Stone thought of Susan. ‘I guess not.’
Harvey Shiel looked straight ahead as he drove, giving Stone and Linda the space they needed. After a little while he said, ‘I have a cabin on the shore. You can stay there as long as you like.’
‘I’d like that,’ Linda said.
‘It’s pretty basic, but it’s peaceful.’ Shiel hesitated, then said, ‘What about me? Will the Company want me back, now I’ve completed my mission?’
Stone said, ‘You want to go back?’
‘I’ve been here eight years. I’ve made a life for myself here. I’m married, I have kids, a business . . . You think they’ll want me to return to active service?’
‘I can’t see any way for you to return to active service without waiting for 1984 to swing by,’ Stone said. ‘You can ask them then, if you feel the need, but don’t ask me. They reactivated me for this, but as soon as it’s done I’m going back into retirement.’
‘I’m not going back either,’ Linda said. ‘I’ll help Mr Shiel get rid of the evidence, and that’ll be the last thing I do for the Company.’
‘This is a good place to live,’ Shiel said. ‘It has its problems, sure. There’s a nuclear stand-off with the Soviets, and just now we have an energy crisis, rolling power cuts and gas shortages. But on the whole it’s one of the better Americas. If you work at it, you can make a life here, any kind you want.’
‘I look forward to finding out about that,’ Stone said. ‘They have New Jersey airport here?’
‘They call it Newark.’
‘Take me to Newark, Harvey. I have an appointment to keep at White Sands.’
Stone flew ahead of the sunset and landed at Albuquerque a little after five p.m. local time. He stole a car from the long-term parking lot, claimed he’d lost his ticket at the exit, paid the fine, and drove south along the I-25 to Las Cruces, riding a floating sense of déjà vu. He reached the little town after sunset. After checking into a motel, he ate a beef burrito at a truck stop and in the pungent restroom bought a dozen uppers from a fat biker with wreaths of jailhouse tattoos on his arms.
The gun shop was more or less exactly as Stone remembered it from just a few subjective days ago. He waited until after midnight before short-circuiting the alarm and using the jack from the car to lever a security grille from the back window. He was in and out in five minutes. He stashed the stolen goods in a Dumpster behind the motel, slept exactly six hours, showered, ate breakfast in the diner across the street, and bought beef jerky and plastic jugs of water in the general store where in seven years he would shop for provisions with Tom and Linda Waverly - no, that was in another time-line of this sheaf. Things would be different now.
Stone retrieved his stolen booty from the Dumpster and hid it amongst the clubs in the golf bag in the trunk and headed out of town. Two black-and-white cruisers were angle-parked outside the gun shop. A deputy leaning against the wing of his vehicle and drinking coffee from a foam cup gave Stone the eye as he went past, but when Stone checked his rearview mirror the deputy was ambling toward the open door of the gun shop.
Through the dry mountains, then, into the heat-haze and burning light of the desert. Stone drove past the turnout where the track to the cabin met the road, parked the car behind a billboard advertising a place that sold Indian jewellery, and hiked up a stony slope. He circled wide, coming at the cabin from the west, holing up in a circle of creosote bush, and scoping it out through the twenty-power binoculars he’d stolen from the gun shop.
A pickup truck was parked in front of the cabin, but for a long time nothing moved but heat shimmer. It was so hot sweat evaporated straight from Stone’s skin as he lay on sand and gravel under dry brush with a T-shirt tied like a scarf over his head. Apart from chewing strips of jerky and taking sips of warm water from a plastic jug, he kept so quiet and still that a jack rabbit loped within a yard of him.
He had plenty of time to think about what he needed to do, and think about everything that had happened in the past few days. He remembered saying goodbye to Linda Waverly at the airport. Linda, still possessed by that cold calm, had told him to come back to New York when he had done what needed to be done.
‘Promise me you won’t go through the mirror.’
‘No promises, Linda.’
‘You’re thinking of the woman you left behind. The one that was murdered.’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Right now her son isn’t even born, Adam. Her husband isn’t dead.’
She had never before used his first name.
‘I wasn’t thinking of trying to find her, but I was wondering about trying to save her husband, when the time comes. He was a good friend to me, Linda. The least I can do is warn him off the duck-hunting trip that killed him.’
‘When did it happen? Will it happen?’
‘In a little over six years. Right now he hasn’t even moved to First Foot. He’s still in the army.’
‘You have plenty of time,’ Linda had said. ‘And so do I, if I’m going to try to save my father from himself all over again. We could both wait it out here. It’s as good a place as anywhere else.’
Remembering this and everything else, Stone felt a growing sense of freedom, as if gravity was loosening its hold on him. After this one last task he would be released from the wheel of fate. After this, he would be able to do anything. Send covert messages to the DCI, rat out Knightly and GYPSY early. Help Linda save her father. Warn Jake about the wolves, when the time came. Anything was possible, anything at all.
Close to six o’clock, with the sun westering toward the mountains, two men came out of the cabin and drove the pickup to the rocks where the gate was located. A little later, they drove back down again. Knightly’s men, no doubt about it, left behind to guard the gate after the crew had escaped from 1984, checking it out when it opened each day. Stone wondered about the caretaker.
