Текст книги "The Accidental Time Machine"

Автор книги: Joe William Haldeman

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“I just . . . well, I wondered if you were open on a Sunday morning.”

“Huh-uh. I got to come in and feed and water and clean up after my babies. They don’t know it’s six feet deep out there.”

“It’s your store? You run it?”

“Yeah. Try to hire someone who’ll do this. Who has a higher IQ than the animals.”

“What if I wanted to buy something?”

There was a pause. “You suddenly need a pet on Sunday morning?”

“Not a pet, exactly.” Go with the semitruth. “I’m an MIT researcher. We need a small turtle for . . . for a metabolic experiment.”

“Well . . . you’re down at MIT now?”

“At the Starbucks, actually, right on the Red Line at Kendall Square. I could get up there in less than an hour.”

“Lots of luck.” She laughed again, a pleasant sound. “Tell you what. I’ll give you exactly an hour. Then I cover up my babies and leave.”

“I’m on my way.” He paused just long enough to put a lid on his coffee, and ran down the stairs to the platform.

And waited. The only thing to read was the sex and Personals section of the Phoenix. He studied the WOMEN DESIRING MEN section, and none of them had the hots for a broke ex-graduate student. Well, he could always run one himself: “Broke, shaggy ex-graduate student desires replacement for inexplicably beautiful girl. Will supply own turtle.” If the train would only come.

When it did come, of course, it was jammed full of people who would otherwise be driving or walking. A lot of church perfume, which was pleasant when he stepped into the car but overpowering thirty seconds later. The crowd was unusually tense and silent. Perhaps devout. Perhaps wondering why a loving God would do this to them on Sunday morning.

The T stop was on the wrong side of the mall, and he was five minutes late, so he ran. She was waiting in the door with her coat on. “Hey, slow down,” she called. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She was a small black woman with a broad smile, wearing tight purple jeans and a shirt that said KILL PLANTS AND EAT THEM. She handed him a white cardboard box with a bail, like a Chinese takeout, and a small jar of Baby Reptile Chow. “Fifteen bucks; three for the food. Can’t take plastic; register’s closed.”

He came up with two fives and two deuces and, checking three pockets, enough change. “Hey, you could owe it to me.”

“No, I’ll hit the ATM.” Impulsively: “Take you to lunch?”

She laughed. “Sweetheart, you don’t need lunch; you need some sleep. Give Herman some water and a piece of lettuce and go crash.”

“That’s his name?”

“I call them all Herman. Or Hermione. How long you been up?”

“I got a nap this morning. Sure? About lunch?”

“My boyfriend’s making pancakes. He found out I had breakfast with some turtle wrangler from MIT, he’d up and leave me. Love them pancakes.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

She went off in the opposite direction, toward the parking lot. He opened the box, and the turtle looked at him. Where was he supposed to get lettuce on a Sunday morning?

He hit the ATM, then found a convenience store that had yesterday’s Italian sub in the cooler. He stripped off the wilted lettuce for Herman and squirted mustard on the rest of the sub, and ate half of it down at the subway stop. He rewrapped the other half and left it on the edge of the trash bin. Some actual street person would find it and thank his lucky stars. Until he opened it. Ew-w, mustard.

He couldn’t think on the rattling subway, but did sort out some things on the walk home. He had to be methodical. This trial would be a little over three days. Then roughly a month, and then a year. Then fifteen years, during which time it would be nice if the whole world was waiting. And he was, incidentally, famous and tenured.

After only three more demonstrations. They’d better be compelling.

One thing he had to check with this trial was just how much stuff the machine would take with it. A coin was interesting, but a camera and a watch and a turtle would give actual data.

He would put the turtle in a metal container and set it where the coin had been. But he’d attach a bigger metal container, his desk trash can, to the machine by a conducting wire. Put something heavy in it.

He was assuming, since the metal coin was transported and the wooden base was not, that conductors of electricity went and nonconductors didn’t. But maybe it was because the coin was above the machine and the base was below. So check that out by putting something nonconductive on the top.

There was a note taped to the door, and for a wild moment he could hope it was from Kara. But it was just the landlord reminding him to shovel the walk. Now thatwould be a reason to travel into the future. Spring.

Herman had withdrawn into his shell, which was understandable. He had probably spent all his remembered life in a pet-store window. Then he was thrown into a cardboard prison and thrust into a backpack, to endure a long subway ride and then a swaying walk while the bitter cold slipped in. The turtle equivalent of being abducted by aliens.

