The Reality Master

THE REALITY MASTER A Novel By PM PILLON Copyright 2007 by PM Pillon

VOLUME ONE OF THE REALITY MASTER SERIES Volume Two: The Reality Master And A Threat To The World Volume Three: The Reality Master And Travel Beyond Volume Four: The Reality Master Mission Through Time The Reality Master the adventures of joey, kurt & natalie This is a work of fiction and any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

The Reality Master Copyright Š 2007 by PM Pillon.

Website: pmpillon.com Gmail: pmpillon All rights are reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

No parts of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the Copyright holder.

CONTENTS PART I JOEY GETS LUCKY

CHAPTER 1: AGITATION 2: DISCOVERY IN BIG SUR 3: BOY MEETS STONE 4: A SURPRISE IN CLASS 5: FIRST BLOOD DRAWN 6: NIGHTMARE 7: SWIMMING IN VICTORY 8: AND THE WINNER IS...

9: MOONLIGHT 10: WHO, ME?

PART II ENTER THE FEDS

11: I SPY 12: ORLANDO 13: PAUL CHANGES THE GAME 14: DREAMING OF EMPIRES 15: LONG LOST ENEMIES 16: TESTING, ONE...TWO...THREE 17: SUSPICIONS GROWING 18: BAY TO BREAKERS 19: THE STADIUM MIRACLE 20: DONOVAN CONFIRMS 21: SCHEMING FOR LUCRE 22: A RECKONING ABOUT PAUL 23: ORDERS FROM WASHINGTON 24: TIME TO GO! 25: IT’S GROUCHO! 26: GONE WITH THE WIND 27: SEARCHING FOR A MATCH 28: THE NORTH SIDE 29: JUST A LITTLE BUG 30: WATCH THE DOT 31: HEADING SOUTH 32: GENGHIS 33: DEPARTURE

PROLOGUE: ARRIVAL On a cool and clear night, a sheer and towering cliff awaited its approaching moment to become the temporary abode of a celestial interloper. It stood stoic, unimpressed by the clamorous sea imperiously fulminating with an incessant barrage of waves against its base. A stone’s throw away was the exit point of an effluent stream, a capillary of the fecund land mass it flowed through. With the aid of a clear sky and a full moon, a distant horizon was visible in every direction; ocean filling

the entire sight in one, verdant and untrammeled panoplies of mountain forest in another. A hundred miles of this California Big Sur coast and its regions to the east were in virtually pristine condition, more than two hundred thousand acres with relatively few human inhabitants.

Inland, the luminescence of moon and stars bestowed an unfettered. evergreen view of redwoods, maples, pines, firs and oaks. Flying about the natural paradise were raucous jays, crows, magpies and woodpeckers.

Invisible in the shimmering light, a sonorous ocean air swept in from the west, rustling the trees; a natural refrain emanating from their dancing, undulating branches and leaves, increasing and decreasing in compliance with the invading force. The wind’s voice eerily equivocated, fluctuating back and forth from a bare whisper to an angry, frightening ululation of dominant abandon; now gradually quieting, at last dying, only to be reborn and assiduously grow unto a mature and bellowing rage. Animals added their sounds to the holistic cacophony: a bark, a howl, a burst through bushes, crackling twigs and branches stepped on or dragged. The stars were in full bloom, complimenting the moon to illuminate the peaks, the canyons, and all within.

One of the star lights was moving, and as it came nearer the earth, it grew in size until was clear that it was not a star but a far smaller, soaring, perhaps piloted, object. As it came into the atmosphere, it developed color – an orange tint. A few hundred feet from the ground, it stopped and remained in place for more than an hour. Finally, a smaller light emerged from it, and the larger light rose again until it disappeared.

The new light was purposeful, changing directions as it descended. It floated down and meandered among the trees as though surveying the scenery, until eventually it traveled westward, following a gushing stream to its merger with the ocean. Hovering above the beach, the light hesitated, then floated into a crack on a shrubbery-laden boulder that was lodged partway up the cliff next to the stream, as though perching there for a view of magnificent sunsets. The object continued to glow for some minutes, its light gradually diminishing and finally extinguishing completely. Someone who saw it at close range would describe it as small and round, and maybe add that it looked for all the world to be nothing more than an ordinary stone.

1: AGITATION Joey Blake could be in trouble again, he knew, because he remembered his mom waking him up three times. He looked at his clock and saw that his school’s first bell for class was only fifteen minutes away. Realizing this, he catapulted out of bed, pulled his clothes on, ran down the stairs and hurried through the kitchen where his mom had his breakfast serial set up on the table.

Joey said, “Sorry, mom, I gotta run or I’ll be late again,” as he swept a kiss across her cheek and rushed for the door.

