screaming for help.”
“Took them where? ” Instead of answering me, he said, “Carpe cerevisi.”
“Meaning? ”
“Seize the beer.” I took an icy bottle from the cooler and passed it to
him, hesitated, and then opened a beer for myself.
“Not wise to drink and drive, ” I reminded him.
After taking a long swallow, I said, “I bet God likes beer. Of course,
He’d have a chauffeur.” The twenty-foot-high levee walls rose on both
sides of us. The low and starless sky appeared to be as hard as iron,
pressing down like a kettle lid.
“Transport where? ” I asked.
“Remember your wristwatch.”
“Maybe it needs repair.”
“Mine went nuts, too, ” he reminded me.
“Since when do you wear a watch, anyway? ”
“Since, for the first time in my life, I started feeling time running
out, ” he said, referring not solely to his own mortality but to the
fact that time was running out for all of us, for the entire world as we
knew it. “Watches, man, I hate them, hate everything they stand for.
Evil mechanisms. But lately I start wondering what time it is, though I
never used to care, and if I can’t find a clock, I get way itchy. So now
I wear a watch, and I’m like the rest of the world, and doesn’t that
suck? ”
“It sucketh.”
“Like a tornado.” I said, “Time was screwed up in the egg room.”
“The room was a time machine.”
“We can’t make that assumption.”
“I can, ” he said. “I’m an assumption-making fool.”
“Time travel is impossible.”
“Medieval attitude, bro. Impossible is what they once said about
airplanes, going to the moon, nuclear bombs, television, and cholesterol
free egg substitutes.”
“For the sake of argument, let’s suppose it’s possible.”
“It is possible.”
“If it’s just time travel, why the pressurized suit? Wouldn’t time
travelers want to be discreet? They’d be super-conspicuous unless they
traveled back to a Star Trek convention in 1980.”
“Protection against unknown disease, ” Bobby said. “Maybe an atmosphere
with less oxygen or full of poisonous pollutants.”
“At a Star Trek convention in 1980? ”
“You know they were going to the future.”
“I don’t know, and neither do you.”
“The future, ” Bobby insisted, the beer having given him absolute
confidence in his powers of deduction. “They figured they needed the
protection of the spacesuits because … the future might be radically
different.
Which it evidently is.” Even without the kiss of the moon, a faint
silvery blush lent visibility to the riverbed silt. Nevertheless, the
April night was deep.
Way back in the seventeenth century, Thomas Fuller said that it is
always darkest just before the dawn. More than three hundred years
later, he was still right, though still dead.
“How far in the future? ” I wondered, almost able to smell the hot,
rancid air that had blown through the egg room.
“Ten years, a century, a millennium. Who cares? No matter how far they
went, something totally quashed them.” I recalled the ghostly,
radio-relayed voices in the egg room, the panic, the cries for help, the
screams.
I shuddered. After another pull at my beer, I said, “The thing ..
.
or things in Hodgson’s suit.”
“That’s part of our future.”
“Nothing like that exists on this world.”
“Not yet.”
“But those things were so strange … The entire ecological system
would have to change.
Change drastically.”
“If you can find one, ask a dinosaur whether it’s possible.” I had lost
my taste for the beer. I held the bottle out of the Jeep, turned it
upside down, and let it drain.
“Even if it was a time machine, ” I argued, “it was dismantled.
So Hodgson showing up the way he did, out of nowhere, and the vault door
reappearing … everything that happened to us … How could it have
happened? ”
“There’s a residual effect.”
“Residual effect.”
“Full-on, totally macking residual effect.”
“You take the engine out of a Ford, tear apart the drive train, throw
away the battery no residual effect can cause the damn car to just drive
itself off to Vegas one day.” Gazing at the dwindling, vaguely luminous