I've been sent back. AJ couldn't push the thought out of his mind, as he lay shivering on the rock ledge up in the Riverside mountains. Maybe it was just chance, he thought, that so many lightning bolts struck so close before finally zapping me next to the car — but it was impossible for him to avoid the feeling that a force beyond his comprehension had sent him back on a mission.

He had been deposited exactly where he had been a week earlier ... or an hour earlier: he couldn't tell. It was pitch-black, with no moon to shed any light. There was a vast open void of blackness between him and the few lights visible from the valley below. He might have believed he was floating in space if he were not firmly rooted to the rock ledge where he had come to escape from NowTime2.

The rain had stopped, and the air was mild. But the rocks were wet, and there was still moisture in the air; a soft breeze would have been pleasant if he were in dry clothes, but everything besides his jacket was sopping. He had awakened lying flat on his back, covered by the jacket as if he had arranged it over himself in his sleep as a blanket; his adult clothes were gone, along with his wallet and everything else in his pockets. Only the key chain, with Darth Vader firmly attached, was still in his hands. This is my proof that I was back in BeforeTime. But it's proof only for me, he decided, tossing the keys into the darkness. It's not the kind of thing I can show Mom and Dad.

Mom, he thought suddenly, a wave of sadness washing over him as he remembered the hospital scene which had taken place just a few moments earlier. But if I'm back in NowTime, then she's alive again. But, of course, that assumed that this NowTime was like the last NowTime, and that this NowTime was "adjacent" timewise to the NowTime he had left last week. From up here on the rock ledge, it was impossible to tell: for all he knew, several years had elapsed. Or, he thought, since I was back in BeforeTime for a week, maybe a week has gone by and Mom and Dad have driven off without me, off to their new home in Omaha.

But that didn't seem likely. Even if they were furious, they would have come looking for him. They're not monsters, he thought. They wouldn't have simply shrugged their shoulders and abandoned me. So that means that I may have come back to the same night that I left. It occurred to him that perhaps as far as the folks here in Riverside were concerned, he had been gone only an instant -- and since they couldn't see him up here in the mountains anyway, maybe they didn't even know he was gone.

Still, that left one question: was this NowTime — which he realized he would have to call NowTime3 to distinguish it from NowTime1 and NowTime2 — substantially the same as the one he left? He was still shaken by the difference between BeforeTime2 and BeforeTime3, when Gorbachev disappeared from the world scene and glasnost was considered nothing more than a Russian vodka. Maybe Eisenhower doesn't exist in this world, he thought.

But there would be no way of knowing without going back — back down the mountain, to face the music, assuming that Norma and Lucas were still down there, packed up and ready to move. He didn't relish the thought: he had visions of Lucas stalking around the yard with a loaded shotgun, while Norma shrieked curses into the air from the doorway. They probably decided not to come up here looking for me, in the dark and the rain, he thought. And I'm not going back down there in the dark, either. Even if he could find his way back down the ravine without tumbling end over end to the bottom, he didn't want to face them in the darkness.

So he continued sitting, with his knees hunched up to his chest and his arms clasped around them, brooding over his situation while waiting for the darkness to end. The sky slowly turned gray, and then rosy, while he continued wondering about the cosmic chess game in which he found himself an unwitting piece. If I'm only a pawn, he thought, who is directing the strategy?

Finally, he could wait no longer; the sky was pink and the dark, impenetrable shadows had retreated further up the hills. It was time to go home. Despite his reluctance to face the music, the downhill trek generated its own momentum. He scampered down the slopes, over the rocks, through the ravines, soaking his pants and shoes once again as he moved through the thick brush. It had taken almost an hour to climb up to the rock ledge, but he was back down to the base of Box Tree Canyon, to the edge of the creek and the cottonwood trees, in less than half an hour.

At the end of the dirt road, where the canyon met the asphalt section of Two Trees Road, a police car was waiting. It had just pulled up as he emerged from the shadows of the cottonwood trees, where the birds were twittering madly in the early morning light, and the two uniformed policemen seemed startled by his presence. They were sent to find me, AJ thought. But maybe they didn't see any point in starting until sunrise, and didn't know which path they should follow up into the hills.

"Did my Mom call you?" AJ asked cautiously, as they ushered him into the back seat of the car. God knows what she might have told them, he thought.

"Nope, sport, she didn't," the friendlier of the two responded as his partner backed the car down the road to find a wide enough spot to swing around. The one behind the wheel was older, with gray fringes of hair around a balding dome. He looks like he's pissed off to be here, AJ thought.

"Well, was it my Dad?" he asked, as they approached the corner of Terrace Drive.

"Nope," responded the talkative cop.

"Oh." There's no point, he thought, having them listen to my parents tell me what a jerk I've been; they might join in, and then I'd have four grownups harassing me. "Listen, why don't you just drop me off here? I'm right down the block — down by that house with the car and the Jeep in the driveway."

