We're on the road again, AJ thought happily, as they left Roswell behind. Lucas whistled in harmony with the Glen Miller band on the radio, and Norma smiled at him as they headed west toward Arizona on Highway 380. Elvis hasn't hit the scene yet, and nobody has heard of rock and roll, AJ thought. Still, any music on a sunny morning, with a spring breeze blowing across the southern New Mexico mesas, was guaranteed to raise everyone's spirits.

AJ paid no attention to the music, for he was still obsessed with the bombshell that hit him the day before: She's been sending me coded messages all along! Who she was — now that he had a real name to add to the nickname he heard only once in Denver — was a mystery to him, as was her reason for following him from city to city around the country, and sending him hundreds of little cryptograms. When he realized that her necklace ornaments spelled "BJ" and began to press her for answers, she clammed up and simply shook her head. Moments later, Mr. Powell slammed open his door, threw out the wailing young boy like a dead fish, and called him in to get his papers signed. When he came out of the office, Joanna was gone.

The star drawings were packed in the bowels of a moving truck that had left the previous afternoon. He knew he wouldn't see them again until they arrived in California; there had been no reason to memorize any of the patterns all the years he collected the drawings, so he wouldn't be able to decipher them until they moved into their new home. Only the two-star patterns at the beginning and end of the message stuck in his mind: if BJ at the end of each drawing meant "BJ," he thought, then AJ at the beginning must mean "AJ." So I know three letters of her coded alphabet; hopefully, it won't be too hard to figure out the rest. He sighed, and then decided to stop obsessing, and focus instead on the drive across the southwestern deserts of America.

Their route followed the Rio Hondo river for the first fifty miles, past ticky-tacky shops at the edge of Roswell and then into arid land filled with mesquite and sagebrush. To their south stretched an enormous vista of rolling sagebrush plains, with no trees, no cattle or houses — just a sense that they were headed out into desert. On the north, El Capitan was visible, standing far above the other peaks in the Capitan range. Hawks were visible circling lazily in the sky, swooping down to inspect something near the ground, and then coasting back up into the wind currents again.

Past the town of Capitan, they navigated through hilly valleys, filled with scrub pine trees and fertile green sage grass. They wiggled through the Indian Divide, past Carrizozo Peak, and out of the mountains onto a huge plain known as the Chupadera Mesa, which extended to the northern and western horizon. An hour later, they stopped for a Mexican lunch of green chili and enchiladas at the crossroads of Route 380 and Route 54, and Lucas refilled the gas tank before they headed off again.

Thirty-six miles further into the desert, along a bumpy, two-lane road, they passed through the tiny village of Bingham. The wind, which had been blowing steadily since Carrizozo, was now whipping the sage brush back and forth. In BeforeTime, AJ knew only that this was an area where the government tested V-2 rockets captured from the Germans at the end of the war; now he knew much more. Twenty miles south, in the Stallion Range Center of the White Sands Missile Test Range, was the Trinity Site — where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945. The area around Trinity was utterly desolate, but was also very much alive: there were no people around, but desert life abounded. There must have been a lot of very surprised rabbits and rattlesnakes when the bomb went off, AJ thought. He remembered that the Spanish called this area Jornado del Muerto on their march toward the northern mountains of Santa Fe in the 1500s. Journey of Death, he thought. It fits.

They reached the Rio Grande River just before two o'clock and zoomed through San Antonio a few moments later, turning north toward Socorro. Past Socorro and Magdalena, they entered the Cibolla National Forest, a rich growth of piñon trees that reminded AJ of Colorado. Off to the south and the east were lush meadows — and then, coming out of the trees and over a ridge, they entered an enormous valley, the Plains of San Augustin, with vistas that stretched off for miles in every direction. The plains were the remains of vast inter-mountain lakes that existed thousands of years ago, according to the map Norma carried, and though a close-up view showed that they were covered with nothing but sage grass, the panorama from the top of the ridge was a thick carpet of pale green.

Norma and Lucas chattered happily as they passed through Datil, Pie Town, Omega, Quemado, and Red Hill; they were anticipating sunshine, orange trees, and a more hospitable climate in California. AJ had a sense that they might not have any of the Big Fights on this trip; perhaps they would even enjoy each other's company. Norma pointed out that Pie Town was located right on the Continental Divide; Quemado had a small cemetery and a quaint old Spanish church; but Datil, Omega, and Red Hill had nothing at all to remember them by. And between the towns, there was absolutely nothing: just 50 miles of open country, with tumbleweeds blowing across the road and vast empty areas like the North Plains between Pie Town and Quemado.

The Arizona border was marked only by a small, weather-beaten sign between Red Hill and Springerville; someone had used the sign for target practice, and it had half a dozen bullet holes through it. At Springerville, they took Route 260 into the Apache National Forest, in a U-shaped path that would eventually take them to Carrizo. The forest was filled with white birch and pine trees, many with pebbly trunks ten feet in diameter and stretching two hundred feet into the air. A few miles further up into the mountains, they were surrounded by alpine meadows, with sheep grazing in lush grass beneath snow-covered peaks. It was the beginning of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, and they drove along a gently curving road past a small mountain lake, through McNary and into a tiny town with the odd name of Hon Dah. Could that be where the Japanese got the name for their car? AJ wondered as they drove on toward Whiteriver.

The next morning, they were on the road at 8:30. Past Globe, the terrain was rugged once again, with winding roads and no passing lanes. They crossed Bloody Tanks Wash and Pinto Creek, and then found themselves in real desert, with the first saguaro cactus plants that AJ had seen; all of them were ten feet tall, with arms sticking up above the rocky terrain. They drove through Devil's Canyon in the Mescal Mountains, filled with grotesque rock formations and devilish statues, and then through the Queen's Creek Tunnel and over an enormous bridge across Queen's Creek before reaching the town of Superior.

Half an hour after leaving Globe, they passed through Gonzales Pass, and then down a steep grade and out onto a flat plain. This was classic desert, with huge cactus plants, sand, and very little vegetation. There was also very little traffic, and Lucas managed to get the Chevy-Jeep combo up to 70 mph while zooming through Apache Junction, Mesa, and Chandler as Route 60 bent northwest to bring them to the western edge of Phoenix.

The city was much smaller than AJ remembered from BeforeTime, but it was already approaching Denver in size — retirees were flocking to the dry sunshine, bringing their civilization with them. Thirty years from now, he thought, pollution will blow all the way from California, and moisture from the swimming pools will raise the humidity to a level approaching Florida's. For now, it was pristine; still, Lucas shook his head and scowled at the sprawl of the city. He insisted on driving straight through until they reached the small town of Buckeye before stopping for gas.

They were out in the open now, in typical Arizona desert, with sand and sagebrush all around them, and low mountains on the horizon. Unlike yesterday's mountains, these were completely barren: no trees, no grass, nothing to provide a green cover. And unlike the scenery the day before, there was very little saguaro cactus on this side of Phoenix; only one or two lonely sentinels out in the middle of the desert, standing tall above the sagebrush, as if guarding against attack from aliens in space.

Because of the dearth of towns, most of the highway signs announced the intersections with local roads and dry arroyos. They crossed the Hassayampa River, the Coyote Wash, and Sore Finger Road, which won the prize for most imaginative road-name on the trip. There were a few small one-store towns — Aguila, Wenden, and Quartzsite — but nothing noteworthy until their lunch stop of Blythe appeared at the Colorado River, which marked the boundary between Arizona and California. The river was broad and deep here, and it looked powerful and beautiful to AJ as it wound south for its final hundred miles into the Gulf of California.

In BeforeTime, AJ remembered, there had been an interstate highway that stretched from Phoenix, through Blythe, and all the way to Los Angeles. But this is the 50s, he thought, and the interstates don't exist yet. There was nothing west of Blythe except desert, though the old Highway 60 headed due west toward the Joshua Tree National Monument. Lucas explained at lunch that he had decided to turn south instead on a small two-lane highway, Route 78, for a long 75-mile detour around the Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range to Brawley, some 20 miles north of the Mexican border at Mexicali. From Brawley, they would head back north again, along the western edge of the Salton Sea, which he wanted to see. Why the detour? AJ wondered. Is he trying to keep those FBI guys from following us?

