Eventually, deciding that I had sequestered myself in the woods long enough to re-establish my standing at City Hall as a stable and trustworthy adviser, I drove up to Monterey, hopped the coastal pod to San Francisco, and flew home to New York, to my dusty, untended flat on Sixty-third Street. Not much had changed. The days were shorter, now that November had come, and autumn’s haze had yielded to the first sharp blasts of the onrushing winter, slicing crosswise through the city from river to river. The mayor, mirabile dictu, had been to Louisiana and, to the displeasure of the New York Times ’ editorial writers, had advocated construction of the dubious Plaquemines Dam, had been photographed embracing Governor Thibodaux: Quinn looked sourly determined, smiling the way a man might smile who had been hired to hug a cactus.

Next I went out to Brooklyn to visit Carvajal.

It was a month since I had seen Carvajal, but he looked very much more than a month older — sallow, shrunken, eyes dim and watery, a tremor in his hands. He hadn’t seemed so wasted and worn since our first meeting, in Bob Lombroso’s office, back in March; all the strength he had gained in the spring and summer now was gone from him, all the sudden vitality which perhaps he had drawn from his relationship with me. Not perhaps: surely. For, minute by minute, as we sat and talked, color returned to him, the gleam of energy reappeared in his features.

I told him what had happened on the hillside in Big Sur. He may have smiled. “Possibly a beginning,” he said softly. “Eventually it has to start. Why not there?”

“If I did see, though, what did the vision mean? Quinn with banners? Quinn exciting a mob?”

“How would I know?” Carvajal asked.

“You haven’t ever seen anything like that?”

“Quinn’s true time is after mine,” he reminded me. His eyes reproached me mildly. Yes: this man had less than six months to live, and knew it, down to the hour, to the moment. He said, “Possibly you can remember how old Quinn seemed to be, in your vision. The color of the hair, the lines in the face …”

I tried to remember. Quinn was only thirty-nine now. How old was the man whose face had filled that great banner? I had recognized him instantly as Quinn, so the changes couldn’t have been great. Jowlier than the present Quinn? The blond hair graying at the temples? The lines of that iron grin more deeply incised? I didn’t know. I hadn’t noticed. Only a fantasy, perhaps. Hallucination born of fatigue. I apologized to Carvajal; I promised to do better the next time, if I were to be granted a next time. He assured me there would be. I would see, he said firmly, growing more animated. He was more vigorous the longer we were together. I would see, no doubt of that.

He said, “Time for business. New instructions for Quinn.”

There was only one thing to convey this time: the mayor was supposed to start shopping around for a new police commissioner, because Commissioner Sudakis was shortly going to resign. That startled me. Sudakis had been one of Quinn’s best appointments — effective and popular, the closest thing to a hero the New York Police Department had had in a couple of generations, a solid, reliable, incorruptible, personally courageous man. In his first year and a half as head of the department he had come to seem a fixture; it was as if he had always been in charge, always would be. He had done a beautiful job transforming the Gestapo that the police had become under the late Mayor Gottfried into a peacemaking force once again, and the job was not yet done: only a couple of months ago I had heard Sudakis tell the mayor he would need another year and a half to finish the cleanup. Sudakis about to quit? It didn’t ring true.

“Quinn won’t believe it,” I said. “He’ll laugh in my face.”

Carvajal shrugged. “Sudakis will no longer be police commissioner after the first of the year. The mayor ought to have a capable replacement ready.”

“Maybe so. But it’s all so damned implausible. Sudakis sits there like the Rock of Gibraltar. I can’t go in and tell the mayor he’s about to quit, even if he is. There was so much static over the Thibodaux and Ricciardi businesses that Mardikian insisted I take a rest cure. If I go in there with something as wild as this, they might have me put away.”

Carvajal stared at me imperturbably, implacably.

I said, “At least give me some supporting data. Why does Sudakis plan to quit?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would I get any clues if I approached Sudakis myself?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. You don’t know. And you don’t care, do you? All you know is that he’s planning to leave. The rest is trivial to you.”

“I don’t even know that, Lew. Only that he will leave. Sudakis may not know it himself yet.”

“Oh, fine. Fine! I tell the mayor, the mayor sends for Sudakis, Sudakis denies everything, because as of now it isn’t so.”

“Reality is always conserved,” said Carvajal. “Sudakis will resign. It will happen very suddenly.”

“Must I be the one to tell Quinn that? What if I don’t say anything? If reality is truly conserved, Sudakis will leave no matter what I do. Isn’t that so? Isn’t it?”

“Do you want the mayor to be caught unprepared when it happens?”

“Better that than to have the mayor think I’m crazy.”

“Are you afraid to warn Quinn about the resignation?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think would happen to you?”

“I’ll be put in an embarrassing position,” I said. “I’ll be asked to justify something that makes no sense to me. I’ll have to fall back on saying it’s a hunch, only a hunch, and if Sudakis denies he’s going to quit I’ll lose influence with Quinn. I might even lose my job. Is that what you want?”

“I have no desires whatever,” said Carvajal distantly.

“Besides, which, Quinn won’t let Sudakis quit.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. He needs him too much. He won’t accept his resignation. No matter what Sudakis says, he’ll stay on the job, and what does that do to the conservation of reality?”

“Sudakis won’t stay,” Carvajal said indifferently.

I went away and thought about it.

My objections to recommending that Quinn start looking for a successor to Sudakis struck me as logical, reasonable, plausible, and unarguable. I was unwilling to crawl into so exposed a position so soon after my return, when I was still vulnerable to Mardikian’s skepticism about my stability. On the other hand, if some unforeseen turn of events would force Sudakis to quit, I’d have been derelict in my duties if I had failed to give the mayor the warning. In a city forever on the edge of chaos, even a few days’ confusion about lines of authority in the Police Department could bring matters close to anarchy in the streets, and one thing Quinn really didn’t need as a potential presidential candidate was a resurgence, however brief, of the lawlessness that had roiled the city so often before the repressive Gottfried administration and in the time of the feeble Mayor DiLaurenzio. And on the third hand, I had never before refused to be the vehicle of one of Carvajal’s directives, and it troubled me to defy him now. Imperceptibly Carvajal’s notions of reality conservation had become part of me; imperceptibly I had accepted his philosophy to an extent that left me fearful of tampering with the inevitable uncoiling of the inevitable. Feeling a bit like someone who was climbing aboard an ice floe heading downstream in the Niagara River, I found myself resolving to bring the Sudakis story to Quinn, misgivings or no.

But I let a week slide by, hoping the situation would somehow resolve itself without my interference, and then I let most of another week go past; and so I might have allowed the rest of the year to slip away, but I knew I was deluding myself. So I drew up a memo and sent it in to Mardikian.