"Hey, sport?" The friendly cop leaned out the window and gave him a smile as AJ closed the car door.

"Yeah?" AJ replied, shading his eyes from the bright sunlight that was starting to appear over the top of the mountains. I'll bet this guy spends more of his time rescuing stray cats and lost children than chasing criminals, he thought.

"You got any brothers or sisters?"

"No, sir, I surely don't."

"Well, then, you must have a pretty good friend. It was a young kid who called us — something about a lightning bolt. You sure you're okay?"

"Yessir, I'm fine. I'm sure my folks will check me over for bumps and bruises."

The cop shrugged, and nodded to his partner to drive off. Before AJ could ponder his casual statement that they knew he had been hit by lightning, Blackie spied him from the front yard and began howling as if he were a marauder. Lucas had the Chevy backed into the driveway, had attached the Jeep to the car with a trailer hitch, and was strapping down the tarpaulin over the Jeep. Norma was sitting on the front steps, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee in the cool morning light. Despite the gorgeous California morning, she looked grim and ragged.

Lucas heard Blackie yapping as AJ approached, and looked up. He let go of the strap, and it twanged back across the Jeep; the tarpaulin fluttered softly in the gentle breeze. He walked up to AJ, and stood silently for an eternity of a moment, looking down at the bedraggled child who barely reached the height of his chest. His hair, jet-black and glistening, was slicked back as if he just gotten out of the shower, and he looked like he hadn't had much sleep. But he didn't wear his usual scowl, and there was no aura of rage around him. Finally, he said softly, "Looks like you had a rough night out there, son," and wrapped his arm around AJ's shoulder as he walked him back to the car.

He's never called me anything but "kiddo" before, AJ thought, as he felt his legs wobbling beneath him. But he couldn't think of anything to say. Lucas had not demanded an explanation or apology, and AJ made a snap judgment that it was better to remain silent.

Norma approached the car from the porch, and Lucas moved back to re-attach the tarpaulin. She stood in front of AJ, wearing one of her home-sewn dresses from a Sears pattern, holing her body tense and rigid. It seemed to AJ that she would wait until hell froze over, if necessary, for him to say something. The woman he was looking at was 35 years younger from the tired shadow he had seen in the hospital last night. It had been only been a few hours since her last words to him, and there was no question what he must say to her. "Will you forgive me, Mom?"

Her shoulders slumped, her body relaxed — but she remained silent, a tortured look on her face. There was no need on his part to fake anything: what he had told Norma on her deathbed was what he knew he had to tell her sincerely now: "The past is the past, Mom. I promise I won't ask you about it ever again."

Norma stifled a cry, and reached out to envelop him in her arms in the kind of hug that only a mother can give. "Whatever you were looking for, AJ, whatever you thought you know or saw, let it go. Just let it go."

I still don't know what this is all about, he thought. He had a hunch about the identity of the young waif in the photograph — but it obviously tormented Norma, and even if he never mentioned it to her again, he now knew that it would continue to haunt her for the rest of her life. So he promised her, in a muffled voice directed into her blouse, "I'll let it go, Mom. I swear."

"We left all that behind us, years ago ... " Norma continued. But before she could go any further, Lucas interrupted.

"Are you going to just stand here and yap all day, or could we get going?" he asked. If he had overheard any of the conversation between AJ and Norma, he gave no sign of it.

Blackie was ready: he was in his trailer home, peering out of the back of the Jeep, forming the rear guard in the caboose of their train. His bark, which ranged from a throaty growl when threatened to a middle-range mutt-like woof!, was now an excited yip! yap!, and AJ could hear his tail thumping rapidly on the floor of his small wooden home. He was ready to go; so were they.

With a flourish, Lucas held the passenger door open for Norma and AJ; AJ scampered into the back seat, and Norma got in the front, ready to ride shotgun on yet another voyage across America. Though she was a good driver, Norma never took the wheel on these trips; Lucas felt that it was a man's job to drive. Lucas scooted around the front, patted the hood of the Chevy as if it were a faithful horse, and hopped into his seat. They were off.

They headed north on Route 91, passing through Colton and Grand Terrace for San Bernardino. This would be their last look at the orange groves and palm trees of California; as they got closer to the San Bernardino mountains, the soil got sandier, and the trees were planted further apart. Exhausted by the events of the night and lulled by the motion of the car, AJ drifted slowly into a state of half-consciousness.

The highway took them through miles of open grazing pastures until they reached the small town of Victorville. Then it was over the Mojave River, and through 40 miles through uncultivated, uninhabited scrub brush before reaching Barstow. Little lines of hills marched off in every direction at a distance from the road; tumbleweeds blew slowly across the empty landscape.