Traveling through time would be nothing in comparison.

Matt put him in a big bowl with a jar lid of water and his wilted lettuce leaf, and set him under the desk lamp to warm.

He rummaged around the kitchen and found a metal loaf pan that could serve as Herman’s time-travel vehicle. It was kind of sticky; he washed it for Herman and posterity. Someday it would be in the MIT Museum.

Should he top it off with foil? That would make a Faraday cage out of it, a complete volume enclosed by conductors. But that hadn’t been necessary before. Anything sitting on metal connected to the outside of the machine ought to do it.

So the loaf pan went on top of the machine, with a bigger jar lid of water and five pellets of Baby Reptile Chow. He cut the cheap cell out of its blister pack. ONE HUNDRED HOURS OF CONTINUOUS OPERATION, it said. USE FOR SURVEILLANCE. Or voyeurism. Or to win a Nobel Prize. He turned it on and it worked. It went next to the loaf pan. Then the watch, sideways so metal was in contact with metal. A stub of pencil for the nonconductor—no, that looked too ad hoc. In the everything drawer he found a white plastic chess piece, a pawn.

Connecting the metal trash can was a slight problem. In the lab, he could just use alligator clips (continuing the reptile theme), but here he had to improvise. He used a computer power cord and lots of duct tape. The multimeter verified that they made a closed circuit. Something heavy to put in it? A gallon plastic jug; he filled it with water up to the rim. See how much evaporates.

Herman was drinking, his neck craned over the jar lid. Matt let him finish, then moved him to his new abode.

H Hour. He set the cheap cell camera on LOCK and placed it so that it looked at the clock radio. Then he set his own camera up to take his picture when he pushed the button.

“This is the sixth iteration,” he said to the camera. “We expect it to be gone for about three days and eight hours.” Webeing himself and Herman, he supposed.

He pushed the button at exactly noon. The machine faded nicely. The white pawn fell with a click to bounce off the wooden base.

Everything else had gone, including the heavy trash can.

He went into the kitchen and opened a beer quietly, aware that posterity was listening.

4

Matt spent all of Monday writing an account ofthe thing he had to call a time machine. He could change the name to something less fantastic before anybody else read it. The disappearing machine? Not much better.

He wouldn’t finish the paper, of course, until he had a live turtle and video footage. Or a dead one and blankness, whatever.

There wasn’t much to say about the physics involved, the disappearing or time-traveling mechanism, especially since reproducing the machine didn’t reproduce the effect. It had to be some accidental feature of its construction.

But he was understandably reluctant to take it apart. In all likelihood, he wouldn’t find anything conclusive, and when he put it back together, it might just be a photon calibrator again.

The report was only five pages long, and even he had to admit that it wasn’t very impressive. He could have set up this iteration better. The machine was going to reappear at 8:16 Wednesday night in his shabby apartment. He could’ve taken it back to the lab and had it appear on Professor Marsh’s desk at ten in the morning. Or in the middle of the rotunda in Building One, high noon, with hundreds of students as witnesses.

Then again, there was something to be said for keeping control over the conditions of the experiment. If he had done a public demonstration now, it probably wouldn’t be himwho pushed the button the next time. The machine was technically the property of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics. They had only given him a degree and a job, both begrudgingly. He wasn’t eager to turn over the science scoop of the century to them.

When he checked on his e-mail that afternoon, he found he had one less reason to be loyal to the Center and MIT. He’d been fired.

Technically, the funding for his appointment had not been renewed. So there would be no paycheck after January 1. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

The message had come from the Center’s administrative assistant, not Professor Marsh. But it was Marsh who had done it, who hadn’t renewed the funding.

Matt picked up the phone and put it back down. Go talk to him in person.

On the clattering ride down to Cambridge, he considered and rejected various strategies. He knew better than to appeal to the old man’s mercy. He couldn’t claim outstanding job performance; the job hadn’t been that demanding recently. More puttering than math. He was reasonably well caught up on the literature, though most of his energy of late had gone into time-travel theory, of course.

Could he use that as a trump card? Instinct said no: Hire me back for my penny-ante job and I promise to rewrite the laws of physics. On the other hand, when he did want to publish his results, the connection with the Center and MIT would be valuable.

