12 Monkeys

2

“Proceed.”

Freezing water roared from nozzles in the wall, pummeling Cole’s naked body. He shivered, trying not to cry out, and ducked as two hulking figures in decontamination suits stabbed at him with two long poles. The poles ended in stiff wire brushes. The figures poked at him mercilessly; every now and then he could glimpse one smiling through the suit’s smudged mask.

“Raise your arms above your head.”

Cole obeyed, wincing as the water was replaced by caustic chemicals that burned his skin. The suited figures began scrubbing at his armpits. Foul-smelling water sluiced around his ankles and whorled down the drain. From a grate overhead a voice commanded:

“Proceed.”

The two figures stepped away. Shuddering, Cole walked from the shower and down a narrow passage, still naked, every inch of him feeling raw. In the next room a three-legged stool stood beneath a single flickering light. Beside the stool was a small white plastic box. Cole grit his teeth to keep them from chattering and sat down.

“Proceed.”

The stool groaned beneath his weight as he reached for the white plastic box and withdrew an old-fashioned hypodermic needle. He made a fist, clumsily jabbing at his arm and watching blood move slowly up the syringe’s neck. When he glanced up he saw a single, nearly opaque window of thick plastic in the rusty iron wall. Behind it shadowy figures moved, watching him. When the syringe was full he replaced it gingerly in a compartment in the plastic box. In the narrow doorway two guards appeared, holding a prison uniform. Without waiting for the command Cole stood, walked over to them, and dressed.

When he was done, they escorted him along a walkway in the cavernous underground space. The uniform chafed painfully at his skin. The air smelled stale, but not as warm as it did in the prisoners’ quarters. He didn’t make the mistake of asking his guards where they were taking him. After some minutes, they stopped in front of a tall door that slid open silently.

“Go.” One of the guards shoved Cole forward.

He was inside a chamber where every conceivable surface was covered with print: walls and ceiling, even parts of the floor were papered with photographs, old newspapers, maps and charts, computer readouts, handbills. “CLOCK STILL TICKING!!! NO CURE YET!!!” one headline screamed. Warped bookshelves sank beneath the weight of moldering volumes, incomplete sets of encyclopedias. Against one wall stood a bank of computers, their screens blank and gray. There was a makeshift pyramid of televisions with broken screens, an ancient Motorola radio. In the center of all this stretched a long conference table littered with even more technological debris — computer circuitry, a few dozen television remote control units, a transistor radio. Around the table sat six men and women in stained white clothes that reminded Cole of surgical scrubs.

One of the guards cleared his throat. “James Cole. Cleared from quarantine,” he announced.

At the head of the table a man with delicate, rather jaded features and long pale hands nodded. He wore a pair of heavy dark square-framed glasses. “Thank you. You may wait outside,” he said to the guards. His dark glasses fixed on Cole appraisingly.

“He’s got a history, Doctor,” the other guard warned. “Violence. Antisocial Six, doing twenty-five to life.”

The scientist’s blank gaze remained on Cole. “I don’t think he’s going to hurt us. You’re not going to hurt us, are you, Mr. Cole?”

Cole shook his head imperceptibly. “No, sir.”

“Of course not. Prisoners are not in the habit of harming innocent microbiologists like myself.” He smiled coldly, then made a dismissive gesture at the guards. “You may go. Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Cole?”

There was an empty chair at the conference table. Cole glanced around at the others. They regarded him coolly, impersonally; one woman stifled a yawn.

“Mr. Cole?” the microbiologist urged softly. Cole sat.

The man made a temple of his fingers. For several minutes he said nothing. Then, “We want you to tell us about last night.”

Cole took a breath. “There’s not much to tell,” he began. “I—”

“No,” the microbiologist corrected him. His voice was light, menacing. “We will ask you questions. You will answer in as much detail as possible. So: when you first left the elevator, where did you find yourself?”

“In a sewer.”

“A sewer.” The microbiologist glanced at the woman next to him, who was scribbling earnestly on a torn bit of paper. “In what direction was the water flowing?”

Cole frowned. “In what—”

“No questions, Mr. Cole!” the microbiologist snapped, showing even, white teeth. “You must observe everything. Again, in what direction was the water flowing?”

“Uh… north,” Cole said, guessing. He felt sweat begin to pearl on his forehead.

“North,” the microbiologist repeated, adjusting his dark glasses. Several of the others nodded. “Very good. Now, did you notice anything in the water?”

It went on like that for an hour. Cole’s eyes watered from exhaustion; the acrid chemical taste coated his tongue. Another scientist handed him a blackboard and asked him to sketch a map.

“Sample number four. Where did you find that?”

Cole fidgeted in his seat. The room swam before his eyes; his fingers left damp smudges on the blackboard. “Uh…”

“It’s important to observe everything,” a woman broke in impatiently.

Cole swallowed. “I think it was… I’m sure it was Second Street.”

The scientists began to whisper excitedly among themselves. Cole started to yawn, clapped a hand over his mouth. He looked around the room, finally focusing on another headline.

“VIRUS MUTATING!!!”

Beside it was a faded newspaper photograph of an old man in a tweed jacket, an expression of resigned despair on his chiseled features.

“SCIENTIST SAYS ‘IT’S TOO LATE FOR CURE.’”

A voice shattered Coles reverie. “Close your eyes, Cole.” Cole started, then obediently shut his eyes. The darkness was a blessed relief.

“Tell us in detail what you’ve seen in this room,” a woman said softly.

Cole shook his head. “In this room? Uh…”

“Tell us about the pictures on the wall,” the microbiologist said.

“You mean the newspapers?”

“That’s right,” the woman said soothingly. “Tell us about the newspapers, Cole. Can you hear my voice? What does he look like, the man who just spoke? How old were you when you first left the surface?”

“How old…?”

“Tell us,” she urged.

“Tell us,” other voices chimed in. “Tell us, tell us…”

He tilted his head back, eyes still tightly shut, his body aching with exhaustion. The bitter taste lingered in the back of his throat. He wondered vaguely if he had been drugged — he could remember so little, even now he was uncertain if he was awake or dreaming. How old were you when you left the surface? He tried not to yawn as the voices blurred and faded into one another voice, droning on and on…

“Flight 784 is now boarding at Gate…”

He stood in front of the observation window, watching as a 737 descended smoothly through the smoggy air, then touched down onto the runway, tires shrieking. His mother’s hand held his loosely. His father pointed at the aircraft and said, “Look — there it is—”

From behind them came a shout, then a woman’s voice, yelling. He turned, his father grabbing his free hand, and saw a middle-aged man with a thinning ponytail hurrying past. As the man turned the corner, he bumped the young Cole with a Chicago Bulls sports bag.

“Hey.” Cole frowned at the man’s departing back. A woman’s voice pierced the air.

“NOOOOOOOO!”

Everywhere there were people running and screaming, luggage skidding across the floor as they fled. Cole watched open-mouthed as a man dove to the floor, arching onto his back and staring up at Cole with panicky eyes as he cried—

“Just exactly why did you volunteer?”

Cole gasped. His eyes flew open: he saw before him the long litter-strewn table ringed with anxious faces.

“I said, why did you volunteer?” The microbiologist impatiently tapped a pencil on the table.

Cole swallowed, looked around. “Well, uh — actually, the guard woke me up. He told me I volunteered.”

The scientists turned to each other, whispering urgently. Cole tried desperately to keep his eyes open, but it was too much: the dream started to take him again. His head dropped, he could hear an intercom blaring, and footsteps…

“Cole? Cole?”

Once more the tapping sound pushed him into wakefulness. Cole started, gazing into the eyes of an earnest-looking man with silver hair and one gold earring — an astrophysicist, he had told Cole earlier. The astrophysicist nodded as he went on, “We appreciate your volunteering. You’re a very good observer, Cole.”

Cole glanced over at the microbiologist, his pencil drumming its tattoo on the tabletop. He nodded. “Thank you.”

“You’ll get a reduction in sentence.” The silver-haired astrophysicist looked at Cole, obviously waiting for him to thank him again, but Cole kept his face impassive.

“To be determined by the proper authorities,” another scientist broke in.

“We have another program,” a zoologist added. It was clear from her tone that she expected Cole to be impressed by this. “Very advanced, something quite different. Requires very skilled people.”

The microbiologist leaned across the table, his dark glasses pointing ominously to Cole. “It would be an opportunity to reduce your sentence considerably…”

“The zoologist nodded. “And possibly play an important role in returning the human race to the surface of the earth,” she said.

“We want tough-minded people. Strong mentally.” The earnest-looking astrophysicist tugged at his earring, then glanced at the man beside him. “We’ve had some — misfortunes — with unstable types.”

Cole felt a tightening in his stomach. One of the woman gazed pointedly at him. “For a man in your position,” she said, her eyes glinting, “this could be an opportunity.”

“Not to volunteer could be a real mistake,” a man added softly.

Cole opened his mouth to reply, hesitated. The microbiologist tapped his pencil impatiently.

“Definitely a mistake,” he said.

Cole stared at the pencil, the thin pale fingers that clutched it, then looked around the table at the ring of anxious faces. He took a deep breath and asked, “When do I begin?”

“Yet among the myriad microwaves, the infrared messages, the gigabytes of ones and zeroes, we find words, byte-sized now…”

Dr. Kathryn Railly stared raptly at the man perched on a high stool at the front of the room. She’d heard him read before, at another club in Philly, but tonight he was really on a roll. She adjusted her glasses, brushed a strand of dark hair from her elegantly composed face, and leaned forward, listening intently.

“…words, tinier even than science, lurking in some vague electricity where, if we listen, we can still hear the solitary voice of that poet telling us, ‘Yesterday This Day’s Madness Did Prepare; Tomorrow’s Silence, Triumph or Despair…’”

Breep! Breep!

Kathryn started, then reached reflexively for the beeper in her pocket. From their chairs, several black-clad bohos glanced at her and scowled.

“Sorry,” she whispered, and stood. Her neighbors shot her filthy looks as she stepped over their feet, picking her way through folding chairs and coffee mugs and nouveaux beatniks. “‘Scuse me, sorry…”

From his seat the poet glared at her, his voice rising. “‘…for you know not why you go, nor where…’”

Only, of course, Kathryn did know ‘where.’ In the lobby she found a pay phone and made a quick call. A second call sent her to the Eighth Precinct Station House. Detective Franki met her in the hallway. He was a man on the young side of forty, with eyes that had seen too many greasy dawns on the wrong side of town. He nodded at her briefly.

“Dr. Railly. Thanks.” Without further ado, he took her arm, propelling her down the corridor as he filled her in on the case.

“…so they get there, they ask the guy real nice for some kind of ID. He gets agitated and starts screaming about viruses. Totally irrational, totally disoriented, doesn’t know where he is, doesn’t know what day it is, the whole ball of wax. All they got was his name.” Franki shoved a paper at Kathryn as they strode past crowded holding cells. “They figure he’s stoned out of his mind, or it’s some kind of psychotic episode, so—”

“He’s been tested for drugs?”

Franki shook his head. “Negative for drugs. But he took on five cops like he was dusted to the eyeballs. No drugs! You believe that?”

He paused in front of a tiny observation window. Kathryn took a breath, trying not to wince at the rank scents of urine and disinfectant. Then she leaned forward and peered through the dirty glass.

Inside the padded cell a man was restrained to a heavy steel chair. He was of average height but powerfully built, with smoothly muscled forearms and neck, high forehead, and a prizefighter’s nose. His hair was a black stubble across his scalp, his eyes blearily alert as he stared at the gray walls. Sweat trickled down his forehead, threading between bruises and welts, and a nasty-looking cut above one eyebrow. Every now and then his head would start to droop forward, as though he were falling asleep, until the restraints grew taut and he jerked upright again to stare wide-eyed at the empty room.

“You have him in restraints,” Kathryn Railly said in a low voice.

“Were you listening?” Franki punched the wall in frustration. “We got two officers in the hospital! Yeah, he’s in restraints, plus the medic gave him enough Stelazine to kill a horse! Look at him! Raring to go!”

