Finity

PART TWO The Bureau of Missing Nations

On Monday morning we made and ate a quick breakfast in the room’s kitchenette, then got dressed, stepped out the door into the corridors of the Big Sapphire, and headed for the office that we had been assigned. Iphwin was waiting for us there, to my surprise; I couldn’t help wondering how a man who ran so much of the planet’s economy had time to meet with us so often and at such length, without even any interruptions.

“Well,” Iphwin said. “Glad to have you here at last. I’ve decided to take charge of this matter personally, at least for a while. Now, Helen, let’s start with a reconciliation problem. Let me suppose the existence of two documents of equally good provenance, containing statements absolutely contrary to each other. Suppose, say, that one of them specifies that General Grant died at the battle of Cold Harbor, and the other that he was killed while holding Little Round Top at Gettysburg.”

“But he wasn’t,” I said. “He lived to be the president of the United States, for two terms I think, after Johnson?”

“After Johnson?” Helen said, gaping at me. “Where I grew up, Lyndon Johnson was the president of the Republic of Texas, the last one before they voted to go communist, and shot him. And after I came to Enzy, I learned he was the first Secretary of the Treasury for the government in exile. Either way, U.S. Grant couldn’t have been president after him—”

“Andrew Johnson,” I said. “The Vice President who succeeded Abe Lincoln after his assassination in 1865.”

She shook her head slowly. “Hannibal Hamlin succeeded Lincoln,” she said. “In 1863. After the impeachment.”

None of this perturbed Iphwin one bit that I could see; he listened with great interest but didn’t seem to feel any need to intervene.

After a long pause, just to break the silence, I finally asked, “Can I ask what provenance is?”

“Provenance is what you have when you have established that a document actually originated where and when it was supposed to have,” Helen said. “As Iphwin has set up this problem, the documents have equally good provenance, which means the case is equally strong that either one really does date from the American Civil War.”

“Oh,” I said. “I was hoping that I was just misunderstanding one idea somewhere, but it doesn’t seem likely, now.”

The pause dragged on, broken only by Iphwin’s moving between three chairs. When he finally found one he liked, at least for the moment, Iphwin sat tugging at his lower lip and said, “All right, now, imagining you have those two documents, of equally good provenance, what is your next move?”

“Well,” Helen said, “speaking as a historian I guess it’s pretty obvious. I need to find some way to challenge the accuracy or the provenance of at least one of them, preferably both.”

“What would you do, Lyle?”

“I’m not a historian.”

“Answer as the developer of abductive statistics.”

“Hmmm. But if you can do the things Helen just outlined, that would be the thing to do.”

“Assume for the moment that it proves impossible; you cannot show that either document is from anything other than that period, and both appear to be absolutely authentic. Furthermore, in your case, anyway, you have a large body of evidence that tells you that neither of the documents can possibly be right.”

“In abductive math, we don’t. We leave them unreconciled until something turns up to settle the question.”

“All right,” Iphwin said, with seemingly infinite patience, though I felt like a complete idiot who had wandered into a Socratic dialogue while looking for the bathroom. “Suppose now it is absolutely dreadfully important to reconcile the two documents and the known facts.”

“Well, then, at that point I try to identify how many things the documents do agree on. For example, they agree that there really was a General Grant in the Civil War.”

“Why do you want to know that?” Iphwin demanded. For one moment he had an expression of keen interest, before he resumed his usual bland composure.

“Because what I’m finding out are the implicit constraints on the solution. It can’t be one that denies the shared material.”

“All right, go on.”

“Then at the next higher level, you get more abstract points of agreement, like that the Civil War had battles and that General Grant died in one of them. And then you try to figure out whether the two messages are different enough. That is, do they require reconciliation? How much does your world change if they can or can’t be reconciled? For example, we are more likely to have hypotheses in which General Grant died once; till then we know he’s dead and that it’s probably associated with battle during the war.

“Thus the abductive process would say that we suspend conclusions and not apply induction or deduction yet—and would then work on the conditions that allow us to form hypotheses, because if all your hypotheses were just random noise, you’d never find anything that worked in the real world.

“There has to be an abductive process, a process of generating hypotheses more likely to be right than not—and so what you’re doing is taking the shared elements in the evidence and identifying a family of hypotheses—all the possible hypotheses in which Grant served in the Civil War, all of those hypotheses in which he was killed in battle, and so forth—down to where you have to suspend judgment and get more evidence. Abduction isn’t a process of finding answers—ordinary induction and deduction do that—but of allocating scarce time to questions. And of course from that standpoint, only having two pieces of evidence, the question is trivial; it gets more complex when some of the hypotheses are about which pieces of evidence are relevant, and how.”

Iphwin nodded. “Now let’s try something bigger. This time you have two documents from the American Civil War, and each contains a list of ten battles. There are only two battles that overlap between the two lists.”

“Well,” Helen said, “the usual thing a historian would do is figure that the two lists were made for different purposes by different people, and what’s important for one may not be important for the other.”

“Suppose each list purports to be a list of the ten battles with the highest death tolls.”

“The two sides may have called them by different names, or they may disagree about what a battle is,” she said. “Like the way that the first three days of the Battle of Wheeling is often called the Battle of Deer Run, and the last four days are counted separately as the Battle of Steubenville.” She seemed to be gaining morale every moment as her specialty was called on; her green eyes were keen with interest and she sat up with her old athletic energy.

“Well,” I said, “an abductive statistician would say that we have a family of hypotheses that the two documents actually contain the same information, or part of the same information, in forms which are somehow mutually translatable; that is, with enough information, the maker of one list could always explain his differences with the maker of the other list. And therefore the genuine unknown is the relation between the two documents. If we add more documents to the pile, they might determine the relationship.”

“And could the relationship be anything as simple as one being true and one being false?” Helen asked. “Lyle, I’m alarmed at what you do for a living.”

“It could very easily be the case. For example, say you go looking for your glasses.”

“Usually when I do that they’re on my forehead.”

“Just so. You have a family of hypotheses: forehead, on the nightstand, folded into the bedclothes, used as a bookmark, and so forth. You draw a hypothesis from that family—which you make as small a family as you can before drawing—and test it. Say it turns out false. Then you add the assumption that any hypothesis which has tested false is still false, and on that grounds you keep testing new ones till you find one that is true—which establishes a relation with all the other hypotheses.”

“But I don’t care about all the places my glasses aren’t, once I find them.”

“Nevertheless you’ve established it.”

“Good enough,” Iphwin said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“I wish I knew where,” I admitted. “I really don’t understand why you can’t just tell us what’s going on.”

Iphwin nodded. “I hold a family of hypotheses to the effect that telling you, at this time, might imperil discoveries I will need later. It may not, for all I know. But I prefer not to run the risk. And if it does cost us the further discoveries, the consequences may be grave for everyone, and therefore I won’t tell you until I am sure I am not going to screw something up. But I do want you to know that this isn’t my choice.”

Helen sat down and cocked her head to one side, looking at Iphwin as if he had just tried to put one over on her. “All right, then, is there any way you can tell us who or what your adversary is?”

“I wish I could. I have a whole series of guesses based on various experiences and encounters with the forces that oppose me. Many of these experiences point to contradictory conclusions. Others complement each other, of course.”

“I guess what you’re trying to tell me is that the weirdness in the world”—I thought I understood what he was saying but couldn’t believe he was saying it—”everything from the fuel consumption of my jump boat while it was tied up, to the severe discrepancies in our memories, to the behavior of Billie Beard and the way she kept appearing and disappearing—all these things are being caused? I mean, not just like ordinary events, but something is causing them to be contradictory?”

“Or the indeterminacy may be a form of attack on my business,” Iphwin said. “Make the world unpredictable enough and capitalism becomes impossible, and it so happens I am a capitalist. I have a very large array of holdings. A couple of years ago I became aware that many things were happening that looked like coincidences but seemed to be happening too often; then on top of that, the explanations that seemed to suggest themselves rapidly became mutually contradictory. Some very good mathematicians—you would know their names, Lyle, but no, I may not tell them to you—working under a covert contract from me, concluded that the odds of all these things happening were very low, but of course that means little; the odds of any one configuration of the world are low, but the world always ends up in some configuration or other. They also compiled a list of other things that might happen, incidents that might fit a pattern established by the previous incidents, and to my deep surprise those predictions began to come true. In the words of a fellow American, a few generations back, ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.’

“Furthermore, as soon as I began to take any steps to identify the enemy and to harden myself as a target, the attacks stepped up and became more elaborate and complex. Now, my researches identified you all as possible assistants in this project. I cannot tell you who is attacking me because I don’t really know. In fact, a secret known to only a few people in my company is that I don’t know anything from before when I was about twenty—as far as I can determine, I have complete amnesia for my childhood and adolescent years, and I seem to have arrived from nowhere— there are no records of me before that time, and yet one day there I was in Edinburgh, able to read, write, calculate, and so forth, with my identity papers in one front pocket—I also knew how to use and present them—and an enormous wad of cash in the other. It is entirely possible that all this originates from some enemy that I don’t know about because they have lain low for fifteen or twenty years.”

“Since you’re an expat who does business in the Reichs,” Helen pointed out, “one obvious possibility is that the American Resistance may have targeted you.”

“You can dismiss that possibility. I am not at all concerned that what remains of the American Resistance might be after me, because I am a primary financier for the American Resistance, I am in contact with it, and I coordinate my activities with it. You are high enough placed in the company so that you might as well know this right off; every so often ConTech is doing something inexplicable because we’re supporting the illegal American organizations around the world.”

“Is that something you should be telling brand-new employees?” I asked.

“You have no idea how long we’ve been watching you, or how much we know about you. You wouldn’t have been hired if I couldn’t be perfectly sure it was safe to tell you this. Anyway, my point is this: as you investigate this problem for me, don’t let yourself get too suspicious about the activities of American Resistance cells and fronts all around my company. They aren’t the ones causing the trouble. I don’t want you to waste time investigating them, and I really don’t want you to blow any of their various covers.”

“You can depend on us,” Helen said, firmly, and I found I was nodding my head vigorously, liking ConTech and Iphwin a great deal more than I had before.

“You’ll pardon my pointing out that I know that, and I should know it—I’ve spent enough to make sure I knew it,” Iphwin said. “Now, the way that I became interested in you was that some of our espionage and intelligence teams developed a very real possibility that we could at least get a rough list of who the adversary was after—that is, we didn’t know who the bad guys were except at the local, low-ranking flunky level, but we did know who they seemed to be out to get. And as it happened, Billie Beard showed up pretty often wherever they were planning to make trouble—and she was all over Auckland last month, but especially hanging around Whitman College. The two of you had already been identified as potential recruits for ConTech, with interesting specialties, and since that was just the category of people she seemed to have an ugly tendency to kill, if she got to them first, we moved as quickly as we discreetly could to get you under our umbrella. The other thing, which interests me very much this morning, is that before being sent after you, she was pulled off a job in Mexico City, where she had been shadowing Jesús Picardin.”

“Who’s that?” I asked. “The name sounds familiar.”

“It should. Picardin is the boss for Esmé Sanderson, who used to be second in command for Colonel Roger Sykes of the Third Free American Regiment. The one that you know in your talk group as ‘the Colonel.’ When Terri Teal got word of your arrest, she called Sykes, who called Sanderson, who talked to Picardin—and he’s the one that dug out the huge file on Beard and dispatched it to Saigon. If anyone did, he’s the one who got you out of jail.”

“I like him already,” Helen said.

