This time it was raining gently.
Miriam winced at the sudden stabbing in her head and pocketed the locket. Then she did what she'd planned all along: a three-sixty-degree scan that took in nothing but autumn trees and deadfall. Next, she planted her pack, transferred the pistol to her right hip pocket, retrieved her camera and the recorder, and started taking snapshots as she dictated a running commentary.
"The time by my watch is fourteen twelve hours. Precipitation is light and intermittent, cloud cover is about six-sevenths, wind out of the northwest and chilly, breeze of around five miles per hour. I think."
Snap, snap, snap: The camera had room for a thousand or so shots before she'd have to change hard disks. She slung it around her neck and shouldered the pack again. With the Swiss army knife Ben had given her on their second wedding anniversary—an odd present from a clueless, cheating husband with no sense of the difference between jewelry and real life—she shaved a patch of bark above eye level on the four nearest trees, then fished around for some stones to pile precisely where she'd come through. (It wouldn't do to go back only to come out in the middle of her own car. If that was possible, of course.)
As she worked, she had the most peculiar sensation: I'm on my second moon mission, she thought. Did any of the Apollo astronauts go to the moon more than once? Here she was, not going crazy, recording notes and taking photographs to document her exploration of this extraordinary place that simply wasn't like home. Whatever "home" meant, now that gangsters had her number.
"I still don't know why I'm here," she recorded, "but I've got the same alarming prefrontal headache, mild hot and cold chills, probable elevated blood pressure as last time. Memo: Next time bring a sphygmomanometer; I want to monitor for malignant hypertension. And urine sample bottles." The headache, she realized, was curiously similar to a hangover, itself caused by dehydration that triggered inflammation of the meninges. Miriam continued: "Query physiological responses to . . . whatever it is that I do. When I focus on the knot. Memo: Scan the locket, use Photoshop to rescale it and print it on paper, then see if the pattern works as a focus when I look at it on a clipboard. More work for next time."
They won't be able to catch me here, she thought fiercely as she scanned around, this time looking for somewhere suitable to pitch her tent and go to ground. I'll be able to nail them and they won't even be able to find me to lay a finger on me! But there was more to it than that, she finally admitted to herself as she hunted for a flat spot. The locket had belonged to her birth-mother, and receiving it had raised an unquiet ghost. Somebody had stabbed her, somebody who had never been found. Miriam wouldn't be able to lay that realization to rest again until she learned what this place had meant to her mother—and why it hadn't saved her.
With four hours to go before sunset, Miriam was acutely aware that she didn't have any time to waste. The temperature would dip toward frost at night and she planned to be well dug-in first. Planting her backpack at the foot of the big horse chestnut tree, she gathered armfuls of dry leaves and twigs and scattered them across it—nothing that would fool a real woodsman, but enough to render it inconspicuous at a distance. Then she walked back and forth through a hundred-yard radius, pacing out the forest, looking for its edge. That there was an edge came as no surprise: The steep escarpment was in the same place here as on the hiking map of her own world that she'd brought along. Where the ground fell away, there was a breathtaking view of autumnal forest marching down toward a valley floor. The ocean was probably eight to ten miles due east, out of sight beyond hills and dunes, but she had a sense of its presence all the same.
Looking southwest, she saw a thin coil of smoke rising—a settlement of some kind, but small. No roads or telegraph poles marred the valley, which seemed to contain nothing but trees and bushes and the odd clearing. She was alone in the woods, as alone as she'd ever been. She looked up. Thin cirrus stained the blue sky, but there were no jet contrails.
"The area appears to be thinly populated," she muttered into her dictaphone. "They're burning something—coal or wood—at the nearest settlement. There are no telegraph poles, roads, or aircraft. The air doesn't smell of civilization. No noise to speak of, just birds and wind and trees."
She headed back to her clearing to orient herself, then headed on in the opposite direction, down the gentle slope away from her pack. "Note: Keep an eye open for big wildlife. Bears and stuff." She patted her right hip pocket nervously. Would the pistol do much more than annoy a bear? She hadn't expected the place to be quite this desolate. There were no bears, but she ran across a small stream—nearly fell into it, in fact.
