"What ever happened to Gorby, anyway?"

AJ was doing a sanity test, trying to get a quick fix on the status of the world that he had fallen into. He had awakened in the morning in his familiar bed, located in a familiar apartment. It had been late at night when the lightning lifted him out of the Northport village park, and he took it for granted that he had been dumped — unconscious, perhaps — back in his bed in Manhattan at about the same time at night.

As he slowly came awake, he looked about nervously, wondering where he was and how he would fit in. The bedroom was empty, and the reason was obvious when he looked at the clock: it was 8:30 in the morning. His joints felt stiff when he swung his legs out of bed and stood up; it was depressing to be back in a middle-aged body again. He had awakened with the same scrap of paper that he held in his hand when the lightning snatched him away from Northport — the torn half of a birth certificate from Joanna. He decided to put it in a dresser drawer in the built-in closets along the wall, and was relieved to see that they were much the same as he last remembered.

He could hear the noise of the television in the kitchen, and that's where he found Ann. She looked the same, too, but he spotted one or two gray hairs, a sure sign that another year or two had passed while he was away. But she didn't scream, or jump with fright, or show any visible sign of surprise at his appearance, so he had no idea whether this was the same world, or a new world — nor any clue as to whether a day, a year, or a decade had passed since he left BeforeTime3 on his four-year sojourn through NowTime3. Hence the question about Gorbachev: in the BeforeTime3 world, he had fallen from grace in 1985. What will Ann's answer be in BeforeTime4? he wondered

She was standing at the stove, humming softly, as she cooked a scrambled egg in the skillet. She turned and smiled at him.

"Who?" she asked, in response to his question.

"Gorbachev — you know, the Russian guy."

"Gorbachev? God, who knows? That was a long time ago, Jonathan," Ann said, sliding the eggs onto a plate. "Who cares? What made him pop into your mind?"

"Oh, I dunno," he lied. "I had a dream about him last night ... and then my mind was blank when I woke up, and I realized I couldn't remember what ever happened to him."

"It must have been one hell of a dream," Ann laughed, as she sat down at the kitchen table. "You were really thrashing around for a while there in bed last night — I thought maybe you were dreaming about a wrestling match."

"Oh ... sorry," he apologized. "But anyway, what ever did happen to Gorby?"

"Gorby, Gorby ... God, Jonathan, who remembers these things?" Ann sighed, as she glanced at the front page of the paper she had carried over from the kitchen counter. "He did the glasnost thing, liberated the Soviet Union, won the Nobel Prize, blah blah blah. Didn't he start up some kind of think tank in Moscow?"

Bingo! Jonathan thought, grinning from ear to ear. Good old Gorby is back! "Yeah, I think you're right," he said. "He's probably writing his memoirs or something ... "

"Didn't he do that already?" Ann asked. She had turned to the Times and was scanning the movie reviews. "As Zack would say, that's ancient, man!"

"Speaking of whom ... " Jonathan said, suddenly realizing how quiet it was in the dining area. He looked behind him, and saw that the doors of both the boys' bedrooms were open. He couldn't see around the corner of Zack's doorway, but the bed in Danny's room was clearly empty; the bed was rumpled and unmade, and clothing was strewn around the floor. " ... where are the kids?"

"Kids?" asked Ann idly. "Did I miss something? Did Danny have a sleep-over last night without my knowing about it?"

"Beats the hell out of me," Jonathan answered honestly.

"Well, as far as I know," Ann replied sarcastically, "Danny is in school, doing whatever ninth graders do these days. As for Zack: God only knows — I think he may be following in his father's footsteps, and skipping his college classes this spring."

Ninth grade? he thought. College? He did a quick calculation: when he left BeforeTime3, Zack had been ... God, he couldn't even remember what grade he was in. Sarah was in college, but he couldn't remember whether she was a freshman or a sophomore. But for some reason, Danny's status was more clearly defined in his memory: he was in fourth grade.

Five more years have gone by? he wondered. He got up from the table, walked around Ann to fetch a cup, and picked up the front section of the Times as he poured coffee from the machine next to the refrigerator. Sure enough: it's Monday, May 1st, 1995.

"You're looking a little creaky," Ann commented, as he walked back to his end of the kitchen table. "I think you did a little too much birthday celebrating last night. You've gotta stop that dancing on the table stuff."

"Dancing on the table?" Jonathan asked, horrified.

"Jeez, you must have been drunk if you can't even remember whether you were on the table or under the table," Ann laughed. "I was just kidding — but I don't think I'm going to give you any more of that cognac for your next birthday."

God only knows what the BeforeTime3 version of me was doing last night, he thought. But he decided to take advantage of it, and protested to Ann that he was still feeling hung over, and would have to spend the day recovering ... from whatever the hell it was that I was supposed to be doing today, he thought.

He remembered from BeforeTime3 that his shadow-self had kept his life organized on a computerized calendar; five years later, Jonathan assumed he would be doing the same thing. He retreated into his old office, and found that a new model of Apple computer adorned the desk, and a smaller notebook-sized machine sat next to it. The Jonathan Halifax who had occupied his slot in the timewarp between 1990 and 1995 was still working as a free-lance computer consultant -- and his calendar showed that he was going to be a busy lad for the next few months. Consulting engagements, workshops, seminars, and a software development project to create the file-security subsystem for a new computer ... the list went on and on. Nearly every day on the calendar was filled, and it wasn't until early August that blank spaces appeared.

Fortunately, Monday and Tuesday were free, and the last three days of the week were scheduled for attending a seminar called "Practical Applications of Fuzzy Logic." Thank God, he thought. I don't know what I would do if I had to show up at a client office tomorrow and talk about computers, when I haven't seen one for five years

Five years! he thought. That's a lifetime in the computer field. As for world affairs, national politics, and the city he lived in — well, that will take a lot of catching up, too. And as for his personal life: the trick, he realized, would be keeping Ann from fully appreciating his ignorance while he scrambled to find out what he had missed. Some of the pertinent details he was able to acquire over the next several days from Danny, who was now the only child left in the house; he was convinced that both his parents were seriously brain-damaged. So, through a series of conversations in which he played the humble idiot, Jonathan learned from Danny that Zack had blossomed scholastically, had zoomed through high school in three years, and was now pursuing a double degree at Yale.

"A double degree in what?" he asked innocently.

"Jeez, Dad," Danny said, "can't you keep track of anything?"

So much for that, he thought. It took another week, and a series of patient questions and comments to learn from Ann and Danny that Sarah, his teenage tyrant who had already moved off to college when he was passing through BeforeTime3, was now fully grown. She was living in Manhattan, he learned, sharing a loft in SoHo and working as an investment banker for a small investment fund that specialized in environmental issues.

