"How do you know all this?"

"I was base doctor for ten years. These guys had to talk to someone or go insane. Before I did med I was a physics and math major, so I could relate to some of the shit. And I wasn't going anywhere." He smiled. "The way I see it, it was one of ours, from the future."

"So there was no crash?"

"There was a crash alright. I guess you could call it that. The machine partially materialized inside one of the ranch's stables. There was some kind of explosion. Only one body was recovered from the wreckage. Quite dead."

I looked at him meaningfully.

He smiled again. "The body was human, Jon. I don't know anything more about him than that."

"So why the stories about the flying saucer and the weather balloon?" I asked.

"What would you tell the public?"

"I don't know."

"You'd lie, that's what you'd do," he said. "And you'd lie like a mother fucker. 1947-World War Two barely finished, and the Cold War just brewing up. What are you going to tell the people? That we found a time machine? What the hell are they going to think?"

"They're not going to think it was a weather balloon."

"Damn straight, they're not," Gershon said. "Government couldn't keep the crash a secret. So they had to construct a lie and then wrap it within a more elaborate one."

"And then spend the next fifty years denying the existence of flying saucers," I said. "And no one bothers to guess what else it might have been."

"Uh-huh."

"Why flying saucers?"

"Flavor of the month, I guess. The term 'flying saucer' had only been coined a few weeks earlier. Some pilot had been flying around the Cascade Mountains in Washington and described seeing nine objects moving at nearly fifteen-hundred miles an hour. He said that they seemed to skip across the clouds like a saucer skipping on a pond. The idea of flying saucers can be frightening-forces beyond our understanding and the like-but the idea of contact with aliens has an optimistic side too. Significantly, any threat that contact with extraterrestrials poses is only a threat to the future."

I saw where he was headed. I said, "A time machine, however, poses an entirely different threat to humanity. It doesn't just affect the future-it threatens the past and present as well. It threatens our very existence."

"Better to keep it a secret," he said, and he began coughing again.

Gershon went silent. I did what I could to keep him warm.

Nightfall had transformed the desert. Stars, familiar yet strange, shone above us, yet they seemed slightly askew. Was the passage of little more than eighty years reflected in the movements of the galaxies beyond? I didn't think so. Perhaps it was my imagination, some after-effect of the journey, or some residual disorientation from the machine itself?

I don't know, but I never experienced that phenomenon again. I did not realize it but even then I was being synchronized, adjusted, slotted into the time I'd been transported to.

The moon had yet to rise and there were no discriminating shades. All was black. Gone were the shales and shelves of rock, the yucca and sagebrush that dotted the otherwise desolate perspective. The surrounding landscape appeared as though it had been carved from one single fragment. But not only that: the history, the ongoing narrative of our existence, that is revealed in every leaf and tree, every pebble and grain of sand, was concealed in that complete darkness. Time was held captive.

It felt as if the universe had in that moment been created.

When Gershon spoke again, we talked in hushed tones.

"Did they ever explain why the machine crashed in the first place? And why Roswell?"

"I don't think they ever recovered anything like a 'black box', that they could identify or recognize, so they never learned what happened during its last moments. As for why Roswell, no one was sure. But the timing may have been important. That was the year that the armed forces were separated into army, navy and air force. It was the year the CIA was formed and Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. Who knows how significant these events might appear to the future? And less than an hour away from Roswell sat the repository of America's first atomic weapons."

"So are there UFOs?" I asked.

"I've seen plenty of things flying around that I couldn't identify," Gershon replied, "but they weren't piloted by Little Green Men."

I asked him what had happened after I'd passed out, back in that room.

The gas was everywhere, he said. He'd dragged me up a gangway and into the machine itself, shutting the hatch.

Within the carapace was a chamber. Six seats arranged in two tiers. The console was a low, narrow shelf that took up a third of the cabin. Above it, undetectable from without, was a window or viewscreen. There, concave screens that resembled a computer monitor, a keyboard that could be accessed easily from either forwards chair.

A single thick lever was set astride the central keyboard. To either side of it, beneath a sheet of rippled clear glass or plastic, were two palm-sized disks. The left one was bright green, the right one, a dull red color. User friendly.