There was no sign of an edge to the woods, in whichever direction she went. Nor were there signs of habitation other than the curl of smoke she'd seen. It was four o'clock now. She returned to her clearing, confident that nobody was around, and unstrapped her tent from the backpack. It took half an hour to get the dome tent erected, and another half-hour with the netting and leaves to turn it into something that could be mistaken for a shapeless deadfall. She spent another fifteen minutes returning to the stream to fill her ten-liter water carrier. Another half-hour went on digging a hole nearby, then she took ten minutes to run a rope over a bough and hoist her bag of food out of reach of the ground. As darkness fell, it found her lighting her portable gas stove to boil water for her tea. I did it, she thought triumphantly. I didn't forget anything important! Now all she had to do was make it through tomorrow and the morning of the next day without detection.
The night grew very cold without a fire, but her sleeping bag was almost oppressively hot with the tent zipped shut. Miriam slept lightly, starting awake at the slightest noise—worried at the possibility of bears or other big animals wandering through her makeshift camp, spooked by the sigh of wind and the patter of a light predawn rainfall. Once she dreamed of wolves howling in the distance. But dawn arrived without misadventure and dragged her bleary-eyed from the tent to squat over the trench she'd remembered to dig the day before. "The Girl Scout training pays off at last," she dictated with a sardonic drawl.
A tin of sausages and beans washed down with strong black coffee made a passable breakfast. "Now what?" she asked herself. "Do I wait it out with the camp or go exploring?"
For a moment, Miriam quailed. The enormity of the wilderness around her was beginning to grind on her nerves, as was the significance of the situation she'd thrown herself into. "I could break a leg here and nobody would ever find me. Or—" Gunfire in the night. "Someone stabbed my mother, and she didn't come here to escape. There must be a reason why. Mustn't there?"
Something about the isolation made her want to chatter, to fill up the oppressive silence. But the words that tumbled out didn't tell her much, except that she was— Let's face it. I'm scared. This wasn't the sensible thing to do, was it? But I haven't been doing sensible properly since I got myself fired on Monday.
Unzipping the day pack from her backpack, she filled it with necessities, then set out for the escarpment.
It was a clear, cold morning, and the wisp of smoke she'd seen yesterday had disappeared. But she knew roughly where she'd seen it, and a careful scan of the horizon with binoculars brought it into focus once more—a pause in the treeline, punctuated by nearly invisible roofs. At a guess, it was about three miles away. She glanced at the sky and chewed on her lower lip: Doable, she decided, still half-unsure that it was the right thing to do. But I'll go out of my skull if I wait here two days, and Paulie won't be back until tomorrow. Bearing and range went into her notepad and onto the map, and she blazed a row of slashes on every fifth tree along the ridgeline to help her on the way back. The scarp was too steep to risk on her own, but if she went along the crest of the ridge, she could take the easy route down into the valley.
Taking the easy route was not, as it happened, entirely safe. About half a mile farther on—half a mile of plodding through leaf mounds, carefully bypassing deadfalls, and keeping a cautious eye open—an unexpected sound made Miriam freeze, her heart in her mouth and ice in her veins. Metal, she thought. That was a metallic noise! Who's there? She dropped to a squat with her back against a tree as a horse or mule snorted nearby.
The sound of hooves was now audible, along with a creaking of leather and the occasional clatter or jingle of metalwork. Miriam crouched against the tree, very still, sweat freezing in the small of her back, trying not to breathe. She couldn't be sure, but it sounded like a single set of hooves. With her camouflage-patterned jacket, knitted black face mask, and a snub-nosed pistol clutched in her right hand, she was a sight to terrify innocent eyes—but she was frightened half out of her own wits.
She held perfectly still as a peculiarly dressed man led a mule past, not ten yards away from her. The animal was heavily overloaded, bulging wicker baskets towering over its swaying back. Its owner wore leggings of some kind, but was swathed from head to knees in what looked like an ancient and moth-eaten blanket. He didn't look furtive; he just looked dirt-poor, his face lined and tanned from exposure to the weather.