"She's 25 now, isn't she?" Jonathan asked one night, as they finished dinner. "Shouldn't Sarah be making enough money to have her own apartment by now?"

"You forget, AJ," Ann replied from the kitchen sink. "It's not the way it was when they were growing up. MBA's don't get a hundred-thousand dollar starting salary any more."

An MBA? Nobody told me about that, he thought, and added the new tid-bit to the jig-saw puzzle that he was building up. Sarah occasionally called to say hello, and Jonathan decided that after he had reacquainted himself sufficiently with his BeforeTime4 world, he would have to have lunch with her and get a closer look at the grown woman he claimed as a daughter.

The five-year absence was ultimately not so bad in terms of its physiological effects, Jonathan discovered. It would take some getting used to, like everything else, but he wasn't worried about it. But there's something I'll never get back, he thought. All the years when the kids were growing up. Zack called one evening from college, and Jonathan was embarrassed, hurt, and incredibly angry that he didn't even recognize hiss voice; Zack laughed but, like Danny, seemed to assume that parents were helpless Neanderthals. He was calling to announce that, with the college year winding up, he had decided to take a summer job in New Haven; he wouldn't be home for the summer.

So Zack and Sarah are effectively gone, Jonathan thought, feeling his heart sink as he hung up the phone. And Danny had one foot out of the nest, too: he left for school as soon as he could bolt down breakfast, stayed for after-school activities until seven o'clock each evening, and then disappeared into his bedroom even before he and Ann had finished dinner. Danny, too, would be gone for the summer: the summer camp he had been attending had hired him as a CIT, and he would have to report for duty within a few days after his high school classes ended.

"A what?" Jonathan asked, when Danny mentioned it at dinner.

"A CIT, Dad," Danny said, rolling his eyes at the ceiling. "Jeez, don't you know anything? A counselor-in-training. Next year, I'll be a full-scale counselor, and then I can boss those little pinheads around the way they always did to me."

I missed the entire sleep-away summer camp routine, he thought. Sarah was never interested, and both boys were too young in BeforeTime1 1985. He had also missed Sarah's college years, Zack's high school years, PTA meetings, school plays, soccer games, and fights over curfews: the irony was that he had just finished going through it himself, in NowTime, but he had missed it for his own children.

What a hell of a price to pay, he thought, as Danny hurriedly took his plates to the sink and disappeared into his bedroom again. For the experience of do-overs for a ten-year period of my own life, I forfeited ten years of watching my children grow.

I guess there's no free lunch, he decided, as Ann passed the salad to him. But there was no point dwelling on it: what was done was done. Like Mom said, he thought, as he followed Ann into the bedroom to watch a new sitcom on TV, punctuated by commercials of golden-age folks over 50 that he now found demeaning, the past is the past. Let it go.

The one thing that had not changed through all this was Ann. The teenage girl who had treated him with hostility and suspicion just days earlier, and who had finally forgiven him for undefined sins that last night in Northport, had mellowed and softened over the years — but she was still the same Ann. He felt a special pleasure in knowing that, an extra pleasure in experiencing the everyday humdrum of life now in 1995, having just returned from living through his high school years with her all over again. It's almost like dusting off an old movie, taken thirty years ago, he thought, and playing it again for the first time.

Ann had run the household for years, attending to the details of paying the bills, dealing with the phone company, fighting with the building superintendent, and all of the trivia of life in Manhattan. Jonathan had always been grateful, and was doubly so now. He had no idea whether the phone company still sent bills, whether checks were written the same way, or when the rent was due. No problem: Ann took care of it. She even told him she had rented a summer house in the Hamptons for the month of August. "No need to make it the entire season," she said briskly, "after all, none of the kids will be here this summer."

By mid-July, the hectic pace of work had slowed down enough for him to schedule a lunch date with Sarah. They met at a small restaurant in the Wall Street area, and he was grateful that she spotted him, for he would never have recognized the tall blonde woman he had last seen as a teenager ten years earlier.

"Sarah," he said, as they were seated in the middle of a large, noisy room occupied by intense young men and women in their pinstripe suits, "you look absolutely ... stunning!"

"Why, thanks, Dad," she beamed, and turned to her menu. She was very busy, she said, and had only an hour to spare for lunch.

It was okay with Jonathan: he had no idea what to say to her, as she babbled away about long-term bonds, interest rates, and arcane financial instruments. She wolfed her food while he picked at a chef salad, and it was toward the end of the meal that the realization suddenly hit him: she's the spitting image of Joanna.

"Sarah," he said, "there's something I've always been curious about. Where did you get that necklace you've worn all your life?"

The five tiny stars twinkled as she looked down and caressed the thin gold chain between her fingers. She smiled and answered in a soft voice, "Someone very special gave it to me, a long time ago. But I've sworn never to tell; you'll find out for yourself."

He opened his mouth to object, but then stopped. The last time I argued with her about this was back in BeforeTime2, he thought. And she turned it into an inquisition into her sex life.

But even if she wouldn't answer his question, it was obvious that Sarah's necklace was somehow related to the mysterious star drawings. He had completely forgotten about Joanna and his promise to find her; reentry into BeforeTime4 had absorbed all his attention. But after Sarah had given him a peck on the cheek and dashed back to her office, he sat alone at the table, staring into a cup of coffee as the waiter cleared the rest of the table. There's no law saying I have to find her, he thought. Indeed, there was a temptation not to find Joanna, for he wanted no part of a past that might provoke another lightning attack.

But he couldn't shake the memory of her standing in the darkened park in Northport, shrieking an oath that she would track him through the darkest levels of hell if he failed to come find her. Nor could he shake the memory of her statement that it was she who had rescued him each time the lightning had struck him in NowTime; he remembered the comment from the doctor who attended him on his return to Water Mill in 1985 that cardio-pulmonary resuscitation was almost always needed to keep victims of lightning attacks from expiring.

Well, I did make a promise, he finally decided. And a promise is a promise.

When he finally got around to the problem of tracking her down one evening in early August, it turned out to be much more difficult than he had expected. The torn birth certificate Joanna had given him showed a surname of "Danforth," the name of a hospital at Eglin AFB, and the illegible scrawl of the attending nurse and doctor at the time of birth — but not much else.

But the name "Joanna Danforth" should be enough, he thought. Jonathan began by connecting himself to the Social Security System's mainframe computer that contained information on virtually every American, living or dead, who had ever had been assigned a Social Security number. The system eventually gave him a list of over thirty Danforth "hits" on the database, but none were the ones he wanted. There were three Joanna Danforths among the thirty, but they were all too old or too young by many years.

It took an hour just to get this much information, and Ann was calling from the bedroom that the late news was beginning. He quickly programmed his Macintosh to interrogate the Social Security computer for half a dozen variations on the spelling — Danfirth, Danfurth, and Denforth — and left it running all night.