Past Barstow, there was nothing: no horses, no cows, no farms, no grazing, no houses, no gas stations, no stores. There was none of the trash of civilization that AJ remembered seeing back East — none of the abandoned motels or auto junkyards, no run-down barns or crumbling wooden sheds; the only detritus of society was the occasional shredded tire by the side of the road suggesting that some driver had met with disaster along the way. Aside from the highway, the only sign of civilization was the row of telephone poles on the left of the road: as they came over a rise, the poles stretched in a straight line up ahead of them as far as the eye could see — like crosses in a graveyard, they marched forward until they became tiny toothpicks in the distance.

They crossed the Nevada border just before noon, and an hour later, they skirted the northern edges of Las Vegas. Winter had not left this part of the country, and the temperature was well below freezing; the mountain ranges off to the north were blanketed in snow. Lucas had no interest in seeing the casinos; he wanted to get well into Utah before stopping for the night.

Half an hour beyond Las Vegas, they passed through the Moapa River Indian Reservation at the edge of the Muddy Mountains. An occasional mine was visible from the road, and a Union Pacific train chugged by, hauling a short line of fifty ore cars. They passed BJ's Restaurant and then crossed over the Muddy River into Glendale. The landscape grew hillier, with exposed sandstone rocks, clumps of cactus, and long, serrated ridges that looked as if a giant had scraped his fingernails in a long line when the rocks were still molten. With the Jeep behind them, Lucas slowed down to second gear, as they ratcheted up a long hill onto a high plateau above Glendale.

A few minutes later, they descended the steep eastern side of the plateau, down through Riverside and Bunkerville and into the border town of Mesquite, a lush farm community nurtured by the nearby Virgin River. As they crossed the border into Arizona, frothy clouds cast dancing shadows on the sides of a long ridge of mountains stretching for miles on the right. Then they suddenly disappeared, flooop!, around a bend, into the incredibly steep canyons of the Virgin River Gorge. The gorge towered straight up on both sides of the road, and the crevice was so narrow there was barely room for the road itself. The stone was shale and sandstone, reddish-orange in color, with visible evidence of the work of the Virgin River over millions of years. Highway signs warned of strong cross-winds, and Lucas rolled down the window to feel the breeze; but it was deathly quiet and still, and they held their breath as if even the most feeble exhalation would be a transgression in the midst of the awesome spectacle of the gorge.

Almost immediately after exiting the canyon and crossing into Utah, they reached St. George. It would have been faster to head north at this point, following the main road to Salt Lake. But Norma had asked repeatedly if they couldn't make a little detour off to the east, in order to drive through the stunning array of canyons and rock formations known as Zion Park. It looked like a small detour to Lucas, and it allowed him to connect up to Route 89 to head for Vernal in the northeast corner of the state.

Twenty miles beyond St. George, the town of Springdale announced the imminent entrance to Zion Park. The rock formations were like massive giants, looming up, touching the sky, with the Halifaxes down at the level of their toenails. The rocks all appeared to be solid granite, carved by the Virgin River; around a series of hairpin curves, they came upon sheer granite rock faces that looked like they were sliced by a giant's sword. Norma prevailed upon Lucas to stop a few times so she could lean out the window to snap a few shots. AJ could tell, though, that for Lucas it was not photographing the scenery or getting out to look at it that mattered — it was just being there. Lucas seemed to draw strength from the beauty of the immense landscape of the West, almost as if it gave out radiation that he could absorb.

By six o'clock, they were out of the park and into an area of sandy, scruffy, pine-covered hills. The rocks were gone, with a suddenness that was surprising; there were no mesas, buttes, bluffs, or cliffs. The sun had set and it looked as if it would be dark soon; but they had reached the turn-off for Route 89, and a highway sign indicated that they had only fifty miles to go before reaching the town of Panguitch.

They crossed Muddy Creek, slowed down briefly to look at the Sugar Knoll Cafe and the one dilapidated motel in Mt. Carmel, before moving back into open land past some small farms along the Virgin River. Orderville and Glendale offered no resting spots either, so they kept going. The two-lane highway was completely empty and Lucas managed to get his speed up to 70 mph as they traveled through a long north-south valley with split-rail fences, small ponds, clumps of birch and cottonwood trees, and small ranches with names like Little Bit of Heaven. Panguitch finally appeared at seven o'clock, a good-sized town with tilled land in a broad valley. High mountain ranges ran along both sides of the valley, all heavily covered with snow. They came to a stop, after a long day and some 470 miles of driving, at the Marianna Inn on the north edge of town. Blackie was delighted to be let out of the Jeep, and ran happily around the car before accepting a warm bed for the night on the floor of their motel room.

