“I’d like a glass of iced watermelon juice,” Matt said.

“It would be synthetic,” the valet said, “but I can have it in two minutes. Unless you are joking.”

“I’m joking. Thank you.” The valet inclined his head and disappeared.

They both stared at the spot where he’d been. Then Martha pulled the stopper out of the white wine, studied it, and put it aside. “Red or white?”

“Take white,” he said. She poured a glass and passed it to him, then poured one for herself.

He held out his glass, but they evidently didn’t have that custom. She had a stranger one: she touched the surface of the wine with a fingertip and shook a drop off onto the floor.

She smiled at him. “My mother always did that. She said she promised hermother that she would never drink a drop of wine. That was the drop she never drank.”

Matt took a sip; it was icy cold but not too dry, flowery. “Did MIT let you go visit your mother?”

She nodded. “Easter and Christmas, when the roads allowed. But she’s failing, was failing.” Her mouth went into a hard line, and she bit her lower lip.

“Mine, too,” Matt said. “My mother. The last couple of times I saw her, she didn’t know who I was.”

She nodded without looking at him. “Matthew. A good name. But . . . you’re not Christian?”

“I was born a Jew.”

“Like in the Bible?” He nodded. “We don’t have them, you, not in a long time.”

He didn’t really want to know, but had to ask: “What happened to them? There used to be lots, in Boston and Cambridge.”

“They left, I guess. A lot of people left during the One Year War. Coming out this way.”

“People used to say the Jews ran Hollywood. I guess we could run toHollywood.”

She considered that, not getting the joke. “You miss it. Your church.”

“Synagogue, no. I stopped going when I was younger than you.”

“Your parents let you not go?”

“My mother had stopped years before. My father never went.”

“That’s so strange. I never knew anyone who didn’t go to church.” She sat up straight. “I guess I am one, now.”

“Until you get back. God must understand.”

She looked at him. “You don’t believe that.”

“No. I should have said, ‘If there is a God, I can’t imagine that he would not understand.’ ”

“Em and Arl, they didn’t act like believers. They acted as if Christians and Muslims were unusual.”

“Comes and goes, I suspect. There weren’t a lot of religious people in the time and place I left. And then I wound up in yours, where everybody believed. Maybe the pendulum will have moved back the next time we jump.”

“How far into the future will that be?”

“If our calculations were correct, twenty-four thousand more years.”

She took a sip of wine. “About four times the age of the Earth.”

“According to the Bible.”

She reached into the bag and took out the Bible. “May I take this? Try to read myself to sleep.”

“Sure. Sweet dreams.” He watched her go into her bedroom and listened to her undressing.

After a minute, he finished the glass of wine and took the bag into his room, to seek his own kind of consolation.

The valet woke them separately and led themboth to the garden, where La was sitting. It was full of night blossoms and their heavy fragrance, with dozens of large candles lending a warm light. She was wearing a white jumpsuit that revealed a spectacular, if virtual, figure.

She was sitting on a stone bench, and another one faced her. They sat down.

“You may stay here,” she said without preamble, “and live out the rest of your days in total comfort, and occasionally go down into the world for amusement. While I go on to explore the future. Or we can go together.”

“We were never sure,” Matt said, “whether the time machinewould work if someone else pushed the button. You might need me to come with you.”

“If I push the button, and nothing happens, we’ll have to work something out.”

“Like my thumbgoes, and the rest of me stays behind?”

“It would be an interesting experiment. I don’t think it would work.” There was no humor in her smile.

“But you can stay behind as well as go,” Matt said.

“Copies of me, aspects of me, will stay here, to run LA. But the part of me that goes on ahead is my essence. The part that’s here with you right now.”

“You could stay,” Matt said to Martha. “I got you into this, but there’s no reason you have to continue.”

“I’ve thought that through,” she said, “and prayed for guidance. I couldn’t stay here.”

“I don’t blame you,” La said. “This is one boring world. Matt might enjoy it for a while.” She gave him a knowing smile. “Almost any woman on this planet would be yours for the asking. But they really are boring.”

He saw Martha blush and lower her eyes. He hadn’t really thought of that aspect.

“They wouldn’t be ‘mine.’ But everybody here can’t be as vapid and silly as that couple.”

“Oh, really? There’s a kind of dead-end stability at work here, all over the civilized world. Everybody’s rich from birth, so there are no needy people complicating the situation. Anyone who tires of having everything can go off to the wilderness for as long as they can stand it, so the restless are taken care of.

“And I find myself with no challenges, either; nothing that isn’t dealt with automatically. So I’ve been sort of hoping that you would survive long enough to show up.”

“Of course,” Matt said. “You would know approximately when and where I would appear.”

“Maybe. We knew when and where you would land afteryou took the taxi—that was a daring move, and lucky— but there has been a cultural blackout in New England since 2181, so we couldn’t know whether you’d survived your contact with the Christers.”

“We wouldn’t have . . .” Martha began. “Sorry. Go on.”

“I had pretty sophisticated observation and analysis tools on the lookout for you in the here and now. But they weren’t necessary. When an ancient bottle of MIT wine went up for auction, that was all I needed.”

“How long have you been planning this?”

“Oh, I got the idea a couple of hundred years ago. Then just had to wait and see.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might not wantcompany? Going into the future.”

“You need me. You know where the machine will take you next.”

“The Pacific Ocean.”

“You plan to go there in a bank vault?”

“I can get a metal boat.”

“Yes, and land in the middle of a typhoon and drown in seconds. Or just get lost at sea and dehydrate slowly.” She stood up. “Follow me.”

They went around a pond with luminous fish. “You need to find a backward time machine—both of you—and the only place you’ll find that is in the future. I can take you safely to that future. But then you go back, if you wish, and I go on.”

“All the way?”

“Whatever that means, yes.”

They walked down a flight of stone steps to a basement door. La pushed it open.

In the glare of a brilliant bluish light, a proper time machine. At first it looked like a huge mechanical insect, but that was just an all-terrain transportation system. Carried on top of and in between the four pairs of articulated legs were two containers, each about ten meters long, one with windows.

“Defense!” she said, and the bottom one was bristling with weapons. “Streamline!” The legs folded up around the machine, and a metal sheet slid around to enclose it in a seamless ovoid, which grew swept-back wings.

“I don’t think you could have built this, clever as you are with tools. But you’re going to need it. The jump after the next one will be into outer space.”

“ Maybe. The math is ambiguous.”

“In your time, maybe. No longer. Trust me—you don’t want to go out there in a taxicab or a bank vault.”

“Outer space?” Martha said. “Between the stars?”

“Well, between the planets. Stars come much later.