"Like you only proved that he wasn't run through the time machine right away."

"Hunh?"

"Those meat and potatoes wouldn't stick to his ribs forever. Fifty years is plenty of time to digest them."

"Oh." He slumped against the back of the couch. "I went off half-cocked, didn't I?"

"Looks like." She took one of his hands in hers. "It'll be okay. You'll get to the bottom of it."

"Shit."

"Norm!"

"Okay. Look, I got to get back. Hank's pissed enough now, we spend so much time screwing around with this thing."

"Don't let him keep you too late. Major Tran called. They'll be here in time for supper."

"Damn. I don't know if I'll be able to cope. Unless John's got something to cheer me up. There was another one, honey. I found out today. Besides O'Brien and the four hoods."

"What?"

"Another victim. A kid. Twelve years old. Carstairs never found out about him or the hoods. But he must've felt something. That had to be why he was so stubborn about letting go."

"Evil. I told you…"

"I'll be home as soon as I can." He kissed her good-bye. They still did that, after all these years.

"What happened to the high?" Beth asked as he slouched through the office door.

"My old lady shot it down." He explained. "Where's John? What'd he get?"

"I haven't seen him. I thought he was with you."

"But…" What the hell? John had had plenty of time… Teri? The sonofabitch was making whoopie on company time. He grabbed a phone, then thought better of it. No point stirring things up, or playing Typhoid Mary with his depression. Let John enjoy till he decided it was time to come in.

A thump startled him.

Old Man Railsback had dozed off. A book had fallen off his lap.

Hank's door was closed, but the sound of his feet as he paced could be heard.

"Beth, see if you can get Judge Gardner for me. If you can't, just leave a message saying I dug up another disappearance. With a witness."

"At the Groloch place again?"

"Yeah. I'll be in here shuffling papers."

Quitting time arrived. Still no John. This was going to have to stop. Sooner or later, Cash decided, Harald was going to force him to take official notice.

Irked, he returned home. He had been counting on John to give the day a bright ending.

It was just the day that had him down. John had been vanishing without explanation since before Christmas.

A cool shower did wonders. Norm felt human by the time Tran and his family arrived.

XX. On the X Axis;

1889-1945;

A Bohemian Physician

Neulist arrived May 12,1889.

The crone of a midwife strained cataracted eyes-and screamed. "Another one! Another devil!"

No one listened. She had been going on this way for twenty-five years, since the flight of her husband and children. Her warnings had been so fervent for so long that even the most compassionate villagers shunned her as a madwoman.

Those same villagers shunned the growing boy. His approach stirred irrational loathings. Even his parents barely tolerated him.

He had spent years in isolation, hated by millions. The antipathy of a few hundred superstitious peasants troubled him not at all. What bothered him was being a child.

Children in this age were little more than slaves.

He found the midwife's past overwhelmingly intriguing. All that talk about her husband and children, about possession and flight…

The other villagers were bored with it. Possession? By now they believed she had driven them off with her shrewish ways.

The mayor once mentioned having received a letter all the way from America, from Fiala, asking after her mother. The boy broke into the man's home and stole it when he was seven.

It gave him an address.

He mulled that letter, and the old woman's story, for years. And knew were his destiny lay.

As a child he had no more rights, and little more power, than a bondservant. Till he turned thirteen he hired out to work in the fields. Then he joined his father in the mines at Kladno.

There was little he could do till he became a man.

Except study. The village priest overcame his revulsion and helped a haunted but brilliant child find the navigation markers of life in that age.

Those were the years when he learned patience. He had no choice. A strapping was the inevitable consequence of the slightest rebellion.

His mother died when he was nine.

His father loathed him almost as much as did the midwife. His childhood became one long exercise in discipline. He learned, without coming to understand, what it was like to live on the receiving end of dictatorship.

In time he became perfectly willing to invest decades in his vengeance. And absolutely determined to carry it out. For these years of hell the Zumstegs would pay in agony and blood.

The summer of 1908, finally, saw him fleeing his hell for Vienna, taking his own, his father's, and his church's savings. There, through applied gall and a talent for forgery, he enrolled himself in the Academy of Fine Arts, where his work as a sculptor was just good enough to keep him in. Two years later he reverted to old habits, began studying contemporary medicine with a Dr. Mayer in Leopoldstadt, Vienna's Jewish district.

Despite, or perhaps because of, his background in twenty-first century medicine, he was an abysmal failure as a medical understudy. Students weren't permitted to contradict the common wisdom of their teachers, nor to promulgate crazy medical theories. Mayer endured him for two years. The doctor was a patient, tolerant man, completely oblivious to any aura of the alien. His cause for dismissing his apprentice was, in fact, personal. He learned that his goy pupil had been bedding his daughter-and had gone so far as to abort their love-child.

Mayer expelled his protege from his practice with that air of great sadness characteristic of the career long-suffering European Jew.

There had to be, Neulist thought at the time, laws of temporal inertia, or laws of chronological thermodynamics, that refused to permit the introduction of changes or new ideas.