The next morning, they got a civilized start at nine o'clock. Lucas wanted to reached Vernal by dinnertime, but estimated that it was only five or six hours of driving from Panguitch. After breakfast, they followed Route 89 out of town; the road followed the river, which had stopped meandering and now ran straight north. A few miles beyond Panguitch, the tilled farmland disappeared, and they were back to sagebrush, rocky hills, and deep ravines on both sides of the road.

At Duchesne, they stopped for gas and a late lunch. Blackie was shivering from the cold weather, and Lucas agreed to let him ride the rest of the afternoon in the back of the car with AJ. When they were ready to go, they followed Route 40 west through Bridgeland and Myron, into Ballard and Fort Duchesne before reaching Vernal. Route 40 branched southeast out of town through the adjacent village of Naples, and took them to the one-store outpost of Jensen, some nine miles away. This was home for the Halifax clan, where Lucas's parents and grandparents had lived for over fifty years; Lucas let out a deep sigh and announced that they would stay for a day before heading on to Omaha.

To AJ, the comparison between the BeforeTime world of Manhattan in the 1980s and the simple life that Lucas's parents led in their mining camp outside Jensen was a jolt. Grandma and Grandpa had electricity, but the whole family still shared a single outhouse fifteen feet behind the back door. AJ figured that everything was probably the same now as it had been eight years earlier, when Norma and Lucas had first brought him here in BeforeTime, shortly after they arrived in Denver on their trek from Washington. Indeed, it was probably much the same as when Lucas was a kid in the 1920s, and when his Dad was a kid before that. Grandma and Grandpa didn't look like the picture-book grandparents, pink-cheeked and white-haired, that AJ had in his mind's eye. They were a weather-beaten gray, almost colorless; and although they seemed glad to see Lucas and his family when they arrived, they were quiet and almost grim in their demeanor. Grandpa no longer worked; AJ assumed that it was an accident in the mines that had left him an invalid, spending his days sitting mute in a rocking chair with a blanket draped over shattered legs.

Lucas occasionally told stories of his childhood here, of the Ouray Indian children at the edge of the camp that he grew up with, but he had always made it very clear that it was a life he had left behind. His allegiance was primarily expressed by his annual deer-hunting expedition to Utah; aside from that, he perceived himself as a college-educated engineer of the modern world, not a miner's son from the Wild West.

AJ was not so surprised that Lucas only wanted to spend a day here before moving on; what did surprise him, though, was the awkward tension between all of the adults during the brief visit. At the dinner table, he watched carefully as everyone took helpings of chicken, mashed potatoes and turnips and then sat staring at their plates as they ate. After ten minutes of silence, broken only by the occasional clatter of a fork against a plate, he felt goose bumps rising on his arms. A monastery would be more lively than this, he thought.

The next morning, everyone was up early to greet a cold, gray, cloudy dawn. Breakfast was served at six; by seven, everyone was in the car, and Blackie was perched in his nest. Grandma waved good-bye to Norma and Lucas, Lucas gave her a quick hug, and they were off. It was only after they were gone that it occurred to AJ: none of us said good-bye to Grandpa, nor did he make any effort at breakfast to wish us well in our new home in Omaha.

Route 40 headed west out of Jensen, past a cluster of mining supply companies, and across Ashley Creek. A light rain began falling as they crossed the Colorado border; unlike some of the other borders, this one was marked only by a small sign, with no welcoming words. A huge storm cloud was moving off to their north, but they had no one to share it with: they had been alone on the road since they left Jensen.

A sign on the far end of the small village of Dinosaur warned them that there was no gas for the next 57 miles. Blue Mountain, Massadona, and Elk Springs passed by them; all of these so-called towns were tiny, with a single restaurant, or single-pump gas station, as the fulcrum of business activity. The highway was flat here, and Lucas was trying to made the best time he could. The road was rough, and the combination of patches and frost heaves made the tires hum as they rattled along. Sheep grazed along the edge of the road, unhampered by fences; they watched drowsily as the car went by. A few miles past Massadona, three deer slowly, peacefully ambled across the road; they looked at the Halifaxes curiously, then moved off into the hills.

Soon after the deer disappeared, they came over a ridge and suddenly found themselves looking out over a vista of twenty miles of vast, open rolling hills of sage brush. Twenty minutes later, a few miles past Elk Springs, they came over another ridge and saw massive, snow-covered mountains in the east for the first time since entering Colorado; the mountains were twenty miles away, but the picture-postcard spectacle was so awesome that Norma gasped and Lucas whistled at the sight. Norma asked if they could stop to take a picture; but Lucas launched into a long, convoluted theory based on the Indian superstition that taking a picture steals part of the soul of the subject. Actually, said Lucas, taking a picture of the landscape just gives you the illusion of capturing the soul of the country.