Leaving Blythe, the land was incredibly fertile, with green fields, and rows of palm trees; it seemed the residents were milking the nearby Colorado River for everything it was worth. They headed south on the Ben Hulse Highway, parallel to the river, past enormous long, 500-foot stacks of hay bales. They passed through Palo Verde, with a population of 300, and then all of a sudden — in a flash, it seemed — they were beyond the agricultural area and into real desert badlands, far more desolate than anything AJ had seen all day. They were on a narrow two-lane road, with no shoulders, and the road passed through incredibly steep up-and-down dips reminiscent of roller coaster rides. But then, ten minutes later, they were beyond the dips and passing around the south end of the Chocolate Mountains, with another vista of empty sage brush and badlands stretching to the horizon.

Much of the land they had driven through in New Mexico and Arizona had fences within a hundred feet of the road — presumably to keep cattle in and strangers out. A few fences had rather odd signs — like "Turtles Are Protected: Be Aware" — but this land had no fences. If you decided that you were bored with civilization, AJ thought, you could take a sharp turn off the road and drive through the desert for the rest of your life, without ever being seen again. Occasionally, there were tire tracks suggesting that someone had done just that; but Lucas explained patiently, when Norma asked, that it was more likely that the tracks were made by hunters, campers, or prospectors.

They passed through the Imperial Sand Dunes, a seven-mile stretch that looked like tan snow after a blizzard, with waves and ripples perfectly formed. Ten miles further along, they finally reached Brawley. After the absolute desolation of the land they had just driven through, the lush agriculture of the town was a stark contrast. The irrigation was provided by the Alamo River, which helped explain the palm trees that lined the highway. There were more cultivated fields and stacks of hay bales that looked like giant pieces of Nabisco Shredded Wheat. As they drove along one field of emerald green alfalfa, AJ noticed a tight formation of six dazzling white sea gulls flying at top speed at a height of only three feet above the field; the color contrast was amazing, and the presence of gulls was equally amazing after all their travels through the desert.

But the reason became obvious when Norma showed him the map: they were now only 140 miles from the California coastline. But the gulls didn't even have to fly that far: they were only a few miles south of the Salton Sea. Past Brawley, they crossed the New River, zoomed through Westmorland, and gaped at the highway sign that warned "65 Miles To The Next Town." Moments later, the southern end of the Salton Sea became visible a mile off on the eastern side of the highway. But then the road bent closer to the water, and AJ could see that it was a dark, cobalt-blue; it was picturesque and impressive, but still a let-down his from BeforeTime memories of a vast ocean, larger than the Great Salt Lake, stretching from Mexico to Reno.

Past Coachella, at the north end of the Salton Sea, a long range of hills became visible off to the west, which Norma identified as the Little San Bernardino Mountains; most were barren, but at least one had snow at the top. In the distance, they could see that clouds filled the entire open space of the San Gorgonio pass through which the highway led. AJ could still remember driving the interstate from Phoenix to Los Angeles in BeforeTime, when he came around a bend in the road to see not only the San Gorgonio Pass, but also thousands of windmill turbines, at the bottom of the pass and snaking up the hills and ridges, lined up to catch every breath of the wind that blew off the ocean, through the pass, and on into the desert. The generators were like a vast armada of seagulls all flapping their wings and taking flight simultaneously — not just ten or twenty, but rows upon rows, hundreds upon hundreds, of white three-bladed propellers spinning, whirling and twirling in the sunshine. It was absolutely the most breath-taking sight he had ever seen, and it typified the futuristic image of California. But that was then, he thought, and this is now.

They navigated up a small rise, between the rugged pine-covered hills that towered above them on both sides, and through the beginning of a rainstorm. Lucas joked that he didn't want any more lightning storms like the one that had hit them in Virginia three years earlier, or the one that chased them out of Denver the previous spring. They dropped down the other side of the foothills, where the clouds were banged up against the mountains, as if giants had thrown mounds of ice cream against the peak, and then raced through Beaumont and Moreno Valley, and into their new destination of Riverside. This is it, AJ whispered. California!

They had a chance to familiarize themselves with Riverside for a few weeks, as they settled into the Thunderbird Lodge, while Lucas started his new job and Norma looked at the real estate listings. It usually took them about two weeks to found a house to rent, during which time they camped out in the motel. Last time they did this, AJ remembered, I was able to stay out of school for the whole time. But this time his parents decided that he should enroll in a nearby public school right away in case the house search took longer than usual.

Three weeks later, to the day, the Halifaxes moved into a compact one-story ranch house, in a neighborhood on the eastern edge of town known as Belvedere Heights. It was up in the foot hills, at the very edge of the San Bernardino mountains. AJ was given a bedroom of his own, with an extra door that led directly out to the back yard. And the back yard had a lemon tree and two orange trees, something very exotic compared to the cactus and sage brush of Roswell.

Soon after they settled into their new house, a boy down the street, Tommy Ingraham, knocked on the door to announce that his dog had just delivered a litter of tiny black puppies. Tommy's parents decreed that all but one had to be given away, and he begged AJ to take one.

If this had happened in BeforeTime, AJ thought, it would have caused a minor crisis. What does one do with a dog in Manhattan? Is it house-broken? What does it eat? Who's responsible for taking it out on the street every morning with the super-duper-pooper-scooper? Where are its papers, and what is its lineage? Does it have fleas, ticks, rabies, tapeworms, or contagious fungi? Has it been spayed, de-clawed, and de-loused? How will we keep it out of the kitchen and away from Dad's computer? Is anyone in the family allergic to the beast's hairy fur? Who will take care of it when the family goes away for the weekend? Every time Zack had proposed the idea of a dog, AJ remembered, he was so overwhelmed by these life-and-death questions that he eventually gave up and stopped asking. By contrast, this dog simply arrived home with AJ one afternoon, and was accepted into the family with no fuss at all. When Norma asked its name, AJ shrugged; he had called the mutt "Blackie" in BeforeTime, and while it now seemed an idiotic name, he was unwilling to change it.

Most of AJ's afternoons were spent outdoors, with only a modest effort on homework. But there was another project that occupied a great deal of time during the first weeks after they arrived: decoding the star drawings that had finally been unpacked. The messages were all short, which made the decrypting job more difficult; but AJ had several hundred messages in his collection, which provided a sufficiently large sample of words and letters to work on. From a dimly-remembered computer project, he remembered that the most commonly used letters in the English alphabet were E, T, A, O, N, he, R, S, and H — but he knew that using this information was dangerous: based on the character frequencies, he would have concluded that the star-code J was the letter "N" if he hadn't already discovered that it was a "J". But he also remembered that two-letter diphthongs could be useful: the sequence "TH" was the most common in the English language, while combinations like "QZ" and "VW" were extremely uncommon. And Joanna had shown him the spacing between words, so he could make an educated guess that a one-star character, standing alone, was either the letter "A" (which he already decoded as A from the greeting at the beginning of each message) or the letter "I".

Still, it was slow going. Joanna is a clever girl, he grumbled after decoding half the letters and then discovering that three of them were wrong, but she can't always spell correctly, and she made a few coding mistakes when she encrypted her messages. But the alphabet finally fell into place:

 

 

With this in hand, it was a relatively simple process to translate Joanna's messages. Most were simple and playful — COME PLAY WITH ME — but some were as ominous as the black pencil with which they were drawn, and some were utterly inexplicable.

The inexplicable messages were especially frustrating because Joanna had not appeared in school since his arrival in Riverside — or if she was here, she had managed to remain in hiding. There had been no star drawings on his desk, and thus no way to communicate with her. However, AJ remembered that in Denver and also in Roswell, there had been no messages in the first school he attended upon arrival in the city; the stars always began with the following school year, in what turned out to be his "permanent" school. In any case, there was nothing more he could do at this point — she'll either reappear, he thought after carefully hiding all of her messages away in his bookshelf, or she won't.

