My face hurt. I tasted blood. My vision was blurry. When I blinked rapidly, I couldn’t see any better, but each blink caused my head to throb painfully.
I could hear him singing softly. At first I couldn’t identify the song, but then I realized it was an American standard, Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave.”
Hesitant to move for fear I would draw his attention before I could see well enough to defend myself, I remained facedown, head turned to my right, for perhaps a minute until my vision cleared.
On the floor, about two feet from me, was the brick of money wrapped in plastic. Whatever my pathetic treasure might amount to, it wouldn’t buy my life from a murderer who was a billionaire.
Beyond the package of cash rose the chronosphere. I couldn’t see Cloyce’s feet moving anywhere in that glimmering construction, only the inner gimbal mounting as it silently carved lazy eights in the air, the arms of it moving impossibly but ceaselessly. And in the golden light that arose equally in every cubic inch of the chamber, my enemy cast no telltale shadow.
I was lying with my right arm trapped under me. When I moved the fingers of that hand, I could feel the swell of leather that was the belt-slider holster. Slowly, taking care not to move otherwise, I wormed my hand to the Beretta — and found that it had been taken from me.
On the floor between me and the brick of money lay a tooth. I searched my mouth with my tongue and found not one hole but two. The way the blood thickened in my throat and the taste of it were beginning to sicken me.
Judging by his voice, he was behind me, several steps removed.
Lacking a weapon, my best hope seemed to be to get up fast and rush away from him, around the chronosphere, try to keep it between him and me until I got to either the copper door or the stainless-steel stairs.
I thrust up, but dizziness and pain stalled me when I got as far as my hands and knees. Cloyce kicked my left arm out from under me, and I fell facedown again.
Now he was softly singing a different Cole Porter number: “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
His choice of songs alerted me to what was coming next, but I was powerless to escape it. He kicked me in the hip, in my left side, again in my side, and I felt a rib crack.
He jammed one boot on my back, put his weight on me, and the cracked rib seemed to catch fire and burn through my flesh.
I now understood my dream:
What the Nazis hoped to do to the Jews they killed, to the Gypsies and the Catholics they killed, was to kill them twice. It is what all tyrants hope to do, those armed with the mighty power of the state, like Hitler, and those with lesser power, like Cloyce. Mere physical destruction does not satisfy them. They use fear to wither your spirit, continuous propaganda and cruel mockery to confuse you, torture and forced labor to break more than just your body. They want to reduce you, if they can, to the condition of a frightened animal who has lost any faith that might have sustained him, who accepts his humiliation as deserved, who descends into such depression that he forsakes all belief that justice is attainable, that truth exists, or meaning. After they first kill your soul, they are then satisfied to kill your body, and if in fact they have succeeded, you cooperate meekly in your own physical — second — death. They are all in the army of the damned, and if they have a stronger faith in the righteousness of evil than their victims have in the reality and power of good, they cannot lose.
The only responses we can have to their viciousness are the courage to fight back or the cowardice to acquiesce. Well, one other option might be the pretense of acquiescence.
As the broken rib burned in my side and as waves of pain swelled through my battered face, I begged him not to hurt me any more, not to kill me. I pleaded, beseeched, implored, and groveled with my face pressed to the floor. The tears were easy to produce because the pain squeezed them from me, but he could mistake them for tears of terror and self-pity if he wished.
He grabbed me by the back of my sports-jacket collar. Commanding me to get up, he hauled me to my feet. He slammed me against the wall so hard that the pain in my chest seemed to drive a spike all the way into my skull to puncture awareness and let darkness flood my mind once more. I barely held on to consciousness, but the black wave passed.
Now Cloyce was singing “Anything Goes.” Not singing it so much as muttering it, snarling the words, his face right in mine. He was a tall man, muscular, strong. Having surprised the fight out of me with the shotgun butt, he was going to enjoy beating me to death with his fists. His breath smelled of something sour and vile. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and a handful of my crotch, and between words of the song, he suggested I should submit to him sexually as all the terrified women had done before he killed them.
My right hand fumbled its way into that pocket of my sports jacket, though there was nothing in there but a few spare rounds of ammunition and the pantry key on the stretchy pink plastic coil.
Suddenly Tesla loomed beside us, his gaunt face wild with rage. He reached for Cloyce but reached through him,
Perhaps thinking that I had hoped to be saved, Cloyce said, “It can’t help you. It’s not him. Just an aspect of him. Spun off in an experiment, bouncing around in time because it doesn’t belong anywhere.”
Twisting my hair, twisting a handful of my crotch, Cloyce began laughing at me, highly amused by the tears that streamed down my face and by the helplessness they seemed to represent.
Pinching the bow of the key between thumb and forefinger, with all my strength I drove the serrated blade of it into the soft tissue behind his chin, as deep as it could go, perhaps into the underside of his tongue, and then twisted it violently.
As a gush of warm blood spilled over my hand, Cloyce reeled backward, clutching at his throat, keening in pain, probably sure that I had shoved a knife into him.
Before he might comprehend that he would survive the wound, I staggered away from him, snatched the shotgun off the floor, turned, pumped a round into the chamber, and delivered to him his second death.
Fifty-one
Judging by the silence, the freaks hadn’t begun chopping at the front door yet, but surely by now they had begun to examine it and fiddle with the doorknob. The axes would start to flash soon.
My jaw ached from ear to ear, the broken-off roots of two teeth throbbed, and the right side of my face was swelling, threatening to reduce that eye to a slit. I kept swallowing fresh blood that welled up in my mouth, and I was also bleeding a little from my nose. None of the elements that constituted my crotch felt good, either, but I could walk without whimpering.
Psychic magnetism works best when I’m trying to locate a person, wandering around with the face and name of my quarry in mind. But occasionally it functions as well when I’m searching for an object while conjuring a mental image of it.
I couldn’t picture the master switch of which Tesla had spoken, because I didn’t know what it looked like. I assumed, however, that anyone as obsessed with detail and order as Nikola Tesla would label the damn thing MASTER SWITCH in capital letters. I pictured those two words in my mind’s eye, hoping that what I wanted was in this high room, which seemed to be the Grand Central Station of the time-management machinery.
For a minute I circled the chronosphere, but then I was compelled to move into it, through the larger fixed gimbal mounting, toward the arms of the inner mounting that scissored multiple lazy eights simultaneously from the air. Even closer, I was not able to see how they moved in such elaborate arcs yet continued to support the rotating egg — the passenger capsule — which was always floating at the center.
Later, I would read as much about gyroscopes as my fry-cook brain could tolerate. I didn’t absorb a lot, just enough to wonder if this had been an electrostatic gyro, in which the rotor — or in this case the egg — was supported by an electric or magnetic field. But if I understand correctly, the rotor of an electrostatic gyro has to be in a high vacuum, and the egg was not in a vacuum.
As I drew near to the swooping golden arms of the inner gimbal, they seemed to make an approach to the egg impossible. I would surely be battered to death if I tried to dart among them to the prize.
But then, as if sensing my approach, the great gold-plated arcs slid into new rhythms and patterns. As they
