"That's possible," Lepidopt told Bozzaris, "if the old man at some point time-jumped to 1952; though Marrity has a valid-looking birth certificate from a hospital in Buffalo, New York. One of these virtual babies wouldn't legitimately have a birth certificate."
Lepidopt stared hard at Bozzaris. "It's more likely," Lepidopt went on carefully, "that the old guy is Frank Marrity, having jumped back to here, to 1987, from the future."
Bozzaris blinked. "Wow."
"That's probably what killed Sam Glatzer," Lepidopt added. "When the old Frank Marrity drove the Rambler into his younger self's driveway on Sunday afternoon, Sam found himself seeing the same guy in two places. Remote viewers are out on a wire when they work, precarious, and that might have been a badly disorienting shock."
A young policeman in blue shorts and T-shirt rode up to them on a bicycle and braked to a halt in front of Lepidopt. "No interference anywhere within a hundred yards of the pier," the man said. "I dropped the radio."
Lepidopt waved magnanimously. "No problem. Thank you." After the policeman had nodded and pedaled away, Lepidopt shrugged at Bozzaris.
"We should just grab the old guy," Bozzaris said, "the older version of Marrity, and find out everything he knows about the future! He looks sixty—he must be from about 2012!"
Lepidopt shuffled north along the damp, gritty sidewalk, staring down at his sneakers. Bozzaris stepped after him.
"We'll grab him all right," said Lepidopt quietly. "If necessary we'll kill him to keep the other crowd from getting what he knows. But the future as he's experienced it won't necessarily be relevant, if I carry out the orders that were on the Play-Doh last night."
"Oh, yeah." Bozaris frowned. "And not just the future — nearly my whole life, if you go back and change something that happened in '67. I was born in '61."
"It's unlikely to alter your life story at all," Lepidopt muttered, aware even as he spoke that what he said was a lie.
What if the changes he provoked should alter or somehow prevent the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel by surprise on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when most of the country's reserves were in the synagogues or praying at home? And how could any deliberate change not be aimed to affect that?
Lepidopt had been at the Mossad headquarters in the Hadar Dafna building on King Saul Boulevard in Tel Aviv during that two-week war, overseeing the Mossad remote viewers nearly twenty-four hours a day as they desperately tried to track the Egyptian tank divisions in the Sinai desert. Israel had managed to defeat the Syrian and Egyptian armies — and some opportunistic Iraqi and Jordanian forces too — but in the first week of the war, things had looked very bad indeed for Israel. Many, many lives had been lost. Changing the course of that disastrous war would inevitably change Bozzaris's life, in any number of ways. For all Lepidopt knew, Bozzaris's father was killed in the Yom Kippur War; plenty of men were, in the Sinai, on the Golan Heights, in the skies and at sea. Or maybe he wasn't, but would be killed in a new reality's version of the war.
At least Bozzaris had already been born by 1967. Lepidopt's son, Louis, had not been born until 1976.
He remembered the amulet that had been exposed onto the strip of film in the radiation-exposure badge he'd been given in 1967. Your life story be sacrosanct, and all who are in your train. Unchanged, unedited. He wished it hadn't been taken away from him, and that he had given it to young Louis.
"Which is bullshit," said Bozzaris, smiling as he dug in the bag for another doughnut. "At least — at the very least — you and I will never have had this conversation. I'll never have eaten this doughnut." He took a quick bite, as if the universe might even now try to prevent it.
Lepidopt thought about the orders the three of them had read in the damp Play-Doh last night at the Wigwam Moteclass="underline"
Use Einstein's maschinchen to return to 1967 by way of your lost finger. Tell Harel, 'Change the past' — he has been ready for that recognition sign since 1944. Give him a full, repeat full, report. Get to the Rephidim stone and copy out inscription on it (which as things now stand is obliterated in 1970 by Israeli scholar who kills himself immediately afterward). Deliver inscription to Harel, with your full story. You will be returned to Los Angeles in resulting 1987, if desired.
After they'd all read it, Lepidopt had rolled the blue Play-Doh into a ball, and then had filed off all the incised figures on the steel cylinders that had pressed the message into the Play-Doh. And Bozzaris had thrown the defaced cylinders off the end of the pier an hour ago.
I wonder, Lepidopt thought, what the inscription on the Rephidim stone was… or what I'll discover it to be, if I can get back to 1967. I wonder if I'll sympathize with the man who killed himself to make sure it was lost.
He remembered the passage in the second -century Zohar:
… but when Israel will return from exile, all the supernal grades are destined to rest harmoniously upon this one. Then men will obtain a knowledge of the precious supernal wisdom of which hitherto they knew not.
"True," Lepidopt sighed, "it's bullshit."
Bozzaris grinned. "How do you figure you'll go back in time?"
"I have no idea. Ideally the elder Frank Marrity will tell me how. If not, maybe the Einstein letters will explain it; maybe we'll summon ghosts, and ask them; maybe the thirty-five-year-old Frank Marrity knows, and will tell me."
"Not if the sunglasses girl gets near him again."
"I suppose the likeliest outcome is that I won't figure out how to do it at all."
That would be very good, he thought; we did manage to decisively win the Yom Kippur War, after all, and Syria and Egypt had been hugely relieved, as usual, when the UN had finally imposed a cease-fire.
But I must go back if I can, and try to save as many as possible of the Israeli men and women who died in that war.
"How would it be 'by way of your lost finger'?"
"I can't imagine. I suppose my aura still has ten fingers, one of which now contains no actual physical finger. An astral projection would still have ten fingers."
By way of your lost finger.
An enormous thought welled up in Lepidopt's head: What if all my "never agains" — never again touch a cat, never again hear the name John Wayne, never again hear a telephone ring — apply only in this time line? If I go back to 1967 and simply prevent the twenty-year-old Lepidopt from touching the Western Wall, then I won't get that first premonition! And maybe — surely! — in that time line I won't then get any of them!
He seized on the thought. Of course that's been the explanation for them all along, he thought eagerly — they've simply been oracular clues that this is not the time line that's to prevail. This isn't the destined course of my life.
Everything, including that first premonition at the Wall, has been provisional, subject to an eventual revision. When I return here to 1987, having saved the Rephidim inscription in 1967 and given Harel my full report, I'll find myself in the real time line, free of those too close boundaries to my life.
He thought of the uprooted Jewish tombstones he had seen bridging ditches in Jerusalem. Perhaps the tombstone he'd been picturing lately — the one with Lepidopt incised on it, with 1987 as its second date — could be uprooted too.
He looked coolly at Bozzaris. You'll be all right, he thought. You'll be safely born by the time I switch the tracks ahead of history's locomotive—