But to ensure that he would remember the stars and their meaning, he spent several afternoons after school translating his own diary into Joanna's code. It was slow and laborious, and it took much more space than his original writing; the diary filled three hard-covered school composition books, and he began a fourth one to record his experiences in California. It's a pain in the ass, he thought, but this way, Mom and Dad won't be able to figure out what I'm writing if they ever find this stuff.

School finally came to an end, and he had another summer free to enjoy himself. Much of the summer was spent entirely alone, exploring the mountains that he reached by riding his bike up Two Trees Road and into a grove of cottonwood trees that led into Box Tree Canyon, where a tiny creek disappeared into the side of the hill. The mountains were dry and dusty, without trees or grass, for there was no relief from the dry heat during the summer, not a single day of rain.

 

 

The tallest peak was only 3,000 feet high; the 10,000-foot serious mountains were some ten miles behind them, further east towards Barstow and Redlands. But the "little mountains," as he called them, were his own private playground, and to him they were a lush paradise. The mountains seemed to go on forever, with more and more rows of peaks behind the ones he could see — mountains that extended all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, or at least to the deserts in Nevada.

His favorite pastime was hiking into the mountains, hunting for lizards with his slingshot; Blackie stayed home, for AJ worried that he would not be able to climb up the rocks. Occasionally Tommy or one of the other neighborhood kids came along, but mostly he went alone, up through the scrub brush and sandy rocks. Sometimes he spent just the afternoon, but often he brought along a sandwich and a canteen so he could spend the entire day. Norma didn't care, as long as he was home for dinner; and because of the late summer sunsets, she even allowed him to wander back into the hills after dinner.

Five minutes away from Two Trees Road, he was in a grassy, shallow mini-valley within a larger canyon, completely away from civilization: no other houses were visible. Some of these canyons within a canyon were like small baseball fields; he tried once to convince Tommy that they should bring their bats and balls up here, but Tommy thought he was nuts. But to have a canyon to himself — whether for baseball or just wandering through — was an awesome luxury. In BeforeTime, he remembered, his kids had the top of a school building for their playground, while he had the whole world — it stretched on forever, as far as the eye could see. None of those New York kids have anything like this, he muttered cheerfully, as he moved over the ridge of one canyon, into the next.

The sage brush was up to his chest, sometimes as tall as he was. Though it was thick, he found that he could move through it easily; small white butterflies fluttered up into the sky as he pushed back the branches. What slowed him down was the soft, spongy, loamy soil and the layers of loose grit on top of the sandstone rocks. Occasionally, a rabbit would pop up, scamper down a ravine, up the other side, and then disappear into a rock. And there were millions of prairie dog holes, though he never saw one of the little fellows. The birds, rabbits, and prairie dogs were not even worth hunting; they were too fast, too shy.

There were millions of birds in the mountains — everywhere: chirping, singing, flying, making their nests in the bushes. Huge splotches of bird shit adorned the tops of the larger rocks, with white stains dripping down the sides. But aside from the birds, it was absolutely silent up in the hills except for the sound of his own footsteps; the silence was the antithesis of the Manhattan noise that had surrounded him in BeforeTime. Sometimes, the sound of dogs barking floated up into the hills from the homes below, and he could sometimes hear the moaning whistle of a train, as it moved south from San Bernardino on the Southern Pacific Railroad track, cutting along the edge of the southern-most mountain.

The after-dinner hikes were the best, for they provided an opportunity to watch the sun set from a wide rocky ledge he had discovered, high up on one of the craggy hills that looked out over the neighborhood and the entire valley. Huge boulders at the top of the ridges looked, from below, like pebbles that could be tipped over easily; but up close, he could see they were the size of a garage and weighed 20 tons or more. The wind changed as the heat of the day faded away, and the birds took advantage of the drafts; he watched hawks and crows and an occasional seagull coasting on the updraft, circling high overhead and then swooping down to pounce on victims near the ground.

In BeforeTime, he remembered, I came to this same ledge. It was ten feet long, shaped like a teardrop, with a scooped-out depression in the center. He discovered it when he spotted a lizard sleeping in the sun, and he found that he, too, liked to sun himself on this wide, quiet, hidden place. The wind and rain had gouged out all kinds of strange holes, crevices, nooks, and crannies in the sandstone rocks around the ledge; it was a tiny replica of the fantastic rock sculptures in Arizona and Utah.

As he sat on the ledge, feet dangling over the edge, the sun descended slowly toward the edge of the world. He watched it settle, inch by inch, down into the abyss beyond the horizon. It was calm and peaceful, and except for the distant cry of a bird circling above, perfectly silent. He drifted off for a moment, and when he focused again on the sun, a startling thought occurred to him: I can't tell whether I'm in NowTime or BeforeTime. And it didn't matter: he had become a child again, the child that played happily in the hills once before, and now once again.

Maybe this is what reincarnation is all about, he thought. If I go back, I'll be going back to mortgage payments, tax notices from the IRS, and a million other hassles. All of that seemed much farther away, now that he had been here in NowTime for a little over three years. It can wait for now, he thought.

His reverie lasted long enough for the sun to drop entirely below the horizon. It was still light, but the shadows were lengthening. He would have another hour before the dusk became deep enough to made the path hard to find. It's time for a little end-of-the-day lizard hunting, he thought. Some of the lizards were scouts: they could sit motionless on a rock for long periods, watching him with their head cocked. Then, with no warning, they would twitch and scoot off to safety. He was convinced they could watch him from the back of their heads. Sometimes he tried to outwait them, to see if he could creep closer; sometimes he just shot his slingshot at them as soon as he saw them.

Lucas had no concern about his hiking in the mountains, and didn't even insist that he have a companion with him. By contrast, AJ realized, I would never have allowed Zack or Danny to wander up here alone in BeforeTime, not when they were only ten like me; I would have worried too much about the danger of their falling. But in the NowTime 50s, it was acceptable — he was miles away from anyone, and could lie undiscovered for days at the bottom of a ravine if he fell; but nobody worried.

Lucas's only rule was that he have a pocket-knife with him at all times. The knife had been a birthday two years earlier in Denver, and it made a noticeable bulge in AJ's pocket — no Swiss Army knife, just a simple one-bladed knife that folded into a compact hunk of metal about three inches long. Lucas had one reason for insisting on the knife; and his insistence carried the stern warning, accompanied by threats of broken arms and legs, that he had used only once before, when AJ received his rifle. The pocket-knife might be used for carving wood, or gouging holes in leather, or any other damn-fool thing he wanted to do, Lucas said, but it must be with him at all times in case of a rattlesnake bite. AJ had no idea if there were any rattlesnakes in southern California, but Lucas was convinced they inhabited every square inch of territory west of the Mississippi.

Fortunately, AJ was not required to practice the required response to a snake bite: twisting a tourniquet tightly above the wound, slashing an "X" deep into the flesh at the point of the bite, and sucking the venom out and spitting it on the ground. But Lucas repeated it over and over, and gestured so convincingly with his own knife, that AJ was convinced he would carry out the steps by instinct. "Five minutes!" Lucas roared, with an intense glare. "That's all you have. Five minutes! After that, the poison will make you begin stiffening up, and you'll never walk down out of those mountains alive."

So AJ carried the knife in his front pocket, and the slingshot in his left rear pocket; after years in BeforeTime of periodically patting the left cheek of his rear end to make sure he had lost neither his wallet nor his comb, it was a relief not to have to worry about either. At the age of ten, he thought, who worries about combing his hair? And who has enough money to worry about a wallet?

He also had no watch on these trips into the mountain; at his age, it had not yet occurred to anyone that he should own one. AJ judged the time by the approximate position of the sun in the sky, but Norma never seemed to care whether he was half an hour early or half an hour late. Up in the mountains, there was no sense of time, no sense of urgency. It was an enormous relief after years of living in BeforeTime New York, where minutes and seconds were something that even youngsters had to keep track of, and after working in the computer profession, where time was measured in units of microseconds, nanoseconds, and even picoseconds.

