“A hundred and eight pounds.”
“You see the problem.”
“Not yet.”
“It’s like a pair of scales, like a teeter-totter. If you’re going to trade timelines, the trade has to be weight for weight, mass for mass, the same on both sides, an even trade, and you don’t weigh one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds. That’s a lot of candy bars.” He rested his head on his hand. “Oh, and there’s another problem: in order to force the trade, to make the Machine bump from its timeline to yours, yours would have to be the only other timeline available, which means we would have to dissolve your secondary timeline, the one you’re living on right now, so that you fall back into your original, but of course, should you do that, you’ll immediately retrace the original and come to your original end, the, uh, you’ll perish, uh, in a fire.”
She looked at Dane again. She could tell he was reallythinking, his fist propped under his nose, his eyes like steel.
“Oh, and there’s still the other problem,” Parmenter continued. “The mental state, the reach, the method you used to generate that momentary linger on the Machine’s timeline—that would be the moment you appeared in Dane’s home as, uh, yourself. Whatever you did, however you felt, whatever method you used, it was an incredible fluke, an accident, but it put you ahead in time.” He scurried over to the command console and came back with a three-ring binder full of notes and computer printouts. “I got the exact time and location of your appearance from Dane and extrapolated backward—well, actually, extrapolated the Machine forward in computer simulation, but at any rate, the readings show a major deflection in the Machine’s timeline at that point, meaning an incursion of another timeline into its own. Ifthe theory were sound, and ifyou’d weighed one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds at that point, and ifyou’d occupied only your original timeline, you could have bumped the Machine from its timeline to yours and taken its place. You could have done it—if you had any idea how.” He calmed, looking at his notes. “But, of course, you didn’t weigh one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds, you were occupying multiple timelines at the time and had no idea how you were doing what you were doing, and so … here you sit. Which brings us to the last problem.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. It’s just the last one I can think of at the moment.”
“Go ahead.”
“Your reversion, which we still don’t understand, and all the manipulations you’ve imposed on the Machine since then have rendered it … well, it’s all messed up, okay? We can’t make any of this work until we recalibrate it, and we can’t do that until we know the exact extent of your reversion, where you went and when you got there.”
Dane clarified, “He needs to know where you were when you suddenly appeared in our time, and exactly what time and date it was. Do you remember?”
Of course she remembered. She and Seamus had verified it on site at the fairgrounds. Still, she held her peace, reading their faces.
“Oh!” said Parmenter. “Before you say anything, there’s still one more problem, and it’s only fair to tell you. Once you supply the information and we recalibrate the Machine, it will be fully controllable from this room, meaning anyone with access to the controls can dissolve your secondary timeline and retrace you. They will be able to end your life at will.”
She almost laughed. She did smile at the inescapable cosmic joke being played on her, the pitiful sense of doom coursing through her. If this was sanity, being crazy made a lot more sense.
Parmenter said in conclusion, “So it comes down to whether we have your trust, I suppose.”
She did laugh this time, but her laugh was bitter. “You gotta be kidding.”
Parmenter looked at Dane, so she looked at Dane, and Dane began, “I’ve been working on a plan—”
She signaled stop with her hand. “No, no, just hold on a minute.” Then she looked him over. “First, tell me who you are.”
He met her eyes, but then he couldn’t and looked away. The pain she saw all over him took her back to his bedroom when he stopped the dance and backed away … when he didn’t dare look at her as she was leaving. “There’s so much to think about right now, so much we just can’t get wrong—”
“Mr. Collins”—only his last name felt safe—“at least give me that much. I’ve spent every minute of every day trying to figure out who I am, and before I give these guys the ability to fry me if they want, I need to know I’m right. I need to know who you are, and I need to know that youknow.”
He turned his gaze upon her and let his eyes rest there. They were filling with tears, but he blinked them away and spoke resolutely. “Mandy, I’m your husband. We were married June nineteenth, 1971.”
Speaking of time, that stopped it. She explored his eyes, but in a different way now that she had permission, and for the first time since the county fair her world felt quiet, settled, unmoving. It was a sensation she wouldn’t identify until later, that of her soul dropping anchor. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear the plan.”
chapter
47
Dane unrolled the drawings on Preston Gabriel’s dining-room table, and the white-haired magician took a long, careful look at his rendering of a cocoonlike pod. It was six feet tall, hexagonal, with six triangular panels at the bottom that opened like a flower and closed to a point. The pod was designed to be suspended—and then dropped—from a crane. The drawing showed a girl stuffed inside, head down.
“Explosive bolts?” Preston asked, pointing to the panels that composed the pod’s lower end.
“We can conceal them in the seams and she can trigger them with her toes.”
“So how do you protect her head and shoulders?”
They looked at a third man in the room, Emile DeRondeau. The designer/builder replied, “It’s all in how the charges are mounted. We position them to blow outward.”
“After which she has … ?”
Dane answered, “One second, two seconds at best. Think it’s doable?”
Preston shook his head trying to fathom it. “You’d better ask Mandy. The timing—”
“She said she’d find out.”
“That’s not the scary part,” said Emile.
“All the parts are scary,” said Preston.
Emile pointed at an escape hatch on the back of the cocoon, the side away from the audience. “For me, the scariest part is this packing bolt that locks her in.”
No man had an argument there.
“But the point,” said Dane, “is to keep her safe from beginning to end.”
“What about the rigging in the costume?”
Dane whooshed a sigh. “We’re going to need Keisha on that—which means she’s in for some staggering news.”
“How long do we have?” asked Preston.
“Mandy premieres in the big room at the Orpheus Friday, the twenty-fifth of March. This stunt happens in the rear parking lot at two that afternoon. That gives us just under three weeks.”
“You could have come up with this a year ago,” said Emile.
“Well,” said Preston, eyebrows arched at the prospects, “that’s why they call it magic.”
“And if it works, it’ll be the biggest stunt Mandy’s ever done,” said Dane.
“The Grand Illusion.”
Dane looked at the drawing. “Not a bad name for it.”
Jack Wright didn’t care much for Vegas people. “I got two thousand acres and barely enough water thanks to you people down there, you and your politics and your money.”
Loren Moss tried to explain that he had nothing to do with that. “I’m not a hotel owner or a developer. I’m a professor of astrophysics,” he explained.
“So what are you doing in Vegas?”
“Well, that’s what I came to talk to you about.”
They were driving in Jack’s old pickup across his ranch to a piece of ground that wasn’t much use for grazing anymore and a safe distance from people, homes, or anything else breakable. When they were out of sight of any sign of mankind in any direction, Jack pulled to a stop, the desert dust blowing from the truck tires. “This what you had in mind?”