ACCESS CURRENT UR LOCAL SOURCE? Y N
Wesley selected Y. The Kindle thought some more, then posted a new message:
THE CURRENT UR LOCAL SOURCE IS MOORE ECHO ACCESS? Y N
Wesley considered the question while eating a strip of bacon. The Echo was a rag specializing in yard sales, area sports, and town politics. The residents scanned those things, he supposed, but mostly bought the paper for the obituaries and Police Beat. Everybody liked to know which of their neighbors had died or been jailed. Searching 10.4 million Moore, Kentucky, Urs sounded pretty boring, but why not? Wasn't he basically marking time, drawing his breakfast out, so he could watch the players' bus go by?
"Sad but true," he said, and highlighted the Y button. What came up was similar to a message he had seen before: Ur Local is protected by all applicable Paradox Laws. Do you agree? Y N.
Now that was strange. The New York Times archive wasn't protected by these Paradox Laws, whatever they were, but their pokey local paper was? It made no sense, but seemed harmless. Wesley shrugged and selected Y.
WELCOME TO THE ECHO PRE-ARCHIVE!
YOUR PRICE IS $40.00/4 DOWNLOADS
$350.00/10 DOWNLOADS
$2500.00/100 DOWNLOADS
Wesley put his fork on his plate and sat frowning at the screen. Not only was the local paper Paradox Law-protected, it was a hell of a lot more expensive. Why? And what the hell was a pre-archive? To Wesley, that sounded like a paradox in itself. Or an oxymoron.
"Well, it's under construction," he said. "Traffic fines double and so do download expenses. That's the explanation. Plus, I'm not paying for it."
No, but because the idea persisted that he might someday be forced to (someday soon!), he compromised on the middle choice. The next screen was similar to the one for the Times archive, but not quite the same; it just asked him to select a date. To him this suggested nothing but an ordinary newspaper archive, the kind he could find on microfilm at the local library. If so, why the big expense?
He shrugged, typed in July 5, 2008, and pushed Select. The Kindle responded immediately, posting this message:
FUTURE DATES ONLY
THIS IS NOVEMBER 20, 2009
For a moment he didn't get it. Then he did, and the world suddenly turned itself up to superbright, as if some supernatural being had cranked the rheostat controlling the daylight. And all the noises in the cafe--the clash of forks, the rattle of plates, the steady babble of conversation--seemed too loud.
"My God," he whispered. "No wonder it's expensive."
This was too much. Way too much. He moved to turn the Kindle off, then heard cheering and yelling outside. He looked up and saw a yellow bus with MOORE COLLEGE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT printed on the side. Cheerleaders and players leaned out the open windows, waving and laughing and yelling stuff like "Go, Meerkats!" and "We're number one!" One of the young women was wagging a big foam Number One finger. The pedestrians on Main Street grinned and waved back.
Wesley lifted his own hand and waved feebly. The bus driver honked his horn. Flapping from the rear of the bus was a piece of sheeting with MEERKATS WILL ROCK THE RUPP spray-painted on it. Wesley became aware that people in the cafe were applauding. All this seemed to be happening in another world. Another Ur.
When the bus was gone, Wesley looked down at the pink Kindle again. He decided he wanted to utilize at least one of his ten downloads, after all. The locals didn't have much use for the student body as a whole--the standard town-versus-gown thing--but they loved the Lady Meerkats because everybody loves a winner. The tourney's results, preseason or not, would be front-page news in Monday's Echo. If they won, he could buy Ellen a victory gift, and if they lost, he could buy her a consolation present.
"I'm a winner either way," he said, and entered Monday's date: November 23, 2009.
The Kindle thought for a long time, then produced a newspaper front page.
The date was Monday's date.
The headline was huge and black.
Wesley spilled his coffee and yanked the Kindle out of danger even as the lukewarm liquid soaked his crotch.
*
Fifteen minutes later he was pacing the living room of Robbie Henderson's apartment while Robbie--who'd been up when Wesley came hammering at the door but was still wearing the tee-shirt and basketball shorts he slept in--stared at the screen of the Kindle.
