Parallel with his viewpoint he could perceive Daphne's lifeline, and he found that his attention extended to it. And her attention extended to his — closer to her lifeline he could feel her awareness of him. In a point that had no location in space or time, they clung wordlessly to each other.
What Einstein had done with the lifeline of the suicide in the tower in 1932, Marrity was trying to do in reverse with Daphne. Einstein had pried the woman's lifeline up out of the four-dimensional fabric, and Marrity was now blocking Daphne's lifeline from moving in that extra-dimensional direction. In this timeless view he had always been here blocking it.
Their linked attentions amplified each other, occupied a wider focus — and Marrity was aware of a vast wall, or shear, or towering gap in the direction that was future. It was not just the ends of lifelines — it seemed to eclipse all lifelines, and whatever it was, it was no more than the distance of two minutes away.
Marrity hoped their attentions would widen in a perpendicular direction to get them "over the top" of it — and he tried to convey Climb, climb! to Daphne, and he projected the image of an airplane taking off on a short runway, desperately clawing the air to get altitude before it reached the boundary of trees.
Together, boosting each other, their attentions soared until even the woven lifelines were far away, and the world itself was just a far-ranging helix around the curving pillar of the sun, and then in spite of their tininess they even glimpsed the vast dazzling crown or blazing flower of galaxies moving apart through space that uncurled around them—
Their attentions fled, recoiled, narrowed sharply toward their little world again, like a rocket that comes back down only after the world has turned all the way around under it.
In the sunlit tower, the woman who was Rascasse projected her attention to the oiled glass that lay on the backseat of one of the cars in the lot below, and somehow for a moment it seemed to be a dinner jacket draped over a chair by a swimming pool at twilight. But she concentrated, and when she could feel the slick glass under her fingers as well as the tower's gritty cornice railing, and smell the car's upholstery as clearly as she smelled the morning breeze, she stepped back, out of her body, into the volume of space Einstein had been occupying in 1932.
And in the wall that was the tower extending in both directions through time, she could see the persistent ripple where Einstein had gathered up the vacuum energy, for God knew what purpose.
The hungry denizens of this state were present very close by, attached to the several newly chopped-off lifelines — this time Rascasse didn't need to kill anybody to pay her way onto the freeway. She let her attention overlap theirs.
On this bigger scale, she perceived the lifelines that stood out like comets in this non-sky, and Daphne's was there.
Rascasse's attention extended in the direction of Daphne's lifeline, but somehow Frank Marrity blocked her way, even though Marrity was dead. Both versions of Marrity were dead! Her father had somehow blocked Daphne's lifeline with his identity, so that focusing on her simply deflected Rascasse into the past direction, to where Marrity's lifeline hung truncated.
Rascasse became aware of something like a cliff, or static waterfall, in the future direction, and all perceptible lifelines disappeared from view where they met it. It was only seconds distant, and in panic she fell back into her four-dimensional body.
She was draped like a towel over the railing, and had to thrash and flail her limbs to get upright again.
Mishal's down," yelled Malk. He reached his right arm across and fired two shots out the open van window and then opened the door and leaped out. Lepidopt heard him yell, "Blow it up!" as he scrambled away.
From the back of the van, Lepidopt peered through the windshield and gritted his teeth. Charlotte was rapidly dragging the Daphne girl in this direction, though it was a wonder nobody had shot her yet, and beyond her he could see two sprawled bodies, Marrity's on the grass straight ahead and Mishal's on the pavement off to the right.
Do it, he told himself.
Lepidopt tore open his shirt and yanked off the tape that held his dried finger against his skin, and he threw the tape with the finger still clinging to it into the far corner.
We did win the Yom Kippur War, he thought, even without help from the future.
He turned to the ashtray and quickly picked up Marrity's recently crushed-out Dunhill filter, and he gripped it between the first two fingers of his left hand as he positioned his bare feet on the gold swastika, pressed his hands into the sweaty Chaplin handprints, and projected his consciousness out to the beacons on Mount Wilson and in Death Valley.
He was aware of two different breezes, and the smells of pine and weathered wood, and he felt a faint electric tingle in the soles of his bare feet—
For a moment it was the remembered out-of-body weightlessness, and he choked with vertigo — but then he was spinning down through darkness, and the cigarette filter between his fingers was vibrating as if he were dragging it fast along a finely corrugated wall, and he let himself step gratefully back into his body as a gust of energy whipped past him and rushed away downward.
He was still in the van, and in the first instant, he thought the bomb had gone off — a man holding a set of keys was knocked off his feet and the sand in the cat box in the corner was blown up against the van wall. The lightbulb overhead was swinging back and forth.
"What the hell was that? " snapped Malk from the driver's seat, his voice sounding strained to the breaking point. "The blasting cap?"
Lepidopt noted that Malk was still in the front seat. He had not yet got out of the van.
The man with the keys sat up on the van floor and blinked up at Lepidopt. Lepidopt stared down at him and dizzily recognized his own two-minutes-younger self.
A single infant wailed on the floor by the back doors, and both of them jumped and stared at it. As he instinctively started toward it, Lepidopt noted wispy dark hair, and little fists and feet waving—
I can't get it out of the field in time, he thought, and even as he reached for the baby — the infant duplicate of himself — it winked out of existence.
At some point Malk had turned around in the driver's seat, and now his eyes were wide at the sight of the two identical Oren Lepidopts.
In the still quiet dawn air Lepidopt heard Charlotte Sinclair, outside, say, "Frank! How the — oh God — be very careful."
While Malk and Lepidopt's own younger self gaped at him, Lepidopt twisted the dial on the kitchen timer beside the bomb. "One minute," he said. "We've got to get out of here."
The other Lepidopt scrambled up from the floor. "Because of Louis?" he asked.
"Because of everybody," Lepidopt told him.
Malk was trying to say something, but Lepidopt cut him off with a wave as he slid between the front seats and grabbed the passenger-side doorhandle. "Later. Fifty-six seconds."
At that moment the morning stillness was shaken by rapid-fire shooting, and the two Vespers men who had been watching the van whirled to look back toward the tower.
Frank Marrity was standing beside an olive tree and emptying his pistol into his older self.
Lepidopt flung himself out of the passenger-side door and, braced against the flanking car, aimed his .22 automatic across the parking lot at the head of the white-haired man who had stepped away to the left with Charlotte, and as the man shoved Charlotte away and drew his big revolver, Lepidopt shot him through the head.
The two Vespers men only a few yards away spun at the sound of the shot, and one of them managed to fire twice before they were punched backward by several fast shots from the driver's side of the van; one sat down hard and then tipped over, but the other fired once more before Lepidopt put a final bullet into his forehead.