"They'll be all over Key West like ants at a picnic," the Professor went on when the hubbub had subsided somewhat. "They'll talk to everybody they think Tony might have extorted. We're having trouble enough dealing with a state education department inspector-does anybody here think we're ready to persuade, the FBI we're normal citizens?"

I thought about it. Suppose Lex stayed at the bottom of the pool, and Ralph and Alf kept their mouths shut, and Erin held off on time-traveling or teleporting anywhere for an hour or so, and none of the Callahans picked that moment to arrive naked from the other end of s.p.a.ce and time, and no aliens or gangsters happened to shoot any of us or set off any thermonuclear devices in our midst . . . could we possibly all play normal human beings well enough to convince FBI agents?

Nah.

No way in h.e.l.l. I wasn't sure exactly what it would be, but something would surely go wrong. Pixel, perhaps: I was confident I could get Ralph and Alf to (literally) play dumb, but as one of my favorite songwriters said, you just can't herd cats: there's simply no controlling Pixel. (Well, maybe two of his former servants could manage it, a little-Robert and Virginia Heinlein-but n.o.body since.) He'd probably take offense at something and walk through a wall and that'd be it. Or Nikola Tesla would show up, juggling b.a.l.l.s of fire-and Nikky has been p.i.s.sed at the FBI ever since they stole all his papers and possessions from his hotel safe the day he died. With my luck, he'd demand his stuff back and underline the point with lightning bolts.

One of our newer regulars, Papaya, spoke up. He's got a terrible stutter I won't attempt to reproduce, on the grounds that Papaya would edit it out of his speech if he could do so in life, and I can do it for him here, so why not. (What about Walter and Brad, then, you ask? Neither of them has a problem with the way they speak. Why-do you?) I mention it only because he's a cla.s.sic example of why I contend we need laws to constrain parents in the naming of their children. His people are Cajun Conchs, who came to the Keys generations ago from Nova Scotia by way of Louisiana, and they thought nothing of naming a boy after one of their favorite local fruits. Unfortunately the family name was LaMode. If you tell people your name is Papaya LaMode, they'll naturally conclude you have a stutter, not to mention an odd sense of humor; almost inevitably, you'll develop both. Maybe the sense of humor is compensation enough; I don't know. "So if I'm hearing you right, we seem to have four basic alternatives-none of which is acceptable. Is that the situation?"

The Professor and I exchanged a glance across the pool. "Well," he said, "that was the situation ... until Erin changed the rules. It turns out she has a fifth ace up her sleeve."

"The Ace of Thugs," Erin said.

She was her usual age again, now. Usual for this ficton, I mean. She sat cross-legged at the approximate center of the pool, a few inches above the surface of the water. I've never quite understood how she can do that. It isn't quite Transiting, the form of teleportation Solace and the Callahans taught her-is it? I asked her about it, once. The trouble was, she answered me.

"It has allowed her," the Professor went on, "to devise the first new con I've heard of in a very long while. If we can pull this off, not only will we get left alone to continue our valuable research in defining the maximum human tolerance for bliss, but also everyplace between here and Miami is going to become a slightly nicer place to be."

Papaya frowned. "Parts of Florida becoming nicer?" He shuddered. "That just ain't natural."

"Neither is a party," Doc Webster said softly from his chaise longue over on the bar side of the pool. "You have to make it happen."

"Amen," said several voices.

"Hush, Doc-I want to hear about this new con," said Mei-Ling, running fond fingers through the memory of her husband's hair.

Like more than one of my customers, Mei-Ling used to be a player herself once-before her conscience started bothering her, and she retired to respectability as an honest wh.o.r.e. ("Now the marks ask me to screw them," she told me once. "And they're happy I'm good at it.") By the kind of synchronicity which would be implausible anywhere else, and seems inevitable in The Place, four other patrons of mine happened to follow the same unconventional career path . . . and all five ended up working in the same wh.o.r.ehouse: the one Mike Callahan's wife, Lady Sally, used to run in Brooklyn. At different times, is the kicker-all five met each other for the first time here in Key West, the day I arrived to open up The Place back in 1989. In a further resonance, the other four are two couples, who both met and married while working at Lady Sally's House: Joe and Arethusa Quigley (of whom more anon), and the Professor and Maureen.

