A jolt awakened him: an unexpected force had thrown him a foot into the air and then dropped him back to earth. He landed softly, and tried to make out his bearings. It was dark everywhere, and he was hemmed in on his left and his right by walls. Instead of the tightly stretched white sheets that accompanied his last two timewarps, he was now covered by a soft blanket that was bunched up past his knees, leaving his ankles and feet completely free. It was warm and musty, but an occasional draft tickled the skin on his neck. And there was an odd smell — a combination of dust and leather, overlaid by a hint of gasoline.

From a distance, he heard soft voices — a woman's murmur and an occasional comment from a deeper voice. The murmur was soft, but it sounded familiar — not like the anonymous nurse he would have expected in a hospital. The man's voice was also familiar; but something about it made him edgy. A woman's voice whispered, "Lucas." The word floated through the air, hovered above him, and dropped heavily on his face. Lucas! He was back in the land of NowTime, but the atmosphere was different. I've returned to the home of a stranger, he thought.

The surroundings gradually took on a familiar form: he was in Lucas's custom-built car bed, in the back of the Chevy. The walls that he sensed were the fabric of the front seat and back seat, between which his small bed had been cushioned. Norma and Lucas were driving through the night, whispering quietly to avoid waking him; the jolt that awakened him a moment ago had been a bump in the road.

He saw no lights coming in through the windows of the car, though some stars could be seen in the distance. But the stars were clearly visible as tiny pinpricks; his eyesight was back to its youthful sharpness again. He verified this by wiggling his fingers and toes: they were short once again. It didn't seem so strange this time, and he anticipated that the transition from giant size to pygmy size would be less difficult. While patting, poking, and pinching himself, he discovered that Darth Vader was nowhere to be found; the loss of his guardian angel was troubling.

For the moment, he decided it was best to lie quietly in the back, listening to their whispered conversation to find out where they were going and how he had gotten here. Gradually, he deduced that they were leaving Fort Worth behind, hauling a trailer behind them, and moving to new quarters in Denver. They had been in Fort Worth for less than three months; the move was abrupt.

But this all fits, he thought. This was where we're supposed to be going. He remembered from BeforeTime that they had moved to Denver in 1951, and that the drive had been much shorter than before. But which BeforeTime memory was that? he wondered. The BeforeTime memory before the first lightning bolt in 1985, or after the second one in Central Park nine months later? And when I think about NowTime, how should I distinguish between the NowTime of the first timewarp, when I traveled from New York to Texas, and this new NowTime where I woke up?

The computer heritage of his BeforeTime life supplied the answer: simply append an appropriate digit. So there was BeforeTime1, the life he led up to Water Mill; and BeforeTime2, the period from September 1985 to May, 1986. Similarly, he now distinguished between NowTime1 (from Glen Oaks to Forth Worth) and NowTime2 —this NowTime.

As he mulled this over on his makeshift bed, the route to Denver took them west by northwest from Fort Worth. The midnight escape from Malvey Avenue led them out of town on Jacksboro Boulevard, past pawnshops and bail-bond service companies, and eventually onto State Highway 199, a narrow two-lane patched and bumpy road that passed through the little towns of Reno, Springtown, and Agnes. Just past the turnoff to Wizard Wells, Norma gasped. Lucas asked quietly, but sharply, what she had seen. "Look," she whispered, "didn't you see? On that long, corrugated iron shed we just passed? Someone painted in big black letters, 'I love Joanna.'"

"Drop it, Norma," Lucas whispered. "It has nothing to do with you. Just leave it alone."

AJ had no idea what they were talking about, but the subject was dropped. Lucas pointed out a turkey buzzard crouched on the road, frozen momentarily in the car's headlights as it plucked at the entrails of a dead rabbit plastered on the road; it waited until the last possible moment before flying away. Moments later, Norma announced that they had entered the town of Joplin; there were no cross-roads, no stop lights, and no center of town before Norma could find any unusual stores or restaurants to identify, they were out of town and on their way to Jacksboro.

 

 

They crossed over the Trinity River in the dead of night. A single street light was often the only thing to indicate they had come out of the surrounding grazing land into small towns with odd names like Antelope, Windthorst, and Scotland. They crossed the Little Wichita River and Lucas barely slowed down as they zoomed into Wichita Falls at 2:30 AM. From there, they bent west on Route 287 into the Panhandle of Texas, heading for Amarillo, 225 miles further away. Just past Vernon, they passed a dead skunk on the road; the stink seeped into the car, and AJ held his breath for long moments, waiting for the stench to fade. Chillicothe, Quanah, and even Childress were like ghost towns in the darkness. At Estelline, Lucas whispered to Norma that they were crossing the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River that formed much of the border between Texas and Oklahoma.

