Three Days to Never

by Tim Powers

  “So he hates you?”

  Marrity frowned as he put the dog down. “I think he does. Though he’s more civil than I would be, if I met the old man.” Then with a shiver of loss he remembered that his father had been killed in 1955. “But of course the old man turns out not to be the bad guy we always thought he was.” And who is now? he asked himself rhetorically. Got to have a bad guy.

  “What did we talk about,” Golze asked, “in the bus, when you were thirty-five?”

  Marrity thought: You wanted Grammar’s VHS movie, and I sold it to you. But the movie is gone, this time. And you also asked about Einstein’s machine, which I didn’t know about, then. Aloud he said, “You said you wanted to buy a machine my grandmother had, which had been designed by Albert Einstein.”

  “And?”

  “And I sold it to you, for fifty thousand dollars.” Close enough, he thought—I sold him the movie that time. “I want something else, besides money, this time.”

  Golze smiled, obviously pleased. “And there was the movie too.”

  “You mentioned a movie, but I didn’t have that, whatever it was.” He picked up a big red plastic ant that had stopped moving.

  Golze’s good cheer was gone. “The movie, it was watched at your house at four-fifteen p.m. two days ago! Before there were any divergences between your lifeline and your younger self’s!”

  That’s right, thought Marrity, forcing himself not to reach for the 7-Up can. Instead he nervously twisted the key in the ant’s belly. “Daphne—may have watched a movie—I was working—”

  “Why are you lying? Your younger self has described it as a paranormal ‘intrusion’ that occurred at four-fifteen on Sunday.” He leaned forward across the oars and smiled at Marrity, widening his eyes and showing his yellow teeth. “Why are you lying?”

  Marrity exhaled. “Because it’s gone, the movie’s destroyed,” he said, relieved to be admitting the truth. “In my original life nineteen years ago, I sold it to you, but in this time line the VCR burned up with the movie in it when Daphne was watching it.”

  “Burned up? You know it was burned up?”

  “I saw the VCR in my, his, front yard. It was charred.” The ant had begun writhing mechanically in his hands, and he hastily set it down.

  “And her teddy bear was burned too,” said Golze quietly. “And the stereo in Rascasse’s car! Was this poltergeist? Telekenesis? Did she grab these things psychically?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t there. She didn’t have any psychic powers when she was my daughter.”

  “Poltergeist!” Golze shouted it like a curse.

  The fat man picked up the oar handles and rowed furiously to a spot several yards farther out. Then he let go of them and rubbed his red face with both chubby hands as the boat surged on for a yard or two and then rocked to a stop on the green water.

  Marrity peered around at the distant new apartment buildings beyond Alvarado Boulevard, and in the other direction at the rental dock’s little lighthouse, which looked as if it dated from the 1920s. And a man from the twenty-first century sitting in a boat between them, he thought.

  Finally Golze said, “I believe you,” through his fingers. “All our remote viewers reported that it simply disappeared; not just stopped being used, but dropped out of their perceptions entirely.” He lowered his hands and stared at Marrity. “Why would she have poltergeist powers in this time line?”

  “I can’t imagine. It’s new to me.”

  “Tell me the truth about our meeting nineteen years ago.”

  “I can give you the machine.”

  “The meeting.”

  “Well, the blind girl was there, and after I gave you the movie, she stopped bothering to pretend she could see out of her own eyes. There were some vulgar jokes, when one of the men would go to the bathroom. She was pretty drunk, as I recall! And you had—I’m glad not to see it here—you had a mummified human head, which appeared to be alive.” He squinted at Golze, but the fat man didn’t seem surprised, so they must have it in this time line too. “It made noises and wiggled its jaw, anyway.” He picked up the ape with the cymbals, which had run down again. “Like one of these toys. Why didn’t you get all battery-operated ones?”

  I’m talking too much, he thought as he wound it up. He put the ape down and took another sip of the lukewarm, fortified 7-Up and shifted on the blue vinyl cushion. He wondered if the cushions were supposed to serve as life preservers if the boat sank.

