detail. "It's a lab of some sort. Yellow walls. Fluorescent lights. Formica counter tops.
A periodic table on the wall."
"And is there anybody else in this lab?"
Jake nodded. God, why did the examiner have to be female? "Yes. There's a
woman --a white woman, with dark hair. She looks to be about forty-five or so."
"And what is she wearing, this woman?"
Jake swallowed. "Nothing ... "
The Swiss witness examiner had left, and Lloyd and Michiko were now comparing
reports of Jacob's and Carly's visions; Carly had agreed to be similarly examined by
the Vancouver police, and the report of that interview had been emailed to CERN.
In the intervening hours, Michiko had rallied a bit. She was clearly trying to focus,
to go on, to help with the larger crisis, but every few minutes she would fade away
and her eyes would go moist. Still, she managed to read through the two transcripts
without getting the paper overly wet.
"There's no doubt," she said. "They match in every particular. They were in the
same room."
Lloyd tried a small smile. "Kids," he said. He had only known Michiko for two
years; they'd never made love in a lab --but in his grad-student days, Lloyd and his
then girlfriend, Pamela Ridgley, had certainly heated up a few countertops at
Harvard. But then he shook his head in wonder. "A glimpse of the future.
Fascinating." He paused. "I imagine some people are going to get rich off this."
Michiko shrugged a bit. "Eventually, maybe. Those who happened to be looking at
stock reports in the future might become wealthy --decades from now. That's a long
time to wait for it to all pay off."
Lloyd was quiet for a moment, then: "You haven't told me what you saw yet -what
your vision was."
Michiko looked away. "No," she said, "I haven't."
Lloyd touched her cheek gently, but said nothing.
"At the time --at the time I was having the vision, it seemed wonderful," she
began. "I mean, I was disoriented and confused about what was going on. But the
vision itself was joyous." She managed a wan smile. "Except now after what's
happened ... "
Again, Lloyd didn't push. He sat, outwardly patient.
"It was late at night," Michiko said at last. "I was in Japan; I'm sure it was a
Japanese house. I was in a little girl's bedroom, sitting on the side of the bed. And
this girl, maybe seven or eight, was sitting up in bed, and she was talking with me.
She was a beautiful girl, but she wasn't --she wasn't --"
If the visions were of a time decades in the future, of course she wasn't Tamiko.
Lloyd nodded gently, absolving her of having to finish the thought. Michiko sniffled.
"But --but she was my daughter; she must have been. A daughter I haven't had
yet. She was holding my hand, and she called me okaasan; that's Japanese for
'mommy.' It was like I was putting her to bed, wishing her good night."
"Your daughter ... " said Lloyd.
"Well, our daughter, I'm sure," said Michiko. "Yours and mine."
"What were you doing in Japan?" asked Lloyd.
"I don't know; visiting family, I guess. My uncle Masayuki lives in Kyoto. Except
for the fact that we had a daughter, I didn't really get any sense that it was in the
future."
"This child, did she --"
Lloyd cut himself off. What he'd wanted to ask was boorish, crude. "Did she have
slanted eyes?" Or maybe he would have caught himself in time and phrased it more
elegantly: "Did she have epicanthic folds?" But Michiko wouldn't have understood.
She'd have thought some prejudice underlay Lloyd's question, some silly misgivings
about miscegenation. But that wasn't it. Lloyd didn't care if their eventual children
were occidental or oriental in appearance. They could as easily be one as the other,
or, of course, a mixture of the two, and he'd love them just the same, assuming --
Assuming, of course, that they were his children.
The visions seemed to be of a time perhaps two decades in the future. And in his
vision, which he hadn't yet shared with Michiko, he was somewhere, maybe New
England, with another woman. A white woman. And Michiko was in Kyoto, Japan,
with a daughter who might be Asian or might be Caucasian or might be something in
between, all depending on who her father was.
This child, did she -
"Did she what?" asked Michiko.
"Nothing," said Lloyd, looking away.
"What about your vision?" asked Michiko. "What did you see?"
Lloyd took a deep breath. He'd have to tell her sometime, he supposed, and -"
Lloyd, Michiko --you guys should come on down to the lounge." It was Theo's
voice; he had just stuck his head in the door again. "We just recorded something off
CNN that you'll want to see."
Lloyd, Michiko, and Theo entered the lounge. Four other people were already
there. White-haired Lou Waters was jerking up and down on screen; the lounge VCR
was an old unit --some staff member's hand-me-down --and didn't have a great
pause function.
"Ah, good," said Raoul, as they entered. "Look at this." He touched the pause key
on the remote, and Waters sprang into action.
" --David Houseman has more on this story. David?"
The picture changed to show CNN's David Houseman, standing in front of a wall of
antique clocks --even with a breaking story, CNN still strove for interesting visuals.
"Thanks, Lou," said Houseman. "Most people's visions of course had no time
reference in them, but enough people were in rooms with clocks or calendars on the
wall, or reading electronic newspapers --there didn't seem to be any paper ones left
--that we've been able to conjecture a date. It seems that the visions were of a time
twenty-one years, six months, two days, and two hours ahead of the moment at
which the visions occurred: the visions portray the period from 2:21 to 2:23 P.M.
Eastern Time on Wednesday, October 23, 2030. That assumes the occasional
aberrations are explicable: some people seemed to be reading newspapers dated
October 22, 2030, or even earlier --presumably they were reading old editions. And
the time references, of course, depend a great deal on what time zone the person
happens to be in. We're assuming that the majority of people will still live in the
same time zone two decades from now that they happen to live in today, and those
that report times off by a whole number of hours from what we'd expect were in
some other time zone --"
Raoul hit the pause key again.