Lucas expected to hit Amarillo by sunup, and Norma softly called out the names of the towns that marked their progress. Memphis, Hedley, Giles, Lelia Lake, Clarendon, and Ashtola slipped behind them in the darkness. When they reached Claude, AJ heard the gas station attendant telling Lucas that AT&T had come through town a few weeks earlier to remove all the pay phones; the coin slots had rusted over from lack of use, and the folks at Ma Bell were pissed. This is serious stuff, AJ thought: a town without phones is on the edge — no, over the edge, into the abyss. The citizens of Claude once had telephones but had apparently decided not to use them, choosing instead to turn their backs on society and hunker down in quiet oblivion. It gave him a whole new way to define what was a town and what was not. In BeforeTime, he looked for the obvious: if a cluster of houses and buildings out here on the tundra had an identifying name, a traffic light, a gas station, a post office, and a MacDonald's, then it qualified; if it had only a WhataBurger or TasteeBurger; if it lacked traffic lights, stop signs, or even a highway warning demanding that people slow down to Mach 1 as they passed through — then it didn't qualify. But it never occurred to him that any place would be without phones, or that the phone company would go out of its way to remove its pay phone boxes.

Lucas would have driven straight through Amarillo, but Norma begged him to stop for breakfast when she saw a roadside diner with its lights on. AJ could hear the tires crunching over gravel as the car pulled to a stop; the engine rattled and turned over a few more times after Lucas turned off the ignition, and then it was silent. Norma turned and looks over the seat to check on AJ; though he had intended to feign sleep, he was so hungry that he can't help smiling at her.

"Are you awake, AJ?" she asked softly.

"Yeah, Mom," he responded, "but I don't know how long I've been sleeping. I don't even remember climbing into the car."

"That's because you didn't climb in the car, kiddo," Lucas's voice said. "You've been unconscious most of the past week. We had to make a hell of a stink to get you out of the hospital so we could put you in the car."

"What happened to me?" AJ asked.

The story, which Norma explained over breakfast at a restaurant named Hinkey-Dink's, was simple. The school girl watching him from the library window had seen the lightning strike him, and had run to the librarian for help. The librarian turned out to be a savior, for her double-duty as school nurse made it possible for them to race out into the rain and provide CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after the lightning bolt zapped him. If I ever get back to Fort Worth and find the librarian, AJ thought, I'll bring her a dozen roses and never accuse her of goose-stepping again.

After breakfast, the sun was already high on the horizon, surrounded by a bright blue, cloudless sky. They turned north on Highway 287 and continued through classic cattle-grazing country: wide-open and rolling, with little clumps of sagebrush on fields of green sage grass. At Dumas, Lucas and Norma argued for a few moments whether it made more sense to jog west and follow the larger road, Route 87, toward Dalhart, or whether they should stick with the original plan of heading north toward Boise City, Oklahoma. Boise City won the day, and they passed through Etter, Cactus, and Stratford before crossing the border into Oklahoma. Though Etter had only a grain silo and one gas station, Stratford proudly advertised itself as the "home of God, grass, and grit." A sign at the far end of Stratford, just past the Sunset Motel, announced that this was the last chance to stop in Texas.

The passage through Oklahoma was brief, lasting barely more than an hour, for they were at the extreme western tip of the state, far from the major cities of Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Boise City was the only town they saw in the entire state. It had a Dairy Queen, a Mexican restaurant, two motels, a gun shop, and a high school on the same city block, in addition to the Cimarron County Courthouse. It was a town that reminded AJ of the BeforeTime movie, The Last Picture Show.

As they left Boise City, a highway sign informed them that Lamar, Colorado was 99 miles away. At least AJ thought it was what the sign said; someone had used the sign for target practice with a high-powered rifle, and the letters and numbers were hard to read. They moved into flat, open land, used mostly for grazing, though some of it was tilled and planted. AJ was beginning to get a sense of being on the high plains: no mountains were visible yet, but there was an occasional lonely mesa off in the distance, and a strong sensation that they were driving across the top of a long, high plateau. There was not another car to be seen, and Lucas gunned the old Chevy up to 70 mph to cross into Colorado as soon as possible.

The first town in Colorado was Campo, a huddle of one-story cinder block houses. The land was completely flat; hundreds of cattle grazed off in the distance, appearing as little dots on the horizon. On their right, they saw nothing but farmland, plowed and tilled, interspersed with lush fields of grass. A small Department of Agriculture sign was tacked in the ground by the side of the road; it said, "Soil is life. Protect it."

Lucas would have driven 36 hours straight to reach Denver, but he reluctantly agreed to stop when they reached Lamar, near the junction of the Arkansas and Big Sandy rivers. They drove by a gas station, a grocery store, and BJ's Burger And Beverage And A Little Bit More before reaching the residential area, which consisted of two blocks of stately homes under sturdy trees facing the main street of town. They finally stopped at the El Donna Motel at the far edge of town.

