The fall through darkness was less surprising this time, but it was just as black and seemed just as endless. Unlike the first transition from BeforeTime into NowTime, AJ felt an ache and a heaviness and a dull pain. The head-over-heels tumbling was also worse: it made his stomach heave. Maybe the lightning bolt was stronger this time, he thought. Or maybe it hit me in a different part of the body, or maybe my tolerance for abuse is lower the second time around.

He awoke slowly. His mouth felt dry, his tongue was heavy, and his head still ached. Ugh! What a hangover! he thought. Maybe I'm moving back into an old man's body.

He squinted and opened one eye slowly, hoping the light would not be too strong. Had it been a normal hangover, he would have waited much longer. But he was curious to know: Where am I? And most important: Am I back to BeforeTime?

As before, he found himself immobilized in a bed, covered with a starched white sheet stretched tightly across his body. The light was soft and mellow, an early-morning kind of glow that was easy on the eyes. The walls were a pale lemon yellow, as he remembered them from before, and a familiar soft breeze fluttered through the open window at the side of the room. But there were no other clues to tell him what day, what month, or what year this was. he tried to sit up, but found that he was too weak to fight against the sheets; the throbbing hurt so much that it was easier to just close his eyes, lie back against the pillows, and drift back to sleep ...

The light was much brighter when he next opened his eyes. He had been awakened by a gentle prodding and poking, and the pressure of a cool hand on his forehead. An elderly, kindly-looking man was standing next to his bed; a doctor, it appeared. He couldn't make out the name badge on his starched jacket, and it suddenly occurred to him: if I'm squinting, it means I can't see the doctor's name. That means I'm nearsighted again, which mean I'm back in my old body, my BeforeTime body. I am home!

" ... so you're very lucky to still be in one piece, all in all, Mr. Halifax," the doctor was saying.

"Ummm ... well, I suppose you're right," AJ said thickly. His words slurred, his tongue filled his entire mouth. He didn't remember having any of these side effects when he flipped into NowTime. But it was a small price to pay: he was so happy to be back where he belonged that he would have tolerated anything.

"Am I okay? Can I go home?"

"Well," said Dr. FuzzyName reluctantly, "not today. We think everything is all right, but we'd like to keep you here overnight just to be safe. Your wife has been called, I believe."

He smiled and began to move away. AJ stopped him with a question. "Doctor ... can you tell me what year this is?

The doctor turned back, puzzled. "The year? 1985, of course."

A flood of relief washed over AJ's body. Thank God! he thought. Nothing else matters.

"Doctor?" he asked. "How lucky was I? Isn't lightning fatal when it hits someone directly?"

The doctor stopped at the door with a pensive look; he seemed to be mentally cataloging other patients he had had in his career.

"Well, usually so," he said finally, with a smile. "But not always. We've had lots of strange cases: I had one patient who recovered from lightning, but suffered permanent amnesia. And back when I was an intern, we had a young boy, hit by lightning, who thought he had been turned into a middle-aged man. I think I even remember reading about a case where the patient suffered such a mental shock that he regressed back to his childhood."

"Well, what happens when someone is hit by lightning?" AJ asked. "If you don't have any metal on you, shouldn't the lightning just go right through you and into the ground?"

"Funny you should mention metal," the doctor chuckled. "The last case like yours was a golfer at the Amagansett Country Club, back in July. He had metal cleats in his shoes, and it turned him into a lightning rod. As for you, who knows?" he shrugged again.

"Well, I know I didn't have any metal on me," AJ said. "So what happened to me?"

"People struck by lightning are rendered unconscious, and their heart action and breathing cease," the doctor intoned, as if reciting from a medical text. "After that ... well, it depends on whether someone is around to pick up the pieces. If you get prompt cardiopulmonary resuscitation and prolonged artificial respiration, you can recover. In cases like that, the recovery is complete, which seems to be the situation with you; in other cases, the patient can have permanent impairment or loss of hearing or sight."

And with those sobering words, he vanished through the door. AJ squinted down at his toes; they seemed miles away. His sight impairment had begun a long time ago, and had nothing to do with a lightning bolt. His hearing seemed okay, too; but his muscles felt heavy and rubbery, and for a moment he felt a twinge of regret that he no longer occupied his NowTime body. There were no warts or wrinkles on that body, no layers of fat. While he was poking and pinching various bodily appendages to ensure they were still firmly attached, he noticed that he still had the little Darth Vader doll clutched in one hand; he wonder whether Danny had noticed its absence.

