“Should I say anything?” Parmenter asked.
“You could try saying ‘Boo.’”
She tried remembering Clarence and Lemuel, how conniving they were, how much it hurt to be zapped with a taser and jabbed with a needle. That got her dander up, but that was anger more than fear. She thought of escaping from them and running back to the ranch—the ranch? Where’d the ranch go? She’d lost it.
“Umm …” Parmenter said. “Is there something I could do that would frighten you?”
The blocks broke free and clunked to the ground. Mandy bent in frustration, hanging her head. She felt so tired.
Parmenter got something from Moss through his headset. “Yes, right, I’m getting the same thing here.”
Moss scanned his monitors once again, a curious smile on his face. “Well, she is getting there, she’s a little closer each time.”
Parmenter came back, “But how long can we keep this up? The others are …” He lowered his voice, apparently to keep Mandy from hearing. “You know the situation there. We can’t keep DuFresne and his bunch on hold forever, and we certainly can’t keep a lid on what we’re attempting. Sooner or later it’s going to come to light and we’ll miss our chance entirely.”
Moss nodded, smiling more broadly. “I know. I think you’re right.” He looked over his shoulder.
Immediately behind him, face lit by the monitors, was Dr. Martin DuFresne. He was hearing every word over a speaker and nodding in amused agreement with Parmenter’s appraisal. Next to DuFresne was the man they all referred to as Carlson. The project team knew little or nothing about him except that he was the one who brought large sums of cash in a briefcase on a regular basis and acted as if he and the people he represented owned the whole project, which, for all practical purposes, they did.
Moss continued, “But I think she has enough on her mind right now. She has a premiere tomorrow. You can’t expect her to handle all this tonight.”
Parmenter nodded to Moss, who couldn’t see him, then addressed Mandy. “You’ve done very well, just moving along step by step. Don’t be discouraged. We’ll get there.”
“We’d better,” she said as she peeled off the sensors.
Dane sat alone in Preston’s dining room going over his checklist one last time, page … after page … after page. Every item was already verified and checked off twice by himself, Preston, and Emile, but if he wanted to sleep at all tonight, he would have to go over it one more time just in case that one little thing that slipped everyone’s mind would come to his. By God’s grace, if it was there he’d think of it before he fell asleep.
The doorbell rang. At nearly eleven P.M., that did not feel right. Preston was on the road somewhere between LA and Vegas, and of course he wouldn’t ring the doorbell. Dane wondered if Preston kept any firearms in the house, but it was a little late to be thinking about that, and maybe a little paranoid.
He went to the door and looked through the peephole.
Well … !
He had to crack the door open and put his finger to his lips—Parmenter said the house might be bugged—but after that, he flung the door open and gave Arnie Harrington a hug.
* * *
It was Parmenter’s turn to sleep overnight at the lab; he’d worked and bargained and made offers to make it happen that way, and Moss seemed only too happy to sleep in his own bed that night.
Well and good. Parmenter had things to do he didn’t want anybody to see, such as weighing himself on a medical scale he’d borrowed from upstairs, then combing carefully through his office for his notes, files, and hard drives, all the essential secrets of the Machine’s development and how it worked. He put them all in a box, then weighed himself holding the box.
Not quite.
He threw in a paperweight and two manuals.
Too much.
He took out the paperweight.
Okay. Within limits.
Just after midnight, two semitrucks exited the Las Vegas Freeway and turned up a street one block from the Orpheus. They belched, rumbled, and hissed onto the rubble-strewn vacant lot and parked side by side. Preston Gabriel and two of his crew hopped down from the cab of the first one; three more of his crew climbed down from the cab of the other. They would sleep in the trucks that night, but first they had a lot of prep to do.
Dane took Arnie for a walk through the neighborhood and told him enough to keep him awake worrying. The rest, he supposed, would have to wait until a day long after tomorrow when the story would have an ending. With Arnie tucked in on the living room couch, Dane turned in, easing into the big four-poster in Preston’s guest bedroom. He set the alarm for six in the morning, clicked off the lamp …
And lay sleepless for a little while, dwelling on an image that hovered in his mind—a snapshot that still existed in an album back in Idaho: Mandy, not in a glimmering gown on a big stage, exulting in the thrill and applause of her audience, but in pants and a top she made herself on a portable sewing machine they took everywhere with them on the road, standing at an outdoor picnic grill in a public park, cooking up their dinner. They had no roof over their heads other than a travel trailer, no future beyond a month or two of low-paying festivals, county fairs, or Grange hall gigs, and yet there she was, flipping burgers and boiling green beans, her heart chained to his for the distance. That was forty years ago.
Only the Lord God could have brought him such a woman. He never could have found her himself, never could have known hers would be the kind of love that would last so long and still be so tenacious despite a gulf of age and memory. She was a kid who didn’t even know who he was, but still she came looking.
He hadn’t thought of it in these terms until now, but maybe this was why he always opened doors for her, let her take his arm when they walked, stood when she entered the room. Loving her had always been easy, but somewhere along the way he just knew he had to honor her.
Mandy was numb with exhaustion, one blink away from sleep, but at long last she was alone and it was quiet, and after tomorrow nothing would matter the way it did now. She knelt by her bed.
“Dear Lord, I gave you my life a long time ago and I meant it, so whatever it is, or was—only you know—it’s yours. Near as I’m allowed to know, most of it’s already happened and it’s like I missed it, so I hope you don’t mind my praying backward—I figured I could since time is all messed up anyway—but I hope I lived my life well and you’re pleased, and … whatever my life was—and you know and I don’t, so I’m just saying this, just asking—if it’s okay with you, could it really be true? Could I please have lived my life with Dane? Could I please have been his wife? That’s the only way I can imagine it, and that’s what Dane and everybody tells me, so I hope that’s your way of seeing it, too. I hope we had a great life together.
“But even if I was never in love with him, and even if we were never together, thank you for letting me meet him and love him for just a little while, as weird as it was. I pray you’ll always take care of him and reward him for being the wonderful man he is. He treated me really well. Just wanted to say so.
“Guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She climbed into bed and turned off the light.
chapter
49
At 5:00 A.M., March 25, Parmenter was at the command console of the Machine, running simulations of what might be to come and checking the readings that resulted. He could tell Mandy was still asleep. The monitors were void of activity and, apart from maintaining Mandy’s secondary timeline, the Machine was at rest, allowing him a limited but sufficient access to its functions. This would be his only opportunity.
At 5:20, having double-checked his times, readings, and figures, he weighed himself, holding the box containing his notes, printouts, and hard drives. He’d lost one pound during the night, probably due to dehydration and elimination.
At 5:50 he accessed the Machine. The processing time was snail-paced but he got the input prompt he wanted and entered 14:24:09, two-twenty-four and nine seconds in the afternoon, today.