The monitor in the lab was coming alive with bars on the graph, interdimensional intensity waves, deflection vectors.
“What is going on?” DuFresne demanded, and now the Watchers were stepping up for a closer look.
“I’m canceling, I’m canceling!” Moss countered.
DuFresne watched the monitors. It didn’t look like it.
She’d found it. The feel, the intuition, was different, like driving on the wrong side of the road or writing with the wrong hand, but she’d found it. Some of her reaches were dropping out for no reason, but she just had to feel around to find them again, along with a couple hundred others.
Yes! She could remember when Dane told her, “Hey, Mandy, guess what: Marvellini’s calling it quits. He’s offering us the business if we want it.”
DuFresne was losing his cool. “I thought you were canceling!”
Moss was losing his as well. “She keeps resetting!”
“Dane,” Preston radioed, “it’s working! She has them!”
The doves were returning in droves, bursting from the trailers, lining up in wing-to-wing formations, one formation behind the other, formation on formation, descending toward the net like waves breaking.
Hundreds of horizons reeled, rocked, and raced before the eyes of Mandy’s mind as each bird climbed, banked, dropped, lined up wing-to-wing with forty-four others, and descended behind other lines of doves toward the trucks, the four men, the net. She placed herself on the back of each bird to guide, prod, love it along, feeling the wind streaming over each dove’s head, the violent beating of the wings, the muscles driving like pistons. Okay, drop down, level out, you see that cord running across the net? Grab on, grab on… . That’s it! Now climb, baby, and pull! PULL!
Preston and his men had planned for this, envisioned it, hoped for it beyond all reason, but absolutely nothing came close to standing there and seeing it. Line upon line, wave upon wave, the birds took hold of each horizontal course of webbing and pulled it skyward, lifting the next course for the next line of birds who came in as one, grabbed hold, and lifted. With each additional line of birds lifting, the net rose faster, opening up more courses for more lines of doves to grab, until lines were coming in by the fives, tens, twenties, grabbing their courses and pulling, pulling toward the sky. The last hundred courses reeled off in a blur.
It was the most amazing thing these men had ever seen.
A gasp moved like a wave over the audience, from the folks in the bleachers and then the folks on the ground as heads turned toward the south. What was this, a cloud, a huge white banner? What could it be? Surely it wasn’t what it looked like: a glimmering, sparkling, living magic carpet … made of … were those birds?
People in the bleachers rose to their feet as the usual ooohhhsand aahhhhsebbed to a stupefied silence and the silence broke into a cacophony of cries, questions, exclamations. This couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be.
They’d never seen anything like it.
Neither had Dane. He wanted to drop to his knees in awe and gratitude, but … not yet, and not where he’d be seen. He headed for the crane, the main point of vulnerability.
Moss fell back from the keyboard, overwhelmed by the numbers and the blinding speed with which every setting, every indication, every prediction was changing.
“Seamus!” DuFresne shouted into his headset. “What’s going on?”
Seamus stammered trying to answer, his video camera sweeping, blurring, searching.
The announcers on the television were going berserk. The cameras zoomed in on a huge white banner flying toward the Orpheus. “What is that?” they shouted. “No, I don’t believe it! I have never, ever seen anything like this!”
Seamus got his camera pointed and zoomed, but the shot was too shaky.
The television cameras zoomed in closer, stabilized.
DuFresne was on his feet, nose inches from the television screen. “Are those … are those doves?”
Moss couldn’t think of which key to press. He could only read the monitors. “Exactly four thousand, eight hundred and sixty-four—on that many timelines.”
She remembered!
The wedding cake was half gone by the time they left the reception … their travel trailer was a Terry and had a propane furnace … they kept the original Bonkers, Lily, Maybelle, and Carson on the windowsill next to the dinette … she cooked dinner on a barbecue stand in Brentwood Park in Minot, North Dakota, because they couldn’t afford restaurants … they hauled and stored all their gear in the vanishing trunk Dane built.
And she really was Mandy Collins, riding a zillion doves and marveling at the view below each bird’s pounding wings. In countless minds, through countless eyes flying free, she could see the pod dangling just below the boom of the crane.
Inside the pod, her body was racing through different hairstyles and lengths; her fingernails were growing out, jerking short again, growing out, jerking back. She may have had a few colds in the last second or two.
Okay, guys, steer for the pod … this way, this way …
Only a few seconds and they would be overflying the stage.
The TV announcers were on their feet.
“Like a flying carpet—literally!” cried Kirschner.
“At least a hundred feet long, sixty, eighty feet wide, made up entirely of white doves!” Rhodes shouted, his voice high-pitched, his mike distorting.
At the hospital, Arnie had to move up close to see around the people crowding the television.
“An unbelievable precedent in the world of entertainment!” cried the announcer. “Impossible to believe, but there it is, folks, and we guarantee, what you are seeing, we are seeing.”
People around the lobby—patients, nurses, doctors, administrative staff—were running over to see, scrambling to find another television, spreading the word: “You’ve got to see this!” They were stunned, totally engaged, astounded.
And Arnie had to laugh. “Dane, you old trickster!”
Back in the vacant lot, Preston and his men had folded up the platform, the wrapping, the Velcro strips, and loaded them into a trailer. Now, with stacks rapping and diesel smoke belching, the two semis drove out of the vacant lot while they had the chance.
“Cancel those timelines!” DuFresne roared. “Get rid of those birds!”
“There isn’t time!” Moss shouted back. “It takes at least one second to cancel each timeline, that’s—she’s way ahead of us!” Then, in all his number crunching, he discovered something that hit him like a blow to the stomach. “Oh, no …”
“What? What now?”
“Four thousand, eight hundred and sixty-four doves … the girl, the costume, that, that rigging, whatever it is … no wonder!”
All eyes went to the video screens now filled with synchronized doves connected by a nearly invisible grid with something—ribbons? flags?—trailing on thin threads beneath it.
DuFresne didn’t take his eyes away as he prodded, “What?”
Moss pounded the console. “She has gravitational equivalence with the Machine. Equal mass, one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds!”
DuFresne needed no further explanation. “Stone! Mortimer! Drop the pod!”
Moss objected, “No! Not before the retrace is complete!”
“Drop it now!”
Mr. Stone, out of his fireman’s uniform and back in his basic black, was at the controls of the crane. Mr. Mortimer, also back in style, was just behind the crane, pouring out the remainder of the crane operator’s “medicated” coffee and making sure the man’s “fainting spell” would look convincing. Stone had been waiting for the hourglass onstage to run out before triggering the release, the point being to make the show appear to go as planned even while the girl’s retraced body incinerated in the volcano. The cloud layer of birds doing a fly-by under the crane’s boom forewarned him there could be a change in plan. He replied, “Roger that,” and reached for the red button.