Just before Maybell, as they came over another ridge to look out on another vista, they passed an area where Lucas said there had been a huge prairie fire in 1948. Caused by lightning, the fire had burned 15,000 acres as far as the eye could see. It was still called the "I do" fire, in honor of the fire-fighter who had already scheduled his wedding for the day of the fire; the man had rushed through his vows, dashed off to fight the fire, and was burned to death before he could even celebrate his wedding night. The story was interesting, but AJ's attention had been snatched away by a glimpse of green through the back window of the car: behind them on the horizon, disappearing periodically behind the ridges but maintaining its distance, was a car whose features and details were indistinct. It was so far away that it looked like an ant frantically scooting along the road to keep up with them; nevertheless, he became more and more convinced as the miles rolled by that it was a green De Soto.

I should tell Dad, he thought. He leaned forward, cleared his throat, and then stopped. It will just open a Pandora's Box, and I'll have to explain why I've noticed this same damn car every time we've moved. It was a green car two years ago in Denver, he suddenly realized, remembering a picture in his mind's eye, that Joanna ran to when I heard someone call her "BJ."

Late in the afternoon, after they had driven over the mountain ranges and around Denver, Lucas saw a sign telling them that Omaha was 457 miles away; it was clearly beyond reach for that day, but he let out a small sigh of relief, knowing that they would get there by the next evening. The driving had become easier, now that they were out of the mountains, but there was a heavy cross wind blowing across the road. The wind made a whining noise as it tried to get in the windows; combined with the bumpy, patched road, it sets AJ's teeth on edge and began to give him a dull headache. But Lucas seemed not to notice; he zoomed through Merino, shot through Atwood, watched another Union Pacific train go by, passed a small wooded cemetery, and finally pulled into the town of Sterling a little before six o'clock.

On the final day of the journey, they switched onto Route 138, following the South Platte River as it headed through Iliff, Proctor, Crook, and Sedgwick. After a quick lunch in North Platte, they continued driving along the Platte River, whose banks were marked by thick clumps of trees; the so-called river was barely more than a meandering stream. The weather was warmer out on the plains than the freezing temperatures in the mountains, and a huge thunderstorm had formed off to the north and east of their path. The storm had produced an atomic-bomb-size mushroom cloud that made AJ wonder whether they were going to be passing through a tornado; but it was not the right season, and Lucas ignored it. The road here was only two lanes wide, but Lucas barreled along at 70 mph through enormous empty meadows.

As they headed into the darkening thunderstorm, there was a massive flash of lightning — perhaps five miles in front of them, and at a height of a mile above the ground, it lit up the sky for miles around. It seemed infinitely larger to AJ than the lightning bolt that had struck their car years ago in Virginia, or any of the lightning bolts that had transported him between NowTime and BeforeTime. Something this powerful would dissolve all of us into individual electrons, he thought.

By the time they reached Brady, hunkered down in the storm, the rain was coming down in solid, heavy sheets; another huge lightning bolt flickered horizontally through the sky. Near Gothenburg, with its sprawling Farmland Service grain elevator reaching into the sky and a sign pointing off to a long-defunct Pony Express station up the road, another phenomenal lightning bolt shot straight down into a field off to the southeast. They passed a herd of black cows all huddled together in a mangy mob in the rain, but there was no other sign of life.

By mid-afternoon, they had passed through Willow Island, Cozad, Darr, Lexington, and Overton. The rain continued beating like a drum on the car, and lightning flashes were in the air all around them. On the final leg of the journey, as they turned off Route 30 to took county road 92 straight east, Blackie stared out at the scenery and licked the window. But there was nothing to see: tiny crossroads at Osceola and Rising City showed no sign of life, and even the town of Wahoo looked like everyone had decided to stay indoors for another month until spring really arrived. Nevertheless, Lucas couldn't resist rolling down the window and yelling "Wahoo!" as they passed through the center of town.

The whoop of delight was well deserved: they were almost there. It was only another 30 miles to Omaha, and they covered the distance in under an hour. Lucas decided to look for a motel on the south side of town, so he and Norma could begin their house-hunting relatively close to his new job at Offutt AFB, which was nestled beside the Missouri River ten miles south of the city.

The house they eventually found was on a street with the curious name of Child's Crossing. The street started at the top of a hill, where a perpendicular cross-road, Bellevue Boulevard, ran parallel to the nearby Missouri River; for a kid on a bike, Child's Crossing was a wonderful long, coasting ride downhill until it reached bottom, crossed a railroad track at Galvin Road, and climbed up the other side. They were just a quarter-mile down from the top of the hill -- far enough to get up enough speed so that AJ could slam on his bicycle brakes and skid dramatically into the driveway, but not too far to tire him out on the uphill ride before he reached the crest of the hill.