The mule paused. Almost absently, its owner reached out and whacked it across the hindquarters with his rod. He grunted something in what sounded like German, only softer, less sibilant.
Miriam watched, fear melting into fascination. That was a knife at his belt, under the blanket—a great big pigsticker of a knife, almost a short sword. The mule made an odd sort of complaining noise and began moving again. What's in the baskets? she wondered. And where's he taking it?
There were clearly people living in these woods. Better be careful, she told herself, taking deep breaths to calm down as she waited for him to pass out of sight. She pondered again whether or not she shouldn't go straight back to her campsite. In the end curiosity won out—but it was curiosity tempered by edgy caution.
An hour later, Miriam found a path wandering among the trees. It wasn't a paved road by any stretch of the imagination, but the shrubbery to either side had been trampled down and the path itself was muddy and flat: Fresh road-apples told her which way the man with the mule had gone. She slashed a marker on the tree where her path intersected the road, crudely scratching in a bearing and distance as digits. If her growing suspicion was true, these people wouldn't be able to make anything of it. She picked her way through the trees along one side of the path, keeping it just in sight. Within another half-mile the trees ended in a profusion of deadfalls and stumps, some of which sprouted amazing growths of honey fungus. Miriam picked her way farther away from the path, then hunkered down, brought out binoculars and dictaphone, and gave voice to her fascination.
"This is incredible! It's like a museum diorama of a medieval village in England, only— Eww, I sure wouldn't drink from that stream. The stockade is about two hundred yards away and they've cleared the woods all around it. There are low stone walls, with no cement, around the field. It's weird, all these rows running across it like a patchwork quilt made from pin-stripe fabric."
She paused, focusing her binoculars in on a couple of figures walking in the near distance. They were close enough to see her if they looked at the treeline, so she instinctively hunched lower, but they weren't paying attention to the forest. One of them was leading a cow—a swaybacked beast like something from a documentary about India. The buildings were grayish, the walls made of stacked bundles of something or other, and the roofs were thatched—not the picturesque golden color of the rural English tourist trap she'd once stayed in outside Oxford, but the real thing, gray and sagging. "There are about twelve buildings; none of them have windows. The road is unpaved, a mud track. There are chickens or some kind of fowl there, pecking in the dirt. It looks sleazy and tumbledown."
She tracked after the human figures, focused on the stockade. "There's a gate in the stockade and a platform or tower behind it. Something big's in there, behind the wall, but I can't see it from here. A long house? No, this doesn't look . . . wrong period. These aren't Vikings, there's, uh—"
Around the curve of the stockade an ox came into view, dragging some kind of appliance—a wooden plow, perhaps. The man walking behind it looked as tired as the animal. "They're all wearing those blankets. Women too. That was a woman feeding the chickens. With a headscarf wrapped around her face like a Muslim veil. But the men wear pretty much the same, too. This place looks so poor. Neglected. That guy with the mule—it must be the equivalent of a BMW in this place!"
Miriam felt distinctly uneasy. History book scenes were outside her experience—she was a creature of the city, raised with the bustle and noise of urban life, and the sordid poverty of the village made her feel unaccountably guilty. But it left questions unanswered. "This could be the past; we know the Vikings reached New England around the eleventh century. Or it could be somewhere else. How can I tell if I can't get in and see what's inside the stockade? I think I need an archaeologist."
Miriam crouched down and began to snap off photographs. Here three hens pecked aimlessly at the dirt by an open doorway, the door itself a slab of wood leaning drunkenly against the wall of the hut. There a woman (or a man, the shapeless robe made it impossible to be sure) bent over a wooden trough, emptying a bucket of water into it and then lifting and pounding something from within. Miriam focused closer—
"Wer find thee?" Someone piped at her.
Miriam jolted around and stared: The someone stared right back, frozen, eyes wide. He looked to be about fourteen or fifteen years old, dressed in rags and barefoot: He was shorter than she was. Pipecleaner arms, legs like wire, big brown eyes, and a mess of badly trimmed hair in a pudding-bowl cut. Time slowed to a crawl. That's a skin infection, she realized, her guts turning to ice as she focused on a red weal on the side of his neck. He was skinny, not as thin as a famine victim but by no means well-fed. He had a stick, clenched nervously in his hands, which he was bringing up—
Miriam glared at him and straightened up. Her right hand went to her hip pocket, and she fumbled for the treacherous opening. "You'll be sorry," she snapped, surprised at herself. It was the first thing that entered her head. Her hand closed on the butt of the pistol, but she couldn't quite draw it—it was snagged on something.
