Griffin stood out front of his cottage, staring at a smoldering trash fire. There were charred box springs at its center. Molly Gerhard recognized the stench of burning mattress stuffing. Beside her, Jimmy wrinkled up his nose.
Griffin did not look up at their approach. “She’s gone,” he said.
“I know,” Molly Gerhard said. “I was just at the time funnel. I saw her leave.”
Griffin grunted.
“Maybe she’ll come back,” Jimmy suggested. “Women have been known to change their minds.”
“She’s not coming back. I’ve been through two divorces. I know the signs.”
Griffin was holding his wrist in one hand. Slowly, he forced the hand open and moved it away, so he could stare down at his watch. By the look on his face, it told him nothing.
“Well?” he said at last.
Molly, unsure what he wanted, didn’t respond.
“Where did she go? Why did she go there? What does she know that we don’t?”
“I really don’t—”
Jimmy squinted up at the sun. “It’s too hot out here for this kind of conversation,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”
They talked in the village pub. It was, Jimmy had firmly pointed out to them, not a reproduction of a real pub, but rather a reproduction of an American imitation of one. Molly Gerhard didn’t care. She’d been in phonier. At least this one didn’t have cardboard leprechauns taped to the mirrors.
Griffin sat hunched over the bar. He looked like he could use a drink. She’d heard he had a problem there. In all her years working for him, she’d never actually seen Griffin with an alcoholic beverage in his hand. That could just be discretion, though.
She sat at a table, and Jimmy lounged by the window.
It seemed to Molly Gerhard that Salley would be pleased by how she dominated their thoughts in her absence, as she never had while she was here. She was one of those people who discredited their own ideas by the force with which they argued them. With her gone, they were able to give her speculations the serious consideration they deserved. They were able to admit that she might well be right.
“Salley’s the key to everything,” Molly said.
“How so?” Jimmy asked coolly.
“She’s figured it all out. Exactly what’s going on. Why we haven’t gotten anywhere in our negotiations. Everything.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yes. She as good as said so any number of times.”
Griffin sighed, straightened, turned. Tick-tock, Molly thought. Like a machine resuming its function. This was one of the reasons she was leaving for the private sector. She didn’t like what manipulating destiny did to people, how it coarsened them. He took up the reins of the discussion. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s begin by establishing the precise order of events.”
Griffin got the ball rolling by telling how he had come back to the village from yet another futile and unproductive meeting with the Unchanging to find both Salley and his All Access pass gone. Then Molly Gerhard related how she’d been conned into leading Salley to the time funnel. “I didn’t see what harm she could do,” she said shamefacedly. “I honestly didn’t think she was that devious.”
“Where did she go?” Griffin said.
“I don’t know. Forward, presumably.” With the AA pass, she could have gone anywhere. But if she had returned to the Cenozoic or Mesozoic, her return would have been logged into the system. “If she’d gone back, the Old Man would be here now. Since he’s not…” She shrugged.
“How far forward?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could you identify the exact entrance to the funnel she used?” Jimmy asked.
She closed her eyes, thought. “Yes.”
“Then we can follow her.”
“What? How?”
“Let’s just say we have our ways. Technically speaking, I’m not even supposed to know about them.”
“No, you’re not.” Griffin glowered at his subordinate. Then, to Molly: “Why would she go forward? What’s she trying to accomplish?”
“Hard to say. But she’s headed all the way to the end of the line. To the real source of time travel. Sometime many, many millions of years beyond Terminal City.”
“She told you this?”
“Not directly. She tried not to say anything. But that’s not easy for her. She was dropping hints constantly.”
“That’s true,” Jimmy said. “She was bubbling over with things unsaid.”
“After a while, I gave up on trying to get a straight answer out of her, and just began assembling her pronouncements. I’ve been sorting through them in my mind, and I think I’ve put them into some sort of order.”
“Go on,” Griffin said.
“She kept referring to how quiet it was. How clean and unspoiled. She talked about how much she wanted to get out into the local ecosystem, but she never said a word about the fact that there don’t appear to be any large animals in it. It suggests she didn’t want us to realize that we’re in the aftermath of a major extinction event.”
“She said something to me about how quiet it was,” Jimmy said. “I didn’t think it meant anything.”
Molly Gerhard reminded herself that she couldn’t expect Jimmy to be of much use here. This wasn’t his arena of action. “It means everything,” she said. “To begin with, there hasn’t been the time for the adaptive radiation of species.”
Jimmy cleared his throat. “You’re losing me,”
“Evolution,” Griffin said, taking control again, “is not like an arrow, with a fish crawling out of the water at one end and a white male in a business suit on the other. It is a radiation in all directions, provided only that there is room to evolve in the indicated direction.
“Usually, there isn’t. In a healthy ecosystem, all niches are filled. A desert mouse wanders into the grasslands and finds there are field mice there already. It can’t harvest the grass seed as efficiently as they can, or dodge the local owls and foxes as well. So it’s either driven back into the desert, or it dies.
“After a major extinction event, however, there are empty niches everywhere, devoid of predators or competition. So elements of a single species can radiate out in several directions to fill them. They get larger, they get smaller, they climb trees. Before you know it, there are mice the size of gophers, mice the size of hippopotami, otter mice, bison mice, with sabre-tooth mice and grizzly mice to prey on them.
“It’s a fast process. It only takes ten million years or so for the niches to fill up again. So the fact that they haven’t, means we’re in the aftermath of a major extinction event. Which means that this can’t be the Unchanging’s home time.” He scowled. “I should have seen it myself. I would have, if I hadn’t been so tied up in negotiations.”
“Okay,” Molly said. “So we’re all agreed that this isn’t the Unchanging’s original time period?”
“What is it, then?” Jimmy asked.
“It’s a quarantine station for animals being transshipped forward, and a holding space for items they’ve acquired and only occasionally need to refer to.”
“Hold on. If they’re our descendants, why couldn’t they have simply survived the extinction event?”
“Salley said that they weren’t people.”
“They look like people.”
“Salley said that too. She also made a big deal about how they didn’t smell. She said it often enough that I finally asked myself what kind of animal doesn’t have a smell.” She paused, half expecting Jimmy to make a