But not essential. He could take his evidence to Harvard, for instance. That made him smile. The rivalry between the two schools went back to the nineteenth century. Maybe Marsh would be fired for firing him.

The sky was the color of aluminum. Snow piled up in waist-high drifts, but the sidewalks were clear. The students were so bundled up you couldn’t tell their gender.

There was no wind as he approached the Green Building, which was so unusual it seemed ominous. Usually it whipped across the quad from the frozen Charles and chilled you to the core.

He showed his card to the scanner at the entrance to the Green Building, and it let him in. So he still existed, at least until the end of the month.

He got off the elevator on the sixth floor to a pleasant shock: Kara, standing in the foyer.

“Kara? Were you looking for me?”

“Matt!” She looked surprised. “Um . . . this is Strom Lewis.”

Matt took his hand, dry and strong. He was younger and better-looking. “I graded your papers in 299. Marsh.”

“That’s right; I thought you looked familiar. I’ll be working for him, starting next year.” The elevator door started to close, and Kara caught it and slipped in. “Maybe I’ll see you?”

“Maybe.” Kara held up a hand in good-bye, and so did Matt.

Lose your job and your girl to the same punk kid. It just couldn’t get much better.

Marsh wasn’t in the laboratory. Matt went through to the man’s office. He had a journal and a book open in front of him, making notes in a paper notebook. Matt knocked on the open door.

Marsh put a finger down to mark his place in the journal. “Matthew. What can I do for you?”

“Well, for starters, you could give me my job back. Then you could tell me what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on.” He set his pencil down but didn’t pick up his finger. “You’ve had the same job for four years. It’s time for you to move on. For your own good.”

“Move on where?”

“You could finish your dissertation,” he said, “for starters. Then I could give you a good recommendation anywhere.”

“You think that kid Lewis can do what I do?”

“Nobody’s better than you as a technician, Matthew. But you can’t be a lab tech all your life, not with your education.”

He didn’t have a good argument against that, since it was true. He enjoyed the work, but he couldn’t deny that it was underemployment. “So I have to leave at the end of December?”

He shrugged. “You finished the calibrator. I don’t have any short-term work for you. Might as well go on home and work on your dissertation.” He picked up the pencil and turned his attention back to the journal.

Matt went back into the lab, suddenly a stranger there. He opened his drawer, but there was almost nothing of value there that didn’t belong to MIT.

Except a pair of earrings. Kara had taken them off when they went skating on Boston Common a couple of weeks ago. Her skimpy outfit, otherwise perfect, hadn’t had a pocket.

Might as well take them. Send her a note.

He went over to the campus pub, the Muddy Charles, and had a beer, and then another. That fortified him enough to walk the cold mile to the nearest liquor store. He got a bottle of cheap bourbon and a bottle of red vermouth. The road to Hell would be paved with Manhattans.

When he got home, he was slightly intimidated by the silent witness to history in the living room. He took a tray of ice and a glass into the bedroom and quietly made a big drink, and found a mystery novel he didn’t remember reading. He took both into the bathroom and slid into a tub of hot water.

By the third chapter he remembered he’d read the book before, and was pretty sure the murderer was not the beautiful ex-wife, but rather the lawyer who had hired the private eye. He grimly read on, though, rather than get out of the tub and try to find another book.

There’s more than one way to read a book, though. You can make a template out of the edge of the page, holding it in such a way that it reveals only the first letter of each line of the page underneath. In this way you can search for hidden messages from God. On the third try he found the word "sQwat.” Then the phone rang.

It was his mother. “You’re in the bathroom again.”

“Taking a bath. I should take a bath in the living room?”

“You weren’t home earlier.”

“No, I went down to school.” Might as well. “I got an e-mail that my appointment isn’t being renewed. So I went down to talk to my boss.”

“What, you’re being fired? What did you do?”

Well, my boss thinks I’m crazy because I see boxes disappear. “He said it was for my own good. Like I have too much education for the job. I should finish my dissertation and move up in the world.”

“So what have I been telling you?”

“Okay, fine. Can you loan me about twenty grand for rent and groceries while I sit around and think?”

Wrong thing to say. There was a long pause and a sniff. “You know I would if I could. It’s hard enough to make ends meet. . . .”

“Just kidding, Mother. I’m gonna start looking tomorrow. For a job.”

“Have you been drinking? At three in the afternoon?”

He didn’t say, “Haven’t you?” He rattled the ice in the glass. “In fact, I am. It seemed like the right occasion.”

