard time accepting it herself—that she was really sitting on a hard wooden floor eating packaged Polish cookies. Nate groaned at the taste of sugar on his tongue, focusing his attention on the cookie as if it were the first food he’d ever tasted. But Jill was too anxious to do more than nibble. She kept staring at the marked changes on Denton’s face and Aharon’s, even Nate’s.
Aharon was the most changed. Hannah could not stop staring at him,either. The robe he wore was coarse and rank. He had lost weight and added bulky muscle. Even so, he looked drained and ill-used, as if he’d been on board a Roman galley for three months. Denton, on the other hand, was glowing with a tan, his hair bleached blonder by sunlight. There was a new strength and calm about him. Still, there was a dazed look about his eyes that made Jill think he hadn’t transitioned as easily as it appeared.
Nate, if she tried to regard him objectively, had turned from olive to a deep reddish-brown since their days at Udub, and he had lost weight to the point of skinniness. She knew she herself probably looked anorexic. She pulled a strand of her hair forward, studying it. She’d gone nearly platinum from the power of the sun on Difa-Gor-Das. Even her delicate white skin had browned.
“Aharon,” Hannah said, “there’s no way you could look so different. You said something about three months, but it’s only been a couple of weeks. What is going on?”
Aharon looked at the rest of them guiltily. “I’m afraid if I tell you, Hannah, you’ll have me locked away, it’s so crazy.”
“Maybe I’m the crazy one, but at this point I’d believe you if you told me pigs could fly.”
Aharon grunted. “Compared to this, Hannah, flying pigs are nothing. So? Should I do the honors, or is there someone here who actually knows what they’re talking about?”
Jill took up the challenge and tried to explain to Hannah, in pop science terms, about the black hole. Hannah listened intently but got a feverish half smile on her face, as if she couldn’t quite believe it—and couldn’t quite not.
“This is what happened to you, Aharon?” she asked her husband incredulously. “You went to some other world?”
“On my life, Hannah, that is what happened. I was there for months.” Aharon turned to Jill. “So tell me—why has it been only five days here?”
“You were there three months,” Nate clarified. “We were on Difa-Gor-Das for nine. Time expands along the continuum of universes. During the time we were gone, about six months passed on Earth.”
“But it’s only been five days, you said?”
Nate looked at Jill for help.
“Let’s back up for a minute and explain how we got us back. Nate and I were on a world with highly advanced technology. In fact, they were about two hundred thousand years ahead of Earth—plus or minus a couple of major upheavals.”
She and Nate exchanged a look. “We found old data on how to use the black holes, though they themselves had gone beyond needing them centuries ago. To put it as simply as possible, when something goes through a black hole it creates a very distinct energy signature. Using their technology we were able to locate the signature in the fifty-fifty universe that marked our going through the gateway. We were eventually able to isolate each of the five patterns that went through—that would be you. After that it was not difficult to trace where the patterns had gone and to get a lock on you. It’s hard to explain, but it’s amazing technology—and alarmingly straightforward to manipulate.”
“Well, not exactly straightforward,” Nate said. “It took us seven months.”
“Okay, it’s not straightforward.” Jill smiled. “But it’s possible, which is amazing enough. Picture yourselves as energy patterns woven into this enormous tapestry. We were able to just… cut you out of where you were and insert you back into Earth’s pattern.”
Denton, Aharon, and Hannah were looking at her blankly.
“I still don’t get the change in time,” Denton said.
“When you reinsert a pattern like that you have to decide when as well as where,” Nate explained. “It’s so cool! There’s this unbelievably complex energy pattern of life, and when you look at it that way—from the fifth dimension, as energy—you can actually see time.”