“Me too, and all we knew about him before was that Billie Beard was interested in him. Anyway, the fact that he showed up in your case in that way is extremely interesting. Especially since Jenny Bannon, who was the other leg of the process leading to your release, was also being shadowed by Billie Beard at one time, and furthermore it turns out that she and Picardin belong to the same VR chat group. Somehow or other this is turning out to be a very small world.”

“And she’s from a country that I thought was entirely imaginary, or some kind of delusion,” Helen said. “She’s from that confusing part of my memory.”

Iphwin looked blank and stood stock-still. I’d never seen that happen before. Helen quickly sketched in what she’d told me. She seemed to gain confidence this time and though her lip sometimes trembled when she spoke of her mother, she didn’t cry.

“That’s one place she’s from. But one of our employees met her at a reception and got a business card, and though there is no such country as the Free Republic of Diego Garcia, nor any such street as the one its embassy is on, nor any such phone exchange in Auckland as the one listed—when we dial that number, we get the embassy, and if she’s not too busy, Jenny Bannon answers the phone. And obviously enough, since your friend Kelly went to school with her and still calls her, and you can call Kelly— well, you see what I mean by discrepancies.

“Now, aside from the intellectually interesting question of how you all arrived in such a small world with each other, the other thing that is interesting to me is that exactly the same people who appear to be trying to track down and kill the remaining American Resistance, and who seem to be associated with, and perhaps arranging, the many coincidences and lapses of causality that have been doing so much damage to ConTech, are the people who have been trying to kill this small knot of chat rooms and acquaintances.

“Furthermore, they seem to have been foiled largely by accident, which is not only odd in a professional organization, but makes many of my investigative team wonder, intensely, whether we ourselves might be being attacked by one group or force, and supported by another, neither of which we know anything about. If the enemy of the enemy is my friend, why won’t my friend introduce himself? But in any case, anyone that the enemy is out to eliminate—such as you two, or Jenny Bannon, or Jesu Picardin—is probably a good person to keep alive and well, if we possibly can. Hence our interest in you.”

Through all this long conversation, Iphwin hadn’t sat still for as long as five seconds, but had bounced from place to place, sitting on desks and shelves, leaning against walls, and rocketing around the room like a man who has lost something valuable. “And honestly, according to the research group, that is as much as I can safely tell you at this point. I will tell you more, eventually everything, I hope, just as soon as I’m sure it’s safe. For the moment, though, what I specifically want you to do is to conduct an investigation into an area that we don’t have anyone assigned to yet—an area where we have a single puzzling piece of information that makes no sense that we are aware of, but ought to make some kind if we only knew what kind, and we’d like to see what you can do with it.

“That piece of information is this: ask most people on the street questions about the past, either elementary history or events in their own lifetime, and we get a pretty conventional story, with minor errors that we could just as easily ascribe to bad memory, bad teaching, or sheer random perversity as anything else. But whenever we try interviewing people who seem to be of interest to the enemy, or whose research interests look particularly relevant to the investigation, when we ask what those special people remember of the past, we find all sorts of fundamental disagreements, such as the argument we just had about General Grant, or like Helen’s experience of suddenly finding all of history was different from what she remembered.

“Neither of you is a policeman or secret agent—as far as I know, though the Saigon police have a different opinion about you, Helen, and are absolutely convinced that you must have been a top-level agent for years. Based on what you did, it seems as if briefly you were not a relatively mild-mannered history professor—but then, while you weren’t, who were you? Anyway, the one thing we know is that these wildly inconsistent memories have something to do with the problem—so your job, the historian and the abductive mathematician, is to arrive at some explanation for the phenomenon.”

“That’s the job, then?” I asked. “To figure out why people linked with this mysterious attack on ConTech have memories so different from everyone else’s?”

Iphwin nodded, and then sat down cross-legged on the floor, like a small child. As he spoke he used his finger to draw some complex, incomprehensible diagram on the floor. “My company has been attacked many times since I founded it. We’ve been leaned on by organized crime, by various kinds of secret police, by underground political organizations, and by religious cults. No surprise in all that—if you get big enough, you get leaned on. But in every case before, I’ve been able to fight it off, with some combination of bribes and force. This one concerns me more.

“It looks like a general assault on causality, happening all around ConTech. Perhaps they have discovered some way of altering causality and are using it to make ordinary attacks and blackmail more effective. Or maybe someone with a power beyond anything we know simply has an agenda too different from anything any of us would have for any of us to understand it. Whatever the case, if it’s possible to know, I don’t just want to know who they are and why they did it, but how.”

He jumped up from the floor and said, “Each of you has an interview with a psychiatrist in ten minutes. Don’t worry, it’s not because I think you are crazy.” Then he lunged out the door before either of us could say anything, and when we looked at the computer terminals on our desk we saw that each of us had to report to a room on the same floor in ten minutes’ time.

I thought a while. “ConTech must have tracked the whole network of our friends, for Iphwin to have such a clear understanding of how we got out of jail. And yet with so many of them watching us, the party of bodyguards could still get ambushed in Saigon, and somehow or other Billie Beard could still get through to beat me up. And someone impersonating me managed to pick you up in my jump boat and take you to Saigon, before returning the boat, and not bothering to do anything to cover it up.” I sat down and stared into space. “There’s an amazing amount of power somewhere behind Iphwin. And whoever the bad guys are, there’s at least that much power behind them.”

“Always assuming that Iphwin and the bad guys aren’t the same people.”

“Always assuming.” I stood up and straightened my clothes. “Well, off to the psychologists. The funny thing is, the only thing that I’m pretty sure of is that I’m not losing my mind.”

“Mine might be misplaced but I’m sure I still have it somewhere,” Helen said, also standing and smoothing her skirt. She stretched and yawned. I liked the way she stepped forward and straightened my tie as if I were her prize cat. “And you’re not a professor anymore, so you don’t get to be absentminded. All right, let’s go see the nice shrinks and see what they want to do with us.”

In a short while I was sitting in a small room in a comfortable leather armchair, watching a quiet little man with a dark ring beard take notes on everything I said. He began by asking, “Who is Mickey Mouse?”

I answered, and he asked, “What was the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution? What coach introduced the forward pass? When was the World’s Fair in St. Louis? Who won the Second Canadian War?”

Some of the questions, like the St. Louis World’s Fair, referred to things I had never heard of—the city had never been rebuilt after the great earthquake of 1885 because the rivers no longer ran by it. Some were insanely trivial and easy. Every so often one of the questions would be completely unintelligible on first hearing, and after hearing it again slowly I would realize it was rooted in assumptions that were so different from mine that I had to think about it a couple of times. I pointed this out to the shrink, and he nodded vigorously the way all shrinks do. Also the way they all do, he asked me, “How does it make you feel when a question is so far off base that you can’t figure out how to answer it?”

“A little tense, I guess. Not worse than that.”

“When was the last time you saw an article in a professional journal by an American astronomer? Not an expat or dual citizen, like yourself, but someone living and working in the American Reich?”

“Oh, well, that would be—” My mind went blank.

“Do you see?”

“See what?”

“My session was just the same,” Helen said at lunch. We were eating in a company cafeteria, but since we knew no one, no one had said hello, and we were left very much by ourselves, a long way from any other group of workers. ConTech was always full of surprises, and this time the surprise was that the food was exceptionally good and the furniture and silverware would not have been out of place in a good restaurant. I sat back in my chair, sipped my coffee, and tried to think about everything that had happened so far.

“Why do you suppose Iphwin is so focused on these attacks on ConTech?” Helen asked. “From what he’s described, and from what’s in the folders, the whole thing isn’t costing him very much, at least not yet.”

“Well, my guess is that he’s alarmed because he has no idea who is doing it, or for what reason, and he doesn’t know how they’re doing it. It’s one thing to be robbed in broad daylight by someone who wants your money. It’s another thing to get up in the morning and find your furniture was rearranged while you slept. The objective harm may be smaller but the mystery is more threatening.”

“I suppose.” She pushed her brown bangs up her forehead and said, “I wonder if there’s a hair salon anywhere in the Big Sapphire. I suppose there must be, since there’s a good five thousand people living in here.” We watched the waves roll by, half a mile below, in the bright equatorial sunlight outside the big windows; even with the dark blue tint, it was still uncomfortably bright and the glare was dazzling. “Even granting what you say, it still doesn’t make sense for Iphwin to be taking a personal interest in these matters, not to this extent. Iphwin controls more economic resources than most independent nations; he’s probably bigger than the Scandinavian and the Hungarian Reichs put together. That’s a huge quantity of money and power. And yet he wants us to believe that he’s worried about these pinprick attacks on his periphery, some of which could be just pure coincidence. ConTech is so big that they could be draining him for fifty years and he’d never feel it. He doesn’t seem like a miser type, and his security forces are supposed to be really good— even if they’re not, he could hire good ones in a heartbeat—so why is he fretting about this? Why doesn’t he just delegate it to some security types and just read their report when they’ve caught the bad guys? This is as bizarre as mopping his own floors or working in his own ticket booths would be. And haven’t you noticed how much of this whole huge business empire seems to run entirely on his personal whim? How can he possibly be making so many small day-to-day decisions, and have time to meet with us for hours, apparently just to shoot the breeze? Lyle, the whole thing looks as if somehow all of the vast resources of ConTech—more than you can find in most nations—are being used solely to support this little peripheral project.” She was staring me as if she really expected me to know the answer.

I thought. I knew nothing. “Put that way, it does seem pretty strange—a panic over a pinprick. I wonder how Iphwin thinks that anyone could seriously knock him down with anything on the scale we’ve been looking at? Isn’t he too big to worry?”

“Maybe you’re never too big to worry,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee. “Or it could be that the effects he’s getting— mutually incompatible events, effects happening before their causes—in small affairs out in the periphery, are more threatening because he doesn’t know if they can scale them up. Look at the case of that warehouse in Buenos Aires. They sent out a railcar of crates of ball bearings, bound for Valparaiso, and the minute the train was out of sight, another train pulled in returning the shipment. And when they checked the electronic mail, they found they had gotten a message the day before complaining about having the same shipment sent twice. Now, so far, ConTech effectively lost one customer but gained a whole carload of ball bearings; but what if it had gone the other way, and with every shipment instead of just one? What if the time travel or duplication or whatever it is starts to happen when they send out electronic funds transfers? You could drain a bank account pretty fast that way. I suppose the more of nature you own, the more you have to worry about keeping the laws of nature working—and who’s ever had to worry about that before?”

That afternoon, back in our office, we tried to figure out how to investigate the phenomenon we’d been assigned. Supposedly our shrinks were going to confer with each other and write a report for us, but we would not see that for at least a day. “Why do you suppose they asked us all those trivial questions, anyway?” Helen asked.

“Trivial or nonsensical. Though I suppose it might be they were just asking a wide range of questions about all the possible things that some people remember. And I wonder which ones we each thought were nonsensical?”

“Good point.” She glanced at her monitor screen, and then said, “Hey, there’s a task list for this afternoon. It starts with making a bunch of phone calls.”

I looked over her shoulder; for some reason it was a task for both of us. “Does that mean we each call all those people and record what they tell us, or does it mean we call them together in a conference call?”

“Since I have no idea what it’s about or what is supposed to happen,” she said, “my vote is that one of us calls and the other one watches the one making the call, just in case anything too crazy starts to happen.”

First on the list was Clarence Babbit, of Chicago, Illinois. I lost the coin flip, so I dialed. I heard the phone ring, and then I was sitting there with my hand on the hung-up phone. “Did I make the call?” I asked Helen.

“You dialed and then hung up, and you’ve been sitting perfectly still for almost a full minute. Well, it did say to note anything unusual that happened, so I guess we should write that down.” She took a long moment, and did. “You have no memory of the call?”