AJ still hadn't heard a good explanation of why they had left Fort Worth in such a rush; all he knew was that they left on a Friday night, and that Lucas had to report to his new job in Denver on Monday morning. But it was obvious that he was pleased: leaving Texas for Denver got him much closer to the stomping grounds where he had grown up. Consequently, there had been no major arguments on this drive; Lucas was downright pleasant and treated them to a nice dinner before they turned in for the night.

"By the way," said Norma, as she tucked AJ into his cot, "the librarian found something when she saved you from the lightning."

"What's that?" he asked curiously.

"Well, it seems to be some kind of doll," Norma mused as she pulled a small black figure from her purse. "I've never seen anything like it."

Darth! Relief flooded through him as he realized that his small companion had survived another passage from BeforeTime to NowTime. He didn't know why the doll had survived these trips; but whatever the reason, he was delighted to have it back with him again. Norma placed him on the pillow beside him, patted his cheek softly, and turned out the light.

The next morning, they got a leisurely start at nine o'clock; Lucas was no longer in a hurry, for he was convinced that they would have no trouble reaching Denver by mid-afternoon. Leaving Lamar behind them, the sky became darker and darker. The weather report at breakfast had warned of tornadoes from Amarillo to Denver, but Lucas decided that they should keep driving; mist began to form on the windshield, and the few cars approaching them from the other direction had their headlights on. Meanwhile, AJ noticed that there were long rows of ridges out in the fields, as if someone had dragged a giant comb through the earth. Adding to the strange sights, there were hay bales out in the fields shaped like giant loaves of bread: each one was thirty feet long and fifteen feet high, perfectly formed with no wires or rope to hold it together. The sides were smooth, as if the bales had come out of a huge baking pan.

The road jogged west briefly to Wiley, slowing Lucas down; but then it headed straight north for 25 miles to Eads and then another 20 miles to Kit Carson, before turning northwest toward Limon. The rain had become heavier and the clouds were still dark as they passed through open grazing land, with clumps of sagebrush and cactus grass; throughout, they could see cattle grazing in the distance, and an occasional deer or antelope watching them from a safe distance or skipping along through the grass to its own private melody. The low grass cover made the entire landscape, which stretched on and on and on — for an eternity on all sides — a mesmerizing blanket of pale, lush green.

Lucas consented to stop for lunch in Limon. From there, they were close enough to their final destination that everyone became edgy with anticipation. Route 287 carried them through Agate and Deer Trail, across the East Bijou and Middle Bijou Rivers, slowing them down briefly as it joined Route 36 in Byers. Coming over a small rise just past the turnoff to Peoria, the Rocky Mountains were barely visible for the first time; they were still 50 miles from Denver, and it gave AJ a whole new appreciation for how far one could see in this open country. The highway then carried them straight through Strasburg, Bennett, and Watkins, before depositing them at the western edge of the city.

 

 

The motel-to-house sequence followed, and after a brief search, the Halifaxes settled into a house in a suburb called Aurora. Though it was close to the end of the school year, Norma insisted that he check in at the local Aurora public school. A Miss Saltmarsh was assigned to baby-sit him for the final month before summer recess, and she sent home a report card in late June showing a "satisfactory" effort in music, art, social habits, study habits, and safety; after living in New York for nearly twenty years, there were a lot of things AJ felt he could teach her about street safety, but he decided to keep his mouth shut.

The short period of schooling gave him no opportunity to become acquainted with his classmates; he found that the neighborhood had half a dozen boys and girls approximately his own age. Though nobody actively picked on him, he was clearly the outsider and the ugly duckling as a newcomer; for the most part, the children left him alone. It occurred to him, near the end of the school year, that he hadn't received any more of the mysterious star drawings; it intensified his feeling of solitude.

Throughout their first summer in Denver, the weather was unbearably hot. Heat radiated from the sidewalks and hung heavy in the air. There was no escape from it, not even in the shade of trees. The breezes, when there were any, gave no relief: coming from the Kansas plains, they too were the temperature of a baked potato. Norma liked to escape the heat by spending the afternoons at a municipal swimming pool, and insisted on dragging AJ along whether he was interested or not; it gave her an excuse to change into her bathing suit and gossip with her friends while cooling off in the water. AJ remembered the pool vaguely from BeforeTime: it was always crowded, filled from one end to the other with laughing, screaming, yelling, happy children. Mothers, teenagers, and the occasional bored father lined the edges of the pool, jumping in among the children only occasionally to cool themselves from the fierce heat.

