‘You have to admit it was a pretty neat plan,’ Tom said. ‘Cause a civil war right in the middle of that trouble their President was having, come in and help stop what we’d started . . .’
‘A neat plan? There would have been civil war all right. Breakdown of law and order, tens of thousands of deaths, all the trouble of policing a post-revolutionary America, and for what? Another version of the Stars and Stripes flying alongside all the other versions outside every Pan-American Alliance Assembly Building in every sheaf? Another version of America forced to buy into the idea that the Real is the centre of the multiverse?’
‘I said that it was a neat plan, Adam. I didn’t say that it was a
good
plan. Remember our argument just before SWIFT SWORD was about to kick off? I was on the side of the Free Americans. I wanted to help them any way I could, and you said nothing good would come of it because they were as bad as the Communists they wanted to overthrow. Remember that?’
‘You supported expansionism. So did Dick Knightly.’
‘I
used
to support expansionism, yeah, but I wasn’t as fanatical about it as the Old Man. Why I quit GYPSY? Why I didn’t even want to join up in the first place? It’s because I didn’t like what it was planning to do. It’s because, I guess, I was coming round to your way of thinking.’
‘GYPSY is planning covert action to destabilise sheaves, isn’t it?’ Stone said. ‘Sheaves like this one.’
‘It’s worse than that,’ Linda said. ‘It’s planning to destabilise our own history by changing the past.’
Stone laughed. He couldn’t help it. It came bubbling out of him.
‘He isn’t ready for this,’ Tom said.
‘Show him the time key,’ Linda said. ‘Tell him everything.’
‘Maybe we better wait until White Sands. He’ll have to believe it then.’
‘Fuck it,’ Linda said, and swerved across two lanes and braked on the hard shoulder, the station wagon rocking on its shocks as a tractor-trailer went past in a rush of wind and a howling horn-blast. She switched off the motor and said, ‘We aren’t going another inch until we get this straightened out. Mr Stone, I want you to listen to what my father has to say. Don’t ask any questions: just listen. And while you’re listening, remember that my father killed himself a few days ago right in front of your eyes, and here he is again. And he isn’t a doppel or some other kind of impostor. He really is my father. Dad, you show Mr Stone the time key and explain how it works. No games. No smoke and mirrors. Just the plain truth.’
Tom Waverly reached inside his denim jacket and pulled out a padded envelope folded around the shape inside it. ‘This is what Eileen Barrie was working on,’ he said, and tossed the envelope into Stone’s lap.
Stone picked it up. He could feel something flat and hard inside. It was about the size and weight of a cell phone.
‘Go ahead,’ Tom said.
Linda turned in her seat to watch as Stone reached inside the envelope and drew out a pale green, foggily translucent oblong. It felt cold and then suddenly warm. Little coloured lights flickered inside it and he had the sudden dizzy feeling that the thing was opening into a void miles deep, that baleful stars burning way down inside it were turning to look at him.
Linda said, ‘Mr Stone? Are you all right?’
Stone was familiar with fear. He knew from long experience that in a tight spot fear could be your friend, that fear’s little squirts of adrenalin could heighten your senses, bristle your hair, divert blood from vulnerable limbs to the centre of your body, pump you up for fight or flight. This, though, wasn’t fear. This was terror: the bowel-squeezing, scrotum-tightening, mind-freezing terror of a man-ape facing a leopard on the primaeval African veldt. And terror didn’t make you want to fight or flee. Terror took you by the scruff of your neck and shut you down. Terror made you ready to give up your life. You went limp in its jaws; you no longer cared that you were about to be carried off and disembowelled.
Stone’s grip on the hard little oblong convulsively tightened. It felt slick and soft and disgusting, as if the rotting hand of someone long dead yet still animate had crept into his. He tried to free himself, but his fingers were cramped around it and his gaze was locked on its vertiginous depths, and then a black headache spiked straight through his skull and wiped him clean.
11
It was dark when Stone woke, and the station wagon was quiet and still. Tom Waverly leaned in through the open door, bending over him, helping him to sit up. The car was parked outside a two-storey motel. Crickets were trilling to each other in the humid night air, louder than the hum of traffic on a road beyond a thin screen of poplars.
‘Where are we?’
‘Somewhere outside Indianapolis,’ Tom said. ‘Let’s get you into the room. We’re safe enough here, and you’ll feel a whole lot better after a good night’s sleep.’
Stone allowed himself to be helped out of the car. ‘Where’s Linda?’
‘Gone to get some food at a Chinese place across the highway. How do you feel?’