Kathryn sighed. The man looked more like he was ready to pass out. As she watched, his head swiveled, slowly, until he was staring directly at her. His eyes narrowed, giving him a ferociously intense look. Kathryn found herself backing away slightly from the window.

“That would explain the bruises, I guess,” she said. “The struggle.”

Franki sighed. “Yeah, yeah. You want to go in? Examine him?”

“Yes, please.” She glanced at the page in her hand. “This is all you have on him? You ran it through the system?”

“No match up.” A click as Franki unlocked the door. “No license, no prints, no warrants. Nothings. I should probably go in with you.”

She stepped around him and into the cell. “Thank you, but that won’t be necessary.”

Franki watched her, nodding. “Well, I’ll be right here. Just in case.”

She crossed the cell, moving confidently but with care, always mindful of the door behind her. “Mr. Cole?” she said warmly. “My name is Dr. Railly—”

The gaze he turned on her was as innocent and beatific as a child’s — or a lunatic’s. She felt a small spark of unease, recalling Detective Franki’s words: No drugs. You believe that? She cleared her throat and went on.

“I’m a psychiatrist, Mr. Cole. I work for the county. I don’t work for the police. My concern is your well-being. Can you tell me what happened this evening?”

The man stared at her, unblinking. “I need to go now.” His voice was low and unthreatening, almost soothing, as though she were the one in trouble. Kathryn tilted her head, nodding.

“Mr. Cole, I’m not going to lie to you. I can’t make the police let you go. But I will try and help you — if you cooperate. Can you do that, James?” She glanced at the page in her hand. “May I call you James?”

“James!” The man snorted. “Nobody ever calls me that.”

Kathryn frowned. “Have you been a patient at County? Have I seen you someplace?”

He shook his head, the restraints biting into the bruised skin of his neck. “No, not possible.” He sounded more agitated; his gaze flickered nervously from Kathryn to the door to the observation window. “I… I have to get out of here. S’posed to be getting information.”

Mood liability, apprehension, possible hostile paranoia, thought Kathryn. She nodded sympathetically and asked, “What kind of information?”

“It won’t help you. You can’t do anything about it. You can’t change anything.”

“Change what?”

Cole’s voice rose. “I need to go.”

Definite hostility and poor frustration tolerance. Kathryn slapped the paper against her palm. “Do you know why you’re here, James?”

“Yes. I’m a good observer — I have a tough mind.”

“I see. You don’t remember assaulting a police officer? Several officers?”

“They wanted identification,” said Cole. “I don’t have any identification. I wasn’t trying to hurt them.”

“You don’t have a driver’s license, James? Or a Social Security card?”

“No.”

Kathryn hesitated, noting possible side effects of the Stelazine: facial muscle spasms, those nervous glances that might be indicative of blurred vision. “You’ve been in an institution, haven’t you, James? A hospital?”

“I have to go.”

“In jail? Prison?”

Cole sighed resignedly. “Underground.”

“Hiding?”

He gazed up at her. Once more his expression grew childlike. “I love this air,” he said softly. For the first time he smiled. It made him look sweet, boyish. “This is wonderful air.”

Kathryn ventured a half-smile in return. “What’s wonderful about the air, James?”

“It’s so clean and fresh. And no germs!”

“Why do you think there aren’t any germs in the air, James?”

He went on as though he hadn’t heard her. “This is October, right?”

She shook her head. “April.”

“April?”

“What year do you think it is, James?”

“1996.”

“You think it’s 1996?” Kathryn asked, her voice steady. Delusional, possibly hallucinating. “That’s the future, James. Do you think you’re living in the future?”

Cole’s expression clouded into bewilderment. “No, 1996 is the past.”

“1996 is the future, James,” she said calmly. “This is 1990.”

He looked up at her, too stunned to speak. For a moment Kathryn gazed at him, taking in those impossibly deep eyes — incredulous now, almost desperate. “Thank you, James,” she said at last, and turning she strode quickly to the door. Detective Franki held it open for her.

“Well?” he demanded.

“He’s certainly delusional,” she said, sighing. “Maybe even mildly schizophrenic. Hard to tell when all you can see is his face, and that’s been beaten black-and-blue.” She shot Franki an icy look. “Oh, I know: ‘potential cop killer in a major psychotic episode.’ But it’d sure make my job easier if you hadn’t tranked him up so much I can’t make a valid diagnosis.”

Franki rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. You gonna sign or what?”

“Oh, I’ll sign,” she said coolly. She followed him to his desk and filled out a set of forms. “Seventy-two hours observation, some more drug testing. If he lands on the street again, I hope it’s not in your jurisdiction.”

Franki smiled. “Me, too. Thanks, Dr. Railly.”

She stood to go, brushing a tendril of hair from her eyes. At the door she paused. “Oh, and Detective Franki — it’s difficult to make impartial judgments when you’re so obviously stressed.”

He snorted. “Yeah, well, I could use a fucking vacation.”

“I was thinking more like Prozac,” she said sweetly. “Think about it.” And she left.

In his cell, Cole blinked and stared dazedly at the padded gray wall, the tiny lozenge of thick glass where shadowy figures came and went. The bitter taste in his mouth was so strong now that he almost gagged. He tried to focus on something besides rising nausea and the painful throbbing above his left eye. Had there been a woman here, asking questions? Or was that another nightmare, like the one with the scientists? He licked his lips, tasting blood and bile, and looked up when he heard the door grinding open again. Two surly policemen entered. One roughly undid the restraints that bound him to the chair. The other knelt and clapped a pair of heavy manacles about Cole’s ankles.

“C’mon,” he snapped, yanking Cole to his feet.

“Where you taking me?” Cole asked thickly as he lurched forward.

One of the policemen reached over to tighten the straightjacket. “South of France, buddy. Fancy hotel. You’re gonna love it.”

Cole jerked his head back. “South of France. I don’t want to go to the south of France.” He frowned, ragged bits of memory — or was it a dream? — coming back to him. “I want to — to make a telephone call.”

The policeman smirked as he led him from the cell. “Zip it, ace. You fooled the shrink with your act, but you don’t fool us.”

Cole stumbled down the hall between them until they stopped in front of a steel door. One of the policemen unlocked it. A moment later the door swung out. Cole blinked, amazed, as morning overwhelmed him, a dazzling fury of white light.

“Send us a postcard, okay, ace?” The policeman laughed as he led Cole into the waiting prison van.

“Yeah,” the other cop sneered, holding the door open for his colleague. “Don’t forget to write.”

Cole stared blankly as the door clanged shut. With a muted roar, the van pulled into the city street.

When the van finally stopped, someone came and removed the manacles. Someone else dragged him, less roughly this time, into another grim building. There were more gray corridors, another white-tiled room. Two attendants stripped him, tossing the straightjacket into a metal bin, then arranged him beneath an institutional shower. Cole stood there obediently, grimacing as the hot water raced across his bruised face and chest. One of the orderlies turned off the water. The other, a broad-shouldered man whose ID tag read BILLINGS, handed Cole a towel.

“C’mere,” he said, his fingers digging into Cole’s scalp. “Lemme see your head, Jimbo, see if you got any creepy-crawlies.”

Cole stared dumbly at the towel, then looked up at Billings. “I need to make a telephone call.”

“Gotta work that out with a doctor, Jimbo.” The orderly’s hands kneaded Cole’s forehead. “Can’t make no calls till the doctor says.”

Cole’s eyes flashed. “It’s very important.”

Billings drew back, but his hands remained on Cole’s scalp. “Whatcha gotta do, Jimbo, is take it easy, relax into things.” His fingers tightened until Cole’s eyes burned with tears. “We all gonna get along fine, if you just relax.”

Cole gasped with pain. Billings watched him, then finally withdrew his hands. “That’s better,” he said, smiling. “Now let’s get you some clothes, Jimbo, introduce you to your new pals.”

He stood while they dressed him in brown polyester trousers and a cheap Orlon shirt. “Nice.” Billings grinned, tugging at Cole’s sleeve. “Now let’s go on down to the clubhouse, okay, Jimbo?”

He shuffled through a long, cheerless hallway, passing people dressed like himself in ill-fitting clothes, their expressions slack and incurious. At the end of the corridor a door yawned open onto a bright dayroom.

“Here you go, Jimbo,” Billings said, ushering Cole inside.

Light poured through grilled windows onto the linoleum floor. A dozen men and women in basic Kmart castoffs and ratty bathrobes milled about, staring blankly out the windows or watching the raucous cartoons blaring from a wall-mounted television. In a corner a woman desultorily pushed puzzle pieces around on a table. But Cole saw only the light — brilliant sunlight streaming through the windows like golden syrup.

“Hey, Goines!” Billings beckoned to a young man in a plaid shirt pacing in front of a window. “Yo, Jeffrey, come here—”

The man named Jeffrey Goines bounded across the room. Billings clapped a hand on Cole’s shoulder and said, “Goines, this here is James. Whyncha show him around? Tell him the TV rules, show him the games and stuff, okay?”

Goines rocked back and forth on his heels. “How much you gonna pay me, huh? I’d be doing your job.”

Billings grinned. “Five thousand dollars, my man. That enough? I’ll wire it to your account as usual, okay?”

Goines but his lip thoughtfully. “Okay, Billings. Five thousand. That’s enough. Five thousand dollars. I’ll give him the Deluxe Mental Hospital Tour.”

Billings walked away, chuckling. Jeffrey turned to Cole and said conspiratorially, “Kid around, kid around. It makes them feel good, we’re all pals. We’re prisoners, they’re the guards, but it’s all in good fun, you see?”

Cole stared at this odd young man, nonplussed. Goines was young, dark-haired and blue-eyed, and as restive as a golden retriever. Compared with all those slack-jawed, empty-eyed patients staring vacantly at the TV, he looked like a preppy young intern, except for a certain furtiveness about his deepset eyes.

“C’mon,” Jeffrey said. Cole nodded and followed him to the tables set beside the windows. “Here’s the games,” Jeffrey announced disdainfully, flicking at the edge of a Monopoly set. “Games vegetize you. If you play the games, you’re voluntarily taking a tranquilizer.”

Cole said nothing, turning his head to stare down at a partially completed jigsaw puzzle showing a lion, sheep, birds, and bored-looking wolves all huddled together beneath some trees. A woman orderly patiently helped a man with trembling hands put two pieces together. THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM, the puzzle box read.

“I guess they gave you some ‘chemical restraints,’ huh?” Jeffrey asked, darting a glance at him. “What’d they give you? Thorazine? Haldol?” Cole stared at him blankly. “No? How about Meprobamate? How much? Learn your drugs, know your doses.”

“I need to make a telephone call.”

Jeffrey gave a barking laugh. “A telephone call? That’s communication with the outside world! Doctor’s discretion. Hey, if all these nuts could just make phone calls, it could spread! Insanity oozing through telephone cables, oozing into the ears of all those poor sane people, infecting them! Wackos everywhere! A plague of madness.”

Abruptly, Jeffrey lowered his voice. “In fact, very few of us here are actually mentally ill,” he whispered slyly, leaning in close to Cole’s face. “I mean, I’m not saying you’re not mentally ill — for all I know you’re as crazy as a loon. But that’s not why you’re here. Why you’re here is because of the system.” He gestured at the television. “There’s the TV. It’s all right there. Commercials. We are not productive anymore; it’s all automated. What are we in for, then?”

Jeffrey Goines drew back, gazing at Cole expectantly. When Cole said nothing, he stabbed a finger in the air.

“We’re consumers!” Jeffrey cried triumphantly. “Okay, buy a lot of stuff, you’re a good citizen. But if you don’t buy a lot of stuff, you now what? You’re mentally ill! That’s a fact! If you don’t buy things — toilet paper, new cars, computerized blenders, electrically operated sexual devices—”

His voice grew more shrill, almost hysterical. “— SCREWDRIVERS WITH MINIATURE BUILT-IN RADAR DEVICES, STEREO SYSTEMS WITH BRAIN-IMPLANTED HEADPHONES, VOICE-ACTIVATED COMPUTERS!”