  “The wind-up ones provide discontinuity,” Golze said shortly. “So you gave us the Chaplin movie, when you were thirty-five.”

  “Right. A videocassette, labeled Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, though that’s not what the movie in the cassette was.”

  “Had you watched the movie?”

  “No. My daughter did. Practically put her in a coma.”

  “I can imagine. And we asked you about the machine too?”

  “Yes, but at that time I didn’t know anything about it. This is the truth. I only learned about it years later, from hints you dropped about Einstein and my grandmother. I had to read up on quantum mechanics, and consult Ouija boards and spiritualists, all sorts of screwy research. I still don’t exactly know how it works.”

  “But you figured out how to work it. You came back in time by means of it.”

  Marrity smiled smugly. “Right.”

  “Then we can use it to go back in time from here, and prevent the destruction of the movie.”

  It seemed to Marrity that Golze was acting as if the movie was the important thing, and discounting what Marrity had to offer. “What do you even need the movie for?” Marrity asked. “The machine lets you go into the past and future, all by itself.”

  “You sound like Rascasse,” said Golze. For a moment he was silent, staring out at the water. Then, “Yes,” he went on irritably, “the machine would let me go into the past and future—the past and future from wherever I am, from whatever specific little volume of cubic space the universe has permitted me to occupy. But I—we—want to be able to travel in now.”

  “Now?” asked Marrity in bewilderment. “You can already travel in now. Anybody can.”

  “I can be in one compressed, predestined point of it, not travel in it. My whole possible future is contained in a cone that expands into the future from here, this constricted now point. And my past is locked into a cone that extends backward in time from now. That’s the Grail, those two cones, and Einstein’s machine will let me travel in them. But all the time and space outside those cones is an extension of now, it’s every place and time general relativity says I can’t get to. Getting out there would be…moving sideways in the time-space hypercube; your grandmother did it, to get to Mount Shasta—she got there instantaneously.”

  “But—obviously I’ve read up on this—the bits that are outside the cones right now will be included in the widening cone of your possible past, if you just wait. And anyway, the boundaries are expanding at the speed of light, and the entire earth can’t be more than one light second from end to end! What’s the big deprivation, what are you afraid you’ll be excluded from?”

  Golze wasn’t looking at him, and Marrity wondered if the fat man somehow aspired to eventually be in all places and moments at once. Would that, Marrity wondered, make him God?

  If it did, he would always have been God—he would have been occupying every place in every moment since the beginning of time.

  Marrity forced himself not to smile at the thought; then he remembered the twitching black head he had seen nineteen years ago, and the hateful woman little Daphne had grown up to be, and the babies he had seemed to see in the weeds two days ago; and he considered the nature of any God that could have created this world—“This dreary agitation of the dust, and all this strange mistake of mortal birth,” as Omar Khayyam had written—and the impulse to smile was gone.

  Golze had been looking at the water, but now looked directly at Marrity. “So where is the machine now?”

  Marrity
sat back, to put as much distance as possible between their faces. “That’s my merchandise, telling you that. But first you’ve got to pay me.”

  “Okay.” The black steel oarlocks clanked as Golze pulled on one oar and pushed on the other, and the boat rocked on the jade water as the bow began to move to the left. “What payment do you want?”

  Marrity took a deep breath and let it out, glad of the breeze in his sweaty hair. “Why are we doing this in a boat?” he asked. He looked around at the grassy banks and the arching red wooden footbridge. “This is where a scene in Chinatown was filmed, right?”

  Golze frowned, either at the evasion or at the question itself; and at first it seemed he wouldn’t reply. Then, “Yes, Jake Gittes was in a boat here, in that movie, photographing Hollis Mulwray and Mrs. Mulwray’s daughter.”

  Golze opened his mouth to go on, but Marrity impulsively said, “Jake didn’t get the daughter away in the end, did he?”

