"Okay," she said flatly. She thought about her younger self, the pre-1978 Charlotte who could still see. I have done nothing but in care of thee, she thought forlornly.
"Paul," Rascasse went on to Golze, "tell the field men to bring in that old man who has been driving the green Rambler. He hasn't done anything worth watching yet, but we need to prevent the Mossad from getting hold of him too. And I think we need to take another look at the Einstein cluster on the freeway."
Charlotte was estimating how many steps it would take her to get to her coat and purse at the back of the bus, and the bottle of Wild Turkey.
"The freeway" was the Vespers term for the five-dimensional state outside of time, the region where the ghosts existed and where a person's whole lifetime could supposedly be seen as something like a long rope curling through a vacuum abyss; though sometimes they described the lifetimes as sparks arcing across a vast gap, or as standing waves ringing some inconceivable nucleus.
From any point on a person's lifeline, such as right now, the person's future was contained in an invisible cone expanding away forward in time. Like everybody, the Vespers could largely control their futures; but Charlotte knew that they hoped to work in the other direction too, so that even their pasts would be expanding cones of changeable possibilities, opening out backward.
Charlotte needed it to be true.
They were hardly the first natural philosophers to hope to do this — the Holy Grail was a picture of their ambition: a chalice made of two opposite-facing cones, one opening upward and the other opening downward.
Already they could project their astral awarenesses "onto the freeway," out into the bigger space of the fifth dimension, but they could only hang in one place out there and look around. They couldn't do anything that could by analogy be called moving. And they could do even just this much only by summoning the beings that existed in that region, and… paying them.
With the device Lieserl Maric had possessed, they believed they would be able to travel through the fifth dimension, into the past and the future — and they would probably be able to dispense with the diabolical escorts.
And they would be able to change the past, with surgical precision.
Right now the Vespers were pretty sure they knew how to "short out" a person's lifeline, how to make someone never have existed. Einstein had supposedly left a device in a tower in Palm Springs that could delete a person's lifeline from the universe, but among the Vespers it was generally believed that the device had never been used since Einstein created it in 1932.
They couldn't be certain, because in the resulting world — the world in which the shorted-out person had never existed — only the person who had performed the "erasure" would have any memory of the erased person or the world that had included him or her. And so far no one had claimed to have done it.
Charlotte had heard Golze joke about a person known as Nobo-daddy, who was evidently the mythical founder of the Vespers. According to the story, at some point the Vespers had shorted out the founder's lifeline, erasing him from the memories of everyone in the world except the one person who had done the erasure, and leaving the Vespers as an organization that nobody had founded.
"We should call it a tollway, not the freeway," said Rascasse through closed teeth. "Fred!" he called to the driver. "Pull over when you see somebody walking alone — tell him you need to know how to get to the 210 freeway. Get the person to come aboard the bus to show you on your map. Charlotte can do a scan to make sure nobody's watching, and when she says go, we'll subdue the person."
Charlotte could see her own face squarely in the center of Golze's vision; probably he was smiling at her. "People who would never get in a stranger's car will get into a bus," he said. "Everybody trusts bus drivers."
Eleven
What intrusion? yesterday my daughter watched a video, an old b&w — I was in other room — reading d'ter's mind — and the video scared her so bad that she set the VCR & her bedroom on fire. Just with her mind, no matches
wheres the video from?
my grandmother's house, labeled Pee-wees Big Adv'ture, but only first 5 min were Pee-wee — after, this b&w. Very old movie, a silent-something about a woman eating the brains out of a bald guy's head
by the ocean?
Dunno — ask her?
later — video where now?
burned up
G'mother Lisa Marrity?
yes
what did she know about Einstein?
he was her father. She had letters from him
letters where now?
stashed. I cn make copies
need them now.
tomorrow. Bank safe deposit
What d u know about Einstein & yr g'mother? & Chaplin?
Einstein, nada, she ne'r mentioned him. Said she knew Chap in 30s, went t Switzerland in 77 after he died
G'ma ever refer to electric machine she &/or Einstein made?
No
Where was yr g'mother last, in Calif?
?Airport, I guess?
Any certain reason to think so?
She took cab. Card here. Who was the woman who talked t me? — books, liquor, cig'ts?
Not sure. Don't talk to her. Meet tomorrow — here, noon? We'll compensate for time off work.
"Well," said Malk, slapping the sheet of paper onto the wooden table, "he didn't put those letters in any safe-deposit box. No bank was open yesterday, and we followed him all day today."
"We followed him yesterday," said Bozzaris. "It's Tuesday now." He was crouched on the floor at the shadowed opposite end of the little twelve-sided motel room, dialing the telephone that was mounted on the low vertical section of the white wall; above elbow height the walls slanted inward to a flat ceiling panel.
The ringer coil and clapper had been taken out of the telephone, and the two brass bells themselves had been carefully wrapped in tissue paper and stashed in separate places. Lepidopt wasn't worried about the cellular phone, which Marrity would reach if he called the number on the card Lepidopt had given him — the premonition had palpably been about telephone bells, not the electronic tone of a Motorola cellular phone.
"The letters must be at his house," said Malk. "We could go look for them right now."
"No," said Lepidopt, who was sitting on the bed. "There's a thousand places in that house to hide letters; and he's being cooperative, considering his crash recruitment. Incidentally, Bert, I want you to go through his trash cans, before dawn, and find that burned-up VCR and videocassette."
"Okay. Does he believe his daughter's in big danger, and that you can save her?"
"Partly. Mostly."
"Odd that he wouldn't give you the letters right away. Why does he want to make copies of them?"
"So he can sell the originals, I imagine," said Lepidopt. If it were my son who was in danger, he thought, I would not be thinking first of making money from selling the Einstein letters.