"We have to call someone," Wesley said. He was smacking a fist into an open palm, and hard enough to turn the skin red. "We have to call the police. No, wait! The arena! Call the Rupp and leave a message for her to call me, ASAP! No, that's wrong! Too slow! I'll call her now. That's what--"
"Relax, Mr. Smith--Wes, I mean."
"How can I relax? Don't you see that thing? Are you blind?"
"No, but you still have to relax. Pardon the expression, but you're losing your shit, and people can't think productively when they're doing that."
"But--"
"Take a deep breath. And remind yourself that according to this, we've got almost sixty hours."
"Easy for you to say. Your girlfriend isn't going to be on that bus when it starts back to--" Then he stopped, because that wasn't so. Josie Quinn was a member of the team, and according to Robbie, he and Josie had a thing going on.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I saw the headline and freaked. I didn't even pay for my breakfast, just ran up here. I know I look like I wet my pants, and I damn near did. Thank God your roommates are gone."
"I'm pretty freaked, too," Robbie admitted, and for a moment they studied the screen in silence. According to Wesley's Kindle, Monday's edition of The Echo was going to have a black border around the front page as well as a black headline on top of it. That headline read:
COACH, 7 STUDENTS KILLED IN HORRIFIC BUS CRASH; 9 OTHERS CRITICAL
The story itself really wasn't a story at all, only an item. Even in his distress, Wesley knew why. The accident had happened--no, was going to happen--at just short of 9:00 p.m. on Sunday night. Too late to report any details, although probably if they heated up Robbie's computer and went to the Internet--
What was he thinking? The Internet did not predict the future; only the pink Kindle did that.
His hands were shaking too badly to enter November 24. He pushed the Kindle to Robbie. "You do it."
Robbie managed, though it took him two tries. The Echo's Tuesday story was more complete, but the headline was even worse:
DEATH TOLL RISES TO 10 TOWN AND COLLEGE MOURN
"Is Josie--" Wesley began.
"Yeah," Robbie said. "Survives the crash, dies on Monday. Christ."
According to Antonia "Toni" Burrell, one of the Meerkats cheerleaders, and one of the lucky ones to survive Sunday night's horrific bus crash with only cuts and bruises, the celebration was still going on, the Bluegrass Trophy still being passed hand-to-hand. "We were singing 'We Are the Champions' for the twentieth time or so," she said from the hospital in Bowling Green, where most of the survivors were taken. "Coach turned around and yelled for us to keep it down, and that's when it happened."
According to State Police Captain Moses Arden, the bus was traveling on Route 139, the Princeton Road, and was about two miles west of Cadiz when an SUV driven by Candy Rymer of Montgomery struck it. "Ms. Rymer was traveling at a high rate of speed west along Highway 80," Captain Arden said, "and struck the bus at the intersection."
The bus driver, Herbert Allison, 58, of Moore, apparently saw Ms. Rymer's vehicle at the last moment and tried to swerve. That swerve, coupled with the impact, drove the bus into the ditch, where it overturned and exploded.
There was more, but neither of them wanted to read it.
"Okay," Robbie said. "Let's think about this. First, can we be sure it's true?"
"Maybe not," Wesley said. "But Robbie . . . can we afford to take the chance?"
"No," Robbie said. "No, I guess we can't. Of course we can't. But Wes, if we call the police, they won't believe us. You know that."
"We'll show them the Kindle! We'll show
them the story!" But even to himself, Wesley sounded deflated. "Okay, how about this. I'll tell Ellen. Even if she won't believe me, she might agree to hold the bus for fifteen minutes or so, or change the route this guy Allison's planning to take."
Robbie considered. "Yeah. Worth a try."
Wesley took his phone out of his briefcase. Robbie had gone back to the story, using the Next Page button to access the rest.
The phone rang twice . . . three times . . . four.
Wesley was preparing to deliver his message to voicemail when Ellen answered. "Wesley, I can't talk to you now. I thought you understood that--"
"Ellen, listen--"
"--but if you got my message, you know we're going to talk." In the background he could hear raucous, excited girls--Josie would be among them--and lots of loud music.
"Yes, I did get the message, but we have to talk n--"
"No!" Ellen said. "We don't. I'm not going to take your calls this weekend, and I'm not going to listen to your messages." Her voice softened. "And hon--every one you leave is going to make it harder. For us, I mean."
