A good space of time passed before Mr. Jansen said anything. “You all right?”
She was, and it bothered her. She tried to imagine the hood and grille of another car plowing into her left side faster than she could react, the scream of tires, the slam of metal, the flying particles of glass and the brain-jarring impact, how it must have sounded and smelled, how it must have felt to be trapped in this crumpled cooker while the smoke and flames roasted her alive… .
But she’d never been here. This was all part of another story she’d never lived.
“Well,” she said at last, “it happened to somebody. That’s a fact.”
She would have climbed out, but Mr. Jansen stood on the ground immediately to her left and didn’t move. He was shining his flashlight at the floor of the car, at the ashes and crumblings around her feet.
“What?” she asked.
He just wiggled the flashlight to draw her attention, so she looked.
With each wave of his light, something amid the ashes sparkled. Something pretty in the middle of all this ugliness? She bent over, reached for the sparkle, and felt a small, crusty chain between her fingers. At first it was just another forlorn piece of someone else’s tragedy, but when she lifted it from the ashes and spread it across her palm …
A silver chain, stained by ash and smoke, the tiny links wilted by the heat, the ends broken and burned away, and in the center of its length … one indistinguishable lump of silver, and one intact silver dove.
“I saw it there when they first brought the car in,” said Mr. Jansen. “But Dr. Kessler said, ‘No, don’t touch it, leave it right where it is.’” He tilted his light to study her face. “Looks like it was this that she was keeping for you.”
chapter
45
Parmenter was driving the car. “Fortunately, it’s after eight. The main crew’s gone home and Moss is the only one there.”
Dane was lying on the floor in the back. “What does he know about your contact with me?”
“Just about everything. I had to contact you first. You had knowledge of the past forty years, you already knew who Mandy was, you know who she is—with a little explanation, of course …”
“Of course.”
“While Mandy is, or was, a young girl with no idea in the world that she’d been married to you for forty years, no way to fathom or believe what we would tell her. We needed you to help us contact and communicate with her, which meant contacting and communicating with you, which meant letting you in on all the pertinent details. That much he knows.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Well, I—”
“Don’t.”
“Right. Don’t. Okay, here we are.”
“Just drive on in and act normal.”
“Act normal. Riiight …”
Dane felt the car slow, then turn, then roll to a stop. Parmenter rolled down his window, and Dane could hear the beep from the card reader as Parmenter swiped his card through it. A faint mechanical whir told him a gate was opening.
They drove down a ramp to underground parking, the sound of the engine and tires reverberating off the concrete walls. Parmenter pulled into a parking lot and shut off the engine. He gave the area a quick 360-degree sweep, then said, “Okay. We’d better make it quick.”
An entry door was only a few yards from where the car was parked. They ducked through, took an elevator up one floor, went down a bare hallway to a service door, stepped through that to another hallway that led to another door that Parmenter unlocked with his security card.
Inside that door was a cluttered office: a desk piled with blue-penciled computer printouts, stacks of binders and manuals against the wall, two whiteboards filled with incomprehensible formulas, and a computer system with three monitors side by side, each one showing a fluctuating display of columns, numbers, graphs, and vaporous, undulating shapes.
Parmenter rolled a chair from a corner. “Have a seat.”
Dane settled in, appreciating all the scribblings on the whiteboard—even if Parmenter had faked all of it, it was still impressive.
“That’s our bottom line, I suppose,” the scientist said, waving a felt tip marker at the whiteboard. “I reworked it several times, from several directions, and every time I landed on one conclusion.” He sighted down the marker at some scribblings in the lower right corner of the second whiteboard, some letters mixed with some numbers and a squiggle sitting on top of some other letters and numbers divided up with slashes and squiggles.
Dane ventured a guess. “Mandy’s in deep soup.”
“Well, we all are, but she is at the heart of the problem. Her reversion was so vast—forty years, several hundred miles!—that her gravitational leverage on the Machine is insurmountable. We can’t counter it. She’s controlling the Machine, using all its power and capability to perform her magic.” He scanned the scribblings for help, but then just said it. “And to maintain her secondary timeline, the very thing that keeps her forty years behind the rest of us. But it’s not without cost. The deflection necessary—”
The other door to the office opened and a younger man, with black curly hair, stepped in. Parmenter rose to make the introduction. “Dane Collins, may I introduce my associate and project manager, Dr. Loren Moss.”
Dane rose and shook the man’s hand. There were no smiles.
“Loren, I was just about to tell Dane about the deflection debt, how it forced retracings of the other subjects.”
Moss nodded and addressed Dane. “Every reversion, every time we shift a timeline or create a new one, we bend space just a little more. It’s like bending a spring; the more you bend it, the more it resists, until you just can’t add any more strain without removing some first. We call that deflection debt. We can’t place any more stress on the universe without relieving some first.”
Parmenter continued, “The rats were so small and the reversion so brief, just a matter of minutes, that the deflection debt was negligible. Monkeys were larger and had greater mass, so they required a little more. The human subjects had far greater mass and required much longer reversions—some a day or two, the soldier—”
“Seven days,” said Moss.
“One of our own staff—”
“Me,” Moss offered. “Fourteen months.”
“Followed by Ernie Myers who only required a three-hour reversion; we reverted him back to the instant he fell from his ladder so he’d remember the fall but not remember being injured. It worked—the first time. Doris Branson, the same thing. We reverted her to the moment of her car accident so the last thing she remembered was losing control of the car. That was four hours. But it was adding up. Our readings indicated a building imposition on the space-time fabric and we were wondering how much more strain we could impose before we reached our limit.”
“I think Mandy put us there.”
“Absolutely,” said Parmenter, referring to the computer monitors. “Not that it’s her fault, of course, but the deflections she imposed were so severe that the space-time fabric began to cast off the earlier deflections. I imagine that little toy block has retraced by now …”
“It’s like a ship that’s too heavy,” said Moss. “If you still want to load more cargo you have to unload something else first.”
“So our little toy car broke into pieces again, our restored pop can squashed again, the rats all retraced, and then the monkeys—” Parmenter leaned toward the monitors. “Wait, hold on.”
Hold on?Dane was about to pounce with a question and now Parmenter was saying “Hold on”? Dane held his peace; it looked serious.
Parmenter tapped away at his keyboard, muttering computations to himself. Moss waited patiently, no doubt familiar with how Parmenter operated. At last, alarmed, Parmenter leaned back, blew out a breath, and said, “She’s coming here.”
Moss looked incredulous. “Coming here? You mean … ?”