No, that couldn't be. These leaves had turned, frozen fire. But today was April 21 — spring, not autumn.

Lloyd's view continued to shift and suddenly, with what should have been a start, he realized he wasn't alone in bed. There was someone else with him.

He recoiled.

No — no, that wasn't right. He didn't physically react at all; it was as if his body were divorced from his mind. But he felt like recoiling.

The other person was a woman, but—

What the hell was going on?

She was old, wrinkled, her skin translucent, her hair a white gossamer. The collagen that had once filled her cheeks had settled as wattles at the sides of her mouth, a mouth now smiling, the laugh lines all but lost amongst the permanent creases.

Lloyd tried to roll away from the hag, but his body refused to cooperate.

What in God's name was happening?

It was spring, not autumn.

Unless—

Unless, of course, he was now in the southern hemisphere. Transported, somehow, from Switzerland to Australia…

But no. The trees he'd glimpsed through the window were maples and poplars; it had to be North America or Europe.

His hand reached out. The woman was wearing a navy-blue shirt. It wasn't a pajama top, though; it had buttoned-down epaulets and several pockets — adventure clothing made of cotton duck, the kind L. L. Bean or Tilley sells, the kind a practical woman might wear to do her gardening. Lloyd felt his fingers brushing the fabric now, feeling its softness, its pliancy. And then—

And then his fingers found the button, hard, plastic, warmed by her body, translucent like her skin. Without hesitation, the fingers grasped the button, pushed it out, slipped it sideways through the raised stitching around the buttonhole. Before the top fell open, Lloyd's gaze, still acting on its own initiative, lifted again to the old woman's face, locking onto her pale blue eyes, the irises haloed by broken rings of white.

He felt his own cheeks drawing tight as he smiled. His hand slipped inside the woman's top, found her breast. Again he wanted to recoil, snapping his hand back. The breast was soft and shriveled, the skin hanging loosely on it — fruit gone bad. The fingers drew together, following the contours of the breast, finding the nipple.

Lloyd felt a pressure down below. For a horrible moment, he thought he was getting an erection, but that wasn't it. Instead, suddenly, there was a sense of fullness in his bladder; he had to urinate. He withdrew his hand and saw the old woman's eyebrows go up inquisitively. Lloyd could feel his shoulders rise and fall, a little shrug. She smiled at him — a warm smile, an understanding smile, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if he often had to excuse himself at the outset. Her teeth were slightly yellow — the simple yellow of age — but otherwise in excellent shape.

At last his body did what he'd been willing all along: it rolled away from the woman. Lloyd felt a pain in his knee as he did so, a sharp jab. It hurt, but he outwardly ignored it. He swung his legs off the bed, feet slapping softly against the cool hardwood floor. As he rose, he saw more of the world outside the window. It was either mid-morning or mid-afternoon, the shadow cast by one tree falling sharply across the next. A bird had been resting in one of the boughs; it was startled by the sudden movement in the bedroom and took wing. A robin — the large North American thrush, not the small Old World robin; this was definitely the United States or Canada. In fact, it looked a lot like New England — Lloyd loved the fall colors in New England.

Lloyd found himself moving slowly, almost shuffling across the floorboards. He realized now that this room wasn't in a house, but rather a cottage; the furnishings were the usual vacation-home hodgepodge. That night table — low-slung, made of particle board with a wallpaper-thin veneer of fake woodgrain on top: he recognized it, at least. A piece of furniture he'd bought as a student, and had eventually put in the guest room at the house in Illinois. But what was it doing here, in this unfamiliar place?

He continued along. His right knee bothered him with each step; he wondered what was wrong with it. A mirror was hanging on the wall; its frame was knotty pine, covered over with clear varnish. It clashed with the darker "wood" of the night table, of course, but—

Jesus.

Jesus Christ.

Of their own accord, his eyes looked into the mirror as he passed, and he saw himself—

For a half-second he thought it was his father. But it was him. What hair was left on his head was entirely gray; that on his chest was white. His skin was loose and lined, his gait stooped.

Could it be radiation? Could the experiment have exposed him? Could—

No. No, that wasn't it. He knew it in his bones — in his arthritic bones. That wasn't it.

He was old.

It was as if he'd aged twenty years or more, as if—

Two decades of life gone, excised from his memory.

He wanted to scream, to shout, to protest the unfairness, protest the loss, demand an accounting from the universe—

But he could do none of that; he had no control. His body continued its slow, painful shuffle to the bathroom.

As he turned to enter the room, he glanced back at the old woman on the bed, lying now on her side, her head propped up by an arm, her smile mischievous, seductive. His vision was still sharp — he could see the flash of gold on the third finger of her left hand. It was bad enough that he was sleeping with an old woman, but a married old woman—

The plain wooden door was ajar, but he reached a hand up to push it open the rest of the way, and out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a matching wedding ring on his own left hand.

And then it hit him. This hag, this stranger, this woman he'd never seen before, this woman who looked nothing like his beloved Michiko, was his wife.

Lloyd wanted to look back at her, to try to imagine her as she would have been decades younger, to reconstruct the beauty she might have once had, but—

But he continued on into the bathroom, half turning to face the toilet, leaning over to lift the lid, and—

— and, suddenly, incredibly, thankfully, amazingly, Lloyd Simcoe was back at CERN, back in the LHC control room. For some reason, he was slumped in his vinyl-padded chair. He straightened himself up and used his hands to pull his shirt back into position.

What an incredible hallucination it had been! There would be hell to pay, of course: they were supposed to be fully shielded here, a hundred meters of earth between them and the collider ring. But he'd heard how high-energy discharges could cause hallucinations; surely that had been what had happened.

Lloyd took a moment to reorient himself. There had been no transition between here and there: no flash of light, no sense of wooziness, no popping of his ears. One instant, he'd been at CERN, then, in the next, he'd been somewhere else, for — what? — two minutes, perhaps. And now, just as seamlessly, he was back in the control room.

Of course he'd never left. Of course it had been an illusion.

He glanced around, trying to read the faces of the others. Michiko looked shocked. Had she been watching Lloyd while he was hallucinating? What had he done? Flailed around like an epileptic? Reached out into the air, as if stroking an unseen breast? Or just slumped back in his chair, falling unconscious? If so, he couldn't have been out for long — nowhere ear the two minutes he'd perceived — or surely Michiko and others would be looming over him right now, checking his pulse and loosening his collar. He glanced at the analog wall clock: it was indeed two minutes after five P.M.

He then looked over at Theo Procopides. The young Greek's expression was more subdued than Michiko's, but he was being just as wary as Lloyd, looking in turn at each of the other people in the room, shifting his gaze as soon as one of them looked back at him.