Heloise the cat trotted up the steps from the yard, looking sleek and satisfied after her twilight prowl, and went straight to Quinn. Apparently she had missed the news and did not know that her friend’s status in the family had changed. She walked right over to him, arched her back and meowed.
Quinn extended his hand and murmured absently, “Yes, I think you’re right.”
The cat rubbed its head and back against Quinn’s hand with a musical half-purr, half-mew that made Quinn smile. “You are indeed a fascinating creature.”
Houston stared at him. “What is it with you and that cat?”
He glanced at her, a spark of his old easy amusement in the curve of his mouth. “In my time,” he said, “cats are a rare and valuable species. You have to be on a waiting list for years before even being interviewed to be matched with one.”
A nervous laugh escaped Houston. “You’re kidding me, right? I mean, granted, a lot can happen in three hundred years but…” And she peered at him closely through the darkness. “You talk to that cat as though—well, as though she talks back. You don’t mean to tell me…?”
She left the speculation unspoken and he laughed softly. “That cats are going to develop the ability to speak over the next three centuries? No.”
Houston relaxed, then he added, “However, we will discover some interesting things about the value of learning to communicate with other species.”
Houston opened her mouth to question, then shook her head. “No. I don’t want to know.”
She thought, in the dark, she could see the faintest hint of a twinkle in his eye. “Perhaps that’s best.”
The twist of conversation had eased some of the tension between them, and Quinn’s tone sounded a little more relaxed as he said, “Look. The moon’s coming up.” He looked across the porch at her. “Would you walk with me a little?”
Houston hesitated, then stood up. They walked down the steps together, and moved across the moonlit lawn. It was a moment before either of them spoke, and when they did it was at the same time.
“Listen, it’s just that—”
“I wanted to tell you—”
They stopped, and turned to look at each other. Quinn said, “Go ahead.”
And Houston insisted, “No, please—you.”
They started to walk again. Quinn’s voice was quiet against the background of gently chirping crickets; they might have been discussing sports or politics or simple domestic matters, anything except what they were discussing.
He said, “I’ve always been kind of a—you have a good word for it—hotshot, I think it is. Don’t get me wrong, it takes a certain amount of recklessness and independence to do what I do, and the profession has always attracted the adventurous type. But—I don’t know. I’ve been accused of being a loose cannon. Maybe they were right. I’ve just always done things my own way, and this time, everything I’ve done has been wrong. I should never have stayed here. There are procedures that cover this sort of thing, and I didn’t follow them. Once I stayed, I never should have gotten as involved as I did with you and Mark. I interfered in your lives. I…the most important rule I broke was in allowing myself to care for you…to make love with you. That was wrong. I knew I couldn’t stay. I knew my leaving would hurt you. And I knew it was wrong. Houston, I’m sorry.”
She drew a breath and released it a little more shakily than she had intended. She wanted to be mature about this. She did.
“I just feel like such an idiot, that’s all. All that nonsense about destiny, about you seeming so familiar to me—of course you did, I must have seen that picture of you and Grandpa Sam a dozen times. I mean, I know you couldn’t tell me—I wouldn’t have believed it anyway—but I just wish I’d known before I made a complete fool of myself.”
He made a move as though to touch her arm, but she sidestepped him—casually, she hoped.
“You didn’t make a fool of yourself,” he told her.
“So.” The effort she made to keep her tone easy made it sound too bright, almost brittle. “What is it—do you guys get assigned a family or something, to follow our progress down through the centuries, like migratory birds?”
“What?”
“Because I’ve got to tell you, I don’t much like feeling like a laboratory animal, and if that’s an example of the kind of progress we make in three hundred years—”
“Houston, what are you talking about?”
“My grandfather, then me,” she explained impatiently. Her nerves were starting to feel a little raw; it might have had something to do with the tears that were stinging her eyes. “I guess you were around for my parents, too—that must have been interesting! And all that stuff I was telling you about them—”
“Houston, I don’t know your parents.”
“I just hate it that it was all so…planned! So phony and manipulative. God knows I’m not big on romance, but there are some illusions even I like to keep. I mean, I know there’s no such thing as destiny, but I’d like to at least believe in spontaneity.”
“I didn’t know he was your grandfather,” Quinn said quietly.
Houston stopped, and turned to him. “What?”
“He was my friend. I left him in 1934, and except to find out the date and manner of his death, I never knew anything more about him. I had no idea he had children. I certainly never expected to meet one of his descendants—and fall in love with her.”
Fall in love. He had said that. She didn’t want to hear that. It made no difference now; it meant nothing. But he had said it and she had heard it and there was a tightening inside her, a leaping for joy, a yearning toward him. Love. Yes.
With every ounce of will she had, she pushed the tumbling emotions down. Yet she couldn’t stop herself from searching his eyes in the moonlight, trying to find…something. Hope, truth, promise…something.