The following morning, he discovered that the Social Security computer had been cranking away busily until three in the morning, and had transmitted to his modem a compact list of a hundred names, with relevant information about age, race, and Social Security earnings contributions. After breakfast, he went through the list carefully, found three names that were possibilities, and decided to check them by phone.

The first, a Joanne Danfirth, showed a current address outside Augusta, Maine. But five minutes of conversation with an increasingly skeptical Ms. Danfirth made it clear that this was not the woman he had last seen in a rainy park in Northport, New York in 1960. The other two were equally unproductive.

It was nine o'clock once again, with dinner out of the way and Danny and Ann watching a TV movie, before he could try another database. While he found it unusual that the Social Security system would have no record of Joanna, it didn't surprise him — their system had been in a state of gradually worsening disrepair since the mid-70s, and it was only through a continuing series of miracles that it ran at all.

But that still left a number of databases that might help. There was NCIC, for example — the National Crime Information Center, which now linked the FBI, and all 50 of the state police departments. But it contained only criminal records involving felonies or worse; jaywalking and traffic tickets wouldn't be on the system, or it would have filled every hard disk in the country. So he decided to leave that one until last, and mentally prioritized the remaining ones.

The U.S. State Department had all of its passport records on-line, and he knew how to access it. All of the banks were now connected to a tight network of central check-clearing data centers, and the Federal Reserve system. But all of the accounts were keyed on the account-holder's Social Security number. Since he couldn't find Joanna within the Social Security system itself, that left him helpless.

Driver's license and automobile registration records were now on-line, of course. So were insurance, Medicare, hospitalization and doctor-visit records -- linked to municipal birth and death records. Records of every telephone call made by anyone with a phone, anywhere in the country, could be obtained. Tax records from the IRS, state, and local municipalities were within his grasp. Military service records from every branch of the armed forces were linked together, not that he figured Joanna for the gung-ho military culture. Credit card records were available from Amex, VISA, MasterCard, and a dozen others — and credit-checking agencies like TRW knew incredibly detailed secrets about 100 million Americans. Magazine subscriptions, professional societies, and hobby groups were now computerized — and they sold their data to consumer research organizations who consolidated it into demographic profiles of every square foot of the country. Mortgage and property records were a matter of public record; jury duty, lawsuit, and lien records could be accessed. Even church attendance and public library membership records were retrievable — all of them were on-line. When Jonathan had zapped out of BeforeTime3, the average American had his name, address, Social Security number, and myriad juicy tidbits about his life recorded on approximately 245 different computerized databases. Now, in 1995, the total number of databases was approximately the same — but they were all linked together in a vast spider-web of cross-referenced information.

With enough time, and the proper computer links, Jonathan thought, there's no place in 1995 you can run, no place you can hide — no place you can buy anything, charge anything, call anyone, or even wipe your nose without having the transaction recorded at least once. Some of the databases were more poorly organized than others; some were harder to break into than others; some had data that was obsolete, redundant, contradictory, or downright garbage. And many depended on a Social Security number as the primary key, so searching on surname was slow and painful.

But after two weeks of searching, with his trusty Macintosh interrogating mainframe databases throughout the country on a round-the-clock basis, he had to accept the conclusion: there was no Joanna Danforth anywhere in the country — nor had there been any trace of such a person for the past 35 years. If Joanna existed, she had gone underground and hibernated since 1960. It was a possibility he preferred not to accept.

Gradually, Jonathan decided he would have to abandon his high-tech computer search and try a different tack. He turned once again to the scrap of a birth certificate Joanna had given him, hoping he could find something that he could use as a search key: a document number, a reference number, any kind of number that a government agency would normally attach to a piece of paper that would have the official status of a birth certificate.

Suddenly, the location on the certificate jumped out at him: Eglin Air Force Base. He had seen it the first time he looked at the document here in BeforeTime4, and somehow read right over it — because it was the same place he was born, his mind accepted it as casually as if it had read, say, "United States of America." But now, in a state of paranoia that Joanna might have vanished entirely, a new thought suddenly occurred to him: maybe it's not even her birth certificate!

Indeed, if the document said Eglin AFB, could it have been his birth certificate that she was carrying around all those years? Why not? he thought. It's not beyond the realm of possibility — after all, someone who could follow me from city to city, watching me carefully enough to spot each time I was hit by lightning, might be nutty enough to collect all kinds of things about me. If the birth certificate was his, then he had been wasting his time these past two weeks, for every piece of computerized information about him was under the heading of Halifax, not Danforth. Indeed, he had idly poked through a few systems to find his own records, and spent several hours one evening correcting some of the credit records that TRW had managed to screw up. But he was reasonably sure there would be no Jonathan Danforth on any of the computer databases.

On the other hand, there was a distinct possibility that the certificate was indeed Joanna's — and that she was born in the same place as him. Everywhere he went in NowTime, she was always in a grade lower than his, so he estimated her birthdate as somewhere in the 1945 or 1946 time period. He finally decided on the brute-force solution: he would fly to Eglin Air Force Base and check out the paper files himself.

He booked a flight to Pensacola, and told Ann that he would be spending a couple of days on a consulting assignment in Florida; she shrugged and asked only that he be sure to return before the end of the week — Labor Day weekend was approaching, she said, and she wanted to spend it at their summer house in Water Mill. He felt bad about deceiving her, but decided that any attempt to explain about Joanna would just complicate things. On the other hand, he thought, if I do find her, it might be possible to convince Ann that the timewarp phenomenon wasn't just a figment of my imagination.

He arrived in Pensacola near midnight, picked up a rental car and headed out of the airport parking lot. The streets of Pensacola, as he drove quietly along Ninth Avenue toward the Philip Beall Memorial Bridge, looked as if they had been rolled up for the night. He turned on the radio and listened to country and western music from a station in Panama City, but outside it was quiet and dark. Over the bridge, and through the tiny village of Gulf Breeze, he finally reached his motel. He parked the car, walked through a strong wind blowing off the Gulf, got directions to Eglin on Interstate 10 from an androgynous night clerk named Jan, and trudged along the hallway to his room.

The next morning, the day clerk at the front desk informed him in no uncertain terms that the night clerk was an idiot, and that Jonathan would be an even greater idiot to drive back through the main city of Pensacola to catch the interstate over to the air field. "Eglin ain't no one-shack field for crop-dusters," the day clerk pointed out to him. "That gol-durned air base is probably bigger than the whole state of Rhode Island. I mean, the landing strips and control towers aren't all that big, I suppose, but the whole place is in the middle of miles and miles of forest. It's where they trained most of the Cuban freedom fighters and God only knows how many other CIA invasion forces."

