What the hell is going on? AJ wondered, as they pulled away from the outskirts of Denver, along Santa Fe Avenue and onto Highway 85 toward Roswell. Norma and Lucas were grimly silent in the front seat of the Chevy: no fights, but no discussion either. AJ occupied his standard seat, though there was less room than normal because of some additional suitcases beside him. The silence was a blessing, for it gave him a chance to review the clues he had been gathering in order to make some sense of the hurried flight.

Whatever happened, he thought, must have been completely unexpected. Normally, it took his parents a month to orchestrate a move from one city to another, but this time it took less than a week. Was this all caused by a woman yelling "BJ" at Norma? Could this be Mom's nickname from sometime in the past?

Given the Communist hysteria of the times, it was difficult for AJ to avoid the thought that Lucas and Norma might be a husband-and-wife spy team, perhaps even colleagues of the infamous Rosenbergs. Maybe they belonged to the Party during the war, he thought, and they've been secretly running from the FBI ever since. Or maybe it's the KGB after them — maybe they betrayed the Party, or tried to quit after they found out what Stalin was doing with his Siberian labor camps.

Bank robbers? Con artists? White collar criminals? Child pornographers? The possibilities marched through his mind, one by one, and were discarded as highly unlikely. None of his theories were conclusively impossible, so he scraped them out of the mental dustbin, and put them in another category of "unlikely, but reserved for future consideration." After all, he thought, I don't really know whether Lucas is married to Mom, or even who employs him. He had simply accepted Lucas's statement that he worked for a defense contractor, and spent his days as a liaison at the local Air Force base. But AJ had never been to his office, and had no way of verifying what he said.

The drive south had begun at noon, as soon as the moving men finished up with their packing. As they drove out of the city, navigating through the suburb of Littleton and out into the countryside south of Denver, the snow-covered Rockies were clearly visible all along the western horizon. The weather these past few days had been unusually mild, with Chinook winds bringing rain and thunderstorms to melt away most of the snow that accumulated during the winter — and today's weather was gray and ominous, with boiling dark thunder clouds stacked up against the mountains for a distance of twenty miles. The weather was clear on the southern horizon, but a few miles away there were lightning bolts arcing into the foothills at the southern edge of the cloud mass. And the storm clouds had dropped thick shrouds of rain all the way to the ground some ten miles away. A sure sign, AJ thought, that our path is gonna lead straight into a spring squall.

As they approached Castle Rock, the lightning was far enough in the distance that there was hardly any point paying attention to it; if there was thunder associated with the lightning, it was too far away for them to hear. But then a long, thick bolt flashed up in front them, perhaps five miles away, flickering on and off for several seconds before disappearing. The center of the storm had moved off to the west, closer to the mountains — but an enormous, heavy rain cloud was dead ahead of them.

Castle Rock was only fifteen miles south of Littleton, but it was a different world. The landscape was different from the Denver suburbs: they were surrounded on both sides by small buttes with chopped-off tops. A huge rock, a local Rock of Gibraltar, loomed over the town; it was only a few hundred feet high, but it was indeed like a castle guarding the town beneath it.

Enormous lightning bolts were now crashing into the hills every few seconds, onto the highway, and all around them. Norma was terrified, and AJ began to wonder if it was perhaps a signal that he was about to be whisked back to BeforeTime. But Lucas continued driving grimly, determined to bull his way through the storm and reach the clear weather further south. A huge lightning bolt lit up the sky to their south, close enough that the thunder washed over them like a drum roll.

Another, and another and another — they came at intervals now of thirty seconds — and meanwhile the rain had become so heavy that each drop hit in huge splat! sounds against the windshield. A bolt slammed into the ground a hundred feet ahead of them, causing a tube of blue-green flame the color of an old Coca-Cola bottle to dance up from the road, rising ten feet into the air and hovering for long seconds before fading away. Two more bolts hit the ground simultaneously, one on each side of the road — and the rifle-sounding crack! of the thunder made him jump in the back seat of the car.

Lucas was forced to slow down to a crawl, for the water was now an inch deep on the highway, and the rain was mixed with grape-sized pellets of hail, banging on the car roof and windshield. The highway wove in and out of small hills on the south end of Castle Rock, and gradually the rain faded to a mild spattering and the lightning bolts were behind them. They crossed over Monument Hill and all of a sudden, it was gone. If the storm was meant to be some kind of omen, AJ thought, it was very effective. But now there were only fluffy, puffy white clouds ahead of them. Lucas's shoulders relaxed as he settled in for an easier drive, and Norma let out a long sigh.