This time, in NowTime, he knew the dangers of the pool. He knew what was supposed to happen to him this summer, and he was determined to avoid it: if ever there was one thing in his life he wanted to do over differently, this was it. He saw the water as a vast ocean of viruses and disease. He didn't mind the fact that half the young boys peed in the pool; he could spot the moment it happened by watching the beatific smile of pleasure on their faces, knowing, as they did, that peeing through their swimming trunks while submerged in the water was something nobody else would be able to detect. If I had a sister, he found himself thinking, I would ask if girls pee in swimming pools too.

He didn't even mind the spitting or the blowing of noses: he was no prude, and he could swim through snot, phlegm, and urine just like everyone else. That wasn't the reason he stayed out of the water most of the summer. All he cared about was the polio virus: this was the summer the epidemic would reach its peak. He was in the midst of his own private AIDS crisis, in a country that seemed only casually concerned about the rampaging disease around them. Dr. Salk hadn't appeared on the scene with his vaccine yet, so they didn't have the familiar school ritual of annual vaccinations. AJ was convinced, from his BeforeTime memories, that public swimming pools were the prime carrier of the virus; all he needed to do was avoid it, and he should be safe.

Unfortunately, he focused so much attention on his own exposure that he forgot that Lucas too would contract polio this summer — and he, too, rarely went near the pool, preferring instead to spend his weekends working on a tiny garden plot in the back yard, planting carrots, radishes, and cucumbers, and tying fledgling green tomato stalks to the stakes he had pounded in the ground. Consequently, it was a great shock one evening after dinner, when AJ heard from his bedroom a tremendous flurry of activity, phone calls, and eventually an ambulance arriving at the front door. Lucas was carried away on a stretcher by two grim attendants; he looked ghastly, and Norma looked terrified.

But if Norma looked terrified, AJ felt terrified: he might have forgotten much of 1951 from BeforeTime, but he had never forgotten that the same night Lucas was taken away was also the night that he fell prey to the disease. But this time around, he had done everything he could thought of to minimize his chances of exposure — except the undoable, staying away from his family. Still, he remembered that Norma never did come down with polio in BeforeTime. Whatever she did to avoid it, he thought desperately, should work for me, too.

But in the blackness after midnight, he awakened from a feverish dream; his pajamas and the sheets on his bed were soaked. He hoped against hope that it was just a bad cold. Maybe, he thought, I should call Mom to let her know that I feel awful — but he felt so awful that he can't get out of bed. His attempt at calling her failed; all he could do was croak softly.

In the morning, Norma found him feverish and complaining of nausea. She didn't even stop to take his temperature, but simply packed him into the Chevy and drove him to the hospital herself. So much for avoiding polio: the one significant event in AJ's young life he would like to have eliminated had proven to be as inevitable as the tides. He had forgotten just how utterly awful he felt the first time around; as before, he was sick to his stomach the entire trip to the hospital, and Norma told him to roll down the window and vomit into the wind.

With all of his transitions from BeforeTime to NowTime and back again, AJ had grown to hate hospitals. But this time, he was far too ill to pay attention to the details. He was plopped on a stretcher and wheeled into a room with intense, bright lights. He had only a moment to contemplate the situation before he was lifted bodily and placed face down on a table at belt-buckle level of the doctors and nurses around him. Up to this moment, he had been passive about the whole affair — too weak and feverish to question anything. But now, suddenly, he knew what was coming. Once was bad enough, and he remembered it across the void of 35 years as if it were happening to him right now — which it was. The standard procedure for his illness, he remembered, was to jam a needle into his back, a needle he was convinced had been designed for rogue elephants and hostile hippos. The needle was inserted into the base of the spine to withdraw a sample of spinal fluid, in order to determine just how serious a form of the disease he had contracted.

In BeforeTime1, it was the most awful pain he had ever felt; by contrast, the jolts of lightning were a feather's tickle. He squirmed and kicked and fought it then, and he fought it now. The only difference now was that he knew how agonizing it would be, so he fought twice as hard. But despite every ounce of energy he had for the fight, he was small and he was sick — and there were four strong nurses to hold him down. Each grabbed an arm or a leg, each pressed firmly on a shoulder or buttock. Weak and feverish, he bellowed a howl of agony as the needle plunged in.

The next thing he knew, he was being wheeled down a hall in a hospital bed with high metal side-bars that made it look like a giant crib; he must have passed out from the pain while they were loading him into the contraption. He was strapped down to the bed so tightly that he couldn't move his arms or his legs; all he could do was turn his head from side to side to get some sense of his progress. Near the end of one hall, out of the corner of his eye, he passed a room, empty except for one familiar sight: a huge iron lung, painted a sickly mustard yellow. A small blond head stuck out of one end of the contraption; it was a young boy who couldn't have been any older than AJ was, and his head didn't turn even though the wheels on AJ's hospital bed squeaked loudly enough to raise the dead. The sight jogged a BeforeTime memory: a week from now, AJ thought, he'll be gone, and nobody on the hospital staff will tell me anything about him. He suspected the truth then, and now he knew it with absolute certainty: the boy died. He died once in BeforeTime, AJ thought, and now he'll die a second death in NowTime. He whispered a farewell as he passed the room, wishing the boy peace wherever his journey ultimately took him.