Oh shit. She yanked at her pocket desperately, keeping her eyes on his face, despite knees that felt like jelly and a churning cold in her gut. She had a strong flashback to the one time she was mugged, a desperate sense of helplessness as she tried to disentangle the gun from her pocket lining and bring it out before the villager hit her with his stick.
But he didn't. Instead, his eyes widened. He opened his mouth and shouted, "An solda'des Koen!" He turned, dropping the stick, and darted away before Miriam could react. A moment later she heard him wailing, "An solda!"
"Shit." The gun was in her hand, all but forgotten. Terror lent her feet wings. She clutched her camera and ran like hell, back toward the forest, heedless of any noise she might make. He nearly had me! He'll be back with help! I've got to get out of here! Breathless fear drove her until branches scratched at her face and she was panting. Then the low apple trees gave way to taller, older trees and a different quality of light. She staggered along, drunkenly, as behind her a weird hooting noise unlike any horn she'd heard before split the quiet.
Ten minutes later she stopped and listened, wheezing for breath as she tried to get her heart under control. She had run parallel to the path, off to one side. Every instinct was screaming at her to run but she was nearly winded, so she listened instead. Apart from the horn blasts, there were no sounds of pursuit. Why aren't they following me? She wondered, feeling ill with uncertainty. What's wrong? After a moment she remembered her camera: She'd lost the lens cap in her mad rush. "Damn, I could have broken my ankle," she muttered. "They'd have caught me for—" she stopped.
"That look in his eye." Very carefully, she unslung the camera and slid it into a big outer hip pocket. She glanced around the clearing sharply, then spent a moment untangling the revolver from her other pocket. Now that she had all the time in the world, it was easy. "He was scared," she told herself, wondering. "He was terrified of me! What was that he was shouting? Was he warning the others off?"
She began to walk again, wrapped in a thoughtful silence. There were no sounds of pursuit. Behind her the village hid in the gloom, like a terrified rabbit whose path had just crossed a fox on the prowl. "Who are you hiding from?" she asked her memory of the boy with the stick. "And who did you mistake me for?"
It was raining again, and the first thing she noticed once she crossed over—through the blinding headache—was that Paulette was bouncing up and down like an angry squirrel, chattering with indignation behind the camcorder's viewfinder. "Idiot! What the hell do you think you were doing?" she demanded as Miriam opened the passenger door and dumped her pack on the backseat. "I almost had a heart attack! That's the second time you've nearly given me one this week!"
"I said it would be a surprise, right?" Miriam collapsed into the passenger seat. "God, I reek. Get me home and once I've had a shower I'll explain everything. I promise."
Paulette drove in tight-lipped silence. Finally, during a moment when they were stationary at a traffic light, she said: "Why me?"
Miriam considered for a moment. "You don't know my mother."
"That's—oh. I see, I think. Anything else?"
"Yeah. I trusted you to keep your mouth shut and not to panic."
"Uh-huh. So what have you've gotten yourself into this time?"
"I'm not sure. Could be the story of the century—the second one this week. Or it could be a very good reason indeed for burying something and walking away fast. I've got some ideas—more, since I spent a whole day and a half over there—but I'm still not sure."
"Where's over there? I mean, where did you go?" The car moved forward.
"Good question. The straight answer is: I'm not sure—the geography is the same, the constellations are the same, but the landscape's different in places and there's an honest-to-god medieval village in a forest. And they don't speak English. Listen, after I've had my shower, how about I buy supper? I figure I owe you for dropping this on your lap."
"You sure do," Paulette said vehemently. "After you vanished, I went home and watched the tape six times before I believed what I'd seen with my own two eyes." Her hands were white on the steering wheel. "Only you could fall into something this weird!"