With the warm weather and lazy schedule of summer, he often slept out in the back yard in a sleeping bag; he stayed awake late into the night, watching the sky and looking for shooting stars. When he first climbed into the sleeping bag, he could often hear squeals and giggles from the Ingraham house down the street, where Tommy's sisters skinny-dipped in their pool at night; but by midnight, all the lights in the neighborhood were out and the area was pitch black. The stars spread out in a canopy that stretched from the western horizon to the skyline of the mountains behind them in the east. The stars were visible in all of the western cities they had lived in, of course, but they were even more spectacular here; having spent his adult BeforeTime life in New York where the stars were never visible, it was mind-boggling.

These hours, when he was alone and it was quiet, when he was peacefully fading into sleep, were among the best in California — and quite possibly the best in his childhood life. And yet if you had asked me about it in BeforeTime, I wouldn't even have remembered the experience, he mused dreamily one evening. It's interesting that the things most worth doing over are the small, quiet moments that you don't even remember later on.

During the daytime, AJ found that Lucas was less interested in the local scenery than the ongoing events of the Cold War. On August 24th, Lucas announced at breakfast that Congress had stripped the Communist Party of its rights and had deprived Communist unions of their protection under the National Labor Relations Board; only two of the 346 Congressmen voted against the legislation. This didn't seem like such a big deal to AJ, but he reminded himself that labor unions were much more powerful, much more popular, and much more relevant in NowTime society than they would be thirty years hence. What really outraged Lucas was a detail that even AJ found surprising: the initial legislation was proposed by that paragon of liberalism, Senator Hubert Humphrey. His proposal would have made party membership punishable by a $10,000 fine and ten years in jail.

"Do you realize," Lucas asked Norma, "that the Senate passed Humphrey's bill unanimously, and it failed to become law only because it died in conference when the House voted on it?" Norma opened her mouth to say something, then paused and shook her head.

Just after Labor Day, school started again. AJ was now in 6th grade, in a new school — the Longfellow school on Sixth Street and Eucalyptus. The school was surrounded by row houses and apartment buildings on the adjacent streets, and the playground was on the other side of Seventh Street; it was almost entirely packed dirt instead of the grassy fields of the first Riverside school. Still, the school yard was the place all the children spent their social time, during lunch breaks and recesses.

For sixth grade boys, this meant less running, shouting, and games of tag; everyone was now much more serious about baseball. For the first time, AJ's left-handed status became an advantage: nobody wanted to borrow his baseball glove. Many of the ball games erupted into shouting matches over disputed calls of "Out!" and the shouting matches further degenerated when one of the kids threw his glove and hit an opponent in the face; in a flash, all of the baseball gloves were hurled as projectiles. Smack! Whump! the gloves thudded against bodies, fell into the dust, and became indistinguishable from a dozen others covered with grime. AJ's was the only one that did not fly through the air; it was still new, and he wanted to keep it well-oiled and supple.

On the third day of school, he noticed a familiar face in the school yard, standing at the edge of a pack of girls who observed the glove fights with a collective air of disdain. It took him a moment to remember her name: Joanna. He was momentarily puzzled, and a little surprised; but it was almost beginning to feel normal that she eventually appeared wherever they moved. Maybe, he thought as he ducked from a dusty brown glove hurtling toward his face, her father works at the same defense job as Dad. Maybe they get transferred every year, too.

But there was no chance to ask her: the school bell rang, and the children scattered. He made an attempt to catch up with Joanna, but she had taken off like a shot and disappeared into the school building. There were only three sixth grade classes, and within a couple of days, he had determined that she was not in any of them; since sixth grade was the highest grade in the school, before they moved on to junior high, AJ could only guess that she was a year or two behind him. However, it was hard to tell by looking at her size: at this age, there was a full 18 inches of size difference between the tallest and shortest even in the sixth grade, and as much as two feet when you put the shortest fourth grader next to the tallest sixth grader. The girls were growing faster at this age, and a few of the sixth graders were developing breasts, which embarrassed them and amazed the boys. Joanna was roughly his height, and had not begun developing; AJ concluded that she must have been in fifth grade.

But it was no longer a surprise when the star drawings began to appear on his desk in the morning. The first one was brief, but gaily colored — as if she had inaugurated a new box of crayons to compose a message welcoming him to the Longfellow school. But this time, he was ready: he still hadn't figured out how she managed to leave the messages on his desk without ever being caught, but he had decided that he could leave messages for her, too. At the end of the next school day, he placed an envelope on the book rack beneath the seat of his school-desk; the envelope was taped shut, and it had the characters BJ to attract her attention. Inside was his first message to her:

 

 

But she did not answer; a week later, there was only the plaintive message:

 

 

He tried again, with a longer, and more aggressive question:

 

 

But again there was no answer; indeed, there were no messages of any kind in the weeks that followed. I've spooked her, he decided glumly. He wandered the hallways and playground during the lunch break and recess periods, but she was nowhere to be found in the school. Like a turtle, she had pulled into her shell; but like a chameleon, she had blended into the scenery and effectively disappeared. He could only hope that she would re-surface again when she was ready — and in the meantime, he returned his attention to school life.

With school starting up again, his morning routine had changed: instead of riding his bike, he now took a bus. He didn't miss the long uphill ride home in the afternoon, and there was an added benefit of the new routine: if he arrived at the bus stop early enough, there was time for fifteen minutes of the glorious California alternative to snowball fights: rotten orange fights. The bus stop was on Canyon Crest, a two-lane road that stretched as far as the eye could see, lined along one side with healthy, thriving orange trees, and along the other side with the railroad tracks. AJ knew now, as he did not know in BeforeTime, that these trees would sicken and die from smog within a decade; but for now, they were filled with plump, juicy oranges.

Not all of the oranges stayed in the trees, though; a modest number had fallen on the ground and were slowly decaying. They were the size of a baseball, and so soft that they squished when held tightly. With a few minutes of scavenging under the trees, each of the half-dozen boys waiting for the bus had gathered an armful, and they proceeded to pelt anyone within range. The girls declared themselves off-limits, with shrill threats to tell their mother, the police, and maybe even Eisenhower.

Naturally, very few of the oranges found their mark: most of the boys had poor aim and limited strength, and all of them were adept at skipping away from the juicy blobs of fruit. But every once in a while, one of the projectiles hit home with a resounding thud and a wet, glutinous splat! Never mind that the victim looked like a pitcher of orange juice had been poured down the front of his shirt, and that it would be nearly lunch time before it dried. Both victim and aggressor recognized it as a moment of exquisite joy: a whoop and squeal of "gotcha!" arose from a dozen throats simultaneously.

At home, Norma and Lucas showed little interest in AJ's school activities; occasionally Lucas asked a question when Norma inquired about his activities in the classroom, but mostly he left AJ alone. Norma's questions were generally rote, too; it was obvious that she and Lucas were much more interested in discussing office politics at his company. So they settled into a patter that usually lasted for only a few minutes at the beginning of the meal:

"How was school today, dear?"

"Fine." Translation: same old shit.

"What did you learn in math?"

"Nuthin'." We're still doing fractions.

"Well, how was social studies?"

"Okay." Boring, actually, but what do you care?

"What did you have for lunch?"

"Food." You watched me make it this morning, dammit. Same as yesterday: cheese sandwich, apple, cookies, and milk.

But tonight, this last answer evoked a sharp reaction from Lucas: "Don't be a smartass, kiddo. Your Mom asked you a reasonable question."

Jesus! AJ thought. This was exactly what my kids used to do to me, and this is exactly how I reacted to them as a parent. So he tried to make amends.

"Well, we did learn one interesting thing in history today," he observed brightly.

"What's that?" asked Lucas.

"Well, we were studying the history of Israel and Egypt."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, and I learned some stuff about King Solomon that I didn't know before."

He heard a sharp intake of breath from Norma's side of the table, but when he looked up, she was focusing her attention on some errant peas on her dinner plate.

"Aha," said Lucas noncommittally. He was staring at Norma, but then turned and shrugged at AJ. "That's really great."

"Well, did you know he had 700 wives and 300 concubines?" AJ asked. "One of the brides was the daughter of an Egyptian pharaoh, who captured the Canaanite city of Gezer and gave it to his son-in-law as a gift."

"Really?" said Lucas, with a mild look of amazement.

"Yeah, and he's the guy responsible for the saying 'nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore' that gets quoted from the Bible."

"That's a nice saying," Norma said quietly. She had a faraway look on her face.