Gershon could see what was happening in the room.

Jenkins was gesturing wildly. More men entered. The gas started to dissipate. There was a loud hammering from outside the capsule. Someone was working on the door.

Gershon thought he saw some of the men attempt to disengage one of the coils from the carapace, and that's when he did the only thing he could think of. He shifted the lever. The transparent covers slid back and he slammed his fist onto the left switch, which was pulsing with green light.

"What happened then?" I asked.

Gershon was pale. He had the two gowns bundled around him and was lying down. I'd elevated his legs on a mound of sand.

"The screen went black for a moment. I felt this weird rocking sensation, so I climbed into one of the chairs next to yours. A message flashed on the HUD, and there was this sound, like an eggshell cracking, but loud. The hammering stopped. I looked out the viewscreen and saw Jenkins' men, caught in freeze-frame." He seemed to be looking past me as he recalled the events. "That silence was so total, so complete. It was as if I'd gone deaf. It's..." He was shaking his head, confounded.

"I'm not sure how much time passed. That rocking sensation returned a couple of times and that cracking, two, maybe three times. Like we were passing through a series of barriers. Barriers that should never be crossed, yet the machine went through them like tissue paper. That was when I realized I'd been hit. You were out but you were breathing. The red disk on your armrest was glowing. On the screen there was a new message: "COMPLETE INSERTION IN PROGRESS: STAGING COMPLETE: QUERY ABORT?" There was that rocking feeling again and suddenly a new image appeared on the screen."

He leaned his head forwards. He was unable to move his arm. "And this is what I saw. All of this."

A thought struck me. "Where's the carapace now?"

He said that as soon as the carapace had settled, a new series of messages rapidly scrolled up the screen. One message repeated itself, to the accompaniment of a faint beeping noise: "AUTO-RECALL IMMINENT: STAGING CONFIRMED: QUERY ABORT?"

Gershon told me a countdown began flashing along the HUD. He pushed the lever forwards to its original position and the plastic sheaths slipped back over the disks. He dragged me from my seat, opened the hatch and pushed me out into the desert. When we were about ten feet from the vehicle, he turned to look back at it.

"It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen." His eyes blazed momentarily with the fervor of an ecstatic.

"When I was learning my bar mitzvah they had this book there, a kid's version of the Bible. There was this picture of Abraham on the cover and..." He smiled. "Anyway, Exodus was my favorite. Plagues, rivers of blood, the departure from Egypt. There was this bit about how they followed a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day, through the desert. That's what it looked like."

"Which one?"

"Both. The body of the carapace was barely visible, but I couldn't make out the legs. It seemed to just float on this cushion of fire and cloud. The air crackled and that portal I'd dragged you out of, it blinked at me once, like God's great eye, and the carapace sank into the cloud.

"All at once there was a tremendous rush of wind, and the whole thing, the clouds, the flame, all seemed to fall in on itself. It was like watching an explosion played backwards. And then it vanished."

I felt a sudden surge of new panic.

"How long have we been here? Aren't they going to come after us?"

"Relax." Gershon coughed. "No one's coming after us. If they had any means of following us, they would have been here by now. Hell, they would have been waiting for us."

Gershon said again that the base wouldn't be built for forty years. He knew that because a digital readout had displayed the date: March 10, 1911.

We had been here, in 1911, for about two hours already. I had been unconscious for little over an hour.

Gershon believed that, somehow, our very presence in this time negated the possibility of pursuit. Perhaps the future was already being altered in some way. The flutter that had been created by our arrival evolving into a hurricane of change over the years.

We remained undisturbed that night and nothing has happened since then to suggest that we were ever followed. Perhaps it is something I have already done, or something I am going to do. I plan on keeping my eyes open.

I wonder what I'm going to do.

What do I ever do?

Gershon was dying. Shutting down. His hands were cold and pale. His pulse, thready beneath my fingertips.

I got up to stretch my legs and followed the trail that marked where I'd been dragged from the carapace. It led to a flat, hard-packed layer of ground. Starlight reflected dimly from thin patches of glass that had been burnt into the sand by the vehicle's passage. Shards of frozen time.