(I once ventured to suggest that Mei-Ling's marriage to Doc Webster slightly damaged the perfection of the symmetry. "Not at all," the Doc said. "I did the same jobs as the other five, just more efficiently. A good con man takes your money and sells you first-rate bulls.h.i.t. A good hooker takes your money and sends you away feeling better. I was a physician: I split the difference." The best I could come back with was, "And the fee.") Doc murmured something in f.u.kienese that caused his wife's fingers to slide down the back of his head and begin kneading at the base of his skull. "Yes, Erin dear: tell us-" He interrupted himself to purr briefly. Or maybe it was more f.u.kienese. "-what exactly is your new game?"

"I just heard of a new one, way up in western Canada someplace," Joe Quigley interrupted. "Second cousin of mine. Some kind of time-travel scam."

"So is mine," Erin admitted, looking interested.

"Huh. I wouldn't put it past my second cousin to claim-jump a new con. Yours involve The Beatles?"

Now Erin was confused. "No."

"Elvis?"

She shook her head. "The biggest celebrity involved in mine is the conqueror of Florida."

"Jesus Christ!" said Long-Drink McGonnigle. "You mean Jeb, the man so accursed by G.o.d he has George Bush for both father and brother?"

"I saw that movie," Susie Maser said. "Faye Dunaway. She was his sister and his daughter."

Doc Webster nodded. "Chinatown. With Nick Jackieson."

In a heroic attempt to regain and focus the attention of the group, Erin raised her volume slightly. "I didn't mean the present governor. I'm talking about the very first European ever to see the place."

"Knack Sickle Gin," said the Doc, trying to get it right. "Jackson Nickel," Walter riposted, getting into the spirit of the thing.

Erin raised her volume a little more-and herself, too, another foot or two higher above the water. "And I don't claim that it's a new con-far from it. What I'm talking about is probably the first con that was ever perpetrated on a white man in this state, actually."

"Nixon Jackal," the doc muttered. He shook his head irritably. "Jack's Knuckle In."

I was near enough to pick up mild alarm in his tone, and began to be mildly alarmed myself. Doc was emphatically not a rude man. Almost pathologically not a rude man. And he loved Erin. He seemed to have caught a case of spoonerism as if it were hiccups.

Erin unfolded her legs and stood up on the surface of the pool. "Actually, the only change I'm really making in the scam is to cheat. That will make it much easier. But it will also-"

Smokes spoke up. "Who was the conqueror of Florida? Flagler, right?" Smokes is another example of what I was talking about earlier. Smokes is actually not a nickname, despite the fact that he is one of maybe ten living humans who enjoy marijuana more than I do, and looks it, and his last name is Pott. In fact he had his first name legally changed, at considerable difficulty and expense, largely because he could no longer stand the one his parents had thoughtlessly seen fit to saddle him with. Pete. Well, if your name is Smokes Pott, you're going to end up living in Key West. That's just the way it is. So again we see how careless parental nomenclature can warp destiny. (There's even a tiny pun in there, for smoking pot must start with a peat pot.) "Jack Sickle Nun ... Jack Nicholson. Ha!" Doc had finally nailed it.

"No," Shorty Steinitz said. "Jack Nicholson was mayor, not governor. Not in Florida, either. California, someplace with a chewy name...."

"I thinking think of you're East Clintwood," Walter said helpfully.

"Actually, Smokes," Erin said, with the kind of infinite patience whose subtext says, If you really make me keep being this patient for infinity, I will kill you all in your beds, "the conqueror and first ruler of Florida was Ponce-"

"A ponce?" Shorty Steinitz said loudly, struggling to follow the conversation with his good ear. He glanced across the pool to Smokes. "I'm sorry, young feller, I thought you said Flagler." He bent close to his wife, who hasn't got a good ear, and bellowed, "He said fegeleh." Then he looked puzzled and turned back to Erin. "The governor of Florida is a ponce? He doesn't seem good looking enough to me."