"Remember Hunter S. Thompson's First Law of Gonzo Journalism: 'When the going gets tough, the tough get weird'?" Miriam chuckled, but there was an edge to it. Everywhere she looked there were buildings and neon lights and traffic. "God, I feel like I spent the weekend in the Third World. Kabul." The car smelled of plastic and deodorant, and it was heavenly—the stink of civilization. "Listen, I haven't had anything decent to eat for days. When we get home I'm ordering take out. How does Chinese sound?"
"I can cope with that." Paulette made a lazy right turn and slid into the slow-moving stream of traffic. "Don't feel like cooking?"
"I've got to have a shower," said Miriam. "Then I've got a weekend of stuff to put in the washing machine, several hundred pictures to download and index, memos to load into the computer, and an explanation. If you figure I can do all that and a pot roast too, then you don't know me as well as I think you do."
"That," Paulette remarked as she pulled over into the parking space next to Miriam's house, "was a very mixed metaphor."
"Don't listen to what I say; listen to what I mean, okay?"
"I get the picture. Dinner's on you."
After half an hour in the bathroom, Miriam felt human, if not entirely dry. She stopped in her bedroom for long enough to find some clean clothes, then headed downstairs in her bare feet.
Paulette had parked herself in the living room with a couple of mugs of coffee and an elegant-looking handbag. She raised an eyebrow at Miriam: "You look like you've been dry-cleaned. Was it that bad?"
"Yeah." Miriam settled down on the sofa, then curled her legs up beneath her. She picked up one of the mugs and inhaled deeply. "Ah, that's better."
"Ready to tell me what the hell is going on?"
"In a moment." Miriam closed her eyes, then gathered up the strands of still-damp hair sticking to her neck and wound them up, outside her collar. "That's better. It happened right after they screwed us over, Paulie. I figured you'd think I'd gone off the deep end if I just told you about it, which is why I didn't call you back the same day. Why I asked you to drive. Sorry about the surprise."
"You should be: I spent an hour in the woods looking for you. I nearly called the police twice, but you'd said precisely when you'd be back and I thought they'd think I was the one who was nuts. 'Sides, you've got a habit of dredging up weird shit and leaving me to pick up the pieces. Promise me there are no gangsters in this one?"
"I promise." Miriam nodded. "Well, what do you think?"
"I think I'd like some lemon chicken. Sorry." Paulette grinned impishly at Miriam's frown. "Okay, I believe you've discovered something very weird indeed. I actually videoed you vanishing into thin air in front of the camera! And when you appeared again—no, I didn't get it on tape, but I saw you out of the corner of my eye. Either we're both crazy or this is for real."
"Madness doesn't come in this shape and size," Miriam said soberly. She winced. "I need a painkiller." She rubbed her feet, which were cold. "You know I'm adopted, right? My mother didn't quite tell me everything until Monday. I went to see her after we were fired . . ."
For the next hour Miriam filled Paulette in on the events of the past week, leaving out nothing except her phone call to Andy. Paulette listened closely and asked about the right questions. Miriam was satisfied that her friend didn't think she was mad, wasn't humoring her. "Anyway, I've now got tape of my vanishing, a shitload of photographs of this village, and dictated notes. See? It's beginning to mount up."
"Evidence," said Paulette. "That would be useful if you want to go public." Suddenly she looked thoughtful. "Big if there."
"Hmm?" Miriam drank down what was left of her coffee.
"Well, this place you go to—it's either in the past or the future, or somewhere else, right? I think we can probably rule out the past or future options. If it was the past, you wouldn't have run across a village the way you described it; and as for the future, there'd still be some sign of Boston, wouldn't there?"
"Depends how far in the future you go." Miriam frowned. "Yeah, I guess you're right. It's funny; when I was a little girl I always figured the land of make-believe would be bright and colorful. Princesses in castles and princes to go around kissing them so they turned into frogs—and dragons to keep the royalty population under control. But in the middle ages there were about a thousand peasants living in sordid poverty for every lord of the manor, who actually had a sword, a horse, and a house with a separate bedroom to sleep in. A hundred peasants for every member of the nobility—the lords and their families—and the same for every member of the merchant or professional classes."
