The Green Card Man was watching me carefully. From across the street he’d looked no older than thirty. Over here, he looked closer to forty-five. Only, when you got close enough to look into his eyes, he looked older than the ages and not right in the head.
“Are you some kind of guardian? Do you guard the rabbit-hole?”
He smiled… or tried to. “That’s what your friend called it.” From his pocket he took a pack of cigarettes. There was no label on them. That was something I’d never seen before, either here in the Land of Ago or in the Land of Ahead.
“Is this the only one?”
He produced a lighter, cupped it to keep the wind from blowing the flame out, then set fire to the end of his cigarette. The smell was sweet, more like marijuana than tobacco. But it wasn’t marijuana. Although he never said, I believe it was something medicinal. Perhaps not so different from my Goody’s Headache Powder.
“There are a few. Think of a glass of ginger ale that’s been left out and forgotten.”
“Okay…”
“After two or three days, almost all the carbonation is gone, but there are still a few bubbles left. What you call the rabbit-hole isn’t a hole at all. It’s a bubble. As far as guarding… no. Not really. It would be nice, but there’s very little we could do that wouldn’t make things worse. That’s the trouble with traveling in time, Jimla.”
“My name is Jake.”
“Fine. What we do, Jake, is watch. Sometimes we warn. As Kyle tried to warn your friend the cook.”
So the crazy guy had a name. A perfectly normal one. Kyle, for God’s sake. It made things worse because it made them more real.
“Henevertried to warn Al! All he ever did was ask for a buck to buy cheap wine with!”
The Green Card Man dragged on his cigarette and looked down at the cracked concrete, frowning as if something were written there.Shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSHsaid the weaving flats. “He did at first,” he said. “In his way. Your friend was too excited by the new world he’d found to pay attention. And by then Kyle was already tottering. It’s a… how would you put it? An occupational hazard. What we do puts us under enormous mental strain. Do you know why?”
I shook my head.
“Think a minute. How many little explorations and shopping trips did your cook friend make evenbeforehe got the idea of going to Dallas to stop Oswald? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?”
I tried to remember how long Al’s Diner had stood in the mill courtyard and couldn’t. “Probably even more than that.”
“And what did he tell you? Each trip was the first time?”
“Yes. A complete reset.”
He laughed wearily. “Sure he did. People believe what they see. And still, he should have known better.Youshould have known better. Each trip creates its own string, and when you have enough strings, they always get snarled. Did it ever cross your friend’s mind to wonder how he could buy the same meat over and over? Or why things he brought from 1958 never disappeared when he made the next trip?”
“I asked him about that. He didn’t know, so he dismissed it.”
He started to smile, but it turned into a wince. The green once more started to fade out of the card stuck in his hat. He dragged deep on his sweet-smelling cigarette. The color returned and steadied. “Yeah, ignoring the obvious. It’s what we all do. Even after his sanity began to totter, Kyle undoubtedly knew that his trips to yonder liquor store were making his condition worse, but he went on, regardless. I don’t blame him; I’m sure the wine easedhis pain. Especially toward the end. Things might have been better if he hadn’t been able to get to the liquor store—if it was outside the circle—but it wasn’t. And really, who can say? There is no blaming here, Jake. No condemnation.”
That was good to hear, but only because it meant we could converse about this lunatic subject like halfway rational men. Not that his feelings mattered much to me, either way; I still had to do what I had to do. “What’s your name?”
“Zack Lang. From Seattle, originally.”
“Seattlewhen?”
“It’s a question with no relevance to the current discussion.”
“It hurts you to be here, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. My own sanity won’t last much longer, if I don’t get back. And the residual effects will be with me forever. High suicide rate among our kind, Jake. Very high. Men—and wearemen, not aliens or supernatural beings, if that’s what you were thinking—aren’t made to hold multiple reality-strings in their heads. It’s not like using your imagination. It’s not like that at all. We have training, of course, but you can still feel it eating into you. Like acid.”
“So every tripisn’ta complete reset.”
“Yes and no. It leavesresidue.Every time your cook friend—”
“His name was Al.”