“Jeffrey.” The orderly at the puzzle table looked up and shook her head. “Take it easy, Jeffrey. Be calm.”

Jeffrey’s mouth snapped shut. He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, then continued in an utterly tranquil voice.

“So if you want to watch a particular program,” he said, oblivious to the fact that Cole was staring, mesmerized, at the television, “say, All My Children or something, you go to the charge nurse and tell her what day and time the show you want to see is on. But you have to tell her before the show is scheduled to be on. There was this one guy who was always requesting shows that had ALREADY PLAYED!”

Cole jumped, startled, as Jeffrey began picking up speed again.

“He couldn’t quite GRASP THE IDEA THAT THE CHARGE NURSE COULDN’T JUST MAKE IT BE YESTERDAY — TURN BACK TIME! HE WAS NUTS! A FRUITCAKE—”

“Okay, that’s it, Jeffrey,” the orderly said, exasperated. “You’re gonna get a shot. I warned you—”

Miraculously, Jeffrey calmed himself, smiling benignly at the woman and nodding. “Right! Right!” He laughed merrily. “I got ‘carried away’! Explaining the workings of… the institution.”

Cole stared at him, amazed at Goines’ transformation. Just then someone tapped him on the shoulder. Cole turned to see a somber-looking black man impeccably dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and elegantly subdued tie.

“I don’t really come from outer space,” the man said by way of introduction.

Jeffrey gave Cole a sly glance. “This is L.J. Washington, Jim. He doesn’t really come from outer space.”

L.J. Washington shot Goines a wounded look. “Don’t mock me, my friend,” he said, then went on to Cole. “It’s a condition called ‘mental divergence.’ I find myself on the planet Ogo, part of an intellectual elite, preparing to subjugate barbarian hordes on Pluto. But even though it’s a totally convincing reality in every way — I can feel, breathe, hear — nevertheless, Ogo is actually a construct of my psyche. I am mentally divergent in that I am escaping certain unnamed realities that plague my life here. When I stop going there, I will be well.”

Cole stared at the man’s dignified face, the carefully knotted tie about his neck, and his neat faux-alligator belt. Then, glancing down for the first time, Cole saw that L.J. Washington was wearing an immense pair of fuzzy orange bedroom slippers.

“And you, my friend?” Once more the black man touched Cole gently on the shoulder, gazing with intense concern into Cole’s eyes. “Are you, too, perhaps, divergent?”

Before he could reply, the muscular figure of Billings loomed up behind them. “Okay, Jimbo — conference time.” The orderly clapped a huge hand on Cole’s shoulder and directed him to the door. “Say good-bye to your pals. We’ll see ‘em again in a little while…”

“Conference?” Cole wondered, glancing back over his shoulder at L.J. Washington.

“That’s right. Psychiatric evaluation — pretty standard stuff, nothing to worry about,” Billings added soothingly. “Right this way…”

Cole walked with him, his head aching. His mouth was parched; the acrid taste was stronger now, and he knew it must have something to do with the drugs they’d given him the night before. As he padded down the dim hallway, voices wafted out from behind closed doors: walls and laughter, a nervous giggle. He passed a room where eyes glittered from the darkness of a raised bunk and someone whispered words he couldn’t understand. Cole blinked, the throbbing behind his eyes almost blinding him, and stared at his feet slapping against the linoleum in their flimsy cloth sneakers.

“Here we go—”

He was brought up short by Billings yanking at his arm. “This way, Jimbo. Doctor’s waiting.”

A metal door swung open, revealing a long, brightly lit room. In the middle, four men and women sat around a beat-up conference table littered with coffee mugs and manila folders. On the walls hung newspaper clippings, a schedule of recreational events, and a newsletter from Tulane Medical School. A bulletin board was plastered with notices advertising various meetings: ONE DAY AT A TIME! JUST TWELVE STEPS TO A NEW LIFE!

“Here he is, Dr. Fletcher,” Billings announced. “James Cole.”

The man sitting at the head of the table nodded at the orderly. Even inside, he wore tinted glasses, so that his gaze was inscrutable. “Thank you. Now, Mr. Cole—” he gestured at an empty chair “—please, have a seat.”

Cole remained standing as Dr. Fletcher went on. “I’ll introduce you to my colleagues: Dr. Goodin, Dr. Casey, I think you already know Dr. Railly…”

For a moment Cole’s eyes met Dr. Railly’s. Her expression was cool, almost icily professional, but her eyes held a glint of warmth. He shook his head agitatedly. “This is a place for crazy people! I’m not crazy!”

Dr. Casey frowned slightly. “We don’t use that term — ‘crazy’ — Mr. Cole.”

Cole’s voice rose. Behind him Billings crossed his arms and watched him knowingly. “You’ve got some real nuts in here! Listen to me, all of you! I know things you don’t. It’s going to be difficult for you to understand, but—”

“Mr. Cole,” broke in Dr. Fletcher. “Last night you told Dr. Railly you thought it was…”

He took a pencil from a small pile of writing implements and glanced at a file by his elbow. “… 1996.” His gaze flicked back to Cole. “How about right now? Do you know what year it is right now?”

“1990,” snapped Cole, gazing down at the conference table. “Look, I’m not confused. There’s been a mistake, I’ve been sent to the wrong place—”

He lunged, grabbing for Dr. Fletcher’s pencil. Just as his fingers closed around it, Billings huge hand enfolded Cole’s.

“Hey!” Cole cried. He looked up into Billings’ implacable face — no help there — then twisted and gazed imploringly at Dr. Railly. “Tell him — I’m not going to hurt anybody.”

“James, please.” Kathryn Railly turned in her chair to face him. “These are all doctors here — we want to help you.”

Beside her Owen Fletcher nodded. He adjusted his tinted glasses, looked down at the pencil in Cole’s fingers, and motioned at Billings. The orderly let go of Cole’s wrist. Cole quickly reached for a pad of paper and began drawing.

“Do any of you know anything about the Army of the Twelve Monkeys?” Cole held up the paper, now scrawled with the crude image of a dancing monkey. “They paint this, stencil it, on buildings all over the place.” He waved the paper excitedly, turning and holding it up so that first one doctor and then another could see it.

“Mr. Cole…” Dr. Casey murmured, shaking his head.

“Right.” Cole stared at the paper dejectedly, crumpled it, and dropped it to the floor. “I guess you wouldn’t. This is only 1990, they’re probably not active yet. That makes sense!” Billings eyed him watchfully as Cole began pacing the room.

“Okay — listen to me. Five billion people die in 1996 and 1997. Five billion.” Cole ran a hand over his stubbled scalp, then stabbed at the air with a finger. “Got that? Almost the whole population of the world! Only about one percent of us survived.”

He paused, saw the doctors exchange knowing looks.

“Are you going to save us, Mr. Cole?” Dr. Goodin asked.

Cole clenched his hands in frustration. “Save you! How can I save you? It already happened! I can’t save you! Nobody can! I’m simply trying to get some information to help people in the present so that they can—”

“The present?” Dr. Casey interrupted gently. “We’re not in the present now, Mr. Cole?”

“No, no, this is the past.” Cole’s voice broke as he said with exasperated patience. “This has already happened. Listen—”

Dr. Goodin raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Cole, you believe 1996 is the ‘present’ then, is that it?”

“No, 1996 is the past, too. Look…” Cole stopped and stared at each of them in turn. In their eyes he saw nothing but cool detachment and, perhaps pity.

“You don’t believe me,” he said at last. Above the bruises on his face, his cheeks reddened. “You think I’m crazy, but I’m not crazy. I’m a convict, sure, I have a quick temper, but I’m as sane as anyone in this room. I…”

Tap. A small sound disoriented him. Tap, tap, tap.

Cole looked around, feeling a faint prickling on his neck, a growing sense of unease.

Tap, tap…

That noise, where had he heard that—?

“Can you tell us the name of the prison you’ve come from?” Kathryn Railly asked softly.

Tap. Cole felt sweat breaking out on his face and chest. Tap, tap. He glanced down, glimpsed cold eyes behind the tinted lenses, a pencil twitching in Fletcher’s hand. Tap.

The pencil. Memory flooded him. The microbiologist at the camp — he wore glasses like those, didn’t he? Or had that been another doctor? a policeman? His icy voice had demanded, His icy voice had demanded, Why did you volunteer?

Tap.

“Does this bother you Mr. Cole?”

Cole jumped as Dr. Fletcher’s voice boomed out. The doctor held up a yellow pencil between two long thin white fingers. “It’s just a pencil,” said Fletcher. He smiled disarmingly. “Nervous habit of mine, that’s all…”

Cole shook his head, forcing the image of that other man, that other room, from his thoughts. “No!” He took a deep breath, willing himself to stay calm. “Look, I just don’t belong here, okay? What I need to do is make a telephone call to straighten everything out.”

Fletcher nodded, infinitely patient. “Who would you call, Mr. Cole, to straighten everything out?”

“Scientists. They’ll want to know they sent me to the wrong time. I can leave a message for them, on voice mail. They monitor it from the present.”

Fletcher tipped his head. “These scientists, Mr. Cole. Are they doctors like ourselves?”

Murmurs as the other psychiatrists glanced at one another.

“No!” Cole exclaimed, confused. “I mean, yes… Please — one call!”

He looked desperately at Dr. Railly, his pleading eyes locking with hers. Without speaking, she nodded. A moment later Dr. Goodin handed a telephone to Cole. Cole punched the numbers in and held it to his ear as the doctors watched.

Brring. Brring.

Cole swallowed, his mouth dry, as a woman’s voice shrilled. Hello?”

“Uh, yes—” He turned so that he wouldn’t see the others staring at him. “This is, uh, James Cole. I need to leave a voice mail message for, uh—”

“Whaaaat? Voice mail? Is this a joke? James who?”

He stammered, “C-Cole. James Cole—”

“Never heard of you!”

Click!

He stared in dismay at the receiver in his hand. Sympathetically, Railly reached for it and hung it up as the others looked on.

“It wasn’t who you expected?” she asked gently.

“It was some lady. She didn’t know anything.”

“Perhaps it was a wrong number…?”

“No.” Cole shook his head numbly. “That’s the reason they chose me. I remember things.”

Dr. Railly stared at him and suddenly frowned. “James, where did you grow up? Was it around here? Around Baltimore?”

“What? Cole replied distractedly. At the table, Railly’s colleagues watched her with new interest. Fletcher’s eyes narrowed and the pencil quivered in his fingers: was she showing some special interest in this patient?

Kathryn Railly shook her head slowly. Her frown faded; she was still looking at Cole, but it was as though she was seeing someone else there, someone not wearing brown polyester pants and worn white sneakers and a plastic ID bracelet. “I have the… strangest feeling I’ve met you before… a long time ago, perhaps. Were you ever—”

Tap. Dr. Railly!” Fletcher called. His pencil danced dangerously along the table edge. “Dr. —”

“Wait!” Cole broke in excitedly. “This is only 1990!” His eyes brightened as he went on, “I’m supposed to be leaving messages in 1996. It’s not the right number yet — that’s the problem. Damn! How can I contact them?”

Fletcher stared pointedly at Dr. Railly, one eyebrow raised. Railly flushed. Recovering her composure, she crossed the room to a small cabinet, unlocked it, and removed a bottle. “Here,” she said, turning briskly to Cole and pouring several pills into her palm. Her tone was cool. “James, I want you to take these.”

He stared at her, torn between disbelief and rage.

“Please,” she said. Behind her other doctors stood, gathering their things. “We let you make the phone call. But now, James—”

In her outstretched hand three red-and-white capsules glinted. Directly behind her he could hear Billings waiting impatiently.

“James,” she repeated, her voice no longer gentle. “Now, I want you to trust me.”

He is at the airport again. Outside the sky is leaden, threatening. Flies batter helplessly at the observation window where he stands with his parents, staring out at a plane touching down on the runway. He thinks that he has never seen anything so beautiful, the arrowed wings and sleek white body settling smoothly onto the tarmac.

