“Good afternoon, Mr. Christiansen. You’re quite lucky,” he said. “The falling joist wasn’t burning, and your friends got you out quickly. No more than a few scorches and very minor smoke inhalation; you can thank heaven for all that muscle protecting your bones. We kept you under to make sure there was no brain trauma. Breathe deeply, please.”
Tom did, and coughed, as always—there was something about the feel of a stethoscope on the skin of his chest or back that made him cough, had since he was a kid. His lungs did have a faint soreness, the way they felt after a cold or a bout of the flu.
“Excellent. OK, let’s see if the machinery was telling the truth. Look at this light. Then at my finger. Follow the finger….”
The examination was brisk but thorough; he supposed they’d done the EMR and the rest of the sophisticated stuff while he was unconscious.
“Well, you need more rehydration, and there was a mild concussion, but apart from that you’re fine. You can be discharged in a few hours. Take it easy for the next week and drink plenty of water, bouillon or fruit juices. Avoid caffeine or alcohol.”
“Ah… how long was I out, Doctor?”
“It’s shortly after ten A.M., Sunday.”
Whoa! I lost nearly forty-eight hours!
The doctor smiled. “We let you get some rest. Believe me, sleep induction is a wonderful tool. Your friends have been in to see you.”
“Friends?” Tom asked.
“A Mr. Tully, and a young lady—”
“Late twenties, gorgeous?” Tom asked with a grin, and grinned wider at the doctor’s nod. Well, well, he thought. It wasn’t kiss-and-run.
He basked in the glow of that for a second, then let the two help him up and through a small ward—four beds—to a washroom. He felt a little weak, and stiffer than a board, but that faded as he moved. A hot shower made him feel even better, as if the hurt were washing off with the sluicing water and swirling away down the drain in the middle of the little tile floor; he didn’t even much mind the crowded feeling that the hospital shower stall gave him—he was used to that.
Roy Tully showed up first, and laughed outright at Tom’s poorly concealed disappointment. There was a bandage on his right hand, smelling of some sort of burn lotion. Tom made a note of it—as a sort of mental game, he liked to keep track of the people who’d saved his life, and vice versa. This time put Roy up two to one.
“I ran into your Ms. Rolfe in the lobby yesterday,” the little man said. “Oh, sweet Lord Jesus—”
“I can fill in the details,” Tom said dryly, then coughed and took another drink of water. “Nope, nothing serious,” he went on at his partner’s look of concern. “Just need a day or two to get the pipes back in order. What’s up?”
“Wait a second,” Tully said, ducking out of the privacy curtain.
The other beds in this room were vacant at the moment. He dropped a rubber wedge under the door and heeled it home, then brought out his PDA and jacked in a set of display glasses that looked like old-fashioned Ray-Bans. Tom cocked an eyebrow at the precautions but put them on and slid the little mikes on the sides into his ears. The world disappeared; he slitted his eyes against the light that would come when the tiny mirrors and lasers began to shine images onto his retinas.
“This is the disk you had in your hip pocket when we dragged you out. I’ve looked it over, and now you should. It’s… sort of remarkable, Tom. I haven’t let anyone else look at it. Palmed it so Fart, Barf and Itch wouldn’t notice.”
“You haven’t shown it to the boss?” Tom asked, puzzled. Cutting out the competition was fair enough, though he liked Perkins, but the usefulness of data tended to degrade rapidly. “If there’s important information, we should—”
“Shut up and watch.”
The disk was obviously homemade. A professional job would have given a seamless wraparound 3-D effect, with only the fact that you couldn’t alter the viewpoint by turning your head to tell it from the real thing. Here he could see the black-line limits of the visual world at the edges of his vision; the first shots were people at a barbecue or outdoor party: well dressed, wealthy, and at a guess somewhere in the northern Bay Area—Adrienne’s stomping grounds, he thought whimsically.
Then he looked again. There were a couple dozen people visible, and all of them were white; that was not something you’d expect in the Bay Area these days. People moved in and out of the view; an unstaged setting was always less orderly than Hollywood. A flash of bright hair brought him bolt upright—it was exactly the shade of Adrienne’s. Then the woman turned around, and the face wasn’t hers; a strong family resemblance, but a good decade older, and not beautiful—merely good-looking in a horsey way that went with the tweeds, riding boots and breeches she was wearing. Children ran by, chased by a nanny who looked Guatemalan or Mayan.
The icon in the lower left-hand corner showed a date: May 17, 2009.
The view panned up past a big Georgian-style country mansion, and then to a mountain behind it. He blinked, racking his memory….
Looks like Mount Saint Helena, north of Callistoga, Tom thought. But it can’t really be.
For one thing, he’d be in Callistoga if it were Mount Saint Helena, and for another this mountain was a lot shaggier, thickly forested with oak and Douglas fir and even redwoods.
The viewpoint changed. The date was the same, but the camera pickup was on an open hillside, looking out over a smallish city or big town on the flats below, and beyond that a huge bay. Something nagged at him as the view swiveled south and then panned slowly north again.
“Holy shit,” he whispered. “That’s the bay—San Francisco Bay, from the hills above Berkeley!”
Only it wasn’t. It had taken him a full minute to recognize it, because so much was different. His San Francisco Bay was half the size of this—the legacy of a century and a half of silting and draining and reclamation. This one was huge, and it still had its broad skirt of marsh and swamp and tidal flat; through the sound pickup he could hear the thunder of millionfold wings arriving and departing across miles, streams of birds rising like skeins of black smoke from reed swamp and cordgrass salt marsh and open water. The land around the bay was mostly open as well, a checkerboard of farmland south where Oakland should be, marsh and slough and oak-studded savanna elsewhere, and directly below him…
“That should be the campus of UC Berkeley,” he whispered.
There was nothing there but forest and flower-studded openings, and then a road and a complex of what looked like neoclassical public buildings where the city proper should start. The town beyond was a small fraction of Berkeley’s size, and its skyline was utterly without steel and glass.
About twenty, thirty thousand people max, he thought. Same as Fargo, North Dakota.
It was mostly low houses, one or two stories with red-tile roofs, and embowered in trees that made it look more like a forest; there was a port toward the southern edge of the built-up area where the marina should be, a modest factory zone, and then a grid of squares, residential alternating with small parks, rather like the older part of Savannah in Georgia. The bayside freeways just weren’t there.
The Golden Gate and Bay bridges weren’t there either, and neither were the container ships and tankers that should have thronged the surface. Instead only a scattering of vessels could be seen on the cobalt-blue water streaked with whitecaps, and none of them were very large. Some were sail-powered, or at least had masts—big schooners and a couple of ship-rigged three-masters. Across the water… the peninsula that should be covered in white tiers by the buildings and towers of San Francisco was mostly sandhills and scrub, with another biggish town along the water’s edge.