"Helicopter," said Golze, staring out the port window at the San Gabriel Mountains. "So don't do anything."
"Oh." She seemed to let out her breath.
"You're the dipshit," said Marrity to Golze, belatedly.
"What did you do," said Rascasse's voice, "to make the damn thing work? How do you stop at one specific time?"
Marrity glanced at the bracket and saw that the flowers were shaking and the red blobs in the lava lamp's tapered cylinder were all clustered at the top.
"How I did it — I was improvising, but it worked — was to tape right against my skin a thing that had undergone a decisive change at the time I wanted to get to. I found one of my grandmother's old cigarette butts between the bricks of the shed floor, and used that. It wasn't precise to the minute, but it landed me in the right day, at least."
"Your grandmother?" said Daphne.
Marrity just kept staring at the flowers. He could feel sweat rolling down his chest under his shirt.
"A cigarette butt?" said the silvery voice. "Nothing more than that?"
"That was it," said Marrity hoarsely. "It sort of shivered and got hot when I had slid back in time along the gold swastika — which looks like a quadruple helix in that perspective — to the right day. And then you just sort of — stretch, flex, step out of your astral projections. You can feel the rest of your momentum go rushing on without you, into the past."
After a pause, Daphne asked Golze, "Where's my father?"
"Dead, I suppose," said Golze, still looking out the window. "Probably wrapped around a tree in the Hollywood Hills. He took off down the canyon in a car driven by a blind woman."
For a moment Marrity thought of telling her that he was her father, but the banksias were shaking their narrow petals.
"But you can still go back?" said Rascasse. "It's not one way?"
"You can go back," said Marrity, speaking to the flowers and the lamp. "The return — and both my great-grandfather and my grandmother did it — is apparently prepaid. Plain Newtonian recoil, in a lot more dimensions. If I stand on the gold swastika again, I think I'll shoot straight back to where I was in 2006. Though I'll be arriving," he added, careful to keep looking at the flowers and not at Daphne, "in a very different life."
"How much came back here with you," said Rascasse's voice. "Clothes, the air?"
Marrity was glad of the distraction of the questions. "It's apparently everything within the boundaries of the aura that goes," he said. "I thought it would be a bigger volume; a lot of stuff I was going to bring along got left behind in 2006 — my Palm Pilot, an iPod, a Blackberry."
"Sounds like a salad," said Golze.
Glancing down at Daphne peripherally, Marrity noticed that she hadn't reacted to Golze's statement about her father probably being dead — she was still glancing around at the interior of the helicopter. Already she doesn't care about her father, he thought. Just as I remember.
A shrill buzzing sounded from below Golze's seat. "Could you get that?" said Golze. "It's the cell phone."
"It's my father," said Daphne.
Marrity's shirt clung to his sweaty skin as he leaned down across Daphne to lift the telephone case. He unsnapped it and pulled out the bulky telephone, then raised his eyebrows at Golze.
"The button at the top," Golze sighed, "puts it on speaker. Then just set it down on the seat."
"Modern ones are no bigger than a bar of soap," said Marrity defensively. He pushed the button and laid the brick-size thing on the vinyl seat.
"Hello," called Daphne.
"Hello," came a woman's voice, loud enough for everyone in the cabin to hear, even over the steady whistle of the turbine engines overhead.
"Hello, Charlotte," said Golze. "You're lucky this time line is about to be canceled."
"Put my dad on," said Daphne from the floor.
"He's not here, Daphne," said Charlotte's voice from the mobile telephone on the seat, "but he should be back anytime. Now I want to talk to the grown-ups alone, can we—"
"He's standing right beside you," Daphne interrupted, "I can hear you through him. Oof! And his mouth's full of beer."
For a moment there was silence from the phone. "Who believes that?" asked Charlotte finally.
"I do," said Golze.
Marrity nodded sourly.
"I'll know it soon enough," said Rascasse's voice from the flowers. "Your signal's clear."
"Okay, dammit, yes, he's right here," Charlotte said, "and young Daphne brings me to my point. I'm holding a gun on him—"
The flowers in the wall bracket shook. "You're not," said the metallic voice. "It's in your purse. I don't see him."
"What else you got, Charlotte?" asked Golze wearily, leaning back and closing his eyes.
Rascasse's voice said, "I look for him, but see this girl instead." For once the artificial voice seemed to express an emotion-bafflement.
"Dad!" called Daphne from her cocoon on the floor plates. "Don't let them catch you!"
The young Frank Marrity's voice came out of the phone's speaker now: "I won't, Daph, and I'll come get you soon. These people aren't planning to hurt you. "After a moment he added, "It smells like peanut butter there. Don't eat or drink anything they give you, Daph."
"That's just how this helicopter smells," said Daphne.
"We bought it from the Comision Federal de Electricidad," said Golze, "in Mexico City. Maybe they use peanut butter for insulation."
Marrity's voice from the phone said, "Don't do anything in the helicopter, Daph!"
"I already told her," said Golze.
"Denis," said Charlotte's voice, "I bet you could sense the Marrity I'm with if you look at the girl there."
Old Marrity noticed that the blobs in the lava lamp were breaking up into strings.
"It's true," said Rascasse's violin voice, "I sense him there — but not enough to see him. I can hardly see this girl."
"Okay," said Charlotte, "I'm not bluffing now, here's some truth: The young Frank Marrity and that girl have a psychic link — as Denis says, their minds overlap. They'll look like an X from the freeway, not separate lines. You can't negate her, you can't isolate her time line, while he's still alive."
"This is bullshit," said old Marrity quickly, rocking on the seat as the helicopter swayed under the rotors. "I never had any, any psychic link with her, in either of my lifetimes." He wiped a hand across his mouth. "I'm not telling you another thing until my younger self's safety is… assured."
Frank Marrity found that he had leaned back against the brown tile wall of the telephone alcove. A moment ago he had been leaning in over the pay phone with his ear to the receiver Charlotte held, but now he felt as if he were wrapped in some coarse fabric and rocking supine on a hard floor, and he realized that in his shock he had mentally fled his physical situation and retreated to Daphne's.
That's no help, he told himself, and he took a deep breath of the smoky gin-scented air that was actually around him and looked out at the fountain and balconies of the Roosevelt Hotel lobby. The tables on the tile floor around the fountain were crowded even at this afternoon hour, and he made himself hear the babble of voices and clink of glasses rather than the drone of the helicopter's engines.
"If we do this my way," said Charlotte into the phone, "his safety will be assured. Denis, if you try to stop his heart, you're just as likely to kill the girl."
Marrity pushed away from the wall and stepped up beside Charlotte again. On the little wooden counter below the pay phone was the pad on which she had written Eugene Jackson's number, and now Marrity picked up the hotel pen and scribbled, MY YOUNGER SELF? and then, THE YOUNG FRANK M?