“Nope. Should I try Mr. Babbit, again, or do we go on to the next one?”

“Try Babbit again.”

I dialed, got the phone ring at the other end, and a moment later, I was sitting there with my hand on the receiver.

The list was entirely numbers within the American Reich, so we dialed our way through, taking turns. When Helen would dial, I’d watch her hit the buttons, hear the ring start at the other end, and hang up, then remain perfectly stationary for the better part of a minute before waking up with no memory of what had happened. When I’d dial, she’d observe the same thing. We used the computer’s camera to film it, so we could watch ourselves going through the whole strange procedure, and by doing that we confirmed that our behavior was identical.

“Well,” I said, when the last one had finished, “that was very interesting and completely not informative. And if there’s anyone home at those numbers, I bet they’re getting really annoyed at the phantom rings.”

“I wonder if, when we get phantom rings, it’s because people in the American Reich are trying to call us?” Helen asked.

My head ached for a second and I said, “What did you just say?

“I just said ... I can’t remember. Do we have a recorder on at the moment to see what it was?”

We did—it’s SOP in most business offices in the Dutch Reich, as a form of political CYA, to record all conversation in offices unless it’s specifically switched off. We pulled back the last couple of minutes of sound recordings from our office, and listened to the question together. “I wonder if, when we get phantom rings, it’s because people in the American Reich are trying to call us?”

My head hurt. Helen’s head hurt. And neither of us could seem to get our minds around the question. We played it again and transcribed it, and then read it aloud several times. “This works a lot like the forbidden words on-line,” Helen said, abruptly. “After all the practice, now I can ask the question, and it doesn’t seem like it’s all that radical—but at the same time it doesn’t seem like it has an answer we can get. But you know, most of us get phantom rings much, much more often than we dial a wrong number and hang up, don’t we?”

“Certainly I do. I kind of think everyone does, too. Do you suppose maybe, if there’s a forbidden zone for phone calls or something ... but who’s forbidding it? And why control our behavior, if that’s what they’re doing, rather than just tell us the number is unavailable?”

Helen sat back in her chair and stared at the ceiling, obviously thinking hard. “There are several great big assumptions we’re making, aren’t there, Doctor Abduction? And wouldn’t your method be to look at what they all have in common?”

“That would be it. We assume that we exist in the real world and we’re not in VR at the moment,” I said. “That’s a big assumption that we ought to be able to check, somehow. If we are in VR, it’s got the biggest bandwidth ever seen, because it’s perfectly smooth, with none of the little glitches that are always there in VR.”

“Why is that assumption important?”

“Oh, because all the inexplicable events we’re having would be perfectly explicable in a VR program that either had different reality rules or wasn’t fully enforcing the ones it had. For that matter it would explain all of Iphwin’s problems. Unfortunately, I guess, we seem to be real.”

She sighed and took a sip of her coffee, making a face because it was cold. “That’s a test right there. If we are inside a VR world, the world had no way to know I was going to reach for the coffee, and it made it the right temperature for the circumstances instantly, and gave the cup a different weight coming up and going down. That’s way too complex for most programs. Well, all right, then, we are in physical reality, and one easy explanation goes away. What other assumptions are we making?”

“Well, about the phone experiment,” I said, thinking hard— “you know what? We’re assuming that we want to hang up the phone and then we forget about it. But we have no way of knowing what we wanted at the time, do we? Suppose we take wanting right out of it—we’ll just have the computer record whatever comes through the phone, use the dialer on the computer to call the number, and stand clear across the room. This time we won’t listen.”

The result was oddly impressive; the computer dialed and then hung up, instantly, yet when we checked its logs, there was only a disconnect with no indicator as to which end had hung up.

“Hmm,” Helen said. “Now let’s see what happens if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there.”

We dialed the number on the handset, walked out of the room, and came back a minute later.

A tiny tinny voice was saying, “Hello, hello? Who the hell is this? I’m going to report this to the—” And the line went dead.

This was getting interesting, as I explained to Helen. “Hmm. It would appear that it responds faster to the computer than to us, which suggests it somehow knows the difference between us and the computer. And as soon as any information starts to come through—notice how the first few words there could have been anywhere, but at the moment when poor Mrs. Culver would have had to speak whatever the local noun for the local cops is in Miami, the connection broke?”

“Let’s pick on someone else next time,” I suggested. “What can we try next?”

Next we tried putting the call up on a speaker phone, with a recording of Helen saying, “Hello. Sorry to bother you. This is your phone company calling to determine whether there is a phantom ring problem on your line. We believe you may have been getting a large number of rings without anyone on the other end of the line. If you have been having this problem, please say ‘Yes’ and state your name clearly. If you have not been having this problem, please say ‘No,’ and feel free to tell us about any other problem that you may be having with your telephone service.”

When we were satisfied with the message, Helen said, “Well, shall we pick on Culver in Miami again, go back to Babbit in Chicago, or do one of the ones we’ve called less?”

“Culver. Definitely Culver. Very likely she’s at home, and we know she’s picking up the phone and yelling. If she’s called the cops, that’s even better—they’ll be on the line.”

“Seems like kind of a nasty prank to pull on an old lady.”

“How do you know she’s old? Maybe she’s a young widow. Maybe her husband forgot to wear his flameproof sheets and stood too close to the burning cross and was burned to death last week.”

“I guess we can always hope. Okay, we’re setting up Mrs. Culver to do her part for science.”

We set the message to play out loud in a few seconds, dialed the number, and left for ten minutes to get coffee from the cafeteria, to make sure we wouldn’t be anywhere near when the phone was picked up and the message played. The house recording system would pick up whatever was said.

We had just sat down to coffee and more fruitless speculation when the lights went out in the cafeteria. There was still plenty of afternoon sun through the window, so it wasn’t dark, but there was that weird hush that falls in a really big building when the power goes out, as if everything had suddenly been smothered in thick cotton.

An alarm screamed from the direction of our office, and a voice announced, “All personnel, Floor 188, Block C, please stand by to evacuate as needed. We have a fire in Room A-210. Fire suppression is being applied. Please stand by.”

Room A-210 was our office.

“Well,” Helen said, tucking a loose strand of chestnut hair back in, “I think we’re hitting Iphwin with something considerably more expensive than a phone bill. I don’t suppose either of us is willing to consider the possibility that it’s a pure coincidence?”

A minute later the voice announced that the fire in A-210 was out, and specifically asked Helen and me to go in and assess damage. Power came back on as we were walking back to our office.

We found what I might have expected: the computer and the phone, along with all the data cables, had become hot enough to partially melt. The robot sprinklers in the room had done their job, aiming the foam streams at the hot spots, and therefore though the carpet was a messy ruin, and one chair that had the bad luck to be behind the computer from the sprinkler’s viewpoint would probably never be the same, most of the place had been saved.

Up above, there was one burned ceiling panel. I got up on a chair and gingerly lifted it; a black cube fell out and smashed on the floor, scattering an assemblage of electronics components. “Betcha that’s the room recording system,” I said.

“No bet. I’m sure it is.” Helen crouched and looked it over. “Yep. In fact it’s more interesting than that. Charred microphone. Charred recording block. Charred everything between those two points. But nothing else even got warm.”

I climbed down off the chair and said, “This time I get to ask what’s the assumption we’re making.”

Helen sighed. “I think we’ve been assuming the universe is not out to get us. And I think all the evidence is, that it is.”

After the office cleanup crew got done, there was only about an hour left, so we sat down to try to write our report. We both noticed that whoever was typing had a tendency to space out and stare into space, and now and then to type a few meaningless words before trailing off, but by dint of dictating to each other, and occasionally giving each other a gentle shake, we got it done. I almost erased it just as we finished, but Helen knocked my hand out of the way and we managed to send it to Iphwin.

We had accomplished the whole task list for the day, such as it had been, and we were exhausted, but there wasn’t any feeling of having put in a good day’s work. “Well,” I said, “want to go for an elevator ride?”

“You hopeless romantic,” she said.

We got into the elevator, rode down to our floor, and went into our apartment. The clothing I had ordered had been delivered, and the maid service had hung it all up; the fridge was stocked with groceries, and that little company apartment was now about as much home as it could be. A note on the table said that Helen’s remaining possessions had been gotten from her apartment in Auckland and were being held in storage until we moved into a larger place, and gave her an e-mail address for requesting that anything she wanted be brought out of storage and delivered here. “Maybe some of the naughty undies,” she said, “for when I need to revive your mood.” She was checking through her bureau drawers, and then said, “Ha, nope. They put ’em in here. I guess they know more about us than I thought.”

“Well, speaking of which,” I said, “it is our second night living together, and tonight we are not dead exhausted, nor in fear of our lives.”

“If that’s a suggestion, the answer is yes. Provided that you cook dinner.”

I grabbed the apron and tied it on. I poached some fish in wine, threw some noodles and mixed vegetables on it so we could pretend we cared about nutrition, and had something edible in just a few minutes.

As we sat at the small table, eating, killing some of the white wine that hadn’t been used on the fish, and watching the sea darken as the sun set (so close to the equator, it was never more than a few minutes before or after six), Helen said, “Tell me about anything you remember, anything at all from your past.”

I shrugged. “It’s all pretty dull, as you must know. Are you curious about anything in particular?”

“Well, I’m not curious about you per se—” she began.

“Why, thank you.”

“I don’t mean that! I mean I’m curious about how many memories we don’t share, besides General Grant and the existence of the country where I grew up. For example, the history I teach in school is that after the German atomic bomb attack stopped the D-Day invasion and wrecked London, Washington, and Moscow, there was about a year and a half of disorganized fighting all over the world, and then a brief period of peace. Then Germany ordered eleven nations and regions to set up Reichs, and when they dragged their feet, the Germans went back to war in 1954 and really finished the job. They probably killed a fifth of the world population during the Lebensraum period in the sixties and seventies, and since then they’ve been relatively quiet, only occasionally threatening someone else or bullying the Japanese and Italians around. Right?”

“Right. That’s how I learned it in school.”

“Well, I told you what I grew up with. Now, can you name the American presidents?” she asked.

“If I couldn’t, my parents would have beaten the hell out of me. Washington, Hamilton, Washington again, Monroe for three terms, Perry—”

“Good enough. My list goes Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Burr, Madison, and on from there. You had Lincoln and a Civil War, didn’t you?”

“Yep. And he died, but we disagreed about when.”

She nodded. “All right, that’s just to start with. Now how about some minor details? Did your grandparents ever complain about having to learn to drive on the left when they came to Enzy?”

“Why should they? America was like all the English-speaking countries, it drove on the left.”

“When I grew up,” she said, “Americans drove on the right. So did Canadians.”

“Why would Canadians be different from people from any other state?” I asked.

“Define Canada.”

“Uh, the big state north of Lake Erie, between Michigan and Quebec.”

She nodded more emphatically. “Who made the first airplane?”

“The Wright brothers. Flew it at Kitty Hawk in 1903.”

“Who was the greatest baseball team of all time?”

“Well, I guess most people would say the 1927 Yankees— Ruth, Gehrig, those guys.”

“See, that’s the strange thing. These different histories we have tend to agree about trivia and disagree about big things, with about equal frequencies. Who was president during World War Two?”

“Franklin Roosevelt,” I said.

“Same here. You see? Drastically different patterns of what happened and all these strange details that overlap. Now what kind of assumption do we have to make, to make it possible to reconcile these?”

“I thought we weren’t working anymore today.”

