Aharon looked at the rest of them guiltily. “I’m afraid if I tell you, Hannah, you’ll have me locked away, it’s so crazy.”

“Maybe I’m the crazy one, but at this point I’d believe you if you told me pigs could fly.”

Aharon grunted. “Compared to this, Hannah, flying pigs are nothing. So? Should I do the honors, or is there someone here who actually knows what they’re talking about?”

Jill took up the challenge and tried to explain to Hannah, in pop science terms, about the black hole. Hannah listened intently but got a feverish half smile on her face, as if she couldn’t quite believe it—and couldn’t quite not.

“This is what happened to you, Aharon?” she asked her husband incredulously. “You went to some other world?”

“On my life, Hannah, that is what happened. I was there for months.” Aharon turned to Jill. “So tell me—why has it been only five days here?”

“You were there three months,” Nate clarified. “We were on Difa-Gor-Das for nine. Time expands along the continuum of universes. During the time we were gone, about six months passed on Earth.”

“But it’s only been five days, you said?”

Nate looked at Jill for help.

“Let’s back up for a minute and explain how we got us back. Nate and I were on a world with highly advanced technology. In fact, they were about two hundred thousand years ahead of Earth—plus or minus a couple of major upheavals.”

She and Nate exchanged a look. “We found old data on how to use the black holes, though they themselves had gone beyond needing them centuries ago. To put it as simply as possible, when something goes through a black hole it creates a very distinct energy signature. Using their technology we were able to locate the signature in the fifty-fifty universe that marked our going through the gateway. We were eventually able to isolate each of the five patterns that went through—that would be you. After that it was not difficult to trace where the patterns had gone and to get a lock on you. It’s hard to explain, but it’s amazing technology—and alarmingly straightforward to manipulate.”

“Well, not exactly straightforward,” Nate said. “It took us seven months.”

“Okay, it’s not straightforward.” Jill smiled. “But it’s possible, which is amazing enough. Picture yourselves as energy patterns woven into this enormous tapestry. We were able to just… cut you out of where you were and insert you back into Earth’s pattern.”

Denton, Aharon, and Hannah were looking at her blankly.

“I still don’t get the change in time,” Denton said.

“When you reinsert a pattern like that you have to decide when as well as where,” Nate explained. “It’s so cool! There’s this unbelievably complex energy pattern of life, and when you look at it that way—from the fifth dimension, as energy—you can actually see time.”

Their faces went from blank to dazed.

“What Nate’s trying to say is that we could have brought us back at any time, including at the six months’ mark we believed to have actually passed on Earth. But in the end we decided on five days. We wanted it to be long enough since our disappearance that we wouldn’t be likely to run into a bunch of cops or agents but not too long, because…” She hesitated, looking at Nate. “Well, let’s just say that time is of the essence.”

“But isn’t there some sort of paradox?” Aharon said, waving his hands as he talked. “Are you saying we’re here and we’re simultaneously somewhere else? Can that be?”

“It can, because the time we are in now is not the same time you were in, or we were in, or Denton was in, in the other universes,” Nate said. “Space-time is like a sheet. The other universes are entirely separate sheets.”

Aharon was rubbing his forehead, trying to get his head around that. Denton just shrugged and grinned.

“Cool. But in that case, why not just bring us back before this whole mess even started?”

Nate got an excited sparkle in his eye. “We thought about it. The problem is we—our old selves—existed then. From what we could understand of the alien’s notes on the subject, that would not have been a good idea.”

“And to be honest,” Jill added, “after what we’d seen about the misuse of other aspects of the wave, we wanted to screw around as little as possible with what we didn’t understand.”

The matter-of-fact way they were talking had Hannah’s eyes large as saucers. She turned her head to stare at the changes on Aharon’s face as if seeking for confirmation.

“However it happened that you got us back, I can only be grateful,” Aharon said, taking his wife’s hand.

“Works for me,” Denton agreed. “I would have gotten bored out of my skull, being stuck where I was for another forty or fifty years.”

“Good,” Jill said, feeling relieved. “Because we couldn’t send you back, even if we wanted to. We don’t have the technology to do it here and, frankly, Nate and I are glad about that.”

“Oh, yeah,” Nate agreed.

“Maybe we should all describe what happened,” Aharon said. “Where we went.”

Denton stretched out long legs. “Absolutely. Since you already have us curious about this Difa-Gor-Das, Jill, why don’t you guys start?”

Pol 137 woke up on a bed in a warm room. For a long time he tried to pull the fragments of his memory together against the darkness in his mind the way a man in the wind will try to pull together the remnants of a tattered coat.

The door to the room was open several inches, letting in a little light and the sound of voices. Pol had no idea where he was. He listened and listened to the voices, but something about them only made him more afraid. His fear became so acute that it outweighed any possible risk, and he fumbled around and found a lamp near the bed. He turned it on. The room revealed was unfamiliar. But there were a hundred little details, the lacy curtains on the window, the homey checked pillows, a chenille bedspread, a homespun rug on the floor, that hurt his brain.

He was not on the world of Centalia anymore.

This thought was so disturbing that he jumped out of bed. He was fully dressed, wearing some discarded Bronze clothes he had stolen during his days on the road running from Gyde and his monitors. The sight of them, here, seemed all wrong. But his survival skills kicked in and he went on reconnaissance. He went to the door of his room stealthily, prepared to bare his fangs, prepared to fight. There was no one in the hall, but the voices were louder, coming from a room a few doors down. The door to that room was open, like his own. He went back to the lamp by the bed and turned it off. Then he moved down the hall on silent feet, cautious and dangerous.

He reached their door and could not help peering into the lighted room. He moved as far into the shadows as he could, pressing himself against the far wall. He could only see three of them from his vantage point, but one of them was the woman, the blond woman. He stared at her, mesmerized. He took in her face—streaked white-blond hair, brown eyes, brown hair on the ridge above her eyes. Just like his.

He closed his eyes, the pain slicing through his head as though his brain were literally splitting just a little more in two. He was getting a memory of this woman… She was in a bed and he was questioning her. She had looked different then, but even so, he knew her.

And he also knew, with complete certainly, that he had returned to the place from whence he had come. He had returned to the other side of the chasm. Before he had gone to Centalia this had been his world and he had been pursuing her. Not the way a man pursues a woman but the way a detective pursues a criminal—the way he had been pursuing the state terrorist.

Had she done this to him?