Lepidopt shrugged. "She added improvements, over the years— the movie, the footprint slab. She might have figured out others, more portable."
"So what will it look like? This maschinchen?"
"A gold-wire swastika, for one thing," Lepidopt said, "about three feet across, laid flat for her to stand on — just like what they found at her arrival site in Shasta. She would have concealed that — with luck she buried it here somewhere, and it's still buried. We need to see the wiring, and ideally the whole construction."
"There wouldn't have been any of the — two days ago, none of the virtual babies would have appeared here, right?"
"No. And apparently they only last a few seconds, so they wouldn't still be around anyway. You can quit worrying about stray babies stuck under the pier."
"Were there reports of… virtual babies, in that meadow on Mount Shasta, on Sunday?"
"No, but she didn't use the maschinchen to travel through time on Sunday — just instantaneously through space, sideways out of the cone of her possible future. Not like when she jumped in 1933. On Sunday I think she was trying to scrape something off of herself, something like a psychic barnacle — jump in a direction it couldn't follow — die clean, without it."
Bozzaris laughed, though he seemed to shudder too. "Psychic barnacle — and the friction of it has caused all the fires in the mountains." Looking out at the water, he asked, "Did Lieserl change the past, when she jumped and returned in 1933?"
Lepidopt spread his hands. "How would we know? If she did, we live in the world as she remade it. Did Einstein change the past when he jumped in 1928? Only Lieserl Marity and Einstein would know the answers to these questions."
His answer didn't seem to cheer Bozzaris. "And they're both dead," he said. "But even in '33, when she'd have returned to '33 from the past, none of the spooky babies would have appeared here — right?" He shook his head. "That's too weird, about the babies."
"No, they wouldn't have appeared here — quit fretting about them. According to Levin at the Technion in Haifa, the virtual infants appear where the physical body arrives, and even then only briefly. When you lose five-dimensional velocity after traveling in time — decelerate back into sequential time, back down to our constricted Asiyah world from moving in the bigger Yetzirah world — the excess energy is thrown off as virtual replicas of yourself, and it's more economical for the universe to throw a lot of very young replicas than a few maturer ones; just as a heated brick throws a lot of low-energy infrared waves rather than anything in the higher-frequency visible range."
Bozzaris rocked his head, clearly not comprehending the metaphysics of it. "Are they real babies, though? When it does happen? Or are they just, like, mirages?"
A blond girl on a bicycle slowed to toss a little red plastic transistor radio to Lepidopt; he caught it with his left hand. "Normal reception, and boring," she said, and accelerated away, her tanned legs flashing as she rode out of the shadow toward the beach.
"Sayanim are getting prettier all the time," noted Bozzaris.
"You are a beast." Lepidopt had not kept the plastic Sears bag the radios had come in, and after he had peered at the tuning dial to verify the frequency, he tucked the radio into the pocket of his sweatshirt.
"What are they tuned to?" asked Bozzaris.
"A hundred and eight megahertz," said Lepidopt, "the highest frequency FM goes to. I believe it's a Christian broadcasting station." He sighed. "If Lieserl did jump from here, less than forty-eight hours ago, the space-time fabric should still be kinked enough to put some wrinkles in high frequencies. The signal should interfere with itself."
He squinted around impatiently at the beach and the parking lot, then went on, "One time an infant was taken out of the reentry field, before the field collapsed. That infant lived at least seven years. So yes, they seem to be real babies."
"Am I allowed to know about this?"
"It's relevant to our business. Lieserl was with her father when he went to Zuoz, in the Swiss Alps, in 1928. She was twenty- six then, and Einstein was forty-nine. Later he told her that he had gone to Zuoz to undo a sin he had committed some years earlier — and that he had wound up committing an even greater sin. Anyway, when his mysterious machine was prepared and he stood on the mountain in Zuoz and… flickered for a moment, I suppose… he immediately collapsed, unconscious, since he had used only one astral projection of himself, which was in the valley below Piz Kesch, and so the shock of reentry was not distributed, not balanced. And Lieserl found herself not only confronted by her unconscious father, but surrounded too by… what, several? dozens? … of naked infants lying in the snow. She snatched up one of the babies and ran to the nearby house of a friend of Einstein's, Willy Meinhardt; there she got people to come help, but when they returned to the spot, only Einstein lay there. All the other infants had disappeared, though the one Lieserl had rescued was still fully present at Meinhardt's house. Before that, Einstein liked mountains — he used to go hiking in the Alps with his wife and Marie Curie. After that he couldn't stand the sight of a mountain."
A teenage boy glided past on a rumbling skateboard and called, "Goofy station but clear reception!" He tossed a green plastic radio, and Lepidopt caught it and waved.
"We know all this," he went on to Bozzaris, "from a Grete Mark-stein, who was an old girlfriend of Einstein's and who took the impossible infant and raised him — it was a boy, of course — for the next seven years. Here, you hold this radio; keep it for your own. Apparently Einstein didn't make child-support payments, so in 1935 Grete went to several colleagues of Einstein's, in Berlin and Oxford, asking them to tell Einstein that she was his daughter and the seven-year-old boy was his grandson, and that she wanted financial help; she told us that she knew Einstein would understand who she really was, and who or what the little boy was. The Oxford man, Frederick Lindermann, happened to give the woman and the boy a drink of water when they visited his office, and after they had left he saved both glasses, for fingerprinting."
Lepidopt paused to look up at half a dozen seagulls sailing in the sunlight overhead, bright white against the still dark blue sky.
"Isser Harel," he went on, "got hold of those two glasses in 1944, four years before he became head of the Shin Bet and six years before he became director general of the Mossad. Harel verified the woman's prints as Markstein's, but of course he was very intrigued by the boy's prints. The secret archive Harel built behind a false wall in his Dov Hoz Street apartment in Tel Aviv, during the days of the British Mandate, was mainly to hide the boy's water glass." He shrugged. "Not that it proved anything — it was just an old glass with a child Einstein's fingerprints on it, and there was no proof that the prints weren't put on the glass in the 1880s — but with its admittedly hearsay provenance it was evidence that Einstein had something Israel needed to know about. Harel concluded that it was time travel, that somehow the young Einstein had been brought forward to 1935; in fact it was time travel, but the boy was only a quantum by-product, not the real Einstein."
"So why are Frank Marrity's fingerprints identical to that old man's, the guy who was driving the Rambler? Is Frank Marrity a surviving duplicate of the old guy?"
Malk had found the Rambler this morning in the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital parking lot, though the old man who'd been driving it had not been seen. Shots had been fired in the hospital lobby, and Marrity and his daughter, both apparently unharmed, had fled.