Erin closed her eyes, sighed, visibly counted to five, and let herself begin very slowly sinking into the water.

Fast Eddie couldn't stand it. He hit a crashing discord on his piano and stood up so fast the stool crashed over. It seemed an odd time for a Jerry Lee Lewis impression, but from long a.s.sociation with Eddie, I automatically got ready to supply the vocal. Instead he slammed the cover down on the keyboard.

"Fa Chrissake, don't youse get it?" he shouted. "What's de oldest scam in Florida?"

"Real estate," Double Bill said positively.

Eddie made a sound like logging on to the Internet five octaves lower, sucked air, and yelled at the top of his lungs, "Gah dammit, she's talkin' about de Fountain a Ute!"

There was a momentary hush. Erin was in up to where, a few hours ago, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s had been, and still sinking. Over behind the bar, The Machine farted and peeped, signaling the end of its automatic self-cleansing ritual.

Ensign Bowman, one of half a dozen swabbies from the naval base who've become semiregulars in recent years, broke the silence. "What's a Ute?"

Susie Maser shook her head. "That's a different picture. My Cousin Vinnie." Then she suddenly looked dismayed.

The top of Erin's head slipped beneath the surface.

It's my opinion Ensign Bowman was actually asking for information; I don't think he knew the film. Nonetheless it was unfortunate, because it happens that Susie's husband Slippery Joe prides himself on his Joe Pesci imitation, undeservedly, and everyone present knew it. Susie and his other wife Suzy both realized what they had to do, and didn't hesitate, thank heaven-he was already beginning to squint and curl his upper lip when they threw him in the pool. Fortunately he missed Lex by a good yard or two.

Long-Drink McGonnigle happened to be floating nearby; he was pushed into me by the tsunami. "The other bourbon and the draft beer and salt are already in the back," he murmured to me.

I grinned. A fellow Donald Westlake fan. I'd just been thinking the same thing myself. "Thanks, Rollo. How about the vodka and red wine?" I helped him to safe harbor next to me at the side of the pool.

"Oh, he was in earlier. He'll be back tomorrow," said Long-Drink.

(We were referencing a bar in Westlake's immortal Dortmunder series, and I could probably have made everything twice as confused by saying its name aloud, just then.) Finally Slippery Joe had been hauled out, and his wives had stripped him, dressed him in a beach towel toga and sent him off to my place to put his clothes in the dryer, and Fast Eddie had bellowed "SHADDAP A'READY," and order, insofar as we know that term at The Place, had been restored.

"Go ahead, Erin," said Eddie, "We'll lissen, dis time." He said the second sentence with special emphasis, and we all noticed that Eddie's right hand was around behind him, where he stores the nasty little blackjack he uses on those rare occasions when a troublemaker wanders in.

"Thank you, Uncle Eddie," said Erin with quiet dignity. By now she had surfaced again, and was sitting zazen on the water, legs crossed beneath her, spine straight, hands joined on her lap with thumbtips touching in the Zen version of the mudra. She looked slowly around at us all, shedding water from her hair that glistened in the poolside lights. "Uncle Eddie guessed correctly a minute ago: I intend to sell Tony Donuts Junior the Fountain of Youth."

Dead silence.

Then, rooba rooba rooba, interspersed with giggles.

"How that gonna help us, girl?" Bad Death Wallace asked. He looks like a Rastafarian, and used to be one until, he claims, he started thinking about how weird it was to worship someone named Highly Silly a.s.s, Eh? After an ugly misunderstanding with the police concerning his own name-actually his father named him, after watching his mother perish in childbirth-he left Montego Bay in a cargo container, hoping to reach America. But like so many apostates, expatriates, and fugitives before him, he settled for Key West instead.

"The h.e.l.l with how it can help us," said Noah Gonzalez. "Let's think about how it can hurt us."

"He has a point, Erin," Arethusa Quigley said. "Have you figured a way to handle the blowoff without any comeback? Tony doesn't strike me as the kind of mark who'll take his s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g and chalk it up."

