The van belonged to a sayan who ordinarily lived in it, with a cat, and the interior smelled sourly of cat box.
"Whatever happens with this meeting," said Mishal, "this silly proposed trade of girls, you'll follow your orders today — this morning. I'll try to learn something about this singularity in the tower, and if possible I'll relay it over the radio for you to add to your report, but you have to use the machine to jump back to 1967. As soon as I've relayed all I can find out, or at the very first sign of any trouble, you go. You heard Einstein's ghost say how to do it. Right?"
"Right," said Lepidopt.
"And you've got your, your homing device? "
Mishal was referring to Lepidopt's dried finger, which was still in the Flix chocolate box in his pocket. In 1928 Einstein had been guided to his destination in the past by a bullet shell, which struck Lepidopt as a much more dignified sort of talisman.
"Got it."
"Can you feel your target sites yet, those pieces of glass? They should be set up by now."
Lepidopt tried to stretch his mind outward, past the haze of the whiskey, to a piece of oily glass on Mount Wilson and another in Death Valley. He didn't get any clear impression. "No," he said.
"Well, you probably have to be out of your body to sense them. You can still do an astral projection, I hope! You got good marks for that, in your training."
"I did? I hated it." Lepidopt shifted uncomfortably in the driver's seat at the memory of hovering weightlessly under some ceiling and seeing his limp body slumped on a couch on the other side of a room.
"Assuming it works," Lepidopt said, "do you want me to tell Isser Harel in 1967 that we've agreed to change some part of the past for Charlotte Sinclair, in exchange for her help?"
For a moment Mishal was silent. Then, "The thing the Zohar predicted," he said. "The 'knowledge of the precious supernal wisdom.' You want to use that to fix some divorce or childhood trauma or something for that woman? " He shook his head. "You don't throw what's precious to dogs."
Lepidopt asked, "What's precious to dogs?" Mishal didn't laugh, and Lepidopt flexed his maimed right hand on the gearshift. "I'll be changing the past," he said. "From 1967 on."
"Right," said Mishal. "The Yom Kippur War will certainly go differently in the new time line you'll help initiate. A lot of things will."
"I, uh, got married in 1972," said Lepidopt, ashamed to be bringing it up. "My son was born in 1976. He's eleven now."
"That would follow, yes." Mishal sniffed. "I hope I don't smell the way this van does, when I meet these people."
"I wonder — if he'll still be born. That is, if he'll still be born. What if something I change — like a whole war — makes my younger self and his wife conceive the boy on a different night? What if the child is a girl, this time around? What if there is no child? My younger self in this new time line might die before fathering him."
"Unlikely — especially with you, the elder you, looking out for his safety. You can tell Harel that that's a condition of your cooperation."
"But I can't eliminate the possibility of my younger self dying. Much less eliminate the possibility that my son won't be conceived exactly as it happened originally." Lepidopt bared his teeth at the dark freeway lanes under the lightening eastern sky. "The boy I know might turn out never to have existed."
"All of us are at risk," said Mishal. "There might be a war six years from now in which your son will be killed, if you don't do this."
"But if he's killed, he'll at least have existed," Lepidopt said, knowing he was pushing a point Mishal considered settled.
"All our sons and daughters," said Mishal sternly, "and wives and parents, are at risk every day. Do you know what this thing in the Sinai desert is, at the Rephidim stone, that you're to copy out?" He laughed. "Well no, of course you don't. None of us does. But according to old manuscripts that never made it into the Sepher ha-Bahir compilation in the twelfth century, it's a way to travel in all the worlds of the Sephirot, not just in four or even five dimensions. It could make this time machine look like the Wright brothers's airplane."
"I see," said Lepidopt.
Mishal waved a hand, acknowledging Lepidopt's previous point. "God won't lose sight of any of us. Not of us. Do you think that machine can change God's memory? It would be disrespectful, as well as wrong, to think so."
Can I have that in writing? thought Lepidopt; but he simply kept the gas pedal pressed to the floor and watched the taillights of Malk's van.
Twenty-seven
Old Frank Marrity was glad to see the last of the flatbed truck as it turned left out of the hospital parking lot, heading south, though when its taillights had disappeared down Indian Canyon Drive he could still for a moment see the foolish chair mounted on the back of it.
He had managed to throw the tent and all the electronic equipment off the truck bed, in painful, sweating haste by the glare of the burning cabin, but that damned chair had been bolted to the wood. Canino had tied Golze's wheelchair to it, and Marrity had had to hang on to it, cursing and several times half sliding off the truck altogether during the bumpy half-hour drive down the mountain road to Palm Springs.
He had barely been able to crawl off the truck bed when they had finally stopped here in the hospital parking lot.
The few cars that whispered past now on the street beyond the sidewalk trees still had their headlights on, and the breeze was pleasantly cool, but the sky was already deep blue and in half an hour or so the sun would be rising over the distant Santa Rosa Mountains.
Across a sidewalk and a narrow lawn, the square, four-story tower loomed in gray shadow against the cloudless sky. Peering up at it, he could see a corner of the belfry ceiling through the west-facing arch at the top. The low tile-roofed building at its foot was medical offices now, but the tower had reputedly once been the highest structure in this desert village, the crown of the long-gone El Mirador Hotel.
Three Vespers cars had pulled into the lot ten minutes ago, and Marrity was leaning against the left-rear door of one of them, a brown-and-white Chrysler Fifth Avenue that was brand new but looked very old-fashioned and boxy to him. When will I see Saturns again? he thought. Lexuses? Geos?
The driver's-side door was open and the haggard-looking woman who was apparently Rascasse was sitting in the driver's seat, listening to the multiband radio. She smelled like stale bread this morning.
"We, uh, talked our way into the house," said a voice from the speaker, "and the cement block they had was just a section of sidewalk. Decoy. One of the renters there eventually directed us to a place called the Wigwam Motel, and the people we want had been there but have cleared out. Nothing in the room."
"Okay," said Rascasse in her new contralto voice. "Get here as quickly as you can."
Marrity couldn't see Golze in the passenger seat, but in the predawn quiet he clearly heard his frail voice: "They're working from a mobile base now."
"Indeed," said Rascasse, "and they'll be heading this way." He spoke into the radio again. "Prime."
"Tierce," came a tinny reply from the speaker.
"They're bringing Charlotte here to make the trade. But probably there'll be a vehicle accompanying them, a truck or van, that will be visible to human eyes but not to astral sight — not to my mind. Get — oleander." Marrity saw the old woman lean forward briefly, and then she sat back and went on, "Get the copter here, and have him circle and describe to me all traffic on the streets. Not models, just… 'a white van, a blue car ahead of it, a red car passing both of them' … like that."