As they approached Pueblo, some 90 miles south of Denver, a new range of mountains appeared on the western horizon, running further south. It was their first view of the Sangre de Cristo mountains; they were less imposing than the main body of the Rockies, but they were snow covered, and at least one of the peaks was over 14,000 feet high. South of the city, the highway was empty: an occasional car was visible in the distance, but they had the road to themselves. The land was quite open for the first twenty miles, with vistas in every direction over the flat plains; but then they passed through a long area of dense scrub pine along the edge of the San Isabel National Forest. Back out in the open again, the land became rocky; it was the beginning of the badlands, though they occasionally passed herds of cattle grazing peacefully in small meadows.

Just past the town of Wootton, as they began climbing up Raton Pass, Lucas came around a sharp turn and slammed on his brakes to avoid crashing into an Old El Paso truck filled with Mexican food. It sat at a drunken angle with a broken axle, blocking the entire lane; the driver had abandoned the truck, and AJ snorted at the thought of ranch hands throughout the territory scrambling to hijack the taco chips and enchiladas before the owners could return.

South of Raton, the road was absolutely straight for long stretches of ten miles at a time, but patched and cracked like much of the Colorado highway. The road was so straight that they could see cars approaching them from the other direction miles before they reached them, and miles after they had passed them. Looking out the rear window, AJ could see one car maintaining a steady pace, some three miles behind them. It was so far away that he could barely make it out, but he had the impression that it was a green De Soto; though his BeforeTime and NowTime memories were jumbled together, he had a flashback of the drive from New York to Texas where another green De Soto cruised along behind them for miles. It must be a popular model of car, he thought.

South of the Canadian River, they passed Maxwell and Springer, and then a sign announcing the entrance to the Foxfire Ranch. A windmill twirled gently in the breeze, its three blades painting a patriotic red, white, and blue and its weather vane spangled with stars. Norma pointed out a group of six antelope deer near the windmill; further away, cattle grazed on the horizon, so distant they were mere ant-size dots. They passed a man whose pickup truck had broken down: the hood was propped open, and the man was strolling nonchalantly back toward town. He didn't even look up, and didn't make an effort to hitch hike. He doesn't have a care in the world, AJ thought enviously, as the man receded into the distance.

Shortly after five o'clock, they pulled into the town of Las Vegas. Norma read a note from the map, which pointed out that this was not the gambling Mecca in Nevada, but a Spanish settlement on the eastern slopes of the Sangre de Cristo mountains whose official title when founded in 1835 was Las Vegas Grandes de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores. "I don't give a damn what it is," Lucas growled. "This is where we're stopping for the night."

The next morning, Lucas expected to hit Roswell, in the southeastern corner of the state, by mid-afternoon. They headed down Grand Avenue, past Pancho's Cafe, and onto Route 84 out of Las Vegas — another patched, bumpy, two-lane road that headed south for Santa Rosa. There was scrub brush everywhere, with rocks and uplifted mesas in the distance. There was no civilization at all on the 60 mile stretch from Las Vegas to Santa Rosa: no stores, no gas stations, no homes, no cars, no people — just bleak, empty desert. And it was absolutely silent in the car: AJ couldn't tell whether Norma and Lucas had consciously decided not to speak to each other, or whether they were just lost in their own thoughts. But with the radio off, the only sounds were the tires humming on the road and the wind rushing past the car. It's like traveling through outer space, he thought.

 

 

At Santa Rosa, they passed by Angie's Cafe, and then turned south on Route 54 toward Vaughn. The road was as empty as the day before; it was rare when even a single car passed them in the other direction. But ten miles north of Vaughn, they came upon a pickup truck sailing along ahead of them while straddling the center line. Even going uphill in a no-passing area, the driver resolutely squatted on the very center of the highway, blissfully unaware of their car behind him or the possibility that instant death could come hurtling over the ridge from the other direction.

It took two miles before Lucas could find an area to safely pass the truck, and they all looked curiously at the Indian hunched over and peering intently ahead with a death-grip on the wheel. "Drunk as a skunk," Lucas muttered as they zoomed on ahead, back out onto another infinite plain that stretched to the horizon on their south, east, and west. There was one abandoned adobe house and a windmill to their east, but aside from that, the landscape was empty. The drunken Indian was forgotten, but moments later, a convoy suddenly rushed by them in the opposite direction: four bright yellow trucks with the same Old El Paso logo that they had seen yesterday on the Raton Pass. Norma joked that they were heading north to rescue their friend, and Lucas remarked that they might be bushwhacked by the Indian they just passed.