“I don’t know that we get much of a choice,” Helen said, sighing. “The more I turn all this over in my head, the more I can’t leave it alone. We’re assuming something or other that won’t let us see what’s going on, I’m just sure of that.”

A thought suddenly hit me very hard, and I said, “How did we meet?”

“You don’t remember?” Helen said, looking cross.

“Humor me.”

“Well,” she said, not happily, “it was new faculty orientation at Whitman, and we were seated together because we were next to each other in the alphabet. There was a terribly dull speech by the bursar, and you started passing notes to me.”

I groaned. “We came in in different years. You had already been here a year. You joined the faculty in 2055 and I joined in 2056. We met when you posted the notice in the paper about Fluffy, just after I got hired.”

“Gee, I’d forgotten about Fluffy. Poor thing. But we were already dating when it happened, and it wasn’t that big a deal, Lyle, how would we have met about her? And why would I have run an obituary in the newspaper for my cat?”

“An obituary? I don’t mean two years ago when she died of old age.”

“She got run over just after I started dating you.”

“I met you because she got lost and turned up in my backyard. I had seen the ad in the paper so I captured her.. . .”

“I see what you mean,” Helen said. “It’s not just the big things, is it? It seems to be everything.” She stared at me. “We’re finding out something here, but I’m not sure I want to find it out.”

I had half a thought. “Let me ask something more directly relevant. Did you ever turn down an opportunity to become a really good shot with a pistol, or to learn to use that whole arsenal of weapons you had last night?”

She gaped at me. “Well, yes I did, now that you mention it. When I was in the second year of my master’s program, and thinking about going into Reich Studies, I was pretty broke and I applied to the intelligence services. They didn’t want me as an analyst but they offered me the chance to take the physical qualifier. Then I got a decent job, and dropped out and worked for a year, so I never went back to schedule the qualifier. I suppose if I hadn’t gotten that job just then, I might have taken the test and become a spy or a policeman or something, and learned all about using guns and knives.” She got up, gulped her wine, and went to stare out the window at the dark. “That was it, wasn’t it? Some little turning point in my life where I didn’t become the woman who was so good with a gun two nights ago. But then how did she show up just then, and why am I here? My memory includes you getting shot, Lyle, and I think you did. Or some of you did.”

There was a long, awkward silence, and then Helen began to cry, collapsing back onto the couch in a big, awkward tangle of limbs. “You know,” she said, “I have a horrible feeling that somewhere out there you’re dead, and I’m crying. And it doesn’t seem fair, because the me that killed Billie Beard saved your life, and she probably doesn’t have you. She could be the one crying. And it seems so unfair that I’ve still got you, and I didn’t do a thing—”

I got up and took her in my arms, and started kissing away tears and trying to soothe her, as I suppose lovers have been doing for upset lovers since the world began. Her wet face pressed against my neck, and then her soft lips began to move against my skin, and whether it was just stress, or a desperate need to reassure each other, or even just that we had been planning to make love anyway, that’s what we did.

Later, as we were lying in bed, waiting to drift off, I said, “Here’s an odd observation. Does it seem to you that people don’t talk about the past nearly as much as they used to? I mean, I notice nowadays that when small children begin to talk about what happened last year or last month, their mothers shush them as if they’d talked about bowel movements or their private parts. I don’t remember that when I was a child, do you?”

“No, come to think of it.” She rolled over and rested her head on my chest. “And I think I never bring the subject up, not because it would be impolite, but because I just don’t. Now and then some older person starts to talk about their life or things they saw or did long ago, and I find I always get very impatient and try to avoid hearing it. Isn’t that strange in a historian? And my memory is going, too. Every lecture, I go to the library and look up things I know by heart before I write that lecture. Isn’t it strange that I never noticed any of that before?”

“Strange, or maybe part of the pattern,” I said. “Which we seem to be getting better and better at talking about—we’re having fewer memory lapses and seizures, or whatever those were. As if practicing somehow makes it possible to think about the problem.”

“I wonder how many other people wandered in from how many other worlds,” Helen said.

“Other worlds?” I asked. Then I got a blinding headache and passed out.

A moment later I woke up, my head still in pain, with Helen holding me and saying, “Here, take an aspirin. Are you all right?”

“I guess so. What happened to you when you said ‘other worlds?’ ” At the phrase, my stomach lurched and my head hurt.

“Nothing when I said it. I thought it a moment before, and felt sort of dizzy. Which makes me think it’s one of those ideas, like, like, like, the ones we couldn’t speak before. Well, then, all right, many of us are from different versions of the past...” She gasped. “Ooh, now there’s a thought that hurt. Which I guess is our indicator that it’s important. Not many of us. We all are.”

I swallowed the aspirin and said, “The thought didn’t hurt me because I don’t understand what you are getting at. But now I’m really, really curious.”

She drew a deep breath and said, “All right, here’s the thought. Suppose people are crossing from one history to another—all the histories are sort of tangled together like spaghetti, all right? And most of the time, when you cross over, you cross over to a strand very near your own, so only small details are different—like how you met, or how long your cat lived, or something. But every so often you accidentally take a big leap, like I did when I came here to this history. And whatever causes those crossovers, the crossovers have been getting more and more frequent in the recent past, so that people have been having more and more disagreements about the past. Well, you know, when a subject becomes controversial—especially when it becomes controversial and impossible to settle—”

“Of course!” I said, and now my head felt like it was in a vise. “Polite people start avoiding it. Nobody wants to be the rude person who brings it up. Ways are found to pussyfoot around it... sometime in the last few years, then, or maybe the last twenty or so at most, the worlds have started to drift together—”

She was sobbing again, and I rolled over and held her. This time I could guess. “Your mother?”

“Oh, yes, that.” She turned and hung on to me for dear life. “That, and if we’re right, then after all these years I just found out I’m not crazy.”

I suppose we could have talked more, but exhaustion swept over us, and though it seemed I just shut my eyes for a moment, when I looked up, it was already dawn. Helen was still in my arms, traces of tears all over her face, her lips wet and red, hanging slack. She looked impossibly young to me, and I lay there watching her till she began to move and her eyes opened.

At breakfast, we tried to have a normal, trivial conversation, but we discovered that we just weren’t going to be able to talk about much else. “There is a certain kind of sense to it,” Helen said. “Figure Iphwin owns all of ConTech, and ConTech might be as much as half of one percent of the global economy. He’s so big that he has to operate internal markets and figure out trade policies between his own holdings. There isn’t much way to take him down by a frontal assault—but if you can somehow make things less predictable, disrupt the causality inside the company, then that changes things. In some ways it’s not much different from doing random damage, like twentieth-century bombing raids, or getting the company directory and sending letter bombs at random. But in other ways it’s worse, because how can anyone plan that a certain number of time reversals will happen, or that some shipments that were never ordered will turn up from companies that don’t exist, or, like that case in Mexico, where ninety tons of specialty steel get shipped and forty thousand sets of pajamas get delivered? For most of the other possible kinds of attacks, you can control risk with insurance, because you know what the range is of what might happen, and what the likelihood is. Random bombings might be terrifying but they just add one more bad thing to the list of bad things that are likely to happen, and give it a high likelihood. But when the two things being messed with are the range of what might happen and how likely it is—then there’s no bet you can take out against it.”

“Suppose the enemy is Murphy,” I said, before I had time to analyze what I meant myself.

“Who’s Murphy?”

“Murphy’s Law?”

“Still never heard of it.”

“Oh. Well, it’s not really important. What I’m getting at is, how often do you discuss the past with your friends, in a way that matters to them? How many people have a long-running argument with their spouse about which of two perfectly plausible events happened to them a long time ago? There could be tremendous amounts of random noise in the past before anyone would notice there was any pattern of any such thing. And maybe small violations of causality account for Murphy’s Law, which is the law that ‘If anything can’t go wrong, it will.’ I mean, that’s a violation of causality right there.”

“Who was Murphy?” she asked.

“Funny thing,” I said, “but I’ve heard at least ten different stories about him. The inventor of the parachute but not the first successful parachute. The guy who invented a safety hatch for submarines, that was supposed to make it impossible to dive with a hatch open, but actually made all the hatches open at the bottom of the dive. A man who ran a mail-drop blackmail operation and was caught in the Tsunami of 2002, which kept him from getting to the post office but allowed the post office to stay open and send the mail. The navigator on the Titanic. All sorts of stories about the guy, actually. I always figured most of them were folklore, but maybe in all of history there was just one Murphy, and he has multiple pasts in which he always ends up coining his law, the same way that the multiple American pasts always seem to have the ’27 Yankees and the Wright brothers.”

“And you’re suggesting—”

“That maybe perverse anticausality—just call it perversity— is just a physical factor in the universe, like entropy or gravity. Maybe it normally occurs at such a small level that people who encounter it don’t think enough of it to care very much; or they notice it, like Murphy, but they don’t try to do anything about it systematically. This implies that either the background level of perversity is increasing—or it might be caused by Iphwin himself. Maybe he’s got the first economic unit that’s both big enough and self-aware enough to detect perversity, so that he sees it happening, where none of the markets did.”

“How would we test that?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I was just seeing if there was any reason to question an assumption that we were making, that there was a real enemy somewhere doing something, and not just the system itself generating the events. But though it could be the system, it could just as easily be a real enemy. And having been beaten the hell out of by Billie Beard, I find it hard to think of her as just a system artifact, or purely an expression of the law of perversity.” I looked at my watch. “Probably about time to get ourselves up to the office. I guess we should think about what sort of experiment would allow us to distinguish between a physical law and a physical enemy—but that would depend on knowing what an enemy could do, and until three days ago I wouldn’t have believed that anybody could tamper with causality.”

When we got to the office, about five minutes early, the only instruction was to continue experiments by whatever means we wished; there was also a budget that told us that we had a ridiculous amount of money to play around with.

“What say we go do research in Fiji for a year?” Helen said, grinning at me.

“I’m worried about getting shot,” I said, “so how about we beat the bad guys and then honeymoon in Fiji?”

“Oh, all right,” she said. “Has anyone ever told you you’re excessively responsible?”

“Nearly everyone. Let’s see. One thing we could try to develop is a map of all these alternate pasts we’re finding—they seem to occur in families, like the way that Terri is from a world that includes the Reichs and Empires, like I am, or that Kelly and you both share Diego Garcia, with all of our personal histories tangled up into something you can’t unscramble when we tried to fit them together, so we seem to all be from different worlds, but not from evenly distributed different worlds—there wouldn’t be that many similarities in such a small group if the distribution were even across the infinite possibilities. It suggests that there’s some huge diversity of pasts out there, but it’s grouped into a much smaller number of ‘supergroups’ or ‘history families’ or whatever you want to call them.”

“Have you thought of an experiment?”

“Let’s try this one. We’ll send a small payment to anyone who answers a questionnaire, identifying as many things as they can and labeling the rest ‘never heard of it.’ Sort of like what the shrinks did with us, you know. And we’ll make it sort of a chain letter—there’s another payment for anyone who modifies the quiz according to directions, and then sends it on to another person. The modification will be adding a couple of things to be identified to the list—that way we’re not just restricted to what we know about, so that if there’s some Supreme Court case called Hickenlooper versus Iowa or something, that’s important in histories that neither of us has, it stands a good chance of being added to the list. We could pay the first few thousand respondents and cut it off after three hours; the net’s a big place and that would give us a starting map, to see whether addresses correspond to histories, for example.”

