"Right. Later."
The man who had driven up in the Chrysler was pacing the sidewalk a hundred feet away; the other two drivers were still sitting in their cars. Marrity wondered irritably what Vespers men did on their days off. Maybe they never got days off.
Marrity took a deep breath and then spoke. "You don't need to do this negation thing with anybody," he said. "You'll have the machine itself within the hour, and then you'll be able to go back and fix things, not just, just — start chronological avalanches! All you've got to do is kill D-Daphne, like you agreed to." He realized he was nodding like a monkey, and made himself stop. "That was part of our agreement, in the boat on the lake."
In this situation, he was certain, he was doing all that remained to be done for poor Daphne. If they killed her, she would at least have had a life; but if they negated her, there would never have been any Daphne Marrity at all. And how much of his own memories, his own identity, were tied up with her? He himself would become an entirely different person if she were negated, a person unimaginable to him now.
"We haven't got the machine yet," croaked Golze.
The two Mossad vans were parked in shadow at the end of West Tahquitz Canyon Way, in front of a house that was half hidden behind palm trees and honeysuckle and grapevines. A wrought-iron arch with an unlit lantern hanging from its curlicued peak opened on a stone stairway barely visible in the tree shadows beyond, and to the left Lepidopt could make out the two- or three-story house, with doors and windows deeply inset in thick, pale walls. A mailbox was mounted on one pole of the arch and a plastic rake leaned against the other. Mishal said Einstein had stayed here in 1931 and had hidden attention-deflecting stone amulets in the terraced garden behind the house.
They were seven blocks south of the El Mirador Medical Plaza, about half an hour short of dawn.
During the drive from San Bernardino to Palm Springs, the van had been a moving pocket of warmth and dashboard lights and a pair of glowing cigarettes in the lonely rock-studded hills in the predawn darkness, and the only signs of human habitation in the landscape of jagged ridges and remote, tilted alluvial deltas had been one line of half a dozen trailer trucks pulled off on the shoulder, and the twin red dots of Malk's taillights in the otherwise empty lane ahead. Lepidopt had been glad to turn off the freeway onto State Highway 111 and follow it into the sleeping town of Palm Springs, with its low, plain 1950s-style office buildings, its shops with aluminum foil covering the windows, and its dark ranch houses with gravel yards.
"It's about time to divvy the cargo," said Mishal now, unsnapping his seat belt. "Handcuff Marrity in here with the Einstein machine, where you can blow both of them to smithereens if worse comes to worse. Then you and Bert just circle around town in it, and try to stay in touch with me via the radio."
He tucked the Azden microphone-transmitter into his shirt pocket and clipped the microphone under his collar. The trouble with body microphones was that the crystal-controlled transmitters were as big as a deck of cards, and couldn't transmit farther than a few city blocks at the best of times, and a human body tended to block the radio waves.
"If you can't hear me," said Mishal, "just jump at dawn. You can at least bring Harel the news that the singularity Einstein appeared to refer to may exist in that tower. Once you've jumped, all of this" — his wave took in the other van too, with Charlotte and Marrity in it, and all of Palm Springs — "won't ever have happened."
"Different courses for all of us," Lepidopt agreed in a level voice. He thought of being able to swim in the ocean again, and listen to Rimsky-Korsakov again, and then he thought of Louis back in Tel Aviv.
"Arm the thing," said Mishal, opening the passenger-side door. A puff of cool, sage-scented air dispelled the interior smells of cat box and cigarette smoke.
Lepidopt unsnapped his seat belt and stood up in a crouch to shuffle into the back of the van. He switched on the overhead bulb.
The Chaplin handprint slab was now bolted upright next to Einstein's big, dusty glass cylinder, and wires were stapled across the carpeted floor to a yard-wide gold swastika laid flat. On a linoleum counter closer to the back doors were a bottle of brandy, an ashtray already crowded with cigarette butts, and, screwed firmly into the counter, the "pressure-firing device."
This looked vaguely like a small floor jack, but the disk sticking up from one end of it wouldn't support anything — it was the pressure cap that would set off the bomb.
A copper tube — a nonelectric blasting cap — had been crimped onto the nozzle-like opening at the other end of the device, and the blasting cap was connected to a red plastic adapter that was screwed into the threaded cap well of a long brick of tetrytol explosive wrapped in tarry black paper.
A homely looking blue kitchen timer connected a dry-cell battery to a wire that ran into the tetrytol brick through a groove in the plastic adapter. If it came down to it, Lepidopt could either set the timer and run, or just smack the pressure cap.
A four-inch cotter pin was stuck through the barrel of the pressure-firing device, and Lepidopt now carefully pulled it out and laid it on the counter beside the ashtray.
"It's armed," he said.
From the pavement outside the van, Mishal called, "Good. I'll send over Malk and Marrity."
By the dim yellow glow of the overhead bulb, Lepidopt stared at the bomb and the time machine, and he tried to imagine what might go wrong. What if he and Malk and Marrity were captured, and the bomb didn't work? There was no bowl of dry macaroni here, but a gun available in an unexpected place might be just as comforting a backup here as it had been in the safe-house apartment on La Brea.
Still lying on the blanket-covered plywood floor of the other van with her arms loosely around Marrity, Charlotte had been alternately looking through the eyes of the three Mossad men; aside from Marrity's here beside her in the darkness, there were no other viewpoints within several hundred feet.
Malk was just sitting in the driver's seat in front of them, peering into the shadows through the windshield and the rearview mirrors. Mishal and Lepidopt had been talking inside the other van, though of course she could not hear what they had said, and now Mishal had got out and was walking up toward this van. That other van was more interesting, though, with the Chaplin block and what looked like a bomb, so she kept on looking through Lepidopt's eyes.
She saw him open a black plastic box and pull a small-caliber automatic pistol out of the foam-rubber padding inside; his glance swept the narrow interior of the van, then focused on a plastic pan full of well-used cat litter in the corner. The cat box became larger in his perspective as he approached it, and then she saw his hands push the gun in under the gray sand. His gaze narrowed a little, as if he were wincing.
Charlotte put her mouth to Marrity's ear. "In the other van," she whispered, "there's a gun under the sand in the cat box in the corner." She felt him nod.
"You two awake?" asked Malk as he saw Mishal approaching in the rearview mirror.
"Yes," said Marrity, stretching beside Charlotte. Mishal was unlocking the back doors, and Marrity kissed Charlotte quickly in the moment before the doors swung open and the dawn breeze cooled her face and arms.
Then Mishal was unsnapping the padlock that moored their ankles to the floor. "I'll be driving this van," he said, "and Charlotte, you'll be sitting up front with me. Frank, you go with Malk to the other one."