Twenty miles before Roswell, the scenery began to change to cultivated land. They passed a ranch with hundreds of sheep grazing on lush grass; and then farms of alfalfa, hay, and grass, with farm laborers hunched over hoes in the fields. Crossing over the Salt Creek and onto Main Street in Roswell at half-past noon, they passed the offices of the Roswell Daily Record and the New Mexico Military Institute ("educating America's Future Leaders," AJ read on the huge sign adorning the campus lawn). All that remained now was to find a motel; after an argument about the economics of staying in the luxurious Roswell Inn, Norma and Lucas compromised on the Frontier Motel.

Norma's map described Roswell as a quintessential Small-Town America, a cluster of 26,000 people, surrounded on all sides by a dry, flat plain. It had originally been a watering hole for the Pecos Valley cattle drives of the 1870s; but though there were a number of small farms and cattle ranches in the area, its primary reason for existence in the 1950s was the nearby Air Force base. The base was initially established as the Roswell Army Flying School in 1941, and it then went through several transformations before finally acquiring its current identity as Walker Air Force Base. No one in town seemed to know exactly what went on at the base, but one stray word gave AJ a clue, when he happened to overhear Lucas's phone call to his office after they checked into the Frontier Motel. The word was "sage," and though AJ no longer remembered what the acronym meant, he did remember that SAGE was the first of the computerized Air Defense systems that would eventually be linked up with the Minuteman and the Atlas intercontinental missiles. And he remembered that in the BeforeTime 80s, SAGE had been the source of apocryphal computer stories: the radar software had once detected the moon as an incoming missile and had automatically ordered the fighters to scramble. Walker must be a support base for the SAGE guys, he mused, but I can't imagine what they're doing down here in the desert.

After a two-week scouting expedition, Lucas found their new house on South Pennsylvania Avenue. Enormous elm trees lined the block, though a wistful BeforeTime memory reminded AJ that they would eventually disappear, victims of Dutch elm disease and Japanese beetles. The house, too, was typical small-town America: a tiny front yard with big pine trees on both sides, and a back yard the same size as the one in Aurora. Odd, AJ thought. I don't remember the house at all from BeforeTime.

In mid-June, some two months after their arrival in Roswell, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were finally executed in the electric chair in Ossining. The trial had begun in March, 1951, during AJ's NowTime1 visit, and he had completely forgotten about it. But now, two years later, their appeals to the Federal Circuit Court and U.S. Supreme Court had been exhausted, and Eisenhower had refused two appeals for executive clemency. Lucas had pored over an article in the Roswell Daily Record, and reported at dinner that Ike had defended his actions with the words, "I can only say that, by immeasurably increasing the chance of an atomic war, the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world." But Lucas pointed out that the Rosenbergs were the first civilians to be put to death under the General Espionage Act of 1917. I wonder whether such a law will still be in place when my children were born, AJ wondered. Probably so.

A scarier bit of news was the survey showing that 78 percent of the population believed it was important to report to the FBI relatives or acquaintances suspected of being Communists. Lucas had already had four martinis, by AJ's count, when the news report came over the radio after dinner one evening; his words were beginning to slur as he announced that, in his opinion, the FBI might as well put everyone in the chair next to the Rosenbergs, since no one really knew who was a Communist and who was not.

Lucas was now making some occasional business trips, though Norma never told AJ where he was going; kids weren't supposed to care about such things. But the stretches of two or three days alone with Norma gave him an opportunity to try quizzing her. Asking Lucas about his life before 1947 had gotten him nowhere, and it seemed that Norma held the key to this mystery anyway.

But he knew that approaching her head-on wouldn't get him anywhere. So at dinner one evening, when just the two of them were sitting at the table munching on a meal of corned beef hash and canned corn, he asked her, "What did you do in the war, Mom?"

Norma's eyes grew dreamy, and she replied, "Well, I was in college at the beginning of the war — but then I dropped out, because there didn't seem to be much point to it."

"So what did you do then?" AJ asked, as casually as he could.

"Well, I got a job in the government — in Washington — working on the war effort," she answered in a vague way. She wore shorts and a halter top in the Roswell heat, and looked slightly ridiculous in the apron draped over her skimpy clothes.

"What part of the government? Was it with Wild Bill Donovan's spies?"

"Oh, I hardly remember any more," she smiled as she got up from the table to carry the dishes to the sink. "It was a branch of the Army — I can't even remember the name. It was pretty boring stuff: purchasing and requisitions. You know: ordering supplies and ammunition, things like that. I was just doing a lot of the paperwork."