That took us the better part of the morning, devising a questionnaire, a payment system that couldn’t be cheated too easily, and a system for modifying the questionnaire that still would not let them cheat on the payment system. It was ten-thirty before we managed to fire it off; we had agreed we wouldn’t check until everything had come in, which wouldn’t be till one-thirty, so we spent two hours reviewing all the mystery cases: shipments that arrived before orders or were transformed into other objects by the time they arrived, nonexistent branches of the company that left frantic messages—and then, just as often, called in to thank ConTech’s central office for the help. Some ships and planes had vanished; one ship had been found floating without a crew, a hundred miles from its exact duplicate, which was also crewless. A few days later the whole crew turned up in jail, four thousand miles away, having been there since before the voyage started.

“There’s definitely something peculiar about time in all of these,” Helen offered, after an hour. “Doesn’t it look as if many of them are cases of time flowing backward or going into a loop?”

I nodded. “From the results we can’t tell if time is looping, or if it’s just caused by there being a multiple stream of pasts. Maybe the shipment that arrives before the order just has a past where the order was dated earlier. Maybe the two ships are both from pasts where the ship just vanished.”

“But if the ship vanished in the past, how can it be here today?”

I swallowed hard, because I had thought of something that might upset Helen. “Helen, if there are multiple pasts, and if there are going to continue to be multiple pasts—and we haven’t seen anything putting a stop to them—then there have to be multiple presents, because we’re the past of the future. And since the future is the present of the future—”

“God, that makes my head hurt, but I see what you mean. We can’t assume we’re the only present...” She stared at me. “A few months ago you were very, very drunk and you told me about something called the Many Worlds Interpretation. What was that?”

I shrugged. “I hadn’t thought of it, but it’s another hypothesis we could add. Down at the quantum level—we’re talking subatomic particles here, really small stuff, nothing you can observe in everyday life—there’s a little problem called the uncertainty principle.”

“I’ve heard of that. Doesn’t it mean that the observer creates reality or something like that?”

“That’s what it means in the humanities, where people just pin new labels on ideas they inherited from the Greeks. But what the uncertainty principle means in physics is a lot stranger and much more rigorously demonstrated. Suppose you had a car whose speedometer could only register five speeds—maybe zero, two miles per hour, ten miles per hour, twenty-six, and a hundred and ten. It would always register one of them, and the closer your actual speed was to one of those speeds, the more likely it would be to register that speed.”

“I’d take it in and get it fixed.”

“Damn straight. However, we can’t take the universe in and get it fixed, obvious as the need might be. Now it so happens that the only way we know what’s happening with subatomic particles is to bounce other subatomic particles off of them, and subatomic particle behavior is quantized—it can only take on certain values, like that five-speed speedometer. Therefore when we bounce one particle off another one to find out what’s going on, we don’t get a single answer—we get a distribution of probabilities. Sort of the way you’d take a guess at what your car was doing—’Well, probably ten percent chance it’s between 10 and 26, seventy percent it’s between 26 and 110, and twenty percent it’s more than 110, so I’m probably okay on the highway.’ No matter how exactly we bounce the particle or measure its behavior after the collision, we don’t get a precise picture, but a set of bets, probabilities assigned to possibilities. Still with me?”

“This is worlds easier when I’m not drunk.”

“I bet. Okay, now here’s the tricky part: there’s no difference between a measurement and any other interaction with the universe. Any physical process that depends on that particle will act as if all the possibilities were happening at once, with that mix of probabilities. Unless you do something for which the particle must be in exactly one state—and if you do that, then it will ‘collapse’ into that single state.”

“Pretend I understand you and give me an example.”

“Ever hear of Schrödinger’s cat?”

“Why would I want to shred anybody’s cat?”

I ignored that. “Schrödinger suggested a thought experiment, trying to get at how weird the problem is. He said, suppose you put a cat in a box so that you can’t observe the cat, and inside there’s a bottle of poison gas, which has a fifty percent chance of releasing the gas, based on some quantum event it’s going to observe. Then since the unobserved quantum state is 50 percent one way and 50 percent the other, until you open the box, the cat must be 50 percent alive and 50 percent dead.”

“Sounds like something a German would think of doing.”

“He didn’t do it. He just pointed it out as an example of how hard that is to understand in ordinary life. Naturally, when you open the box, since the cat has to be either alive or dead, what you find is either a live cat or a dead one, and that tells you how the quantum event came out. But up till then the box should behave as if it had a 50 percent alive cat—whatever that means— inside it.

“Now, one of the greatest arguments in all of science, still going on after 150 years, is about what that means. The Copenhagen Interpretation, which most physicists buy, is that it’s all just a computational device, and that it’s just that we don’t know how to really understand our own equations—all we know is that they work. The Aphysical Interpretation is that somehow there’s a ‘real’ world that ours is only a shadow of, and the probability distributions somehow reflect an underlying unified reality that we can’t perceive. And the Many Worlds Interpretation says that every time a quantum event happens, the universe splits into multiple worlds, enough so that across all those worlds, each event happens all the possible ways. When a Copenhagen interpretation guy opens the box, he finds the cat alive and says, ‘The calculations showed a 50 percent chance that this would happen.’ The Aphysical guy opens it and says, ‘This live shadow cat reflects the state of the real cat.’ And the Many Worlds guy says, ‘Aha! I am in the universe that got the live cat; in some other universe at this moment someone is recognizing that he is in the universe with the dead cat.’ And the really clever trick, so far in the history of physics, is that all these are just interpretations. The experiment doesn’t go one bit differently from one interpretation to another; the only thing that changes is the meaning we read into the event. At least up till now; we might be conducting, somehow, a giant experiment that’s showing that Many Worlds has, let us say, a certain edge.”

Her jaw dropped. “So if Many Worlds is right, then there could be an infinite number of universes with divergent pasts out there? And maybe what’s happening is that things are crossing the fence, or whatever it is, between the universes?”

I nodded. “That’s what I mean. But there’s a lot of what is going on that doesn’t seem to fit that theory. Why should that make it impossible to phone America? Supposing that you and I are meeting different versions of each other—Lyle Prime flew you to Saigon, and Helen Prime rescued me in the shooting at the Curious Monkey—why don’t we ever run into ourselves? And why do the crossings over only seem to happen now and then, and why don’t we all just have multiple pasts until someone asks us a question?”

“Prove we don’t.”

“All right, I’m thinking of a past event. I’m not thinking of a distribution of them. Is any part of your past a distribution of events?”

She thought hard for a moment. “As far as I can tell, no.”

“See? It doesn’t fit with what I’d expect. Let’s go to lunch and try to get away from all this for a while; by the time we get back we should have results from our survey.”

Since we were trying not to talk shop, there was practically nothing to talk about; wedding plans seemed hopelessly indefinite, managing the apartment together required practically no consultation (since we were both neat minimalists), and the weather was perfect as it tended to be at this time of year. We ate, we looked out the window, and we read the paper to each other (learning mainly that the world was proceeding about as always—I can’t recall a single surprising thing). By one-thirty, when it was time to return to the office, we were looking forward to it.

The results were about as much of a nonresult as you could get; we had a few hundred responses, and the “I don’t knows” for each item, plus the disagreements, were generally uncorrected with address, time of response, domain, or anything else. “Some of the answers correlate,” Helen said, “but that kind of figures. Hardly anyone has Mickey Mouse being a Disney character and a newspaper character named after a brand of chewing gum; nobody has Teddy Roosevelt assassinated by German agents in 1916 and being Secretary of War during World War Two. Which just tells us that most people live in a locally consistent world. Not the most informative thing I’ve ever seen, eh?”

I shrugged. “Well, there’s one implication in the whole thing. If the addresses and domains aren’t correlated with the histories, then what that tells us is that people are distributing across the various pasts without any regard for geography, which kind of implies that the rate of crossing over is uniform around the world. Which lends support to the idea that somehow or other people have begun to drift between the Many Worlds.”

“People, objects, phone calls, and e-mail at least,” Helen said. “I wonder what else is? And here’s a question for you. Suppose Schrödinger teaches the cat to flip a coin and push a lever based on the outcome, and then he puts the kitty in the box with a setup so that one lever releases poison gas. How come the cat isn’t half alive and half dead from doing that, just as if he used a subatomic experiment? Schrödinger has no way of knowing which way the coin flip came out from the outside. But I’m sure the cat is either alive or dead, no other way about it. What difference does using a subatomic gadget make?”

“Great question,” I said. “In fact—”

The phone rang, Helen picked it up, said hello, mouthed “Iphwin” at me. “Yes,” she said. “Of course we’ll be happy to do that, sir, but I was wondering why you think that we—oh, my god. Well, I see. Okay. We’ll get right down to the apartment, pack a bag, and get ready to go. Yes, sir, of course. Thanks and good-bye.”

She hung up, shaking her head, and said, “Well, brace yourself. We’re on our way to Mexico City. Maybe we can manage to visit Colonel Sykes while we’re in the country, eh?”

“What’s in Mexico City?”

“There’s a ConTech employee, a woman from Uppsala in the province of Sweden in the Danish Empire—whatever the hell that may be, but it doesn’t seem to bear much of a resemblance to any arrangement I’d heard of before—whose name is Ulrike Nordstrom. She’s being held by the police in Mexico City, on suspicion of murder. Iphwin seems to think that Nordstrom really did the murder, but that the evidence the Mexico City cops have on hand isn’t enough to hold her, so our job is to go there, with big wads of Iphwin’s money, pay Nordstrom’s bail, bribe some public officials, and get Nordstrom safely back into the keeping of ConTech.”

“Why us? He must have thousands of employees who can do that job.”

“He does. But he thinks we’ll help to stir matters up a bit, as he puts it. It so happens that the deceased appears to be Billie Beard.”

Who knew what I might have thought of this last week? By now I was getting so used to the way the world had started to work that all I did was sigh and say, “Billie Beard has a knack for turning up dead in an extremely inconvenient fashion. I hope that woman knows how much trouble she is.”

“At least one of her is less aware of it right now than she was a while ago. Come on, we’ve got to pack—Iphwin wants us to get on a jump flight in about two hours.”

We got off the elevator at our floor in comfortable silence; I know I was mainly thinking that this had to be more interesting than sitting in an office, playing phone pranks and tabulating the results. I suppose Helen was thinking the same.

We were less than a step from the door to our apartment when Helen froze and stuck her hand out, against my chest. I was about to say “What?” loudly, but I had heard it too— something in the apartment had gone thump, loudly, and as I listened there was a softer thud, and the not-quite-consciously-perceptible sense that something was moving near the door.

Helen pointed to the wall by the hinges of the door, and I flattened myself against it. Then she pressed her back against the wall on the doorknob side of the door, took out her key, and put that in her left hand. She nodded at me, meaningfully, and I wondered what she meant for just an instant before I saw her pull a pistol from her purse and soundlessly set the purse down on the floor beside her.

She unlocked the door and shoved it open, burst into the room taking up a firing stance—and let out the happiest little cry I had ever heard from her. “Fluffy!”

There on the rug, rolling around, clearly overjoyed to see her, was her ratty old Persian cat from years ago, the one that I remembered as dying of old age two years ago, and Helen had told me she remembered as having gotten run over. Fluffy looked pretty old—the fur was thin, fine, and dry, she was now terribly scrawny, and pretty clearly she was a little stiff in the hips—but otherwise about the same cat that I remembered. “You know how to use a gun again,” I said, because it was the first thing I thought of.

“And you’re not in a wheelchair,” she said, scooping up the cat and hugging it to her chest. “And Fluffy is obviously a whole lot better too.” I stood and stared at her as she set the gun down on the counter to have both hands free to play with the cat. After a long moment she looked back at me and said, “Oh, don’t look so surprised. I’m sure I didn’t understand half of it, but just ten minutes ago, at our meeting with Iphwin, you explained everything that’s been happening since last Friday, and it made perfect sense to me.”

