“What did you say?” Marsha asked.
“I didn’t say anything,” Rick said, stepping aside so Marsha could have a look. “It sounded like it came from the telescope.”
“No way.” She peered into the eyepiece. Rick saw movement in the window, and Marsha said, “A woman in a blue bathrobe just walked past.”
The voice said, “I’ll cook you a couple of eggs. How do you want ’em?”
“Scrambled,” a male voice said.
“This is bizarre,” Marsha whispered, backing away from the telescope.
“It’s the NSA again,” Rick said disgustedly. “They’re the only people who could possibly have access to something like this.”
Marsha looked at him with wide eyes. Every mathematician lived in dread of the NSA. “What do we do?”
“Damned if I know,” Rick said. He examined the telescope again. “Nikon?” he muttered, reading the label on the side of the tube.
“Yeah, right.”
“No, really, that’s what it says.”
Marsha bent over to look, and that motion triggered another flash of déjà vu: Rick clearly remembered seeing her bend down to look at his proof of Fermat’s last theorem, the one where he graphed An + (A + 1 )n and (A + 2)n, and the graphs proved that the two functions never intersected. But exactly what was being plotted against what?
Marsha gasped. “They’re going to break in,” she said.
“Who?”
“Them.” She pointed toward the roof across the way, where three figures had appeared. They were black silhouettes against the Moon, and each one turned around a couple of times, evidently looking for their ’scope. Rick pointed it toward them and heard a man’s voice say, “The doot must have come up and grabbed it.”
One of them turned and looked toward Marsha’s apartment. Rick reached out and switched off the light, but it was too late. The voice said, “Yada, there they are.”
“Now what?” another voice said.
“Rewind?” the third one, female, said.
“Nodo. I’ve already crossed myself twice,” the first voice said. “I do it again and I’ll spring a twonky a month long.”
“Bort that,” the woman said, “Let’s just go take it back.”
“But won’t that snark his discovery? We trang that up and the department’ll send us all back to the Cretaceous.”
“We’ve already tranged it. If he’s figured out how to work the scope, he’s probably—”
“Like it’s really tough to point it at something.”
“—Listening to us right now.”
“Oh skrot, you’re right. Let’s bounce before we snark it up any worse.” One by one all three figures disappeared again, and this time there was no doubt about them falling off the roof or hiding behind something. They simply vanished.
“That’s not the NSA,” Marsha whispered.
“No, I don’t think so,” Rick whispered back “But whoever they are, you were right; they’re coming here.”
“What can we do?”
“Have you got a gun?”
Marsha shook here head. “Just pepper gas,” she said, taking her purse from the table by the door and removing the leather-covered spray canister from inside it.
“Good,” Rick said. “Get ready to use it.” He went into the kitchen and grabbed the broom from the corner by the back door, busted off the bristled end by stomping on it, and swished the ragged broken end back and forth in the air. “This ought to do,” he said. “Now we stand back to back in the living room and wait for them to make their move.”
They took up their positions. “Don’t hesitate,” Rick said. “Spray ’em all the moment you see a target.”
“Right.” Marsha held out the pepper canister. “Shouldn’t we call the pol—”
But it was too late. With a flicker of light and a whuff of displaced air, the three figures from the roof materialized right beside them. Rick felt a moment of intense déjà vu; he could hardly see their black-clad shapes through the sudden visions of the elegant graph proving Fermat’s last theorem, but he swung around with the broomstick and flailed away at the shadowy figures beyond it.
Marsha spun and sprayed with the deadly accuracy of a city-bred woman, and all three intruders dropped to the floor, coughing and choking. A beam of blue light shot out from one of them and struck the wall beside Rick, and he leaped aside and whacked at the source of it with the stick. He felt wood strike flesh, and the light winked out. Holding his breath and blinking to regain his sight, he reached down and picked up a wide-barreled pistol-gripped flashlight and backed away again.
“Got any rope?” he asked.
It took fifteen minutes before any of their captives recovered well enough to speak. Rick and Marsha had tied them to kitchen chairs, and stood back to wait. In the bright overhead light, their stealth-black oversuits looked less threatening, almost silly.
“I recognize all three of them,” Rick told her. “They were at your welcoming party, and in the quad when we both got hit by that déjà vu. And I’d be willing to bet they were in the car that came at me from nowhere on the way home, too. Weren’t you?” He pointed the blue light gun at the most-recovered of the intruders.
“Hey, watch that,” the kid said, still sniffling from the pepper spray. “You pop me with that, you’ll twonk the whole connie.”
“You want to put that in English?” Rick asked.
“What part didn’t you snag?”
“Twonk.”
“Twonk? You’re tranged. I’m sure that’s a twencie. From way before your time, in fact. Means screwing up the time flow. Leaving a twonky, like a magnoscope on a rooftop.”
Marsha said, “I think he means an anachronism.”
“Straight! You twonk the connie—that’s continuum—and you cause all sorts of problems downstream.”
Rick leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Are you trying to tell us you’re time travelers?”
“Ain’t trying to tell you nada. You asked.”
Rick wouldn’t have believed a word of it if it hadn’t been for the telescope in the living room, and the way his head filled with future memories every time these guys showed up. Did time machines leave some kind of wake that caused déjà vu?
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“What do you think? We’re here to dock you solving Fermat’s last theorem.”
“Dock?” Marsha asked.
“Doc-u-ment-a-rize,” the kid said. “It’s a field lab in historical vidding.”
Rick laughed. “You’re nuts. You’re tranged. I haven’t solved it. I wasn’t even interested in it until you guys showed up at the party last night and gave Vince the idea.”
“We didn’t give nobody zot.”
“Ah, but you did.” Rick tugged a paper towel off the roll beneath a cabinet and drew a quick XY axis on it with a pen from the cup by the phone, then he swept two curves upward from the origin. “That’s it, right?”
The kid’s eyes bugged. “Torrie, you get that?”
The girl coughed. “You skrottin’ me? I can hardly see.” Rick wondered how she could see anyway; her glasses—as lensless as the telescope—blinked from the frames with a dozen different colors, all aimed inward.
The kid said, “Skrot, that would’ve been maxie. The whole concept swished out in four lines on a napkin. Maybe we can get him to do it again. Will you?”
“Weren’t you listening?” Rick said. “I got the idea from you. Every time you show up, I see it in my head.”