"And what is she wearing, this woman?"

Jake swallowed. "Nothing… "

The Swiss witness examiner had left, and Lloyd and Michiko were now comparing reports of Jacob's and Carly's visions; Carly had agreed to be similarly examined by the Vancouver police, and the report of that interview had been emailed to CERN.

In the intervening hours, Michiko had rallied a bit. She was clearly trying to focus, to go on, to help with the larger crisis, but every few minutes she would fade away and her eyes would go moist. Still, she managed to read through the two transcripts without getting the paper overly wet.

"There's no doubt," she said. "They match in every particular. They were in the same room."

Lloyd tried a small smile. "Kids," he said. He had only known Michiko for two years; they'd never made love in a lab — but in his grad-student days, Lloyd and his then girlfriend, Pamela Ridgley, had certainly heated up a few countertops at Harvard. But then he shook his head in wonder. "A glimpse of the future. Fascinating." He paused. "I imagine some people are going to get rich off this."

Michiko shrugged a bit. "Eventually, maybe. Those who happened to be looking at stock reports in the future might become wealthy — decades from now. That's a long time to wait for it to all pay off."

Lloyd was quiet for a moment, then: "You haven't told me what you saw yet — what your vision was."

Michiko looked away. "No," she said, "I haven't."

Lloyd touched her cheek gently, but said nothing.

"At the time — at the time I was having the vision, it seemed wonderful," she began. "I mean, I was disoriented and confused about what was going on. But the vision itself was joyous." She managed a wan smile. "Except now after what's happened… "

Again, Lloyd didn't push. He sat, outwardly patient.

"It was late at night," Michiko said at last. "I was in Japan; I'm sure it was a Japanese house. I was in a little girl's bedroom, sitting on the side of the bed. And this girl, maybe seven or eight, was sitting up in bed, and she was talking with me. She was a beautiful girl, but she wasn't — she wasn't — "

If the visions were of a time decades in the future, of course she wasn't Tamiko. Lloyd nodded gently, absolving her of having to finish the thought. Michiko sniffled. "But — but she was my daughter; she must have been. A daughter I haven't had yet. She was holding my hand, and she called me okaasan; that's Japanese for 'mommy.' It was like I was putting her to bed, wishing her good night."

"Your daughter… " said Lloyd.

"Well, our daughter, I'm sure," said Michiko. "Yours and mine."

"What were you doing in Japan?" asked Lloyd.

"I don't know; visiting family, I guess. My uncle Masayuki lives in Kyoto. Except for the fact that we had a daughter, I didn't really get any sense that it was in the future."

"This child, did she — "

Lloyd cut himself off. What he'd wanted to ask was boorish, crude. "Did she have slanted eyes?" Or maybe he would have caught himself in time and phrased it more elegantly: "Did she have epicanthic folds?" But Michiko wouldn't have understood. She'd have thought some prejudice underlay Lloyd's question, some silly misgivings about miscegenation. But that wasn't it. Lloyd didn't care if their eventual children were occidental or oriental in appearance. They could as easily be one as the other, or, of course, a mixture of the two, and he'd love them just the same, assuming—

Assuming, of course, that they were his children.

The visions seemed to be of a time perhaps two decades in the future. And in his vision, which he hadn't yet shared with Michiko, he was somewhere, maybe New England, with another woman. A white woman. And Michiko was in Kyoto, Japan, with a daughter who might be Asian or might be Caucasian or might be something in between, all depending on who her father was.

This child, did she—

"Did she what?" asked Michiko.

"Nothing," said Lloyd, looking away.

"What about your vision?" asked Michiko. "What did you see?"

Lloyd took a deep breath. He'd have to tell her sometime, he supposed, and—

"Lloyd, Michiko — you guys should come on down to the lounge." It was Theo's voice; he had just stuck his head in the door again. "We just recorded something off CNN that you'll want to see."

Lloyd, Michiko, and Theo entered the lounge. Four other people were already there. White-haired Lou Waters was jerking up and down on screen; the lounge VCR was an old unit — some staff member's hand-me-down — and didn't have a great pause function.

"Ah, good," said Raoul, as they entered. "Look at this." He touched the pause key on the remote, and Waters sprang into action.

" — David Houseman has more on this story. David?"

The picture changed to show CNN's David Houseman, standing in front of a wall of antique clocks — even with a breaking story, CNN still strove for interesting visuals.

"Thanks, Lou," said Houseman. "Most people's visions of course had no time reference in them, but enough people were in rooms with clocks or calendars on the wall, or reading electronic newspapers — there didn't seem to be any paper ones left — that we've been able to conjecture a date. It seems that the visions were of a time twenty-one years, six months, two days, and two hours ahead of the moment at which the visions occurred: the visions portray the period from 2:21 to 2:23 P.M. Eastern Time on Wednesday, October 23, 2030. That assumes the occasional aberrations are explicable: some people seemed to be reading newspapers dated October 22, 2030, or even earlier — presumably they were reading old editions. And the time references, of course, depend a great deal on what time zone the person happens to be in. We're assuming that the majority of people will still live in the same time zone two decades from now that they happen to live in today, and those that report times off by a whole number of hours from what we'd expect were in some other time zone — "

Raoul hit the pause key again.

"There it is," said Raoul. "A concrete number. Whatever we did here somehow caused the consciousness of the human race to jump ahead twenty-one years for a period of two minutes."

Theo returned to his office, the darkness of night visible through his window. All this talk of visions was disturbing — especially since he himself hadn't had one. Could Lloyd be right? Could Theo be dead a mere twenty-one years from now? He was only twenty-seven, for God's sake; in two decades, he'd still be well shy of fifty. He didn't smoke — not much of a statement for any of the North Americans to make, but still an achie vement among Greeks. He worked out regularly. Why on earth should he be dead so soon? There had to be another explanation for him having no vision.His phone bleeped. Theo picked up the handset. "Hello?"

"Hello," said a female voice, in English. "Is this, ah, Theodosios Procopides?" She stumbled over the name.

"Yes."

"My name is Kathleen DeVries," said the woman. "I've been mulling over whether to phone you. I'm calling from Johannesburg."

"Johannesburg? You mean in South Africa?"

"For the time being, anyway," she said. "If the visions are to be believed, it's going to be officially renamed Azania sometime in the next twenty-one years."

Theo waited silently for her to go on. After a moment, she did. "And it's the visions that I'm calling about. You see, mine involved you."

Theo felt his heart racing. What wonderful news! Maybe he hadn't had a vision of his own for whatever reason, but this woman had seen him twenty-one years hence. Of course he had to be alive then; of course, Lloyd was wrong when he said Theo would be dead.

"Yes?" Theo said breathlessly.