"Sounds grimly real to me, babe. Forget Hollywood. Your map was accurate, wasn't it?"
"What are you getting at? You're thinking about . . . What was that show called: Sliders? Right?"
"Alternate earths. Like on TV." Paulette nodded. "I only watched a couple of episodes, but . . . well. Suppose you are going sideways, to some other earth where there's nobody but some medieval peasants. What if you, like, crossed over next door to a bank, walked into exactly where the vault would be in our world, waited for the headache to go away, then crossed back again?"
"I'd be inside the bank vault, wouldn't I? Oh."
"That, as they say, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question," Paulette commented dryly. "Listen, this is going to be a long session. I figure you haven't thought all the angles through. What were you planning on doing with it?"
"I—I'm." Miriam stopped. "I told you about the phone call."
Paulette looked at her bleakly. "Yeah. Did I tell you—"
"You too?"
She nodded. "The evening after I told them to go fuck themselves. Don't know who it was: I hung up on him and called the phone company, told them it was a nuisance call, but they couldn't tell me anything."
"Bastards."
"Yes. Listen. When I was growing up in Providence, there were these guys . . . it wasn't a rich neighborhood, but they always had sharp suits. Momma told me never to cross them—or, even talk to them. Trouble is, when they talk to you— I think I need a drink. What do you say?"
"I say there're a couple of bottles in the cabinet," said Miriam, massaging her forehead. "Don't mind if I join you."
Coffee gave way to a couple of modest glasses of Southern Comfort. "It's a mess," said Paulette. "You, uh—we didn't talk about Monday. Did we?"
"No," Miriam admitted. "If you want to just drop it and forget the whole business, I'm not going to twist your arm." She swallowed. She felt acutely uneasy, as if the whole comfortable middle-class professional existence she'd carved out for herself was under threat. Like the months when she'd subliminally sensed her marriage decaying, never quite able to figure out exactly what was wrong until . . .
"'Drop it?'" Paulette's eyes flashed, a momentary spark of anger. "Are you crazy? These hard men, they're really easy to understand. If you back down, they own you. It's simple as that. That's something I learned when I was a kid."
"What happened—" Miriam stopped.
Paulie tensed, then breathed out, a long sigh. "My parents weren't rich," she said quietly. "Correction: They were poor as pigshit. Gramps was a Sicilian immmigrant, and he hit the bottle. Dad stayed on the wagon but never figured out how to get out of debt. He held it together for Mom and us kids, but it wasn't easy. Took me seven years to get through college, and I wanted a law degree so bad I could taste it. Because lawyers make lots of money, that's numero uno. And for seconds, I'd be able to tell the guys Dad owed where to get off."
Miriam leaned forward to top off her glass.
"My brother Joe didn't listen to what Momma told us," Paulette said slowly. "He got into gambling, maybe a bit of smack. It wasn't the drugs, but one time he tried to argue with the bankers. They held him down and used a cordless drill on both his kneecaps."
"Uh." Miriam felt a little sick. "What happened?"
"I got as far as being a paralegal before I figured out there's no point getting into a job where you hate the guts of everybody you have to work with, so I switched track and got a research gig. No journalism degree, see, so I figured I'd work my way up. Oh, you meant to Joe? He OD'd on heroin. It wasn't an accident—it was the day after they told him he'd never walk again." She said it with the callous disregard of long-dead news, but Miriam noticed her knuckles tighten on her glass. "That's why I figure you don't want to ever let those guys notice you. But if they do, you don't ever back off."
"That's—I'm really sorry. I had no idea."
"Don't blame yourself." Paulette managed an ironic smile. "I, uh, took a liberty with the files before I printed them." She reached inside her handbag and flipped a CD-ROM at Miriam.
"Hey, what's this?" Miriam peered at the greenish silver surface.
"It's the investigation." Paulie grinned at her. "I got everything before you decided to jump Sandy's desk and get Joe to take an unhealthy interest in us."
"But that's stealing!" Miriam ended on a squeak.
"And what do you call what they did to your job?" Paulette asked dryly. "I call this insurance."
"Oh."