“Flight 784 now boarding at Gate…”

His mouth is open to ask his father if that is the plane they are going to take, when suddenly behind them there is a shout. He turns to see a ponytailed man in gaudy checked pants running past. The man is glancing over his shoulder. He doesn’t see the boy; when his duffel bag slams painfully into Cole’s stomach, the man glances down and yells, “Watch it!”

Cole starts. He knows that voice — but before he can say anything he hears a woman screaming, “Noooooo!”

The ponytailed man is gone. Another man sprints around the corner — a blond man in a Hawaiian shirt, his eyes wide as he runs toward the gate. As he passes Cole he turns, so that the boy sees his face is melting: his mouth is twisted, his mustache dangling from his upper lip. Cole gasps, but then a shot thunders through the concourse and he is blinded by dazzling white light.

“Wh—?”

He sucked his breath in and blinked awake. A few feet away a flashlight hovered in the air like ball lightning, then moved slowly on. Disoriented, Cole felt for the bedclothes: sheets, smooth and clean though rumpled, not the filthy padding strewn on the floor of his underground cell. But all around him he could hear snores and soft breathing, the occasional moan — had he been taken to another part of the prison compound? Just then he heard a low voice — a woman’s voice. He turned, careful not to make any noise, peering into the darkness until he made out two figures. A female nurse and another orderly, both wearing white uniforms, walked from bed to bed, pausing with the flashlight as they checked each occupant.

Not the prison, then; at least, not that prison. Cole watched as the flashlight bobbed slowly down one row of beds and up another, until finally the two figures left, silently closing the door behind them.

All was dark and still, save for the murmur of restless sleepers. Cole fixed his gaze on a barred window at the far end of the room. Moonlight slanted in pale rods to the floor, made an abstract pattern of stripes and squares. For a long moment Cole stared at it, then quickly glanced around at the sleeping patients. Without a sound he slipped from his bed. Walking stealthily between the others, he made his way to the window and peered out.

Overhead the moon hung, its silvery glow filtering through the leaves of a solitary oak. Beneath the tree a couple stood embracing. Moonlight glinted off the woman’s dark hair and the curve of the man’s arm. Cole stared, entranced, his fingertips grazing the metal grille.

“It won’t work. You can’t open it.”

Cole whirled to see someone sitting up in the bed nearest the window. It was Jeffrey Goines.

“You think you can remove the grille and but you can’t,” Jeffrey went on in a matter-of-fact tone. “It’s welded.”

Cole turned back to the grille and gave it a perfunctory tug. In the moonlight, Jeffrey’s teeth shone in a grin.

“See? I toldja.” He waved loftily at the darkened room around them. “And all the doors are locked, too. They’re protecting the people on the outside from us. But the people outside are as crazy as us…”

Jeffrey’s voice droned on as Cole stared at the windowsill. A small spider crept across the peeling paint, pausing now and then as though it knew it was being watched. Cole stared at it, fascinated, his hand groping automatically for a specimen bottle at his waist.

“Shit.” Jeffrey suddenly fell silent. There was a click from the room behind them. Alarmed, Cole grabbed the spider and scrambled across the floor and back into bed, throwing the covers over himself just as the door opened and an orderly peeked inside. The blade of a flashlight probed the darkness, resting for a moment upon Cole’s face, his eyes closed and mouth slightly ajar as he breathed softly. In his hand he could feel the spider struggling to free itself. After a moment the flashlight clicked off. The door closed. All was silent, until Cole heard Jeffrey’s hoarse whisper.

“You know what ‘crazy’ is?” Jeffrey went on, as though nothing had happened. “‘Crazy’ is ‘majority rules.’”

Cole sat up in bed, barely listening as he peered into his closed fist at the spider. Jeffrey took a deep breath and intoned, “Take germs, for example.”

“Germs?” Cole shot him a look, the spider scrabbling furiously at his palm.

Jeffrey nodded. “Germs,” he repeated earnestly. “In the eighteenth century there was no such thing! Nobody’d ever imagined such a thing — no sane person, anyway. Then along comes this doctor — Semmelweiss, I think. He tries to convince people — other doctors, mostly — that there are these teeny tiny invisible ‘bad things’ called germs that get into your body and make you sick! He’s trying to get doctors to wash their hands.”

Jeffrey suddenly leaned forward, leering, eyes wide as he mimed astonishment. “What is this guy?” he said in a funny high-pitched voice. “‘Crazy?’ Teeny tiny invisible whaddayou call ‘em — germs?!”

Jeffrey cackled. Cole glanced at him, then back at his hand, trying to figure out what to do with the spider. Jeffrey continued, oblivious.

“Cut to the twentieth century! Last week, in fact, before I got dragged into this hellhole. I order a burger in this fast-food joint. The waiter drops it on the floor. The he picks it up, wipes it off, hands it to me — like it was all okay…”

Cole nodded absently, holding his hand up to his face. Jeffrey punched angrily at the bedclothes and hissed, “What about the germs?” I say. He goes, ‘I don’t believe in germs. Germs are just a plot they made up so they can sell you disinfectants and soap.’” Jeffrey gave a triumphant hoot. “Now, he’s crazy, right?”

Suddenly Jeffrey turned and stared at Cole with huge eyes. “Hey, you believe in germs, don’t you?”

Cole stared back, his hand poised before his face. As Jeffrey watched, he popped the spider into his mouth and swallowed it.

“I’m not crazy,” Cole said after a moment.

Jeffrey nodded somberly. “Of course not. I never thought you were.” He tilted his head toward the moonlit window. “You wanted to escape, right? That’s very sane.” His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “I can help you,” he said, his blue eyes glowing. “You want me to, don’t you? Get you out?”

Cole shook his head. “If you know how to escape, why don’t you—”

Jeffrey sat up very straight. “Why don’t I escape? That’s what you were going to ask me, right?” He laughed, as though Cole were a child who’d said something clever. “‘Cause I’d be crazy to escape! I’m all taken care of, see? I’ve sent out word.”

Cole frowned. “What’s that mean?”

“It means that I’ve managed to contact certain underlings, evil spirits, secretaries of secretaries, and assorted minions, who will contact my father.” Jeffrey’s voice rose, his blue eyes boring into Cole. “When he learns I’m in this kind of place, he’ll have them transfer me to one of those classy joints where they treat you properly. LIKE A GUEST! LIKE A PERSON!”

Cole looked around nervously and edged into the center of his bed.

“SHEETS!” Jeffrey shouted, heedless of the other patients waking in the room around them. “TOWELS! LIKE A BIG HOTEL WITH GREAT DRUGS FOR THE NUTCASE LUNATIC MANIAC DEVILS—”

Cole glanced around to see people sitting up in their beds. A few whimpered. Most watched Jeffrey with the same blank interest they’d shown the television in the dayroom.

“THAT’S RIGHT! WHEN MY FATHER FINDS OUT—”

With a bang the door flew open. Patients huddled back into their beds as the night nurse and two brawny orderlies burst into the dorm.

“Okay, that’s it, Jeffrey,” an orderly yelled. Too late Jeffrey tried to calm himself.

“Sorry. Really sorry,” he announced, taking a deep breath. “I know — got a little agitated. The thought of escaping crossed my mind and suddenly—”

The orderlies grabbed him, one to each arm, as the nurse flourished a hypodermic needle.

“—suddenly I felt like BENDING THE FUCKING BARS BACK, RIPPINGOFF THE GODDAMN WINDOW FRAMES AND — EATING THEM! AND LEAPING, LEAPING—”

Cole watched, fascinated and horrified, as the nurse administered the medication and the orderlies began to drag Jeffrey across the room.

“You dumb assholes!” Jeffrey shrieked, trying vainly to shake them loose. “I’m a mental patient! I’m supposed to act out! Wait till you morons find out who I am! My father’s gonna be really upset. AND WHEN MY FATHER GETS UPSET, THE GROUND SHAKES! MY FATHER IS GOD! I WORSHIP MY FATHER!”

The door slammed shut as they hauled him into the corridor. For several minutes Jeffrey’s shrill voice echoed back into the dorm, then, at last, there was silence. Cole swallowed and looked around, his heart pounding.

The room was utterly still. In the window the moon hung, crisscrossed by bars of black and gray. From the other beds came the sounds of soft breathing, mumbled nonsense words as once more the patients slept, undisturbed. Only in one bed near the window someone still sat upright, his dark eyes staring with pity at the dorm’s locked door.

“You see, he, too, is mentally divergent,” L.J. Washington said, turning to gaze at Cole. “But he does not accept it.” He raised one hand and gestured gracefully at Cole, as though delivering a benediction, and added, “It is a better thing if you accept it, my friend. A far, far better thing.” And with a peaceful smile, L.J. Washington lay back upon the bed and went to sleep.

The next morning Cole ate with the other patients in the psychiatric wing’s common dining room, cold scrambled eggs and damp toast supervised by the cool gaze of Billings and another orderly. A nurse came around, administering meds. When she reached Cole she glanced down at her clipboard, frowning, then went on to the woman next to him. The nurse left; another patient nudged him and pointed to where they were to take their breakfast trays. Cole followed him, then under Billings’ careful scrutiny made his way with the other patients to the dayroom.

The television was already on, tuned to a morning talk show. Dull-eyed patients slouched in cheap plastic chairs and the frayed couch, staring blankly t the TV. Cole wondered if anyone would even notice if he turned it off. He yawned, scratching idly at his sleeve. When he’d gotten up this morning, he’d found that the tiny dresser beside his bed had been outfitted with several flannel shirts and worn polyester pants. The shirts were too tight and chafed at his chest and arms, but when he mentioned this to Billings, the orderly had only shrugged and said, “Hey man, this ain’t The Gap. Just get dressed, okay?”

Cole tugged at the collar of his shirt, wincing, then found an empty seat by a table strewn with magazines and coloring books, and a plastic bucket holding crayons and magic markers.

“Good morning,” a sonorous voice pronounced.

Cole looked up and nodded at L.J. Washington. “Morning.”

I wonder where he gets his clothes, he thought as Washington padded by, resplendent in three-piece suit and fuzzy bedroom slippers. Cole sank into his chair as more patients filed into the room. Except for Washington, none of them paid him the slightest bit of attention. For a few minutes he sat watching them, then began sifting through the pile of magazines. Pages were torn from all of them. In some, pictures had been defaced with obscenities or crudely drawn figures of men and women. Cole finally settled on a year-old issue of Women’s World: it had wide margins, and only a few pages were missing. He groped among the basket of dried-out markers and pencil nubbins until he found a purple crayon long enough for him to hold comfortably. Balancing the magazine on his knee, he began writing furiously in its margins, turning the magazine upside down and sideways when he ran out of room.

He worked like that for an hour, undisturbed. In the room around him people sat quietly, the near silence broken only by the door opening to let in another patient and L.J. Washington’s dignified greeting.

“Good morning, Sandra. Good morning, Dwight.”

Every now and then Cole glanced up at the television. The segment on Frisbee-catching dogs had ended. Now the screen showed the gritty videotaped image of an animal, a lab monkey with shaved head, its limp body heavily restrained and so covered with wires it was difficult to make out the pallid brown form. As a narrator intoned, the monkey convulsed pathetically, its eyes wide and terrified, yellow teeth bared. Cole grimaced. He glanced around to see how the others were reacting to this disturbing image: not at all. He went back to writing in his magazine.

“Torture! Experiments!” A voice shattered the dayroom’s drugged calm. Cole covered his magazine and looked up to see Jeffrey striding across the room. “We’re all monkeys!”

With a small bow, Jeffrey grabbed a plastic chair and pulled it over beside Cole. “Your servant, sir,” he announced with mock politesse.

Cole stared at him in dismay. “Your eye,” he said, pointing at Jeffrey’s face. The skin around one eye bloomed purple and livid green. “They hurt you!”

Jeffrey grinned, cocking a thumb at the television. “Not as bad as what they’re doing to that kitty.”

Cole turned. On TV, more taped footage showed a laboratory cat running in mad circles, eating its own tail while lab workers watched impassively. The cat’s entire body was shaved of fur. Droplets of blood flew from its tail as it clawed in anguish at the raw flesh.