  “No,” said Golze with exaggerated patience, “the horrible old man took her away. But this is a relatively good spot for this particular confidential conversation. The jangling toys, and the fact that the boat keeps turning, make it difficult for anyone on the shore with a shotgun microphone to monitor our talk.”

  He bent to fetch up the dog again, and he squinted at Marrity as he slowly ratcheted the spring tight. At last he put it down and scratched at the black ribbon choker around his neck. “And the lake’s got associations with Charlie Chaplin. In certain ways it’s a deflection, for any psychic trying to track us. What payment do you want?”

  That was a short delay, Marrity thought forlornly.

  “Three things,” he said at last. “First, you leave Frank Marrity, the younger one, alone. No more shooting at him, no more anything at all, ever. You just forget about him and let him live to a ripe, untroubled old age.”

  “Okay. I don’t know how we can prove we’ve done that until he has died of old age, but I can tell you that I don’t know why we bothered to try to kill him in the first place. And I suppose if we killed him, your younger self, you might just disappear! I’m not sure of the physics on that.” He tugged at one oar, and the boat jostled around to the right, swaying in the water. “What’s the second thing?”

  “You let me use the…time-travel procedure to return to 2006, where I can resume my life. Oh, and there’s a house you’ve got to buy.”

  “A house? Okay, after we put you through a very thorough series of interviews, probably under narcohypnosis. What’s the third thing?”

  There was a long pause before Marrity answered, and Golze shifted the boat again.

  “I could tell you in three words,” Marrity said finally. “Two. And I certainly don’t care what you think of me. But I want to explain what it is, anyway.”

  “Fine. What is it?”

  “It’s the way the universe originally played out, the way my real life played out. I had a life, and I want it back.”

  “What took it from you?”

  “The damned Harmonic Convergence took it from me. An incident in this year, here in 1987, changed, even though it was in my past—imagine having something in your past change on you, so for instance you and some friends were shooting a gun when you were seventeen, and nothing went wrong, and you’ve grown up to happy middle age—but now suddenly you find yourself in a life in which you’ve been a quadriplegic since the age of seventeen because one of your friends accidentally shot you in the neck, way back then!” He mopped his face with the sleeve of his windbreaker. “And you still remember the original happy life! You’d want to go back, right?—and tell your seventeen-year-old self not to go shooting with those friends.”

  “How did the Harmonic Convergence do this?”

  “All these zombies—blanking their minds on the mountaintops—pressure drop—they’ve made a crack in the space-time continuity. Things resume on the future side of the crack, but not quite the same, a bit of quantum randomness has seeped in, like groundwater into a cracked foundation. Hell, you might soon get a visit from your future self, trying to put your life back on its original track.”

  “You’re not a quadriplegic. What is it you want us to prevent from happening?”

  “Well, it already happened. Yesterday. And I want you people to undo the change, undo the error, put my life back into its original…configuration.”

  “Okay. What happened yesterday that shouldn’t have happened?”

  For a few seconds the only sound was of some children playing around the snow-cone vendors on the north shore. Marrity stared out across the lake surface, with its patches of tiny, fine-hatched ripples among the glassy low swells.

  “My younger self…Frank Marrity…” Marrity was dizzy, and wondered if he was going to vomit. “He saved my daughter’s life, at that restaurant, yesterday. He did a tracheotomy on her. She was supposed to choke to death, she died there, in my original lifeline. In the real world.”

  Golze’s eyes were wide behind his steamy glasses and a smile was baring his yellow teeth and pulling his beard up on the sides. The choker ribbon was fully visible around his fat neck.

  “You want us to kill your daughter?” he said. “What is she, twelve?”

  “Yes, she’s twelve. But by the time she’s thirty, she’s a monster. And no wonder—she’s unnatural, living past yesterday; like a dead body walking around and talking.”

  “But you told her to run, this afternoon. We’d have her now, maybe, if you hadn’t told her to run.”