"And did you do that right up until you met Dad in 1947?"

"Well, no," she hesitated, "not for that long. It would have driven me crazy, being stuck in an office like that. So I quit after a while."

"Well, were you still doing paperwork stuff when I was born?"

She turned, dried her hands on the dishtowel, and frowned at him. "No, AJ, I wasn't. Now would you please stop asking all these questions, and go do your homework?"

Dead end, he thought. Well, it would have been a little too easy if she had just opened up and spilled the beans. With a sigh, he hopped down from the table and went off to the tiny desk in his bedroom. Her last sentence had been spoken with a sharp edge, and though he knew she meant no harm, it startled him. Parents often snap at their kids, he thought. I suppose I did it far too often as a parent, too. He knew that he shouldn't let it bother him, but he couldn't help feeling his mood turn glum as he shuffled down the silent hallway from the kitchen, past the living room, through their bedroom, and into his own empty nest.

As an only child, he had grown accustomed to studying in complete quiet; even when Norma and Lucas were both home, they usually spent their evenings in the living room. Unlike his BeforeTime apartment in Manhattan, which had televisions and stereo systems blaring at all times, surrounded by city noises of ambulances, police sirens, and garbage trucks, things were as silent as a tomb here. Sometimes he heard the radio in the kitchen, but it was always playing softly. No wonder I could never manage to work in an office with all that noise, he suddenly realized. How strange and subtle are the childhood influences that govern our behavior in later life.

School ended in late June with a ceremony AJ had come to expect: turning in his textbooks, with a close scrutiny by the teachers to ensure he had not marked, folded, spindled, or otherwise mutilated the treasured tomes. They turned each page carefully, looking for pencil markings or creased pages; finally satisfied, they wrote a notation in his ledger and allowed AJ to write his name on a list pasted inside the book's front cover. He had never understood why future generations of fourth graders would need to know the lineage of previous users of the book, but that was the tradition. Having gone through it again, he now understood why he reacted so viscerally in BeforeTime when he saw his own children using yellow Highliters to underline sections of text in their books, or — blasphemy! — actually tearing pages out of the book to do their homework.

With the precious textbooks safely returned, they were turned loose. Running out the front door, he had a fleeting thought: I never got any star drawings in this school. But his attention was elsewhere: he was looking forward to a long, lazy summer. He had already discovered that the best part of the Roswell neighborhood was the sand lot two blocks away from the house. Empty plots of land were the quintessential experience of suburban children in the 50s —and when all the empty lots disappear, as surely they would someday, AJ thought, succeeding generations of children will be irrevocably different.

The Roswell lot was two blocks long and two blocks wide, bounded by quiet residential streets on two sides, homes on a third side, and the rear entrances of the Main Street stores on a fourth. Inside the four-square-block interior was nothing but tumbleweeds, cactus, sand, and packed dirt. AJ knew that an adult would wrinkle his nose and walk away: it was not fit for a picnic and there was too much brush and uneven ground to use it for baseball or football. But to his neighborhood friends, it was a vast, unexplored country: their own version of the virgin American West. The tumbleweed bushes, which the adults dismissed as a nuisance, reached their waists and made sturdy barriers for imaginary gunfights or endless games of hide-and-seek. There were secret trails criss-crossing the area, carefully marked paths to treasures of marbles and caches of candy that were painstakingly recorded on treasure maps. Dozens of children could lose themselves in this uncharted land for weeks, from sunrise to sundown, without ever once being bored.

The sandlot was important to AJ for another reason: he was curious to see how he would react to yet another "do-over." The backside of the empty lot — the side farthest away from the streets that normally served as their main entrance and exit — faced the rear entrance of several stores; among these was a beer and soda distributor. The kids usually confined their play to the front side and middle of the lot, but one day his next-door neighbor, Steven, reported back from a scouting expedition, as AJ knew he would, that there was an unbelievable treasure at the far end: stacks of wooden crates, filled with soda bottles. Not empty bottles, mind you, but full bottles. And not just one or two crates, but row after row of crates, stacked up to the shoulder height of an adult.

A dozen dusty, sweaty boys gathered around Steven as he described the bonanza. He reported that the crates were not guarded by dogs or watched by adults; there were no fences, no locks, no alarms or traps. With that, the pack took off like a shot, scurrying across the lot, following their secret trails in and out of the maze of tumbleweed bushes until they arrived at the promised land of More Soda Than You Could Ever Imagine.

