"Yes, but at that time I didn't know anything about it. This is the truth. I only learned about it years later, from hints you dropped about Einstein and my grandmother. I had to read up on quantum mechanics, and consult Ouija boards and spiritualists, all sorts of screwy research. I still don't exactly know how it works."
"But you figured out how to work it. You came back in time by means of it."
Marrity smiled smugly. "Right."
"Then we can use it to go back in time from here, and prevent the destruction of the movie."
It seemed to Marrity that Golze was acting as if the movie was the important thing, and discounting what Marrity had to offer. "What do you even need the movie for?" Marrity asked. "The machine lets you go into the past and future, all by itself."
"You sound like Rascasse," said Golze. For a moment he was silent, staring out at the water. Then, "Yes," he went on irritably, "the machine would let me go into the past and future—the past and future from wherever I am, from whatever specific little volume of cubic space the universe has permitted me to occupy. But I — we — want to be able to travel in now."
"Now?" asked Marrity in bewilderment. "You can already travel in now. Anybody can."
"I can be in one compressed, predestined point of it, not travel in it. My whole possible future is contained in a cone that expands into the future from here, this constricted now point. And my past is locked into a cone that extends backward in time from now. That's the Grail, those two cones, and Einstein's machine will let me travel in them. But all the time and space outside those cones is an extension of now, it's every place and time general relativity says I can't get to. Getting out there would be… moving sideways in the time-space hypercube; your grandmother did it, to get to Mount Shasta— she got there instantaneously.
"But — obviously I've read up on this — the bits that are outside the cones right now will be included in the widening cone of your possible past, if you just wait. And anyway, the boundaries are expanding at the speed of light, and the entire earth can't be more than one light second from end to end! What's the big deprivation, what are you afraid you'll be excluded from?"
Golze wasn't looking at him, and Marrity wondered if the fat man somehow aspired to eventually be in all places and moments at once. Would that, Marrity wondered, make him God?
If it did, he would always have been God — he would have been occupying every place in every moment since the beginning of time.
Marrity forced himself not to smile at the thought; then he remembered the twitching black head he had seen nineteen years ago, and the hateful woman little Daphne had grown up to be, and the babies he had seemed to see in the weeds two days ago; and he considered the nature of any God that could have created this world — "This dreary agitation of the dust, and all this strange mistake of mortal birth," as Omar Khayyam had written — and the impulse to smile was gone.
Golze had been looking at the water, but now looked directly at Marrity. "So where is the machine now?"
Marrity sat back, to put as much distance as possible between their faces. "That's my merchandise, telling you that. But first you've got to pay me."
"Okay." The black steel oarlocks clanked as Golze pulled on one oar and pushed on the other, and the boat rocked on the jade water as the bow began to move to the left. "What payment do you want?"
Marrity took a deep breath and let it out, glad of the breeze in his sweaty hair. "Why are we doing this in a boat?" he asked. He looked around at the grassy banks and the arching red wooden footbridge. "This is where a scene in Chinatown was filmed, right?"
Golze frowned, either at the evasion or at the question itself; and at first it seemed he wouldn't reply. Then, "Yes, Jake Gittes was in a boat here, in that movie, photographing Hollis Mulwray and Mrs. Mulwray's daughter."
Golze opened his mouth to go on, but Marrity impulsively said, "Jake didn't get the daughter away in the end, did he?"
"No," said Golze with exaggerated patience, "the horrible old man took her away. But this is a relatively good spot for this particular confidential conversation. The jangling toys, and the fact that the boat keeps turning, make it difficult for anyone on the shore with a shotgun microphone to monitor our talk."
He bent to fetch up the dog again, and he squinted at Marrity as he slowly ratcheted the spring tight. At last he put it down and scratched at the black ribbon choker around his neck. "And the lake's got associations with Charlie Chaplin. In certain ways it's a deflection, for any psychic trying to track us. What payment do you want?"
That was a short delay, Marrity thought forlornly.
"Three things," he said at last. "First, you leave Frank Marrity, the younger one, alone. No more shooting at him, no more anything at all, ever. You just forget about him and let him live to a ripe, untroubled old age."
"Okay. I don't know how we can prove we've done that until he has died of old age, but I can tell you that I don't know why we bothered to try to kill him in the first place. And I suppose if we killed him, your younger self, you might just disappear! I'm not sure of the physics on that." He tugged at one oar, and the boat jostled around to the right, swaying in the water. "What's the second thing?"
"You let me use the… time-travel procedure to return to 2006, where I can resume my life. Oh, and there's a house you've got to buy."
"A house? Okay, after we put you through a very thorough series of interviews, probably under narcohypnosis. What's the third thing?"
There was a long pause before Marrity answered, and Golze shifted the boat again.
"I could tell you in three words," Marrity said finally. "Two. And I certainly don't care what you think of me. But I want to explain what it is, anyway."
"Fine. What is it?"
"It's the way the universe originally played out, the way my real life played out. I had a life, and I want it back."
"What took it from you? "
"The damned Harmonic Convergence took it from me. An incident in this year, here in 1987, changed, even though it was in my past — imagine having something in your past change on you, so for instance you and some friends were shooting a gun when you were seventeen, and nothing went wrong, and you've grown up to happy middle age — but now suddenly you find yourself in a life in which you've been a quadriplegic since the age of seventeen because one of your friends accidentally shot you in the neck, way back then!" He mopped his face with the sleeve of his windbreaker. "And you still remember the original happy life! You'd want to go back, right? — and tell your seventeen-year-old self not to go shooting with those friends."
"How did the Harmonic Convergence do this?"
"All these zombies — blanking their minds on the mountain-tops — pressure drop — they've made a crack in the space-time continuity. Things resume on the future side of the crack, but not quite the same, a bit of quantum randomness has seeped in, like groundwater into a cracked foundation. Hell, you might soon get a visit from your future self, trying to put your life back on its original track."
"You're not a quadriplegic. What is it you want us to prevent from happening?"
"Well, it already happened. Yesterday. And I want you people to undo the change, undo the error, put my life back into its original… configuration."
"Okay. What happened yesterday that shouldn't have happened?"
For a few seconds the only sound was of some children playing around the snow-cone vendors on the north shore. Marrity stared out across the lake surface, with its patches of tiny, fine-hatched ripples among the glassy low swells.