Jonathan cut him off before he could get more deeply into the history recital, and found out that the base was 45 minutes away, off Route 98 that trailed along the north side of the bay. For a few miles, he saw nothing but scrub pine on both sides of the road, but then the ticky-tacky stores began. A small office complex housed the Lighthouse Baptist church and a Pizza Hut, side by side; Jonathan could almost imagine the famished faithful staggering next door, asking for pepperoni and mushrooms before they got back to their worshipping. Further down the road, a billboard showed the photo of an adolescent girl, with huge text that trumpeted, "Donna was abducted. $10,000 reward." Another billboard made that figure seem trivial by announcing that the next drawing for the state lottery had reached the astronomical level of $25 million.

Just past the village of Mary Esther, a sign suddenly pointed him north on Route 393, with the helpful information that Eglin was only eight miles away. More traffic signs directed him to turn north again, after a few miles, onto Route 189. He crossed Route 85, and then, rather suddenly, he was at the guard post at the west entrance to the base. I should be excited to find it, he thought. After all, this was where I was born. But he had no conscious memories of having lived here, had never seen a picture of the place all his life. All he knew was that it was a mystery Norma would never explain to him, and that there was good reason to believe Joanna was born here, too.

He drove along Eglin Boulevard, a four-lane highway that led into the base, watching squadrons of fighter jets whistle overhead at low altitude as he cruised through a pine-tree forest planted among grassy lawns. A left turn on Nomad Way brought him eventually to Building 1529, where he located the historical office at the end of a corridor filled with busy young military people dressed in camouflage uniforms, scurrying from office to office. Everyone was amazingly young, he noticed, including the history officer.

"No, sir," she said politely, after he explained his request. "This is only the historical office for this squadron. Actually, there are three historical offices on the base — but you probably want the main one, over in Building 1."

"Where's that?" he asked, thoroughly confused by his enormous map. The young officer ignored the map completely, giving verbal directions and gesticulating with her arms as she pointed left and right and left again to indicate which roads he should take.

Building 1 turned out to be the command headquarters for the base, and the historical office was located next to the public relations office. Computer terminals were everywhere, and more bright, and excessively polite, uniformed youngsters nodded their heads and yessirred and nosirred as they pointed him to the right place. Alas, this history office was barren, too: aside from pamphlets describing the construction of the base in the 1930s, they had no records of the military population, the births, or the deaths that had occurred during its existence.

"Try the hospital," the chief history officer suggested. In response to the obvious question, she pointed back where he had started: the base hospital was only a quarter-mile away from the visitor center at the west entrance. He drove back past a huge hangar labeled "Climactic Laboratory," with an enormous circular thermometer indicating that the temperature inside was hovering at zero degrees; he imagined Eskimos inside, desperately trying to avoid the Florida heat.

The hospital sat, alone and forlorn, in a corner of the base; it was a modern stucco building that looked no more than five years old. He parked, walked inside, and finally found an office labeled "admissions." An earnest young woman sat at a computer terminal, pecking in data as she asked a series of questions of a pregnant woman and her nervous husband; all three appeared to be 18 years old, perhaps even younger.

Bemused by the spectacle, Jonathan waited until the clerk had finished, then said to the expectant mother, "Don't worry, they'll take care of you. I was born here, and look at me: I survived."

The pregnant woman simply stared at him, so he turned to the clerk, and asked her if the hospital had been around for long. "Oh, forever and ever," said the young woman, rolling her eyes. "At least since the 60s."

But she confided to Jonathan that she had seen some ancient records that went back even further, and she abandoned her terminal and the pregnant couple to get them. From a tall metal file cabinet on the other side of the room, she fetched a dusty notebook that contained a two-column typewritten list of people admitted to the hospital day after day, year after year. But the list only went back as far as 1958.

"That's all we've got," she said, shrugging. "But you might want to go down the hall and find Mr. Smallen. He's the Mr. Know-it-all of the hospital. He's been here forever."

Mr. Smallen, a portly, bald-headed man, confirmed that the hospital was indeed new; it had been built in 1966. The older hospital, he said, had been torn down; it was a wonderful old wooden building, but it had been decreed a fire hazard.

"And the records?" Jonathan asked. "The births and deaths in that old hospital?"

"Retired," Mr. Smallen barked. "After five years, all our records are retired to the National Personnel Record Center in St. Louis. Beats me what happens to 'em out there: microfilmed or put on a computer or God knows what."

Well, that's a bummer, Jonathan thought. End of the line. Mr. Smallen gave him a smile, and returned to the paperwork on his desk. Jonathan was out the door, down the steps, and almost back to the car before he decided to make one last attempt. He had to wait for another thirty seconds until Mr. Smallen came to the end of one of his data entry forms and looked up at him.

"There was a doctor on duty here back during the war," Jonathan told him. "Back in World War II, in 1945 or 1946."

"Hey, I know I'm looking a mite run-down," Mr. Smallen laughed, "but if you're telling me I look that old, then I better get me a new job. I've only been here since 1957."

"No, of course not, you wouldn't have been here yourself in those days," Jonathan agreed. "But what I really want to know is whether you've ever heard of the doctor."

"Well, what's his name, son?" Smallen's voice boomed, with the first sign of impatience Jonathan had seen all morning, his eyes glancing down at the paperwork pile in front of him.

"Ummm ... " Jonathan said, pulling the precious birth certificate from his shirt pocket. "Lemme see now. It was a kind of strange name, I think. Ah, here it is: Dr. Florian. Benjamin Florian. Ever heard of him?"

"Heard of him? Course I heard of him!" Mr. Smallen said, more softly now. "Ever'body heard of Doc Florian — why, he was here since they first built this place."

"Terrific!" Jonathan said. "If you can tell me where to find him, then I'll go ask him about this information I'm trying to find. Does he work here? Live around here?"

The little bald-headed man rolled his eyes and pointed upward. Jonathan followed the direction of his finger, but could see only the sound-proof insulation in the ceiling. He looked back and shrugged a question mark at Mr. Smallen.

"He's gone to his Maker," Smallen said. "Just last week. He had heart bypass surgery about a month ago, and he just never did recover from it. Body kinda wore out all at once."

"A week ago?" Jonathan asked, crestfallen. He knew it was selfish, but he couldn't help thinking: why couldn't you have held on for a few more days, Doc?

"Yup," Smallen nodded his head up and down. "But I don't think he woulda been able to talk to you anyway, not after that surgery. He was hardly awake, and he didn't make much sense when they talked to him. The only one who could understand what he was mumbling was old Nurse Jessie, and that's only 'cause she worked with him all her life."

"Nurse Jessie?" Jonathan asked. "Was that her name? What was her last name?"

"I dunno, everyone just called her Jessie. But you don't need a last name, everyone knows her. You wanna talk to her, you just go down where she lives, over in Choctaw Beach — anyone can point you to where she lives."

