He said, “Hello?” and heard his brother say, “How’s the flight?”
“Don. I hope you’re not calling to rescind my invitation.”
“Michelle’ll pick you up at the airport as planned. I’m just calling to warn you and apologize in advance. I just got an invitation I can’t refuse to a social event tomorrow evening.”
“No need to apologize.”
“Sure there is. This is a soiree of Hollywood swine.”
“I can use the time to rest up for Monday.”
“Well, actually, I’d sort of like to take you along. In case I need somebody intelligent to talk to. Unless, of course, you think you’d be uncomfortable.”
Ivan examined the prospect for a moment, then said, “On Tuesday I’m going to read a paper on Paleozoic soils at the Page Museum. Young snotnoses keen to establish their reputations on the ruins of mine will be there. In light of that, I can’t imagine how people who undoubtedly don’t know mor from mull could possibly make me uncomfortable.”
“Good. To the extent possible, I’ll camouflage you in my clothing.”
“What’s the occasion for the party?”
“The occasion’s the occasion.”
“Let me rephrase the question. Who’s hosting the party?”
“Somebody in the business who’s throwing himself a birthday party. None of his friends will throw one for him, because he doesn’t have any friends. If I hadn’t come within an ace of an Oscar last month-which by the way is the limit of his long-term memory-it’d never have occurred to him to invite a writer. If I was a self-respecting writer and not a Hollywood whore, I’d duck it. But, hey, it’ll be entertaining from a sociological point of view.”
“As long as I get to ogle some starlets.”
“Starlets’d eat you alive.”
“That would be nice, too. Look, please don’t think you have to entertain me the whole time I’m out there.”
“Oh, this place’ll afford you endless opportunities to entertain yourself.”
“I look forward to it.”
“See you soon.”
“Goodbye.”
“Resume,” he murmured to the laptop. “The point is.”
“The point is,” his younger self said, “they can’t have sprung up overnight, even in the geologic sense. The Silurian seas are receding as the land rises, and the plant invasion’s not a coincidence. But there were also opportunities during the Ordovician for plants to come ashore in a big way. Only theydidn’t. Maybe there was lethal ozone at ground level for a long time after the atmosphere became oxygen-rich. If so, a lot of oxygen had to accumulate before the ozone layer rose to the higher levels safe enough for advanced life-forms. Our-”
“Stop,” he said, and thought, What a lot of crap. Then he sighed deeply and told the laptop, “Cue the first Cutsinger press conference.”
After a moment, Cutsinger’s image appeared on the screen. He was standing at a podium, behind a brace of microphones. He said, “I am at pains to describe this phenomenon without resorting to the specialized jargon of my own field, which is physics. Metaphor, however, may be inadequate. I’ll try to answer your questions afterward.”
This is afterward, Ivan thought bitterly, and, yes, I have a question.
“The phenomenon,” Cutsinger’s image went on, “is, for want of a better term, a space-time anomaly-a hole, if you will, or a tunnel, or however you wish to think of it. It appears, and I use the word advisedly, appears to connect our present-day Earth with the Earth as it existed during the remote prehistoric past.
We’ve inserted a number of robot probes, some with laboratory animals, into the anomaly and retrieved them intact, though some of the animals did not survive. Judging both from the biological samples obtained and from the period of rotation of this prehistoric Earth, what we’re talking about is the Siluro-Devonian boundary in mid- Paleozoic time, roughly four hundred million years ago. Biological specimens collected include a genus of primitive plant called Cooksonia and an extinct arthropod called a-please forgive my pronunciation if I get this wrong-a trigonobartid. Both organisms are well-known to paleontologists, and DNA testing conclusively proves their affinities with all other known terrestrial life-forms. Thus, for all practical purposes, this is our own world as it existed during the Paleozoic Era.
However, it cannot literally be our own world. We cannot travel directly backward into our own past.”
Ivan looked up, startled, as a flight attendant leaned in and said something.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“We’ll be landing soon. You’ll have to put that away now.”
“Of course.”
She smiled and withdrew. He looked at the laptop. “The anomaly,” Cutsinger was saying, “must therefore connect us with another Earth.”
“Quit.”
Michelle met him as he came off the ramp. For a second, he did not recognize her and could only stare at her when she called his name. He could not immediately connect this young woman with his memories of her as a long-limbed thirteen-year-old girl with braces on her teeth; then, he had never been quite able to decide whether she was going to grow up pretty or goofy-looking. It had been a matter of real concern to him: he had first seen her cradled tenderly in her mother’s arms, eyes squeezed shut and oblivious of her beatific expression; baby Michelle was not asleep, though, but had seemed to be concentrating fiercely on the mother’s warmth, heartbeat, and wordless murmured endearments. Tiny hands had clasped and unclasped rhythmically, kneading air, keeping time, and when Ivan had gently touched one perfect pink palm and her soft digits closed on, but could not encircle, his calloused fingertip, the contrast smote him in the heart. He had no children of his own, and had never wanted any, but he knew immediately that he loved this child. He had murmured it to her, and to Don and Linda he said, “You folks do good work.”
The discontinuous nature of these remembered Michelles, lying unconformably upon one another, heightened his sense of dislocation as he now beheld her. She was fresh out of high school, fair-skinned, unmade-up, with unplucked eyebrows and close-cropped brown hair. It cannot be her, he told himself.
But then the corners of her mouth drew back, the firm, almost prim line of her lips fractured in a smile, and she delivered herself of pleasant, ringing laughter that had a most unexpected and wonderful effect on him: his head suddenly seemed inclined to float off his shoulders, and he found himself thinking that a man might want to bask for years in the radiance of that smile, the music of that laughter. Now he was convinced, and he let himself yield to the feeling of buoyant happiness. As a child she had had the comically intent expression of a squirrel monkey, but her father and her uncle had always been able to make her laugh, and when she had the effect was always marvelous. She closed with him and hugged him tightly, and his heart seemed to expand until it filled his chest.
As they headed into the hills north of Hollywood, she concentrated on her driving and he stole glances at her profile. He decided that the haircut suited her vastly better than the unfortunate coiffures she had been in the habit of inflicting upon herself. Well, he thought, you turned out pretty after all.
And he thought, I love you still, darling, and I always shall. Whether it’s really you or not.
Seated at the metal table, screened from the sun by the eucalyptus tree and with his book lying open on his lap, he admired the blue and orange blooms and banana-shaped leaves of the bird of paradise flowers in his brother’s backyard. He could look past them and the fence and right down the canyon on the hazy blur of the city. The morning had begun to heat up, and there was a faint ashy taste to the air. He noticed a small dark smudgy cloud where the farthest line of hills met the sky.
Michelle emerged from the house carrying two ice-flecked bottles of imported beer on a tray. She set it on the table and sat down across from him and said, “Daddy’s still talking to the thing that would not die.”
He nodded in the direction of the smudgy cloud. “I hope that’s not what I think it is.”
She looked. “Fires in the canyons. It’s the season.” She opened one of the beers and handed it to him.
“What’re you reading?”
Unnecessarily, he glanced at the spine. “The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant.”
She clearly did not know what to say in response.
“It’s about the lives of the great philosophers,” he went on after a moment, “and their thoughts on being and
