But he blinked, and he was back at the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs on a cool December evening in 1932. Everyone had climbed out of the green-lit pool or hurried out of the dining room and now stood around the cactus garden below the tower, for a young woman was up in the north arch of the tower's belfry, sobbing and waving a revolver that glittered in the last slanting rays of the sun.
Einstein, puffing and sweating in a rumpled white dress shirt, had climbed the three flights of wooden stairs inside the tower and now stepped up at last to the open fourth-floor belfry.
The girl had been looking down at the crowd on the pavement and the grass, but now she turned to look at him. Her fair hair was blowing around her face and her skirt fluttered in the evening breeze.
"You're Albert Einstein," she said.
"Yes," he panted. "Listen to me, you mustn't—"
"You're too late."
And she stepped out through the arch onto the narrow cornice, and leaned backward with her hips against the railing. Then she put the revolver barrel to her temple and pulled the trigger.
As a dozen voices screamed and the girl's body toppled backward, Einstein rushed to the railing and looked down — but he was not looking at the girl's body but at the chair by the pool where he had hung his dinner jacket.
When he spied the jacket, he projected himself to it, and touched the glossy fabric of it and felt under him the canvas straps and the rubber-tipped legs of the chair on the poolside concrete, and from this difference in height between his two points of view, he launched himself out into the timeless state in which lifetimes were streaks across a blank absence.
From this perspective the tower was a wall that extended into the past in one direction and into the future in the other.
In closer focus he could perceive the girl's lifeline curled up the tower stairs and abruptly dispersed at this point.
One or more of the entities that existed on this plane were now clustered around — had through eternity been clustered around — the end of her lifeline. Einstein couldn't help but be overlapped with the alien thing or things, and though he sensed life in the ridged or droning thoughts, and even something like hunger, he had no basis from which to understand them.
Einstein laid his attention across the girl's lifeline at a point before the dissolution that was her death, and by drawing on the energy latent in the total vacuum of this place, he was able to pry her lifeline out of the four dimensions it occupied — he hoped, in effect, to break off the section of it that was her death.
But instead, to his horror, her lifeline simply disappeared. The static arrangement of vast arching ropes or sparks didn't include her lifeline now, had never included it.
He recoiled back into sequential time.
Einstein was leaning over the balcony, looking down, but there was no crowd below. There had been no dramatic disruption of this evening, and the people in the pool were splashing around and laughing.
Before he collapsed and retracted the astral projection of himself that was still sitting in the chair by the pool, he stepped out again into the fifth-dimensional perspective, and there was a new feature now in the tower wall as it extended into the future: a kink like a ripple in glass in the arch where he had been leaning over the rail, a lens effect that didn't damp out as it receded into the blur of the future. The burst of vacuum energy he had pricked up here would apparently always occupy this volume of space, in the El Mirador tower's western arch. Mercifully it would be imperceptible and unusable by anyone not astrally occupying two time shells at once and focusing on this place.
He inhaled the projection by the pool. In the twilight nobody noticed Einstein up in the tower, and so he slowly trudged back down the stairs, knowing that he had left a blade, in the space back up there in the belfry, by which anybody could be cut right out of existence.
His mind was numb, thinking over and over again, But I was trying to help her.
Who was she?
Nobody, ever — not even imaginary.
What drove her to suicide?
Nothing that ever happened to anybody.
Beside Marrity, the ghost of Einstein sighed. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.
Never born. Derek had never been born either, though he had lived and had children.
Einstein had always avoided the boy Derek, even though — or especially because — the boy was a physical duplicate of himself, created out of excess energy when Einstein had shed fifth-dimensional velocity in returning from 1911 to 1928. Lieserl had eventually adopted the boy from Grete Markstein in 1936, when Derek had been eight years old. By that time Einstein had settled in Princeton, never to return to California.
But Derek visited Einstein, in the Princeton hospital, in April 1955. Einstein was clearly dying then, of a burst aneurysm of the abdominal aorta.
Only days earlier Einstein had met with the Israeli ambassador to the United States and a man from the New York Israeli consulate. The state of Israel was to celebrate its seventh anniversary on April 27, and they feared some attack. Isser Harel, now director general of the Mossad, had not forgotten the water glass with the impossibly young Einstein's fingerprints on it — actually Derek's fingerprints— and wanted once more to ask Einstein about possible tactical uses of time.
Einstein had agreed to discuss it, but then the aorta had burst and he was taken to the hospital.
Derek had got in by claiming to be a son of Einstein's first wife, and after apologizing to the dying old man, he asked Einstein who had been his father and mother.
Einstein simply stared at the young man. "I don't know," he said finally, wearily. "Ask Lieserl. She is the person who found you."
"But I'm related to you," said Derek. He was pleading. "It shows in our faces. I have two children — who were their father's parents?"
"I am watched, all of the time," said Einstein. "The FBI knows I am having more to tell, because Israel wants to hear it, so obviously. Another group, also, which has followed me into this exile of mine from Europe. I have ways, you do not, of pushing them away from myself." He sighed and closed his eyes. "They all have seen you now, and they want to know who you are. Even what you are. If they know you are no connection with me, you are safe — if you know no answers, you have no object in being questioned. Go home to your children."
Did he arrive home in safety? asked Einstein now, his frail hand barely tangible in Marrity's left hand.
No, thought Marrity bleakly. No, he never came home to us.
Oh weh. It was a sigh of despair.
Marrity looked at him, and again it was the dark-haired young man who was identical to Marrity's memories of his father.
Frankie, said this apparition, and Marrity knew that this really was his father, not another appearance of Einstein.
Dad! thought Marrity, squeezing the faintly felt hand in a convulsive grip. Dad, I'm sorry! What did they do to you, why didn't you ever come back—
Frankie, said the phantom of his father, run, don't go to the tower in the desert. I had no birth, but you'll have no birth or death.
Then Marrity found himself blinking tears out of his eyes and staring only at Lepidopt, who was looking back at him bewilderedly.
Mishal had climbed down off the foot of the bed and stood up to dig cigarettes and a lighter out of his pocket, and Lepidopt freed his hand from Marrity's. He was lighting a cigarette too now. Apparently the seance was over.
"We need some sayanim, with a couple of vans or trucks," Mishal was saying to Malk. "We need to get out to that tower, and we've got to bring our whole base; we can't afford to have this" — he gestured at the block and the boxes — "anywhere but with us."