"Yes, oh. I don't think they know about it—otherwise we'd be in way deeper shit already. Still, you should find somewhere to hide it until we need it."
Miriam looked at the disk as if it had turned into a snake. "Yeah, I can do that." She drained her glass, then picked up the disk and carried it over to the stereo. "Gotcha." She pulled a multidisk CD case from the shelf, opened it, and slid the extra disk inside. "The Beggar's Opera. Think you can remember that?"
"Oh! Why didn't I think of doing that?"
"Because." Miriam grinned at her. "Why didn't I think of burning that disk in the first place?"
"We each need a spare brain." Paulette stared at her. "Listen, that's problem number one. What about problem number two? This crazy shit from another world. What were you messing around with it for?"
Miriam shrugged. "I had some idea that I could hide from the money laundry over there," she said slowly. "Also, to tell the truth, I wanted someone else to tell me I wasn't going crazy. But going totally medieval isn't going to answer my problem, is it?"
"I wouldn't say so." Paulette put her glass down, half-empty. "Where were we? Oh yeah. You cross over to the other side, wherever that is, and you wander over to where your bank's basement is, then you cross back again. What do you think happens?"
"I come out in a bank vault." Miriam pondered. "They're wired inside, aren't they? After my first trip I was a total casualty, babe. I mean, projectile vomiting—" she paused, embarrassed. "A fine bank robber I'd make!"
"There is that," said Paulette. "But you're not thinking it through. What happens when the alarm goes off?"
"Well. Either I go back out again too fast and risk an aneurism or . . ." Miriam trailed off. "The cops show and arrest me."
"And what happens after they arrest you?"
"Well, assuming they don't shoot first and ask questions later, they cuff me, read me my rights, and haul me off to the station. Then book me in and stick me in a cell."
"And then?" Paulette rolled her eyes at Miriam's slow uptake.
"Why, I call my lawyer—" Miriam stopped, eyes unfocused. "No, they'd take my locket," she said slowly.
"Sure. Now, tell me. Is it your locket or is it the pattern in your locket? Have you tested it? If it's the design, what if you've had it tattooed on the back of your arm in the meantime?" Paulette asked.
"That's—" Miriam shook her head. "Tell me there's a flaw in the logic."
"I'm not going to do that." Paulette picked up the bottle and waved it over Miriam's glass in alcoholic benediction. "I think you're going to have to test it tomorrow to find out. And I'm going to have to test it, to see if it works for me—if that's okay by you," she added hastily. "If it's the design, you just got your very own 'Get Out of Jail Free' card. Doesn't matter if you can't use it to rob bank vaults, there's any number of other scams you can run if you can get out of the fix instantaneously. Say, uh, you walk into a bank and pull a holdup. No need for a gun, just pass over a note saying you've got a bomb and they should give you all the money. Then, instead of running away, you head for the staff rest room and just vanish into thin air."
"You have got a larcenous mind, Paulie." Miriam shook her head in awe. "You're wasted in publishing."
"No, I'm not." Paulette frowned seriously. "Y'see, you haven't thought this through. S'pose you've got this super power. Suppose nobody else can use it—we can try me out tomorrow, huh? Do the experiment with the photocopy of the locket on you, then try me. See if I can do it. I figure it's going to be you, and not me, because if just anybody could do it it would be common knowledge, huh? Or your mother would have done it. For some reason somebody stabbed your mother and she didn't do it. So there must be some kind of gotcha. But anyway. What do you think the cops would make of it if instead of robbing banks or photographing peasant villagers you, uh, donated your powers to the forces of law and order?"
"Law and order consists of bureaucracies," Miriam said with a brisk shake of her head. "You've seen all those tedious FBI press conferences I sat in on when they were lobbying for carnivore and crypto export controls, huh?" A vision unfolded behind her eyes, the poisonous fire blossom of an airliner striking an undefended skyscraper. "Jesus, Paulie, imagine if Al Qaida could do this!"
"They don't need it: They've got suicide volunteers. But yeah, there are other bad guys who . . . if you can see it, so can the feds. Remember that feature about nuclear terrorism that Zeb ran last year? How the NIRT units and FEMA were able to track bombs as they come in across the frontier if there's an alert on?"