The whole way to Mexico City, including almost an hour of weightlessness, we talked, with me trying to piece together enough information from Helen’s memory to be able to figure out what I had explained to her before. This Helen was perhaps ten pounds heavier than the one I was used to, much more solidly built and muscular, and had led rather a more adventurous life; she seemed fond enough of me, but she didn’t have the complex, thoughtful approach to the world that, the Helen I was used to did, and I had a distinct sense that whatever it was that my other self, over in some other stream of time, had figured out, this one had not listened as carefully or asked as many questions as the Helen I had had lunch with. Therefore, she just didn’t provide enough information for me to reconstruct whatever the solution that some other I had arrived at had been.

The ConTech company ship made a swift, safe landing on the lake; since the beginning of jump boat travel, cities had gone to great lengths to open up bodies of water near themselves for landing areas, and Mexico City was now about half lake, at least as much as it had been during early Aztec times. We hit the water, motored up to a company slip, and were waved right through all the usual formalities; it was dark out on the lake, at five A.M. We had flown right through most of the night, into the previous day, in a bare couple of hours—it had been Tuesday, five-thirty P.M. when we left, and now it was Monday, five A.M. We knew that we’d be exhausted soon enough, but for the moment the effect was of being oddly wide awake for the time of day it was.

As we approached the company slip, we saw there was a sizable group of men waiting for us. The moment the boat tied up and the gangplank extended, as we walked off the boat, a slim man approached me. In the lights of the pier, I could see that he had black, tightly curled hair and an aquiline nose; he wore a small goatee, a plain white shirt, and dark trousers and coat.

“Are you Mr. Lyle Peripart?” he asked, in accentless English.

“Yes, I am.”

“And you are Miss Helen Perdita?” he asked.

“Yes.”

With a very slight shrug and nod he commanded the big men who lunged forward to handcuff us. “Then I am afraid that I shall have to place both of you under arrest. We understand that you are coming here in the matter of a murder, and we rather suspect that your presence here was ordered by Geoffrey Iphwin or by ConTech, both of which have been indicted in absentia for conspiracy to commit murder. You may enter a guilty plea now if you wish, or wait until a later meeting with a police interrogator.”

They relieved Helen of a frightening array of weapons, more or less politely, and then pushed us into a police van, not too roughly, and drove us to the station. It turned out that the slim man who had arrested us was going to be our interrogator, a detail he had somehow failed to mention before, and that interrogation would begin immediately.

“My name,” he said, standing over me, after Helen had been taken out, and I had been cuffed to a small stool, bolted to the floor in the center of the room, “is Jesús Picardin.”

“Thank you very much for faxing the file of documents that got us released,” I said.

He stared at me incredulously. “What in the sweet name of Our Savior are you talking about?”

I told him the story of our rescue from the jail in Saigon, and he said, “This is the most preposterous set of alibis that I’ve ever heard. First of all, my chief investigator, Senora Beard, would have had no reason to be anywhere in the People’s Republic of Vietnam, and in any case that city is called Ho Chi Minh City, so far as I know. And if Helen Perdita had indeed shot her there, I would hardly have been working to free Helen Perdita. As for your mention of Esmé Sanderson, this is the most preposterous part of the whole story—who do you think you are trying to fool? She’s shared an office with Billie Beard for the better part of ten years, and the two are old partners; now that Billie is gone, in fact, Esmé is going to be my acting second in command. How you could expect her to give you an alibi is beyond me.”

One of the men came in and said something to Picardin; “teléfono” was the only word I caught, but the rest of it apparently told the police captain that it was important, because he got up and went out to get it. While he was out there, I contemplated my situation. A week ago I had only been dimly aware that this city existed, and although I suppose I knew it must have police stations, it would not have occurred to me that I would be sitting in one. Worse yet, from my standpoint, I was clearly a really long way from home myself, now, because I was in one of the worlds where Saigon was called Ho Chi Minh City, which meant I was somewhere outside my home group of worlds by some considerable distance; there were no Reichs here. That seemed like a good enough thing, but from the cursory perusal of the notes Helen and I had been able to do, if you got away from National Socialism, you found yourself in the world of the Puritan Party, or the ones where Communist Russia had conquered the Earth, or the ones where America had gone up in a nuclear civil war of some kind in the early 1980s. There were some other families of worlds, as well, we thought, but we hadn’t gotten them sorted out yet.

At the moment, if the name Ho Chi Minh City was the clue that I thought it was, we were probably in one of the Communist-descended lines, which wasn’t where either Helen or I had come from. Clearly ConTech existed in this world, and so did Geoffrey Iphwin, but would the Geoffrey Iphwin of this world even recognize our names? If he did, would we be his employees, and would he be sending any help?

I tried to leave that question thoroughly alone, but unfortunately it was about the only source of amusement I had, except perhaps for meditating upon the way my wrists hurt where they were cuffed to the chair. The room itself offered only whitewashed concrete block walls, a spotless black floor with a drain that made me wonder if perhaps in this particular version of Mexico the police might be even a little bit inclined to brutality, and two fluorescent fixtures with thin metal dividers just below the glowing tubes. The only decor was the door, painted pale hospital green, with a big dead-bolt lock on the other side; the bolt itself was visible in the gap between the door and the jamb, but it looked like you’d need a welding torch to get through it, the door seemed convincingly hard to break, and anyway I wasn’t going to get anywhere near it unless I got out of the handcuffs, which I had no idea of how to do.

Perhaps I would be better off considering just how far away from any kind of home or help we might be, after all. Or just thinking about how much my wrists hurt.

The door opened, and Jesús Picardin came in, with Helen walking after him. She had all her weapons in a wire basket, exactly like the one in which Picardin had my wallet, belt, computer, and belt phone. “We’ll have to move quickly,” Picardin said, his voice low and hushed.

Helen, behind him, had a tense but friendly little smile, and she nodded at me, indicating that I was supposed to cooperate in this, whatever “this” might be. Picardin undid the handcuffs and handed me my things; I put the belt on, the wallet in my pocket, and made sure everything was good to go. “I’m not sure how long Geoffrey Iphwin will be able to keep Esmé on the phone. She was shouting at him, you know. I’m afraid that for some reason or other she blames him for the death of Billie Beard, and this Esmé does not have the memories of Billie that I do—or that the Esmé I know does. But if we can get past the front office, we can probably go get the prisoner released.”

“If I thank you for our release in Saigon—” I began.

“Your charming partner has already done so. She said this was the second time I had gotten you released. I never did know what became of that pile of documents I faxed, but I’m very glad that it did you good. Let’s hurry. Quietly now.” He hustled us down a long corridor past two rooms full of busy cops talking to the usual array of battered, hopeless, angry, bewildered, and exhausted people that you see in a police station.

Once we were clear of those areas, we moved at a dead run, through hallway after hallway, following Picardin. He managed to tell us in a low voice that we were going the long way round in hopes of not being seen before we reached the prisoner’s cell.

We knew what Ulrike Nordstrom looked like from the photo Iphwin had sent to us, and besides she was the only one in her row of cells; it looked like they didn’t arrest many women as dangerous offenders around here. She was short and pale blonde, a little heavy, and she wore her hair in a sort of bowling-ball cut. She immediately jumped up and said, “Lyle! Helen! Am I glad to see you! What are you doing here?”

Helen and I glanced at each other, and I said, “Er, we know you from your photograph, but how do you know us?”

“It’s me. It’s Ulrike! Lyle, you and I were married for five years, and Helen was my maid of honor. Right after college. It can’t have been that long.”

Picardin was looking at us very, very intently, and didn’t seem to be the least bit pleased, but he unlocked the cell door and let her out anyway. “I have a key for a back service exit,” he said, “so we can get you out of here. But I wish someone would tell me things before they become surprises.”

“We all wish that very much,” Helen said.

Picardin handed her papers and wallet back to Ulrike. She seemed to be pouting, and from the way she was watching me, I got the distinct impression that at one time this expression had been some kind of private signal between Ulrike and whatever Lyle it was that she had married. She was getting angry at me, I guessed, because I wasn’t receiving the signal. We hurried after Picardin, down the hall, and out the door he motioned us through. “We’ll be in touch, I’m sure,” he said. “I just hope I can figure out the rules of this world before I make any mistakes that are too big.”

At the end of the long dark alley, we found a street that seemed to be deserted, and, knowing nothing more than that the lake, where ConTech’s jump boat was, was west, that was the way we headed. We hurried on for a few blocks without seeing anything move—the sun would be coming up in a few minutes, and apparently this neighborhood was too affluent to have people who worked early mornings, but not affluent enough to have servants coming in at this hour.

After a few blocks without seeing anyone, we relaxed, and Ulrike said, “Lyle, I don’t know where to begin. Your family sponsored me to come to New Zealand, after the war, and I came and lived at your house, and when I first got there I was thirteen, you were eleven, and your brother Neil was fifteen. Doesn’t any of this ring any bells?”

“Oh, it rings all sorts of bells,” I said. “Just not the ones you might think.” The white buildings around us seemed like tombs, or a movie set, no lights on in them—not just ordinary city and household darkness, but no lights, not even one left on accidentally, or a child’s night-light, or a light for finding the bathroom. This was getting stranger and stranger. The street, too, was strangely dusty and encrusted with old dust-drifts on top of the cracked and broken pavement; didn’t anyone ever sweep the streets around here? “In the last few days I’ve learned that memories are one of the least trustworthy things you can find. Trust me on what I remember. Four years before I was born, my parents were in a car wreck, with my newborn brother, Neil. They lived, but he was killed. I never knew him.”

“That can’t be!” Ulrike exclaimed. Helen put a heavy hand on Ulrike’s shoulder and a gentle finger across her lips, murmuring something about not being away from police yet. “I remember Neil perfectly,” Ulrike protested. “Great big guy, wonderful sense of humor, star athlete—I might have gotten somewhere with him if he hadn’t been gay. You don’t remember he was lost on the Elizabeth III when that was sunk?”

I had served on the Lizzy-three, myself, and when I had left Auckland harbor on Friday, she’d been floating at the dock, same as always.

Ulrike appeared more and more confused, and finally said, “Helen, at least tell me this isn’t some kind of elaborate prank.”

Helen said, impatiently, “It does seem like the authorities had some sort of a case against you. Considering you shot Beard dead, with three shots into the head, in a bank, where it was seen by four separate security cameras, I don’t see how the evidence could be any more damning.”

“But that’s just it,” Ulrike said, her hands in her pockets, slowing to a shuffle. “I don’t remember it. I keep trying to but I don’t. I was on the phone, calling a friend, to let him know where to meet me later today, and then I was grabbed from behind by a policeman.” She sounded frustrated, as if perhaps she was used to getting her way and surprised not to get it. She started to cry, sniffling and wiping her face with her hands.

I wasn’t sure what to do, but I handed her my handkerchief, and she wiped her face and blew her nose on it before handing it back to me.

“Sorry about the mess,” she said.

I stuffed it into my pocket and said, “There is something very difficult for me to explain to you. There are many different Lyle Periparts with many different pasts, probably scattered across many universes. There are also many different Helen Perditas, and probably many different Ulrike Nordstroms. Geoffrey Iphwin seems to be in all the universes, too. Anyway, in some but not all universes, each of us works for him, and so we were dispatched to get you out of prison. It happens that neither of us met any version of you, in our home worlds, whatever that might be. So I’m very sorry that I’m not reacting exactly as your ex-husband would, and I’m sorry that we aren’t giving you the kind of attention and support you need and expect from us, but from our standpoint, we just met you, and that’s how we’re reacting.”