Lying on its side was a pack of some sort. Gershon hadn't mentioned it. I rushed to it, hoping it might contain some medical supplies. Something I could use to help him. I spilled its contents onto the ground. There was a torch, a knife, a compass, chocolate, a ground sheet, a packet of cigarettes, and a pair of binoculars. Within the pack's lining was a thick belt with numerous pockets, each of which held a slender, malformed ingot of solid gold. I replaced the bag's contents and walked back over to Gershon.

"Good, you found it." He gave a weak laugh. "Wouldn't you know it, I grabbed the wrong pack. Medical supplies went back with the carapace, I guess."

"Tell me, how the hell did you manage to avoid the gas?"

He looked at me, sighed, then grinned. "You know that swimming pool near the rec room?"

I nodded.

"I used to dive in that pool and sink to the bottom. Pretend I was anywhere but here, and see how long I could hold my breath. My record was three minutes."

He was slipping in and out of consciousness. We lay close together and I did my best to keep the both of us warm. Whenever he woke, he wanted to talk. He talked about women. He talked about God.

"What happens now?" he asked at one point. "Have we put God on rewind? Taken him back eighty years? Sent him spinning? Was He expecting this? Is it part of the Grand Plan?"

I asked if he was religious. His pale, drawn face locked in a grimace.

He talked about the people who'd lived here and passed on. The Shoshone and the Paiute, the Bannock and the Washoe. He talked about the ocean, about how much he missed the open water. He asked me what I was going to do. Where I was planning on going. As if we were just separating for a while.

I was already surveying the packed sands for a place to bury him.

"I'd be heading to New York," he said.

"Why New York?"

"Why not?" He smiled as if he'd made a wonderful joke. "Do me a favor, Jon. Next time you see the open sea, wade on in a few steps and spare me a thought."

He seemed so calm and serene and I asked him that most meaningless of questions.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm okay." And then, somehow reading my thoughts, he added, "I'm not scared.

"When you had Jenkins by the balls and those goons had lowered their guns, I thought I had a chance of surviving and I was as scared as I have ever been." He shrugged. "Now I know I'm going to die."

I told him how sorry I was and he shrugged it off.

"Hell," he replied, "I was dead these last ten years. Just didn't know it."

June 18, 1911 It was deathly cold that night. The sweat froze on my back as I dug his grave. I don't plan on being that cold again.

I've resolved to head north. Back to New York. Back to my home and Gershon's destination. I'll go to Coney Island and wade on in. Sparing him a thought won't be an issue. I'm hoping it might make it a little easier for me to think less often of him, actually.

It's easier to recall things now: dates and times and facts I'd read in that world I've left behind. I plan on putting the knowledge to good use, a little bit at a time.

There's an archduke in Europe who could do with living beyond 1914, and an Austrian painter with nasty ideas who could do with a more valid, if brief, reason for hating Jews. I'll be dealing with him shortly.

There's no rush.

Jenkins showed me what I'm capable of. There are investments to be made and interventions to consider.

But first I have a boat to catch. "Change or die" is my new creed. "What if" becomes "why not", and everything old is new again.

A GAME OF CHESS II.

En Passant.

I.

April 22, 2012.

New York City, Eastern Shogunate.

Morgan spied their car a block down from the bar. A Yamamoto Kobe had procured for them earlier in the week. The plates identified it as a medical officer's transport-ideal for parking, unlikely to be pulled over for a random search. There were two suitcases in the boot. Shine had packed light. He'd also found time to go clean out Lightholler's suite. Everything they needed was crammed into the back.

Morgan climbed in, squeezing his legs beneath the dash. The car's narrow confines made him feel oafish. He leaned back in his seat and waited. Kennedy had said that the flight wouldn't be leaving for another few hours.

Something had gone seriously wrong. Morgan was certain of it. Why else would the major have started Lightholler's re-education so prematurely? The arrangement had been to take him south first. Tell him what they knew a little at a time and then finish the job in Nevada. That was the way they'd recruited Doc.