“These dramatic videotapes, secretly obtained by animal rights activists, have aroused public concern,” a news reporter intoned in a voice-over. “But authorities say there is little they can do if…”

“Look at them?” Cole exclaimed angrily. “They’re asking for it! Maybe people deserve to be wiped out!”

Jeffrey laughed and leaned back in his chair; he might have been happily watching a set at Wimbledon. “Wiping out the human race! That’s a great idea! But it’s more of a long-term thing — right now we have to focus on more immediate goals.” His voice dropped to a whisper, and he reached to touch Cole’s wrist reassuringly. “I didn’t say a word about you-know-what.”

Cole stared at him blankly. “What are you talking about?”

Jeffrey winked. “You know. Your plan. Emancipation!” He glanced down and for the first time noticed Cole’s magazine. “What’re you writing? You a reporter?”

“It’s private,” Cole shoved the magazine under one arm.

“A lawsuit? You going to sue them?” Jeffrey’s eyes shone with excitement.

A shadow fell across the table. Billings loomed up beside Cole, holding out a tiny white plastic cup full of pills.

“Yo, James — time to take your meds.”

“No.” Cole shook his head.

“Doctor’s orders.” Billings produced another cup — plastic, everything here was plastic — this one full of water, and handed it to Cole. “Come on now, Jimbo. This’ll help you feel better.”

Cole sat rigidly and stared at the pills. “What are they?”

Billings shrugged. “Not my job to know that, Jimbo. Drink up—”

He swallowed them. Jeffrey watched, his face expressionless.

“Now you boys be good,” Billings said, crumpling the plastic cups and turning away. “Play nice.”

“For the next few minutes Cole clutched his magazine under his arm, waiting impatiently for Jeffrey to leave. But then, slowly, the sense of urgency faded. He yawned, felt the magazine slide to the floor beside him. He left it there, and after a moment dropped the crayon as well. A bitter taste welled up in the back of his throat, but it no longer bothered him. He found himself yawning repeatedly, although he didn’t feel particularly sleepy. That didn’t bother him, either. After a while he must have dozed; when he opened his eyes, the TV was showing brightly lit scenes of a beautiful young couple romping ecstatically in the surf.

“Take a chance,” a voice urged him. “Live the moment. Beautiful sunshine…”

Nodding and yawning, Cole stood. He dragged his chair closer to the television, settling between two women staring slack-jawed at the screen.

“…gorgeous beaches. Live the dream. The Florida Keys!”

Abruptly the scene cut from the frolicking couple to a still image of the Marx Brothers. A different voice announced, “We’ll return to Monkey Business right after these messages.”

“Hey, that’s pretty good.” Jeffrey sidled up behind Cole, nudging him as he slid into the chair next to him. “Monkey Business. Monk Key Business.”

Cole turned, bemused, as Jeffrey winked and grinned. “Get it, Jimbo? Monk — Key. Monk — KEY!”

Jeffrey held his fist out to Cole and flashed it open so that for one quick moment Cole glimpsed what it held: a key.

“Huh?” Cole shook his head groggily, then looked back up at the television, where an enormous bear moved purposefully through a redwood forest.

“If you see a bearish future,” a narrator droned, “consider the changes sweeping the world…”

Cole stared at the screen and nodded obediently.

“Wooo, they really dosed you up, bro,” Jeffrey said, whistling. “Major load! But listen up — try and get it together! Focus! Focus!”

“…and once you have considered, think of the opportunities they offer you…”

Cole turned his bleary gaze back on Jeffrey. “The plan,” Jeffrey whispered, aggrieved. “Remember? I did my part!”

“What?”

“Not what, babe — when!”

Cole blinked. “When?”

With a glance over his shoulder, Jeffrey passed the key into Cole’s hand. “Now!”

Cole shook his head. “I don’t—”

“But remember,” the TV said warningly, “to invest wisely, you need a partner…”

“YES!” shrieked Jeffrey, leaping to his feet. “NOW! BUY NOW! STOCKS AND BONDS! NO MORE MONKEY BUSINESS! BUY NOW!”

Cole watched dumbfounded as Jeffrey danced crazily in front of him, hands flailing madly, his hair falling across his face.

“YES!” Jeffrey sang. “YES YES YES! ENHANCE YOUR PORTFOLIO NOW!”

Voices on the other side of the room: Cole looked over and saw Billings heading toward Jeffrey, his brooding face angry. Behind him another orderly punched numbers into a beeper.

“BUY! SELL! SEIZE THE OPPORTUNITY!” cried Jeffrey, his blue eyes blazing as he pirouetted in front of Cole. “ACT NOW! DON’T DELAY!” He danced over to where the same dull-eyed woman was laboriously moving puzzle pieces across a card table. “THIS CHANCE WON’T COME AGAIN!” With a gleeful laugh Jeffrey swept his hand across the table, sending the puzzle flying into a thousand bits. The woman gazed at the floor in disbelief, then raised her stricken face to Jeffrey. Blissfully he spun away. As Billings lunged for him, Jeffrey grabbed another patient and shoved him at the orderly.

“DON’T MISS THIS ONCE IN A LIFETIME OFFER…”

“I’m getting dizzy!” a heavyset woman wailed as Jeffrey leaped past. “Make him stop.”

“Five hundred dollars!” an old man shouted suddenly into Cole’s ear. “I got five hundred dollars! I’m insured!”

Jeffrey paused. “OPPORTUNITY!” he crowed, gazing directly at Cole. “DEFINITELY! A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY! OPENING NOW! NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN TO SEIZE THE MOMENT!”

Cole shook his head. The taste in the back of his throat was enough to make him gag. Jeffrey’s words were like some thick syrup dripping slowly into his consciousness. It wasn’t until he heard the dayroom door open and saw two more burly orderlies come running in after Jeffrey that it finally struck him that Jeffrey was sending him a message.

“YES! YES! MASTERCARD! VISA! THE KEY TO HAPPINESS!”

One of the orderlies paused, brandishing a hefty key ring, and quickly locked the door before turning his attention to the raving patient.

“SEIZE THE MOMENT!” Jeffrey shrieked, bounding past Billings and the other orderly. Even from across the room, Cole could see his blue eyes glowing madly as Jeffrey waved his hands. “GET RICH! NOW’S THE TIME! GO FOR IT!”

“Go for it,” Cole repeated. He looked down at the key in his hand and looked up in time to see Billings tripping over a chair as he tried to tackle Jeffrey.

“God damn you, Jeffrey, quit playing the fool!” Billings panted.

Cole hesitated. He glanced at the door, trying to get his eyes to focus. His hand tightened on the key in his palm as the orderlies finally grabbed Jeffrey and brought him crashing to the floor.

“LAST CHANCE! LAST CHANCE! Hey — ow!”

Before he had a chance to think better of it, Cole staggered to the door. Feebly he stabbed at it with the key, trying vainly to find the hole. He glanced nervously over his shoulder to where the orderlies were swarming Jeffrey. Suddenly the key slid in.

“Damn,” he whispered thickly: it wouldn’t turn.

“Hey.”

Cole jumped, turned to see an elderly man in flannel pajamas watching him with pale watery eyes. “Florida, now that would be the place to go,” the man said dreamily. “The Keys are lovely this time of year.”

Unnerved, Cole desperately tried the key again.

It turned.

“Be careful,” the old man said as Cole slipped through the door and into the echoing hallway. “J. Edgar Hoover isn’t really dead.”

Elsewhere in the county hospital, Kathryn Railly headed to her office. As she walked she riffled through the morning’s stack of messages: pharmaceutical updates, urgent messages from parents and spouses inquiring after patients, notice of a change in health club hours for members. As she rounded a corner, Dr. Casey’s head popped out of his office, waving a page torn from a magazine.

“Kathryn! Hang on—” She paused as Casey strode up beside her. “This was in my box, but I have a slight suspicion it wasn’t meant for me.”

Kathryn looked at the ragged magazine page in his hand, frowning as he began to read with exaggerated emphasis.

“You are the most beetifool woman I have ever sin. You live in a beetifool worl. But you don’t know it. You have freedum, sunshine, air you can breeeth.”

Her pale eyes narrowed and she gave him a sad smile. “Cole. James Cole, right?”

Casey held out a hand to silence her, adjusting his glasses as he continued, “I wood do anything to stay her, but I must leave. Pleese, help me.”

Kathryn’s smile faded. “Poor man…”

Thudding footsteps made them both turn in time to see Dr. Goodin racing around the corner.

“Hey, Kathryn!” he shouted, panting. “James Cole is one of yours, right? Well, he eloped! Last seen, he was up on nine!”

Kathryn and Casey stared, dumbfounded, then took off after him.

A security guard cornered Cole near Radiology, where he was backing out of the CAT-scan chamber. It took three guards and four orderlies to subdue him, but not without a fight. By the time they got Cole strapped to a gurney, additional security had to be called, and an ambulance.

“Please… you got to understand, it’s a mistake, okay?” he pleaded.

“Shut up,” ordered Billings.

Kathryn drew her breath in sharply when she saw them wheeling the gurney toward the isolation room. Billings’ right eye was badly swollen, and one of the security guards dabbed blood from a nasty gash on his cheek. On the gurney Cole struggled in vain with the restraints. His face was flushed and blotchy, his pupils dilated. She was stunned by how much urgency he could still pump into his slurred words — he’d had enough Halcion to trank out someone twice his size.

“Dr. Railly?” Billings’ voice broke her reverie. She moved aside to let them wheel Cole into the room.

“Yes,” she replied. She tapped the hypo, checking once more for air bubbles, then turned to Cole. He stared at her with wide mad eyes, and she thought back to a night last summer, when she’d accidentally run over a raccoon. It had looked at her like that, scarcely comprehending and numb with pain, its teeth bared in a bloody grimace.

“No more drugs. Please…” Cole whispered.

Railly swallowed, forcing herself to stare at his hand and not his eyes. “It’s just something to calm you,” she said as she pressed the needle against the skin of his upper arm. “I have to do this, James. You’re very confused.”

Before one of the guards could question her, she turned and fled, trying not to remember how, a year before, she had heard the raccoon snarling and thrashing at the side of the road as she drove away.

She made her rounds, then returned to her office. On her desk was a message for her to meet with Dr. Fletcher in the conference room.

“Shit,” she murmured, rubbing her throbbing temples. She gulped down several ibuprofen, chasing them with a mouthful of tepid Evian water, and hurried back into the hall.

In the conference room, Dr. Fletcher sat between Goodin and Casey. All three looked tense, Goodin bordering on outright anger. Kathryn felt herself grow hot, flashing back to high school visits to the principal’s office.

“Kathryn, sit down.”

Fletcher waved at the chair across from him. Kathryn glanced at it, then quickly moved another chair to the table and sat in it. Fletcher’s eye twitched as he reached for his pencil and exclaimed, “Four years! We’ve worked together for four years, Kathryn, I’ve never seen you like this before.”

Kathryn opened her mouth and Fletcher pointed his pencil at her. “Now please, Kathryn, stop being so defensive. This isn’t an inquisition.”

“I didn’t think I was being defensive. I was just—”

The pencil came down, hard, on the edge of the conference table. “He should have been in restraints. It was bad judgment on your part, plain and simple. Why not just cop to it?”

Kathryn started to snap back, then thought better of it. Instead she stared at the table for a long moment.

“Okay, it was bad judgment,” she said at last. An unwanted vision rose before her: Cole’s helpless form strapped to the gurney with canvas-and-metal bonds. “Bu it have the strangest feeling about him, I’ve seen him somewhere and—”

“He’s already put two policemen in the hospital,” Fletcher interrupted angrily. “And now we have an orderly with a broken arm and a security officer with a fractured skull!”

“I said it was bad judgment! What else do you want me to say?”

Fletcher leaned back in his chair. “You see what I mean? You’re being defensive.” He turned to Dr. Casey. “Isn’t she being defensive, Bob?”