The house itself was a standard two-bedroom affair, not too different from the house they had occupied in Riverside. On the uphill side, stretching up to the crest, was a huge vacant lot — smooth and grassy enough that it was used by the neighborhood boys as the standard playing area for baseball. On the downhill side was a pleasant family with a son, Steven, three years younger than AJ, together with a menagerie of dogs, cats, chickens, and a foul-tempered goose that wandered freely from house to house. AJ soon made friends with a red-headed boy his age named Paul, at the top of the hill, and a chubby kid named Rudy a block down the hill.

A month later, AJ's birthday passed quietly. Maybe Mom and Dad just ran out of ideas, he thought, or maybe they think eleven is too old for toy trucks. In any case, he received a bow-and-arrow set: not the make-believe kind with rubber suction cups, but a real set. The bow was made of wood, and the arrows had tapered metal points that would easily kill a rabbit or bird unfortunate enough to get in their path. And that was AJ's first instinct: as soon as the presents were opened, he took the bow outside to looked for unwary victims lurking around the house. Fortunately for the animal population, he was a terrible shot: half his arrows ended up stuck in the high branches of trees, on the roof of the house, or simply vanished into the weeds in the adjoining lot.

A month later, on Memorial Day, school came to an end. The only unsettling thing to AJ about the end of sixth grade was the absence of any star drawings from Joanna. This was not surprising; the messages had always begun in September, at the start of a new school year — but he hadn't forgotten the ominous tone of her last few messages just two months earlier, with mysterious warnings of Communist agents. Nor had he felt completely at ease on the streets of Omaha — not after the kidnapping attempt in front of the Riverside school, and the unmistakable signs that they had been followed across the country by the mysterious De Soto.

Could Lucas really be a Communist? he wondered. Not only was he lacking proof, but he had no accusations other than the one from Joanna. Still, he thought, if you want to be suspicious, you could found a lot of circumstantial evidence to fit with her accusation. Lucas's oblique comments about Russian computers over the past several years were his strongest indication that he was up to something unusual, but AJ had no way of connecting it to any overt behavior. Lucas sometimes wandered out of the house late at night, slamming the car door and driving away for hours on end. On the other hand, AJ had great difficulty telling when Lucas was drunk and when he was sober in the evening: when he was sober, he sometimes exploded with the same fury one would expect of a drunk; and when he was drunk, he often talked in a quiet, cold tone that one would associate with sobriety. If Lucas had been sneaking out in the middle of the night to spy on someone or something, he could always claim later that he was just off on a drunken binge.

The summer of 1955 drifted along quietly, and AJ lost himself in games of baseball and day-long fishing excursions along the Missouri River. The only news that attracted his attention came in mid-August: IBM introduced a new line of computers to challenge Remington Rand's UNIVAC machine. It was called the IBM 700, and AJ knew it would eventually be replaced by a long string of bigger and faster computers whose model-numbers were known only to the most dedicated of computer veterans: the 650, the 1401, the 7040 and 7090/7094, and finally the 360 in 1964. The new IBM 700 was impressive only in comparison to the UNIVAC: it still filled an entire room and weighed several tons.

But it was the first time in years that anything had happened in the computer field sufficiently noteworthy to hit the newspapers. Lucas mentioned it while sipping his martini, as they sat at the dinner table waiting for Norma to dish out her latest concoction. Lucas was scornful at the thought IBM could create a serious competitor to the UNIVAC. Norma smiled indulgently at him as AJ rose to the bait and challenged Lucas's argument.

"In the long run, Dad, neither this IBM computer or the UNIVAC computer will matter. The whole idea of a single super-computer is going to get blown away by thousands of little computers. Teeny little computers, computers that all work together ... " he hesitated, for the word he wanted to use was "asynchronously," but he doubted that the term even existed in the 50s — and it was not one he would be expected to use.

"Bullshit!" Lucas replied. He stuck a toothpick into his martini glass to fish out the olive.

"But Dad, it makes sense, if you think about it. An army of computers, like ants working independently but in harmony with each other. Or like a flock of birds that can fly in close formation: not a single one of them is in charge, but they could all harmonize and work together. Or like ... " He hesitated: he was at a loss for metaphors again.

Norma, who had been silent through the discussion, surprised them both with a metaphor of her own. "Maybe you could think of it this way," she said. "Imagine that I'm a big computer, and I'm trying to single-handedly control all the other little computers."

"What other little computers?" asked Lucas. He popped the martini olive into his mouth and stared suspiciously at the casserole that Norma had placed on the table.

"Well, just suppose," Norma continued, ignoring his question. "And suppose that the two of you were little computers. And as a little computer, you have to follow the commands of the big computer — that's me — whenever I give them. Okay?"

Lucas and AJ stared at her, for entirely different reasons.

"Now, here are my instructions: when I clap my hands together, then I want both of you to clap your hands at the same time, all together. Ready?"

