"You'll be getting a brand-new head soon," Canino told him.
Marrity had choked and sprayed whisky across the carpet and the tan wall, and now, on his feet and coughing, he burst out, "Christ, that thing's after her again, the triffid or whatever it is! You've got to—"
"There's nothing we can — do from here," said Mishal solemnly. "She knows not to admit him."
Marrity closed his eyes and thought, Don't let him in, don't say anything. Don't let him trick you.
He was sweating, and he realized that a big part of his gnawing anxiety was the knowledge that his own older self was out there in Palm Springs, participating in this or at least not stopping it. Daphne's own father was letting this go on.
"Charlotte," he said, "you called them before — call them again. I need to talk to the, the old guy who's me." He focused his gaze on Mishal and made himself speak clearly. "Let her call them again."
Mishal just raised his eyebrows and stared at him owlishly.
"If that triffid thing gets her," Marrity went on, "she'll be linked to it, as well as to me." Or even instead of me, he thought with a shudder. "They don't want that. If I tell them—"
"But they're not going to negate Daphne," said Charlotte, "they agreed to negate me instead—"
"They'll still negate the girl, if they possibly can," pronounced Mishal. "It was the girl who wrecked the movie component of Lieserl's completed machine." He raised a finger at Marrity. "It's a dybbuk, not a tribb — not a triffid. And we need to be about summoning our ghosts."
"It might actually help," said Malk. When the others looked at him, he shrugged. "If we shake up the ghosts first, get their attention, by letting young Marrity call old Marrity, that's likely to help draw them when we do the actual seance. It'll be a curspic — a conspicuous violation of normal reality."
"This Vespers crowd couldn't trace it," Lepidopt said. "The phone line is routed through half a dozen cutouts; and they can't psychically fix on us, especially here." He waved vaguely at the conical room.
After a pause, "B'seder," said Mishal, "let's do it, we can begin the seance with that. We're all drunk enough. Here." He stepped back to the desk and turned the top Einstein letter upside down, and an envelope fell out of the plastic sleeve. Clumsily he shook out four more envelopes and handed them to Lepidopt, who passed one to each of the others. The envelopes were all tan with age, and each had Lisa Marrity's name and address on the front in Einstein's handwriting.
"Oren," said Mishal, "break open your… holograph amulet. And everybody's got to crowd over to the other side of the bed, by the cement block."
Charlotte and Marrity turned around on the bed while the three Mossad men shuffled around the foot of the bed and edged between the mattress and the block.
"One at a time, now," said Mishal, "everybody press your right hand into the handprint in the cement."
"It's cracked," said Charlotte as she leaned forward to spread her fingers in the indentations.
"Your old friends shot at it this afternoon," said Mishal.
Marrity was the last to do it, shifting across the bed to reach it, and he assumed that the warm dampness of the handprint had been imparted by the people who had touched it only moments before. When he lifted his hand away, a quarter-size flake of gray cement clung to his palm, and he closed his hand on it and shoved it into his pocket.
"Now," said Mishal, "everybody lick the glue strip on the Einstein envelope you've got."
"Ugh," said Charlotte after she had licked hers. "It's like French-kissing a guy who's been dead thirty years."
"Yes," said Mishal, grimacing over his own envelope. "It's likely to catch his attention, though."
"The envelopes were sticky," said Marrity, "when I picked them up, Sunday afternoon. My grandmother must have been licking them too."
"That's kind of touching, really," said Mishal. "I guess she wanted to have a last chat with her father."
Charlotte grimaced. "I French-kissed your grandmother too? This is getting revolting." Marrity could hear tension as well as drunkenness in her voice.
"Stop being disgusting, my dear," said Mishal. "Now if you would call your, ah, erstwhile employers again. I think Bert's right, a conversation between Marrity and his older self might also help catch the old fellow's attention."
Charlotte rolled back over the bed and stood up unsteadily. Marrity followed her and stared at the portable telephone case on the little table by the Einstein letters, and she picked it up smoothly. Then he leaned over her shoulder and stared at the keypad so she could punch in the number.
She handed him the phone, and only at that moment did he realize that he was very drunk, and that he had no idea what he wanted to say to his older self.
Mishal stepped up and pushed a button on the side of the telephone, and then the background hiss was clearly audible to everyone in the room.
"I'll let you talk to him," Mishal said, "but not privately."
Marrity nodded and set the phone down on the bedspread.
A moment later a strained voice from the speaker said clearly, "Yes? I'm told that this is Frank Marrity the Lesser."
"Could I talk to myself, please," said Marrity distinctly.
"You don't have to lean over it," said Mishal. "Just stand and talk normally."
The person on the other end of the line laughed weakly and then said, "Why not?" and added, away from the microphone, "It's for you."
Marrity heard some furious whispering, and then heard again the voice of the old man who had spoken to him and Daphne in their kitchen yesterday morning.
"Hello?" the old man said belligerently.
"That dybbuk thing is bothering Daphne," said Marrity. "Go to wherever you've got her and say, 'Go away, Matt.' Don't let her talk at all. It might quote some lines from The Tempest at you — just respond with Prospero's lines. I assume you still remember them."
"I don't have any idea what the hell you're talking about. I've tried very hard to help you—"
"By eliminating my daughter from the universe! Your daughter! You should be puttingy our life on the line to protect her. How can you have got so ... so depraved in twenty years?"
He could hear the older man breathing heavily. "You may very well find out. Don't stand in back of any cars she's behind the wheel of."
Marrity realized that the other man was drunk. Well, so was Marrity. The parallel frightened him. In what sense was the older man the "other" man?
He was aware of puzzlement from Daphne, and tried to project a reassurance he couldn't quite feel.
He said, "I could never decide to get rid of—"
"I couldn't either, at your age, with just the experiences you've had! Who do you think I am? The Harmonic Convergence cracked the continuity of our life, and in the true version of our life there was some, some variant stimulus and so you didn't do a tracheotomy! She died! She was supposed to die! When you get to where I am—"
"I'll never get to where you are. I'll make better choices."
"Choices! You don't get choices, you get… situations that you react to — the actual cumulative you reacts, with whatever half-ass wiring you've got at the time, not some hovering 'soul.' You're a mercury switch — if the spring tilts you to the right degree, you complete a circuit, and if it's got metal fatigue, it tilts you less, and you don't. You don't have free will, sonny."
"Of course I do, of course you do, what kind of excuse—"