“I don’t understand. If you didn’t know it was my grandfather, if you didn’t do it on purpose, then how…?”
He pushed his fingers through his hair and shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon. The odds against that happening, out of all the hundreds of millions of people who have lived since I left Sam, that a technical malfunction, an accident, should put me in the front yard of his granddaughter…”
“Maybe they’re connected,” she suggested. “The accident that brought you here and your time with my grandfather. Maybe that machine of yours has some kind of trace memory….”
Quinn looked at her soberly. “Maybe,” he said, “it was destiny.”
He was standing close, but he didn’t touch her; he didn’t have to. His warmth caressed her, and the tenderness in his eyes drew her into his embrace. She thought helplessly, I never asked for this…I don’t want this…I can’t love you. I can’t.
If only she could convince her heart of that.
“When I chose to go into this work,” Quinn said softly, “I knew I would never have a family of my own. It was my decision, the price I paid for the life I lead. I’ve never regretted it—until I came here. You and Mark let me borrow your lives for a time, showed me what I might have had if I had chosen differently, and you even let me pretend it was mine. Houston,” he said earnestly, his voice hoarsening with emotion, “if I could stay with you I would. I know you probably don’t want me to anymore—”
A protest formed in her throat but emerged only as a stifled moan of denial.
“But I want you to know I’ve done my best. I wouldn’t have had this happen to you for all the world.”
Houston knew she should step away, turn back toward the house, pretend the last few moments of this conversation had never happened. She couldn’t love him. She couldn’t have him in her life. This couldn’t be happening to her.
But she couldn’t move away from him. She couldn’t even stop looking at him. “Why—why can’t you stay?” Her heart was beating slow and hard. Maybe he would stay, if she asked. Please stay…
He dropped his eyes. She felt the wh
isper of his breath across her cheek. “I didn’t want to tell Mark,” he said quietly. “I thought you should decide how much he should know.”
Something cold and clammy coiled in her stomach. It was a sensation she had grown familiar with over the course of the day: dread.
Quinn started walking again, his shoulder brushing hers. He didn’t look at her now, and his tone was detached, almost clinical. “One of the first problems we encountered in the early days of time travel was the fact that our bodies simply weren’t accustomed to the conditions of earth in the past, and we therefore had no natural immunity to even the most common bacteria and viruses you encounter every day. The same, of course, would be true if you were to transport back to the Middle Ages—you would die of food poisoning with your first meal, if the water or airborne bacteria didn’t get you first. We aren’t born with tolerances for diseases, you know. We have to develop immunity through exposure. And when a man is careering through time, he has no chance to develop a natural resistance to the infections of any one time period.”
Houston listened carefully, her heart pounding in her chest.
“We finally developed a serum that would bolster our immune systems so that we could resist the toxins and diseases of the distant past. Unfortunately, after a certain amount of time—twenty-three days, to be exact—the serum itself becomes toxic to us. So when we travel back in time, we carry with us only twenty-three doses of the serum.”
Houston’s throat felt so tight that she could barely speak. “But you’ve already been here almost a month.”
Quinn nodded. “When I realized it wasn’t likely that I would be able to get back before the serum ran out, I started cutting the doses in half. But even that won’t last much longer.”
He stopped and looked down at her gravely. “So you see, it’s not really my choice. One way or another—I can’t stay.”
There was a strange twisting low in Houston’s chest, like a heart being torn in two. She said with an effort, “How long?”
And he answered, “About ten days.”
Her breath died away, and for a moment she couldn’t speak. For a moment there seemed no point—in speaking, thinking, breathing, caring. Even the night was still, crickets having sung their last, the breeze having dried up at its source. That was how she felt. Dried up at the source.
But she knew it wasn’t that easy. Nothing would ever be that easy, or that painless. And she had a feeling that for her—for them—the pain had only begun.
She made herself look up at him. She tried to smile. “Then,” she said, simply, and with all the courage she possessed, “we’ll just have to find a way to get you home, won’t we?”
Chapter Eleven
Every year the last day of school was celebrated with an informal skating party hosted by the class mothers while Millie invited her staff to a “thanks for a job well done” pool party at her home. This year neither Mark nor Houston was interested in attending.
“Hot date?” Millie teased her with a wink. “When am I going to meet this superhunk, anyway?”
Houston replied distractedly, “Actually, I was hoping to get to the library at the university before it closed.”
Millie widened her eyes. “Library? University? Hello? School’s out—or did you think all this paper in the halls was from a ticker-tape parade?”
Typical of last-day-of-school students everywhere, they had emptied their notebooks and their lockers in a random pattern of destruction. It was the philosophy of the administration—who admittedly grew a little lax this time of the year—that if this was the worst they had to tolerate in the way of vandalism, they were ahead of the game.