“Well, you call me when you’re sober.”

"I amsober.” Loud click. “But not for long,” he said to the dead phone.

5

Tuesday disappeared, and so did part of Wednesday. By noon, he was sufficiently recovered to dress up and go out for a decent lunch, two hamburgers and fries. He looked through the MIT freebie newspaper, the Tech, for job openings, and found two possibilities, one in Cambridge and the other at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Cambridge didn’t answer the phone and Geneva had already found someone.

He was carrying his notebook, so he went on down to the MIT main library, plugged in, and started rereading the notes for his dissertation on patterns of local asymmetries in gravity wave induction associated with two recent supernovae.

His data stank. The inductions were so weak they were almost lost in the background noise. Saying they actually existed was as much an act of faith as one of observation.

It felt like the cable on his personal elevator had snapped. The set of mathematical models that could contain his wobbly data was so large as to make any one solution actually indefensible.

At some level, he’d known that for a long time. He’d been hiding the truth from himself in the complexity and false elegance of the argument. Coming to it fresh after months away made it clear that he’d been building a house of cards.

He closed the notebook with a whispered expletive that made one person look up and two others lean forward to concentrate on their screens.

There was no way to refine the data or hope for technological advances that would reduce the blobbiness of it. The gravity wave that a supernova produced passed through the solar system once and was gone. It was not too bright to bet your career on a set of evanescent and unrepeatable data.

He could still do something with it, if only an analysis of why this approach was wrong. He could visualize trying to defend something that feeble in front of a thesis committee. The death of a thousand cutting remarks.

He wouldn’t need it, though. Not as long as the machine and Herman came back tonight.

He saved a subway token and walked through the stinging wind to Central Square, where thirty dollars got him a dish of nuts and a nonalcoholic beer at a place where pretty naked women danced almost close enough to touch, Middle Eastern music whining and twanging. It disturbed him that their beauty and sexuality couldn’t penetrate his dark mood. That girl’s undulating waist a perfect hyperboloid of one sheet. Another one describing oscillating conic sections as she swung around a pole. The third one’s posture reminding him that, topologically, we are all just a coiling cylinder connecting two holes, with certain elaborations on the outside of the cylinder.

He stayed only a half hour. On his way to the T he optimistically bought a half bottle of decent champagne. For celebration or consolation.

When he got home, he put it in the fridge and opened a can of minestrone for dinner. While it heated, he went to check the e-mail.

There was a note from Kara, with only a question mark in the subject line. He opened it eagerly:

Dear Matt—I’m sorry you lost your position with Prof. Marsh, and hope I didn’t accidentally cause that to happen. I described that photon project to Strom, and he went to talk to Prof. Marsh about it, and I guess he offered Strom your job. He likes Marsh and always got As from him.

I’m sorry. Kara.

Well, wasn’t that just a kick in the balls. Actually, it was kind of a relief to be able to think he didn’t lose the job purely out of incompetence, or from the old bastard reading his mind.

He allowed himself a wicked moment of imagining how Marsh would feel when he published his time-machine results.

Besides, it wasn’t just Marsh, technically, who had given Strom those As. It was Matt himself who had graded the papers!

The minestrone started boiling. He took it off the stove and, after it had cooled, ate it straight out of the pot, staying out of range of the camera and posterity.

At seven, he sat down at the couch with a book, a biography of Isaac Newton. After a couple of pages, he stopped reading and just stared at the board where Herman, history’s first chrononaut, was going to appear. He was about a minute early. At 8:15:03 the whole apparatus appeared, with a slight scraping sound.

It had moved. The chassis of the machine stood on the woodscrews that had secured it to the board, like four little metal feet. They were a couple of millimeters from the drill holes. He looked into the pan and Herman looked back, apparently unaffected by his sudden fame.

Why hadn’t the machine moved before? Or did it just move so little that the screws nudged their way back into the holes?

He knew he hadn’t touched it. Could the house have shifted that much in three days? Unlikely.

He belatedly looked at the clock. It said 12:01:21. The machine had only been gone about a minute, in its own frame of reference.

He checked the water in the jug. No evaporation. Herman apparently hadn’t eaten or drunk anything, or pooped.