"But what I didn't realize was that I had learned the story about Solomon and the baby all wrong."

A stricken look came over Norma's face. She must be embarrassed at how ignorant I am of the Bible, AJ thought.

Lucas interrupted with a question about his math class. He didn't seem to care about Israelite history, but AJ wanted to finish the episode.

"I always thought that when the two women — harlots, Mr. Hernandez called them — were fighting over the baby and went to Solomon for a decision, and that he really did cut the baby in half. But we found out in class that he was just faking it, testing each woman's reaction to the possibility of dividing the baby into halves, to find out who the real mother was."

Norma dropped her fork on the plate with a clatter, and bolted from the table. Pretty squeamish, AJ thought. I said the baby wasn't really chopped in half.

"Enough of this history bullshit," said Lucas firmly. He seemed suddenly tense and edgy. "Why don't you get the hell out of here and go do your homework?"

As he lay in bed late that night, AJ found himself wondering once again about the odd behavior of both adults. His efforts to search for his identity had faded during the summer, but the dinnertime incident reminded there was more going on in the household than met the eye.

Maybe they've gotten sloppy, he thought. Maybe those FBI guys are still tracking them in their green De Soto. Maybe that's why they were so tense tonight. And if they were sloppy, it occurred to him, maybe they had left some of their papers where they could be found. Maybe they left the file drawers in their desk unlocked, he thought. He had checked numerous times over the years, but it had always been in the daytime; the idea of some nocturnal prowling had never occurred to him.

He slipped quietly out of bed and peeked out of the doorway of the room. Everything was dark; the house was silent. He had no idea what time it was, but he assumed that both parents were asleep. He retreated to back into his room, tip-toed to the closet, and carefully felt in the darkness for the cardboard box that held his comic books, star drawings, and coded diary notebooks. If they do have any juicy stuff for me to find, he thought, I want to be sure to write it down.

With notebook and pencil in one hand, he used the other hand to guide himself along the walls of the bedroom, out the door, down the hallway, and into the living room. Halfway across the room, he stubbed his toe on the coffee table, and he had to stop for several minutes while he took some deep breaths to cope with the pain. But eventually he found the desk, squat and heavyset, pushed against the wall at the far side of the living room.

He ran his fingers carefully down the front of the desk, on the both the left side and the right side. To his surprise and delight, he found that the drawers were all unlocked. Sloppy indeed, he thought. Now what?

There was a small lamp on the desk. He held his breath and listened for sounds throughout the house until he could hold it no longer; he let his breath out with a whoosh! and turned the lamp on. The only sound he had heard was his own heartbeat, which was racing with tension. I sure as hell hope they are asleep, he thought, or I'm a dead duck. He put his notebook and pencil on the desk, sat down in a grownup's desk chair that was still too big for him, leaned over, and opened the first file drawer. Let's hope it was worth all this fuss.

The file drawer on the right side was filled with Norma's files; the first folder that AJ pulled out was filled with recipes, and the second had sewing patterns from a Montgomery Ward catalog. Argh! he thought, replacing the folders and switching to the file drawer on the left side of the desk. This one, he assumed, would have Lucas's files, where there might be something more interesting than the ingredients for venison stew.

But at first, it looked no more interesting than Norma's. One folder held ads for fishing lures that Lucas had torn from a magazine; another contained carbon copies of correspondence had with a tenant who was renting the house they had left so quickly in Denver two years earlier. Thumbing through the rest of the folders, AJ snorted in disgust, and was about to abandon the search when he found one near the very end, labeled "COMPUTER."

Aha! he thought. Maybe this is what the FBI guys are looking for! He pulled it out, laid it on the desk, and was just beginning to open the folder when he heard a thump from the dark recesses beyond the living room. He quickly snapped off the lamp, held his breath, and waited. Maybe it's Blackie, he thought. Goddamned dog!

But it was not Blackie. There was another thump, and AJ heard the sound of footsteps emerging from his parents' bedroom. He was terrified, and he thought desperately, If I hide behind the sofa, he won't be able to see me in the dark. Groping down below the surface of the desk, he opened the file drawer and blindly stuck the computer file back inside. Does it go in the front or the back? he wondered, but there was no time; Lucas's footsteps were coming down the hallway, toward the living room.

AJ slid the file drawer closed, dropped off the chair, and crawled crab-like across the rug and behind the sofa. He waited, breathing in short, shallow gasps, while he heard Lucas walk across the living room from the other direction, approach the desk and turn the light on. He heard the sound of the file drawer being pulled to its stops, followed by the sound of fingers riffling through folders. There was a loud grunt, more paper-riffling sounds, and then the drawer was closed. The light was turned off, and AJ heard him walking toward the door. Lucas closed the door behind him, and the house was silent again.

AJ waited for what seemed like an hour before he dared budge from his hiding spot. Remembering his experience in Denver, he dared not look out the window to see where Lucas was going. And for a long time, he was not willing to risk creeping back to his bed. For all he knew, Norma might be prowling around, too; but there was no other sound from the house. If they were having another Big Fight, he thought, as he silently tip-toed back to his bedroom, it was a quiet one this time.

It was not until he woke up the next morning that the realization suddenly hit him: I left my notebook on the desk. He jumped out of bed, threw on his clothes, and ran to the living room. The surface of the desk was bare; the notebook was gone.

Shit! he thought. Now what? He retreated to his bedroom and desperately tried to think how to respond when Lucas confronted him at the breakfast table. He can't read the damn thing, he finally decided. So I'll just say that I left the notebook there by mistake when I came home from school yesterday.

But there was no mention of the notebook at breakfast. Norma hummed to herself as she cooked bacon and eggs, and Lucas buried himself in the newspaper. AJ looked from one to the other, waiting for the confrontation, but neither parent paid him any attention.

It was not until two days later that Norma stopped him when he walked in the back door after school. "I think you left this behind," she said to him, holding the notebook out to him.

"Where did you find this?" AJ blurted, holding out his hand. I know where I left it, he thought. But who found it first?

"You're a strange little boy," she said quietly, bending over to look him in the eyes. "I think you're very bright, but you're very strange sometimes."

"What do you mean, Mom?" he asked.

"You tell me," she said, straightening up and pointing at his notebook. "What does this mean?"

"It's just a code," he shrugged, as innocently as he could. "Some of us at school are sending secret messages back and forth. It's just a game."

"Some game," Norma muttered, tousling his hair gently. She turned and walked back to the kitchen. "Better watch where you put your things next time."

He was baffled by her behavior, but decided that it was best not to press for more explanations. In any case, he thought, it looks like Dad isn't suspicious.

In late October, Lucas left in the Jeep for a week's deer hunting in Utah. If the trip went as expected, he would return with a good size buck, which the local butcher would carve and freeze; there would be another long winter of tough, stringy venison steaks and stews. The antlers would join several more sets in the living room, and the hide — fur still attached — would be stretched out in the driveway on sunny weekends to dry.

In his absence, Norma cut her cooking routine to a minimum: dinners were an exercise in cleaning the refrigerator of every left-over that had accumulated since they arrived in town. But she took advantage of the free time and her unlimited use of the Chevy — she hated the Jeep, which Lucas normally left for her use while he took the Chevy to work. And with a "decent car," as she put it, she dragged AJ along to catch up on a number of errands, including after-school trips to the dentist and doctor for long-delayed checkups, as well as shopping and haircuts, that filled every afternoon after school.

And that's why AJ was standing outside the school on Friday afternoon, right on the corner of Sixth and Eucalyptus, waiting for Norma to pick him up in the car, rather than riding the school bus in the normal fashion. Within ten minutes after the afternoon dismissal bell had rung, every kid in the school had shot out the door and was half-way home. The streets were empty and silent, for there was no traffic; he closed his eyes and turned his face to catch the sun in the warm California afternoon.

Because of the stillness, the footsteps and the sound of approaching cars were more noticeable than they would had been otherwise. One pair of footsteps was behind him, coming softly but steadily up Sixth Street toward the Eucalyptus corner; the other footsteps belonged to an older man, face hidden beneath a broad-brimmed hat, moving at a determined pace along Eucalyptus in a path that would bring him to AJ's corner at approximately the same time as the footsteps behind him. While AJ was processing this data, the third and fourth pieces of data intruded: the two cars that he had heard were driving in opposite directions along Eucalyptus, both about a block away, and both coming toward him.