Ann arrived moments later, looking harried but also relieved. She shook her head at him reprovingly, leaned over to kiss him, and then sat down next to the bed.

"I suppose I should be thankful it hit you, Jonathan, and not one of the kids," she said jokingly, brushing a wisp of hair away from her face, with a motion that was familiar and reassuring. "But didn't your mother ever tell you to come in out of the rain?"

"You wouldn't believe all the things my mother told me," he croaked. He wasn't sure how to explain his strange journey to Ann, but she interrupted before he could continue.

"Well, this mother is telling her children that it's a damn good lesson, and that they're damn lucky their Dad wasn't turned into barbecued chicken!"

"Annie, listen," he broke in, "it was an amazing experience."

"Oh, I know," she replied. "I've read about it. It's supposed to be so peaceful ... "

"What?"

"You know — mind out of body, and all that. I just finished reading an article on near-death experiences in the Times. The article said you just kind of float through space, and you're perfectly prepared for death. It must be kind of weird ... "

"Actually, it wasn't like that at all," he said, quietly.

"Well, you'll have to tell me all about it," Ann said as she rose, "maybe after we get home and things calm down for a minute."

"But Ann — it was amazing! I went back," he said, pulling both arms from beneath the sheets so he could wave them at her.

"Well, I have to go back, too," she said as she kissed him on the forehead and retreated toward the door. "I left the kids alone in the house, and God knows what mischief they're up to. We're packing today, you know, and I just stopped by to make sure the doctor would be willing to release you tomorrow morning."

"Packing?" he asked, puzzled.

"Yes, packing," Ann sighed. "We're going back to the city tomorrow, remember? Labor Day? End of the summer? We were supposed to pack up everything today."

"Oh ... yeah ... I guess I forgot." And indeed he had. His life had been so focused on the events of 1950 and 1951 that he had completely forgotten that this Sunday before Labor Day, in 1985, was the day they had planned to collect all the summer possessions — the bicycles and basketballs, the books, clothes, swimming gear, and even Ann's special pots and pans — in preparation for the trek back to Manhattan. Summer was over.

"I won't go so far as to say you did all this deliberately," Ann laughed, "but I almost wish that it was me in that bed, and you packing the boxes."

She's right, AJ thought. Transporting the family out to the summer house had not been a simple matter of throwing suitcases into the car. We have more junk for a summer vacation than all the possessions my NowTime family carried from one city to the next.

He felt a small twinge of guilt that he wasn't involved in the packing exercise, but he was still annoyed. "Annie?" he called after her.

"Yeah?" she poked her head back in the door, and looked at him quizzically.

"Thanks for the sympathy."

"Sympathy? Listen, Jonathan, I was ready to jump into that lightning bullshit myself when I saw it coming for you — I don't much relish the prospect of raising these three little hellcats without you. And then I was furious with you for letting Zack get so close to danger — he was holding a metal bat in the air, you know ... I think you got all the sympathy you're gonna get from me when I gave you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for ten minutes while Sarah called the ambulance."

"Oh," he said, thoroughly cowed.

"Anyway, I'm too tired now to be sympathetic. Maybe tomorrow. Why don't you get some sleep now, Jonathan? I could use some, too." And with that, she disappeared again. He was still grumpy, but it was nice to be called Jonathan; he hoped he wouldn't hear "AJ" again for a long, long time.

The next couple of days were a blur; somehow, Ann managed to get the summer house packed and the kids organized; she arrived in the car at the hospital just as they rolled Jonathan down in a wheel chair. The kids were nervous, and watched him with wide eyes from the back of the car; but he had regained most of his strength and joked with them while they drove back for a last look at the Water Mill house. Everyone was lost in their own thoughts about the end of summertime as Ann reversed course, headed west on Route 27 past the long-defunct Hotel James, past the Villa Maria convent at the head of Mecox Bay, and into the heavy traffic that crawled into the city. The Labor Day heat was stifling, and the auto exhaust fumes made the roadway shimmer and the sky hazy. For just a moment, Jonathan felt a pang of nostalgia: I am glad to be back, he reminded himself. I really am.

They arrived back in the apartment to find the phone ringing: Norma was calling to see if her precious AJ was okay. Jonathan was polite, but it was an awkward conversation: he didn't talk to her all that often these days; the demands of his own family and his career made it difficult to keep up even with personal friends in the city, let alone more distant members of his family. After a stormy decade in the 1950s, Norma and Lucas had finally gotten divorced in the early 60s, while he was attending college. They were living in Salt Lake City at the time, where Lucas had managed to stay ever since; after moving every year throughout the 1950s, he had finally managed to stay in one house for nearly a quarter century. He had put down roots; Jonathan guessed he would die there. I'm sure not gonna call him up, Jonathan thought. It's weird enough talking to Mom after a 35-year time-warp.

