Free The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers Page B

“Strangled himself. Can I bum a smoke?”
    Hollis slid the pack across to her, then clicked his lighter, but apparently rain had got into it. He picked a Firehouse matchbook out of a box on the shelf and struck one of the matches for her, then held it to his own cigarette.
    “Where’s Lyle?” he asked as he puffed it alight.
    “They’re bringing him in,” said Evian. “Nurses, IV poles.”
    “You can’t cure him in the future?”
    Evian shrugged and widened his eyes. “The past is unalterable! Or we thought so, before you showed up just now where you shouldn’t be. Lyle is supposed to die a week from hex. But we’ve debriefed him very thoroughly, many times, over the years, everything he can give us.”
    Evian, Kokolo, and Scarbee had begun cautiously stepping out into the room.
    “We debriefed
you,”
Evian went on, “with narcohypnosis, right after getting you and your motorcycle back to your apartment, and several times thereafter – you were encouraged to think these interview periods were alcoholic blackouts – and you appeared to remember nothing. But now that you
have
begun to remember what happened, we may as well see if any input from you can manage to prompt something more from Lyle.”
    “Set up a query transmission to the Chicago window,” said Kokolo. “We need to find out for sure that Hollis’s visit today isn’t an anomaly – the schedule signals aren’t always complete, but Chicago can check it against the big chronology. I’m sure he is scheduled to be here – that’s probably why we summon Lyle.”
    “We don’t have much bandwidth left in their allotment for hex, it’ll have to be a very tight frequency,” said Scarbee, edging hesitantly across the linoleum and looking around wide-eyed. Perhaps he had never been in here before. To Hollis he said, “Time may be infinite, but the time-window of our control of the Fermilab accelerator isn’t. It uses up a long piece of that duration to negotiate a transmission. They allot us segments of it. And it’s not cheap.”
    “You guys talk pretty freely to strangers,” Hollis said.
    Kokolo laughed, for the first time. “Like you might tell somebody, call the
L.A. Times?
We know you don’t.” To Evian he went on, “Check his resonance, then, you can do that with just the carrier-wave link itself, no need for a message. If his resonance is the same as what we’ve got recorded, we can be pretty sure he hasn’t deviated from his plotted time-line.”
    Evian nodded to Scarbee. “Get a link-station,” he said, and Scarbee hurried, with evident relief, out of the preserved pizza parlor.
    Hollis stepped through the doorway onto the cement floor of the kitchen. There wasn’t much dust on the counter surfaces – higher air-pressure maintained in this whole place, he thought – and the two disks of dough on the work table were clean, though clearly dry as chalk.
    Kokolo stepped up on the other side of the counter, and Hollis stopped himself from reflexively reaching for the order pad, which was still right below the telephone.
    “We’re going to look at your life-line resonance,” said Kokolo. “It’s a jab in your finger, just enough to hurt.”
    “You’re supposed to die in March of 2008,” called Felise cheerfully. “Suicide, while you’re on Prozac. At first I thought they said it would be while you had
Kojak
on.” She had stepped around behind the bar and was walking toward the kitchen. “I die at forty-eight, but nobody’s looked up what year it’ll happen in.”
    “What takes
you
so long?” asked Hollis, turning toward her.
    “We both survive it by about thirty years. Subjective years.” She smiled at him. “I call that pretty good.”
    Scarbee had shuffled back into the room, wheeling a cart with something on it that looked like a fax machine. He steered it around the pieces of broken wood.
    “We think you survived,” said Evian, “weathered the encounter, because you had referents that let you partly