They continued staring. Norma put her fork down on the table and clapped her hands with a loud crack! Her clap was followed by a rag-tag sequence of unsynchronized clapping: Lucas was the first to followed her lead, and AJ was the last.

A second attempt was hardly any better; AJ could see that Lucas was disgusted — with their performance, and with the game. The third time, just when she guessed they probably had some idea of what she was doing, Norma began the motion of a hand-clap, but then stopped abruptly. Even though the whole thing had taken on an eerie quality for AJ, he was as fooled by the motion as Lucas, and an explosion of claps ensued.

"Tsk, tsk!" she joked. "You didn't follow my command!"

"You cheated!" growled Lucas.

But AJ was in a trance, and he couldn't help asking, "What's the point, Mom?"

"Well, it just seems to me that it would be awfully hard to have one computer — or one person — attempting to synchronize a group of other computers — or people."

"So?" asked Lucas, imperiously.

"So, here's the alternative I think AJ was trying to describe: I'll drop out of the picture as the commanding computer. Let's all of us just clap in harmony."

Lucas sat woodenly, staring at her.

"Go ahead," she said. "You can do it."

AJ took the lead, and as Norma must have instinctively known, they required only three beats of their own rhythm before they had compensated for one another and the entire table was clapping loudly, in perfect synchronicity. The experience was so overwhelming that it was all AJ could do to keep from crying as the conflicting emotions churned through his mind.

How many other BeforeTime ideas did I unconsciously steal from her? How much does she know about Joanna's accusations? But there were no answers to his questions, and no one to talk to.

Toward the end of the summer, Lucas took a two-week vacation, and announced that they would be driving to Utah. Using the trusty Jeep, he planned to go prospecting with Norma, through the deserts and mountains of his childhood. Not for oil, not for gas, not even for gold — but for uranium. They left Omaha at six in the morning for a marathon 18-hour drove, retracing the same route that had carried them to Omaha a few months earlier. Norma carried sandwiches and thermoses of milk and coffee, so they stopped only when the car needed gas. Blackie, meanwhile, had been left to fend for himself in Steven's menagerie next door; AJ, too, was left to fend for himself once they reached Grandpa's house in Jensen: early the next morning, Norma and Lucas took off in the Jeep, toting a shiny new Geiger counter that had set Lucas back a pretty penny.

In their absence, AJ was left alone with the elder Halifaxes. He spent some of his time exploring in the desert, and some hunting for lizards and snakes with his trusty slingshot; but the sun was so hot that he spent long hours in the middle of the day in the cool darkness of the living room. Grandpa rocked in his chair, hour after hour, silently staring at the wall, humming to himself, lost somewhere in his own world; for the first two days, he seemed unaware of AJ's presence. AJ had no wish to intrude and was perfectly happy to use the time for quiet meditation of his own; there were too many disconnected pieces, loose threads, and contradictory puzzles in this NowTime life, and it was rare that he had more than a few moments to look for some sense in the jumble of BeforeTime and NowTime events.

Indeed, he was concentrating so hard on his own thoughts that he didn't even hear Grandpa at first. It was just after lunch on the third day when the old man cleared his throat and slowly began talking. His story didn't involve his own childhood: AJ still didn't know where he was born, who his parents were, or even why he had become a miner. But he was a good miner, Grandpa told AJ, a hard worker and a man determined to made a decent living for his family. When the Depression came along and times were hard, the mining company began laying people off; Grandpa responded by leading a unionization movement in the camp. As times grew harder during the 30s and the company laid off more men, the union became more militant. Grandpa was seen by the company as a trouble-maker; the union was accused of having Communist ties, though none of the miners had ever seen a real Communist in their lives.

The showdown came in 1939: the company announced it was cutting wages again, and the union, led by Grandpa, organized a strike and a round-the-clock picket of the mine. By the standards of the times, let alone the standards of AJ's BeforeTime 80s, it was not a big deal: it didn't made the newspapers in Denver or Salt Lake, let alone Washington. But it was not a response the mining company was willing to tolerate: a group of thugs — "lower than horse thieves," as Grandpa put it — paid him a visit in the middle of the night, a week after the strike began. They beat him within an inch of his life; the broken ribs and intestinal injuries kept him in the hospital for two months, and his legs were shattered in so many places that he never walked again.

"The union stood by me," Grandpa said softly, "and your grandmother did, too. But I guess the real damage wasn't what they did to my legs, but what they did to Lucas."

Lucas, AJ thought silently as the story continued. The son of a militant unionist, the son of a strike-leader accused of being a Communist. It put things in a different perspective. Some quick mental arithmetic informed him that Lucas had been 17 when his father was beaten, presumably nearing the end of his high school education. Whether he would have stayed in the mining camp under normal circumstances was something that neither Lucas, nor Grandpa, nor AJ, would ever know.

