He went to the door and looked through the peephole.

Well … !

He had to crack the door open and put his finger to his lips—Parmenter said the house might be bugged—but after that, he flung the door open and gave Arnie Harrington a hug.

* * *

It was Parmenter’s turn to sleep overnight at the lab; he’d worked and bargained and made offers to make it happen that way, and Moss seemed only too happy to sleep in his own bed that night.

Well and good. Parmenter had things to do he didn’t want anybody to see, such as weighing himself on a medical scale he’d borrowed from upstairs, then combing carefully through his office for his notes, files, and hard drives, all the essential secrets of the Machine’s development and how it worked. He put them all in a box, then weighed himself holding the box.

Not quite.

He threw in a paperweight and two manuals.

Too much.

He took out the paperweight.

Okay. Within limits.

Just after midnight, two semitrucks exited the Las Vegas Freeway and turned up a street one block from the Orpheus. They belched, rumbled, and hissed onto the rubble-strewn vacant lot and parked side by side. Preston Gabriel and two of his crew hopped down from the cab of the first one; three more of his crew climbed down from the cab of the other. They would sleep in the trucks that night, but first they had a lot of prep to do.

Dane took Arnie for a walk through the neighborhood and told him enough to keep him awake worrying. The rest, he supposed, would have to wait until a day long after tomorrow when the story would have an ending. With Arnie tucked in on the living room couch, Dane turned in, easing into the big four-poster in Preston’s guest bedroom. He set the alarm for six in the morning, clicked off the lamp …

And lay sleepless for a little while, dwelling on an image that hovered in his mind—a snapshot that still existed in an album back in Idaho: Mandy, not in a glimmering gown on a big stage, exulting in the thrill and applause of her audience, but in pants and a top she made herself on a portable sewing machine they took everywhere with them on the road, standing at an outdoor picnic grill in a public park, cooking up their dinner. They had no roof over their heads other than a travel trailer, no future beyond a month or two of low-paying festivals, county fairs, or Grange hall gigs, and yet there she was, flipping burgers and boiling green beans, her heart chained to his for the distance. That was forty years ago.

Only the Lord God could have brought him such a woman. He never could have found her himself, never could have known hers would be the kind of love that would last so long and still be so tenacious despite a gulf of age and memory. She was a kid who didn’t even know who he was, but still she came looking.

He hadn’t thought of it in these terms until now, but maybe this was why he always opened doors for her, let her take his arm when they walked, stood when she entered the room. Loving her had always been easy, but somewhere along the way he just knew he had to honor her.

Mandy was numb with exhaustion, one blink away from sleep, but at long last she was alone and it was quiet, and after tomorrow nothing would matter the way it did now. She knelt by her bed.

“Dear Lord, I gave you my life a long time ago and I meant it, so whatever it is, or was—only you know—it’s yours. Near as I’m allowed to know, most of it’s already happened and it’s like I missed it, so I hope you don’t mind my praying backward—I figured I could since time is all messed up anyway—but I hope I lived my life well and you’re pleased, and … whatever my life was—and you know and I don’t, so I’m just saying this, just asking—if it’s okay with you, could it really be true? Could I please have lived my life with Dane? Could I please have been his wife? That’s the only way I can imagine it, and that’s what Dane and everybody tells me, so I hope that’s your way of seeing it, too. I hope we had a great life together.

“But even if I was never in love with him, and even if we were never together, thank you for letting me meet him and love him for just a little while, as weird as it was. I pray you’ll always take care of him and reward him for being the wonderful man he is. He treated me really well. Just wanted to say so.

“Guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She climbed into bed and turned off the light.

chapter

49

At 5:00 A.M., March 25, Parmenter was at the command console of the Machine, running simulations of what might be to come and checking the readings that resulted. He could tell Mandy was still asleep. The monitors were void of activity and, apart from maintaining Mandy’s secondary timeline, the Machine was at rest, allowing him a limited but sufficient access to its functions. This would be his only opportunity.

At 5:20, having double-checked his times, readings, and figures, he weighed himself, holding the box containing his notes, printouts, and hard drives. He’d lost one pound during the night, probably due to dehydration and elimination.

At 5:50 he accessed the Machine. The processing time was snail-paced but he got the input prompt he wanted and entered 14:24:09, two-twenty-four and nine seconds in the afternoon, today.

He added a book to the box and weighed himself and the box again. Within limits.

At 5:54, based on a conversation with Dane regarding when Dane planned to get up that morning, he entered some presets to initiate a function at precisely 6:00 A.M.

At 5:55 he went up the steps to the glass enclosure and, for the first time since Mandy’s reversion, opened the door. The stench of the bloodied sheet brought back the gruesome memory of September 17, but Parmenter’s disgust was mixed with a scientist’s regret. To put forward a theory, these molecules staining the sheet—skin cells, fluids, blood—did not revert with Mandy because they no longer composed something living in the present and possibly because they were not part of the arrangement of molecules that composed the living Mandy in 1970. Under any other circumstances he would have devoted himself to testing the theory and confronting the plethora of riddles and questions that remained, but that was only the scientist side of him. The human side, prevailing, could only do the right thing.

He stepped inside the enclosure, closing the door behind him, then sat on the bench holding his box of knowledge and secrets. He waited.

At 6:00 A.M., Dane’s alarm jolted him. He reached over and shut it off, then sagged back upon the pillow, waking up to the burden of this day and the visceral wrenching that left him only during his few precious hours of sleep.

Oh, Lord, is this day really happening? It’s the stuff of bad dreams, not real life. If I don’t get out of bed, maybe I’ll wake up for real in a little while.

Such words, such thoughts. This day had to happen, as unavoidable as life always was. He flopped over on his back and stared at the real ceiling fan above him, still there just like everything else. He got up and got started.

At 06:00:00, March 25, the Machine awakened, the enclosure glowed an eerie blue, the interdimensional core beneath the bench hummed with energy. Parmenter sat still, letting the program run, recording his mass, his exact location, and exactly when in the course of time this event occurred. After five seconds, the program completed, the Machine went dark, and Parmenter found himself in a strange, nontypical state of mind: he’d just done the last thing he could have done.

By 7:30 A.M., Andy’s stage crew was onsite, giving the bleachers a final cleanup and dressing up the stage, placing a few more artificial plants, trees, and stones to suggest a medieval, fairy-tale forest and replacing the burned trees around the volcano with fresh ones.