Jack and Ginny stood at opposite ends of the table like students awaiting an exam. Bidewell studied Jack, then pulled two books from the stack and let them fall open to their middles. He pushed one across the table toward Ginny and the other toward Jack. Both looked down. The pages were incomprehensible; no words, no paragraphs, just random lines of letters and numbers. Jack looked away and closed his book with a sharp crack.

Ginny left hers open. Bidewell had given her The Gargoyles of Oxfordby Professor J. G. Goyle. She recognized the binding, but could no longer read any of the text, and the pictures seemed muddy and vague.

A third book, the name on its spine also scrambled, was passed among the women.

“You may have noticed the effects of what you experienced outside, what some call the Gape,” Bidewell said as this book was carried back to the table by Agazutta. “Actually, two events have concurred: the Gape, and Terminus. The Gape cuts us off from our past. Terminus cuts us off from any future, and so, by and large, we are cut off from both causality and eventuality, the two pulsing waves of time. The results are obvious, outside. In here, my library is a ruin, but it still offers some protection.”

“ Allthe books are ruined?” Miriam asked, incredulous. “I mean, you docollect curiosities.”

“As many as I’ve examined, including those with which I’m quite familiar,” Bidewell said. “Outside these walls, every book in our region—perhaps every region we could ever hope to access—has also been scrambled. I’ve not seen this before, not on such a scale.”

Jack set his face in a vacant expression—waiting.

“Virginia, you have regained possession of your odd little stone. Now there are two,” Bidewell said.

“Jack, Ginny, could you remove your stones from their boxes…?”

Jack puzzled open his box. The stone lay inside, twisted and black, shining with a single deep red gleam. Ginny lifted hers. “Both present and accounted for,” she said, trying to be cheerful.

“Given their shapes and the way they appear to nest together—but no, we will notattempt that, please keep them separate—I suspect that a third exists, and perhaps more. None of us knows where they might be. None of our sentinels and outriders has reported a third individual with your abilities. But for now, we can’t worry about that. What is outside this warehouse for the time being is beyond our control.”

Agazutta sniffed.

Bidewell nodded. “If they are what I think they are, then they have nearly completed their long journey—they have summed. Bring them to the center of the table, please, and give them a slow wave over this volume. I’ve chosen a particularly valuable book, one I’ve kept in reserve for some time—but which is presently unreadable. Children…”

Jack stood beside Bidewell, following Ginny’s lead. Bidewell opened the book to the middle. Both held out their stones. The women crowded the opposite side of the table to see. Jack and Ginny held the stones over the pages.

At first the text remained scrambled. Then, as if caught in a glowing light of reason, the words began to return—a few, then sentences, phrases, entire paragraphs.

No letters moved, nothing visibly rearranged, but the book under the two stones slowly became readable.

Jack couldn’t help glancing at the first paragraphs to become clear—reading upside down, a trick he had learned years ago.

Language is as fundamental as energy. To be observed, the universe must be reduced—encoded. An unobserved universe is a messy place. Language becomes the DNA of the cosmos. He looked up. Ginny had been reading as well.

“I am humbled by the power you children possess,” Bidewell said reverently. “I’ve waited centuries to observe this effect. It confirms so much that has been, until now, mere philosophy.”

“What arethe stones?” Ginny asked, her hand and the stone trembling. “I’ve had mine as long as I can remember. My parents had it before me. I’ve never been away from it for very long. But I have no idea what it is.”

“Jack?” Bidewell inquired, watching him closely, but with a confident air.

“My mother called it a sometime stone. Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s not. Once, she called it a library stone.”

“Curious. Librarystone. As if she might have known.”

“Known what?” Jack asked.

“For now, these are still just partial shells—journey finished, full and strong, but immature. Even so…as you can see, they have remarkable powers.” Bidewell gripped both their extended hands and pulled them slowly apart. The text below remained comprehensible. In fact, the patch of legibility continued to grow.

“There have been many such over the ages. Some failed and became lumps of useless rock. Some were captured—along with their guardians—and we assume those were sequestered or destroyed. In the names given to them, I suspect, we have clues as to their ultimate nature and function. You may put them away for now.”

“If something has scrambled all order—how can we think or see?” Miriam asked. “Why isn’t our flesh scrambled?” Her voice rose. “Everything should just fall apart!”

Her disturbing observation was met with grim silence.

Bidewell flipped the book’s restored pages one by one. The old man actually had tears in his eyes—tears of relief and awe. “We are just beginning to see how deep the mystery is. For better or worse, all time, everywhere, is now subjective. All fates are local.” He lifted his gaze to a large electric clock mounted over the sliding steel door. The hands were bent and jammed as if invisible fingers had reached inside and twisted them—and the second hand lay at the bottom of the glass. “No timepiece will tick out our remaining seconds. If we end flattened and frozen against Terminus—we are lost. Even these stones will be useless. But we cannot rush the tasks that remain for us. First, we must get to know each

other.” Bidewell pulled a folding chair forward, gripped its seat, and smiled at Jack. Jack sat, eyes sharp.

“Just for this occasion,” Bidewell said, “I have laid in a small feast. Ginny knows where cans of soup and the makings for sandwiches are stored. Ellen, will you begin?”

They sat down to pastrami on rye and tomato soup warmed on the stove. Farrah produced a bottle of red wine and a corkscrew from her capacious handbag. “Wonder what Terminus does to wine?” she asked. She poured a small amount of the dark ruby liquid into a tumbler, sipped it, and lifted an eyebrow in approval, then poured around. “It’s hard to spoil a cheap merlot.”

Ellen lifted her glass and swirled its contents. “The four of us really did start out as a book group,” she said. “We still get together twice a month to eat and drink and discuss literature.”

“We’re well-off,” Farrah said. “Leisure becomes an attractive nuisance.”

Ellen resumed. “Anyway, ladies,after Agazutta’s father passed away, she cleaned out his house. The house had been in the family for over a hundred years. In the attic, she saw an old, dusty box pushed far back into a corner. Inside, she found an unusual book. It had probably been there since before her grandfather’s time.”

Bidewell rubbed his hands, then leaned against the edge of the table. For all his apparent age, he seemed flexible—not spry, but flexible. And tough.

Agazutta seemed bored by this recounting. “Blame it all on me,” she said.

“Agazutta brought it to our group. After a bottle of pinot gris and a fine melon salad with pine nuts and prosciutto, we all agreed the book might be rare—though it was not in English, nor in any language we knew. It seemed to be part of a set. So we thought it would be fun to take it to a dealer in such things—a man I know, John Christopher Brown.”

“They dated in college,” Farrah broadcast to the room.