"I'll stay," she said.

Vincent Reynolds walked slowly up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue, out of breath by the time he got to the top. His hands and arms were very strong-helpful for when he had his heart-to-hearts with the ladies-but he got zero aerobic exercise.

Joanne, his flower girl, floated into his thought. Yes, he'd followed and come close to raping her. But at the last minute another of his incarnations had taken charge, Smart Vincent, who was the rarest of the brood. The temptation had been great but he couldn't disappoint his friend. (Vincent also didn't think it was a wise idea to give any grief to a man whose advice for dealing with conflict was to "slash the eyes.") So he'd merely checked up on her again, eaten a huge lunch and taken the train here.

He now paid and entered the museum, noticing a family-the wife resembled his sister. He'd just written the previous week asking her to come to New York for Christmas but hadn't heard back. He'd like to show her the sights. She could hardly come at the moment, of course, not while he and Duncan were busy. He hoped she'd visit soon, though. Vincent was convinced that having her more in his life would make a difference. It would provide a stability that would make him less hungry, he believed. He wouldn't need heart-to-hearts quite so often.

I really wouldn't mind changing a little bit, Dr. Jenkins.

Don't you agree?

Maybe she'd get here for New Year's. They could go to Times Square and watch the ball drop.

Vincent headed into the museum proper. There wasn't any doubt about where to find Gerald Duncan. He'd be in the area that held the important touring exhibits-the treasures of the Nile, for instance, or jewels from the British Empire. Now, the exhibit was "Horology in Ancient Times."

Horology, Duncan had explained, was the study of time and timepieces.

The killer had come here several times recently. It drew the older man the way porn shops drew Vincent. Normally distant and unemotional, Duncan always lit up when he was staring at the displays. It made Vincent happy to see his friend actually enjoying something.

Duncan was looking over some old pottery things called incense clocks. Vincent eased up next to him.

"What'd you find?" asked Duncan, who didn't turn his head. He'd seen Vincent's reflection in the glass of the display case. He was like that-always aware, always seeing what he needed to see.

"She was alone in the workshop all the time I was there. Nobody came in. She went to her store on Broadway and met this delivery guy there. They left. I called and asked for her-"

"From?"

"A pay phone. Sure."

Meticulous.

"And the clerk said she'd gone out for coffee. She'd be back in about an hour but she wouldn't be in the store. Meaning, I guess, she'd go back to the workshop."

"Good." Duncan nodded.

"And what'd you find?"

"The pier was roped off but nobody was there. I saw police boats in the river, so they haven't found the body yet. At Cedar Street I couldn't get very close. But they're taking the case real seriously. A lot of cops. There were two that seemed in charge. One of them was pretty."

"A girl, really?" Hungry Vincent perked up. The thought of having a heart-to-heart with a policewoman had never occurred to him. But he suddenly liked the idea.

A lot.

"Young, in her thirties. Red hair. You like red hair?"

He'd never forget Sally Anne's red hair, how it cascaded on the old, stinky blanket when he was lying on top of her.

The hunger soared. He was actually salivating. Vincent dug into his pocket, pulled out a candy bar and ate it fast. He wondered where Duncan was going with his comments about red hair and the pretty policewoman but the killer said nothing more. He stepped to another display, containing old-time pendulum clocks.

"Do you know what we have to thank for precise time-telling?"

The professor is at the lectern, thought Clever Mr. V, having replaced Hungry Mr. V for the moment, now that he'd had his chocolate.

"No."

"Trains."

"How come?"

"When people's entire lives were limited to a single town they could start the day whenever they decided. Six A.M. in London might be six eighteen in Oxford. Who cared? And if you did have to go to Oxford, you rode your horse and it didn't matter if the time was off. But with a railroad, if one train doesn't leave the station on time and the next one comes barreling through, well, the results are going to be unpleasant."

"That makes sense."

Duncan turned away from the display. Vincent was hoping they'd leave now, go downtown and get Joanne. But Duncan walked across the room to a large case of thick glass. It was behind a velvet rope. A big guard stood next to it.

Duncan stared at the object inside, a gold-and-silver box about two feet square, eight inches deep. The front was filled with a dozen dials that were stamped with spheres and pictures of what looked like the planets and stars and comets, along with numbers and weird letters and symbols, like in astrology. The box itself was carved with images too and was covered with jewels.

"What is it?" Vincent asked.

"The Delphic Mechanism," Duncan explained. "It's from Greece, more than fifteen hundred years old. It's on tour around the world."

"What does it do?"

"Many things. See those dials there? They calculate the movement of the sun and moon and planets." He glanced at Vincent. "It actually shows the earth and planets moving around the sun, which was revolutionary, and heretical, for the time-a thousand years before Copernicus's model of the solar system. Amazing."

Vincent remembered something about Copernicus from high school science-though what he remembered most was a girl in the class, Rita Johansson. The recollection he enjoyed most was of the pudgy brunette, late one autumn afternoon, lying on her tummy in a field near the school, a burlap bag over her head, and saying in a polite voice, "Please, no, please don't."

"And look at that dial," Duncan said, interrupting Vincent's very pleasant memory.

"The silver one?"

"It's platinum. Pure platinum."

"That's more valuable than gold, right?"

Duncan didn't answer. "It shows the lunar calendar. But a very special one. The Gregorian calendar-the one we use-has three hundred and sixty-five days and irregular months. The lunar calendar's more consistent than the Gregorian-the months are always the same length. But they don't correspond to the sun, which means that the lunar month that starts on, say, April fifth of this year will fall on a different day next year. But the Delphic Mechanism shows a lunisolar calendar, which combines the two. I hate the Gregorian and the pure lunar." There was passion in his voice. "They're sloppy."

He hates them? Vincent was thinking.

"But the lunisolar-it's elegant, harmonious. Beautiful."

Duncan nodded at the face of the Delphic Mechanism. "A lot of people don't believe it's authentic because scientists can't duplicate its calculations without computers. They can't believe that somebody built such a sophisticated calculator that long ago. But I'm convinced it's real."

"Is it worth a lot?"

"It's priceless." After a moment he added, "There've been dozens of rumors about it-that it contained answers to the secrets of life and the universe."

"You think that?"

Duncan continued to stare at the light glistening off the metal. "In a way. Does it do anything supernatural? Of course not. But it does something important: It unifies time. It helps us understand that it's an endless river. The Mechanism doesn't treat a second any differently than it does a millennium. And somehow it was able to measure all of those intervals with nearly one hundred percent accuracy." He pointed at the box. "The ancients thought of time as a separate force, sort of a god itself, with powers of its own. The Mechanism is an emblem of that view, you could say. I think we'd all be better off looking at time that way: how a single second can be as powerful as a bullet or knife or bomb. It can affect events a thousand years in the future. Can change them completely."