"Well, the woman said you were a scientist — a physicist, I think. Is that right?"

"Yes."

"And she said you were — you will be — forty-eight years old."

Theo nodded.

"And she said you were shot."

"Did she say where?"

"Ah, in the chest, I think."

"No, no. Where I was shot — what place?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Was it at CERN?"

"She said you worked at CERN, but — but I don't recall her saying that was where you were killed. I'm sorry."

"Did she mention a sports arena? A boxing match?"

Rusch looked surprised by the question. "No."

"Do you remember anything else?"

"I'm sorry, no."

"What was the story that came on after the one about me?" He didn't know why he asked that — maybe to see where he had fitted into the pecking order.

"I'm sorry, I don't know. I didn't watch the rest of the newscast. When the piece on you was finished, a commercial came on — for a company that lets you create designer babies. That did fascinate me — the 2009 me — but my 2030 self seemed to have no interest in it. He just turned off the — well, it wasn't really a TV, of course; it was a hanging flatscreen thing. But he just turned it off — he said the word 'Off' to it, and it went dark, just like that; no fading out. And then he — me — we turned around and — I guess I was in a hotel room; there were two large beds in it. I went and lay down on one of the beds, fully clothed. And I spent the rest of the time just staring at the ceiling, until my vision ended and I was back at the kitchen table." He paused. "I had a nasty bump on my forehead, of course; I'd smashed it into the tabletop when the vision began. And I'd spilled hot coffee on my hand, too; I must have knocked over my mug when I pitched forward. I was lucky that I wasn't seriously burnt. It took me a while to collect my wits, and then I found out that everyone in the building had also had some sort of hallucination. And then I tried to call my wife, only to find out that… that… " He swallowed hard. "It took them a while to find her, or, at least, to contact me. She'd been walking up a steep flight of stairs, coming out of the subway. She'd almost made it to the top, according to others who saw her, and then she'd blacked out, and fallen backwards, down sixty or seventy steps. The fall broke her neck."

"My God," said Theo. "I'm sorry."

Rusch nodded this time, simply accepting the comment.

There was nothing else to be said between them, and, besides, Theo had to get back to the airport; he didn't want to run up the cost of a hotel room in Berlin.

"Many thanks for your time," said Theo. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his business-card case. "If you recall anything else that you think might be helpful, I'd really appreciate it if you'd give me a call or drop me an email." He handed Rusch a card.

The man took it, but didn't look at it. Theo left.

Lloyd went back to Gaston Beranger's office the next day. This time the journey took even longer: he was waylaid by a unified-field-theory group on their way over to the Computer Center. When he at last made it to Beranger's office, Lloyd began, "I'm sorry, Gaston, you can try to oust me if you want, but I'm going to go public."

"I thought I was clear — "

"We have to go public. Look, I just got through speaking to Theo. Did you know he went to Germany yesterday?"

"I can't keep track of the comings and goings of three thousand employees."

"He went to Germany — on a moment's notice, and he got a cheap fare. Why? Because people are afraid to fly. The whole world is still paralyzed, Gaston. Everyone is afraid that the time displacement is going to happen again. Check the newspapers or the TV, if you don't believe me; I just did myself. They're avoiding sports, driving when only absolutely necessary, and not flying. It's as if — it's as if they're waiting for the other shoe to drop." Lloyd thought again about the announcement that his father was leaving. "But it isn't going to happen, isn't it? So long as we don't replicate what we were doing here, there's no way in which the time-displacement will repeat. We can't leave the world hanging. We've done enough damage already. We can't let people be afraid to get on with their lives, to go back — as much as possible — to the way things were before."

Beranger seemed to be considering this.

"Come on, Gaston. Someone is going to leak it soon enough anyway."

Beranger exhaled. "I know that. You think I don't know that? I don't want to be obstructionist here. But we do need to think about the consequences — the legal ramifications."

"Surely it's better if we come forward of our own volition, rather than waiting for someone to blow the whistle on us."

Beranger looked at the ceiling for a time. "I know you don't like me," he said, without meeting Lloyd's eyes. Lloyd opened his mouth to protest, but Beranger raised a hand. "Don't bother denying it. We've never gotten along; we've never been friends. Part of that is natural, of course — you see it in every lab in the world. Scientists who think the administrators exist to stymie their work. Administrators who act as though the scientists are an inconvenience instead of the heart and soul of the place. But it goes beyond that, doesn't it? No matter what our jobs were, you wouldn't like me. I'd never stopped to think about stuff like that before. I always knew some people didn't like me and never would, but I never figured it might be my fault." He paused, then shrugged a little. "But maybe it is. I never told you what my vision showed… and I'm not about to tell you now. But it got me thinking. Maybe I have been fighting you too much. You think we should go public? Christ, I don't know if that's the right thing to do or not. I don't know that not going public is the right thing, either."

He paused. "We've come up with a parallel, by the way — something to toss the press if it does leak out, an analogy to demonstrate why we aren't culpable."

Lloyd raised his eyebrows.

"The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse," said Beranger.

Lloyd nodded. Early on November 7, 1940, the pavement on the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge in Washington state began to ripple. Soon the whole bridge was oscillating up and down, massively heaving, until, at last, it collapsed. Every high-school physics student in the world had seen film of this, and for decades they were given the best-guess explanation: that perhaps the wind had generated a natural resonance with the bridge, causing it to undulate in waves.

Surely the bridge-builders should have foreseen that, people had said at the time; after all, resonance was as old as tuning forks. But the resonance explanation was wrong; resonance requires great precision — if it didn't, every singer could shatter a wine glass — and random winds almost certainly couldn't produce it. No, it was shown in 1990 that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had collapsed due to the fundamental nonlinearity of suspension bridges, an outgrowth of chaos theory — a branch of science that hadn't even existed when the bridge was built. The engineers who had designed it hadn't been culpable; there was no way with the knowledge then available that they could have predicted or prevented the collapse.

"If it had just been visions," said Beranger, "you know, we wouldn't need to cover our asses; I suspect most people would thank you. But there were all those car accidents and people falling off ladders, and so on. Are you prepared to take the blame? Because it won't be me that takes the fall, and it won't be CERN. When it comes right down to it, no matter how much we talk about Tacoma Narrows and unforeseen consequences, people will still want a specific human scapegoat, and you know that's going to be you, Lloyd. It was your experiment."