  “I wasn’t telling her, I was telling my younger self! This morning you people tried to kill him! Which…obviously isn’t what I want.”

  Golze bent down to pick up the red ant. “You get the ape,” he said. And when the toys were buzzing and clattering away again, he slouched back on his seat and said, “So you want us to kill your daughter.”

  Marrity felt hollow, a frail shell around a vacuum, as if he might implode into himself. Why did the fat man have to ask for a yes or no answer? he thought. I can’t say yes to him.

  The horrible old man took her away.

  But all I want is justice! My real life, not the nightmare life that grew out of the crack in reality, like a weed, like a nest of scorpions. What I’m saying yes to is reality!

  Marrity opened his mouth—but he was sure that if he said yes here, now, he would not ever be able to go back to being the man who had not said it.

  But I want the life the universe originally gave me. It’s mine.

  He took a deep breath.

  Twenty

  Yes,” Marrity said hoarsely. The boat seemed very unsteady, and he gripped the hot orange-painted wood of the gunwales.

  Golze was staring at him curiously. “Not just—kidnap her, sell her to Arab slave traders in Cairo? Get the duck.”

  “No, I think there’s a…a Law of Conservation of Reality, that would bring her back.” Marrity was sweating—drops were running down his forehead and he could feel them crawling over his ribs under his shirt as he obediently bent over and picked up the toy duck. “We’d still wind up in that twenty-four-foot trailer, and she’d still back the Ford over me in 2002. I can’t risk her coming back. And killing her would be”—he was panting with the effort of trying to believe what he was saying—“would be more merciful.”

  “Okay, we’ll do it. So where’s the machine?”

  “You don’t have her. She’s escaped from you. And as far as I can tell, your blind woman still means to kill Frank Marrity.”

  Golze jerked the oars in opposite directions, splashing drops of water into the air and jarring the boat. “Where is the machine?”

  “I’d need some assurances—”

  “We’ll give you what you want if you tell me now. If you don’t tell me now, we’ll give you what you don’t want, abundantly. Where is the machine?”

  Marrity’s shoulders slumped and he shook his head. “It’s at my grandmother’s house. In her backyard shed.”

  “Can we move it? Get it into the car?”

&
nbsp; “No!” Marrity involuntarily looked at his hands, to be sure they were still solid enough to twist the key in the duck. “If you move it, how will I use it in 2006?”

  “We’ll move it back later, don’t worry. We need you to have come back to tell us all this, after all. We don’t want to screw up your time line. But we need to move it now, because other people are going to try to take it, and they won’t care if it interferes with you or not.”

  “Okay, right.” I’ve lost all control, Marrity thought. “No, you can’t get it in the car. Part of it is the cement slab from the Chinese Theater, with Charlie Chaplin’s footprints and handprints on it.”

  “Good lord. That’s part of it? But she didn’t have that in 1933, did she?”

  “No, the slab was still out in front of the theater then. My grandmother had Chaplin himself, in ’33, and he wound up getting temporally dislocated too, at least an accidental astral projection of him did, though he meant to just be a, a nonparticipating observer. It scared the daylights out of him—well, there was the earthquake too—and that summer he burned all but one of the prints of A Woman of the Sea.”

  “And we’ll get that back,” Golze said. “Burned up by a twelve-year-old girl! But we’ll get it back.” He had begun rowing strongly toward the dock. “Got to get to a radio,” he panted. His glasses were opaque white, reflecting the sun. “We’re going to need some help, and a truck.”

  The elderly Frank Marrity gripped the edges of the car seat and wondered if he was going to be sick. Golze was driving Rascasse’s car, too fast around corners, and the car reeked of melted plastic. What had been the stereo was a blackened crater in the middle of the dashboard.

  They were nearly at Grammar’s house, and Golze had driven up the 110 to get here, so they were approaching from the south, and Marrity’s excursions during these last three days had been by way of California Street, to the north; he hadn’t seen these streets for many years, and there was more of his childhood than of his adulthood clinging to these old trees and pavements.