Norma couldn't visit him, because polio was contagious. But she did come to the hospital each day, bringing toys and coloring books to keep him amused; he was aware, as he had not been in BeforeTime, that she was spending most of her time shuttling back and forth from home to two hospitals, for Lucas was fighting his battle in a different hospital altogether. AJ's form of polio was also the weak one, and he knew that he too would recover completely; he still didn't understand how Norma managed to avoid it altogether. On top of everything else, he remembered, she had tried to keep Lucas's garden going — but a freak hailstorm one night pounded the hard green baby tomatoes into mush, breaking the stalks and trampling them into the ground, and bringing a final end to the gardening effort of 1951. The carrots and radishes rotted in the ground, and though Lucas complained about it, he accepted Norma's lack of interest.

The two weeks in the hospital passed slowly. As soon as his status was confirmed, the hospital brought another young boy into the double room where he was quarantined. He was a little older than AJ, and -- though not requiring an iron lung — far sicker. AJ passed the time by talking to him, hour after hour, trying to calm him, or at least provide something to take his mind off his situation. But after four days, while AJ was asleep one night, the nurses wheeled him away. AJ never saw him again, and no one would tell him where he had gone.

Finally, finally, they turned him loose and Norma took him home to spend the month of August focusing on his recuperation. This was a slow process; though he had no painful after-effects from the polio bug, it left his arm and leg muscles quite weak. He slept for long hours each night, but often woke in the early stillness of dawn, watching the first rays of light as they slowly inched across the wall of his small bedroom. The doctor had prescribed daily naps and hot baths, which he enjoyed; he always regretted the BeforeTime pace of life that forced him to rush in and out of showers, and he was content to lie perfectly still in the tub until the near-boiling water cooled to a tepid warmth.

With September came a new year at the Aurora public school. Norma insisted that he not run around the playground with the other kids for the first month after school started; he spent his time instead watching the level of the children's intellectual activity. Math, his own favorite, was a subject to which the eight year olds responded unpredictably: one day they would say it was easy, and the next day it was impossible. Most of them could count by threes or fours, sometimes as high as a hundred; most could add and subtract three-digit numbers, with borrowing and carrying, and a few could make an attempt at simple division. And they had begun to grasp the sense of number: they knew that ten blocks in a row were more than eight, even if the rows were the same length -- a notion which would have baffled a younger child. They were also very good at evaluating one another's performances: "He really stinks at arithmetic," a bad-tempered boy named Brian whispered to AJ as they watched one of their classmates struggle over his multiplication tables at the blackboard one cool autumn morning.

A few weeks later, Lucas spent the dinner hour commenting on the dramatic news concerning the war: North Korean and United Nations negotiators had announced, after five months of haggling, that they would observe a truce along the entire battle line that stretched across the width of the Korean peninsula.

It turned out that Lucas had been reading far more than the Rocky Mountain News, which had been providing a positively upbeat report on the war. AJ was not sure where Lucas got his information, but he constantly seemed to be looking for what he called "one very queer detail," or "the significant trifle" — a bit of dialogue, an overlooked fact, a buried observation. He had dissected, for example, the original cable, in June 1950, from the American embassy in Seoul announcing the initial North Korean assault — basing its account on South Korean Army information which had been "partially confirmed" by American sources.

"What part of the South Korean version was confirmed?" Lucas asked Norma at the dinner table. "What part was not confirmed?"

Even if he is an obsessive nut about politics, AJ thought, you can't ignore his observations. The initial attack by the North Koreans, for example, involved some 70,000 men and 70 tanks which went into action simultaneously at four different points; AJ could hardly disagree with Lucas's conclusion that to assemble, arm, and equip such a force, and then move it into position for a perfectly synchronized strike over a wide front, would have taken at least a month of advance activity. Granted, they don't have spy satellites in 1951, watching every movement from the heavens, AJ thought. But at the time of the attack, Lucas claimed that the United States had over 500 American officers and 700 civilian technicians in South Korea —plus field observers from the United Nations Commission, and the entire resources of the South Korean military establishment. How could MacArthur Headquarters not have known the North Koreans were poised for a strike? he wondered.

