Everybody watched the singer. Even Hauss did not seem to notice as the wire went in front of his face.
And then Joshua jerked the wire tight. Through the wire, through the gloves, he felt the neck give, the skin cut.
He heard a gurgle abruptly cut off.
He heard a scream.
He got away without anyone following him, before anyone except the blonde knew anything was wrong. And she probably thought that Hauss was having a heart attack. It had happened so fast that Joshua was gone before anyone could react. In a cab on the way back to his hotel, he felt relief—relief!—spreading through his soul like a warm syrup, followed, surprisingly, by jubilation. He had done it! And it hadn’t been so bad. It had been easy. Surprisingly easy.
Back in his hotel room he realized the scream he had heard had come from his own throat. It had made his own throat sore.
But not as sore as Hauss’ throat.
He had done it!
When he arrived home, Joshua was relieved to find that Kevin was down the street playing with Jeremy and that Harlow was taking a nap. Joshua was unlocking the door when Socorro came to see who was there.
“How was your little trip?” Socorro asked coldly. She did not move out of the way. She was still pissed to the gills. As she had a right to be. But there was nothing Joshua could do about it. Later tonight, maybe, he could soften her. He would certainly need her help. This was the most vile thing he had ever done. And he had done it. God, he had actually done it without trying to find another way. He should not have listened to his father. Something else would have worked. The neck giving, the skin cutting—Joshua could feel them still.
But now that it was over, now that he was safely home, the relief he felt was even greater. Relief for not getting caught, yes. But, he had to admit there was another relief also: relief at having been able to do the most vile thing. Not a trace of remorse as he’d expected. Relief! He might be able to carry on these missions. The first had to be the worst.
When he didn’t answer, Socorro asked, “Was it worth it?”
“I won’t know for about ten years,” he answered.
“Well,” she said, finally backing away from the door, “come on in.”
“I’ll never know,” he said flatly, the words coming of their own volition. That was true, wasn’t it? And just so, his relief crumbled. What was he doing? What was he becoming? He would have to try and stop. His father had been able: he’d been preventing tragedies for over fifty years, and he’d been able to stop.
But the visions would not allow him to stop. They came, unannounced, with terrible moments of suffering.
His father helped him with money when he had to go to Cologne, Germany, on his second trip, a trip to prevent Wildmar Grun from planting and detonating a series of neutron bombs in the major cities of Israel. Twenty-seven years in the future that would be—if Joshua did nothing.
Money, of course, was not the issue with Socorro. She wanted to know why, despite the fact that she already knew why. Joshua refused to give her any details. Not only for sound legal reasons did he want her to know nothing.
In Cologne, with the aid of a telephone book and a friendly, English-speaking operator, he managed to find Wildmar Grun. He was fourteen years old and had the purest blonde hair a boy could manage. The hair blew lightly in the breeze as he rode up and down the street on a skateboard in front of his house. Kevin would admire this boy’s skateboarding.
He could see Wildmar’s mother through one of the open windows of the house. She was an unremarkable looking woman—a peasant from the fifteenth century. Curtains billowed serenely. Her grief would be real enough. Joshua could imagine nothing worse than losing a child. No—he could not think thoughts like that. The boy did a trick on the skateboard, flipping it into the air as he stepped off. Joshua walked to him and dropped his map. The boy bent to help, and Joshua, according to his instructions, jabbed Wildmar in the back of the neck with a small syringe. He took the map from the boy’s hand and hurried away. He heard no screams.
The next day he left after verifying that Wildmar had died.
Again, he had done it. It had not been so difficult. Just following orders. Only in retrospect did his actions attack him.
After three more trips, Joshua had to stop, had to find a way to stop. Each of the victims had been younger than the one before: a ten-year-old in Paraguay, a girl from Canada who was Harlow’s age, and finally, Raymo Scoth from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In each case, the vision of destruction to Jews and to the world had been worse and the method of execution prescribed in a secondary vision.
Raymo Scoth had been three weeks old. Forty-five years in the future, he would set off a series of controlled explosions along a small, as yet undiscovered fault in the Mediterranean. The resulting earthquakes would shake Israel , and a large part of the Middle East and Europe into a destruction of Biblical proportions.
By this time, Joshua wondered if the destruction of Israel and all the Jews would be such a bad thing.
Raymo Scoth weighed three pounds and five ounces after having clung to life for three weeks. He had been the premature issue of a heroine addicted mother and no one knew who else.
According to the instructions of the secondary vision, Joshua managed to unplug the respirator in the nursery without drawing attention to himself. All the babies were asleep, and the attending nurse slept also, perched precariously on a padded chair by the door.
Somehow, Raymo Scoth had learned to breathe on his own. Not in the vision. The vision showed only the unplugging of the respirator, a brief struggle, then nothing.
Joshua picked up the sickly infant—feeling at the moment of contact how frail and infantlike his own father had become—felt the residual warmth from the incubator, and ran. He was gone before the nurse stirred in her chair. To get past the front desk, he jammed the soft infant into his jacket pocket—ignoring the sounds and tiny breakings as he twisted Raymo into the jacket. In the underground parking structure, he pulled Raymo from his pocket—such a little thing. Without thought, he threw him as hard as he could against the wall. Raymo hit slightly below the “e” in the “PARK HEADING IN” notice painted on the wall.
There was no blood. No blood that he could see. Only a quiet thud.
Only a quiet thud.
Thud.
Joshua ran. If Raymo was not dead, Jews would have to take care of themselves. This time it was over for Joshua. Nothing could induce him, no vision no matter how horrible could make him do this again.
And worse—this vision had been wrong in a detail! The infant had breathed on its own. The secondary vision had not shown that. Had been wrong! Factually wrong. What if it had been wrong in other respects? What if there were another way? His father had told him that there was no other way, but his father had been wrong before.
Thud.
Joshua returned to the house of his youth to speak to his father. He had not been home in over ten years. The house looked small and dark. The trees in the yard had grown, and one, a peach had died. The crack in the entryway tile had spread an inch or so.
A week had passed since his “trip” to Philadelphia. The quiet thud had only increased in volume. He heard it more frequently, wondered if he would ever be free of it. The tell-tale thud.
In the living room, his father sat in his favorite chair. This chair was a replacement for one which Joshua remembered. The chair Joshua sat in was old. He remembered dropping a lit match in it when he was eight. If he turned over the cushion, he knew, the burned spot would be there, a scorched hole the size of a walnut and shaped like the big island of Hawaii.