The circumstances, Grandpa's story made clear, were intolerable in the extreme. Though the union provided a disability pension, it was far less than the family needed to survive. There was no alternative but to ask Lucas to drop out of school and get a job; and there was no other job beside the work at the mine. With Grandpa out of the way, the strike had collapsed; and with several of the miners unable or unwilling to accept the equivalent of slave wages, there was an opening for Lucas. Grandpa had no choice: it was the company's ultimate way of making him eat crow, and he knew it. So did Lucas.

Lucas worked in the mine for nearly two years — enduring insults and abuse, Grandpa admitted, that a rattlesnake shouldn't be made to endure. And so it shouldn't have come as a surprise that he would look for a way to escape; and with the world already engulfed in war in the summer of 1941, it shouldn't have been a surprise that he would use a naval enlistment as his escape route. What was a surprise, and one that Grandpa didn't explain, was that they survived economically in Lucas's absence. More surprising was that Lucas ever returned. But he must have done so, AJ thought, because I have BeforeTime memories of visits to Utah that dated back to 1950, if not earlier. But the conclusion to Grandpa's story filled in the missing pieces, and began to offer an explanation for the strange things going on in Lucas's life.

"When Lucas finished college on his high-falutin' GI bill," Grandpa said with a bitter laugh, "he suddenly discovered that he needed the old farts he had left behind in Utah. He went and applied for some high-security defense job, and the FBI started investigating every inch of his damn life. Hah!"

Every inch of his life, including his parents, his friends, his drinking buddies — everyone. AJ could just imagine Lucas trying to explain that his roughneck miner father was not a Communist — and that even if he had been, he wasn't. Lucas had walked away from all of that, had joined the Navy, had started a new life with a generation of post-war veterans. But the FBI dredged it all up again, AJ thought.

"And you know what of it all?" Grandpa asked rhetorically. "After all that horseshit spread out over damn near twenty years?"

"What, Grandpa?" AJ responded. Grandpa was staring at the wall, eyes unfocused; he hadn't heard him.

"I do believe they turned my son into a Communist," he whispered. Like AJ, he had no proof — but he knew. But unlike AJ, he really knew; there are things that a father knows deep in his bones about his son, things that a court of law might reject, but that God would accept on Judgment Day. The room was silent while they both digested this knowledge; for Grandpa, it was the end of a long, pointless struggle. But I am not God, and I am not Lucas's father, AJ told himself. I can't accept this as proof, no matter how much sense it makes. I have to have my own proof.

At the end of the week, Norma and Lucas returned. Not a single nugget of uranium ore could be found out there in the badlands, they reported. Not only that, AJ could tell from the tension that they weren't speaking to each other. Norma finally began relaxing when they left Utah; she was willing to accept Lucas's life style, it seemed, but only up to a point.

Back in Omaha, summer was coming to an end and Labor Day was approaching. On the second day of school, AJ suddenly remembered the promise he made to himself on the morning they drove out of Riverside: find Joanna. The problem was that he knew only a handful of boys from his immediate neighborhood; most of the three hundred students in school were strangers. He half-expected Joanna to appear standing at the edge of the playground during recess periods, or sitting beside him during the school assembly when the principal welcomed them to a new year. But there was not a sign of her, not even in the awkward square-dancing classes required of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students. He knew that she was not in his grade or above, so he concentrated his attention on the fifth grade and sixth grade students -- but there were only fifty in these two grades, and by the end of the first week, he had been unable to find the blond girl who had followed him halfway around the country ...

Shortly after the beginning of school, the star drawings reappeared. The first message was drawn in black, the shade that Joanna reserved for her warnings. It said:

 

 

 

 

After nearly six months of silence, the warning annoyed him. But Grandpa's story had stuck in his mind; until he found some way to prove or disprove his conclusion, he would always be troubled by the possibility. Perhaps Joanna could help; at the end of the day, he left a message for her on the book rack under his desk:

 

 

 

 

The reply came back at once:

 

 

 

 

Of course! he thought. I completely forgot that weird file folder in his desk. It annoyed him that Joanna could pinpoint something so easily and that he would have forgotten it so easily. But the problem was the same one he had had all along: except on rare occasions, all of the drawers in the family desk were locked, and the keys were nowhere visible. After several consecutive days of skulking into the living room while Norma was cooking dinner, but before Lucas arrived home from work, he finally decided that he would just have to be patient.

Meanwhile, Joanna's messages turned friendly and colorful again, bordering on frivolity; she made no further accusations. His replies were equally friendly until a Thursday in early October, when he made the mistake of asking a question:

 

 

 

 

There was no answer, nor were there any further messages. After a few days, he turned his attention back to the classroom and the distractions of after-school adventures. Though it was early