Lucas's conclusion was simple and blunt: the initial Korean attack was expected and passively accepted, and the drawn-out progress of the war had largely been caused by the government's desire to use Korea as a focal point for (a) maintaining public pressure against Communism, (b) justifying a massive arms buildup, (c) keeping Red China out of the United Nations, and even (d) making it possible for the US. to negotiate a peace treaty with Japan independently of any acquiescence from Russia. Perhaps the best summary of the real US. policy toward the Korean War was the one Lucas found from the commander of the US. Eighth Army, in a speech to a visiting Filipino delegation: "Korea has been a blessing. There had to be a Korea either here or some place in the world."

So everything I've been hearing is a lie, AJ thought. The government has been lying to everyone about the war. Our teachers tell little white lies about everything in school. And then there are the lies from Mom and ... not Dad, but StepDad. I must not forget why I came here, he kept telling himself. Aside from having discovered that his father was not his father, and having rediscovered that the government had begun lying to everyone long before Vietnam, he wanted to know what other lies had shaped his BeforeTime life. When he first arrived in NowTime2, he had expected to catch Norma and Lucas in flagrant lies on a daily basis. But it was not as simple as that, as he gradually learned: yes, they would tell him a flat-out lie if he asked them certain direct questions about the past; but the more insidious lie was the simple withholding of portions of the truth. He listened for tidbits, snooped through the house for crumbs of information — and found nothing. Norma and Lucas behaved as if they were happy here in Denver; but every move to a new city had represented a burning of bridges, a burying of the past. Norma didn't want to talk about Texas; Lucas pretended that New York didn't exist.

During the summertime, AJ had had an occasional opportunity to snoop through papers and pictures while Lucas was at work and Norma was cooking, cleaning, or taking a bath; those opportunities were curtailed now that he was back in school. So far, he hadn't found anything: the momentary opportunity to look at the family photo album showed the same blank pages before 1947 that he found in BeforeTime2. He knew that he had been born in 1944, but from every piece of visible evidence, his life on this planet began in Washington two years after the war ended.

What he was most interested in finding was his birth certificate; he had never seen one in his adult BeforeTime life, and had always used a succession of passports -- the first one provided to him by his parents, without explanation, in high school — as his "official" identification. Children didn't usually rifle through their parents' papers, though the opportunities for doing so increased dramatically in BeforeTime simply because people were keeping more of their personal data on computer files that were easily accessible to their hacker children. But in any case, he was annoyed that he couldn't find anything here in NowTime; with his adult mind, it should have been child's play. It appeared that Lucas had locked away the most important family papers in a safe deposit box in the bank; some of his other papers were kept in a Navy foot locker under his bed, which was always locked. And AJ discovered that one file drawer in the family desk was also locked.

The heavy involvement of the Navy in the Korean conflict provided a few opportunities to ask Lucas some innocent questions about his military career, in an effort to pin down dates and places. Lucas was perfectly happy to tell him about his childhood in Utah and his enlistment, the day after he graduated from high school; it had less to do with patriotism than a burning desire to escape the mining town where he grew up. He would talk ad nauseam about his narrow escape from being caught at Pearl Harbor, or about the gruesome details of the Battle of Coral Sea. But none of this helped AJ; he tried pursuing his own line of inquiry by asking, "Did you quit the Navy right after VJ day in 1945?"

"Hell, no," Lucas laughed. "You don't just quit the Navy when you get tired of it. I signed up for a six-year hitch in 1941; they weren't going to let me out just because the war had ended."

"But what did they make you do, if there was no one to fight?" AJ asked innocently.

"Well, they still sail ships around the ocean, even in peace time; and there was lots of patrol duty. But at the end, in '47, they shipped me back to Washington for some damn paperwork job."

And that, of course, was where he met Norma. The subtle implication from various comments AJ had picked up in NowTime2 was that they were married in Washington in 1947 and moved to Denver immediately afterwards. But if Lucas was telling the truth, he wasn't anywhere near Norma or Washington or Florida until 1947. So where the hell did I come from? AJ thought. But then it occurred to him: It's equally possible he's lying about this part, too.

Back at school, the only interesting topic was science: on October 10th, for example, the science teacher informed AJ's class that transcontinental dial telephone service had been inaugurated. It turned out that Lucas and Norma had read the same article in the Rocky Mountain News, and it became a topic of conversation at dinner. Without thinking, AJ told them what had been drifting silently through his head when the teacher explained the news — that within a few years, kids would be faxing their homework to one another, sending term papers to their teachers via e-mail bulletin-boards, and carrying cellular phones embedded in their digital watches. "In thirty years," he said, "there will be more computer power in the hands of individuals — of ordinary citizens — than in the hands of all the government agencies combined!"

Lucas, who had ignored the prediction about cellular phones and fax machines, looked up sharply at this comment. "Oh, yeah?" he grunted. "What makes you think that?"

