"Yes. Give your wife a break and stop singing in the shower."
"Why?"
"Because you can't carry a tune in a basket."
"I'll think about it. What else?"
"Russell has a malignancy in his colon."
"What? How do you know that?"
"I can smell it on his breath."
"Anything else?"
"That's all. For now."
We had a few more drinks in total silence, if you don't count the thoughts roaring through my head. This was interrupted, finally, by a tap on the door. I yelled, "Come in!" It was Giselle, back from the library.
Prot nodded to her and smiled warmly. She took his hand and kissed him on the cheek before slipping over and whispering in my ear, "It's Robert Porter. That's about all we know so far." Then she plopped down in the corner chair. I brought her a drink, which she gratefully accepted.
We chatted about inconsequential things for a while. Prot was having a fine time. After his fourth Scotch, when he was giggling at everything anyone said, I shouted, "Robert Porter! Can you hear me? We know who you are!"
Prot seemed taken aback, but he finally realized what I was doing. "I tol' you an' tol' you," he snorted unhappily. "He ain' cumin' out!"
"Ask him again!"
"I've tried. I've rilly rilly rilly tried. What else c'n I do?"
"You can stay! Giselle cried.
He turned slowly to face her. "I can't," he said sadly. "It's now or never."
"Why?"
"As I a'-ready 'splained to doctor bew-bew-doctor brewer, I am shed-shed-I am 'xpected. The window is op'n. I c'n only go back on August seventeenth. At 3:31 inna norming."
I let her go on. She couldn't do any worse than I had. "It's not so bad here, is it?" she pleaded.
Prot said nothing for a moment. I recognized the look on his face, that combination of amazement and disgust which meant he was trying to find words she could comprehend. Finally he said, "Yes, it is."
Giselle bowed her head.
I poured him another drink. It was time to play my last trump. "Prot, I want you to stay too."
"Because we need you here."
"Wha' for?"
"You think the Earth is a pretty bad place. You can help us make it better."
"How, f'r cryin' out loud?"
"Well, for example, there are a lot of people right here at the hospital you have helped tremendously. And there are many more beings- you can help if you will stay. We on Earth have a lot of problems. All of us need you."
"You c'n help y'rself if you want to. You just hafta want to, thass all there is to it."
"Robert needs you. Your friend needs you."
"He doesn't need me. He doesn't even pay 'tention to me anymore."
"That's because he's an independent being with a mind of his own. But he would want you to stay, I know he would."
"How d' you know that?"
"Ask him!"
Prot looked puzzled. And tired. He closed his eyes. His glass tipped, allowing some of his drink to spill onto the carpet. After a long minute or two his eyes opened again. He appeared to be completely sober.
"What did he say?"
"He told me I've wasted enough time here. He wants me to go away and leave him alone."
"What will happen to him when you go? Have you thought about that?"
The Cheshire-cat grin: "That's up to you."
Giselle said, "Please, prot. I want you to stay, too." There were tears in her eyes.
"I can always come back."
"When?"
"Not long. About five of your years. It will seem like no time at all."
"Five years?" I blurted out in surprise. "Why so long? I thought you'd be back much sooner than that."
Prot gave me a look of profound sadness. "Owing to the nature of time. .." he began, then: "There is a tradeoff for round trips. I would try to explain it to you, but I'm just too damn tired."
"Take me with you," Giselle pleaded.
He gave her a look of indescribable compassion. "I'm sorry. But next time..." She got up and hugged him. "Prot," I said, emptying the bottle into his and Giselle's glasses. "What if I tell you there's no such place as KPAX?"
"Now who's crazy?" he replied.
AFTER Jensen and Kowalski had taken prot back to his room, where he slept for a record five hours, Giselle told me what she had learned about Robert Porter. It wasn't much, but it explained why we hadn't been able to track him down earlier. After hundreds of hours of searching through old newspaper files, she and her friend at the library had found the obituary for Robert's father, Gerald Porter. From that she learned the name of their hometown, Guelph, Montana. Then she remembered something she had found much earlier about a murder/suicide that had taken place there in August of 1985, and she called the sheriff's office for the county in western Montana where the incident occurred. It turned out that the body of the suicide victim had never been found, but, owing to a clerical error, it had gone into the record as a drowning, rather than a missing person.
The man Robert killed had murdered his wife and daughter. Robert's mother had left town a few weeks after the tragedy to live with his sister in Alaska. The police didn't have the address. Giselle. wanted to fly out to Montana to try to determine where she had gone, as well as to obtain pictures of the wife and daughter, records and documents, etc., in case I could use them to get through to Robert. I quickly approved a travel advance and guaranteed payment of all her expenses.
"I'd like to see him before I go," she said. "He's probably sleeping."
"I just want to watch him for a few minutes."
I understood perfectly. I love to watch Karen sleep, too, her mouth open, her throat making little clicking noises. "Don't let him leave until I find her," she pleaded as she went out.
I don't remember much about the rest of the afternoon and evening, although reports have it that I fell asleep during a committee meeting. I do know that I tossed and turned all night thinking about prot and about Chip and about my father. I felt trapped somewhere in the middle of time, waiting helplessly to repeat the mistakes of the past over and over again.
GisELLE called me from Guelph the next morning. One of Robert's sisters, she reported, was indeed living in Alaska, the other in Hawaii. Sarah's family didn't have either address, but she (Giselle) was working with a friend at Northwest Airlines to try to determine Robert's mother's destination when she left Montana. In addition, she had gathered photographs and other artifacts from his school years and those of his wife-to-be, thanks to Sarah's mother and the high school principal, who had spent most of the previous night going through the files with her. "Find his mother," I told her. "If you can, get her back here. But fax all the pictures and the other stuff now."
"They should already be on, your desk."
I cancelled my interview with the Search Committee. Villers was not pleased-I was the last candidate for the directorship.
There were photos of Robert as a first-grader on up to his graduation picture, with the yearbook caption, "All great men are dead and I'm not feeling well," along with pictures of the wrestling teams and informal snapshots of soda fountains and pizza parlors. There were copies of his birth certificate, his immunization records, his grade transcripts (A's and B's), his citation for top marks in the county Latin contest, his diploma. There were also pictures of his sisters, who had graduated a few years before he had, and some information on them. And one of Sarah, a vivacious looking blonde, leading a cheer at a basketball game. Finally, there was a photograph of the family standing in front of their new house in the country, all smiles. Judging by the age of the daughter, it must have been taken not long before the tragedy occurred. Mrs. Trexler brought me some coffee as I was gazing at it, and I showed it to her. "His wife and daughter," I said. "Somebody killed them." Without warning she burst into tears and ran from the room. I remember thinking that she must be more sympathetic toward the plights of the patients than I had thought. It wasn't until much later, while paging through her personnel file at the time of her retirement, that I learned her own daughter had been raped and murdered nearly forty years earlier.