"Jesus, no," agreed her husband, Joe. "Every time I think of him I picture a large ugly mountain brought to life by Claymation. He couldn't actually kill any of us, of course... Well, now, wait a minute, that's not strictly-"

"You miss my point," Noah said urgently. "I'm not talking about anything as trivial as grievous personal injury or ma.s.sive property damage. Am I, Erin?"

She chose not to answer.

"Earlier today you looked, for a time, markedly older than usual. Now you once again look your normal age. And you say you're planning to run some kind of Fountain of Youth sting. Ergo-" He sighed, looked down at his sandals, and back up. "-you're going to use time travel. Right?"

My daughter didn't duck it. "That's right, Noah."

He spread his hands and said to the group, "There you are. What she's planning to risk is everything."

Rooba rooba rooba rooba.

Nearly all of us read science fiction; the rest have at least seen sci fi; we all had a fair grasp of the scope of catastrophe that becomes possible once you start tampering with the fabric of history-whether it's past or future history. If Erin's monkeying around with Time were to accidentally create a paradox, there was indeed an excellent chance that the universe, all of reality, might go away.

Worse-never have existed.

"Well," Zoey said, "we've played for those kind of stakes before," and the rooba-roobaing dwindled away into silence.

She was correct, of course. Ten years earlier, upon our group's arrival in Key West, circ.u.mstances (and Nikola Tesla) had forced us to take action to prevent Mir, the Russian s.p.a.ce station, from collapsing into an extremely strange state, one with a much lower energy density than what is hereabouts called "perfect" vacuum. Had we failed, all matter as we know it would promptly have ceased to exist within that pinpoint of supervacuum-no more electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, ergo no atoms or molecules of any kind-and it would then have expanded spherically to engulf and annihilate the entire universe, at the speed of light. A sort of gnxg gig, I guess you could say, if you could say that.

No need to thank us; we weren't doing anything else that day anyway. The point is that dicing with the fate of the universe was something at which we had a little experience-more than most people, anyway. Furthermore, we had succeeded that last time. You've probably noticed the universe exists. (It's not our fault it sucks.) And finally, that success had been due in large-no, enormous-part to Erin, who had been a two-year-old at the time. Everyone present had either been here back then or had heard the story since. Zoey's reminder had a calming, rea.s.suring effect on us all.

"You're right, Zoey," Arethusa said. "My apologies, Erin. Of course you're aware of the risks, you probably understand them better than I do, and you're definitely the most responsible person here-obviously you've thought this through. So lay it out for us: What is the plan?"

Erin grimaced. "Well, actually ... I don't exactly have one, as such. I was kind of hoping you and Joe and Willard and Maureen could come up with something good. You're the professionals."

Dead silence.

It expanded spherically to engulf the universe. At light speed.

Finally the Professor put an arm around his wife and spoke up. "You may always," he said serenely, "leave these little things to us."

Erin relaxed slightly. "Thank you, Uncle Willard. I-I've been kind of counting on you. And Maureen. Oh-and you, too, Joe and Arethusa, and Mei-Ling! I know you're all rated peers by your colleagues. But the Professor and Maureen are the only ones here with relevant experience: they've actually conned a Tony Donuts already. And won."

The Professor lowered one eyebrow. "Only with considerable help from Lady Sally, in the form of technology sufficiently advanced that even Eric Drexler would call it magic."

Maureen took her head from his shoulder. "You're too modest, my love. We'd have done just fine on our own, if it hadn't been for rotten bad luck. Who could have imagined that even Tony would be stupid enough to print all his phony bills with the same serial number?"

He patted her hair affectionately. "Thank you, love. But really, who could have imagined him being anything else? I just didn't think of it."

Fast Eddie couldn't contain his agitation. He waved for Erin's attention. "Yo, kiddo-I don't geddit. Youse already started woikin' the scam dis aftanoon: I seen youse bein older-old enough to drink legal. How can youse not know what de scam is?"