"That's just the way things are going to be," AJ told him, with as much innocence as he could muster. "All the computers will become incredibly tiny and there will be millions of them. And there will be one for everybody, as personal as having your own toothbrush. And they'll all be linked together over this transcontinental telephone service that's just getting started now. And that will be more powerful than anything the government could do with its supercomputers."

Lucas put down his fork and stared at him for a moment; then he leaned back and burped out a loud guffaw. "You've got quite an imagination, kiddo — too bad you don't know what you're talking about. I happen to know that all of the important computer work going on today is in the military, and they're going to keep it centralized. None of this telephone bullshit — you can't maintain security if you start sending computer data over phone lines."

"Well, the military might call it security," AJ countered, "but ordinary citizens would call it paranoia." Whoops, careful, he thought. A kid my age doesn't know words like paranoia.

But in his excitement over an issue he felt so strongly about, he was unable to drop his vocabulary to the level of an eight year old. He saw Norma watching him intently with a slight frown, but Lucas didn't seem to notice as he continued: "It seems to me that one of the things our society values most highly is free enterprise, freedom of information, and open communication. It just won't occur to the Government to treat computers as if they were military weapons, like atomic bombs."

"Is that a fact?" asked Lucas sarcastically. "Well, maybe the reason the government doesn't have to worry about it is that computers are so damned expensive. And to get any really useful computer calculations done, you need even bigger computers — which costs even more money, which only the government can afford. And they're going to keep their computers under lock and key, because they do regard them as military weapons."

"Well, that makes sense for now," AJ argued, "but what would it be like if computers were a million times cheaper than they were today? Then everyone could have one!"

"A million times cheaper?" Lucas's eyebrows shot up. "Forget it! I could see them becoming, maybe, twice as cheap in the next five or ten years. But they'll still be so expensive that there will only be a couple hundred in the whole world. Only governments will be able to afford them."

"But if they did become a million times cheaper," AJ persisted, "we happen to live in a society where there would be no restrictions placed on anyone having a computer. But take the Russians, on the other hand: their whole system is based on centralized control of information, not just expensive computer hardware. So even if the Russians ever did figure out how to build computers, and even if their computers cost a nickel to build, they wouldn't let their people own them."

"Like I said," Lucas grumbled, rising up from the table to end the discussion, "it's too bad you don't know what you're talking about. I'm up to my eyeballs at work in this computer shit, and I do know what I'm talking about. Millions of tiny computers connected by telephone lines might be good science fiction, but it's not the real world."

"And," he said, waggling a finger at AJ as he disappeared into the living room, leaving Norma to carry the dishes to the sink, "don't count out the Russians. They're not the idiots you seem to think they are."

AJ was baffled by his comments, but also frustrated by his inability to tell Lucas what had really happened to the computer field over the next 30 years. It was safer to drop the subject and return to his world of children and school work. As the Colorado autumn turned into the beginning of an early winter, the weather became cold and nasty. AJ expected that they would have serious snowfalls by December, but in November it was just cold, freezing rain. On a few occasions, the rain was accompanied by heavy thunder and lightning, and AJ could see that Norma was worried. Her absent-minded son had managed to get hit twice, so far, in less than a year; she was apparently worried that he might wander into another lightning bolt. And indeed he did plan to — someday. But not yet, he told himself one morning, as he watched the thunderstorms outside the classroom window. It's not time. I still have some important information to track down, and I have plenty of time.

At the end of 1951, Norma and Lucas proudly announced to him at dinner one evening that they had decided to settle in Denver for good. The house on Kenton Street was a rental; they had decided to buy a new house, one still under construction, on the south side of town. For the first time, they were moving only to the other side of town instead of the other side of the country; Lucas managed to accomplish most of it himself with a rented trailer over the Christmas holidays. By the beginning of 1952, they were ensconced in their new house on South Glencoe Street and he was enrolled in the Ash Grove Elementary school a mile away, on South Holly Street, under the watchful eye of a harmless old woman introduced to him simply as Mrs. Zibnack.

Construction on the Glencoe Street house was just finishing when they moved in; the entire neighborhood was new, and there were no trees or shrubs on the entire block, nor any grass on the quarter-acre lots of frozen tundra surrounding each house. AJ kept reminding himself that the house would look tiny to him if he ever came back to see it in BeforeTime, but for the moment it looked huge: it had a full basement in addition to the standard two-bedroom layout on the ground floor. By contrast, he couldn't help thinking that it must look tiny to Lucas. Their last two houses had been equally tiny, but this one had a view of the Rocky Mountains on the western horizon, and it must have been a constant reminder to Lucas of his own childhood, in the vast empty spaces of the Utah deserts. He's like a fish out of water, no matter where we go, AJ thought.

