It wouldn’t hurt his wounded masculinity to get back at Strom. But Peter was in the equation, too, and it could be devastating to the kid.

And make Matt look like a fool, as well as a home-wrecker.

She kissed him softly, and then deeply. “Please? Your place at 6:00 on Friday?” She moved his hand to her breast, and then her own hand somewhat lower.

Of course he said yes and, before the subway was halfway home, regretted having said it. He never watched soap operas on the cube, but he was pretty sure he’d just signed up for chapter n-minus-1. And they never had a happy ending. If they had a happy ending, they’d have to go off the air.

A mature man would have called Kara the next day and said he got carried away, sorry, there’s no way that it could work. Let’s admit we made a mistake and stay good friends.

Instead, Matt figured he had just two days to get to the machine and escape into the future.

His first plan was direct passionate action: buy a gun at one of the Southie pawnshops, go disarm the guard, and take the machine. It wouldn’t be stealing, really; it was his machine. Stealingwould be when he crawled into a Dumpster and pushed the button, using it as a getaway car, and showing up in the future with tons of exotic garbage.

A less dramatic opportunity presented itself. The chronophysics department wanted to run the machine through a positron scanner three times—alone, and then with a person touching it, and then with Matt touching it. Careful not to push the RESET button, of course.

Once he was inside the claustrophobic tube, he’d just find a piece of metal, clip it with the alligator clip, and push the button. Off to the twenty-third century.

It would look like an accident. Poor Matt, sacrificed to science.

This time he wouldn’t need any protective gear. Marsh had calculated where he would wind up next, to within a few dozen meters. It was up by where Route 95 crosses into New Hampshire, pretty far from the ocean. Pretty near to the tax-free liquor warehouse. Have to take a credit card.

What, really, ought he to take up into the future? His first thought was old coins. But they’d probably have him take all of the metal out of his pockets for the positron scan.

Rare documents, small ones. He went down to Charles Street and maxed out two credit cards buying a note Lincoln had scrawled to Grant and a letter from Gabriel Garcнa Mбrquez, in the last year of his life, to Pablo “El Ced” Marino when he was an unknown poet, forty years before his Nobel Prize.

Of course he might wind up in a future that cared nothing for history or literature. That would be trouble, no matter what.

There was also the small matter of 177.5 years’ interest on those two credit cards. Maybe they’d go out of business.

It was bound to work one way or another. In some future he was going to come back to that law firm sixteen years ago and leave a million-dollar check to bail himself out.

He spent a day worrying. How could you plan for a trip like this? There was no Baedecker for the future. Science fiction had a really bad record, world peace and personal dirigibles. For lack of anything else positive to do, he bought a really good Swiss Army knife with twenty-one functions, in case they didn’t make him empty his pockets.

Of course, he might be vaulting into a radioactive hell. Or a wasteland rendered sterile by nanotechnology or biological warfare.

He couldn’t un-push the button.

But he couldpress it again, and again. Two thousand years. Then 24,709 and three hundred thousand. The fifth push would be 3,440,509 years, long enough for anything to quiet down.

It would also be a kind of suicide. If there were still people that far in the future, he would be more distant to them than a Cro-Magnon man would be to the here and now.

Did you make your computer chips out of flint back then?

He went to the old-time theater on Brattle Street and watched three twentieth-century movies in a row. A soft-porn romance, a Western, and a once-daring epic about a war in Southeast Asia. It kept his mind off everything, though he emerged with a seriously sore butt and didn’t care if he never saw popcorn again.

He might not.

He got a few hours of imperfect sleep and went down to the Green Building early.

The first time traveler, Herman, inhabited a deluxe terrarium in the lobby. He had grown to helmet size, and slept through Matt’s tapping on the glass to say good-bye.

The only things alive now that might still be alive when he came back were some young Galбpagos turtles in zoos here and there. He would look them up and talk to them about the old days. I knew your cousin Herman.

He’d never been to the seventh floor before. It had a slightly shabby atmosphere. Perhaps positrons were out of fashion.

“Dr. Fuller,” a young Asian man said, walking toward him with his hand out. It still startled him when people called him that, but he’d stopped protesting.

He’d never get a real doctorate now. Maybe another honorary one, for being Guy from the Past.

“Joe Sung,” he said, shaking hands. “You’re up next. Maybe ten minutes.”

“Okay.” The positron scanner was in the next room, visible through a big window.

It was all white plastic. Would there be anything metal inside to contact with the alligator clip?

He should have looked up the machine’s design. It probably did have metal all through it, and so would act as a kind of semiopen Faraday cage, and go up into the future with him.

If not, not. The time machine would disappear for about nine generations, to be recovered near the antique ruins of the liquor warehouse on the New Hampshire border. Matt would be fired, perhaps jailed. Though there probably wasn’t yet a law against sending stuff into the future.

Sung had said something. “Pardon me?”

“Just have a seat out here. I’ll come to get you.” He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “You’ll be in the machine for more than an hour. You might want to use the washroom.”

“Thanks.” Matt went across the hall to the men’s room and sat there thinking. Reluctantly, he decided he’d better not do it. There will be other opportunities.

Or would there be? The rent-a-cop who normally stood outside the door on the ninth floor was not here. When the machine went back to its usual place, he would be. How to get by him? Flash the Swiss Army knife?

He went back to the anteroom and flipped through a copy of National Geographicbackward. The clam farms of Samoa. Our Friend the Dung Beetle. Surprising Pittsburgh.

“Okay.” Sung came out with a pallid young man, the control for the experiment. He looked a little shaky.

“Don’t open your eyes in there,” he said. “It’s kind of close quarters.”

“Thanks.” Matt watched him stagger toward the elevator.

“I monitored him while he was being scanned. Nothing unusual. ’Scuse me.”

Sung headed for the men’s room.

Matt slipped into the room with the positron scanner. The machine was right there, on the end of the platform that went in and out. He snatched it and ran into the corridor and stabbed the elevator button.

The door opened immediately. The pale guy was still there. “What . . . what’s happening?”

“Have to, um, take it down to recalibrate it.”

“Mm,” he said. “Don’t open your eyes in there, man.”

“Yeah, I’ll be careful.”

When they got to the ground floor, Matt went for the door with unseemly haste. He had maybe a minute. There were Dumpsters behind Starbucks and Au Bon Pain.

But there was also a cab. It pulled up to the curb in front of the Green Building and the passenger got out. Then the driver got out, too, to help with the luggage.

Matt dove in. “Hey,” the driver said. “I’ve got another fare.”

Matt clipped the alligator clip to the exposed frame in the open door. But there was a plastic dome over the RESET button.