After the chaos of the Labor Day weekend, life slowly settled down. They were back in their regular city life — a life that, in many ways, was so routine that Ann sometimes suggested they should see a shrink to find out why they weren't as bizarre as everyone else in Manhattan. On the other hand, having just returned from viewing life from a child's perspective, Jonathan now wondered if his three children viewed this life as normal; he was just beginning to realize how complex his childhood had been, even though his BeforeTime assumption had been that it was a simple, ordinary suburban upbringing.

School started in New York on the Wednesday after Labor Day. Danny, whose tiny stature Jonathan could empathize with more closely now, obsessed over the scholastic rigors that awaited him in kindergarten. Zack, who was now just a year older than Jonathan had been in his recent NowTime experience, rolled nonchalantly into third grade with little evidence of interest in his surroundings. And Sarah slouched truculently into her second year of high school, convinced that none of the teachers had anything to teach her that was worth knowing. Jonathan watched all three much more carefully now, wondering if he would be able to offer any useful advice to them from his own recent experiences.

Danny had shown a rare moment of generosity, and willed his beloved Darth Vader doll to Jonathan. "It keeps you safe," he announced to Jonathan, from beneath his mop of thick blond hair, as he collected half a dozen more belligerent Action Figures to take with him on the first day of school. "It will keep you safe if lightning ever hits you again." He had a slight lisp, and pronounced "keeps" as keepth.

From then on, Darth occupied a safe haven, perched on top of Jonathan's desk, leaning against the exhaust vent of his Macintosh computer. Danny checked it when he returned from school each day, to ensure that it was still standing as a miniature guardian angel over his work. And indeed it did watch over him: though the immediacy of his 1951 life was beginning to fade again, every glance at Darth reminded him that he had walked briefly through a parallel world — a timewarp that he couldn't begin to understand — and to which he would never be able to return. It's funny, he found himself thinking one afternoon. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Sometimes I really do wish I could return to NowTime.

But instead, he returned to his computer consulting practice, which he operated from a converted dining room in their apartment. These were the days when 23-year old "rocket scientists" were earning $100,000 a year for writing FORTRAN programs to compute obscure investment formulas for the whiz-kid traders on Wall Street; nobody cared if the programs were good, bad, right, or wrong — as long as they were finished quickly. Jonathan's job was to ensure the programs had no viruses, trapdoors, or security flaws, and that they couldn't be accessed by rogue competitors in another brokerage house. The Wall Street firms paid handsome fees for his advice, and he was happy with his success — although it occasionally annoyed him that rocket scientists barely half his age were earning as much as he was.

 

 

He was an outcast in these days of corporate empire-building, but he was a happy outcast. He had no employees, no overhead, no office politics, no cash flow, no hassles. He gave consulting advice to MIS departments in large companies that were usually so frantically busy they could barely to pause long enough to listen for a few minutes. He wrote esoteric textbooks, which they bought by the thousands and promptly lost on their bookshelves; and he traveled around the world, on a regular basis, to present papers and lectures at computer conferences attended by hotshot computer nerds who had been sent by their companies to take a vacation. Ann joked that his willingness to travel was a direct result of his nomadic upbringing; he had laughed at the joke before, but now, he began to wonder if she was right.

As the summer faded into memory and the crisp fall weather set in, he tried to find a quiet evening to tell Ann what had really happened after the lightning bolt hit him. There was no time during the day, and evenings were so filled with homework, bedtime stories, and household chores that they flopped, exhausted, on the bed to watch the 11:00 TV news with a glass of wine before falling asleep. But it was a bit less hectic one evening, and he asked Ann if she would mind turning off the news while he told her about something important. He could tell that she was annoyed, for she had had no time to read the New York Times, and was depending on the 30-second sound bites to tell her whether civilization outside Manhattan had, without their knowledge, somehow vanished during the day. So she stomped around the bedroom, changing into her nightgown and straightening up the piles of laundry, children's toys, magazines, and assorted pieces of family junk while he began to relate his tale.

Jonathan spoke quietly, for the children's bedrooms adjoined theirs and he wasn't sure they were asleep. He didn't want them to overhear their old man telling such a strange tale, but he told Ann the whole story, leaving out only a few details. After a while, she stopped stacking things, stopped moving around the bedroom, and came over to sit at the edge of the bed, watching him intently. As he reached the end of his brief life in Texas, she reached out and took his hand.