Before Casey could reply, there was a tentative knock at the door. Kathryn swung around and saw Billings holding an ice pack to his face as he said, “Uh, Dr. Fletcher? We got another — situation.”

“Christ,” Fletcher swore, slamming his hand against the table. This time the pencil snapped in two. “Now that is it?”

Billings pulled the ice pack away from his cheek and winced. “I think you better see for yourself, Doctor.”

They filed into the hall behind Fletcher, Billings studiously avoiding Kathryn’s eyes as he led them toward isolation.

In front of the entrance to the padded cell a small crowd was gathered, several security guards and a day nurse. Fletcher bulled his way through them, shoved the heavy door open and stared inside.

“Where is he?”

Behind him Billings shook his head. “He’s — he’s gone, Doctor.”

“He was in full restraints?” Fletcher’s voice rose dangerously. Kathryn braced herself for what was coming. “And the door was locked?”

Billings nodded. “Yes, sir. Did it myself.”

“And he was fully sedated?”

Kathryn met his accusing gaze and replied, “He was fully sedated!”

Fletcher pounded the door’s padded interior. “Are you trying to tell me,” he exploded, “that a fully sedated, fully restrained patient somehow slipped out a vent, replaced the grille behind him, and that he’s wriggling through the ventilation system right now?”

All eyes fixed on what Fletcher was pointing at: a vent set a good eight feet from the floor and covered with a heavy stainless steel grille. It was all of five inches square.

“Is that what you’re trying to tell me?” Fletcher repeated, glaring at Billings. The orderly shrugged uneasily, his gaze still on the vent.

“Uh, yeah, Dr. Fletcher,” he said as more security personnel came running down the hall to join them. “I guess that’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

The glass that makes up the observation window is thick and whorled with dust and grease, the smeared impressions left by a thousand other children pressing their faces against its cool surface. Outside a 747 climbs cleanly into the air, the ground shimmering in the heat of its engines.

“Flight 784 to San Francisco is now boarding at Gate Thirty-Eight. Flight 784…”

Behind him are voices, the first hesitant cries of a gathering crowd. He whirls, trying to shrug off his father’s hand, and sees a blond ponytailed man go barreling past. The little crowd scatters as travelers dive for cover, and for an instant he glimpses a woman standing there, her hands drawn to her mouth as she shouts.

“Noooooooo!”

He frowns. There is something familiar about her — the pale blue eyes, the determined yet graceful set of her mouth, the angle at which her head is cocked. The image of another woman comes to him. A woman with dark hair and pitying eyes, a doctor — what was her name? A doctor—

Yet the woman in the airport is very blond and heavily made up: her full mouth a gleaming slash of red, her pale skin shadowed by mascara. Her blue eyes are wide, her mouth is open but oddly unmoving as she bleats in an unearthly voice—

The Freedom for Animals Association now boarding on Second Avenue. Secret Headquarters, Gate Sixteen. Army of the Twelve Monkeys…”

“Cole, you moron! Wake up!”

His eyes blinked open as the digitized monotone of a PA system continued to drone on in that same bloodless tone—

“…of the Twelve Monkeys. They’re the ones who are going to do it.”

“Cole!”

Cole sat slumped in a chair. He tried to straighten but could not, he was too weak; he could only blink again, focusing on the source of the sound: a tape recorder set on a table. Behind it was a row of scowling faces. The camp scientists, or were they doctors? He closed his eyes for a moment, fighting a wave of pain and nausea.

“…I can’t do anything more. I have to go now. Have a merry Christmas.”

He opened his eyes. The voice died abruptly as the tape ran off the reel, flapping noisily in the too-still room.

“Well?” It was the earnest astrophysicist with the elegant gray hair and one gold earring.

Cole swallowed, his mouth dry and chalky. “Uh, what?” he croaked.

“He’s drugged out of his mind!” one of the other scientists snapped. “He’s completely zoned out.”

The astrophysicist ignored him. “Cole,” he asked, pointing at the tape recorder, “did you or did you not record that message?”

Cole blinked painfully, trying to get a better look at the tape recorder. “Un, that message… me?”

“It’s a reconstruction of a deteriorated recording,” one of the other scientists explained with forced composure. “A weak signal on our number. We have to piece them together one word at a time, like jigsaw puzzles.”

“We just finished rebuilding this,” the astrophysicist broke in. “Did you or did you not make this call?”

Anger finally fought its way through Cole’s haze. “I couldn’t call! You sent me to the wrong year! It was 1990!”

“1990!”

The scientists turned to one another, whispering frantically. Then, “You’re certain of that?” one asked. Before Cole could answer, the microbiologist broke in, his black spectacles glinting in the dim light.

“What did you do with your time, Cole?” he asked in an ominous voice. “Did you waste it on drugs? Women?”

Cole said thickly, “They forced me to take drugs.”

“Forced you!” The microbiologist looked at the others in disbelief. “Why would someone force you to take drugs?”

“I got into trouble,” Cole spoke slowly, trying to piece it all together for himself as well as his anxious audience. “I got arrested. But I still got you a specimen, a spider. But I didn’t have anyplace to put it, so I ate it. It was the wrong year anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

His voice trailed off. The scientists stared at him incredulously, then turned and once more began whispering among themselves. Cole struggled to keep his eyes open. The effort of speaking had left him exhausted. His head ached, and his jaw — had he been struck? He couldn’t remember, didn’t want to remember.

His head lolled forward. His vision clouded so that the face in front of him — the microbiologist — blurred, suddenly took on the sharper contours and glittering eyes of the man in the conference room. The man with the pencil: Dr. Fletcher. Cole sucked his breath in, forced himself to stare until the outlines of the man’s face softened and he could see him again — not Dr. Fletcher but the microbiologist, a pencil twitching between his fingers. With a small cry Cole slumped forward, and the room went black.

He had no idea how long he slept, if indeed he slept at all. Once upon a time, Cole had believed there was a gap between wakefulness and sleep, between life and dream-life, between what he recalled as real and what he knew to be fragments of that other, twilight world.

But now all that had changed. Like the microbiologist’s face, his perceptions melted and were then reformed by whatever weird visual or auditory cues his mind picked up on. Brainwashed prisoners felt like this, and drug addicts, and schizophrenics…

Which was he?

“Cole!”

He woke with a start. Around him all was dark, save for where a slide was being projected on a torn screen.

“What about it, Cole?” the voice boomed. “Did you see this when you went back?”

Cole squinted. The slide showed stenciled graffiti in dull red paint, a circle enclosing twelve dancing monkeys.

“Uh, n—no, sir,” Cole stammered. “I—”

Click. Another slide appeared. Protesters, young skinheads and angry women waving placards and sheets spray-painted with slogans.

Behind placards showing grimacing capuchin monkeys and blinded cats, policemen in riot gear confronted the crowd.

“What about these people?” the astrophysicist’s voice was low. “Did you see any of these people?”

Click. A close-up of the same slide, zooming in on the much-enlarged, blurry face of a man holding a torn photo of a vivisected monkey. The man’s face was as contorted as the animal’s, his rage mirroring the monkey’s anguish. Cole gaped at the slide in disbelief. Despite his long hair and glasses, the man resembled a slightly older Jeffrey Goines.

“Huh?” The astrophysicist tugged at his earring, urging Cole to go on. “Him? You saw that man?”

Cole nodded. “Uh, I think so. In the mental hospital.”

“You were in a mental institution?” The slide disappeared in a blaze of light. Cole shielded his eyes as the microbiologist stepped in front of the screen. “You were sent to make very important observations!”

“You could have made a real contribution.” The astrophysicist shook his head, disappointed. “Helped to reclaim the planet.”

“As well as reducing your sentence,” one of the other scientists added darkly.

“The question is, Cole,” the microbiologist said, pulling up a chair beside him. “Do you want another chance?”

Behind him a jet engine shrieks, its wail nearly drowned by confused shouts, the sound of myriad footsteps running. When he raises his head, the boy sees the blond woman fleeing up the concourse, her bright hair flapping against her back. Someone bumps him and he opens his mouth to cry out.

“Who’s that?” a raspy voice demands.

Cole blinked awake.

“I said, who’s that?” The same voice, petulant now, almost mocking. Cole rubbed his eyes, his fingers smeared with grit, and stared blearily into the dimness. A tiny cell, with the same bare cement walls, the same high ceiling as the isolation room at the county hospital. There was no one in it but himself.

“Hey, Bob — what’s your name?”

Cole dug his elbows into his pallet and raised himself, looking around in vain for the source of the voice. Was this part of the dream? He shook his head, trying to force himself into full wakefulness. His held felt numb, his mouth was raw and tasted of bile.

“Yo, Bob! Whatsamatta, cat got your—”

Suddenly Cole’s eyes focused on a vent no wider than his hand, high up on the wall. Could the voice be coming from there? “Where are you?” he croaked.

The voice laughed with a nasty jubilance. “You can talk! Whaddja do, Bobby Boy? Volunteer?”

Cole squinted at the vent. “My name’s not Bob,” he said at last.

“No prob, Bob. Where’d they send you?”

Cole licked his lips, tasted dried blood. “Where are you?” he asked.

A pause. Then, “Another cell — maybe.”

Cole winced and pulled himself upright, straining to see something behind the vent’s steel mesh — a face, a shadow, a hand, anything. “What do you mean, ‘maybe’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“‘Maybe’ means maybe I’m in the next cell, another volunteer like you. Or maybe I’m in the central office spying on you for all those science bozos. Or, hey—”

The voice took on a more ominous tone. “Maybe I’m not even here. Maybe I’m just in your head. No way to confirm anything, right? Ha ha. Where’d they send you?”

Cole hunched silently on his pallet.

“Not talking, huh, Bob? That’s okay. I can handle that.”

“1990.”

“Ninety!” the voice exclaimed in exaggerated delight. “oooh! How was it? Good drugs? Lotsa pussy? Hey, Bob, you do the job? Didja find out the big info? Army of the Twelve Monkeys? Where the virus was prior to mutation?”

“It was supposed to be 1996.”

The voice cackled. “Science isn’t exactly an exact science with these clowns, but they’re getting better. Hey, you’re lucky you didn’t end up in ancient Egypt!”

A rattle of keys in the door behind Cole. He turned, painfully, as the voice whispered, “Shhh! They’re coming!”

The door creaked open and two guards stepped in, wheeling an ancient gurney. Cole let himself be strapped to it without protest. As they pushed him into the corridor, his eyes remained fixed on the vent in the wall, its steel grille a mouth drawn in a grimace.

It took them only minutes to reach their destination, a gloomy chamber lit by a single flickering fluorescent bulb. The room’s walls were of cracked concrete, pleached with mildew. Veins of water bled onto the floor. Cole could hear a soft slurping as the gurney’s wheels slid through puddles rank with mold.

“Well, Cole. No mistakes this time.” Several pairs of gloved hands tightened the restraints. “Stay alert. Keep your eyes open.”

Cole recognized the earnest tones of the silver-haired astrophysicist, but in the darkness all he saw were pale faces, a row of white-clad bodies moving efficiently through the murk.

“Good thinking about that spider, Cole.” The zoologist’s gentle voice sounded in his ear as the gurney creaked forward. She stroked his arm, let her hand rest for a moment on his forehead. “Try and do something like that again. Here, now—”

At the end of the room he could just make out a huge, rounded shape, an immense, faintly glowing tube made of some kind of transparent material. Cole’s heart began to pound. He had seen this before, where had he seen this? In his dream, at the airport? Or, no — a flash as he momentarily saw a room at the county hospital where he had fled before Billings tackled him. A technician’s stunned face, a sign on the door reading CAT SCAN AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. As he stared at it in growing horror, the tube began to darken, like a clear glass filled with cobalt liquid.

“Just relax now. Don’t fight it.” The zoologist slipped away. In her place stood the microbiologist, his dark glasses glinting in the bluish light. “We have to know what’s there so we can fix it.”

Then he was gone, too. Above Cole there was only the shadowy maw of the glowing tube, a blur of anxious faces. The gurney gave a last whining shriek as it was pushed into the opening. The door to the tube clanged shut.

