“You can see that?” asked Olivenko.
“Seeing what you saw, you have a soldier’s eye,” said Loaf. It was the most generous thing he had ever said to Olivenko. “But the mask has clarified all my senses. Overwhelming for days. Too much. And it was trying to take control. Manipulate me. But I would not obey. And now it doesn’t try. But I see far and clear. I hear everything. I smell everything. The mask helps me sort it out. It’s a gift.”
“What did I tell you?” said Vadesh. “That’s how I designed it to work!”
“Even the original facemasks probably made their victims feel that way,” said Umbo sourly. He turned away from Loaf. For weeks, he had been holding the man’s hand, guiding him; now it was as if Umbo couldn’t bear to see him or be near him.
“We’ll have plenty of time to sort out who and what Loaf has become,” said Rigg. “Right now we have a few hundred people waiting to greet us on the other side of the Wall.”
“Three thousand, two hundred and twenty, including the babies,” said Loaf.
“You counted them?”
“All the ones who can be seen,” said Loaf. “There are more behind the hill, since a few dozen people have left and a few others have come out since we’ve been watching.”
“Three thousand, two hundred and twenty is a suspiciously round number,” said Umbo.
“It’s an estimate,” said Param.
“It’s the exact count,” said Loaf. “Someone just left, so it’s three thousand, two hundred and nineteen now.”
“Counting the babies,” said Olivenko drily.
“When people make up numbers and want them to sound exact,” said Rigg, “they usually make sure the number doesn’t end with zero or five. But in the real world, there’s a twenty percent chance that a random number of items will end in either zero or five.”
“So you believe him,” said Param.
“There are several hundred people behind the hill,” said Rigg. “I see their paths. And while I can’t say if Loaf’s count is correct, I have no reason to doubt it. We all saw how the facemasks fought in the battle we watched. Their precision, their accuracy. Facemasks enhance the abilities of the people who wear them.”
“The people controlled by them, you mean,” said Umbo.
“Loaf says he isn’t controlled,” said Rigg, “and we have no evidence to contradict him.”
“So you’re just going to believe him while he waits for a chance to plant baby facemasks on all of us?” said Param.
“I won’t do that,” said Loaf.
“They don’t reproduce that way,” said Vadesh.
“You don’t know half of what they do,” said Loaf, turning on Vadesh. “In all your years of studying them, you didn’t know they can give off spores within fifteen minutes of deciding to?”
“How can you possibly know that?” said Vadesh. “Humans and facemasks don’t communicate.”
“It would be interesting to take you apart and see how you work,” said Loaf. “So smart, and yet you’re only machine smart, not human smart.”
Vadesh stood in silence.
“I don’t want to cross through the Wall with all those people there,” said Rigg.
“Then don’t,” said Param.
“It’s what we came for,” said Umbo.
“I mean, don’t do it when those people are watching.”
“You think they’ll get bored and go away?” asked Olivenko.
Param looked at Olivenko with her are-you-really-this-stupid expression.
“She means that we should cross the Wall before these people show up,” said Umbo.
Rigg looked at the people’s paths. “They’ve only been here for a couple of days.”
“What does that matter?” asked Param. “Why don’t we go back ten years?”
The idea immediately appealed to Rigg. “You’re right. We don’t know when the next ship from Earth will come. Ten years will give us plenty of time to visit all the other wallfolds and figure out what we can do to defend against them, because we’d know the Earth ships wouldn’t come for at least ten years.”
Vadesh immediately dampened their enthusiasm. “You only got control of the Wall nineteen days ago. If you go back in time before that, you’ll have no control. You’ll have to pass through the Wall on your own, they way you got into Vadeshfold in the first place.”
Rigg immediately remembered the crushing despair, the utter terror, the agony of his minutes—his decades, it had seemed—inside the Wall.
“This time we wouldn’t have General Citizen trying to kill us,” Param said helpfully.
“And now you know how to go back in time and then return without my help,” said Umbo.
“Maybe someday we’ll need to do that—go back in time to put off our confrontation with the people of Earth,” said Rigg. “But right now, since nineteen days ago, any two of us can simply walk through the Wall.”
“So let’s go back nineteen days to dodge the crowd,” said Olivenko.
“I can’t calibrate it like that,” said Umbo.
“Neither can I,” said Rigg. “It’s not like the paths have calendars attached.” But even as he said it, Rigg realized that he could do it well enough. He remembered that when he first discovered that the paths were actually people in motion through time, he had been standing on a clifftop with Umbo, unbeknownst to him, slowing time so that he could see the people instead of the paths. Couldn’t they simply go back a day at a time? Or count back? By picking one animal’s path, and then another’s, Rigg could work his way back to the exact time, then attach to that animal and bring the others with him.
“You’ve thought of a way?” asked Olivenko.
“Yes,” said Rigg. “Take my hands.”
“No,” said Vadesh. “Get inside the flyer, so I can go back, too, and still have the flyer with me.”
Rigg looked at him coldly. “We won’t need you,” said Rigg. “And I don’t want to send you back in time, knowing what you know now.”
“What do I know that’s so dangerous?”
“I don’t want you knowing, nineteen days ago, that our party broke up, that we came here and found people waiting on the other side. That Loaf started talking again.”
“What harm do you think would come from that?” asked Vadesh.
“The more you argue for being sent back in time,” said Rigg, “the more determined I am never to let you do so. Because you wouldn’t want it so much if you didn’t have some plan for exploiting your present knowledge in the past.”
To that, Vadesh had nothing to say.
Olivenko laughed. “Let’s go, then.”
“Nineteen days,” said Rigg.
“Eighteen,” said Loaf.
Again they looked at him.
“It’s been eighteen days since I got the mask,” said Loaf. “That’s when you got control over the Walls, isn’t it? That’s what I remember.”
They all looked at Vadesh.
“He’s confused,” said Vadesh.
“You lied to us,” said Rigg. “You said nineteen days. You counted on us to trust your accuracy. So we’d take you back to the day before I took control of the ship. So you could do something to prevent it.”
Vadesh said nothing.
“Expendables,” said Olivenko. “Can’t trust them, can’t kill them.”
“Get in the flyer and go back to the ship,” said Rigg.
Vadesh immediately started toward the ship. Then he stopped and said, “Rigg, if you only—”
“Go without stopping, without speaking. Go.”
Vadesh got back into the flyer. In moments it rose into the air and flew away.
“Maybe that was a mistake,” said Umbo.
Of course he’d say that, thought Rigg. Of course I was wrong. “Why?” asked Rigg, trying to keep impatience and resentment out of his voice.