"No obstruction to closing the lid, if somebody pulls in here?"
"Nothing's in the way," said Fred. "He's entirely in the bin, and I can close it quietly."
They had picked the young man up at Foothill and Euclid an hour ago. He was a student at one of the Claremont colleges, and he had stepped up into the bus with no hesitation when Fred had asked him to point out the 210 freeway on a Thomas Brothers map-book page. Now he was bound and gagged with duct tape.
Golze nodded and peered down at the glowing crisscrossing dotted lines that were San Bernardino's streets. "Where's your focus?" he asked Rascasse.
Rascasse pointed slightly west of south, toward the largely unlighted patch that was the California State University at San Bernardino campus. "Right behind the library."
Half an hour ago he had carefully laid on the grass down there a square of oiled glass with his handprints and a few of his white hairs pressed onto the slick surface of it.
Soon Rascasse would kneel down by the railing here, step out of his body, and let his astral projection partly assume the sensorium of the Rascasse focus down there behind the college library. At the same time he would still be aware of kneeling up here beside the bus — like a beam of light split by a slanted half-silvered mirror.
Rascasse would then be occupying two finitely different time shells — the minutely slower time three thousand feet below and this infinitesimally accelerated time halfway up the mountain. He would, briefly, be disattached from the confines of the four-dimensional continuum.
Golze would then cut the throat of the young man in the bus, and the fresh-spilled blood — the end-point of one of the lifelines on the freeway, the release of the young man's accumulated mass energy-would in that instant have drawn the hungry attention of one of the Aeons who existed in the five-dimensional continuum; and that creature would be aware of Rascasse, who for the distance of a second or two would be protruding out of the "flat" four-dimensional fabric like a thread pinched up out of a sheet of cloth.
And Rascasse would leap and cling to the bodiless spirit, mind to incomprehensibly alien mind, and look out at the unphysical landscape that he would then perceive surrounding him; and since space and volume didn't exist there, it would be just as accurate to call it the landscape he would be surrounding. Lifescape, fatescape.
He would be out of his body for no more than a second by his watch, but time didn't pass on the freeway — an hour out of his body, a day, a year, wouldn't give him a better comprehension of that non-space.
For that timeless moment Rascasse's perspective would be freed of things in the way — viewed from this bigger space, nothing in the normal four-dimensional continuum could be in front of anything else, or under it, or hidden inside it; and seeing a man or a car at one moment would not make it impossible for him to see them simultaneously at other moments too. Golze had said once, when he had stepped back down into sequential time, that it was nearly the perspective of God. And he had seemed both wistful and angry to have to say nearly.
The cold wind from over the top of the mountain behind Rascasse smelled of pine sap and wood smoke, and he was shivering when the radio on his belt buzzed softly. He unsnapped it and said, "Prime here."
"Quarte here," said a voice from the radio, frail and tinny under the vast night sky. "You said it might get surreal, and not to hesitate to tell you about crazy things happening. Uh, man and superman."
Rascasse switched the frequency-selector dial on the radio. "Right," he said into the microphone. "So what happened?"
"I was in the lead car," came the voice from the radio, "and after the number three car swerved in from the south, number two came up from behind and blocked him on the north. Then in my rearview I saw the Ra — the—"
"The subject car, the quarry, go ahead."
"Right. It suddenly accelerated toward me faster than… any subject car like that should be able to. And he didn't hit me, he should have, but he didn't, but I heard a huge bang, like an M-80. Uh, Caesar and Cleopatra."
Rascasse switched the frequency again, impatiently. "Go on," he said.
"Well, then he was gone. I mean, the car was just gone, not visible anywhere up or down the highway, and not in any of the lots to the sides. The scanner says the subject car is about three miles northeast of us right now. But the weird thing is, the guys in the number two and three cars got out, and it turns out each of them saw the, the subject car suddenly accelerate toward him! Like the subject car split into three cars, each shooting straight at one of us!"
"Arms and the man," said Rascasse quietly, almost absently.
On the new frequency, Rascasse went on, "Find him again, but this time wait until he's out of the car, and then ghosts."
Rascasse switched frequencies again, but after several seconds realized that the field man had not caught the cue. "Dammit," he whispered, and switched back to the previous frequency.
"—try that," said the field man, and then his signal was gone.
"Shit." Rascasse switched the dial back to its previous setting, and the man was saying, "Are you here? Was that a cue? There's no ghosts on the list."
"Never mind," snapped Rascasse, "we're here now. Hit him with a trank dart when he doesn't know you're onto him."
"Okay. What was it about ghosts?"
"It's—a Shaw play that wasn't on your list. Never mind. Just bring him to me. That's all."
" Kay. Later." And the signal was gone again. Rascasse hooked the radio back onto his belt and took a deep breath of the cold, smoke-spicy air.
"Ghosts is by Ibsen," said Golze.
"I know, I know. Shut up."
"I guess that old guy in the Rambler isn't just some relative in town for the funeral."
"Shut up, I said." Rascasse exhaled, almost whistling. "What happened there? When our fellows tried to grab him, and his car disappeared."
"It wasn't bilocation," said Golze. "Trilocation, that is — because the car went in three directions too, not just the man… assuming the man was in the car; he might have 'ported away an instant before. I would have, if I was him, if I'd had that option. But that wouldn't explain three apparent cars."
"Does it sound as if he's used the Einstein-Maric artifact?"
"That wouldn't explain the multiple cars either, or at least I can't see how it would. Maybe Charlotte shouldn't kill Marrity. He could know some things."
"A decision made is a debt unpaid," said Rascasse. "And the Mossad will have briefed him, with compulsions, on what to tell other agencies. The daughter will be more valuable to us isolated. And," he added, waving at the bus behind them, "it wants this offering from each of us — our dues — and Charlotte has been in arrears."
"Our souls."
Rascasse shrugged. "Anything that would interfere with our chosen polarity."
"Does it really count as binding payment if you're drunk when you pay it?" Golze asked. "The rest of us don't drink alcohol. Charlotte does."
"For some people, and Charlotte's one of them, drink is a valuable disassembly factor. But once it's disassembled her, she'll have to leave it behind too."
"That'll be a day. You were kind of sweet on her once, weren't you?"
"Irrelevantly."
Golze pulled a lock-back knife from his pocket and opened the blade. "She thinks she'll be allowed to go back, remake her life."
"Do you care what she imagines?"
Golze laughed fondly. "Care? No. Note." He waved the knife toward the bus. "My dues are paid up. Fred!" he added, speaking louder.
"Yo," came Fred's voice through the open bus window.
"Ask your boy if he's a Christian."