He found an old engineering ruler that he hadn’t used since his sophomore year—he’d taken an engineering drawing course and switched his major from engineering to physics—and he set the millimeter end down next to one of the woodscrew feet. He took extreme close-ups from three angles, which he could later analyze for the precise distance and direction moved. Next time, it might move centimeters. Or across the room.

Or into another state.

He’d have to affix a note—“If found, please return to . . .”—with a substantial reward. Share the Nobel Prize.

Or wire the machine to a big metal box and go along with it.

He took the cell off the machine and hooked its I/O into his notebook, and went back to T = 0. It showed his clock radio at 11:59. Off camera, a tinny version of his voice said, “This is the sixth iteration. We expect it to be gone for about three days and eight hours.” The clock radio went to 12:00 and disappeared.

The screen went gray for about a minute, then the clock radio reappeared, showing 8:15. He could time it precisely later. He ran it back and scrutinized it with the screen brightness turned all the way up. It seemed to be a minute of uniform gray.

But three days had passed, and three nights. That there was no alternation between dark and light meant that it wasn’t getting illumination from the ambient surround.

Where had it gone?

That Herman was still alive indicated that it hadn’t gone into outer space. The jug of water hadn’t boiled away or turned to a block of ice.

He scientifically dipped a finger into the jug. Room temperature, give or take a couple of degrees.

The next time, he ought to include an environmental monitor, something that recorded temperature and pressure. L.L.Bean probably had one.

Money, though. He could probably borrow one from MIT, a midnight requisition. Bring it back in a month.

Forty days, actually. How long would it seem to him, in his metal box?

There was no way to interrogate Herman about the subjective length of his voyage. That he hadn’t eaten indicated it was a short time. Or it could have been three days of turtle terror—he couldn’t eat because he was too upset.

Probably not. If he’d been upset, he would have been locked up tight in his shell, the way he was after the trip from the pet shop. Matt had looked in the pan only a few seconds after it reappeared, and Herman seemed unruffled. Though it was hard to tell. He might be having a profound existential crisis.

Matt looked into the pan again. Herman was gnawing on a pellet of Baby Reptile Chow.

He went for a beer and remembered the champagne. Opened it, poured a jelly glass full, and sat down to think.

If everything was simple and linear, then the next time, the machine would move about twelve millimeters, half an inch, and the gray period would be about twelve minutes long. But it would be dangerous to assume linearity.

The safest course, if he were going to put himself in that metal box, would be to take along enough food and water for forty days. How much would that be? He typed the question into his notebook.

The consensus seemed to be about a gallon of water a day, which seemed like a lot if you weren’t staggering across a desert. Eight of those big five-gallon jugs. Then one thousand five hundred calories of food a day, which would be easier. A couple of boxes of energy bars. A bottle of bourbon to keep from going insane. Maybe two. And a really good book.

And what about air? The only data points he had were that Herman was still alive and the water jug hadn’t evaporated. Presumably a small turtle could last a long time on the air inside a loaf pan. A human could last for hours on a proportional amount. Only hours. So the water would be moot.

In fact, he could do the experiment without any of that, assuming it would take only minutes. If the minutes dragged on into hours, he could always call it quits and disconnect the fuel cell.

If that didn’t work, call 911.

He’d been visualizing himself inside a metal cube, a gargantuan loaf pan like a clean Dumpster. But any sufficiently old car would do. Anything made before the Fossil Fuel Users Tax would have a mostly metal shell.

Mostlymight not do it, though. His Mazda, for instance, had only a spidery titanium frame sunk inside a plastic aero-form. Technically, that would be a Faraday cage. But he wanted to be wrapped in metal.

Denny Peposi. Dopey Denny, Matt’s main connection for recreational drugs. He had a 1956 Ford Thunderbird in his garage. The radio only played recordings of appropriately ancient music, and there were yellowed magazines from 1956 scattered on the backseat. He drove it around the block once a week, and maybe once a year bought enough gasoline to take out a girl he wanted to impress. Otherwise, it just sat there, a perfect Faraday cage with seats of soft Mexican leather. And all the Elvis Presley you would ever want to hear. Or was it Buddy Holly and the Beetles back then?

He was sure he could talk Denny into letting him sit in it, and take a video of him. “Watch! I’m going to make this car disappear.” And then reappear forty days later.

But wherewould it appear? Matt looked at the machine on his way to refill his jelly glass. It had moved northeast a millimeter. If it moved northeast far enough, it would be in Boston Harbor. Or the North Atlantic. Wise to take some precautions about that possibility. Matt swam like a brick.

