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Page 31.

Chapter 24.

The unmarked police car swished through the night. The rain had let up, leaving a pleasant and muddled kind of soggy silence in which crickets set up a racket. Foggy street lights cometed past.

McCarthy drove, Dusenbery sitting beside him with that easy, melancholy smile that Jeff was beginning to detest.

Jeff and Beering sat in the rear. Beering held forth: "I tried to humor my brother. The country was in a depression. Beering Industries proved to be a rocky boat to navigate, given labor strikes and so on. Louis kept coming to me with his grandiose vision of the future. Why just stop at building Empire State buildings, he said. Let's build a society made of concrete and steel and workers' sweat. Let's build a future in which the truly productive... well, you know all that stuff. Then one day he came and said, Albert, I've met the most interesting people. There is this Max Dusenbery who has all these wonderful contacts. We're getting ready to travel into the future. Oh sure, I said, aren't we all. I don't mean just like that, he said. Think of it, Albert, a machine that will take me to the future. I'll be able to converse with the brilliant minds of the time. We'll watch little family cars fly through the air between great skyscrapers, because anything will be possible. There will be walkways among tall buildings. There will be starlight and stardust on our best dreams. Well, he went on and on like that, and I just bled for him. Oddly though, he seemed to have a rational plan. Tell him, Max."

Max Dusenbery turned, and passing lights played on his craggy features. "A mass car, Dr. Maxxon. A heavy, heavy thing, powered by psychic energy, capable of bulling its way through time in the mind of a great psychic."

Jeff laughed. "I guess this is the moment to say I think you are all nuts. But I'll keep my observation to myself."

"I don't blame you," Beering whispered.

"It gets better," Dusenbery said. "Remember, we were all part of the Beering ambiance at the time. Look at this old man." He indicated Albert with his chin. "Didn't know he was a high-stepper in his time, did you? We were all caught up with the music, the dance, the whole thing. It's what you hear, whispering around the halls and corridors of Raritania City, despite ghettoes and boom boxes and tawdry signs. That hint of nostalgia maybe, than croon from yesterday, that song of the times. Somehow, this city is caught in a warp, a wrinkle, an elbow of time, that just won't let go. Haven't you felt it?"

Jeff felt a humming inside, electrical, atomic, or something. He remembered the pinkish energy of cars and signs past, of two little girl skaters regarding him as though he were crazy. "Yes, I have to admit, it's gotten to me."

The car whizzed through narrow lanes and tunnels that had once been considered very advanced, high-tech highways. The car plowed through puddles amid broad boulevards laid out during the 1930's, through a park with weeping branches, past a cemetery whose iron railings were upheld by marble obelisks. The streets became narrow lanes among wealthy homes sleeping in their brick walls. As they passed an ivied mansion, Albert Beering nudged: "My home. My father built it in 1934."

The car crept along, past the Beering pile, past other prominent homes, and eventually turned up a driveway with a sign: Beering Clinic. Stone lions guarded the entrance. Two women in white nurses' uniforms were just getting into a dark car that sped away by a side entrance. The guard who had let them out was about to lock the front door, but stopped when McCarthy tooted his horn.

"It's me, McCarthy, Smitty," he shouted. He said over his shoulder. "Old pal of mine. Retired cop."

Jeff followed the other men up the stairs. The Beering Clinic had something dreary and terminal about it. Jeff felt a prodding in his mind. For an instant, a Depression glass light played in the heavy tree crowns, and a strain of syncopated jazz bounced around in echoes before being swallowed by wind and darkness.

McCarthy and Smitty (cauliflower nose under shiny visor) exchanged a guffaw or two. Then Beering's group walked briskly down corridors smelling of polish and dusty carpets. It was a place, Jeff recognized instinctively, where people died, and every hard angle and uncompromising glimmer of wall or chair was cheerless. Jeff felt a hot prickly of sweat under his collar as Albert Beering nudged open a heavy white door on silent hinges.

"Meet Anna Cranston," Beering whispered.

Jeff felt a tingle in his legs as he entered the room. There was a mausoleal silence inside, and a greenish glow. The room smelled faintly of carbolic acid. Several monitors glowed, and there was a faint, steady peeping sound. I.V. bags hung silently dripping over a bed. In the bed, under a single sheet, lay a husk of a person.

For a moment, Jeff thought he heard laughter, a tinkle of glasses, a few strains of band music. An illusion, caught up in the dripping and peeping. Jeff stepped closer. On the bed lay a very old woman. Her arms looked like rubbery sticks. Her face bore a kind of frown, or was it an illusion of the shrinkage of her features? Her little remaining hair was like white down over skull-gray scalp. Her eyes were closed, and sunken.

Beering pulled Jeff back outside and closed the door. "An old woman, probably on the verge of death, right? There but for the grace of God go I. She went to school with my brother, and was his age. An attractive young woman she was back then, hard to believe now, but time takes us all, doesn't it? She was the medium, Maxxon. She is the one he said would propel him through time, into the future. What a lot of nonsense it seemed. I had almost forgotten, until these killings began. I didn't realize how I loved him. I've had all these years to think about it, after he died so young."

Jeff took a deep breath. "Okay. Suppose I somehow convince myself to accept that all of this may be true. Now what?"

Beering said: "Anna doesn't have long to go. I've been in daily contact with the doctors. She's inoperable and hovering between life and death. Don't you see the dilemma he is in right now? He's not dumb. He's done his research. Wouldn't you, if you'd visited your own future? He knows he died going back. He knows also he has come as far forward as he can. If she dies, and he's caught outside his own time, he'll just vanish because her propelling mind will be gone. He feels he has a mission to accomplish here, but he has little time. He's desperate. He's throwing people into clocks. In the back of his mind is the question--how can he do what he wants to do here and still save himself?"