"Ellen, you don't understa--"
"Goodbye, Wes. I'll talk to you next week. Do you wish us luck?"
"Ellen, please!"
"I'll take that as a yes," she said. "And you know what? I guess I still care about you, even though you are a lug."
With that she was gone.
*
He poised his finger over Redial, then made himself not push it. It wouldn't help. Ellen was wearing her my-way-or-the-highway hat. It was insane, but there it was.
"She won't talk to me except on her schedule. What she doesn't realize is that after Sunday night she may not have a schedule. You'll have to call Ms. Quinn." In his current state, the girl's first name escaped him.
"Josie'd think I was prankin' on her," Robbie said. "A story like that, any girl'd think I was prankin' on her." He was still studying the Kindle's screen. "Want to know something? The woman who caused the accident--who will cause it--hardly gets hurt at all. I'll bet you next semester's tuition she was just as drunk as a goddam skunk."
Wesley hardly heard this. "Tell Josie that Ellen has to take my call. Have her say it's not about us. Tell her to say it's an emer--"
"Dude," Robbie said. "Slow down and listen. Are you listening?"
Wesley nodded, but what he heard most clearly was his own pounding heart.
"Point one, Josie would still think I was prankin' on her. Point two, she might think we both were. Point three, I don't think she'd go to Coach Silverman anyway, given the mood Coach has been in lately . . . and she gets even worse on game trips, Josie says." Robbie sighed. "You have to understand about Josie. She's sweet, she's smart, she's sexy as hell, but she's also a timid little mousie. It's sort of what I like about her."
"That probably says heaps of good things about your character, Robbie, but you'll pardon me if right now I don't give a rat's ass. You've told me what won't work; do you have any idea what might?"
"That's point four. With a little luck, we won't have to tell anybody about this. Which is good, since they wouldn't believe it."
"Elucidate."
"Huh?"
"Tell me what you've got in mind."
"First, we need to use another one of your Echo downloads."
Robbie punched in November 25, 2009. Another girl, a cheerleader who had been horribly burned in the explosion, had died, raising the death toll to eleven. Although The Echo didn't come right out and say so, more were likely to die before the week was out.
Robbie only gave this story a quick scan. What he was looking for was a boxed story on the lower half of page 1:
CANDACE RYMER CHARGED WITH MULTIPLE
COUNTS OF VEHICULAR HOMICIDE
There was a gray square in the middle of the story--her picture, Wesley assumed, only the pink Kindle didn't seem able to reprint news photographs. But it didn't matter, because now he got it. It wasn't the bus they had to stop; it was the woman who was going to hit the bus.
Candace Rymer was point four.
VI--Candy Rymer
At five o'clock on a gray Sunday afternoon--as the Lady Meerkats were cutting down basketball nets in a not-too-distant part of the state--Wesley Smith and Robbie Henderson were sitting in Wesley's modest Chevy Malibu, watching the door of a roadhouse in Eddyville, twenty miles north of Cadiz. The parking lot was oiled dirt and mostly empty. There was almost certainly a TV inside The Broken Windmill, but Wesley guessed discriminating tipplers would rather do their drinking and NFL-watching at home. You didn't have to go inside the joint to know it was a hole. Candy Rymer's first stop had been bad, but this second one was worse.
Parked slightly crooked (and blocking what appeared to be the fire exit) was a filthy, dinged-up Ford Explorer with two bumper stickers on the back. MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT THE STATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, one read. The other was even more telling: I BRAKE FOR JACK DANIELS.
"Maybe we oughta do it right here," Robbie said. "While she's inside slopping it up and watching the Titans."
It was a tempting idea, but Wesley shook his head. "We'll wait. She's got one more stop to make. Hopson, remember?"
"That's miles from here."
"Right," Wesley said. "But we've got time to kill, and we're going to kill it."
"Why?"
"Because what we're up to is changing the future. Or trying to, at least. We have no idea how tough that is. Waiting as long as possible improves our chances."