If it weren't for some remnants of BeforeTime street smarts from dealing with muggers in Manhattan, AJ would probably not even have been aware of any of this. After all, he thought, why should a suburban kid in the 50s worry about the approach of two adults? But an instinct warned him of danger, and when he looked up at the first car, he understood why: it was a dark green De Soto. The glare of the sunlight prevented him from seeing the interior clearly, but there was no doubt that a woman was driving the car.

The second car, approaching him from the other side of Sixth, but on his side of Eucalyptus, was a familiar black color. A Chevy, he thought. Mom. He heard the footsteps behind him approaching closer and at a suddenly faster pace; the older man was also shuffling along more quickly, though his breath seemed labored. Neither driver seemed aware of each other as they approached the intersection, but Norma had obviously seen AJ, for she waved as she glanced to her right to see if there were any cars coming toward the intersection.

Without even allowing her to cross the intersection, AJ bolted into the street, dashed for the car, opened the door, and jumped inside. Norma laughed gaily, tousled his hair, and then sped off. AJ turned as she drove up the street, and watched the other car as it moved off in the other direction. A small face was pressed against the rear window of the de Soto; AJ had only a glimpse before the car turned the corner, but it was enough to shock him. Joanna! he thought.

It had all happened so fast that he had to sit quietly, allowing his heart to stop rattling in its cage, while he replayed the events in his mind. He had no proof, and he didn't even have anything concrete that he could tell Norma — but he knew, with a certainty that required no proof: they were trying to kidnap me.

It was a terrifying thought; it kept him inside all weekend, wondering what it meant. Lucas's return from his hunting trip on Sunday afternoon — foul-smelling from lack of bathing all week, and foul-tempered from lack of success at bagging a deer — distracted his attention. By Monday, he was edgy, but ready to return to school. After all, he told himself, I'll be back on the school bus this afternoon, not standing alone on a street corner.

Coming into the classroom, he had another surprise: a star drawing, the first in a month. Unlike the brightly colored rainbow messages, this one was black:

 

 

More surprising than the message's appearance was its staggering implication. He could barely wait for day's end to leave a message for Joanna:

 

 

She had refused to answer any questions before, and he worry that he might had driven her away again. But two days later, another message awaited him:

 

 

And then the messages stopped. He peppered her with demands, with questions, with threats of telling the police — but though his message-bearing envelopes were gone each morning, there was no reply. She had vanished once again.

Two weeks later, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the school held an assembly. The students were herded into the auditorium to listen to a chorus of unharmonized voices singing obscure hymns to the accompaniment of a tuneless orchestra, followed by a solemn speech by the principal and a sermon from a ruddy-cheeked minister who appeared to have taken a few nips from a flask beneath his frock.

AJ knew they would be released at noon, but it was a long, dull morning — except for a chance encounter resulting from the prearranged seating plan of the different grades in the school. The first graders were placed in the front rows, then the second graders behind them, and so on. Most of the grades didn't fill an entire row, so the rag-tag end of one grade was placed side by side with the beginning of the next grade, apparently on the assumption that adjacent grades wouldn't commit too much mayhem on one another. Thus it was, entirely by chance, that he found himself at the beginning of the sixth grade group, sitting next to Joanna at the end of the fifth grade group. The teachers were concentrating their attention on the front rows in an attempt to keep the boisterous third graders from erupting into open anarchy, and it gave him a chance to whisper quietly to Joanna.

"Why didn't you answer my messages?" he asked her.

"Shhh," she replied, looking straight ahead. "We're not supposed to be talking."

"Okay, I won't," he agreed, but then followed it up with a variation on the same question. "How come you always end up at the same school where I am? And who was that trying to kidnap me?"

"I'm not supposed to talk to you," Joanna insisted.

Looking at her more closely now, AJ could see that she had grown noticeably since New Mexico. She looks like my Sarah looked when she was ten, he thought. But he tried to avoid distracting himself, and continued with the questions. "How come your Dad always ends up in the same city as my Dad? What is he — FBI? CIA? Secret Service? Is your Dad tracking my parents for some reason?"

"Stop it," she hissed at him, "or I'll call the teacher."

Just like a girl, he thought grumpily. But he knew that kids this age had a hard time holding a secret, and he decided he could try one last time before she really did call for help. "Give me one clue. Then I'll shut up and figure it out by myself."

Joanna turned and stared at AJ with a somber expression. "You've already had lots of clues," she said quietly, almost in sorrow. "And you haven't figured out a thing. I think you could go through your whole life without figuring out what's going on, if someone wasn't watching over you."

At that moment, a teacher shushed them both: the opening prayer from the tipsy minister could not survive any distraction. AJ was left to ponder Joanna's strange assessment; when the principal announced the end of the assembly an hour later, the room erupted in pandemonium and he lost her in the throng.

A month later, the Halifaxes celebrated a quiet Christmas. The weather had turned miserable during the winter months, with thunderstorms blowing in off the Pacific Ocean. But even with the gloomy weather, the realization hit AJ as the calendar rolled into the spring of 1955: if this year could be extended forever, I would never go back to BeforeTime. But the curse of his BeforeTime memory was that he knew full well it wouldn't last forever; it was just a matter of time until Lucas came home to announce the next move. AJ didn't know if Lucas had learned yet where it would be, but he knew: the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska.

But he wondered how Norma would react to the news of the move. He could see that she, too, had come to love California. Everything about it appealed to her: the people, the weather, the freedom — and he suspected, too, the distance from her earlier life in Washington and the East Coast. She and Lucas still fought too much, and they both drank and smoked too much; but it seemed much less severe than it had been in Colorado and New Mexico. She was positively radiant much of the time; she obviously wanted to put down roots here in Riverside.

So the inevitable dinnertime announcement from Lucas of another impending move, one evening in mid-March, produced an unexpected result: rather than passively accepting the decision to pack up and move, Norma exploded with anger. "Why do you have to put up with this?" she shouted. "Why can't you tell them you don't want to be transferred this time?"

Though AJ agreed with her, the outburst took him by surprise almost as much as it did Lucas. Lucas was incredulous that she would question his company's right to move employees around the country like pawns on a giant chess board; he was startled to find that she felt so strongly about setting down roots; and he was furious that his male, head-of-household right to made decisions was being challenged.

So yet another Big Fight commenced, accompanied by frequent refills from the martini pitcher. AJ gulped down the rest of his dinner and retreated to his room as the conversation turned ugly. The next morning, he found that neither she nor Lucas were speaking to each other; there was a cold fury between them. Norma banged the frying pan on the stove as she cooked the obligatory bacon and eggs for Lucas's breakfast, and dropped his plate so hard on the table that the eggs nearly slid onto the floor. AJ was intrigued, for his BeforeTime knowledge told him that ultimately they would go to Omaha, but he didn't know how it was going to work out.

The answer became clear in the evening, when Lucas returned home from work with a smug look on his face. He told Norma that he had gotten a raise, and that he was planning on a five-day vacation before the move took place. "Just the two of us," he said cheerfully. "We'll go off to Palm Springs and spend some time relaxing — kind of second honeymoon.".

Norma was obviously taken by surprise, for their vacations thus far had consisted of an occasional weekend camping out in a tent somewhere in the mountains. She looked across the dinner table at him, frowned, and started to say something when Lucas broke in: "Don't worry about the boy: we'll get a baby-sitter to look after him. One of the guys at the office says he does this all the time; he gave me a list of names and phone numbers."

And so it came to pass: a week later, with the familiar packing process well underway, Lucas and Norma drove off in the Chevy. A stout, German-looking grandmotherly type by the name of Mrs. Imhof was left behind to watch over AJ; he was given firm instructions not to cause any trouble.

It was a Thursday morning when they began their trip, and AJ left the house with them, on his way to school. He had no idea whether Mrs. Imhof would be a tyrant, but since three of the five days would be normal schooldays, he figured it wouldn't matter very much. All in all, it was a pretty easy job for the old lady: she only had to pay attention to him on the weekend.