"Jonathan," she said gently, "how long have you been thinking about this?"

"What do you mean, thinking?" he responded. "Annie, I wasn't thinking about all of this. I was there. In the flesh."

"Well, I suppose it must have felt that way, darling," she said, stroking his hand, "but it couldn't have been that way."

"Annie, come on — you know I'm not one for wild stories," he protested. "This wasn't just a feeling. This was the real thing, just like the Coke commercial."

Ann suddenly brightened and smiled. "Maybe it was part of the near-death experience I told you about. You know, it's ... "

"Yes, I know what it is. And I know it's supposed to be warm and fuzzy and peaceful — I read that damn newspaper article you gave me. But this was different: this had a lot of bad stuff too, a lot of ups and downs, and a lot of details that I sure wouldn't want to see again if I was on my way to Heaven."

"Well, I don't know," Ann frowned. "I think some of the articles also say your whole life flashes before you. Maybe that's what happened to you."

"Annie, listen to me," he cried, standing up and waving his arms at her. "This was real. It wasn't my whole miserable life flashing in front of me — it was only nine months. And it ended only because I chose to come back, by sticking my scrawny little seven-year old body into another damned lightning bolt!"

"Shhh," she said, pointing at the bedroom wall that faced Danny's room. "Okay, listen, what do I know about this? I think maybe you should talk to someone professional about what you think you saw ... or what you really did see ... whatever. Anyway, it's late now, so why don't you put on your pajamas and come to bed?"

Well, what the hell, he thought, as he lay in bed later. I am back in the time zone where I belong, so it doesn't really matter whether my experience was real or not. But he couldn't help being annoyed at Ann. I should damn well go back and get her some kind of proof, he thought as he drifted off to sleep.

But the thought was forgotten the next morning, and Jonathan snapped back into his daily schedule along with the rest of the family. Ann tried to slow the pace at dinner each evening with a ritual called "What did you do at school today?" The kids groaned when they introduced it, but Ann persisted almost every evening.

The question was usually aimed at Zack, whose response was a simple one, mumbled while shoving food into his mouth with both hands and an occasional utensil: "Nuthin."

"What did you have for lunch today?"

"Food."

"Well, what did you do in gym?"

"Stuff."

"Who did you play with?"

"Nobody."

Arghh! Jonathan thought. It was hopeless; for all he knew, Zack could have been studying brain surgery, or his teachers might have spent the day playing with tinker toys and rag dolls.

Sarah was a little more responsive, though Jonathan knew that she assumed that both parents had been born sometime between the Bubonic Plague and the Civil War, and were thus blissfully unaware of anything since the invention of electricity. Since all of her teachers were of the same ancient generation, her typical reaction to everything they taught was, "Hopelessly stupid."

Thus, to the question, "How was math today?" Jonathan could usually assume the answer would be, "Stupid. The teacher is just so incredibly, hopelessly stupid."

English? Same thing. Gym? Ditto. Music? More "stupid, stupid, stupid."

Sometimes Ann tried to avoid the negative answers by asking questions that required a polysyllabic response — as in, "So what did you learn in social studies today?"

Sarah laughed. "We had a test today, and a kid got thrown out for cheating — he was trying to look at one of my answers."

"What's so funny about that?" Ann asked sharply.

"Well, I talked to the kid afterwards — it was Josh, what a dork! — and you wouldn't believe the question he was trying to copy from me."

"What was it?" Jonathan asked.

"It was about Eisenhower: Josh didn't know he was a general in WWII. He thought Ike just came out of nowhere to be President back in the 40s. Can you believe someone cheating over that?"

It was the 50s, dammit, Jonathan thought. I was there. He opened his mouth to respond, but Danny interrupted with a whoop; he had apparently just tuned into the conversation.

"Cheaters never prosper!" he yelled. Jonathan remembered that it was a phrase Ann often used; nobody in the family seemed to know precisely what it meant.

"Did you ever cheat in school, Dad?" Sarah asked, with a sly grin on her face.

"No, I didn't," Jonathan answered quickly. "And I certainly wouldn't have needed to cheat about Eisenhower. I was born during World War II; everyone in my generation knows who he is."

"Ah, but you did cheat," Ann broke in. She was smiling, but there was a slight edge to her voice.

Jonathan was baffled. What's this all about? he thought. He shrugged and gave Ann a blank look.

"Remember? You told us this summer," Ann reminded him. "Seems to me that someone who admits having cheated once might have cheated more than once."

