ancient mopic. Humphrey Beauvard, someone like that.'
'Humphrey Bogart,' I corrected him.
'Whoever.'
'He's a time traveller!' Susan blurted.
'You mean,' Roland said, 'he comes from 1957?'
Susan shrugged. 'Sure. Why not?'
'How did he get from Earth, circa 1957, to here and now?'
'Starship,'
'Starship,' Roland said, nodding, then rolling his eyes.
'Yeah, Relativity, time dilation and all that.'
'Do you mean to say,' Roland said, his voice larded with irony, 'he left Earth in 1957… in a starship?'
'Don't be so damn snotty. Why not?'
'Because there weren't any starships in 1957. There aren't any now.'
'Maybe the Ryxx kidnapped him! I don't know! Do you have to pounce on me every time I?'
'But we're talking about a hundred and fifty years ago, Susan.'
I said, 'The Ryxx have been on the Skyway for something like three hundred years; Roland. No telling when they achieved interstellar travel.'
Roland shook his head skeptically. 'I'd be willing to bet it was very recently.'
'Why don't we simply wait,' Liam broke in, poking his head through the hatch, 'for Carl to tell us? Whatever the explanation is, I'd lay odds it's involved.'
'Or maybe he has something to hide,' Roland said.
'What?' I wanted to know.
'That's the question, isn't it?'
'Well, if you're speculating he's a spy or something-'
'Well, not a spy.'
'Then what is he? Remember it wasn't his idea to tag along with us. I dragged him into all of this by stealing his car.'
Roland had his chin propped up on one arm, chewing the nail of-his little finger. 'I just have a strange feeling about him,' he murmured.
'Don't know what could've caused that,' I said. 'He seems like your average bloke to me,'
Susan tittered, then slid her hand down my thigh to massage the inside of the knee.
Silence for a moment.
'Well,' John said, 'what shall we do?'
'About Carl?' I asked.
'No. About the scouting party,'
'I'm still very reluctant to leave Sam,' I said.
'I can understand that, Jake. I can certainly understand how you feel about leaving your fath?' Tongue-tied for second, he motioned vaguely in the direction of the cab. 'Uh…'
'My father.'
'Yes. Yes, your father. Um, it's rather difficult sometimes?'
'It's okay. By the way, Sam's location is more or less here,' I said, pointing to a small bulge in the rear bulkhead of the cabin. 'That's his CPU, Central Processing Unit. His auxiliary storage is wedged in the bulkhead between the cab and the cabin. And of course there are various input and output units all over the place.'
'The Entelechy Matrix,' Roland said. 'That's in the CPU?'
'Right. Sorry, John. You were saying…'
'I was more or less trying to say that if we lost you, Jake, there'd be no hope for the rest of us.'
'I hardly think that's the case.'
'But you have the Black Cube.'
It was the first time in a good while that anyone had mentioned the strange artifact, probably because no one knew what to say about it. Everything that had happened, everything, it seemed, that would happen, revolved around the enigma that the Cube represented. Putatively, it was the Roadmap, the object of all the chases, the intrigue, the hugger-mugger. In the drama of the Paradox, it occupied center stage. At John's mention of it, the irony of our situation hit home. Here we were, lost and rollerless on uncharted road, with the key to the, entire Skyway system in our possession… supposedly.
Well, if the Cube rues the legendary Roadmap, we had no way to read it. There was no way to even begin to read it. Although we had not tried tampering with the thing, it looked dauntingly inviolable. Its impenetrable blackness seemed to say, Don't even think about it. It was hard to imagine that it could merely contain useful information. Dark secrets, maybe. That Which Man Was Not Meant To Know. But a roadmap indicating the better- class motels and scenic points of interest? Nah.
'You have no idea, John,' I said, 'how close I've come to chucking that damn thing out the port.'
John nodded gravely. 'It's a lightning rod.'
'Precisely. And we've been zapped one too many rimes. So, what makes you think you'd be better off sticking around it?'
'I don't want to… 'stick around' the Cube so much as I want to dog your every step until you bring the bloody thing back home.'
'Yeah? What are you going to say to your doppelganger when you meet him?'
'My paradoxical self? I should think we'd have much to talk about. However, I don't ever remember myself coming the other way. Therefore, if I do make the trip back, I won't bother seeking myself out. I didn't, so I won't. I don't see a parallax there.'
Roland had been thinking. 'What if you did, John? What if you did try to find yourself?'
'I'd fail.'
Roland jabbed a finger at him. 'But what if you didn't fail?'
'But I will. It's history.'
'Excuse me, Suzie,' I said, making a move to get up.
'Sure.'
I wriggled out of the nook and made my way to the safe, which was in the bulkhead by the bunk, where Darla was stretched out. She had been complaining of nausea.
'Feel any better?' I asked her as I stooped to let the lock read my thumbprint.
'Much. I'm all right.'
'But you have free will,' Roland was saying, continuing the argument. 'There'd be nothing to prevent you from going back to Khadija and presenting yourself.'
'But I wouldn't.'
'I would.'
John was genuinely shacked. 'You would?'
'Of course. Couldn't resist it.'
John shook his head, appalled. 'Good God. Tempting the fates like that. It's…' He shuddered. 'There must be some Greek myth to cover this sort of thing.'
'The Greeks didn't have time machines.'
'Well, I meant morally analogous. Oedipus, perhaps.'
'Should I poke out my eyes after I do it?'
'I should think your double's eyes would come popping out by themselves.'
'Explain that,' I broke in, plunking the Cube down an the table in front of John, 'without a paradox.'
'I couldn't begin to.'
'What the bloody hell is that?' Liam said.
'Good question,' I said.
'It's the thing that can't possibly exist,' Roland said. 'But it does.'
'How so?' Liam wanted to know.
'It's the thing I supposedly brought back from my time trip and gave to somebody… who gave it to somebody who gave it to Darla?'