"Wesley, that is one drunk chick. She was drunk when she got out of that first juke joint in Central City, and she's going to be a lot drunker when she comes out of yonder shack. I can't see her getting her car repaired in time to rendezvous with the girls' bus forty miles from here. And what if we break down while we're trying to follow her to her last stop?"
Wesley hadn't considered this. Now he did. "My instincts say wait, but if you have a strong feeling that we should do it now, we will."
Robbie sat up. "Too late. Here comes Miss America."
Candy Rymer emerged from The Broken Windmill in a kind of slalom. She dropped her purse, bent down to get it, almost fell over, cursed, picked it up, laughed, and then continued to where her Explorer was parked, digging her keys out as she went. Her face was puffy, not quite hiding the remains of what must once have been very good looks. Her hair, blond on top and black at the roots, hung around her cheeks in lank curls. Her belly pooched out the front of elastic-waist jeans just below the hem of what had to be a Kmart smock top.
She got in her beat-to-shit SUV, kicked the engine into life (it sounded in desperate need of a tune-up), and drove forward into the roadhouse's fire door. There was a crunch. Then her backup lights came on and she reversed so fast that for one sickening moment Wesley thought she was going to hit his Malibu, crippling it and leaving them on foot as she drove off to her appointment in Samarra. But she stopped in time and peeled onto the highway without pausing to look for traffic. A moment later Wesley was following as she headed east toward Hopson. And the intersection where the Lady Meerkats' bus would arrive in four hours.
*
In spite of the terrible thing she was going to do, Wesley couldn't help feeling a little sorry for her, and he had an idea Robbie felt the same. The follow-up story they'd read about her in The Echo told a tale as familiar as it was sordid.
Candace "Candy" Rymer, age forty-one, divorced. Three children, now in the custody of their father. During the last dozen years of her life she'd been in and out of four spin-dry facilities, roughly one every three years. According to an acquaintance (she seemed to have no friends), she had tried AA and decided it wasn't for her. Too much holy-rolling. She had been arrested for DUI half a dozen times. She had lost her license after each of the last two, but in both cases it had been restored, the second time by special petition. She needed her license to get to her job at the fertilizer factory in Bainbridge, she told Judge Wallenby. What she didn't tell him was that she had lost the job six months previous
. . . and nobody checked. Candy Rymer was a booze-bomb waiting to go off, and the explosion was now very close.
The story hadn't mentioned her home address in Montgomery, but it didn't need to. In what Wesley considered a rather brilliant piece of investigative journalism (especially for The Echo), the reporter had retraced Candy's final binge, from The Pot O' Gold in Central City to The Broken Windmill in Eddyville to Banty's Bar in Hopson. There the bartender was going to try to take her keys. Unsuccessfully. Candy was going to give him the finger and leave, shouting "I'm done giving my business to this dive!" back over her shoulder. That was at seven o'clock. The reporter theorized that Candy must have pulled over somewhere for a short nap, possibly on Route 124, before cutting across to Route 80. A little farther down 80, she would make her final stop. A fiery one.
*
Once Robbie put the thought in his head, Wesley kept expecting his always-trustworthy Chevrolet to die and coast to a stop at the side of the two-lane blacktop, a victim of either a bad battery or the Paradox Laws. Candy Rymer's taillights would disappear from view and they would spend the following hours making frantic but useless calls (always assuming their phones would even work out here in the mid-South williwags) and cursing themselves for not disabling her vehicle back in Eddyville, while they still had a chance.
But the Malibu cruised as effortlessly as always, without a single gurgle or glitch. He stayed about a quarter mile behind Candy's Explorer.
"Man, she's all over the road," Robbie said. "Maybe she'll ditch the damn thing before she gets to the next bar. Save us the trouble of slashing her tires."
"According to The Echo, that doesn't happen."
"Yeah, but we know the future's not cast in stone, don't we? Maybe this is another Ur, or something."
Wesley was sure it didn't work that way with Ur Local, but he kept his mouth shut. Either way, it was too late now.
Candy Rymer made it to Banty's without going in the ditch or hitting any oncoming traffic, although she could have done either; God knew she had enough close calls. When one of the cars swerved out of her way and then passed Wesley's Malibu, Robbie said: "That's a family. Mom, Pop, three little kids goofin' around in the back."