The group stopped for a moment to discuss its options, plan its strategy, and gather its breath. Augie proposed that they should smash all the bottles with rocks. "But will they catch us?" whispered Steven. Ray, who was a little younger and had never seen so much soda in his life, was aghast. "Smash it?" he cried furiously, from beneath his red baseball cap. "Are you wonkers? Let's drink it all!" And Steven, who obviously feared the consequences, whispered again, "But will they catch us?"

In BeforeTime, AJ had been the ringleader: they had agreed to drink as much as their bellies could hold, and then smash everything else. This time around, he still found a wicked pleasure in lifting the bottles out from under the very noses of the enemy world of adults, and double pleasure in knocking the caps off on a large rock and swilling down fizzy lemon soda that had been heated by the sun almost to a boil. But he had no heart for breaking the remaining bottles; he wandered away and listened to the smash of rocks on glass from a distance. I guess I still have one toe in the grownup world, he thought.

To celebrate the Fourth of July, Lucas emerged from his basement workshop one Sunday morning with a surprise gift for AJ: a pair of stilts. He means well, AJ thought, as he looked over the home-made contraption, at least sometimes. The stilts were simple: a pair of four-foot-long pieces of lumber, with a wooden block nailed to the side of each piece, three feet from one end, to serve as a footrest. Next to the footrest, and also closer to the top of each piece, lengths of rope were nailed to the main stilt; AJ tied them tightly around his legs in order to keep the stilts attached, with a strip of old carpet as a cushion to keep the rope from cutting into the flesh.

He had forgotten about the stilts from BeforeTime, and he chuckled when he saw them again. Lucas took him outside and sat him on the hood of the Chevy to get his legs high enough above the ground to fasten the stilts. He tied the ropes firmly, lifted himself up, and he was off. The ground seemed a long way off, but the perspective from his new six-foot height was eerie: it was just like it was in BeforeTime, when his adult eyeballs peered at the world from the same height. It was a strange feeling, and it was compounded by the awkwardness of manipulating the new stilt-legs; but he fell only twice before getting his balance and successfully circumnavigating the entire house. What a blast! he thought joyfully. I haven't done this since I was a kid.

In the middle of summer, Lucas announced the newspaper headlines at the breakfast table: the Korean War had finally come to an end. In Panmunjon, on July 27th, General William K. Harrison of the United States, and General Nam Il of North Korea led a group of senior Communist and UN delegates to assemble for the signing of nine copies of the armistice agreement. The U.S. military estimated that the conflict had cost 52,000 American lives and 102,000 wounded; AJ was staggered by the futility of it all, knowing how little it would mean to his children and their generation. The futility was all the more staggering if Lucas's assessment was correct: the war probably could had been avoided entirely, and almost certainly could had been ended, with exactly the same territorial results, two years earlier. Norma, who had continued to avoid political arguments with Lucas, breathed a sigh of relief; she murmured that she was simply glad that it was over, regardless of what politicians and historians might say about it.

Later in the summer, AJ decided to renew the quest for his past. Since he had struck out while attempting to find information about his past in the relevant wedding licenses, birth certificates, and other important papers, it occurred to him that perhaps he could pick up some clues by snooping on the letters that Norma and Lucas received from their friends and relatives across the country. When he first saw a letter Norma had received from a neighbor in the old Glen Oaks apartment building, he was amazed by its length. None of my friends in BeforeTime, he thought, would write a 4-page letter by hand. But then he realized that it was just as improbable in 1953 for someone to pick up the telephone and follow AT&T's invitation to "reach out and touch someone." Despite what their science teacher had told them last year, nobody in Roswell could direct-dial anyone outside the city limits; and it would cost a fortune to spend 15 minutes on the phone with someone as far away as New York. By contrast, a postage stamp was just 3 cents, and letters seem to get delivered anywhere in the country within a couple of days. Even more amazing, he thought, people actually respect the Post Office!

But the letters proved to be a barren source of information. Lots of gossip, local news about the weather in various parts of the country, news about births and deaths, birthday parties and family events — but nobody said anything relevant to his past, or Lucas's real identity. The letters Lucas received from his family in Utah were so illiterate they were almost incoherent; but they conveyed the basic news of life in a rural area of the West that still seemed twenty years behind the 1950s. I suppose I shouldn't expect to see any juicy tidbits from their casual friends, AJ sighed. But I wish the letters from Mom's mother weren't so stilted and formal.