Houston tried to look interested in the conversation—and in her friend, as they walked out of the building together. “I have a kind of special project I’m working on. Nothing to do with school.”
The last few days of school had been torment for her. She felt as though she were living in two different worlds: the one was filled with restless third-graders who depended on her to make certain they grew into responsible, reasonably well-educated citizens, and that demanded her full attention. The other revolved around a man who was not even supposed to exist outside science-fiction novels and who depended on her for his very life, and that demanded her full attention. Had she been required to play both roles for another single day, she was sure she would have been torn in two.
Millie said, “Something exciting, I hope.”
“Hmm?” Houston caught herself and added quickly, “Oh, yes. Very.” If only she knew.
But Millie looked concerned and Houston could sense more questions coming. So she swooped forward to brush her friend’s cheek with a kiss. “Thanks for a great year, Millie. Have fun at the party without me. I’ll call you in a few days.”
She hurried out to her car, where Mark was already waiting. Immediately, he asked, “Are you sure you don’t need me to go with you to the university, Mom?”
“Thanks, but you and Quinn need to be working on the computer. Quinn gave me a list of books.”
“Yeah, but you really don’t know much about the topic. I might spot things you can’t.”
“I’ll just photocopy everything.”
Mark was thoughtful as she started the car. She had been letting him stay up too late and he looked tired. She felt a stab of motherly guilt for that, but what kind of mother would she be if she had taught her son that regular bedtime was more important than a man’s life?
She had told Mark the truth about Quinn’s deadline because she felt he deserved to know, and Mark had taken it far better than she had. He seemed relieved to know that Quinn was not leaving because he wanted to. And by involving him in the solution to the problem, Quinn had given him some sense of control over the situation.
Houston only hoped he did not feel responsible if he failed.
He said now, “Quinn said you can’t take things that belong in the past through the time-travel channel into the future.”
Houston glanced at him. “Why would you want to?”
“We were just talking about it the other night—artifacts and things, you know, for museums. And he said it couldn’t be done. And that the only things you could bring with you into the past had to fit on your tool belt or in your helmet, and that they were locked into the same frequency you were when you were transported through.”
Houston knew he was not merely engaging in idle speculation, but she couldn’t quite follow what he was getting at. She said carefully, “Yes?”
“So I was thinking…with all those safeguards, I just don’t think it’s very likely that the most important thing you have, the one piece of equipment that would take you back where you belong, could just disappear in transit. It has to have come through with Quinn. He must have lost it somewhere around the apple tree. He must have.”
“But he looked. We’ve been all through that. He said he spent almost a whole week looking.”
“Then he must have missed it. We’ll have to look again.”
Suddenly Houston understood. She felt a hollowness in the pit of her stomach. “It’s not going well, is it?”
Mark shook his head slowly. “I don’t think so. Quinn won’t say anything…but I don’t think so.”
Houston reached across the seat and squeezed his knee, but she had no other comfort to offer.
IT WAS AFTER DARK when Houston returned home. She went first to check on Mark and found him stretched out on his bed with a pen and notebook beside him, fully dressed and sound asleep. The computer was on, but the starfield screen blanker was in place, indicating it had been some time since anyone had used the keyboard or mouse. Houston didn’t risk waking Mark by taking off his shoes or even his glasses but covered him with a blanket and left the room, leaving the computer untouched.
In the kitchen, crumbs on the counter and dishes in the sink told her someone had made dinner—sandwiches, from the looks of it—and again she felt a prickle of guilt. But she had very little time or energy to was
te on counter-productive emotions. She drank a glass of milk, then gathered up the books she had gotten from the library and crossed the lawn to Quinn’s apartment.
The outdoor lights that illuminated the stairs were on, and Houston didn’t realize until she reached the top step, that the lights from the window were more subdued than usual. She knocked softly. When there was no answer, she opened the door.
“Quinn?”
The room was lighted only by the glow of computer screens and the rows of odd little colored lights that represented some kind of electronic circuitry. The effect was a soft yellow illumination with shadows of red and green reflected off the ceiling. The bed was partially in shadow, but she could make out Quinn’s form on it. She was glad. He, too, had been working night and day, and she worried about him.
She looked for a place to put the books, found a clear corner on one of the computer tables and turned to leave as quietly as she had come.
“I’m awake,” Quinn said.
She turned toward him. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“You didn’t.” The springs creaked as he sat up, propping his shoulders against the wall. “I had a headache, thought I’d rest my eyes.”
“Would you like me to get something for it?”
“No, it’s gone now.” And he smiled. “I think it went away when I saw you.”
There was something warm and intimate about the gentle lighting, voices coming to each other through the semidarkness, faces sensed but not entirely seen. Barriers were lowered somehow; words seemed easier. After a moment’s hesitation, she crossed the room toward him, stepping carefully over cables and skirting stacks of books and cartons of periodicals.
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