"Obviously Chaplin didn't burn every copy," said Malk.
"True. This was certainly his own copy, secretly kept in spite of Einstein's advice."
Bozzaris blinked at him. "Einstein said burn 'em all?"
"Right," said Lepidopt. "This one was buried with Chaplin, but Lieserl got it anyhow. You remember Marrity said she went to Switzerland after Chaplin died. I'm sure it's gone for good now, though— Chaplin would have destroyed the original film reels when he'd got it transferred onto VHS tape."
"Dangerous thing to leave lying around, apparently," said Malk.
"Very."
Malk spread his hands. "So what's it… good for? What was it good for?"
Lepidopt stared from fortyish Malk to late-twenties Bozzaris. Twentieth-century men, he thought; Jews, at least, so they know about more centuries and perspectives and philosophies than just the local ones they were born into, but still men who grew up swimming in the complacent default assumptions of the twentieth century.
"You're Halomot," he reminded them. "Call to mind your training, call to mind some of the things you've seen."
Bozzaris grinned. "We expect it to be weird."
Lepidopt nodded, frowning. "Chaplin meant it to be a device that would let a person travel in space-time. It's not, quite, just by itself, but it apparently turns out to be — to have been — a useful component of such a device. Like a catapult to help get jets up to speed coming off an aircraft carrier. The movie by itself would get you up to speed but wouldn't provide an airplane. It—"
"Is that like a time machine?" interrupted Bozzaris.
"The complete device that Lieserl had would be more than that. But yes, it would be a time machine too."
There was no expression on Bozzaris's face. "You mean like so a person could go into the future or the past."
"Yes," said Lepidopt levelly, "and change things. In 1928 Einstein built the prototype, which could only travel up and down, to points in the operator's future and past, not sideways to points outside of his future and past. And it was primitive — apparently Einstein almost killed himself when he used it in 1928 — but over the years Lieserl added expansions and improvements, some of which were apparently provided by the movie. The Chinese Theater slab was probably a supplemental component of it too."
Malk nodded and waved his hand for Lepidopt to continue.
"Chaplin," Lepidopt went on, "apparently meant the movie to be a working time machine all by itself, just like he did with his later movie, City Lights. He had noticed that movies could evoke tangible energies out of the psyches of their audiences, and in these two movies he tried to direct those energies. He met Einstein in January of '31, and attended some seances with him, and when Chaplin went to London later in '31 he stood up the prime minister — a dinner to be given in Chaplin's honor at the House of Commons — to run to Berlin and confer with Einstein again. It seems that Einstein didn't so much say it couldn't be done as that it would be a very bad idea."
"Why did Chaplin want a time machine?" asked Bozzaris.
Lepidopt pursed his lips. "His first son died three days after being born, in 1919. Two weeks later Chaplin started shooting the movie The Kid, in which his Tramp character has adopted an orphan boy who the authorities are trying to take away from him. But apparently that… vicarious cinematic resurrection wasn't enough. Chaplin wanted to go back and — somehow — save his actual son."
Bozzaris had used a water glass to roll a chunk of the blue Play-Doh into a sheet on the tabletop. "Ready for you here." He looked up and frowned. 'Wasn't Chaplin's body dug up again, and held for ransom?"
"Yes," said Lepidopt, stepping away from the wall. "By two idiots who wanted money to open a garage. They were caught, and Chaplin's coffin was restored to the Vevey Cemetery, but the police never caught the woman who had coerced the two men into it, and of course she got away with the videocassette that had been in the coffin."
Malk frowned at the sheet of Play-Doh. "If the movie and the footprint slab are improvements Lieserl added," he said, "what's the basic engine?"
Bozzaris got up from the table, and Lepidopt sat down in his chair, across from Malk.
"It's a machine," Lepidopt said absently, hefting the cylinders, "small enough to fit into a suitcase, apparently. Einstein referred to it as his maschinchen, little machine, and from his papers we gather that part of its function — God knows why — is to measure very tiny voltages. Whatever it is, I think it's in Newport Beach, or was, on Sunday. Tomorrow at dawn Ernie and I will go look for it."
"The cab," said Malk. "The card."
Lepidopt smiled and nodded. "Right. I called the cab company and pretended to be LAPD, aiming to find out which airport Lieserl went to, which airline. But the cabdriver reported taking an old woman with one suitcase to Newport Beach, not to any airport. Balboa and Twenty-first, right by the Newport Pier. It may still be there, some pieces of it anyway, these thirty-six hours later."
"That's this morning," said Bozzaris.
"Young people don't need much sleep," said Lepidopt absently.
Now, carefully, he pressed one of the cylinders into the soft blue surface of the Play-Doh, and then he rolled it slowly away from him, maintaining the pressure. After he had rolled it across four inches, he lifted it away — imprinted on the blue surface now were five sunken bands, with fragments of raised letters visible in them. Then he lined up the other cylinder and just as carefully rolled it across the same area, and its disk edges imprinted the raised lines that had been left untouched by the first cylinder.
When he lifted the second cylinder away, the Play-Doh showed a one-by-four-inch impression with tiny raised characters on it; the top rows of figures were repeated at the bottom, for he had rolled out more than one full turn of the cylinders, to make sure he got everything. The figures were Hebrew letters.
"Do you need a magnifying glass?" asked Bozzaris.
"Yes," said Lepidopt, though already, squinting, he had managed to make out the Hebrew characters that spelled "1967" and "Rephidim stone" and "change the past."
The Rephidim stone again, he thought. Where Moses struck the rock to get water for the Israelites, in the Sinai desert — the original destination of the 55th Parachute Brigade, during the Six-Day War in 1967, for which we were issued the radiation-film badges that were actually amulets.
He sighed and flexed his maimed hand. "So get me a magnifying glass, would you, Ernie?" he said.
ACT TWO: Ye Shall Not Surely Die
And he walked in all the sins of his father, which he had done before him…
— 1 KINGS 1 5:3
Twelve
Derek Marrity wasn't going to go near Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital — no, sir — even though he knew that's where Frank Marrity would be right now.
He needed to see Frank Marrity one more time, to tell him some things to do — and if Frank paid attention and did even some of what Derek would tell him, it should make the difference between living comfortably, on the one hand, and living in a twenty-four-foot trailer in a chain-link-bordered trailer park, on the other. But tonight would not be the night to approach him about it.
He rolled his left hand on the steering wheel to look at his watch, then with his right hand pushed the stem to light its face. Nearly 1:30 in the morning. Not a good time to be driving drunk, and with no believable driver's license, past the empty floodlit lots and the stray dogs and the dark car-repair garages of Base Line Boulevard in San Bernardino.