However, the search through the family desk turned up one interesting discovery: a key to the family safe deposit box. So on a quiet Tuesday morning, when Lucas was away on another business trip and Norma was shopping and doing errands, he snuck off with the key and headed for the bank in town. He realized that if this had happened in Manhattan, he might well have given up: the key didn't identify the bank, and there were hundreds of them in a big city. But Roswell had only one; he had passed it many times on his journeys down Main Street, past the Ginsberg Music Company, Wing's Coffee Shop, and Mack's Camera Center.

Marching into the bank, he saw that the safe deposit boxes were downstairs, in the basement. A kindly old man, who must have been in his eighties, watched him approach his desk, and smiled beatifically. "Yes, son, what can we do for you this morning?"

"Well, sir," AJ said respectfully, "I need to get into my safe deposit box."

"Your box?" the man asked with a smile. "You're kind of young to have a safe deposit box, aren't you, young man?"

"Well, it's the family safe deposit box, actually," AJ admitted, "and I don't need to take anything away. I just need to look at a couple of papers and write some things down."

"Well, let's see about that," said the man, pulling out an ancient, battered card file. The key had a number on it, and he matched that against the name, Halifax. But then he stopped and frowned: "What did you say your name was?"

"I didn't say. But it's Halifax — Jonathan Halifax."

"Well, then, young Jonathan, we've got a problem. Your Mom and Dad have their names listed on the card, but I don't see your name. You're not authorized to open this box."

"Well, I don't know about that," AJ replied, hoping he could bluff his way past the man. "All I know is that Mom asked me to look at my birth certificate and write down the number. They need it at school for something."

"Well," said the man, in a patronizing tone, "I'm afraid you'll have to tell your Mom to come in herself. I'd like to help you, sonny, but rules are rules. And your name isn't on the card."

Damn! AJ thought. The man was intensely polite, but it was obvious that he was not going to budge. There was no point pushing things any farther, so AJ thanked him and left, walking back upstairs to the main entrance. Maybe I could learn to forge Dad's signature, he thought. I wonder if that old geezer would remember me if I showed up with another name?

He was still concentrating on the possibility of forgery as he walked out the door, and was completely unprepared for the surprise that awaited him at the curb: a green De Soto, covered with dust, was backing into a parking space in front of the bank. AJ retreated quickly back into the bank and peered through the glass door as two couples emerged from the front and back seat of the car. They huddled together for a moment, and then turned and walked north, away from the bank.

Fascinated, AJ peeked out the door and then scurried along behind them. They didn't see me, he thought, as he watched them strolling along the sidewalk. Who the hell are they? One of the couples appeared to be in their twenties or thirties, dressed casually. The other pair, an older man and woman with white hair and a slower gait, were dressed conservatively in a style that seemed entirely out of place in a small western town like Roswell. They turned into Wing's Coffee Shop, and AJ watched carefully through the window as they found a booth near the rear.

They don't know who I am, he thought, but there's no reason to let them see me. He crept into the coffee shop and slithered up onto a seat at the soda counter that allowed him to sit reasonably close to their booth, but with his back to them. As a result, he was able to hear most of their conversation, as they ordered coffee from the waitress, but he couldn't see them as they talked. In a whisper, he ordered a coke from the waitress behind the counter; the woman smiled and moved off, shaking her head.

" ... don't see why we should wait any longer," AJ heard the old man say quietly, with an intensity that made him shiver. "We'll just grab him, that's all. Get the hell out of this miserable place."

The younger man's voice interrupted. "No, you can't. Lucas is dangerous, far too dangerous ... "

Lucas? AJ thought. Jesus Christ! Who are these people — FBI agents coming to arrest him?

" ... You have no idea what that weasel is up to," the younger man continued. "If he discovers you, you're a goner."

Suddenly, the younger woman's voice broke in, anger palpable in her voice. "If I ever get my hands on Norma, I'll kill her," she hissed. "How did she ever let Jonathan get near that bastard?"

The shock was more than AJ could handle. He quickly slid a nickel across the counter to pay for his coke, slid down from the stool, and walked quickly toward the door. There were no shouts, no sounds of people running after him; the two couples remained locked in their deadly conversation. AJ turned at the door and for a last, quick peek just as the older man glanced up; a look of recognition came over his face as he saw AJ scuttle out the door. And there was a moment of recognition for AJ, too: the man had a bushy white beard, with a handlebar mustache that drooped down to his chin.

It's the same guy who stopped me in that restaurant men's room back in BeforeTime1, AJ realized, as he ran down the street to retrieve his bicycle. Why didn't they arrest Lucas back then?

But the most ominous part of the overheard conversation was the threat from the younger woman. Why is she after Mom? he wondered nervously, as he pedaled quickly away from Main Street. Maybe they're KGB assassins — Jesus, why didn't I see any of this stuff the first time I was a kid?