The weekend, though, turned out to be a bore. AJ had been told to stay home both days — no hiking expeditions into the nearby hills, no visits to the neighbors. It wouldn't be so bad if there were something to do at home, he thought. A 1980s couch potato would simply curl up in front of the television set for the entire weekend. But they still had no TV, and almost everything else had been packed: the radio, the books, even most of his toys. His homework was finished by dinnertime on Friday, and he had nothing but a long, idle weekend to look forward to.

After a few fruitless efforts to immerse himself in a school book on Saturday morning, he gave up and fell into a gloomy funk. Mrs. Imhof was of no use — she didn't even knew how to play cards. She had brought her knitting and sat happily in Lucas's living room chair, humming softly to herself.

The boredom, and the obvious fact that everything had been pulled out of its normal resting place, was what finally sparked an idea: Why not use the opportunity for a last look through their things to see if I can found any clues? None of the boxes had been taped up, and he figured that if he simply replaced the contents in the same fashion, nobody would notice his snooping. Even if I don't replace everything just so, no one will notice.

There was no point looking through the boxes of books, the packing barrels of dishes, the heavy boxes of gardening tools or even Lucas's growing collection of Playboy magazines. His own room could be ruled out, of course, and it was fairly easy to eliminate the bathrooms, the garage, and the kitchen. He moved on to the room that he expected would hold the real treasures: Norma and Lucas's bedroom. But nothing turned up: a few magazines, but almost everything packed away was clothing, towels, and bedding material. Disappointed, he return to his own room and sat on the bed, moping. I can't believe they would have no records, no files, no papers, he kept thinking. He knew there was less paperwork and bureaucracy these days than in his BeforeTime life But still, he thought, this is ridiculous.

And then it hit him: he had forgotten the family desk, which still sat in its corner of the living room. He had unconsciously ignored that room, for he wanted to avoid the scrutiny of Mrs. Imhof, but it was the only room left. I'll just have to bluff my way past any objections she might raise, he thought.

But as it turned out, Mrs. Imhof was oblivious to his presence for the first thirty minutes in the living room. Several more boxes of books were quickly examined and their contents replaced before he quietly moved to the last corner: two boxes containing the contents of Norma and Lucas's desk.

He was halfway through the first box before Mrs. Imhof looked up and focused on him. "What are you doing, Jonathan? Aren't those things packed away for you to move?"

"Well, yes, Mrs. Imhof, they are," he replied, "but Mom packed away some of my school papers. I still have a week of school before we move, and there's a test next week."

"All right, dear, as long as you know what you're doing."

Damn straight, I know what I'm doing, he thought as he beamed innocently at her. The first box was interesting, and he would have spent the entire day reading through it slowly if he were alone: it contained a dozen manila file folders with Lucas's tax records and financial papers for the Denver house. But he was afraid that Mrs. Imhof might look over from her knitting and discover that these were definitely not school papers, so he flipped quickly through the pages. It showed that Lucas had earned a little over $6,000 the previous year and reported interest of a little over a hundred dollars on a savings account of a few thousand dollars. I know things are far cheaper in the 50s, AJ thought, but these were still sobering figures.

Another file was marked in Lucas's scrawled handwriting: COMPUTER. He nodded and pulled it out, reminding himself that while computers were common in his BeforeTime world, such a file was most unusual in the mid-50s. He had not had a chance to see the contents on his abortive night mission months earlier; now he could look at it more closely. The pages within were carbon copies of densely typed material, most of it unintelligible to him. There were acronyms, engineering specifications, equations and long sequences of garbled English characters. Or a code of some kind, he thought. It was not something he could interpret or decipher on the spot, and it was not something he dared to take away. He thumbed quickly through all of the pages to see if anything made sense, and then put the folder back before Mrs. Imhof looked up.

There was one more box, which contained Norma's files. She handled the household bills, and most of the files were receipts and budgets: $26 for liquor the previous month, $60 for groceries, $30 for gas and electricity. But there was one file of personal correspondence, and that was where he struck pay dirt — not in the letters themselves, but in the contents of an envelope sent by Norma's mother in Washington. The envelope contained a single sheet of stationery, folded in half; it said simply, "I thought you should have this." Nothing more — no elaboration, not even a signature. The letter was written in the same familiar, spidery scrawl as the Washington address on the envelope, and AJ found it odd that Grandma didn't even sign it.

But paper-clipped within the folded paper was the treasure she thought Norma ought to have: a small picture, slightly yellowed and scratched, with the scalloped edges so common of the Brownie photos of the day. It was a picture of a young girl, focused sharply against a blurred background; it must have been taken on a breezy day, AJ mused, for her long, blond hair was wisping to one side in the background. She appeared to be four or five years old, wearing a white dress spangled with a faint pattern of stars. She was holding a bouquet of daisies, and she was missing two of her front teeth as she smiled at the camera.

AJ had never seen the picture before. Nothing was written on the back of the photo, not even the date when it was taken. There were no clues in the one-line missive from Grandma, nor was there anything else in the rest of the file folder to tell him what this was all about. Nevertheless, he knew with a dread certainty that there was something terribly significant about the picture. And something about it looked ominously familiar.

One other file attracted his attention: it contained a single sheet of instructions, typed on cheap paper and faded so that he could hardly read it. But the words at the top of the page confirmed that he was right all along when he had argued with Norma back in New Mexico:

 

 

Why Norma decided to keep this was unclear, but it left in AJ's mind no doubt where he entered the world. He was kneeling down as he read the page, with his back to Mrs. Imhof, so she didn't see him slip the photo into his shirt pocket. The letter went back in the envelope, the Air Force hospital instructions in the file folder, and the file folder in the box.

On Monday, AJ told Mrs. Imhof that he had soccer practice after school; she looked momentarily puzzled, but then shrugged and replied that he should be sure to return home for dinner by six. He had no soccer practice, and frankly didn't even know if the school had a soccer team. But it will cover my absence for a couple of hours, he thought and that's all I'll need.

With so many things on his mind, he was ill prepared for a star drawing to be waiting on his desk. It was been such a long time since he had seen one that he had forgotten most of the code; it was drawn in black, and said simply:

 

 

By the end of the day, he had finally deciphered the message. He was in a hurry to leave, but he hastily encoded a reply — as always, in the form of a question:

 

 

Mrs. Imhof also hadn't noticed was that he had taken his bike to school rather than taking the bus. When school let out, he ran to the bike and headed for a camera shop on Market Street, two blocks down from the school, where he asked for a copy to be made of the picture he had taken from Norma's file. The man frowned, wrinkled his nose, and finally told him that it would take four days. "And tell your Mom," he said, "that it will cost $3.50."

It was a lot of money, but AJ nodded his head and told the man he would be back on Friday afternoon. Then it was back to the bike for the long ride home. At five minutes before six, he scooted in the door and flopped down at the dinner table; Mrs. Imhof was none the wiser.

Tuesday morning, another message awaited him. This one, too, was written in dark black pencil:

 

 

The star-code was now familiar, and his response was terse:

 

 

On Tuesday evening, just after dinner, Norma and Lucas returned, laughing and holding hands as they walked in the door. Mrs. Imhof reported that he had been no trouble, and Lucas reached into a bag to retrieve his reward: a hand-carved wooden replica of a rattlesnake. Good grief! AJ thought. What the hell am I supposed to do with this?