Choctaw Beach, as Jonathan discovered on his Hertz map, was on nearby Choctawatchee Bay. He got back in the car, drove out of the base to Niceville, then turned east on County Road 20 for a twenty mile drive past more shops, dog kennels, gas stations, and empty stretches of Spanish oak and scrub pine, over the C.G. Meigs bridge, through the one-store crossroads of Villa Tasso, and back to the water again on the north side of the huge bay.

The map showed Choctaw Beach as a town, but there was no town here: no stores, no post office, nothing but a single Jiffy Pak delicatessen and a few scattered mobile homes and houses on stilts along the edge of the water. The proprietor of the store confirmed that he did indeed know where Nurse Jessie lived; he looked Jonathan over carefully, apparently decided that he bore no resemblance to the muggers, rapists, and murderers he had seen on his weekly police-manhunt TV shows, and gave him instructions for finding her house down by a brackish pond at the end of a red-dirt road called Chippewa Street.

Nurse Jessie, when he found her, was a pleasant, gentle, woman, bent over from osteoporosis, but very much at peace in a small two-room mobile home surrounded by two ancient junked cars, some chickens, cats, and a sleeping mongrel dog. Birds yapped noisily in the trees and in the underbrush by the pond. Down the road, a dog howled hysterically outside a house with a faded green pickup truck; but aside from Jessie, there was no other sign of human life.

Jonathan reckoned her age to be 75, though he realized that appearances could be deceiving. She was puzzled by his visit, especially when Doc Florian's name was brought up. At first, she seemed to think Jonathan was an investigator from the county coroner's office; it took several minutes to convince her that he was only interested in the births and deliveries that the good doctor had been performed some fifty years ago.

"Oh, dear me, why didn't you say so?" Jessie cackled, when she finally caught the drift of Jonathan's questions. "Those were certainly the good old days, when the base was bustling, and there were all those hundreds of brave young men coming through here, learning to fly, and then going off to fight so far away ... "

Her eyes took on a far-away look as she remembered back to a time when Eglin had served as one of the major training centers for pilots who would eventually be sent to the European or Pacific theaters of the Second World War. "And there were so many of the young women, too — so many of them came down here with their husbands or their boy friends. We delivered thousands of babies in those days, the doctor and I did."

"You delivered babies, too?" Jonathan asked, stunned. The possibility had never occurred to him. He resurrected Joanna's birth certificate again, and looked closely at the faded signatures. "John ... something. Johnston? Is that your name: Jessie Johnston?"

"Yessir, it most certainly is," she beamed, taking the blackened scrap from his hand and peering at it closely. "I can't hardly read it, my eyesight is so bad these days. But if you can read the name Johnston, then it must have been him."

Jackpot! Jonathan thought. I've found the woman who would unlock the secrets of the Rosetta Stone for me. They had been standing on the top of the steps leading up to a tiny front porch of her house, and he asked her if she would like to sit down before he popped the big question.

"Danforth?" she asked, after Jonathan had repeated the name slowly, and then carefully spelled it for her. "No, I can't say that I remember that name. ... "

He let out a breath in a big whoosh, wondering what to do next, when Jessie explained, "But then, I hardly remember any of the names — there were so many of them, after all."

"So many?" Jonathan asked. "How many?"

"Well, at the peak, when we staffed up to full capacity in the middle of the war, we was delivering four or five babies a day," Jessie beamed. "Me and the Doc reckoned that we delivered five thousand babies during World War II. Can you imagine that?"

"Five thousand?" Jonathan asked, horrified.

"Yessir, that's right," she continued. "'Course, it wound down pretty fast after '45, but we figured that we ended up doing close on to ten thousand before they moved all the obstetrics and delivery over to Pensacola."

"Ten thousand?"

"Yessir," she confirmed. "And I kept the records of every one of them babies. Filled out the birth certificate, put a file card in the box, filled out all them durn forms, and everything."

Jonathan was overwhelmed.

"And you know the worst of it?" she asked, squinting at him in the sun.

"What's that?" he asked, dumbly.

"They weren't gonna let the doctor keep any of his records when they went about microfilming everything back in '85. They was gonna move every one of those file cabinets out to the trash heap — not let him keep a single piece of paper showing what the Doc and me had done with our whole life!"

"That's really too bad," Jonathan said politely, wondering how to diplomatically extricate himself from Jessie's ramblings.

"But me and the Doc fixed 'em," Jessie continued proudly. "It was the last thing we did before we both retired."

"What's that?" Jonathan asked, woodenly.

"Why, we lifted the card files — the summary cards he kept of each birth — and we just took them right out of there. It took us most nearly a whole weekend, it did. But those were our babies, and we brought them right here to this house."

"You brought them here?" Jonathan asked.

"Yessir," she confirmed. "They was our history, and sometimes Doc would come over, and we would spend hours going over 'em — we couldn't remember the names, like I said, but when I read all the p'ticulars of each birth, the Doc could remember every howl and grunt that mother made bringin' her little one into the world."

"And you still have those cards?" Jonathan asked, hardly believing his good fortune.

Indeed she did have them. Once again, her suspicions were aroused: was he from the authorities? Was he checking up on something suspicious about the Doctor's death? And most important, had he come here to take her precious file boxes away?

When Jonathan convinced her he had no such intentions, she took him into her tiny home, where gray metal file boxes lined one whole wall of her living room. Each file drawer held three rows of cards, neatly arranged and separated by metal dividers. They were organized chronologically, with the year and month carefully written on labels pasted on the front of the drawer.

Even with such a carefully organized treasure trove, Jonathan thought he was lost: there were no Danforth babies in 1945 or 1946. Maybe I was wrong, he thought. Maybe Joanna was two years younger than me. He began scanning the files for 1947, which were considerably fewer in number — the war was over, and soldiers were rapidly leaving the area as they returned to civilian life.

Meanwhile, Jessie had watched him searching with growing frustration through the first two years of files. As he moved into the 1947 files, she came come over to join him — but she began working in the opposite direction.

"Danforth — here we are!" she said triumphantly, just as he was finishing 1947 with nothing to show for his efforts. She pulled out a buff-colored card and held it close to her face, reading it closely, her lips moving silently.

"Dear oh dear me, yes, I do remember this one now," she said, shaking her head. "Yes, I think this is the one you're looking for: Joanna Danforth, born in 1944."

"Why is it you remember this one?" Jonathan asked, curiously. "I thought you said you didn't remember any of the names."

"Well, I didn't," Jessie said, shaking her head back and forth, as she continued gazing at the card. "But this one was a mess, and the doctor wrote some notes on the card a few weeks after the birth."

"Mess? What kind of mess?"