Which is how Matt wound up, the next morning, in a bad part of Boston, going from pawn shop to pawn shop looking for a wetsuit and a snorkel. He finally found both, at a place full of shabby sports relics. They cost more than half his cash reserves, but the man agreed, with a puzzled look, that he would refund 75 percent if Matt brought them back unused before the end of January. “In case the diving trip falls through,” he said. At a military surplus store he bought an emergency raft that inflated if you pulled a lanyard. He saved the receipt.

He also got a proper cable with alligator clip to neatly solder onto the machine’s chassis, so it would look good in the pictures, and a used high-speed camera, so he would be able to review the moments of the car’s next disappearance and reappearance in slow motion. Unless it reappeared in Boston Harbor, or off the coast of Spain.

6

Dopey Denny lived in a large three-story Victorianin Back Bay. He swung open the door and gave Matt a big hug. Three hundred pounds of dope dealer, understandably stoned at nine in the evening. “Dr. Einstein, I presume?” He was wearing a black robe with glittering astrological symbols, tied with a silver rope. Barefoot in January.

“Hi, Denny.” Matt looked over the big man’s shoulder. “Louise home?”

“Ah, no. No. She moved on. How you doin’ with what’s-her-name?”

“Kara. She moved on, too.”

“Ain’t it a bitch. Want a drink?”

Came here to do science, not socialize, but why not? “Sure. What you got?”

“Got it all.” He took Matt by the elbow and dragged him toward the kitchen. Matt hauled along the duffel bag with all his time-machine stuff in it.

The kitchen was all chrome and tile and looked like no one had ever cooked a meal in it. “I’m doin’ Heineken with a whisky chaser. Or is it whisky with a Heineken chaser?”

“You have one and I’ll have the other.” Matt took a seat at the kitchen table, a spare, elegant Swedish thing. There was a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Glenmorangie on it and one crystal glass. Denny produced another glass and got two Heinekens from a huge metal refrigerator that seemed to have nothing in it but beer and wine. He should use thatfor the time machine. It would be cold, but he wouldn’t die of thirst.

Denny tried to twist the bottles open, then remembered that wouldn’t work with the imported beer, and crashed through a drawer until he found an opener.

He put the beers down and poured Matt a generous amount of whisky, and himself a little more generous one. He sat down on the delicate chair with exaggerated caution. “So you say you need the T-Bird. But just to sit in it?”

“Basically, yeah.” Matt took a sip of the whisky and one of the beer. “Then it should disappear, and then come back.”

He nodded slowly. “Like those guys who made the Statue of Liberty disappear. Way back when.”

“I don’t know anything about that. This isn’t magic . . . Well, hell, maybe it ismagic. I don’t know what the hell it is.”

“Not gonna hurt the car.”

“No way. It just goes, like, somewhere sideways in space. Hell, I’m gonna be init. I wouldn’t do that if there was any danger, would I?” Matt resisted the impulse to slug back the whole glass. That might communicate uncertainty.

Denny took a vial out of his shirt pocket and tapped out a small pile of white powder, then produced a little cocktail straw and sniffed it up. He shook all over, like a big dog. “Ah! Want some?”

“No, thanks. Haven’t done it in years. Are you sure you can—”

“Sure, sure. It’s not cocaine; it’s a DD beta for alertness.” He shook again, grinning. “God damn! Cuts to the chase.”

This was just great. The sole witness to a scientific revolution stoned on an untried drug. Fortunately, all he had to do was push a button.

Which was all Matt had to do, as well. He took another sip from each reagent. “How long have you been taking it?”

“Got it last night. Right up your alley, man; work till dawn.”

“Maybe later. After it’s not a beta.” He laughed. “You’re a fucking wild man, Denny.”

“Hey, it’s a job. Somebody has to do it.”

Matt unzipped the duffel bag and brought out the camera. “You know how to work this?”

“Yeah, sure. Point an’ shoot.”

“Right. But I want to make sure the time function’s on, the clock down in the right-hand corner.” He toggled the switch until CLOCK came up, and selected it. “See?”

Denny took the camera. “No sweat.” He held it up and looked at Matt through the point-and-shoot viewfinder. “Just push this big button?”

“Right. It’ll be on a tripod, set for video, already aimed. Just start it when I tell you to, and if I disappear, leave it running till I come back.” Maybe in a taxi.