It was a sobering thought. Did all this stuff really happen to me the last time around? Or did I just repress it all? He nodded to himself as he turned the bike into the driveway of his house; it would explain why, in Beforetime, he hardly remembered any of his childhood. I should start a diary, he thought, and write all this stuff down. That way, maybe I can figure it out when I get back to a grown-up status again.

That is, if I get back to a grown-up status, he thought, shaking his head. If these guys come in with the guns blazing, we might all get killed. But that didn't make sense either, he realized. I may not know what really happened in BeforeTime, he thought, but I do know that Mom and Lucas survived somehow — they were still alive when I got hit by lightning, and nobody had thrown them into jail.

Shaken, he walked into the house to restore the safe deposit key before Norma returned. But another idea suddenly popped into his head, an idea suggested by the letters stacked on his parent's desk. Why not simply write to the hospital where I was born and ask for a copy of my birth certificate? he thought, while staring at the bright new Underwood typewriter on the desk. Taking a piece of paper from the top drawer, he began typing clumsily. This is a pain in the ass, he thought. No word processor, no correct-Type, no nothing! It had been years since he had used an electric typewriter, and decades since he pushed the clumsy keys on this manual machine. But he couldn't afford any mistakes; he wanted his letter to the Records Department at Eglin AFB Hospital to look like it was produced by a competent adult.

Where the hell is Eglin Air Force Base, anyway? he muttered as he folded the letter into an envelope. How the hell am I going to find the ZIP code? But then he remembered again that zip codes didn't exist yet, and that he could depend on the Post Office to find the base somewhere within the state of Florida.

The letter was simple and to the point, even if it was patently false. The alleged author was his next door neighbor Steven, whom he had transformed into his uncle for the purposes of the letter. Uncle Steven was writing to the hospital, informing them that he had recently taken custody of him after the tragic death of both his parents. The letter asked if it would be too much trouble for the records department to produce a copy of his birth certificate, in order to satisfy the local Roswell authorities and finalize the adoption process. The return address on the letter was, of course, Steven's address. I'll have to warn Steven that it's coming — he'll pee in his pants if he gets an official letter from some Air Force colonel. There were extra stamps in the top drawer; AJ figured Norma wouldn't notice if one was missing, so he banged it onto the envelope and raced down to the corner to stick it into the mailbox.

A week later, on the ninth of September, school started up once again in the tan brick building on Missouri Avenue. AJ was now in fifth grade with essentially the same material that he had seen before; only the teacher was different -- a short, prim woman by the name of Maxine Heath. On the second day of school, a surprise awaited him in the cafeteria: the Staring Girl from Denver was sitting alone in the far corner, silently eating a sandwich while absent-mindedly massaging the ornaments on a small chain looped around her neck.

 

 

At first AJ thought he was mistaken — after all, he thought, I'm in a different state, and this was a new school year. He realized that he must have been staring at her, and that she must have felt it — because she suddenly looked up, directly at him, and stared back. He had such a strong built-in New York habit of not staring at strangers, lest they pull out a gun or call the cops, that he quickly looked down again and studied his sandwich. When he peeked up, she was gone. He couldn't figure out who she was, because she didn't seem to be in any of the fifth grade classes: a few casual questions of his classmates indicated that none of them knew who she was, either. Whenever he saw her in the school yard, she ran before he could get anywhere close to her.

In early October, the star drawings began appearing again. It had been nearly six months since he had seen the last one, so it was a surprise — the rainbow colors nearly jumped off the page as the stars danced in their little patterns:

 

 

But after two weeks of sparkling colors, the stars turned black. Heavily and forcefully drawn, the first one appeared on his desk on one of the few rainy mornings in the early autumn; it accentuated the gloomy mood of the children who were beginning to realize that summer was really over:

 

 

The next day, another one appeared — also black. It filled the page, with stars drawn larger than usual, but also sloppily, as if the artist was in a hurry.

 

 

For reasons that he didn't understand, he was discouraged and depressed by these last two pictures; up until now, the vast majority of the drawings had exuded a childish radiance that bespoke the artist's happiness. Maybe he's become ill, AJ thought, as he examined the drawings at home. Or maybe he thinks I'm about to become ill. Lying in bed at the end of the day, it also occurred to him that the only other black drawings had arrived right at the end of his tenure in each city. Could he be telling me that we're about to leave Roswell? he wondered. But that doesn't make sense: I know from BeforeTime that we won't leave until next March. He stared at the bedroom wall, and traced the line of cracks in the ceiling, trying to make sense of it.

