“It’s looking promising,” was all Corrigan would say.
She brightened up. “So when are you coming up to New York again? We need to celebrate.”
“I told you, nothing’s definite.”
She pouted. “Well, what’s wrong with practicing celebrating? I need your kind of company.”
An icon indicated another call waiting, with a message caption superposed from Judy that read: MILTON PERL, BERRENHAUSER. “Amanda, sorry, but I have to go,” Corrigan said. “Something’s waiting.”
“Let me know soon, then?”
“Sure. ‘Bye.”
Perl was calling to suggest that he and Corrigan ought to meet sometime and get to know each other better. Corrigan agreed, and they fixed a dinner spot for the end of the week. Then Endelmyer’s secretary came through again to advise that a meeting was being scheduled for the following week to reappraise Oz, and the Board would like Corrigan to present his assessment and proposals.
But commercial and material success were by now beginning to look mundane to Corrigan. Carried away in his inner speculations, he found himself wondering about the possibility of devoting himself to more profound callings. He experienced a conviction of being destined for greater things: things that would shake the world, rewrite a chapter of science, shape history. . . . And then Judy buzzed through to say that Lola Ellis from California had arrived and was waiting outside.
As soon as Judy showed her in, Lola wearing a blue coat and carrying a white purse, Corrigan knew that they had met before, but something looked wrong. And she obviously knew him, for instead of acting like somebody being shown into the office of a stranger, she stood waiting expectantly . . . yet at the same time showing apprehensiveness, as if unsure whether he would know her.
Ellis, Essell. Lola. . . . Of course! He should have gotten it from the name alone. She was twelve years younger too, of course, but he should have known the features well enough.
It was Lilly, from his dream life. A twelve-year-younger version of Lilly.
But that made nonsense out of everything that he’d come to terms with over the last two days. For she didn’t belong here. How could somebody from a dream fabrication suddenly walk into this life?
He nodded to Judy, and she left, closing the door. Corrigan and Lilly stood, staring at each other.
He shook his head, nonplussed. Lilly watched his face, giving him that same uncanny feelings that she had always been able to that she was reading the thoughts going on behind. Then she nodded, and he realized in the same moment what she had been looking for and had seen there.
“It’s happened to you too, hasn’t it?” Lilly said.
Chapter Thirty-five
Idiotic fantasies! Megalomaniac delusions!
Corrigan asked himself yet again how he could have allowed himself to be so carried away by it all. All he had needed to do was check the list of Air Force volunteers who were coming to Pittsburgh to see if it included a Lillian Essell from California. If it did, then she had not been a fabrication concocted in his head. Neither, then, had the rest of the simworld existence that he remembered.
They walked slowly along the embankment by the river between the Gateway Clipper Landing, where the tourist riverboats berthed, and the Smithfield Street Bridge. The day was dull and overcast with a hint of rain on the way, the river gray and sluggish. On the far side, the evening traffic was building up on the Penn Lincoln Parkway at the foot of the vertical, rectangular foothills of downtown Pittsburgh. They had got out of Xylog to be on their own and try to think through what it meant. Corrigan had been silent for a long time. Lilly stared ahead, her hands thrust deep in her coat pockets, leaving him all the time he needed.
Yesterday she had woken up to find herself twelve years younger, back in the hotel where the Air Force volunteers for Oz had been lodged that long ago, the day after her arrival from California. She remembered going to Xylog with the others, but her recollections of exactly what took place were vague, since, like Corrigan, she was recalling them from a perspective of many years later; soon after that they ceased completely, and the next thing she knew was being confused and slowly coming together again in the same kind of way as he had experienced.