Good grief, Jonathan thought. The summertime discussion, which had taken place on the very evening he was hit by lightning, seemed a lifetime ago. And the high-school election incident was two lifetimes ago. Why is she harping on this? he wondered.

"What about science? What happened in science today?" he asked Sarah, hoping to change the subject. He remembered that Sarah had been briefly interested in the subject the previous year, during a period when she was experimenting with green fingernail polish that glowed in the dark.

"Oh, just some stupid stuff about weather. You know, cumulonimbus or whatever they call thunderclouds. And nimbostratus, and lightning and some other stupid stuff."

"Lightning?" Jonathan asked, perking up. "What did they tell you about lightning?"

Zack interrupted the discussion by spilling his milk across the dinner table; it reminded Jonathan of his NowTime incident with Lucas, and he forced himself to refrain from yelling at Zack while Ann jumped from the table to get some paper towels. Zack looked at the ceiling and tried to pretend that nothing had happened, while Danny chortled with glee. Danny was already in pajamas, and hoped that Zack's clumsiness might earn him the ultimate punishment of being sent to bed before him.

"So, Sarah," Jonathan continued, "what about lightning? Don't let Zack distract you."

"Well, I don't know," Sarah said slowly, apparently sensing that her father's experience made it impolitic to joke about the subject. She shook her head back and forth, tossing a mangled mop of curls that had faded from pumpkin-orange to a dull copper color. "I do remember they told us that there are lots of them. The teacher said that at any given moment, there are something like 1,800 storms going on around the world, and each of them produces 100 lightning flashes per second."

Jonathan noticed her necklace as she tossed her head, and made a mental note to ask her about the stars; there were five of them on the thin gold chain that never left her neck:

 

 

But for now, he was intent on the statistics she was reporting. Ann was listening, too. "My goodness!" she said, while she patiently wiped up the milk spill. "That's a lot more than I would have expected!"

"Yeah," Sarah continued, apparently impressed with the numbers. "Miss Lambert says there are something like 44,000 thunderstorms and they produce 8 million lightning flashes a day."

Danny had been practicing a new trick of balancing a spoon on his nose, but now he reacted to Sarah's numbers with wide eyes. "Are all of those in New York?" he asked. The spoon fell from his nose, bounced off his plate, and clattered onto the floor.

"No, dummy, they're everywhere," replied Sarah, as she reached over to pick up the spoon. "Most of them are in the equator area, and Miss Lambert told us that there are ten times as many thunderstorms over land as there are over sea."

Jonathan was intrigued by all of this, and was about to pump Sarah for more information when Danny asked plaintively, "What about me, Dad? Don't you want to know about my day?" Jonathan resolved to track down the subject of lightning in a library some day, and turned his attention to Danny's kindergarten exploits.

Danny's recitation was a description of the Star Wars roles he had played with his school chums during recess. It sounded similar to Jonathan's experience a short while ago; the only thing that differed was the cowboy-and-Indian roles preferred by the kids of the 50s. On the other hand, Jonathan thought, the playground in Fort Worth was as big as Central Park. Danny attended a private school whose playground occupied the roof of the building — an area 50 feet square, not counting the space taken by chimneys and air conditioning vents.

"And what about your day, Jonathan?" Ann asked, as she handed out dessert to the children. This was accompanied by muted grumbles as the two boys compared the size of their respective scoops of ice cream to ensure that neither had been favored or cheated. Jonathan smiled: during his NowTime trek, ice cream had been a once-a-month treat rather than an everyday occurrence.

"My day? Same old stuff ... not much happened," he replied.

"Is that the same as 'nuthin,' Dad?" asked Sarah, with another wicked smile. "You always yell at Zack when he says that."

"Oh, come on, I don't yell at him; it's just frustrating to think he spent eight hours at school, and nothing at all happened." I don't really yell at my kids, Jonathan thought, except when I'm mad at them, when I intend to yell at them. But having just returned from the land of midgets, he could suddenly appreciate that children probably think adults spend most of their time yelling. It was sobering to think that Zack, and perhaps Danny and Sarah too, might feel the same way about him.

Ann smiled at him. "And you're telling us that you spent eight hours working in your office, and nothing at all happened?"

"Actually," Jonathan replied, "there was one strange call, now that I think of it."

"Yes?" asked Ann absently, as she reached over to retrieve Zack's ice-cream bowl. Zack was the only human Jonathan had ever seen who could devour an entire snowball-sized scoop of ice-cream in a single swallow. He would usually have his bowl licked clean before Ann had even finished putting the other bowls on the table.