Gradually, the idea faded, and life returned to an endless blur of school days. But then something unexpected occurred: one Friday afternoon in early December, Norma was waiting for him when school let out. From the look on her face, he could tell she was upset, but she wouldn't talk to him. He tried to explain that his bike was parked on the other side of the school building, by the Bland Street entrance, but she just grabbed his arm and marched him to the car. Jesus, what now? he thought.

She had parked the Chevy in one of the diagonal parking spaces in front of the school on West Deming; but to his amazement, he saw that she had taken the spot reserved for the Principal. She must be really upset, he thought. Once in the car, she began driving away from the school, and said in a low, tight voice, "Would you please explain what the hell that letter was all about?"

"What letter?" AJ asked, thoroughly puzzled.

"The letter you told Steven to expect from the hospital at Eglin Air Force Base, that's what letter!" she said angrily.

Arghh! He had forgotten the letter completely, after a reply failed to materialize in the first few weeks. Steven's mother must have intercepted it before he got home from school, AJ thought. Or maybe the nitwit showed it to her despite my instructions. Well, I can't bluff my way out of this one, so I might as well play it straight.

"Well, Mom," he shrugged, "I asked you to show me my birth certificate, and you never would."

"That's bullshit!" she hissed at him.

AJ flinched. She had never cursed at him, and he had never seen her so angry.

"Well, I did ask you a couple of times, and you just kept forgetting. So I thought I would just write to them myself — and spare you the trouble."

"But why Florida? Why did you write to that Air Force base?"

"Well, 'cause that's where I was born, dammit!"

"Don't you curse at me, young man!" She swerved to avoid a pedestrian, then turned down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the house. "I've always told you that you were born in Washington."

He smiled: it was amusing that she would object to his cursing after she had hurled a much stronger epithet at him; the irony washed away the fear that had settled between his shoulders. "Mom, you can tell me whatever you want, but I know that I was born at some stupid Air Force base in Florida. I just want to know the truth, that's all."

She pulled the car into the driveway, slammed the brake with a screech to keep from hitting the garage door, and stormed into the house. He followed behind her, wondering what would come next.

The letter was still on the desk in the living room, and he read it quickly while he heard her stomping around the kitchen. Like his own letter, it was simple and abrupt:

 

 

Norma stormed back in from the kitchen, grabbed the letter from his hands and crumpled it into a ball. She threw it into the wastebasket and waggled her finger at him. "I don't want to ever see you pulling a sneaky trick like that again — do you hear me?"

"Mom — lighten up!" he replied. It occurred to him: she's never heard that phrase. She probably has no idea what I mean.

"It didn't do any harm," he protested again. "If I really wasn't born in Florida, then some slob just wasted five minutes of his time finding out."

"It was sneaky, it was dishonest, and it was uncalled for!" Norma shouted, with a finality that brooked no argument. AJ shrugged, and start walking back to his room when the realization hit him: Shmuck! Of course they don't have any records of Jonathan Halifax. If Lucas isn't my real father, then I was born under a different name! Now what? Write to every court house in Florida to see what Mom's married name was during that period?

It was a demoralizing thought, and he puzzled over it for the entire weekend. The answer is there, somewhere, he thought, while he lay in bed with his face buried in the pillow. I just have to wait for a flash of inspiration to figure out how to find it. It reminded him of his earlier idea to start a diary. Maybe if I write it all down, he thought, it will start to make some sense.

The subject didn't come up again — Norma had apparently decided not to mention the incident to Lucas. But over the next two weekends, AJ huddled in his room and filled a school notebook with a summary of the bizarre incidents that had occurred during his visits to Nowtime. He hid it carefully, along with his star drawings. I should write it in some kind of code, he thought, but it seemed like too much trouble.

Meanwhile, the rest of December passed quietly, and another Christmas arrived. Christmas this year was memorable: he received a .22 rifle. AJ smiled when he opened the package: he remembered describing it to Ann years ago (or years from now, he thought, depending on your perspective). She had been incredulous that anyone in 20th century America would give a 9-year old child a functioning rifle; she was adamantly opposed to giving even the most harmless toy plastic pistol to David or Zack. Indeed, she was so adamant that AJ began to wonder whether he had just invented the story of the rifle to help justify the need for every American boy to own a weapon, even if his children's weapons had to be artificial and non-functioning.

But here it was, this Christmas morning — a real, honest-to-God, working .22 rifle. Lucas had a major-league rifle that he used