"Well, the parents divorced only a few weeks later — and I remember it was real ugly. I don't know what it was about, but the father was in the hospital just a day or so after the birth, hollering at the mother. That's why I remembered it — I never saw anyone fighting like they did. They had all the other mothers in the ward crying and carrying on — we finally had to call the base MP's to come take him out of there!"

Divorced! Aha! Jonathan thought. And if they were divorced right here in Florida, the local courthouse in Fort Walton should have the records!

He was elated: he had confirmed that Joanna Danforth did exist, and that she was born right here in Florida. A tiny voice was nagging in the back of his mind — why couldn't I find her on any of my computer databases? — but he figured that would sort itself out. The next step, obviously, was to track the divorce records down, and find out where her mother and father had gone.

The mother's maiden name on the birth certificate, according to Jessie, was Bernstein. It had occurred to Jonathan, on the flight down to Pensacola, that Joanna had probably married when she grew up; conceivably, she had never listed her maiden name on any documents that ended up in a computer. But now he had her mother's maiden name, together with her first name. That should be enough to find her, he thought.

He thanked Jessie profusely, and slowly backed out of the house as her memory, now refreshed, began unleashing more stories about the gossip and scandals of wartime births on the air field.

As he walked back to his car, Jessie called out to him, "Sonny! Wait a minute!"

I'm 51 years old, Jonathan thought, and she calls me sonny? But he smiled back at her. "Sorry, Jessie, but I've gotta run — I need to look this information up on my computer system, and it's back in the hotel."

"But I want to ask you something, sonny," she wheezed.

Jonathan was not about to wait: he had the information he needed in his hands, but he knew it could take all night to scan the databases from the computer in his motel room. He started the engine and pushed the button to lower the window on the passenger side of the car.

"Listen, Jessie," he said through the open window, as she leaned down to look at him. "I'll probably be all wrapped up with this by tomorrow morning, and I'll have a couple of hours free before my flight leaves. I'll stop by and let you know what I found — it should be interesting!"

And without waiting for her reply, he gunned the engine and sped off toward Valparaiso and Niceville. He stayed on Highway 98 to Pensacola Beach, but the highway was crowded with tourists and vacation campers; it took nearly an hour before he was back in his air-conditioned room.

He had already eliminated some of the potential databases from consideration, for he had known in advance that it was unlikely he would find Joanna's Social Security number here in Florida. But for the remaining ones, he typed in the search criteria: sex = female; race = Caucasian; year of birth = 1944; first name = Joanna; mother's maiden name = Bernstein; social security number = unknown.

He typed the command to initiate the search, and watched the letters and numbers begin to fly by on the screen. The telecom program was set up to save a disk file containing only those "hits" that it found on the various databases; all of the other log-in messages, passwords, and hand-shaking protocols between his Macintosh and the mainframe computers were ignored after they scrolled past the top of the screen.

Still, it was interesting: he had decided to start with the credit card databases, and he watched the computer interrogate MasterCard, then VISA, then Diner's Club, and finally Amex. No luck; after two hours of sifting through millions of database records, the Mac broke the telephone connection, and switched to the next set of inquiries.

I'm gonna have a hell of a phone bill when I check out of this place, Jonathan thought, as he stretched his stiff muscles. It was nearly midnight when the computer suddenly honked a nasal beep! beep! to indicate it had found its first database match.

The entry was saved on the Macintosh disk while the telecommunications program went on, robot-like, to the next database on its list. But he was able to display the text entry while it worked, and he was staggered at what he saw: a Joanna Armstrong, born in 1944, with a mother's maiden name of Bernstein, had been arrested in an anti-war Vietnam protest march in Washington during the fall of 1969. The record had been entered by the metropolitan Washington police, cross-referenced by the FBI as part of its ongoing effort to keep track of kooks, perverts, Communist agents, and Presidential assassins; and the item had been carried on the NCIC database for more than 25 years.

There was no indication of racial heritage — but how many blacks or Chicanos would have a mother whose maiden name was Bernstein? Jonathan thought. This Joanna listed a home address in the northwest section of Washington, DC, but he paid it little attention: the chances she would still be living in the same place were virtually non-existent. Besides, the real pay-dirt in the NCIC record was the one piece of information he had lacked all along: the Social Security number of the unfortunate protester.

Now what? Jonathan wondered. Should I abort the database search and go with this one entry, or play it safe and let the computer spend the rest of the night scanning for every possible trace of additional Joannas with the right family background?

Aw, what the hell? he thought, as he hit the ESCAPE key on the Macintosh keyboard, aborting a long, plodding scan through all the members of the Mormon church. I can always go back and do this again if I have to.

Typing quickly, he amended his search script to include the Social Security number he had tracked down. He had to pray that the Washington police were doing their job carefully that day in 1969: he had no way of knowing whether the number was correct. If the Washington pigs were really busy arresting people that day, he thought, as he keyed the number carefully into his Macintosh, they might have given Joanna the number that belongs to Joan Baez.

Once again, the program was ready to run — but this time, he was prepared to turn it loose and let it search everything. Unless Joanna was a hermit who avoided all contact with modern American civilization, she was certain to have left an electronic trail the likes of which would boggle her mind if she ever saw it.

He carefully typed the "GO" command, watched the computer for a few moments to ensure that it was dialing the first database correctly, and then went to bed. He slept badly, with wild dreams of being chased by lightning up and down the sides of mountains — with Joanna dashing madly after him, beating away the bolts of energy. From time to time, he came groggily awake as the beep and whistle of the computer modem announced that one telephone connection had been broken and a new one was being dialed.

He eventually fell into a heavy sleep, and it was ten o'clock when he awoke. The computer sat quietly, a pattern of screen-saver star-bursts silently flashing on the screen. Typing quickly, Jonathan discovered that the Macintosh had downloaded nearly half a megabyte of items that had been collected from two dozen different databases. I probably have Joanna's entire life story recorded on my disk, he thought, if I chose to look at it carefully enough: her phone calls, her purchases at drug-stores, her tax records, and God knows what else. But he was interested in only one thing: where does the woman live?

Most of the database records had no such information: a credit-card charge, for example, would list only her name, the merchant, the date and amount of the charge, and an authorization number. But Jonathan had instructed the computer to download the "master" records from as many databases as possible, and that's where the details were kept. This Joanna B. Armstrong, it seemed, lived in the town of Brevard, North Carolina; he had no idea where that was, and it was further obscured by her use of a post-office box number on several of her computer files. I'll betcha the goddamn IRS knows exactly where she lives, Jonathan thought, and he scrolled through the gibberish in the file to find the IRS entry. There, finally, was what he needed: a street address, a zip-code, even a phone number.