Ulrike Nordstrom nodded several times, like a slow student trying to convince her teacher that she is getting it, before she fell over in a dead faint. “Shit,” Helen said.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “If it’s just the shock, she’ll probably come around pretty quickly.” Helen and I carried her over to the front stoop of a building, where we could put her feet up. A few minutes later she sat up, apologized profusely, dusted herself off, and seemed ready to go on. Every few minutes as we walked, she would ask Helen to explain it all one more time. Helen would tell her what we knew, which god knows wasn’t much, Ulrike would whine about it, Helen would tell her that that was just the way things were, and Ulrike would walk along, sniffling just loud enough to be irritating, for a hundred meters or so before again asking, “I’m sorry, can you explain it to me one more time?”

We kept walking, and I became more and more alarmed at the silence and the lack of lights, especially as the dawn came up and it became clear that the streets were going to continue to be deserted. “What do you suppose happened here?” I asked.

“Most people won’t live in an area that’s been so heavily irradiated,” a voice said from behind us. I turned around and saw an older guy, maybe seventy years old, with flowing white hair down to his shoulders and a neat white goatee. He wore a black silk shirt with bunches and wads of silver jewelry, and baggy black silk pants, and he leaned upon a silver-handled cane.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Well, you probably remember me more as the Colonel, but my name is Roger Sykes. You are Lyle and Helen, and I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you but I assume you’re Ulrike Nordstrom?”

Ulrike sighed. “Well, at least I agree that I haven’t met you. Or even heard of you.”

“I thought you were a thousand miles south of here,” I said.

Sykes nodded at me and said, “Normally I am. But Iphwin sent a special representative to get me, and told me to come up here and get you. It took longer because you got out of the police station on the radioactive side, and then you went right into the abandoned part of the city. Took me a while to figure out that that’s what you’d done, and even as slow as you’re going, walking with a cane, it took me a longer while to catch up with you. All the same, here I am.”

“Did you say this area was irradiated?”

“It was. One of those things that’s hard to explain to the average citizen; it was hit with high-energy protons from orbit. Killed everything here, but didn’t make anything radioactive. Most people won’t make that distinction, so the area is abandoned, even though they got the corpses out of it decades ago. Mexican Civil War of 2014, if you know that one.”

“Not in my world,” I said, and the others shook their heads.

“A very, very unpleasant one. You were lucky to have missed it. Anyway,” the Colonel said—now that I was seeing him in the flesh and hearing him talk I was gradually getting reminded of the virtual reality characters he had played in so many chat rooms with me for all these years, and his identity was starting to settle onto his body for me—”anyway, if you all just wait, I’ve called in a ride for us. She’ll be here pretty quick—it’s a nonrobot vehicle, partly because Paula’s too cranky to drive anything else, and partly because that way she can take it through areas where vehicles aren’t supposed to pass.

“I have to tell you, she gave me a real turn. There was this loud banging on my screen door, and I thought it was an idiot neighborhood kid whose favorite joke is to knock on my door and holler stupid questions, so I got out of my shower and wrapped a towel around myself, and I stormed out there to see who it was, and discovered somebody I’d seen killed thirty years ago. I don’t know where the hell Iphwin found Paula Rey—in which world or what world—but it was one hell of a prank to play on an old man.”

“There are plenty of strange pranks being played lately,” Ulrike said. There was a whiny edge in her voice that made me think that if I were stuck with her for any length of time I could easily hate her.

With the soft rumble of tires, a hand-driven bus, like some strange relic of the twentieth century, lurched around the corner. The woman at the wheel, when the bus pulled up, was wearing a green T-shirt and blue jeans. She had thick, dark red, curly hair and a quaint pair of old-fashioned spectacles, like nobody else wore anymore. “Now departing for your hotel,” she said, beaming at us. “Rog, you gotta try driving this thing. Iphwin got us a really good one, and it’s the most fun I’ve had driving in years.”

We had all filed in by then, and taken seats in the little fifteen-passenger bus. “Where did you find a gadget like this?” I asked.

“I didn’t. Iphwin located it in a police garage. I doubt they’ve had it out two times in the last year,” Paula said. “They won’t miss it.”

There was a funny noise beside me. Ulrike had fainted on my shoulder. “It’s extremely interesting that that’s what you married in another world,” Helen said, in a very strange tone.

“I absolutely refuse to be held responsible for that. And you know perfectly well what my tastes are in this world.”

“Actually, I know what several other Lyles’ tastes are, and I’m extrapolating,” she pointed out.

The Colonel looked back at us, and even in the dim light of sunrise I could see one of his white eyebrows rise. He fluffed out his silver hair. “Kids,” he said, “if you’re going to fight, I’m gonna have to separate you.”

As we rumbled through the irradiated part of the city, past one dead building after another as the dawn slowly came up, I couldn’t help but think that I already knew way too much about being separated. Ulrike fell into something more like normal sleep against my shoulder, and Helen leaned back until her head was slumped way over. I looked from side to side, at both of the sleeping women, and thought that there must be thousands of them, and thousands of me, and I was willing to bet that no two of us really understood each other.

The bus rumbled on till we came to a big house with a surrounding wall and a metal gate, just after we started to see people on the street again. The gate opened, and Paula drove through. She pulled around two big trees and into a wide, horseshoe-shaped drive, and stopped. “All out,” she said. “Here’s where you’re going to sleep all this off.”

We staggered inside and Paula guided us to bedrooms, all of which came off an upper gallery. With a discreet glance at me, Paula asked about sleeping arrangements. I indicated with a half-nod that Helen and I should go in one room, and Ulrike in a room by herself. Paula, with a puckish little smile that made me almost giggle, probably more from tiredness than from any real humor, indicated she approved of my choice.

The bedroom had brick walls, a high window with bars, and a big old four-poster bed. There were robes hanging on hooks, and a genuine chamber pot under the bed. As soon as I got Helen, who was still staggering and hadn’t really awakened between the bus seat and here, onto the bed on one side, and made use of the chamber pot, I fell across the other side of the bed and was instantly asleep. It occurred to me that this was truly one hell of a way to try to cope with jet lag.

I didn’t wake up until three in the afternoon, by the clock on the wall, and when I did, I felt incredibly nasty and dirty from having been in my clothes for so long and from sleeping with my mouth open. Beside me, Helen was still snoring, the bulge of her shoulder holster still visible. I figured she knew more about that pistol asleep than I could possibly know about it awake, and let it stay where it was. I stripped out of my sweaty, foul-smelling clothes for the moment, used the pot again, put one of the robes on, and carefully opened the door.

Down below, on a couch in the great room that the gallery overlooked, looking much too fresh and comfortable, Colonel Roger Sykes looked up and said, “Aha. First one up besides me, Paula, and Esmé, and of course we’re old campaigners and can’t stay in bed late if you pay us to. Bring your clothes down; you can wash them in the basement, and we’ve got your suitcase from the jump boat. Hot shower, too, coffee, and some stuff to eat. Oh, and don’t forget the chamber pot.”

I staggered down the stairs, handed off my clothing and the chamber pot to a maid, and got a small pot of coffee, a cup, a towel, and directions to the shower. Half an hour later, I emerged, feeling like I was no longer distinguishable from human. I got a good thick ham and Swiss sandwich and an orange and took the food upstairs with my suitcase, so that I could alternate between eating and dressing. It felt good to be clean, good to be dressed, and nice to get food into my belly. If I had just had the foggiest idea what was going on or what had been happening to me for the last few days, I could even have been happy.

Helen was stirring, too, so I steered her to the robe and down to Roger, who sent her through more or less the same process I had just passed through. Ulrike emerged about the time I heard Helen’s shower start running, but it turned out that there were multiple bathrooms, and so she was guided to the next one. She looked like she’d spent part of the night crying, which might be typical for Ulrike or not, but was utterly understandable in the circumstances.

With that much taken care of, I sat down to another sandwich and more coffee, and asked Roger, “So where are we?”

“We’re in the house of Esmé Sanderson. Not the one that had arrested you and was going to kill you, another one. Besides being on our side, this one has the further advantage to us of having a great pile of inherited wealth. Coincidentally we’re in the house of the one who was going to kill you—she, like Billie Beard, was an extremely corrupt cop, and therefore could afford a place like this—but that isn’t the one who is acting as our host now. I know it’s confusing, and I’ve had Paula go over things with me a couple of times.”

“And what exactly are we doing?”

“Waiting for the others,” Sykes said, turning a page in his newspaper, and looking things over. “Hmm. Since I left home yesterday the history of Mexico seems to have changed completely three times. I don’t read Spanish all that well to begin with, and now I don’t know the context either. But for some reason all the comics are the same.” He set the paper down and took off the small pair of reading glasses he was wearing. “When everyone is comfortable and dressed, then Geoffrey Iphwin has promised to pay us all a large sum of money to go to a particular cafe—why that cafe, I have no idea—and wait until other people, who I guess we’re supposed to know, turn up. Once we are there, we’re to wait for instructions. Me, I’m just too curious to let all this slide by.

“I guess you two work for Iphwin, and so does Miss Nordstrom. I couldn’t tell you what Paula and Esmé’s motivations are—those two were the two best XOs I ever had, and therefore they made sure that I never had the foggiest idea what they were thinking; all I knew was what they wanted me to think. That’s why everything ran like clockwork. Based on past experience I would say that whatever their reasons for doing whatever they’re doing may be, we will know in good time, when they want us to, and not a second sooner. Jesús Picardin is also coming along, because he’s mercenary, curious, or both.”

After a while, Helen went upstairs in her robe, a towel wrapped around her head. Shortly after that, Ulrike followed and went to her room. Meanwhile I looked at the paper, briefly, and was reminded again that I didn’t know Spanish. Surely there were worlds in which I did? And in those worlds, did I know that I knew, or did I have to check, as I had just done?

It was almost five by the time we were all assembled and ready to go to the cafe. “It’s not far away,” Sykes said, “or so I understand.”

The only person in the room I didn’t recognize was a tall brunette with an abundant scatter of freckles, who nodded and glanced around the room. “I’m Esmé Sanderson. You must be Ulrike, Lyle, and Helen,” she said. “I guess some of you have had bad run-ins with other versions of me, and I’ve had at least one very negative encounter with one of you. Now that we know we’re all on the same side, or at least all invited to the same parties, I hope we can put all that aside.”

Paula, seated in the corner, snorted and said, “ ‘Very negative encounter’ is Esmé’s way of saying one of you shot her. But she made me promise not to say which one. And I think we have to declare a general truce, which is a good point Esmé isn’t making strongly enough. Try to remember that the person you knew may not be the person you’re dealing with, all right? Good.” She got up. “Anyway, there’s plenty of room in the transport, and there’s a real good reason to take it, and not anything else, according to Iphwin. Saddle up, load in, and get rolling. We have a place to be.”

“Should we take our stuff with us?” Ulrike asked, pushing her still-damp hair back from her cheeks.

“I guess everyone should take at least a bag,” Esmé said, “just to be on the safe side. Give priority to medicine, weapons, and ammo, in about that order, plus anything that’s really going to make you miserable if it gets left behind.”

We all scattered back upstairs; my bags were small enough so that I could carry the whole works, and it was the same for Helen. It looked like everyone had reached the same decision, downstairs, and Paula laughed at us. “I don’t want to think about what our teeth-to-tail ratio is,” she said.

Helen gave her the fierce, scary, tight-lipped smile I had not yet gotten used to. “I hope you’re counting me as teeth.”

“I am now,” Paula assured her. “Okay, all in, and we’ll see if I still remember how to drive.”