Winter was especially fierce that year, and 1952 began with nearly a foot of snow on the ground. AJ had forgotten the incredible cold of Denver winters; BeforeTime winters in New York were comparatively mild, and he had become spoiled. He was also unprepared for the difficulty of traversing deep snow in a four-foot body clothed with heavy clothes and galoshes. Now he saw why kids were so exhausted after playing in snow drifts for a couple of hours: they had no ski parkas, no light-weight down filler, no waterproof gloves, no Velcro closures for their thick boots.

His third grade education at the Ash Grove school continued in the dead of winter. The school itself was an unimposing one-story edifice, surrounded by the usual playground, swings and slides; but the school faced west, and from the front door, there was a magnificent view of the Rocky Mountains. The children in this school were sometimes fidgety, with a high energy level, but he wrote that off to "cabin fever" imposed by the teachers' decision to keep them indoors at lunch time during the winter. Much of the winter, though, he found them quieter and calmer than the Texas yahoos; it was not uncommon to walk into the cafeteria at lunch time and find the children staring calmly out the windows or talking to one another in whispers. While the Texans tended to congregate in groups of five or six, the Colorado children were more likely to socialize in pairs, or stick to themselves. One girl, a blond-haired loner AJ had dubbed the Staring Girl, sat quietly in a corner of the lunchroom and surveyed the scene each day as if she was a prison guard; he caught her staring at him from time to time, her fingers absently fondling the ornaments on a small necklace, and her eyes bore into his, searching to see what crime he had committed.

Shortly after his arrival in the Ash Grove school, the star drawings reappeared; if he hadn't known any better, he would have thought it was something he was doing in his sleep, a subconscious expression of happiness with his life. The first drawing, whose rainbow montage was a stark contrast with the dark, wintry weather outside, displayed a pattern that seemed vaguely familiar:

 

 

He checked the similarity at home after school: it was the same pattern as the very first drawing that appeared in Glen Oaks, nearly three years earlier. Laying the two drawings side by side confirmed that they contained the same number of stars, with the same patterns; but they appeared to have been drawn by different hands. The first one was drawn entirely in crayon, and the corners and curly-cues of the stars were crude and sloppy. The drawing he found on his desk in Denver was carefully traced with a sharp, fine-point pencil; the patterns within the boundaries of the stars had been carefully filled in with an equally sharp-tipped crayon, manipulated by a more careful hand.

Whatever the origin, it was like welcoming an old friend. Over the next several weeks, the drawings continued to appear on his school desk; no matter how early he arrived in the morning, the stars were there before him. Most of the drawings were quite simple and compact. But they were all different; here, for example, was the second drawing he received:

 

 

Winter seemed interminable, but after a surprise blizzard in March, the ground began to thaw. The playground was a vast sea of mud surrounding the school, but the teachers reluctantly allowed them to play outside; with a burst of energy, all of the children exploded into action — running, wrestling, jumping, chasing one another around the periphery of the school yard. At home, AJ had gotten to know a few of the neighbor children, and now he began exploring the area on his bike. There was a large pond, surrounded by trees, down past the end of their street and across Nebraska Way, in a spot where Cherry Creek broadened out; a neighbor kid named Sully told him that he had caught several fish there last summer, which perked AJ's interest.

School finally came to an end and summer returned; he found that he had his aprés-polio health and his freedom, and an enormous amount of time. Unlike the highly orchestrated lives his own children led in BeforeTime, as well as his own life at ages six and seven, there were hardly any constraints on his movements now: Norma, who seemed fully occupied with the daily chores of cooking, cleaning, and shopping, simply told him to be home by dinnertime, and assumed that he wouldn't get into too much trouble. With his bike, he explored the surrounding area, rediscovering childhood haunts, he had forgotten in his BeforeTime adulthood. And he rediscovered childhood pleasures like using the lid from a coffee can as a flying saucer, and watching it sail out across the back yard.

He also rediscovered the delight of shooting pebbles in a slingshot. Perhaps because he had had one as a boy, even Lucas seemed to think that slingshots were acceptable, and he carefully carved the wooden block and attached strips of rubber from an old inner tube to form AJ's first weapon. There were few animals in the immediate area that he could hunt, not without arousing the wrath of the neighbors. But down the road, about a mile away from the house, was the pond that Sully told him about. It was surrounded by cottonwood trees, and it was a favorite with all the kids, for it provided an ample stock of birds, frogs, and butterflies at which to sling a pebble or two with his trusty wooden weapon. He never had managed to hit one of the damn things in BeforeTime; he was annoyed to learn that he was no better a shot this time around.

A month before summer ended, on a quiet Friday afternoon, he decided to see if he could make a "do-over" work out to his advantage. The test he chose involved a specific cotto