‘I could use a shower and two or three bottles of painkiller.’
Stone took the shower cold and then hot, as hot as he could stand it, and began to feel vaguely human again. He began to remember what had happened, too - the translucent green oblong coming alive after he pulled it from the envelope, the void opening up and swallowing him whole - but was unable to make any sense of it.
When he came out of the steamed-up bathroom with a towel knotted around his waist, carrying his clothes and his shoulder holster and pistol, he found Tom and Linda sitting on one of the beds, eating Chinese food from white cartons. Linda stared at the bruises that covered Stone’s torso and asked if he was okay.
‘I guess I passed out. No big deal.’
‘You took out the key and you had a minor fit,’ Tom Waverly said. ‘Maybe you pressed the wrong combination of switches and made it mad at you. It’s a tricky little gadget. The people who worked on it found that out the hard way.’
‘The drugs Walter’s goons gave me did a number on my head,’ Stone said. ‘I’m okay now.’
Tom studied him. ‘How about some Chinese food? Best medicine in the world. We have Kung Pao chicken, we have deep-fried squid, beef with green peppers, noodles, fully-loaded fried rice. All of it good.’
Linda said, ‘Don’t you think we should find him a doctor?’
‘You want a doctor, Adam?’
‘No, no doctor.’
‘See, honey? He doesn’t need a doctor.’
‘I want to talk about this thing you stole,’ Stone said.
Stone refused Linda’s offer of a carton of fried rice and sat on one of the beds, the towel still knotted around his waist and his suit jacket draped around his shoulders. Tom straddled a chair next to him and said, ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Everything from A to B and back again.’
‘It has a long technical name I can never be bothered to remember, which is why I call it the time key. It has a quantum computer in it - we’re pretty sure it’s a self-aware quantum computer. And I guess it took an instant dislike to you.’
‘It’s some kind of weapon, isn’t it?’
Tom Waverly shook his head. ‘It works Turing gates.’
‘What do you mean, it works Turing gates?’
‘It works them so you can travel into the past.’
Linda said quickly, ‘It’s true, Mr Stone. You have to believe him.’
‘I’m trying my best.’
Tom said, ‘Someone phoned me, told me to look out for you and Linda. The man who made that call was the same guy who killed himself in Pottersville. He was a future version of me, Adam. Or at least, he’s a possible future version. Call him Tom Waverly Two. Somewhere in the near future, TW Two got himself a fatal dose of radiation. He knew he was dying, and he used the time key to travel into his recent past to try to change things around. He killed a bunch of Eileen Barrie’s doppels to stir things up, he got you and Linda involved, and then he killed himself. But in the middle of all that, he also called
me
, too. I’d just stolen the time key and run out on GYPSY, and I was lying low right here in the Nixon sheaf. I’d smoked my trail, made it to a safe house I set up a while back. No one knew where I was. No one but TW Two, that is, because my present was his past. He knew what I’d done and where I was hiding out because he had already done it. He told me what had happened to him: what would happen to
me
, if things weren’t fixed. He said that you and Linda would be checking the old dead drop in a few days. From what Linda told me, he went on to the American Bund sheaf, got some medical attention from Freddy Layne’s doctor, and killed two more of Eileen Barrie’s doppels. And then you caught up with him at Pottersville, and he killed himself.’
‘Maybe I can believe he was a doppel. But this talk about the future—’
‘It’s where he came from, Mr Stone,’ Linda said. ‘He travelled from his present, our future, into his past, our present. Just before he killed himself in Pottersville, he told me to find his apartment in the American Bund’s version of New York, and to make sure that you came along. He said that he’d hidden something there, that I would know where to look for it, and you would know what it meant. He told me that it would lead to something he had stolen from Operation GYPSY, that it could change history, explain why he’d done what he’d done, and clear his name. He also said - and this is what I didn’t tell you at the time - that I would meet him again. He was very emphatic about that. He said that he had travelled into his own past. He said that no matter what happened, I would meet him again.’
Stone said, ‘And you believed him? That’s why you came here?’
Linda shook her head. ‘I believed that he had stolen something. I believed that if I found it, it would help explain where he’d been the past three years, and why he killed those women. I believed it would clear his name. As for the stuff about him coming from the future, and me meeting up with him again . . . He was seriously ill. He was dying. And I thought that it had made him delusional. But it turned out that I was wrong. He was telling the truth all along. We followed the trail he left, and it all worked out.’
‘It worked out so far,’ Tom said. ‘He hooked you and Adam up with me. And now we have to go forward.’
