Smoke swirled under the windshield — the ashtray was on fire.
"Just push it closed," Marrity said, "it'll go out on its own. And don't yell through your patched throat."
At E Street he made a left turn fast enough to set the tires chirruping, and accelerated.
"I had to grab something here to brace against," said Daphne more quietly as she pushed the ashtray closed with her foot. Marrity was glad to see she had managed at some point to pull her sneakers on.
"I think the ashtray's kind of melted," she added.
"That's okay. You were smart to think of grabbing the ashtray."
"I'm sorry I looked, when you said not to."
"I'm glad you did. We've got to ditch the truck." Marrity turned right, into a tree-lined street of quiet old bungalow houses. His mouth was dry, and peripherally he could see the collar of his shirt twitching with his rapid heartbeat. "I think they've got a radio beacon on it somewhere, is how those guys found us."
"Okay," said Daphne. "Anything we need out of it?"
"Just my briefcase." Marrity braked to a stop at the curb in front of an apartment complex and trod on the parking brake. He took a deep breath and exhaled before unclamping his hands from the steering wheel and switching off the ignition. In the sudden quiet, he said, "It's got a bunch of Albert Einstein letters in it, along with my students' Mark Twain papers."
"Really!" Daphne opened her door and hopped down to the sidewalk. "That was smart of you."
Marrity opened his door and shivered at the chilly dawn air in his damp shirt. "Let's find a bus stop."
"Do you have your Versatel card?"
"Yup." He climbed down onto the asphalt and walked around the front of the truck to join her on the sidewalk. "Only about two hundred dollars in the savings, though. And about eighty in my pocket."
"All we need is enough money to get there. Then we'll have a whole lot of gold."
"I'll give you a hundred," he said, taking her hand as they began walking west along the sidewalk, "and then I think I should drop you off at Carla and Joel's. I'll pick you up again once I've been to Grammar's house. Then we—"
"No, I have to go with you."
He looked down at her earnest upturned face and shook his head. "There's people shooting at me, Daph. I can't duck them and watch out for you too, worry about you too."
"They're—" Clearly she was thinking fast. "They're after me as much as you. It was me that the cartoon thing wanted, wasn't it?"
"Yes," he admitted. He was nervously watching the traffic moving back and forth on E Street a hundred feet ahead, hoping not to see the tan Honda.
"And they'd probably find Carla and Joel's place. From your phone book, easy. Everybody we know, they'd be watching their places." She scratched her nose. "And anyway, what if that cartoon guy can tell where I am, the way they can tell where the truck is? " She gripped his hand tighter, and he could tell she had scared herself with the thought.
And it scared him too. I sure can't say that's not possible, he thought.
"And," Daphne went on with a brave show of nonchalance, "Carla and Joel put Velveeta cheese on everything."
"They could make you a Velveeta soufflé," he said, matching her tone. "Let's cross, and go down that alley."
Hand in hand they sprinted across the street, then resumed walking, south now, between backyard fences and little old wooden garages.
"They wouldn't call it a souffle," said Daphne.
"Velveeta Puddle."
"'And it's got Rice Krispies in it!'" she mimicked, pronouncing rice as rahss.
"Okay," he said, "good point. I guess you'd better come along with me at that."
Fourteen
If something's going to be on the radio," said Ernie Bozzaris, "why didn't you save a radio for us?"
"She wouldn't have done it right here, where we're standing," said Lepidopt. "And the only thing that's going to come over the radios — one or two of them, anyway, I hope — is interference fringes, alternating patches of noise and silence."
The early morning sun was already bright on the pastel nylon windbreakers of the fishermen out on the Newport Pier, but Lepidopt and Bozzaris stood in the chilly shadows of a closed Thai restaurant up on the damp, sand-gritty sidewalk. Lepidopt looked enviously at the handful of surfers bobbing in the dark blue swells out beyond the surf line — since his premonition that he would never again swim in the ocean, he didn't even dare go out on the pier. He and Bozzaris were both wearing jeans and sweatshirts and tennis shoes.
Lepidopt felt free to dispense with the earplugs out here. He couldn't even see a pay telephone anywhere.
"This is awful public," said Bozzaris. "Why would Lieserl have come here to work the machine?" They had parked across Balboa Boulevard in the ferry parking lot, and at Bozzaris's insistence they had stepped into a bakery on the walk over here, and now he fished a powdery jelly doughnut out of the paper bag he was carrying. "Is this where she did it before, in 1933?" He was blinking around uneasily. "I don't suppose you want any of these," he added, waving the doughnut bag.
"Peace, youth," said Lepidopt. "This wouldn't have been where she set it up in '33, no — but it would be a reliable place for her to have set it up two days ago, since I believe she did not mean to survive that jump. This is a place where time and space might be reliably kinked, you see." He raised an eyebrow at Bozzaris's doughnut. "No, thank you."
"Kinked," echoed Bozzaris around a mouthful that probably contained lard, from pigs.
Lepidopt nodded and waved at the nearly empty parking lot and the pier. "This — right here — was the epicenter of the 1933 earthquake. March tenth, at five fifty-four in the evening. You notice all the buildings are modern! Einstein was at Cal Tech at that moment, actually discussing seismographs, in fact. We believe he was afraid Lieserl had tried out the maschinchen, the time machine, the day before. There had been a foreshock on the ninth, which probably was Lieserl trying it out.
"But she wouldn't have been here, then," he went on. "Not her physical body, at least. I gather time travel — travel, that is, as opposed to just getting out there and looking around from the perspective of the Yetzirah world — actual time travel is most safely done with two remote astral projections of yourself, one on a mountain, one lower down, with the physical you somewhere between. Sea level is the best for the low one, in the Los Angeles area, unless you wanted to project one all the way out to Death Valley." He glanced up and down the row of seaside shops and rental houses; already, in spite of the morning chill, there were young people in scanty bathing suits riding bicycles along the sidewalk, through the patches of shadow and sunlight.
"But two days ago," he continued, "Lieserl Maric — our Lisa Marrity—wasn't concerned with her safety, I believe. She meant it to kill her. So jumping from sea level would have been fine, and she might well have set up the maschinchen right here. I don't believe it's a very complicated apparatus — she apparently carried it here in a taxi, in a suitcase, after all."
Bozzaris squinted around at the parking lot and the more distant green lawn by the foot of the pier.
"Wouldn't she have needed the movie?" Bozzaris asked. "She left that at home."
Just before dawn Malk had crept into Marrity's yard and silently sifted through the contents of his trash cans, and carried away the VCR with the remains of the tape cassette still in it. As if to make doubly sure the thing was destroyed, Marrity had apparently doused it with gasoline and set it on fire. It was just barely possible to ascertain that the remains of a videocassette were in the ruin.