—but Louis won't be.
He remembered what he had thought, last night in the Wigwam Motel, about Marrity's apparent intention to copy the Einstein letters so that he could sell the originals: If it were my son who was in danger, I would not be thinking first of making money from selling the Einstein letters.
Not of money, no, he thought now. But of a life that extends past the next time a telephone rings in your vicinity?
But Louis would still be born in 1976, as in this present time line, assuming the twenty-five-year-old Oren Lepidopt married Deborah Altmann in 1972, which there was no reason to believe he would not. That was the year before the Yom Kippur War, so nothing would be likely to change it; he'd see to it that nothing impinged on that story.
If that young Lepidopt and Deborah conceived Louis on a different night in 1975, this time, though — would he still be the same boy Lepidopt knew? Would he even be conceived as a boy? What was the biological mechanism that decided whether an embryo was to be a boy or a girl?
What if the Yom Kippur War goes differently, because of this mission, and the young Lepidopt is not assigned to the Mossad headquarters, but instead is sent into combat and killed before he fathers his child? But surely that was very unlikely! Lepidopt recalled that there had been no one else who would have been likely to take charge of the remote viewers.
But would they need remote viewers, this time around, if they had prevented or controlled the war because of forty-year-old Lepidopt's report from the future?
Well, I can make sure my younger self doesn't go into combat before Louis is conceived in '76… or go into any dangerous work, before then. Or step carelessly into traffic, or fail to wear seat belts? Or drive at all, maybe? Can I make the younger Lepidopt see the urgency of all this, for a son he's never seen?
Lepidopt was sweating, though it was still chilly here in the shadows of the beachfront houses.
A tanned boy in swim trunks and with white zinc oxide sunscreen on his nose scampered up to them barefoot and said, "Forgetting him, you see—" and paused, panting. He was holding a cardboard tube of Flix chocolates.
Something from Malk, Lepidopt thought. Something he thinks might be urgent, to send it by bodlim, sayan couriers. This boy looked flighty, but certainly there was an adult nearby who was watching to make sure the handoff took place.
"—means you've forgotten me," said Lepidopt, "like my forgotten man." Bozzaris had chosen their recognition signs from the lyrics of old musicals — Lepidopt hoped Bozzaris's tastes would turn out to include old musicals, again! — and this, he believed, was from Gold Diggers of 1933.
The boy held out the cardboard tube, then ran away when Lepidopt had taken it.
"Could be a bomb," said Bozzaris lightly.
"I bet it's not."
Lepidopt tore away the Scotch tape that sealed it and unfolded the piece of paper crumpled in the top; in Malk's handwriting was the message, Just came, FedEx, from home. Gross.
Lepidopt peered inside, then stared more closely — and he almost dropped it.
"Now that's disgusting," he said hoarsely.
"What is it?"
"It's — I believe it must be my finger."
Bozzaris stepped back, then laughed nervously. "Can I see?"
"No. Shoot off your own finger, you want to look at a finger." With his maimed hand he pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his face. "They — saved it! They knew, even back then—" Lepidopt peered again into the cardboard tube. "There's — a couple of holes in the tip, one through the fingernail — and crossways scratches on the nail! They had a label or something stapled to it!"
Bozzaris shrugged. "Twenty years. Tape would have dried out."
Lepidopt gingerly tucked the tube into his sweatshirt pocket next to the radios. One of the radios fell out and cracked on the sidewalk, and he kicked it out onto the parking lot pavement.
"Business card!" he said harshly. "Cab company! Suitcase!"
Bozzaris stared at him. "Hmm?"
"The time machine isn't here. She didn't do it here. This was a feint, a bluff. Lieserl carried an empty suitcase down here in that cab, or no — more likely paid some other old lady to do it. I don't need to be standing here looking at the fucking ocean."
Bozzaris's eyebrows were raised as he fell into step beside Lepidopt, hurrying toward the short street that led back to Balboa Boulevard. Lepidopt nearly never used bad language.
"She left the card on her kitchen counter, and—" Bozzaris began.
"To waste our time, or the other crowd's time — whoever might be alerted by the psychic noise of her departure — CIA, the press, the Vatican! Listen, she hid out all these years — she was as secretive as her father, she had a child too, she didn't want the thing to be found, and used. She would never have left that card on her counter if she really had come down here to do the jump! The cab company and the old woman with the suitcase, whoever she was, were a move to delay anybody looking for the machine — not stop, just delay. If it was worth the trouble to decoy us away from the search even for just a couple of hours, then a couple of hours must be important, it must make a difference. She must have set up — of course she would have set up! — some chain of events that would destroy the machine after she used it."
Lepidopt was practically running now, and Bozzaris pitched his bag of doughnuts at a trash can as they hurried past it. "So where do we look?"
"We have one clue: The machine isn't here."
Fifteen
Bennett Bradley stood up as the two men nodded to him and halted in the restaurant aisle beside his booth. One was short and pudgy and darkly bearded, and the other was tall and effeminate with a white brush cut, and they both wore dark business suits. And by the morning light shining through the windows across the room, they both looked tired.
"Mr. Bradley," said the white-haired one, bowing sketchily. "You can call me Sturm."
"Drang here," said the bearded one with a smile, blinking behind eyeglasses.
"Please sit down," Bennett said. It was barely nine in the morning, and one of these — Sturm, he thought — had called him at seven this morning. Bennett was tired too — he would have liked to sleep later, after having flown home from Shasta last night, and taken the remote-parking shuttle to the car, and then negotiated the freeways to home.
He had left the house this morning without waking Moira.
The two men sat down in the booth, bracketing Bennett.
"We spoke," said Sturm, on Bennett's right, "to your brother-in-law, Francis Marrity, on the phone this morning; and we told him that we had called you last night. We mentioned that we would have to deal with both of Lisa Marrity's heirs to finalize our sale— that is, you and your wife as well as him. He, ah, said that possession is nine-tenths of the law, and hung up. He has checked his daughter out of the hospital, and they have not returned to their house in San Bernardino."
"Hospital? What was she in the hospital for?"
"A tracheotomy. She choked on some food, apparently."
"Kid eats like a pig," said Bennett. "She'll probably need it again, they should have installed a valve."
"Just coffee, for all of us," said Drang to the waitress who had walked up with a pad. When she had nodded and moved on, he said to Bennett, "The price is fifty thousand dollars, and we would like to consummate this transaction as soon as possible. Today, ideally." The fat man's breath smelled like spearmint Tic Tacs.