“You drove last night,” I pointed out.

“Everybody doesn’t know that, and we might as well give ’em a thrill.” She popped the door of the bus open and hollered “All aboard” much louder than necessary. At least one of us was really having a good time.

The drive was short, and sitting behind Paula I could see what a complicated job it was—she had to work what I figured out must be a shift-and-clutch arrangement, point the wheel, and work a foot throttle and brake, all without looking away from the road. I figured out that the thing in the middle that looked like an old-fashioned clock was the speedometer, and the thing marked E-----F was obviously fuel, but the other gauges were mysteries to me, particularly the one called TACH which didn’t seem to have anything to do with how fast we were going. “That looks awfully complicated,” I said, after watching her for a while.

“It gets to be automatic,” she said, “and a big part of it is just knowing that you can do it. If we get the chance on the mission, I’ll teach you—we could use more drivers, and I’m afraid it’s just me and Roger that know how to drive. And he hates it, for some perverse reason all his own. If you’d like to learn, having another one of us able to drive could save a life or two.

I shuddered; I liked the idea of learning to drive, I had always enjoyed manually operating vehicles of all kinds, but I didn’t much like being on an expedition where “saving a life or two” could be an issue.

We pulled up at the cafe, and the only person sitting in the outdoor area was Jesús Picardin, wearing a loud floral print shirt, a ridiculous Panama, bright red shorts, and heavy leather sandals. It was the ugliest impression of a tourist I’d ever seen, with his feet up on the table and a mostly empty beer bottle beside him, but somehow he managed to look dapper while doing so.

“If we’re doing what I think we’re doing,” Paula said, “you should be able to leave your gear on the bus. I’d take along a weapon, if you carry, and maybe anything really precious to you.”

I just carried what was in my pockets, but I noticed Helen sliding an extra knife into her pocket. I suppose in some lines of work a person just can’t be too careful.

The cafe would have been a pleasant enough place, and the company nice enough, if it had all just been a social occasion. I hadn’t been to Mexico before, but the beer lived up to its reputation, and we all sat, chatting and waiting for something to happen, getting to know a little bit about each other. I observed that the version of Helen here—the weapons-proficient secret agent— seemed to bond instantly with Esmé and Paula, and was not altogether sure that I liked that; I missed what I was now thinking of as “plain old Helen,” a term I was trying to lose track of as quickly as I could because I didn’t want to think of the Helen that I really wanted as either plain or old. Jesús and Roger both seemed to have a knack for waiting that I desperately envied; I’d have thought after my four years in the Navy I’d have mastered the skill of sitting about waiting to be useful, but I was tense and nervous.

At least Ulrike was responding reasonably—she was fidgeting too. We spent a while talking about academic life, since in her world she had been a professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University, but there wasn’t much to say that it hadn’t been possible to say since the 1100s when the first universities came into being: administrators had no idea what was going on, faculty politics was vicious and silly, students were often lazy and sometimes plain stupid, and nobody cared very much about human knowledge. Ulrike’s situation was the mirror image of Helen’s— Helen had crossed over into this adventure for which she was well prepared, where apparently Ulrike’s more adventurous self, the hired assassin, had crossed out of this world and left the Ulrike now sitting across from me to hold the bag.

There weren’t many people passing on the street, which might have been any street in a poor section of a city in the sunny part of the developed world, or a middle-class street in any of the poor countries. There were a few whitewashed buildings and some walls of plain CBS block, interspersed with some wooden structures that seemed to have been put up improvisationally. Cables and wires ran everywhere, antennae and dishes sprouted from every flat surface, and crude handbills covered anywhere that people didn’t walk. Little breezes stirred pale gold-yellow dust on the broken asphalt now and then.

I had gotten so used to the scene being static that I would start, just a little, every time that someone went by, or even when a dog emerged from an alley. After pretending to listen for five solid minutes to Ulrike whining about her department chair and all the credit that got stolen, I suppose I was getting desperate for something to break the monotony, since my other choices for conversation were the three women chattering about what nine-millimeter round had the greatest stopping power and the two men discussing fine points of baseball.

That was when the two women came around the corner. The older of the two, who might have been in her late twenties or early thirties, was strikingly beautiful, a honey blonde with her hair done in an elaborate coif from which several tendrils descended in tight curls, wearing a crisp white dress that revealed perfectly tanned arms and shoulders, and rounded, strappy sandals with midheels that seemed to have been specially chosen to exactly complement the perfect calves.

Beside her, the other figure seemed a little awkward and clumsy; the much younger woman, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, had pleasant but not extraordinary features, a saddle of freckles across the nose, mouth too wide, pale blonde hair cut very close, and was wearing a silly-looking pair of Ben Franklin wire-rimmed glasses, a bright pink T-shirt, and a baggy denim skirt with knee socks and sneakers. Both were carrying suitcases.

They approached the cafe, heading directly for our table, and I had a sense that I had seen someone move that way before. I stopped listening to Ulrike entirely, which was probably a good choice. The honey blonde stood still in a very attractive pose, looked over the whole table of people, then spoke with the kind of clear voice that comes from years of training, and said, pointing at Roger, “Now, you’ve got to be the Colonel. And that means you—” she pointed at me—”must be Lyle. But I can’t figure out which of you is Helen.”

“That would be me,” Helen said, “and—good golly. Kelly and Terri, aren’t you?”

Kelly nodded and said, “Yes, that’s me. Geoffrey Iphwin called me late last night and told me to pack a bag and go to Josef Stalin Airport—that’s just outside Paris—and that there would be a ticket and a person waiting for me. The ticket was for Mexico City, and the person was Terri, here.”

“Glad to meet you all,” she said, clearly trying to look poised and confident at the moment when she was unexpectedly face to face with all her adult friends. She didn’t do badly. “You wouldn’t believe how long Mr. Iphwin had to talk to my father to get me permission to do this, and I’m still not sure how he did it. We’ve been arguing all the way here about whether that airport was named after Stalin or Petain.”

They sat down to join us, and we made introductions all around the table. The energy that had dwindled into idle conversation, just as if this were a long afternoon off from our regular jobs for all of us, picked back up in a burst of eager babble, and just as it was getting hard to hear among the too-many voices clamoring for your attention, a waiter came running out of the cafe, carrying a phone with a speaker attachment, and set it down on the table among us.

We waited for a long moment in the hot, gold sunshine, everyone holding a drink or catching someone else’s eye, before the phone spoke. By the time the phone did speak, I think we all knew that it would be Iphwin. “Roll call,” he said. “Lyle?”

I was confused a moment, then Ulrike nudged me. “Here.”

“Helen?”

“Here.”

He worked his way around the table and got a “here” from everyone; then he asked “Is there anyone present I haven’t named?”

“No,” Roger said, “unless you count the waiter who’s inside the building at the moment.”

“Good. Then we can begin. Perhaps I can start by clearing a few things up for you. But first of all, I have a couple more tests to make to be sure that everything is finally in place. These aren’t what you’d call the most normal things you’ve ever done, I’m afraid, but there’s a point to all of them. Is there an electric plug on the outside wall of the cafe?”

I looked and saw that there were several of them. “Yes.”

“Would you please plug something in and out of one of them a few times?”

There was a string of lights across the tops of the posts that ringed the outdoor dining areas. The plug lay on the ground by one of the outlets. I walked over and plugged and unplugged it a few times, feeling like someone was pulling some kind of incredibly elaborate prank on me. Of course, I had been feeling that way for five days.

“Excellent!” Iphwin said. “Now, would you please get the phone from the waiter inside, and then phone Paris directory assistance and hang up as soon as they answer?”

Before anyone else moved, Kelly got up and said, “If there’s any number I know, it’s that one—I’m constantly forgetting phone numbers.” She walked into the cafe.

“What are your little experiments about?” I asked the speaker phone.

“I can’t tell you that just now but I will very soon. Just let Kelly do her experiment, and let me do one more, and then we’ll be in good shape.”

Kelly came out, holding a portable phone, and said, “All right, I’m going to try,” loud enough for the speaker phone to pick it up. Then she dialed and hung up.

A moment later the speaker phone said, “Sorry, try it again.”

“And you still want me to hang up as soon as they answer?”

“Yes. Exactly as you did before.”

She dialed, waited, and hit the button.

“Perfect!” Iphwin said, triumph and satisfaction evident in his voice even through the speaker phone, and immediately added, “Now there’s just one more task. Is there any music coming over the speakers in the cafe?”

“No,” we all chorused.

“Do you want them to put some on?” Terri asked. “I can run and ask them.”

“Thank you, Terri.”

She got up and darted inside; I was beginning to wonder what the staff inside was thinking of our behavior and our requests, but at least so far they hadn’t come out to tell us to knock it off. A moment later, a style of music I’d never heard before—maybe it was something more Latin than my Nazi-run world had retained?—came blaring through the speakers, and Terri came running out, breathlessly. “Thank god for four required languages,” she said, flinging herself back into her chair.

“Just a moment...” Iphwin said. “Now, the phone you were using for calling Paris ... do not pick it up when it rings. It’s going to ring for several minutes. Leave the radio on and leave the speaker phone on. Move the phone to the table, and put an empty chair by the place where you put the phone down, but do not pick up the call.”

The phone began to ring almost immediately, and with a shrug, Helen got up and moved it to the table, then dragged another chair over to the table as it continued to ring and ring.

“Is the phone in place?” Iphwin asked through the speaker.

“Yep. You ought to be able to hear it,” the Colonel said. The phone rang on and on, a maddening sound, and the radio played loudly through the speakers overhead; I was beginning to wonder if this was some kind of complex plan to drive us all mad.

“And is the chair empty?”

Jesús Picardin leaned forward and looked at it, making sure, before he said, “The chair is empty.”

“Everyone sit still for my count of 100. Don’t move while I count. One, two, three, four, five, six, hello.”

The phone had stopped ringing. The speaker phone had shrieked briefly, a burst of high-pitched feedback, at the word “hello.”

And there, sitting in the chair that had been empty an instant ago, holding the phone he had just answered, sat Geoffrey Iphwin, in a magnificent white suit with dark striped tie, a bright red carnation in his lapel.

Everyone jumped back, tipping chairs over and taking big steps backward. Helen, Esmé, Paula, and Jesús had hands on weapons. Iphwin raised his hands, one still holding the phone, and then hit the hang-up switch on the phone. “Is anyone going to shoot?” he asked.

“No, you just startled me,” Esmé said.

“Guess not.” Paula sounded regretful.

“No,” Helen said flatly.

“At least not yet,” Picardin said.

“Good.” Iphwin set the handset down, and reached over to turn off the speaker phone. He looked around. “Well, at last I have all of you in the same world, and now I can explain everything to you. I have identified you all as people I need for an important mission, for which, besides the possible glory if you survive and the undying thanks of your country if it works, I offer to make all of you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. That’s the offer—take it or leave it—high risk, but glory, service to country, and great wealth.”

“What’s the mission?” the Colonel asked.

Iphwin sat back, crossed his legs, and smiled at all of us, a warm friendly smile as if he were about to tell us the best joke in the world. “It’s really a very simple job. Drive north and find America. It’s been missing for at least three decades, you see, in trillions of worlds, and it’s time we found out why.” He got up and said, “Well, now. If you’ll all accept the deal, I can put us up in a nice hotel and we can hold a little strategic conference this evening, and get an early start tomorrow. Is everyone prepared to accept the deal?”

I was nodding, and then I realized we had all said “Yes” in unison. I wondered if Iphwin had arranged that one, or if it was a real coincidence, or just contagious idiocy. The distinction didn’t seem to matter much.