"There it is," said Raoul. "A concrete number. Whatever we did here somehow
caused the consciousness of the human race to jump ahead twenty-one years for a
period of two minutes."
Theo returned to his office, the darkness of night visible through his window. All
this talk of visions was disturbing --especially since he himself hadn't had one. Could
Lloyd be right? Could Theo be dead a mere twenty-one years from now? He was only
twenty-seven, for God's sake; in two decades, he'd still be well shy of fifty. He didn't
smoke --not much of a statement for any of the North Americans to make, but still
an achievement among Greeks. He worked out regularly. Why on earth should he be
dead so soon? There had to be another explanation for him having no vision.
His phone bleeped. Theo picked up the handset. "Hello?"
"Hello," said a female voice, in English. "Is this, ah, Theodosios Procopides?" She
stumbled over the name.
"Yes."
"My name is Kathleen DeVries," said the woman. "I've been mulling over whether
to phone you. I'm calling from Johannesburg."
"Johannesburg? You mean in South Africa?"
"For the time being, anyway," she said. "If the visions are to be believed, it's
going to be officially renamed Azania sometime in the next twenty-one years."
Theo waited silently for her to go on. After a moment, she did. "And it's the
visions that I'm calling about. You see, mine involved you."
Theo felt his heart racing. What wonderful news! Maybe he hadn't had a vision of
his own for whatever reason, but this woman had seen him twenty-one years hence.
Of course he had to be alive then; of course, Lloyd was wrong when he said Theo
would be dead.
"Yes?" Theo said breathlessly.
"Umm, I'm sorry to have bothered you," said DeVries. "Can I --may I ask what
your own vision showed?"
Theo let out air. "I didn't have one," he said.
"Oh. Oh, I am sorry to hear that. But --well, then, I guess it wasn't a mistake."
"What wasn't a mistake?"
"My own vision. I was here, in my home, in Johannesburg, reading the newspaper
over dinner --except it wasn't on newsprint. It was on this thing that looked like a
flat plastic sheet; some sort of computerized reader screen, I think. Anyway, the
article I was reading happened to be --well, I'm sorry there's no other way to say it.
It was about your death."
Theo had once read a Lord Dunsany story about a man who fervently wished to
see tomorrow's newspaper today, and when he finally got his wish, was stunned to
discover it contained his own obituary. The shock of seeing that was enough to kill
him, news which would of course be reported in the next day's edition. That was it;
that was all --a zinger, a punch line. But this ... this wasn't tomorrow's paper; it was
a paper two decades hence.
"My death," repeated Theo, as though those two words had somehow been
missed in his English classes.
"Yes, that's right."
Theo rallied a bit. "Look, how do I know this isn't some scam or prank?"
"I'm sorry; I knew I shouldn't have called. I'll be --"
"No, no, no. Don't hang up. In fact, please let me get your name and number. The
damned call display is just showing 'Out of Area.' You should let me phone you back;
this call must be costing you a fortune."
"My name, as I said, is Kathleen DeVries. I'm a nurse at a senior citizens' home
here." She told him her phone number. "But, really, I'm glad to pay for the call.
Honestly, I don't want anything from you, and I'm not trying to trick you. But, well -look,
I see people die all the time. We lose about one a week here at the home, but
they're mostly in their eighties or nineties or even their hundreds. But you --you're
going to be just forty-eight when you die, and that's way too young. I thought by
calling you up, by letting you know, maybe you could somehow prevent your own
death."
Theo was quiet for several seconds, then, "So, does the --the obituary say what I
died of?" For one bizarre moment, Theo was kind of pleased that his passing had
been worthy of note in international newspapers. He almost asked if the first two
words in the article happened to be "Nobel laureate." "I know I should cut down on
my cholesterol; was it a heart attack?"
There was silence for several seconds. "Umm, Dr. Procopides, I'm sorry, I guess I
should have been more clear. It's not an obituary I was reading; it's a news story."
He could hear her swallow. "A news story about your murder."
Theo fell silent. He could have repeated the word back to her incredulously. But
there was no point.
He was twenty-seven; he was in good health. As he'd been thinking a few
moments ago, of course he wouldn't be dead of natural causes in a mere twenty-one
years. But --murder?
"Dr. Procopides? Are you still there?"
"Yes." For the time being.
"I'm --I'm sorry, Dr. Procopides. I know this must come as quite a shock."
Theo was quiet for a few moments longer, then: "The article you were reading -does
it say who kills me?"
"I'm afraid not. It's an unsolved crime, apparently."
"Well, what does the article say?"
"I've written down as much of it as I remember; I can email you it, but, well,
here, let me read it to you. Remember, this is a reconstruction; I think it's pretty
accurate, but I can't guarantee every word." She paused, cleared her throat, then
went on. "The headline was, 'Physicist Shot Dead.' "
Shot, thought Theo. God.
DeVries went on. "The dateline was Geneva. It said, 'Theodosios Procopides, a
Greek physicist working at CERN, the European center for particle physics, was found
shot to death today. Procopides, who received his Ph.D. from Oxford, was director of
the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider at --"
"Say that again," said Theo.
"The Tachyon-Tardyon Collider," said DeVries. She was mispronouncing
"tachyon," saying it with a CH blend instead of a K sound. "I'd never heard those
words before."
"There's no such collider," said Theo. "At least, not yet. Please, go on."
" ... director of the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider at CERN. Dr. Procopides had been
with CERN for twenty-three years. No motive has been suggested for the killing, but
robbery has been ruled out, as Dr. Procopides's wallet was found on him. The
physicist was apparently shot sometime between noon and 1:00 P.M. local time
yesterday. The investigation is continuing. Dr. Procopides is survived by his ... "
"Yes? Yes?"
"I'm sorry, that's all it said."
"You mean your vision ended before you finished reading the article?"