Sudden, unexpected darkness. True darkness, the airless black night of a sealed casket. Cole closed his eyes, opened them: there was no difference. No flickering blue glow, not even those phantom colors that come between waking and dream. He began to move, desperately, shifting his weight from side to side so that the gurney rattled. He grunted with fear, opened his mouth to yell but then thought, Air! There’s no air! But before he could ever gasp a sound came to him — surrounded him — a low, mechanical hum like a swarm of electric bees. The hum grew louder, and louder still, until he could feel his bones vibrating. Lightning tore through the darkness — once, twice — resolved into a blinding strobe that pulsed in time with the deafening roar. Cole could no longer tell if he was hearing that horrific sound, or if he had been truly deafened and was merely sensing it in his battered body.

But then, miraculously, the sound diminished, so slowly that it was several moments before Cole registered that the thunder had softened to a growl, the growl to a hum, the hum to staccato crackling. His ears rang, and there was a tinny whine that somehow resolved into voices, though he could make out no words, only frenzied cries, a shout. As abruptly as it had begun, the strobing ceased. The restraints chafed at his arms, his chest felt as though it would burst as he strove to raise himself from the gurney. He cried out as a metal buckle pierced his flesh, his voice swallowed by a sudden explosion.

“AAAGHHH!”

All about him the darkness shattered, fell onto him in a rain of stones and earth. With a shout Cole fell backward, his hands flailing against something that thudded to the ground beside him. He looked up and saw gray sky. In front of him was an earthen wall studded with broken roots and bits of metal. A soft disconsolate rain pattered upon his upraised face. When he opened his mouth rain streamed inside, bringing with it the cold bite of dirt.

“Non! C’est mon bras—!”

Cold stared uncomprehendingly as first one figure shoved past him, then another. Their faces were covered with grotesque masks. Corrugated tubes fed into their mouths. Unthinking Cole groped at his own face, but found no mask there; only grime and blood. A sudden gust sent rain sluicing into the trench. Another explosion sent a spume of earth flying across the trench’s opening. There was an answering chatter of gunfire. Cole shivered and for the first time looked down.

He was naked. Shocked, he ran a hand across his chest, brought it to his face smeared with mud and what felt like a bit of wet tissue. When he spread his fingers he saw trapped between them the limp remnant of another finger. A tiny shaft of bone protruded from it, like a tooth.

“Arrête!”

Cole turned, frantically trying to fling the bit of savaged bone from his hand.

“Qui-est—?”

A man in a dun-colored uniform stood in front of him, shouting. Cole stared at him open-mouthed: the archaic cut of his clothes, the filthy puttees wound around his legs. The rifle he clutched menacingly was topped with a foot-long bayonet.

“Where’s your mask? And your clothes — and your weapon, you idiot!” the man shouted at him in French.

Cole backed away from him, teeth chattering. “What? What?”

“Out of the way!” the man continued.

Cole fell back into a half-crouch as several men pushed past him, carrying a stretcher piled with stones. Torn and bloody canvas hung from it in long strands. It wasn’t until the stench of burnt flesh filled his nostrils that Cole realized the bloodstained canvas was actually the remains of a man’s arms, the misshapen stones the crushed pulp of his skull and shattered chest.

“Oh, my God—”

“Captain!” the man shouted in French. Cole doubled over as the bayonet jabbed him in the ribs. “A Kraut! We got a Kraut!”

“I don’t understand!” Cole gasped, clutching his stomach. “Where am I? Who—”

“How’d you get here, soldier?” a voice spoke in German. Another man stepped through the mud, bespectacled and smaller than the first, wearing what was undoubtedly an officer’s uniform. “What’s your rank? Where are your clothes?”

Cole shook his head. “I — I don’t understand.”

“German! Speak German! What are you doing here?”

Cole began to shake uncontrollably. His vision blurred, the background clatter of gunfire and unintelligible voices droned into a single sound, a high-pitched whining that might have been a siren or Cole’s own voice. He felt giddy and nauseated, but he no longer cared; he had gone beyond fear or bewilderment or torture to some other place. His eyes were open, but he saw nothing. The sergeant jabbed him again, but it didn’t hurt — how could it hurt? The edges of his consciousness were pulling away from his mind like burning paper; in a few moments there would be nothing left but a vacant-eyed man. In a trench or a cell, strapped to a gurney or stumbling through an airport lobby — how could it matter? Even that shrill whine was dying away, but Cole felt only a dull relief. He would have smiled, but even that was too much of an effort; it would only be another instant and he would be gone, gone—

“I gotta find ‘em! I gotta find ‘em! Please, you gotta help me!”

The voice was like a shard of glass tearing through his fugue state.

“Please!”

English, but accented English — accented American English. The sergeant jabbed him again and this time Cole flinched, blinking as he suddenly focused on another stretcher being borne past him.

“Please, you gotta listen, I got to—”

On the stretcher the other man thrashed. Blood covered his face and arms and chest, dripped in a thin line from the corners of the canvas to the wet ground. In his blackened face his eyes rolled wildly. Staring at him Cole felt a horror more intense than any that had come before.

“Jose!” he screamed. It was the boy from the cell next to his. “Jose!”

The boy turned. “Cole!” His face contorted in anguish. “Oh God, Cole, where are we?”

His hand reached feebly for Cole’s. Before Cole could grasp it, a man darted between them. There was a flash of light, the stale scent of saltpeter as the photographer crouched in the trench, his unwieldy camera focused on Jose.

“No—” Cole cried brokenly. Without pausing, the photographer clutched his camera to his chest and scurried on. Shots rang out; Cole gasped, grabbed for his left leg and fell.

Gritting his teeth he tried to push himself back up, grimacing at the pain. A whistling overhead ended in a thump that sent more dirt raining into the trench. There were muffled shouts, commands he could not understand. Down the sides of the trench coiled thick yellow smoke. A poisonous stench filled Cole’s nostrils and he coughed, covering his mouth and looking around frantically. The trench grew thick with soldiers in gas masks, like ants in a disturbed nest. Coughing, Cole knelt on his good leg and covered his streaming eyes as he searched for some way out. His gaze fell on a jackknifed form beside him: the captain, his chest split as neatly as a capon’s. From his face dangled a gas mask. With a cry Cole propelled himself forward, fingers snatching for the mask, but before he could grab it another explosion ripped through the trench. The last thing Cole saw was his own face, reflected in the captain’s shattered glasses.

On a chill evening in late autumn, a few brown leaves still clung to the oak trees outside Breitrose Hall. Squirrels worried at a clutch of acorns, and in the velvety sky overhead an owl flew, crying mournfully. Tacked to the building’s gothic façade were flyers advertising a local band, index cards bearing urgent pleas from students for rides home for the Thanksgiving holiday, an out-of-date listing of campus movies. A handful of students crossed lazily in front of the steps, pausing beneath a streetlight to read the newest placard there:

Across the top of the placard a taped, handwritten banner read:

Madness and Apocalyptic Visions

Inside, the lecture hall was nearly full. A woman’s voice echoed hollowly through the cavernous space, punctuated every now and then by coughing, the rustle of papers. Across a giant screen in the front of the room loomed the projected image of a man’s face, crudely but effectively drawn in the bold strokes of a medieval woodcut. His eyes were huge and mad, his mouth agape as though in mortal agony.

“‘And one of the four beasts gave unto the seven angels seven golden vials full of the wrath of God, who liveth forever and ever’.”

The woman speaking at the podium lifted her head. Tall and fine-boned, her dark hair swept into a neat chignon, she was the epitome of academic elegance, striking yet restrained: large-framed tortoise-shell glasses, chic black suit that didn’t show too much leg, only a faint hint of color in her porcelain skin. Her voice matched her, refined but powerful. She paused, giving her audience a moment to savor her words, then went on.

“Revelations. In the twelfth century, according to the accounts of local officials at that time, this man—”

Her pointer indicated the raving madman on the screen.

“—appeared suddenly in the village of Wylye near Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, in April of 1162. Using unfamiliar words and speaking in a strange accent, the man made dire prognostications about a pestilence which he predicted would wipe out humanity in approximately eight hundred years.”

The slide changed to one showing the ruins of Stonehenge, bathed in moonlight that gave them a troubling glow. More rustlings from the audience, this time punctuated with a few impatient huffs.

“Dr. Railly,” a voice at the back of the room began chidingly, but the woman at the podium continued without a beat.

“Deranged and hysterical,” she pronounced, “the man raped a young woman of the village, was taken into custody, but then mysteriously escaped and was not heard of again. Now—”

She looked into the darkened lecture hall, the pool of light on her face making her look like a somber angel. “Obviously, this plague / doomsday scenario is considerably more compelling when reality supports if with a virulent disease, whether it’s the bubonic plague, smallpox, or AIDS. And now we have technological horrors as well, such as chemical warfare, which first reared its ugly head in the deadly mustard gas attacks of World War One.”

On the screen behind her, a series of slides showed images of doughboys in gas masks, an unexploded bomb, the skeletal rictus of a boy’s face in the last agonies of death by gas. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” Railly remarked dryly. “During one such attack in the French trenches in October 1917, we have an account of this soldier—”

Her pointer touched the screen. A sepia-toned photograph showed a dark-haired young man, his features all but obscured by blood, being borne on a stretcher by exhausted soldiers. The man’s wounded hand was outstretched, his expression almost unbearably poignant, the face of someone who has found his heart’s desire only to have it snatched away from his grasp.

“During an assault, he was wounded by shrapnel and hospitalized, apparently in a state of hysteria. Doctors found he had lost all comprehension of French. But he spoke English fluently, albeit in a regional dialect they didn’t recognize. The man, although physically unaffected by the gas, was hysterical. He claimed he had come from the future, that he was looking for a pure germ that would ultimately wipe mankind from the face of the earth, starting in the year — 1996!”

Nervous chuckles from the audience. Railly tapped the screen impatiently as another photograph came into focus. This one revealed the gaunt, haunted image of the same young man, staring with ravaged eyes from the narrow cot of a military hospital.

“Though injured, the young soldier disappeared from the hospital, no doubt trying to carry on his mission to warn others, substituting for the universally acknowledged agony of a war a self-inflicted agony we call ‘the Cassandra Complex.’”

In the hall, two listeners nodded raptly, then glanced smiling at each other — Marilou Martin and Wayne Chang, friends of Railly’s from her university days. A few seats away from them, someone else was having a harder time buying Railly’s theory.

“Doodling while Rome burns,” a man muttered darkly, Marilou turned, frowning, and saw a black-clad man with shoulder-length red hair tapping ferociously at a laptop computer n between glares at Dr. Railly.

“As you recall,” Railly went on somewhat breathlessly, “in Greek legend Cassandra was condemned to know the future, but to be disbelieved when she told it. Hence the agony of foreknowledge combined with impotence to do anything about it.”

The lecture continued in this vein for another hour. At last, a final image filled the screen: the face of the raving madman from the woodcut, superimposed with that of the haunted soldier and the rabid face of the lead singer of an alternative band popular for its doomy lyrics.

“Thank you,” Railly said, suddenly shy. She ducked her head and turned from the podium, then hurried from the lecture hall.

In a reception room on the second floor of Breitrose, members of the university’s psych department had set up a table with dip and raw vegetables and a few tired-looking cold cuts. Railly grabbed a carrot and a glass of seltzer and settled at a library table at the front of the room. Stacks of books bore identical dust jackets in ominous shades of orange and crimson, overlaid with the same black-and-white medieval engraving of a wild-faced man.

Moments later, the first enthusiastic members of the audience began drifting through the door. A few

wan souls congregated around the crudités, but most made a beeline for Railly, lofting copies of the book and thrusting them in her face.

“What a wonderful meditation on such a complex topic,” a tweedy woman began, when she was pushed aside by a lanky red-haired man in black.

“Dr. Railly,” he proclaimed loudly. DR. PETERS was scrawled on his name tag in black Magic Marker. His voice scraped rawly through the others as he announced, “I think you have given your ‘alarmists’ a bad name. Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment, the pollution of land, sea, and air.”