Calling her is out of the question at this point, he thought. Common decency requires that I visit her in person to see if she still remembers who I am. He showered and shaved, dressed quickly, and threw his clothes and the Macintosh into their respective bags. As he rode down the elevator to the front desk, he retrieved his airline guide from the outside pocket of the computer bag and tried to find a listing for Brevard. No luck: the handy-dandy OAG listed Brainerd, Minnesota and Bridgeport, Connecticut — but nothing remotely resembling Brevard. He spent an hour combing a map of the North Carolina before he found Brevard in the southwestern corner, close to Asheville; with that information, he was able to find a connection through Atlanta, and booked a reservation on a mid-afternoon flight.

That gave him nearly three hours to kill, and he figured that he owed Jessie a thank-you; he had promised he would return to let her know if his search was successful. The heat was sweltering in the mid-day sun of late August, and the roads were fairly empty; it took only half an hour to drive back to Choctaw Beach and pull up in front of Jessie's house.

Once he arrived, Jonathan was immediately sorry he had come. His visit the previous day had sparked a dormant interest on her part, and she had spent the better part of the night poking through her card files as he poked through his computer files. Jessie was prepared to tell him the life story of several hundred infants, mothers, and pilots who had passed through her life in the 1940s; all he wanted to do was thank her for getting him started. He expected her to express awe and amazement at the technical virtuosity that had allowed him to find Joanna — or at least show some interest in the present-day existence of someone whose squalling, wriggling body she had held in her arms more than fifty years earlier.

But Jessie lived in the past; as far as she was concerned, none of those babies had ever grown up. The mothers who bore those babes, most in their early twenties, were frozen in time. "They were all so beautiful," Jessie beamed at him.

And the fathers, dashing young pilots who strutted around the air field, impregnating young women on their day off, had not aged a day in Jessie's mind. "Lots of them young boys died on this base while they were learning to fly," she said sadly. "They never did get to the war." Those who did never came back, of course, and Jessie's mental picture of them had never changed.

He stayed for an hour while she rambled on about her ten thousand babies, and finally told her that he had to leave for the airport. She deserved some of the credit for finding Joanna, he realized, but there was no way he could explain to her the timewarps, the lightning bolts, and the strange trek across the country as Joanna had followed him from city to city. In the end, it was easier just to thank her for what she could understand: finding one of her cards that mattered to him as much as they all mattered to her.

"Sonny?" she asked, as he retreated to his car. The diminutive term grated, and it took all his patience to smile at her over the roof of the car as he held the door open.

"Yes, Jessie?"

"What I don't understand," she said, smiling at him with the look of an innocent school girl, "is why didn't you ask about the other one?"

"Other one?" Jonathan asked. "Which other one? What are you talking about?"

"The other Danforth baby," Jessie said, waving the card at him. "Joanna was the girl baby you were looking for — but there was a boy baby, too."

He raced around the car and grabbed the card from her hand. The names that it displayed, and the revelation that it caused, hit him harder than any of the timewarp lightning bolts ever had; he had to sit on Jessie's porch steps to avoid having his legs buckle beneath him.

When he finally comprehended what it meant, he bolted for the car, taking the card with him. Jessie tottered after him feebly, distraught at the thought of losing one of her precious records, but he promised to mail it to her as soon as he could make a photocopy. Before she could answer, he had slammed the car door and was shooting down to the end of Chippewa Street as fast as the car would take him.

He was distraught, and he knew himself well enough to realize that an attempt to turn in the car and take two airplane flights, with a layover in Atlanta, would probably result in scores of people being maimed or throttled. There was no way he could tolerate pacing around the airport, nor the prospect of talking to the syrupy-sweet ticket agents, auto rental clerks, flight attendants, and baggage handlers that stood between him and Brevard. I'll drive to Brevard, by God, he thought.

Not a person in the world knows where I am, and that's fine with me, he thought. I've too much thinking to do, and I need to do it in total isolation. He was on his own, zooming back along the highway to Pensacola Beach. It took half an hour of driving on Route 285, all of it through the interminable pine tree forests that comprised the 720-square-mile wilderness of Eglin Air Force Base, before he reached Interstate 10.

Past Pensacola, he crossed Escambia Bay and hit the Alabama state line 90 minutes after he had left Jessie in the dust. It was 60 miles from Pensacola to Mobile Bay, with nothing but an occasional Shoney's restaurant to provide some relief from the trees on either side of the highway. The Mobile skyline appeared at 2:15, as he headed across Mobile Bay on the Jubilee Parkway, watching a forest of cranes and sky hooks swinging back and forth as they loaded containers onto Gulf-bound cargo ships. Then it was a quick hop through a tunnel under the bay, around the south end of the city, and onto north-bound Interstate 65.

From there, it was clear sailing all the way, 165 miles to Montgomery. Traffic crawled around construction sites on the north end of Mobile, and slowed down as he crossed the confluence of the Mobile River and Little Lizard Creek — but once he got 25 miles north of the city, all signs of commerce disappeared, and he was out in the lush, flat Alabama countryside. Halfway to Montgomery, he pulled off at the Uriah exit and stopped at a gas station. He filled the gas tank, stocked up with half a dozen diet cokes and some tortilla chips, made a pit stop in the men's room, and looked more closely at his map to make sure he knew where he was going. As he pulled out of the gas station, a flatbed truck rolled by, filled with black men — guests of the local jail — wearing spotless white uniforms topped by dashiki hats. He stared at them, they stared at him; it reminded him of a similar sight, years earlier, in the NowTime driving trip to Texas. He had no idea who or what they were, and it occurred to him that they had probably spotted his Yankee nature and found him equally strange.

The rest of the way to Montgomery was a blur; the highway was almost empty, with the exception of the occasional car. He nudged the speedometer up to 75 and kept it there. Whatever scenery Alabama had to offer the tourist was lost on him; he made a complete transversal from the southwestern corner at Mobile to the northeastern corner, where he bounced into Tennessee territory, without seeing a thing. He was on auto-pilot, staring with blank eyes at the ruler-straight expanse of road in front of him, occasionally dodging other cars and trucks with robot-like efficiency, and letting his mind drift onto other things.

He hit the Montgomery city limit at 5:15, where an enormous billboard said, "Go to church, or the devil will get you," zoomed across the Alabama River, through the center of the city, and on past a sign informing him that Birmingham was another 90 miles further north. North of Montgomery, the undeveloped forest gave way to tilled farmlands and meadows; twenty miles before Birmingham, the flat landscape slowly transformed itself into rolling slopes and the beginning of foothills. Birmingham appeared on the horizon at 6:30, as the sun edged closer to the western horizon. He switched onto Interstate 59 for the final 90 miles of Alabama, passing through utterly empty countryside, through Gadsden, and finally into a tiny snippet of northwestern Georgia that didn't even show up on his map.

