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"Not wise to drink and drive," I re a long s, I said, "I bet God likes beer Of course, He’d have a chauffeur"
The twenty-foot-high levee walls rose on both sides of us The low and starless sky appeared to be as hard as iron, pressing down like a kettle lid
"Transport where?" I asked
"Remember your atch"
"Maybe it needs repair"
"Mine went nuts, too," he reminded me
"Since when do you wear a watch, anyway?"
"Since, for the first ti out," he said, referring not solely to his ownout for all of us, for the entire world as we knew it "Watches,they stand for Evilwhat tih I never used to care, and if I can’t find a clock, I get way itchy So noear a watch, and I’m like the rest of the world, and doesn’t that suck?"
"It sucketh"
"Like a tornado"
I said, "Ti room"
"The room was a time machine"
"We can’t make that assu fool"
"Time travel is impossible"
"Medieval attitude, bro I to thesubstitutes"
"For the sake of argument, let’s suppose it’s possible"
"It is possible"
"If it’s just time travel, why the pressurized suit? Wouldn’t time travelers want to be discreet? They’d be super-conspicuous unless they traveled back to a Star Trek convention in 1980"
"Protection against unknown disease," Bobby said "Maybe an aten or full of poisonous pollutants"
"At a Star Trek convention in 1980?"
"You know they were going to the future"
"I don’t know, and neither do you"
"The future," Bobby insisted, the beer having given hiured they needed the protection of the spacesuits because…the future ht be radically different Which it evidently is"
Even without the kiss of the moon, a faint silvery blush lent visibility to the riverbed silt Nevertheless, the April night was deep
Way back in the seventeenth century, Thomas Fuller said that it is always darkest just before the dawn More than three hundred years later, he was still right, though still dead
"How far in the future?" I wondered, alh the egg room
"Ten years, a century, atotally quashed the room: the panic, the cries for help, the screams
I shuddered After another pull at son’s suit"
"That’s part of our future"
"Nothing like that exists on this world"
"Not yet"
"But those things were so strange… The entire ecological systee drastically"
"If you can find one, ask a dinosaur whether it’s possible"
I had lost my taste for the beer I held the bottle out of the Jeep, turned it upside down, and let it drain
"Even if it was a ti up the way he did, out of nowhere, and the vault door reappearing…everything that happened to us…How could it have happened?"
"There’s a residual effect"
"Residual effect"
"Full-on, totally ine out of a Ford, tear apart the drive train, throay the battery--no residual effect can cause the da at the dwindling, vaguely lu into our infinitely strange future, Bobby said, "They tore a hole in reality Maybe a hole like that doesn’t mend itself"
"What does that mean?"
"What it means," he said
"Cryptic"
"Styptic"
Perhaps his point was that his explanation ht be cryptic, yes, but at least it was a concept we could grasp and to which we could cling, a fa away, just as the alu fro my tendency--acquired from the poetry in which my father had steeped me--to assume that everyone spoke in metaphor and that the world was always more complex than it appeared to be, in which case he had chosen the word solely for the rhy him to elucidate styptic "They didn’t know about this residual effect?"
"Youthe project?"
"Yeah The people who built it, then tore it down If there was a residual effect, they’d blow in the walls, fill the ruins with a few thousand tons of concrete They wouldn’t just walk away and leave it for asoles like us to find"
He shrugged "So one"
"Or ested
"Both of us?"
"Could be"
"Identical hallucinations?"
I had no adequate answer, so I said, "Styptic"
"Elliptic"
I refused to think about that one "If the Mystery Train was a ti to do withto do with Mo room? Why did they leave her photo in the airlock on a different night? Why did soe under the windshield wiper and send us there tonight?"
"You’re a regular question machine"