The temperature dropped quickly after the sun set. The cloudless desert sky was full of stars. The luminous smoke of the Milky Way, sky-spanning constellations. In every sheaf that Stone had ever visited the stars were always the same, but elsewhere it was entirely possible that sentient bears or wolves or creatures outside any human experience or dream had built strange civilisations under different stars. So many different Americas. An infinite variety, for all practical purposes. In all that unimaginably vast array, did the Real and the few sheaves stitched to its time-line by Turing gates really count for all that much? Would it really make any difference if a few of those sheaves vanished, or were changed so radically and violently that they forced all the others connected to them to change too? Maybe not. After all, in the infinite array of Americas, there must to be any number of versions of this particular story. In some, Tom Waverly’s blackmail scheme succeeded and he escaped with Eileen Barrie; in others, Knightly’s black op failed to take the nuclear bomb back in time, or Tom was in prison and his daughter was safe and Stone had returned to the farm and Susan and Petey, or he had never left in the first place. How did he, one of so many different versions of one person, count in all this?
He counted, he thought, in the way that everyone counted. Every individual was only a single drop in an infinite ocean, but every drop sparkled with particularity. This moment was never quite the same as any moment before or since, in any of the multitude of sheaves. He was the sum of millions of such unique moments.
Stone remembered the Harvest Home dance at the Ellison place, two weeks before he’d lit out from New Amsterdam and the First Foot sheaf with David Welch. Tables set up in the yard behind the house had been crowded with bowls and platters of food Jars and bottles of homemade apple cider and beer cooled in clay pots brimful with water. Neighbours talked with neighbours; blue smoke boiled up above the men around the barbecue pit; small children chased each other around the tables. After sunset, a fiddler and an accordionist had struck up and people had moved onto the floor as white-haired Ben Shepherd called out dance steps, beating time with a tambourine, beating time with his hands. That was when Susan had dragged Stone from his chair. Mischief in her eyes and her dirty-blonde hair loose about her flushed face as she told him where to put his feet, when to turn, when to turn her, when to clap, both of them laughing as they capered to ‘Dogs in the Ashcan’, caught up in the music and the moment, caught up in each other, dancers inseparable from the dance.
Stone snapped out of his reverie when he saw a scrap of light move away from the cabin - one of the men was using a flashlight to navigate to the outhouse. Stone covered the four hundred yards quickly and quietly and grabbed the man as he left the outhouse, clamping a hand over his mouth, dispatching him with a single thrust of the hunting knife. He lowered the dead man to the ground and drew the Colt .45 that he’d stolen from the gun shop and crossed to the cabin, took a quick peek at the window, then walked straight in. The second man was sitting at the table in his shirtsleeves, spooning peaches from a can. He stared at Stone, reached for the pistol on the table, and Stone shot him twice in the chest, a quick double tap that knocked him out of his chair.
There was a fresh grave behind the cabin. Stone laid the bodies of Knightly’s men beside it and covered them with a tarpaulin sheet and shovelled dirt over it. He allowed himself a few hours’ sleep, woke at dawn, and worked through a set of exercises in the clean cold air, his muscles loosening sweetly and easily, his mind absolutely centred on the task ahead of him.
He made coffee and scrambled a couple of eggs and ate them with the ham he found in a coolbox, then circled the cabin and found a good spot near the top of a ridge three hundred yards to the south, where two boulders leaned together like the heads of lovers, leaving a wide notch beneath. He rigged a hide with a couple of chair legs and a blanket and plenty of cut brush, swallowed an upper to stay sharp, and sat in the shade of one of the boulders. With shoes planted in gravelly sand and his elbows resting on his knees, he used the binoculars to track every vehicle that moved along the highway cut across the bleached plain. Knightly’s people would be pushing it, driving non-stop across America. A ragged army in retreat, anxious to cross back to the Real and start over, make another attempt to change history. Stone figured that they would arrive by the end of the day, early tomorrow morning at the latest.
They came just after five in the afternoon. Three vans materialising out of the shimmering compression of dust and heat haze, small black bullets running close together, appearing and disappearing as they rode through inversion layers shimmering in dips in the highway. No doubt about it.
Stone wriggled inside the hide, settled the stock of the hunting rifle against his shoulder, and laid its heavy barrel on the dirt-filled pillow behind the screen of thorny branches. It was a good rifle, a heavy-barrelled .50 on a Ruger bolt action, with a chequered walnut stock and a twelve-power telescopic sight. One of its 660-grain rounds could smash an engine block or kill a man by hydraulic shock if it hit him anywhere in the body. He’d tested it that morning, working out the drop of rounds over hundred-yard intervals, marking off distances and memorising landmarks in a killing zone spread either side of the track to the cabin. He was confident that he could hit a target no bigger than a man’s head at five hundred yards.
The three vans came on fast, making the turn onto the track to the cabin one after the other, two miles away and closing, moving in a storm of dust as they roared up the slope. Stone pushed off the rifle’s safety with his thumb, tracked the vans through the cross-hairs of the sight. His mouth was dry, but that was only the amphetamine. He felt cool and clear-headed.
The lead van was in range now. Stone could see its driver behind a flare of sunlight on the windshield. He curled his forefinger around the trigger. He was ready. Anything was possible. Anything at all.
Universes waited to be born.