On Wednesday, Joanna's message gave him the answer he had suspected all along:

 

 

His time was running out, and he knew that he was tempting fate; nevertheless, he couldn't help leaving her yet another question on Wednesday afternoon:

 

 

And on Thursday morning, he received a message that took him completely by surprise. It said simply:

 

 

Through the school day, he pondered the message; something about it bothered him more than just the blunt accusation that it made. But he couldn't figure out the cause for his concern — other than the tension of knowing that he would have only one more message to send Joanna on Thursday afternoon, and only one more reply on Friday morning, before he left California forever. What should I say? he wondered. He had a thousand questions, and desperately wanted to spent a full day, pulling all the answers from Joanna's secret storehouse of knowledge. But if there was time for only one last message, he had an ultimate priority. He told her:

 

 

At home, Norma was finishing the final packing, and he had been instructed to pick up his transfer papers on Friday afternoon, so that they could leave on Saturday. AJ was tense and edgy, but Norma and Lucas were too busy with their own checklists to notice: there were a thousand things to be done in order to close down an existence in one city and transport it to the next. Lucas had begun filling the Jeep with the clothing and supplies that he wanted with him in Omaha before the moving men arrived; in the midst of the boxes, he had built a small wooden house for Blackie, who would travel with them looking out the back of the Jeep. The weather had turned nasty again, with squalls blowing in from the coast; Lucas had tied a tarpaulin over the contents of the Jeep, but kept it in the garage in preparation for the trip.

Friday morning, Norma reminded him once again to get his school papers and gave him a hug as he headed out the door. "It's been a good year, AJ. Too bad it couldn't last." It was raining as he left, which worked to his advantage: she turned inside to avoid getting drenched, and thus didn't see him taking his bicycle out of the garage for the final ride to school. He patted his right front pocket to ensure its contents were safe: Darth Vader had been resurrected from a corner of his desk drawer.

At school, a blossoming rainbow of colors awaited him at his desk. An enormous star drawing, on oversized paper, was sparkling with a thousand crayon colors that Joanna had used to surround her final message to him:

 

 

Friday was a blur. Toward the end of the day, he was excused from his last class to get his papers signed at the Principal's office. He half expected to see Joanna in the office, as he had in Roswell, but there was no sign of her. His school books were turned in, his transfer card was stuffed into his back pocket beneath his rain slicker, and he was out the door as the bell rang. The clerk in the camera shop made him wait fifteen minutes, but finally produced the extra copy of Norma's picture. The ride home was long and tiresome: not only was it uphill, but the rain slicker flapped in the wind and the rain beat against his face, making it difficult to see. In the distance, he had a blurry view of lightning crackling in the hills. The slicker had one virtue: it had an inner pocket within its rubberized surface; his pictures were nestled safely, warm and dry.

When he got home, he found Norma sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a martini. She's just going to go downhill from here, he decided. I might as well get it over with. He hadn't even taken off the slicker; water dripped onto the floor as he sat down across from her.

"Mom, I need to talk to you about something," he told her, holding the original photo under the table. "Something serious."

"AJ, honey, you're too young to be so serious," she smiled.

"Yeah, well, Mom, there are times when I feel older than you — and I need you to talk to me like I was your age now, instead of a little kid. Like a real person — okay?"

"Sure, honey," she said with a lazy smile. Smoke from her cigarette curled past her face, making one eyelid twitch.

"What I need to know, Mom," he said slowly, taking the picture from beneath the table and laying it in front of her, "is what this is all about."

"Jeeee-sussss!" she screeched, clawed hands grabbing the picture and holding it away from him, as if it were the personification of evil. "Where did you get this?"

"I found it, Mom." He felt compelled to embellish with a lie. "I was looking for a school report, while you and Dad were away, and I didn't know where it was packed."

"You're lying!" she shouted, the blood rushing to her face as she stood up and leaned on the table, towering over him. "You were going through my things like a common thief, looking at things you had no business looking at!"

She looked briefly at the picture again and then tore it frantically into pieces, tiny scraps which fluttered from her shaking fingers onto the table.

"Mom, I don't care what you think," AJ said, as calmly as he could. "I need to know what this is all about: who is this girl?"

"That is none of your goddamned business!" she shouted. "I'll beat you black and blue, you little bastard, and when your father gets home, he'll beat you even worse!"

"He's not my father, Mom!" he shouted back. "You can't keep lying to me for the rest of your life!"

By now, Norma was out of control. She was in an ugly rage, her hands trembling, her face a mottled red. She began moving around the table toward him.

"Don't you dare talk to me that way, you sneaky little devil," she yelled as she rounded the end of the table and headed for him. "So help me God, I'll make you wish you had never put your fingers on my private things."

AJ had anticipated a rational argument with a certain amount of emotion, perhaps a bit of temper and some raised voices. But this is getting out of hand, he thought. As she reached for him, he ducked and scampered under the table. She lunged down to grab him, but her reactions were slow; he popped up on the other side and headed for the door.

"Keep the picture, Mom," he announced as she glared at him. "Keep the lies. Keep the booze. Keep that son of a bitch you call my father. Keep your whole goddamned life. But don't think you're going to keep me — I'm checking out of here."

"You come back here, you little bastard," Norma hissed at him. "I don't know what made you think you could get away with this, but I'll tell you this: I'm going to whip your ass so hard you won't be able to sit down for a week!" And with that, she lurched around the table and headed for him again.

Suddenly, the whole episode seemed pathetic to him. "Why are you doing this to me, Mom? Why can't you once — just once —tell me the truth? Where was I born? Who the hell was my real father? Why won't you tell me who that stupid little toothless girl is?"

But by now, Norma was past any rational conversation. With a bloody howl, she lunged for him and grabbed at his slicker as he yanked his body away. In a flash, he was outside and running to the end of the driveway before she reached the door.

"You get your ass back here now, do you hear me?" she shouted. "If you're gone when your father gets home, I swear he'll come after you with a gun!"

These people really are screwed up, AJ thought, as he headed into the vacant lot across the street. I've never seen Dad point a gun at anyone, but with Norma egging him on, he might very well come after me with a rifle full of buckshot.

As he reached the far side of the vacant lot, sopping wet from the moist weeds, she yelled at him again from the distance. "If you're thinking of running away, just remember this: we're leaving for Omaha tomorrow, with or without you!"

That's okay, he thought, as he headed for the road that would take him up into the mountains. I'm leaving town without you.

She was far away now, down the slope, silhouetted in the afterglow of a dark, gloomy dusk. The last thing he heard from her were some haunting words which floated through the air, strangely disconnected from the clenched fists she had raised in the air. "You were a goddamned mistake, you little bastard! I never wanted to choose you!"

Well, I never wanted to choose any of this, either! he muttered as he trotted farther up Two Trees Road, into the canyon.

The shadows had extended all the way down the hill, and the rain clouds had settled halfway into the mountains. The rain from the previous few days had caused an explosion of growth; though there were no flowers, there was a thick ground layer of dandelions on the lower slopes of the hills. The boom of thunder, further up in the mountains, was echoing down the canyon; he knew that he would find his lightning bolt up on the rock ledge that looked out over the valley. He passed a ravine filled with sunflowers and willowy cat-o-nine tails, and continued climbing.

The rain had slackened off up here; it was more of a mist. Still, he was completely wet now: the rain had been running down his neck, into his shirt inside the slicker. But it doesn't matter at this point, he thought. In another fifteen minutes, I'll either be fried to a crisp, or rocketed back to BeforeTime to reappear in Central Park in New York. Wet or dry, he had far more serious things to worry about. Indeed, all he cared about was taking his strange picture back with him. Whoever she was, and whatever it meant, he could only hope it would unlock the mystery of the three years from 1944 to 1947.

Finally, after half an hour of slipping on brambles and bushes, and slithering up rocks made slippery from the rain, he reached the great expanse of rock ledge from which he had watched a dozen sunsets during the past year. The houses below were no longer visible; the sky was black from the onset of night as well as the thick clouds around him. Streaks of lightning had crashed into the canyons and smashed against rocks several times on the upward climb, but they were always a hundred feet away from him.

But now he was ready. He had taken off the slicker and flung it to the back of the ledge. The extra copy of the photograph, protected within an envelope from the camera store, was clutched in his left hand; he was not willing to trust its safety to his pants pockets at this point. Darth Vader was tightly held in his right hand, ready for another long ride.

The mist had grown heavier, and he had to blink frequently to keep the moisture out of his eyes as he scanned the heavens, waiting for his deliverance. He was wet, and he was cold, and he was scared shitless. But as the clouds suddenly opened up and he had a split second to watch the lightning hurtling down at him, he had a sudden revelation: I'm going home to my own family — the family that I chose.

"Get me out of here!" he howled, as the lightning stabbed downward and carried him away.

 

Continue to Chapter 9 . . .