"I don't want to go there." The thought made Miriam feel physically ill. "There is no way in hell I'd smuggle a nuclear weapon across a frontier."
"No." Paulette leaned forward, her eyes serious: "But if you have this ability, who else might have it? And what could they do with it? There are some very scary, dangerous national security implications here, and if you go public the feds will bury you so deep—"
"I said I don't want to go there," Miriam repeated. "Listen, this is getting deeply unfunny. You're frightening me, Paulie, more than those assholes with their phone calls and their handle on the pharmaceutical industry. I'm wondering if maybe I should sleep with a gun under my pillow."
"Get frightened fast, babe; it's your ass we're talking about. I've had two days to think about your vanishing trick and our goodfella problem, and I tell you, you're still thinking like an honest journalist, not a paranoid. Listen, if you want to clean up, how about the crack trade? Or heroin? Go down to Florida, get the right connections, you could bring a small dinghy over and stash it on the other side, no problems—it'd just take you a while, a few trips maybe. Then you could carry fifty, a hundred kilos of coke. Sail it up the coast, then up the Charles. Bring it back over right in the middle of Cambridge, out of fucking nowhere without the DEA or the cops noticing. They say one in four big shipments gets intercepted—that's bullshit—but maybe one in five, one in eight . . . you could smuggle the stuff right under their noses in the middle of a terrorist scare. And I don't know whether you'd do that or not—my guess is not, you've got capital-P principles—but that is the first thing the cops will think of."
"Hell." Miriam stared into the bottom of her glass, privately aghast. "What do you suggest?"
Paulette put her own glass down. "Speaking as your legal adviser, I advise you to buy guns and move fast. Mail the disk to another newspaper and the local FBI office, then go on a long cruise while the storm breaks. That—and take a hammer to the locket and smash it up past recognition."
Miriam shook her head, then winced. "Oh, my aching head. I demand a second opinion. Where is my recount, dammit?"
"Well." Paulette paused. "You've made a good start on the documentation. We can see if it's just you, run the experiments, right? I figure the clincher is if you can carry a second person through. If you can do that, then not only do you have documents, you've got witnesses. If you go public, you want to do so with a splash—so widespread that they can't put the arm on you. They've got secret courts and tame judges to try national security cases, but if the evidence is out in the open they can't shut you up, especially if it's international. I'd say Canada would be best." She paused again, a bleak look in her eye. "Yeah, that might work."
"You missed something." Miriam stabbed a finger in Paulette's direction. "You. What do you get?"
"Me?" Paulette covered her heart with one hand, pulled a disbelieving face. "Since when did I get a vote?"
"Since, hell, since I got you into this mess. I figure I owe you. Noblesse oblige. You're a friend, and I don't drop friends in it, even by omission."
"Friendship and fifty cents will buy you a coffee." Paulie paused for a moment, then grinned. "But I'm glad, all the same." Her smile faded. "I didn't get the law job."
"I'm sorry."
"Will you stop doing that? Every chance you get to beat yourself up for getting me fired, you're down on your knees asking for forgiveness!"
"Oh, sorry. I didn't realize it was getting on your nerves," Miriam said contritely.
"Fuck off!" Paulette giggled. "Pardon my French. Anyway. Think about what I said. Tomorrow you can mail that disk to the FBI if you want, then go on a long vacation. Or stick around and we'll work on writing a story that'll get you the Pulitzer. You can catch all the bullets from the goodfella hit men while I'll be your loyal little gofer, get myself a star-spangled reference and a few points of the gross. Like, fifty percent. Deal?"
"Deal. I think my head hurts." Miriam shuffled around and stood up. She felt a little shaky: Maybe it was the alcohol hitting her head on an empty stomach. "Where's that takeout?"
Paulette looked blank. "You ordered it?"
"No." Miriam snapped her fingers in frustration. "I'll go do that right now. I think we have some forward planning to do." She paused unevenly in the doorway, looking at Paulette.
"What?"
"Are you in?" she asked.
"Am I in? Are you nuts? I wouldn't miss this for anything!"