He paused for breath, and people began to edge back toward the cold cuts. A few hardy grad students remained to listen, nodding or shaking their heads as the man went on.

“In this context, isn’t it obvious that ‘Chicken Little’ represents the sane vision, and Homo sapiens’ motto, ‘Let’s go shopping!’ is the cry of the true lunatic?

Having delivered his little bombshell, Dr. Peters gave Kathryn Railly a tight, self-important smile. Before she could respond, an elderly disheveled professor elbowed past him.

“Dr. Railly! Please! The old man thumped a tattered manuscript on the table in front of her. “I wonder if you’re aware of my own studies, which indicate that certain cycles of the moon actually impact on the incidence of apocalyptic predictions as observed in urban emergency rooms—”

Kathryn shook her head helplessly. “Uh, no.” Actually—”

“In fact,” the professor babbled on, “birthing centers in Scandinavia have charted an alarming increase in the number of …”

Kathryn Railly’s eyes glazed over, even as she continued to nod and murmur politely.

“…not to mention the link between drug abuse and solar flares, which has been pointedly ignored by—”

“Kathryn—”

A hand touched her shoulder. Kathryn turned, sighing in relief when she saw Marilou and Wayne standing behind her.

“You were great,” said Marilou. She cast a baleful glance at the reception table, where Dr. Peters was scarfing down raw cauliflower. “Really, really great.”

Kathryn squeezed her hand. “You’re leaving?” she asked, trying to keep disappointment from edging into her voice.”

Marilou looked apologetic. “Our reservation’s at nine thirty. It’s getting late.”

Another hand grabbed Kathryn’s other shoulder. “Dr. Railly!” the elderly man cried. “Please — this is very important!”

Wayne Chang made a face. “You sure you’re gonna be all right?” He cocked a thumb at the apoplectic professor.

Kathryn laughed and glanced at her watch. “You go ahead. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Okay.” Wayne nodded, taking Marilou’s arm. “We’ll make sure the champagne’s good and cold.”

Kathryn watched her friends walk off as the professor rambled on. “Dr. Railly, I simply cannot understand your exclusion of the moon in relation to apocalyptic dementia…”

With a sigh, Kathryn turned back to him. “I left out wolfbane and garlic too,” she said, then tried to cover her exasperation by adding, “But I’d be happy to take a look at your paper.”

The professor beamed. “Well, thank you,” he said. Straightening, he stretched out a gnarly hand and picked up a copy of her book. “Perhaps then you could sign this for me? As one colleague to another?”

Kathryn smiled. “Of course,” she said gently, and reached for her pen.

Half an hour later she left. Several members of the psych department escorted her outside, then waved good-bye as they headed to their own cars. Kathryn pulled her coat tight about her, wishing she’d brought a scarf. The chill early evening had turned downright cold. In little over a month it would be Christmas. Overhead a full moon gleamed, casting baroque shadows on the ornate turrets and arches of Breitrose Hall. Kathryn hurried across the parking lot to her Cherokee, one of the last cars still parked there. Her footsteps echoed loudly against the concrete, and she looked up when a Volvo roared past.

“Congratulations!” someone yelled. Kathryn waved happily as behind her the last yellow lights of Breitrose Hall went dark. A few more steps and she reached her car. She fished in her purse for the keys, hoping the Marilou and Wayne really had ordered champagne — she hadn’t felt this exhilarated since she’d finished her thesis. She unlocked the car door, tossed her purse onto the passenger seat, and was just ducking inside when a shadow fell across her.

“Hello—?” she began tentatively.

Someone grabbed her in a choke hold, pulling her back so roughly she could only gasp.

“Get in!” a hoarse voice ordered. Kathryn writhed around to see a large man silhouetted against the moonlit sky. Unable to scream, she kicked at him, gasping for breath, as he forced her into the front seat.

“I’ve got a gun.”

She froze. The man slammed the front door shut, then opened the rear door and scrambled in behind her. Glancing into the rearview mirror, she saw only piercing black eyes staring at her from the shadows.

“You — you can have my purse.” It hurt to talk, but she tried desperately to keep the quaver from her voice. “I have a lot of cash and credit—”

“Start the car.”

Half-turning in her seat, she thrust the keys at him. “Here!” she said desperately. “You can have the keys. You can—”

He lunged, grabbing her hair and yanking her head back so hard she felt the tendons pop.

“Start the car!” he repeated fiercely in her ear. “Now!”

A moment later the engine roared to life. She backed the car from the lot and headed for the exit, her hands shaking as they gripped the steering wheel. In the mirror she could glimpse the man’s eyes flickering as they passed beneath one streetlamp after another.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said softly, his voice more calm now. “But I will. I’ve hurt people before, when — left! Turn left!”

She yanked the wheel left, hunching forward and praying he wouldn’t grab her again. When she glanced back, she saw him unfolding a tattered map. His face was lost in darkness, but now and then she had a glimpse of ragged clothing as he tried to read the map by the street lights.

After a few minutes had passed in silence, Kathryn took a deep breath, then asked, “Where — where are we going?”

“Philadelphia,” the man said tersely.

“Philadelphia!” Kathryn flashed him a quick stunned look. “But that’s — that’s more than a hundred miles!?

“That’s why I can’t walk there,” the man said without a trace of irony. “Turn here — I think.”

She obeyed, watching him in the mirror as he tried to read. When she looked back at the road again, her heart leapt. Gliding through the darkness was a police car. Kathryn hesitated, then with a quick glance at the mirror switched on her car’s dome light.

“This will help you,” she said, her voice cracking.

A fist crashed through the air, smashing the light. Splinters of plastic sprayed Kathryn’s shoulders as she bit her lip, fighting tears as the police car passed. In the seat beside her, the man crouched, hiding his face until the car was gone. When he slid back upright, Kathryn spoke, heedless of her trembling voice.

“If you make me go with you, it’s kidnapping. That’s a serious crime. If you let me go, you could just take the car and —”

“I don’t know how to drive!” the man shouted. “We went underground when I was six, I told you that. When you come to the corner, turn—”

She slammed on the brakes, whirled, and for the first time looked right at him.

“Cole! James Cole! You escaped from a locked room six years ago!”

A car pulled up behind them and honked angrily.

“1990,” Cole snapped. “Six years for you. Come on,” he added, glancing anxiously at the car behind them. "Take a right turn there.”

She turned onto the access ramp for the freeway. Looking back, she saw Cole settling wearily against the seat. Dirt smudged his face; his close-cropped hair was mud-caked. Kathryn hesitated, measuring her words, then said, “I can’t believe this is a coincidence, Mr. Cole. Have you been… following me?”

He lifted his head. His haggard face filled the tiny mirror. “You told me you’d help me,” he said wearily. “I know this isn’t what you meant, but — I’m desperate. I got no money, a bum leg. I been sleeping on the streets.” He paused, wincing, and shot her an apologetic grimace. “Sorry about that.”

Kathryn’s heart slowed its pounding. A kind of nightmare edginess took over, equal parts despair and anger. “You have been following me, haven’t you?”

Cole shook his head. “No. I saw this—”

He rummaged in a pocket, triumphantly held up a frayed piece of paper — the flyer for her lecture. “—in a store window.” Pride swelled in his voice. “I can read, remember?”

Kathryn nudged the car through freeway traffic. “Yes, I remember.” She bit her lip, then asked, “Why do you want to go to Philadelphia?”

Cole reached for her purse, dragged it into the backseat beside him and started sifting through its contents. “I checked out the Baltimore information; it was nothing. It’s Philadelphia, that’s where they are. The ones who did it — the Twelve Monkeys.”

He leaned over the front seat. “You got any food? Hey!” He pointed eagerly at the dashboard. “Is that a radio?”

Kathryn switched it on. Through the speakers filtered pounding surf and keening gulls, an oozing baritone.

“This is a personal message to you. Are you at the end of your rope? Are you dying to get away?”

Cole stiffened, listening intently.

“The Florida Keys are waiting for you…”

Cole frowned as the sound of crashing surf mingled with the cries of seabirds in the car. Watching him Kathryn felt a twinge of pity mingling with her unease. There was something oddly childlike about this barrel-chested man with a convict’s shaven head and bruised eyes. Right now he looked lost and utterly confused.

“I’ve never seen the ocean!” he blurted. His eyes fixed imploringly on the radio, as though he expected it to argue with him. “Never!”

Kathryn tried not to smile. “It’s an advertisement, Mr. Cole,” she explained gently. “You do understand that, don’t you? It’s not really a special message to you.”

Cole sank back into his seat. “You used to call me ‘James’,” he murmured.

“You’d prefer that?” Kathryn’s hands tightened on the wheel. “James, you don’t really have a gun, do you?”

Outside, endless lines of gas stations, strip malls, condominiums swept by. The commercial ended, and the opening strains of “Blueberry Hill” rose from the speakers. Cole said nothing. When Kathryn checked the mirror she saw him sitting entranced, mouth agape and eyes wide.

“I found my thri—ill…” Fats Waller moaned. Cole rammed into the front seat, reaching for the volume.

“I’m gonna make this louder!” he yelled. “I love twentieth-century music! Hearing music and breathing air!”

Kathryn watched incredulously as he slid across the backseat and hammered at the window control. A rush of cold air filled the car, but Cole only laughed delightedly, sticking his head out the window with his mouth open.

“Air!” he yelped. “I’m breathing air!”

Ahead a sign reared from the side of the freeway.

Kathryn nibbled at her lip again and watched Cole, still reveling in the cold night air. Now what? she thought.

“…on Blueberry Hi—ill…”

Abruptly the song cut off, Cole yanked his head back in from the window, giving Kathryn an accusing look.

“This just in from Fresno, California,” a radio announcer pronounced in gloomy tones. “Emergency crews are converging on a cornfield where playmates of nine-year-old Ricky Neuman say they saw him disappear right before their eyes…”

Cole’s expression became troubled as the announcer continued.

“Young Neuman apparently stepped into an abandoned well shaft and is lodged somewhere in the narrow one-hundred-fifty-foot pipe, possibly alive, possibly seriously injured. Playmates claim they heard him cry out faintly, but since then there has been no contact with…”

Cole shook his head. “Never cry wolf!”

Kathryn frowned, turning the radio down. “What?”

“My father told me that,” Cole said rather primly. “‘Never cry wolf.’ Then people won’t believe you if — if something really happens.”

Kathryn swung the Cherokee past a bus emblazoned with posters advertising Atlantic City. “If something really happens,” she repeated thoughtfully. “Like what, James?”

“Something bad.” Cole yawned, running a hand across his brow. “Is that all the music? I don’t want to hear this stuff.”

Kathryn hit the SCAN button, glanced in the mirror to see Cole yawning again. Despite herself she felt another stab of pity for him — something she tried not to feel for most patients, especially since the warning rating she’d received from Fletcher six years before. It was one thing to make a show of sympathy for the disturbed people she saw every day, quite another to grapple with unreasoned spurts of emotion like this.

But there really was something about him, she thought. For one thing, the last six years seemed to have passed over him like water. Despite a few bruises and his haggard expression, his face was as unlined as it had been when she first saw him, and his eyes — those eyes! — his eyes held such wounded innocence…

“Did — did something happen to you when you were a child?” she asked tentatively. “Something so bad…”

The radio locked into a station and Cole sat bolt upright. “Ohh, this one!” he cried. Automatically Kathryn turned up the volume.

“Sine I met you baby, my whole life has changed…”

With and ecstatic look, Cole stuck his head out the window again. Kathryn allowed herself a small smile as she watched him fighting another yawn, his face one big loopy grin.

“Yeah, I kinda like this one, too,” she murmured, but Cole didn’t hear.

“…’cause since I met you baby, all I need is you…”

Cars streamed past a lonely motel bathed in pink neon. They were in the country now. Overhead the sky was flush with stars. On the western horizon the full moon poised like a kiss as the Cherokee sped on, the radio making promises it couldn’t keep as Kathryn drove and Cole hung blissfully out the rear window, his weary eyes ashine, his lost heart as happy as it ever had been.