"Well, it was from an old lady wanting to know if I was still coming to Miami for the Computer Security conference."

Ann looked stricken. "I thought you weren't going to that one. That's when Sarah has her parent-teacher's conference!"

"No problem, Dad!" said Sarah, gleefully, bouncing up and down in her seat with an enthusiasm normally only exhibited by her younger brothers. "Mom can handle the teachers just fine. You don't have to see my report card! Stay in Miami, go swimming, have a party, have a ball! Send us a postcard, we'll catch up with you at Christmas!"

"Ann, I'm not going, I told you that," Jonathan said quickly. "Remember? The problem was that the conference organizers listed me as a speaker, and printed my mug-shot in their brochure before they even bothered asking if I was available."

"So what's that got to do with the woman who called you?" Ann asked. She reached over to take Danny's bowl, but it prompted a howl of complaint: just because he had reduced his ice-cream to liquid mush apparently didn't mean that he was finished with it.

"Well, I guess she had gotten her hands on the brochure," Jonathan explained, "so she thought I was going. She was hilarious — I asked at one point if I could put her on hold because the other line was ringing, and she complained that she was calling long distance, from Florida. You'd think she was spending a hundred dollars a minute on the phone."

"What's so funny about that, Dad?" asked Zack, wrinkling his nose. Jonathan realized he was impatient to leave the table and watch the Muppet Show on television, but he had been unable to catch Ann's eye to receive official permission to be excused.

"Well, that's not the funny part," Jonathan admitted, "but she was obviously disappointed that I wasn't coming; she even remembered that I was supposed to attend last year's conference, too. Then she asked if I had any other plans to visit Florida — and when I said no, she said, well, maybe she would just drive up here to the Big Apple to say hello."

"Ha. Ha. Ha," said Zack pointedly. "Mom, can I be excused?"

"Just a second, Zack," said Ann, shrugging her shoulders at Jonathan with a question on her face. "I'm sorry, Jonathan, I don't get it. What's the point?"

"The point is that after she said she was going to drive up here at some point, she said to me, 'Well, good-bye, AJ.'"

"AJ?" asked Ann, curiously. "Nobody calls you that, except your mother."

"You sure it wasn't her?" suggested Sarah. "Maybe she was in Florida, maybe she had a hangover from some convention of her own." Sarah giggled at the thought: the idea of an adult out of control was apparently something she found amusing.

"Mom? Please?" begged Zack. Danny had decided not to even bother asking, having tuned out of the big people's conversation long ago. He had simply climbed down from his char and begun walking out of the room, the feet in his pajamas making a scraping noise on the floor.

"Danny! Hold it right there, young man! You've got ice cream from your nose down to your belly button! Zack: scram!" Ann barked out orders as the discipline of the dinner hour collapsed around her. "Sarah, don't you slip-slide away so fast. Stack up those plates and haul them over to the sink."

Okay, Jonathan thought, it wasn't so funny after all. But it was a little spooky — like a hand reaching across the decades to say, Hello, AJ, it's 1951 calling. All he knew is that it wasn't his mother. I don't care how hung over she might have been, or where she might have been calling from, Jonathan thought. I would have recognized her voice.

While Ann chased after the boys, Sarah carried dishes to the sink and Jonathan returned a carton of milk to the refrigerator. Suddenly, he remembered an earlier part of the dinnertime conversation. He turned to Sarah and said, "You know, I've been meaning to ask you: where did that necklace of yours come from?"

Sarah had gone back to the table to fetch more dishes. She had her back to Jonathan when she replied, "Dad, it's private. I've told Mom a million times — you're not going to start bugging me too, are you?"

"Hey," said Jonathan, laughing, "I'm not trying to pry into your private life. I was just curious about the stars — I think I've seen them before."

Sarah turned to him and cocked her head to one side. "Maybe you have," she said, "and maybe you haven't. But I don't bug you about your secrets, do I? You don't see me asking you and Mom about your sex life, do you?"

Good grief, Jonathan thought. Who ever invented teenage girls, anyway? What's this got to do with anyone's sex life? He sighed and retreated from the kitchen; Sarah had won another round in her battle against grownups.

After dinner, Jonathan turned his attention to the book project he had been working on during the summer, back when his abrupt journey to NowTime had begun. It had taken a while to get back to the manuscript in the initial chaos of the return from Water Mill in September, but most of it was finished — except for two new things that he had decided to add. The strange dinnertime conversation with Lucas in Texas had haunted him ever since his return, and he decided that he should add some material on Russian computers, as well as some historical notes on John Mauchly's security problems with the government during the 1950s.

