She was sinking toward the bricks, brown dirt, crumbled foundations. The Machine … still so far away. The memory of that frightening, dopey, wonderful day seemed far away too, as good as lost.
Oh, sweet love, I wanted so much to see Idaho again, to start the new season of our lives. I couldn’t wait.
She remembered driving the BMW, seeing Las Vegas for the last time—and then …
A disturbance, a ripple in space, made her look down. Two men were running amid the rubble, looking up at her.
Faces she would never forget.
The Machine hummed so loudly it turned Moss’s and DuFresne’s heads. The whole room resonated, quivered with the tone. The monitor went crazy with colors, waves, graphs. The deflection figures shot to a new high.
Dane got across the street just as the dark guy, Lemuel, reached for his gun. Dane hollered—gasped, mostly—“Stop! Don’t you … do that!”
Clarence rolled his eyes, plainly fed up as he positioned himself to block anything Dane might try.
Oh, great.
Lemuel had his gun in hand and was aiming.
Dane kept running. What else could he do?
She saw Lemuel aim at her, then a puff of smoke. A dove fell through the rigging and spiraled behind her. She felt it struggle, die, and slip from her hold.
No!Every muscle tensed, her hands trembled. Her eyes darted everywhere, but of course she was wide open with nothing she could do, no place she could hide.
The doves shuddered, out of sync.
Don’t lose the doves!She reached, held, tried to keep the fear at bay. God, help me!
She remembered.
The gravel against her face as they held her down. The stab of the needle. The tire iron in her hand.
Animal terror.
Moss’s hands were poised above the keyboard, but everything was happening so fast. “Convergence,” he said.
“What?” DuFresne asked.
Was the guy deaf? “ Convergence!Her timeline, the Machine’s timeline!”
“Stone! Mortimer! Shoot her!”
Dane had to get to Lemuel before he could line up another shot.
Clarence held his hand up. “Now, take it easy, old man! There’s nothing you can do.”
Well, nothing that would actually work. Head down, Dane charged into Clarence, who easily sidestepped and threw him aside.
Dane!Dane was down there! She saw him go tumbling and another puff of smoke from Lemuel’s gun. She was with the dove, guiding it, when the bullet took off its wing, she felt its agony, and lost hold. It fell past her in death, spinning toward the ground.
Dane got up again, went for Lemuel, trying to stop him, trying to save her …
The white paddock fence became so vivid she could touch it. In clear, crystalizing memory she half climbed, half leaped over it. The pasture grass whipped against her legs as she ran for the ranch house, for home, for him,reaching, reaching …
Lemuel caved in Dane’s guts with his elbow and Dane fell backward, losing awareness, his vision darkening.
Moss was pounding keys, trying to cancel the timeline and normalize deflection. The Machine pushed back, canceling his commands, directing energy toward the timeline, increasing deflection.
He was arm-wrestling with the girl!
Clarence was cocky enough to turn his back. Dane landed a kick that bent Clarence’s knee and made him buckle, if just for an instant. In that instant he went for Lemuel again.
Lemuel pointed the gun at him.
In mind, spirit, memory, Mandy was running forever and ever … longing, reaching, looking up through drug-darkening eyes at a man and a woman in the window of that beautiful house … together … where she wanted to be … where she belonged …
As she fell into the grass …
As she fell toward the broken bricks and concrete …
She reached so hard a shudder went through the birds …
Through Dane.
Through the Machine.
And Dane was somewhere else.No Lemuel, no vacant lot, no noise, no pain … no body? He rode on waves of colors, fell into shadowy crevasses, passed through brightness, darkness, sounds from his memory he heard all at once, far away. He was floating, suspended … in between… .
A warning flashed on the monitor, catching Moss’s eye. Mandy’s collective mass now exceeded that of the Machine by 185 pounds.
“Yes!”Moss exclaimed, getting everyone’s attention. He answered the question in their eyes. “She’s yanked Collins into her collective mass, trying to save him. She’s ruined the gravitational equivalency!”
“Meaning?” DuFresne demanded.
“Meaning no timeline trade today, folks! She’s just killed herself and her husband.” Moss leaned back, relieved. “Too bad Parmenter didn’t see that one coming—”
But then, at that instant, the Machine’s clock indicated 14:24:09, and Moss and everyone else saw the adjustment the Machine made—by prior programming.
Jerome Parmenter was no longer lying on the bed in the next room. With a flash he appeared in the Machine, sitting on the bench holding a box, and he was looking out through the glass with a strange, gotcha kind of smile.
The monitor proclaimed it: gravitational equivalence had been restored. The masses were balanced.
Lemuel spun, looked, pointed the gun in all directions as if he still had an enemy, but he didn’t. He looked up. Engulfed in an eerie, tea-stained atmosphere, Mandy and her doves hovered, wavering as if seen through heat waves, their sound slowed and muffled, the motion of the wings hardly discernible.
The Machine, with Parmenter inside, was distorting like rubber, bending, twisting, warping. The deep HUMMMM was shaking the floor.
Moss leaped from the console. “Run! Get out! Get out!”
Mr. Stone and Mr. Mortimer just stood there. They’d never seen anything like it.
There was little about the collision Mandy could have remembered. She didn’t see the other car plowing through the intersection against the light. Her head hit the airbag before she had any awareness of an impact.
But she did remember entering the intersection.
The last thing the Machine’s monitor indicated was a unity of timelines.
And then the room filled with flames, flashing and flying about the room like spirits, converging in spirals on the Machine, enveloping the platform, the bench, the glass, the cables—as Parmenter sat inside and watched.
DuFresne made it out first. Moss and Carlson were blocked by the other men crowding the door. Carlson was in the doorway and Moss was only a few feet inside the room when the shock wave hit.
In the hospital lobby, the floor heaved and then dropped under Arnie’s feet, depositing him across a couch and in the lap of a gentleman fortunate enough not to be standing. Everyone else ended up on the floor. The magazines hopped off the coffee table, the phones and monitors flew off the reception desk, plants fell over, pictures came off the walls, and people screamed, covering their heads, covering each other, crawling for cover. The place was in chaos.
The television fell on its side but the picture still worked. Arnie stared at the screen, aghast. It was like seeing the space shuttle Challengerblow up all over again.
* * *
The crowds at the Orpheus were on their feet, their mood gone from awe and jubilation to wide-eyed, drop-jawed shock. First there was that wondrous sight, the magic flying carpet made entirely of white doves, and then … a flash, a fireball, and a sonic boom that shook the ground, rattled and echoed through the hotels, and hit the crowd hard enough to knock some of them over.
Even if Mr. Stone and Mr. Mortimer survived the blast that flattened them into the ground, they did not rise to flee before a shower of flaming metal, shards of glass, blazing lumps of plastic, and smoldering circuitry came down on them like a shower of meteors, burning, melting, blackening the ground, and spewing smoke.