Jonathan wanted to get all the way through Chattanooga before stopping for the night, so he wouldn't have to deal with rush-hour traffic in the morning. Just before he hit the city limit, he jumped off the interstate and picked up the marriage of Routes 11 and 64, which he expected to follow all the way to Brevard. Once out of Chattanooga, the highway was empty again, and there was no evidence of civilization. After an hour of dark empty roads, a small roadside motel suddenly appeared. He made a snap decision that he had gone as far as he could for the day, checked in, and collapsed into bed at the stroke of midnight. He should have had dinner, he realized, but his stomach was bloated with soda and chips; he should have called Ann, but he was in no mood to talk, and lacked the energy to make up any stories about what he was doing. He hadn't slept well the night before, and he was tense from twelve hours of driving; he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and awoke before dawn the next morning feeling refreshed.

By 6:30, he was on the road again. The peak of summer had passed, but it was already light; a combination of haze and thick clouds in the sky kept the temperature down to the low eighties, but it was already muggy. Route 64 carried him through the town of Cleveland, past a row of auto junkyards that stretched on for a mile. He was now 50 miles west of the North Carolina border, and the road had narrowed to two lanes, winding through gentle, rolling foothills and beautiful farmland. At Parksville, the road teamed up with Route 74, passed by a ramshackle store called Grumpie's, and headed alongside the Ocee River into the Cherokee Forest. Haze hung over the mountains, shrouding the trees, trying to reach down to the water. The hills looked soft and peaceful, and it soothed away the tension from the previous day.

Past the turnoff for Greasy Creek, the road began to wind and wiggle; he slowed to 40 mph to keep from running straight into the river. The Ocee River had carved a deep series of gorges in the mountains; the river bed was a rocky shale, with waterfalls and rapids. He passed through Boyd Gap, left the Cherokee National Forest at Brush Creek, and finally reached Ducktown just after 7:00 in the morning. No ducks were visible; he assumed they were still sleeping, along with the other inhabitants of the city. A few minutes later, at Isabella, he crossed into North Carolina; a sign informed him that the very same carpet of pine trees was now known as the Nantahala National Forest.

Near Hiwassee Lake, he reached the town of Murphy, where Route 64 and 74 went their separate ways; his way was Route 64, which would carry him slightly south, and then parallel to the Georgia border for a few miles before turning at Shooting Creek to head north toward Franklin. Signs of civilization reappeared briefly: a pink billboard announced, "In Cherokee County, the drug is alcohol." And at the edge of town, a man came out of a tiny mobile home as he zoomed by; but instead of the redneck bumpkin that he would have expected to inhabit such a modest dwelling, he saw that the man was immaculately dressed in a suit and tie, and was strolling toward a spotlessly waxed Honda Prelude.

Past Hayesville, the mountains grew higher, the ravines and canyons deeper. He crossed Winding Strip Gap at an elevation of 3,820 feet; no Rocky Mountains, these, but he felt as if he had been struggling uphill all morning. As he crossed over the Little Tennessee River a few minutes later, a sign showed the cutoff for Route 23, and he found that he was only 59 miles from Brevard. Next came a series of incredible loops and hairpin curves as he went through the Cullasaja River Gorge; and then, at 9:00, he suddenly found himself in the resort town of Highland.

More windy, wiggly roads led through Cashiers and Sapphire; the road then bent west, past Lake Toxaway, and finally emerged at the end of the National Forest at Rosman. From there, it was a quick downhill ride, and he suddenly found himself out of the mountains. Brevard was a mere eight miles further up the road; it was a picturesque town the size of Northport, nestled at the edge of the vast stretch of protected forest he had driven through. He had Joanna's address, but he needed help finding the street. The attendant at the local Exxon station suggested that he try the Chamber of Commerce on Main Street, just off Broadway.

The Chamber of Commerce woman smiled when he mentioned Joanna; she was the sixth grade math teacher, the woman said, and everyone knew her. "She taught math when I was a kid," she said, "and she was a terror. She made her kids learn some crazy formula for calculating sums of numbers. She kept saying that she learned it from a boy in Texas, and that the formula had been invented by a German mathematician who had the same birthday she did."

"Carl Friedrich Gauss," Jonathan said softly, remembering a day that he had spent with a teacher named Awful Henderson.

He had one more thing to do before he confronted Joanna. This is the sort of town that would have a Woolworth's Five and Ten, he thought, even if they've vanished from all the larger cities. He had considered something from a jewelry store, something in pure gold that would catch the sunlight, but there was no time. It's the thought that counts, he reassured himself, even if they are dime-store baubles on a ten-dollar chain.

From Woolworth's, it was a short drive from Main and Broadway to Joanna's address on Fairleigh Road. He pulled up outside a small white house set back from the street; a battered mailbox confirmed that he was at the right place. He wasn't sure what to expect when he knocked at the door, and he knew that he would have only a few seconds to compose a speech as he heard footsteps shuffling from inside. Whatever he had planned to say vanished as the door opened and a middle-aged woman stared at him quizzically.

Jonathan's mind went blank, and he was struck dumb. It reminded him of the phenomenon that elderly people experience when they see a reflection in a storefront window while walking down the street, and think to themselves: who is that old person walking along with me? It couldn't be me — I'm younger than that.

But Jonathan was experiencing the same reaction as he gazed upon this woman he had traveled so far, and searched so hard, to find. He saw not the 50ish schoolmarm with the speckled apron and the lace collar; the face he saw bore no lines or wrinkles, and carried none of the burdens of time. It was instead the face of a young blond-haired girl he had first observed closely in Roswell, New Mexico some 40 years earlier — a face full of hope and confidence, a young girl at peace with herself, but with the inner strength to challenge the gods themselves to keep what she knew was hers.

Though Jonathan could find no words to say to her, he knew he could give to her the same talisman she showed him in Roswell when he first learned her secret code: a golden necklace, with two stars that said:

 

 

 

 

Joanna stared back at him, and then at the necklace, for the same eternity, frowning at first. Finally, the frown faded; she let out a long sigh, and smiled at him.

"It's about time you showed up — I just couldn't chase after you any more," she finally said, in a voice that acknowledged relief, but also bespoke an unshakable faith that someday, indeed, he would come knocking at her door.

Since the night he left Northport, he had known this moment would come — he lacked only the sure knowledge of where and when. Through it all, he had looked for the do-overs most significant: the grand prizes to be captured again, the crippling diseases and mortifying failures to be shunned. And yet I missed the one that mattered most, he thought, though it shadowed me like the twin that it was. The greatest gift of this life lived twice, the only gift that counted, was discovering that the most precious experiences are the ones you don't see; the most important people are the ones whose attachment you're not even aware of. I learned only one thing from the experience, and I would re-live the decade of the 50s all over to learn it again.

I have a sister.

 

 

Continue to Chapter 13 . . .