The Russian section was easy: there was little to report, aside from a brief discussion on the Soviet Union's efforts during the 1970s to mimic IBM's successful mainframe computers. Jonathan already knew that the effort was a disaster: most of the real Soviet activity consisted of pirating Western technology, and smuggling American computers into the country. He had heard apocryphal stories of mainframes, minis, and even a couple of supercomputers vanishing from train stations and loading docks, only to appear months later in Moscow or Peking. Meanwhile, the USSR's efforts to use computers to control its centralized economy had been an unparalleled disaster all through the 60s, 70s, and 80s: shop foremen, factory managers, and regional province chiefs invariably distorted the data captured by their local computers, in order to ensure that politically acceptable data would find its way up the chain of command to the Politburo in Moscow. As for fax machines, laser printers, modems, and telecom networks: forget it. Not only did the Soviet Union lack the technology, Jonathan thought, the whole concept was in fundamental conflict with the mindset of the Soviet state.

The Mauchly story was more difficult to track down. Jonathan had applied to the FBI for Mauchly's dossier, under the Freedom of Information Act; what eventually came back to him was a heavily censored 125-page document. Even with most of the names blacked out, and with deletions of whole sentences, it still made fascinating reading. Jonathan discovered that Mauchly's problems had started much earlier than the 1950-51 time period Lucas had been talking about — for as early as 1947, the computer firm founded by Mauchly and Eckert already had two top-secret military contracts: a subcontract from Northrop for the construction of a computer called BINAC, and a small contract from the Army Signal Corps for electronic cryptographic equipment for the Army Security Agency. This involved to a standard security investigation of the company and its key people, and the results were damaging indeed: Jonathan read from a 1948 report from the Army Intelligence Division about Mauchly:

 

Mauchly was a member of the Philadelphia branch of the American Association of Scientific Workers, an organization formed by the Communist Part as a front to influence legislation restricting the free exchange of information relative to atomic energy. [Three lines censored.] Mauchly was legally married and the father of two children. In August 1946, Mauchly's wife was mysteriously drowned while both were moonlight bathing in Wildwood, NJ.

 

So Dad was right! Jonathan thought. Though he couldn't remember the conversation exactly, he had an eerie feeling that Lucas's description of Mauchly's membership in the Philadelphia organization had been a verbatim repetition of the words he was now reading. In any case, the Army's investigation resulted in the Air Force ordering Northrop, in the spring of 1948, to withhold classified material from the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which had little or no effect on the company's BINAC project. But it also resulted in the Army asking the FBI to conduct a "complaint type investigation" of Mauchly. It was the FBI investigation that led the Army's Philadelphia Ordnance District, on January 31, 1950, to deny a security clearance to the company, and to Mauchly individually. This occurred even though the Provost Marshal of the Air Force had granted Mauchly a top secret clearance as recently as August 8th, 1949.

Flipping through the rest of the report, Jonathan found that Mauchly had appealed the cancellation of his clearance, and that the FBI had conducted a second investigation, which dragged on into 1952. On December 3rd, 1952, the Industrial Employment Review Board reconsidered its ruling and granted Mauchly a restricted clearance. And six years later, the Secretary of the Army, on behalf of all the armed services, upgraded his clearance to secret. It had been an eight-year ordeal, which Jonathan dutifully described in a brief appendix of the enormous tome that he was determined to finish by New Year's Eve, come hell or high water. As he hit the "SAVE" key to file the last page of the manuscript, Jonathan couldn't help wondering: how much of this did Dad know about?

Even after the manuscript had been turned in to his publisher, the Mauchly story stuck in his mind. It was a mental connection with his secret, private trip to the past that he still insisted on calling NowTime. He found that he often dreamed about the period, brief though it was; his unconscious mind reviewed the events, replaying each scene. And gradually he began linking isolated facts and comments together, seeing the discrepancies and contradictions more clearly than he had been able to when he was in the middle of it. None of this happened overnight: winter slowly melted away, and the spring of yet another year, 1986, began to peek into the sunshine; but it was inexorable.

One of the biggest pieces of the puzzle was the timewarp phenomenon. How does it work? he kept wondering. How come the lightning didn't fry me to a crisp? Through a series of friends and professional colleagues, he tracked down a professor of astrophysics at Columbia, a brilliant but absent-minded man by the name of Metcalf who spent much of his spare time investigating theories of time travel. He had been nominated for the Nobel Prize, Jonathan was told, and he rarely agreed to interviews or meetings with people outside his field. But he agreed to meet Jonathan at the request of the director of the university computer center, a man who owed Jonathan a large favor for solving a computer virus problem a year earlier.