Linda nodded.
‘So you’re going to become this guy,’ Stone said. ‘Is that what you’re telling me? You’re going to use the time key, travel back into the past and start killing Eileen Barrie’s doppels, and end up in Pottersville. ’
‘Not if I can help it,’ Tom said. ‘I’m sure Tom Waverly Two was a great guy, but as far as I’m concerned he had one very serious flaw. He’d gotten himself a bad dose of radiation, and he was dying from it. I don’t intend to make the same mistake. I’m going to break the loop. I’m going to change history.’
Tom said it with such solemnity that Stone couldn’t help laughing.
‘He’s serious, Mr Stone,’ Linda said. ‘We’re both absolutely serious about this.’
‘You bet I’m serious,’ Tom said. ‘I’m fighting for my life here. And for the life of Susan Nichols, too.’
A hot stab of anger cut through Stone’s fatigue. ‘All this craziness about you I can take, but don’t for
one fucking minute
joke about that.’
Tom didn’t even blink. ‘It’s no joke, Adam. I can use the time key to travel into the past. We all can. We can stop everything that’s happened before it begins, collapse history in on itself. We can make it so you’ll never need to be called out of retirement, you’ll stay right there on the farm with Susan Nichols and her kid. And I won’t get a lethal dose of radiation and end up killing myself.’
‘Go fuck yourself, Tom. If you really are Tom. And even if you’re not, go fuck yourself anyway.’
‘I know how you feel, Mr Stone,’ Linda said. ‘I’ve had a while to work this through, and I’m still having problems coming to terms with it.’
‘It’s real, honey,’ her father said. ‘It’s real, and we’re right in the middle of it.’
‘You’re both crazy,’ Stone said.
His anger had gone as quickly as it had arrived. All he felt now was a deep, languid weariness; even the pain of his various burns and bruises seemed to have receded to a great distance. When Tom started to explain that they had to get to White Sands and use the time key to travel into the past so that they could do a number on Operation GYPSY, Stone shook his head and said that they could talk about getting back to the Real tomorrow.
‘I need to sleep,’ he said, and lay down and did just that. He woke some time later to find someone had laid the coverlet over him. Tom sat close to the TV, clicking from channel to channel, the sound turned down to a barely audible murmur.
‘You’re really here,’ Stone said.
‘Better believe it.’
‘It’s pretty hard to believe, Tom.’
‘It’s like the worm in a bottle of mescal,’ Tom Waverly said. ‘You have to swallow it whole.’
12
They left the motel at dawn, joining commuter traffic that was already beginning to build up along the Interstate, stopping for breakfast at an International House of Pancakes on the far side of Indianapolis. Everything seemed amazingly normal. Coffee in brown glazed mugs, pats of butter dissolving into transparent grease on blueberry pancakes, brittle strips of Canadian bacon, maple syrup in an aluminium pitcher with a hinged lid. Sunlight burned through the plate-glass windows, picked gleaming highlights on blond wood and red leatherette banquettes, sharpened the haze of cigarette smoke, gilded ordinary people bent to their ordinary breakfasts, and shone on Tom and Linda Waverly as they leaned side by side across the table from Stone, tracing routes on gas-station road maps like a pair of regular tourists. For a moment, Stone could believe that this was the only reality, that everything else was a dream.
Back on the Interstate, the station wagon merged with the bunched rush of traffic. Linda drove with a sure, light touch. Her father slouched beside her, his cassette playing on the stereo again. While Dylan sang about a desperado on the run with his woman in the Mexican desert, Stone watched cars go past. Americans on the move, in their natural habitat. A man in a battered pickup with a yellow hard hat sitting on top of the dash. An old woman with a puffball of white hair in an enormous powder-blue Cadillac. Kids tussling in the back of a small red car the shape of an inverted bathtub, driven by a woman who showed every day of her life on her face. Two swarthy guys in the cab of a slat-sided truck loaded with orange pumpkins that reminded Stone of the pumpkin patch beside Susan’s barn. The memory a little stab in his heart. A barechested black teenager in a rusty brown Toyota, a red handkerchief knotted on his head and one arm hung out of his open window, sped past in a booming blast of music. Look for America? Here it was: passing, repassing, changing lanes, merging, turning off. An unending stream of restless lives. A young woman steering her station wagon with one hand as she touched up her lipstick in the rearview mirror. A businessman in a white shirt and tie driving a black Volkswagen, his suit jacket swinging from a hook behind him like a ghost . . .