She shook her head. "That wasn't me you saw, Eddo. That was the me I'm going to become in eight more years. Obviously, she knows what the scam is. For her, it's ancient history. But I haven't gotten to that page yet."

"But I-" Eddie began, just as I said, "But then-" and Walter said, "How then but-"

She sighed, held up a hand, and rotated around to look at all of us in turn. She generated no ripples on the water in doing so. "Look," she said, "n.o.body here knows much at all about time travel. I've always been careful to speak just as little as possible on the subject, because that's what Mike Callahan and Lady Sally McGee made me promise, before they taught me how to do it. I know some of you have been curious, and I appreciate you not pressing me on it. This is one of those rare instances when less said really is better."

"I'd rather not know anything about it," Noah said, "and I wish n.o.body else did. Like I said before, it's just too d.a.m.ned dangerous to be fiddling with. You obviously excepted, Erin; you're a supergenius. But n.o.body else here is."

Erin shrugged. "I have good days. Well, one basic general principle of time travel that several of you already know, and that it shouldn't endanger the rest of you any to learn about, is the principle I call miscegemation, or Conservation of Surprise. Basically it means you're not allowed to peek ahead. Except in certain strictly limited circ.u.mstances, information both must not and may not ever be allowed to travel against the flow. I could write a note to my future self, even tell her something in it that she doesn't know . . . but she can't tell me anything, and I can't send any messages back to my younger self."

"Can you cheat?" Long-Drink McGonnigle asked. "Like, say you want to tell yourself at age ten who's going to win the World Series that year. Could you time-travel back to, say, ten months before you were born and leave a sealed note with a lawyer with instructions to deliver it to you on your tenth birthday? Or would the action of handing him the envelope cause the universe to pop like a bubble?"

Erin closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "Uncle Phil, the fact that you could ask that question proves the point that people should be told as little as possible about how time travel works. So here's the last little bit you need to know-and it's just about everything I know about the scam we're going to run on Tony." She paused, looking for the right words. "There's ... there's a sensation, that I can't describe to you because you've never felt it in your life, but in order to be able to talk about it, let's say it's a tingling on the top of the head. That's a poor a.n.a.logy because it isn't localized, but let it go. When I feel that particular kind of tingling, I know it means that one of my future selves wants to travel back to my time. It's like asking permission or requesting clearance."

"But if de older Erin does come back here, youse gotta go someplace else."

"That's right, Uncle Eddie. Like the cliche almost says, you can't be at two places in the same time. A very big boom would result-at best! So if you feel that special kind of tingling, you have two basic choices. First, you can do nothing at all . . . and after a while the tingling will go away and that's the end of that. Access denied. Or, you could agree to vacate the ficton, hop to some other place, time where you don't already exist, leaving this one to your future self for a while."

"It's sort of like 'condo-share Time,' isn't it?" Long-Drink marveled, adding "Ow!" when someone kicked him in the shin.

"How do you know when it's safe to come back home to your own ficton?" asked the Professor.

"There's another sensation. Call it a tingling on the soles of your feet."

"So this afternoon...," I said, trying to look as if I understood this well enough to complete the sentence.

"This afternoon just before Tony arrived, I felt my scalp tingle, decided to a.s.sume my future self knew what it was doing, and the next thing I knew I was wandering around the year 2007, gawking like a tourist."

Fast Eddie opened his mouth.

"And I can't tell you how proud I am that none of my friends would be silly or inconsiderate enough to ask me about what I learned there. Then, I mean."

Eddie closed his mouth.

"I guessed immediately what I must be th-What I must be going to be thinking-No, wait, I was in 2007, so it's what I must have thought."

"Give it up, dear," Zoey said. "The language wasn't designed to cope with changing fictons-you'll only break it if you try and stretch it that way. You guessed immediately that your future self was planning some sort of time-travel con-"

Erin threw her a grateful look. "Right. That was really all the hint I needed. A con that involves looking progressively younger . . . in Florida . . . what else can it be but the Fountain of Youth?"

"I ask it before, I ask it again," said Bad Death. "Okay, you make Tony Donuts think this fountain be real. I see that you can. What good is it?"