This is nuts, Jonathan thought, as he directed a cab driver through Central Park and up Broadway to the Columbia campus. I probably won't understand a word this guy says to me. But I need to try, at least once, find out how this timewarp thing works.

"We don't know how it works," Norbert Metcalf said in response to Jonathan's question, as he brushed a pile of journals and computer printouts off the spare chair in his cluttered office, and motioned him to sit. "All we know is that there is far more to the universe than our physical sciences can reveal."

"Yeah, I know," Jonathan said quickly. "Scientists don't understand everything about the universe, doctors don't understand everything about the human body. Etcetera, etcetera. But are there any theories about timewarps?"

"Oh, indeed there are," Metcalf beamed, leaning back in his chair. "But it would take several hours to explain properly. Let me try to put in layman's terms: just about everything in the universe rotates — planets, stars, and even galaxies. Whatever it is that collapses down to form a black hole is almost certainly rotating, and as it collapses the spin goes faster and faster, like a whirling ice skater who pulls in her arms toward her body. And a rotating black hole is quite a different kettle of fish."

"Really?" Jonathan asked. What's this got to do with timewarps? he wondered.

"In physical terms," Metcalf continued, "the rotation effectively distorts space-time in such a way that it opens a gateway to other regions of space, to 'elsewhere.' Starting from one part of our universe, a traveler could pass through both outer and inner event horizons to reemerge in another part of our universe, without ever exceeding the speed of light or being crushed by the singularity."

"What's that got to do with timewarps?" Jonathan persisted.

"Well, this is where we begin to boggle the mind," Metcalf smiled, as if he was lecturing a young child. "Another part of our universe doesn't just mean a different place, but a different region of space-time. The emerging traveler is not just 'elsewhere' but 'elsewhen,' past or future compared with his starting point, depending on the exact route he took around the singularity and through the black hole."

"Elsewhen," Jonathan said, as he shifted in his seat. "That's a cute phrase. But you seem to be saying that timewarps are caused by black holes in space. What about lightning?"

Metcalf shrugged. "Who knows? Lightning may be — sometimes, at least — just a manifestation of the energy released by a black hole. What we see as reality is largely subjective, conditioned by our preconceived ideas and those of the society in which we live."

"And what about the idea of lightning hitting someone more than once?" Jonathan asked. "What about the idea of someone using a lightning bolt to control the way he timewarps back and forth?"

"As far as I'm concerned, timewarps do exist" Metcalf responded, with an intensity that took Jonathan by surprise. "Believe me — they're real. Control of timewarps, though, is not something we're going to achieve with the aid of mechanical devices, but through improved understanding of the human mind, the nature of the unconscious, and their interactions with what we think of as the physical world."

"So it is possible, yes?" Jonathan asked.

Metcalf sighed and rose from his desk. "I have some students waiting for me. They expect me to be late, but I better show up before the class is over."

He turned at the door and stared at Jonathan, "Anything is possible. But if you're planning on another timewarp, keep this in mind: a time traveler will probably return to a universe that is different from, but very similar to, the universe from which he started. These different universes usually differ in very subtle ways so that unless you're very observant, you may not even realize you've returned to a different universe."

A different universe, Jonathan thought, as his taxi carried him back home again. It was a thought that reoccurred at sporadic intervals, usually in quiet moments when his mind returned to revisit the world of NowTime. A week later, on a quiet Saturday morning at the beginning of May, a particularly vivid dream about lightning and timewarps snapped him awake with a start. He was lying in bed on his back, with the down quilt pulled up to his chin; it was deathly quiet in the room, for Ann never moved, never snored, never even twitched in her sleep. The bedroom was gloomy and dark gray; the day was dawning, but a thick belt of clouds hung over the city. Ann's clock was in his line of sight on her side of the bed, but his eyesight was so bad that he could see only a blur of green; twisting his head in the other direction, he could make out the huge red digits on his alarm clock, digits that Ann joked would be visible to a normal person on the other side of the city. It was 6:23, a few minutes before the family would normally begin rising on a weekday morning. On weekend mornings, though, everyone knew they could sleep until lunch time without an alarm going off. Even Danny stayed in bed until seven, for there were no cartoons.

So Jonathan was the only one awake, in a silent house. He padded in his pajamas as quietly