She was getting loud enough to draw curious glances. "We'd better go. Come on, I'll take you to Baskin-Robbins." She loved ice cream. A cone had smoothed over many a rough spot.

They spent the rest of the evening in front of the TV. As Cash had predicted, the phone didn't ring once. Instead of watching Carson, he turned in early.

He didn't sleep well. Michael's ghost hovered over his bed whispering about time machines.

The media did get hold of the story next day, but didn't play it up. Cash supposed it was because they could get nothing to sink their teeth into, though Railsback offered the opinion that reportorial imaginations bogged down when wandering outside the traditional bounds of business, politics, and crime. Harald claimed it was because the department itself was for a time diverted.

The entire department became embroiled in a series of crash priority cases, a hectic mishmash of murder probably due, in part, to the torrid weather. There was the killing of an off-duty patrolman during the holdup of an evening church service, then the rape-murder of a ten-year-old girl, followed by the molestation-immolation of two young boys by a gang of teenagers, and a homosexual jealousy homicide involving the scion of a prominent family. Next came a flare-up in the ongoing struggle for control of heroin traffic in the heavily black central and north wards. There, every time a big fish got sent up, the medium fishes shot it out for the top spot.

It was busy busy busy. If not hunting down a convicted murderer who simply bolted from the courtroom as the verdict was delivered, or beating the bushes in a panicky search for two teenage girls who had run away from the School for the Blind, Cash and Harald were continually in court. Their cases seemed to be coming to trial all at once. Most were disappointing in result. The fifteen-year-old who had gunned down a retired lieutenant, in the course of a robbery witnessed by the forty-three passengers aboard the bus from which the victim had just descended, was found guilty of assault and robbery, but the jury couldn't agree on the murder charge. Cash, being an officer, had never done jury duty. He couldn't begin to fathom the workings of the juror's mind. He sometimes wondered how anyone got put away.

But they both managed a nickel-dime investigation in spare moments. Harald continued doing the donkey work, discovering that the Groloch house had started construction early in 1869, and that the carriage house had been demolished in 1939. He actually located one of the workmen, but the man barely remembered the job, and had seen nothing out of the ordinary. No one remembered Miss Groloch ever having possessed either car or carriage.

And Harald discovered that large quantities of sand, gravel, cement, and building stone had been delivered to the house in July 1914. Presumably these were the materials used to pour the basement floor and wall off part. Cash went back to Carstairs's report several times, but there was nothing in it to indicate that he had thought the basement unusual.

And again he returned to the report. He had copies run off and took one home with the notion of musing over it while watching TV, and of letting Annie worry it instead of why they hadn't heard from the Relocation Board. Somewhere in the report, he thought, overlooked by everyone, was the key.

He had to keep reminding himself that he and Carstairs weren't working the same case, only cases with a coincidental connection spanning fifty-four years.

Cash passed another birthday. Each seemed more miserable than the last. Somewhere around twenty you began the downhill slide, he reflected, though you didn't realize it till years later. Around thirty you tried to stop looking forward. There was one bad ambush up there that you got more and more reluctant to approach. No matter what you had accomplished, you felt like a failure because there was so much more you should have done. By forty you were moving along looking backward, engrossed in might-have-beens. You remembered the girls who were willing when you were too chicken, opportunities that went begging because you dithered when you should have dashed in, alternate branches of the road you didn't even recognize at the time. You cried a lot inside, and died a little more each day. Maybe you fought the hook a little that decade, but by fifty you had surrendered.

Sitting at his desk, before going home to a "surprise" party put on by Annie, Nancy, and his grandchildren, he did his silent dying and penned a fragment of a poem:

Time wanders into oblivion, gentle as a rose

A traitor only too late revealing, had I but known,

The perfect moment.

There were times when, even more than immortality, he wanted a time machine with which he could go back and adjust… Or, at least, use to send an admonitory message to his younger self.

XII. On the X Axis;

3-6 July 1866;

Travels

"You know the crudest jest?" Fian asked. They were walking eastward, tending a little south, toward the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands. "This little cosmic joke rips a vital organ right out of the corpus of State philosophy." It was his first remark in hours.

The roads were awash with refugees and stunned imperial troops. No one paid any heed to three odd peasants.

"How so?" Fial responded.

They had decided they would be less conspicuous using the names of the bodies they wore. Neither the people of Today nor Tomorrow would pick them out as easily.

And, of course, Neulist was a consideration.

Who could guess when, or where, the colonel was?

Father was so damned calm about everything, Fiala thought. "Yes. That bears explanation."

She remained balanced precariously on the knife-edge of a scream. The Other wouldn't die. Temporarily defeated, it lay back in the deep shadows, wounded, hating, a savage thing waiting with reptilian patience.

"Souls. I'm talking souls. Or something so much like them that it makes no difference."

He and Fial, immediately, became hounds on the scent of the connections between souls, tachyons, and Dialectical Materialism.

Fiala (Fial was her twin in this incarnation) remained intellectually numb. She just couldn't surrender to belief in the evidence surrounding her. She tried ignoring it all, even her companions, who strode through this alien time as though they were on foreign sabbatical and going home was a matter of traveling kilometers, not years.

She coped with the impossible by concentrating on the one thing with a reality too unrelenting to be denied.

The soul-eater waiting in the dungeons of her mind.

Father and Fial had decided that they had to remove themselves as far from their own pasts as possible. Who, more than a Zumsteg, could imperil the future? Who knew but what the State might never be born because of a chance remark by a peasant from a village on the outskirts of Prague?