Rivera stared for a moment and then responded, still in Mandarin, but faster and louder.

"It's okay, Carlos. Don't worry." Tommie guided the young man down the stairs. Rivera was still talking, but in bursts, repeating, "Wǒ zài shuō yīngyü ma? Shi yīngyǓ ma ?" Am I speaking English? Is it English?

"Just keep going, Carlos. You'll be okay."

Robert and Winnie brought up the rear. Blount was squinting his eyes in that exaggerated way of his, searching. "Ha!" he said. "The bastards were using the stability servos to shake the building. See."

And for a wonder, Robert did see; all the practice was paying off. "Yes!" The Geisel Library was one of the few buildings not replaced after the Rose Canyon quake. Instead, they built active stabilization into the old frame. "So the admin thought this would give a little extra realism…"

"We could have been killed," said Blount.

They were at the third floor. Coming up the other way was a group of students; at least, Robert assumed they were students, since they were laughing and most had chosen monstrous forms. The two groups slid past each other, the oldsters silent until the students had disappeared above them.

Tommie said, "What triggers the rock and roll, Carlos?"

Rivera weaved around an armoire that was built into the wall. Now he shouted, "Am I speaking English yet?… Yes ! Oh, thank God. Sometimes I dream I get stuck forever." He walked several paces, almost crying with relief. Then the words came streaming out of him. "Yes, yes. I understood your question: I'm not sure what triggers our fake earthquakes. I was at the meeting where we decided to use the stability system this way. The trigger was supposed to be any attempt to 'open' a book that contains knowledge 'Mankind was not meant to know.' Of course, that's a joke — except when it's so deadly serious that Homeland Security shows up. So I think we just trigger the shakes at random."

They continued downward, Rivera all but babbling: "Our chief librarian is totally committed on this. She's also a big cheese in the local Hacek belief circle. She wants to implement Hacek-appropriate penalties for users who break library rules."

Tommie's look of concern was replaced by technical interest. "Jeez," he said, "Hacek torment pits?"

At the main floor, they stepped out onto the standard carpeting of the library's main foyer. An hour earlier, Robert and Sharif had gone through this area to get to the elevators. Robert had scarcely noticed the clean, open space, the statue of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Now it was a welcoming sanity. They walked through glass doors into the afternoon sunlight.

Winnie turned to look up at the overhanging stories of the library. "They've turned the place into a menace. That earthquake was, was…" Abruptly his gaze came down from the sky. "Are you okay, Carlos?"

The librarian waved his hand. "Yes. Sometimes getting stuck is a little like an epileptic seizure." He wiped his face; he was drenched in sweat. "Wow. Maybe this was a bad one…"

"You should get medical attention, Carlos."

"I am. See?" Medical flags had popped up around his head. "I alarmed out on the stairs. There's at least one real doctor watching me now. I — " He hesitated, listening. "Okay, they want me at the clinic. Some kind of brain scan. I'll see you next time." He saw the look on their faces. "Hey, don't worry, guys."

"I'll come along," said Tommie.

"Okay, but don't talk. They're prepping me for the scan." The two walked off toward the west-side traffic circle.

Robert and Winnie stared after them. Blount spoke with uncharacteristic uncertainty. "Maybe I shouldn't have hassled him about the Hacek stuff."

"Is he going to be okay?"

"Probably. Every time another veteran gets permanently stuck, the VA looks real bad. They'll do their best for him."

Robert thought back to all of Rivera's strangeness. Normally, his Mandarin was just short interjections, almost an affectation. If those had been in Spanish, he might not even have noticed. But now — "What's the matter with him, Winnie?"

Blount's gaze was abstracted. He shrugged. "Carlos is a JITT."

"What's that?"

"Huh? Christ, Gu! Look it up." He glared around the plaza. "Okay. Okay." He gave Robert a forced smile. "Sorry, Robert. JITT's an easy search topic. You'll find lots of good discussion. The important thing is, we have to keep our eyes on the ball. Um, Carlos would want that. A lot depends on you doing the right thing."

"But what is that? What — "

Winnie held up a hand. "We're working on it. We'll get you the details soon enough."

On the drive home, Robert looked up "JITT." There were millions of hits, in medicine, in military affairs, in drug enforcement. He picked the Global-Security summary off the top of "respected contrarian" sources:

JITT, "just-in-time-training" (also, "just-in-time-trainee", when referring to a victim of the procedure). A treatment that combines addressin therapy and intense data exposure, capable of installing large skill sets in less than 100 hours. Most famous for its tragic use in the Sino-American Conflict, when 100,000 U.S. military recruits were trained in Mandarin, Cantonese —

and a list of specialties that Robert had never heard of. In less than ninety days the Americans had made up their military language gap. But then there were problems —

This talent pool was decisive in ground operations; however, the human price of the procedure was apparent even before the end of the war.

Robert Gu — and perhaps every student — has dreamed of shortcuts. Learn Russian or Latin or Chinese or Spanish, overnight and painlessly! But be careful what you wish for …. He read the sections on side effects: Learning a language, or a career specialty, changes a person. Cram in such skills willy-nilly and you distort the underlying personality. A very few JITTs suffered no side effects. In rare cases, such people could undertake a second hit — even a third — before the damage caught up with them. The rejection process was a kind of internal war between the new viewpoints and the old, manifesting as seizures and altered mental states. Often the JITT was stuck in some diminished form of his/her new skill set… After the war, there was the legacy of the JITT-disabled veterans, and continuing abuse by foolish students everywhere.

Poor Carlos.

And just what is the Mysterious Stranger promising me?

This had definitely been one of those future-shock days. Robert rolled down the window and felt the breeze sweep by. He was driving north on 1-15. All around was a dense suburbia much like the most built-up parts of twentieth-century California, except that here the houses were a little drabber and the shopping malls were more like warehouse districts. Strangely, there were real malls, even in this brave new world. He had shopped in a couple of them. Some places had plenty of solid architecture. Shopping "for the old at heart" was their motto; that would not have worked in 2000.

Robert pushed away the mysteries (and the fear) and practiced with his Epiphany. Let's see the minimum adornment . Robert shrugged the familiar gesture. Okay so far . He could see simple labeling. Everything, even the ice-plant on the sides of the freeway, had little alphanumeric signs. Another shrug of the shoulder, and he was seeing what the objects he was passing — more accurately, the owners of the objects — wanted him to see. There was advertising. The malls had guessed he was an old fart, and tuned their ads accordingly. But there was none of the outright spam of some earlier sessions. Maybe he finally had his filters set right.

Robert leaned back from the window and reached out to wider universes. Colored maps appeared before his eyes. There were realities that were geographically far away, not overlaid upon San Diego at all. Those must be like the cyberspace crap of the eighties and nineties. Finally he got a window that promised "public local reality only." Yeah. Only two hundred thousand of them for this part of San Diego County. He chose at random. Outside the car, the North County hillsides were swept clean of the subdivisions. The road had only three lanes and the cars were out of the 1960s. He noticed the tag on the windshield of his car (now a Ford Falcon): San Diego Historical Society . Bit by bit, they were reconstructing the past. Big hunks of the twentieth century were available for people who wanted those simpler times.