What did happen, though, was that Marsha edged her chair a little closer and a little closer to his over the course of the afternoon, until she might as well have been sitting in his lap. As Rick’s frustration with Fermat’s last theorem grew, he began to pay more attention to the woman by his side. A sudden rumble made them both look down at their stomachs, then Rick broke out laughing. “Guilty,” he said. “And I’m guilty of making you skip lunch, too. Would you let me take you to dinner?”
She rubbed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. “Sure. But this time bring a notebook and a pen.”
Over steak and shrimp in a quiet corner of the Bayview Inn, Marsha said, “You know, I forgot all about it in the excitement, but when you had your flash of inspiration there in the quad, I had another shot of déjà vu myself.”
“Impossible.”
“No it’s not. The odds for two of us are just a hundred million to one.”
“Hah. What did you remember?”
She got an impish grin and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, but she finally said, “Well, I saw a whole chain of events leading up to my asking you up to my apartment for the night.”
“You’re kidding.”
Marsha toyed with a shrimp on her plate. “I usually don’t kid about that sort of thing.”
“No, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, That’s wild, because that’s the flash I got last night.”
“What?”
“Last night, at the party, when I said I’d just had a moment of déjà vu, that’s what I’d seen. You and me going to bed in an upstairs apartment. Yellow curtains on the windows, and flannel sheets with little sheep printed on them.”
“That’s my bedroom!” Marsha said. “Do you remember anything more about it?”
He shook his head. “Not about the room, but, um, you’ve got a couple of freckles just to the side of your left breast.”
She dropped her fork to the plate. “This isn’t really déjà vu we’re having, is it?”
“I don’t think so. It’s more like precognition or something.”
“Does that mean you’re going to solve Fermat’s last theorem?”
Rick shrugged. “Who cares? What I want to know is whether or not you’re going to invite me up to your apartment tonight.”
Her impish grin returned. “I don’t know. You haven’t kissed me yet. I never invite a man up to my apartment unless he’s a good kisser.”
“Well,” Rick said, leaning forward and puckering his lips, “I’m willing to take the test.”
Rick woke in the middle of the night with the answer fully-formed in his mind. He reached for the note pad he always kept on the nightstand, but his hand met something cold and hard that didn’t belong there, tipping it over with a crash. Oh, right. Different bedroom.
“What was that?” Marsha asked sleepily.
“Sorry,” Rick muttered. “I think I tipped over the lamp.”
“S’all right,” she said, snuggling up against him. “Worry about it in the morning.”
“But I—” need a note pad, he almost said, then he realized he didn’t after all. Whatever his thought had been, he’d lost it again.
He lay back down and stared at the ceiling. What the hell was going on? Marsha was right, this wasn’t just déjà vu. Something was happening to their minds.
Everything in the room had a silvery tint; the Moon had risen while they slept, and was now shining on the bed. A shadow drifted slowly across the foot of it, and Rick thought for a moment that it must be from a passing car’s headlights, but then he realized the angle was all wrong for that. It had to be something up in the sky.
He looked out the window and realized there was a third possibility: Someone was walking along the flat-topped roof of the next building over, and the Moon behind him threw his shadow directly into Marsha’s bedroom. It looked like the guy was carrying something on his shoulder, something that glinted in the moonlight.
A gun? No, it was too big for that, unless it was a bazooka. It looked more like a telescope. Oh, sure. The night was clear and the Moon was bright as could be; it was probably just an astronomy student out there.
Or a Peeping Tom. As Rick watched, the person on the roof set the telescope on a tripod and pointed it straight at Marsha’s window. When he bent down to look through it, Rick raised his head into the shaft of moonlight, middle finger extended.
The person with the telescope leaped back as if Rick had punched him in the nose. Rick slid out of bed and stepped to the window, just to let the guy know for sure he’d been spotted. He was about to open it and shout at the son of a bitch when the man took another step back, tripped over something, and disappeared.
“Oh shit,” Rick said.
Marsha sat up. “Now what?” she asked.
Rick swept his hand around in the darkness at the foot of the bed, looking for his clothes. “I think somebody just fell off the roof over there.”
“What?”
“Somebody was looking at us with a telescope. When I flipped him off, he backed up and dropped out of sight.”
“There was somebody looking at us?” Marsha asked.
“Don’t worry, he just got there.” Rick tugged on his pants and shirt, found his shoes and put them on without socks, and said, “Keep an eye on the roof. I’m going over there and look for a body on the ground.”
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” Marsha asked.
“Not until we know there’s a reason to,” Rick said. “It’d be better for both of us if we didn’t have our names in the paper.”
Marsha nodded. “Good point.”
Rick grabbed his coat on the way out. It was cold as hell stepping into the winter night straight from a warm bed, but he tugged the zipper up to his neck and stuck his hands in his pockets while he jogged across the courtyard, the snow squeaking beneath his shoes.
There was nobody on the ground on either side of the building. No tracks, either. The guy hadn’t gone over the edge, then, and he had to be still in the building. Rick tried the front door, but it was locked, so he went around to the side with the fire escape and leaped up, caught the counterbalanced ladder with one hand and pulled it down. Then, hoping nobody else had called the police either, he crept up the iron staircase three flights to the roof.
The telescope was still there, but Rick couldn’t see the guy who’d set it up. He approached the scope cautiously, looking for tracks in the snow, and sure enough, he found some. A semicircle had been trampled down behind the telescope, and four distinct prints led backward away from it where the peeper had retreated, but they didn’t go anywhere. They vanished into smooth snow, as if the guy had leaped into the sky.
Rick looked for the other end of the trail of footprints, the ones whoever it was had made when he approached, and he saw the same thing. Footprints suddenly appeared in the snow, leading a dozen feet or so up to the telescope.
Too strange. Rick turned once around, looking for anything he might have missed, but he was alone on the rooftop. Alone and cold. With a shrug, he waved at Marsha’s silvery form behind her window, then picked up the telescope and carried it back down the stairway. Let the Peeping Tom come after it if he wanted it back.
“It doesn’t have any lenses,” Marsha pointed out when they’d set it up in her living room. “Mirrors either.” Rick looked down the front of the tube and realized she was right, but when he aimed the telescope at the Moon and looked through the eyepiece, he saw a heavily-cratered surface that looked close enough to touch.
“Something’s certainly doing the job,” he said. He aimed it down to ward the one lit window in the building across from them and looked again. He could see into the room—a kitchen, it turned out—as clearly as if he had his face up against the glass, and now he heard a woman’s voice saying, “Come on, honey, get up or you’ll be late for work.”