She shook her head knowingly, then remembered to reply, “Okay, but be ready for Big Sur this weekend.”

This comment brought Joey to an abrupt halt. He smiled broadly and exclaimed, “Wow, cool!”

Outside, he pumped his fist. He had hoped his dad would make the decision to go down there, but he had looked very preoccupied this week, with his taxes overdue and other problems seeming to weigh on him; he normally spent a lot of time with Joey, but during the last few days he seemed a bit distant; such that their regular bimonthly trip south to rough it in nature seemed increasingly unlikely to occur. Grandpa Karl had been back east visiting friends and relatives for a month, but he was due back to his Big Sur habitat within a couple of days.

When they went down to Big Sur was the best fun Joey ever had with his siblings Natalie and Paul and his best friends – Kurt McCarty, twins Frank and Freddie Shapiro and Phil Branson. Joey felt the urge to run in and see if Natalie was home and ask if she knew about this; but then he remembered that she was out of town attending a program for budding biologists, so she wouldn’t be able to come. Glumly, Joey then considered his teenage brother Paul; Joey hadn’t even seen Paul for two days. He thought bitterly, I know he wouldn’t be interested, even if I knew where to find him. As Joey thought this, he felt a wave of apprehension that dampened his elation from hearing the good news from his mom about Big Sur. But he had no time to consider that – he needed to get to school ASAP. He hopped on his bike and was away, headed for Mason Elementary School in Palo Alto, about two miles from his house, a few miles west of San Jose. The home of Stanford University, where Joey's dad taught, this town is in the heart of Silicon Valley, the epicenter of California’s computer culture. Joey and his friend and fellow fifth-grader Phil both arrived at a spot half a block from the school, so Joey stood up and pumped his pedals mightily

to get ahead of Phil. However, Phil made no attempt to keep up with Joey, disappointing him by not racing to see which of them was faster. Joey screeched to a halt near the main building and Phil pulled up next to him. They always parked next to each other if they managed to arrive at the same time.

“See you at lunch, Phil,” said Joey as he hurried into the building. Joey’s first class was taught by Mr. Sheridan, who always had a wry quip or two to make about his students’ arrival and their enthusiasm for his subject, which was English. Mr. Sheridan, loved teaching, didactically nurturing and edifying the fertile minds of the children who will manage tomorrow’s America; in his opinion, English was a vital crucible for the critical thinking required to make democracy a success.

Mr. Sheridan spoke this morning about recognizing and dealing with one’s own occasional irrationality; such as getting angry at a tree root after tripping on it, or when the wind blew your hat off your head. As he listened to this, Joey wondered if the remarkable intensity of his own competitiveness was an example of this irrationality. Frank was the only one of Joey’s closest friends who was in Joey’s first class, and sat next to him. Lately, Frank had tried to engage Joey in discussions of brain-teasers that went over Joey’s head. Frank’s dad taught linguistics, so Frank had a substantial proclivity for the vagaries of language. Frank was always coming up with oddities such as neologisms and onomatopoeia. Frank also liked neologisms and words like valuable and invaluable that look like they are opposites but have similar meanings, examples of which are the words flammable and inflammable and claim and declaim. And Frank had recently delved into the repetition of a word immediately afterward in the same sentence, such as was in in a flash, or I got on on May 9th. He also enjoyed creating oxymorons such as humbly pompous, miserable happiness and slightly devastated. One evening, when Frank and his dad were watching a news program, a commentator used the term military intelligence, and Frank’s dad sarcastically called it an oxymoron. Frank’s father told him that a sentence that looked ungrammatical and was barely comprehensible – constructed, for example, as in German grammar in which the verb tantalized before finally making its appearance at the very end of the sentence, could be technically correct.

These tidbits seemed pedestrian to Joey, and along with Frank’s average grades caused Joey to doubt that Frank had the intellectual acuity of his dad.

But Joey wished Frank well and hoped that his good friend’s ambitions would ultimately culminate in attainment of success. Joey was aware that some people were late bloomers ... a housewife of many years returned to school at a small college and was later ranked as one of the top ten American scientists ... one of

Frank’s linguistics heroes attended what some would consider a minor college before moving on to MIT and eventually being assessed by many as the world’s smartest man ... and of course, the most famous example of this was a Germanborn American who reputedly flopped as a child in the very subjects that later led to his acclaim as the greatest genius in history.

In the hallway after leaving English, Joey saw his best friend Kurt and told him, “Your big day is finally coming, Kurt – and you’re invited to come to Grandpa Karl’s for the weekend if you want.” and Kurt returned Joey’s smile replying confidently, “It’s mine this time, Joey. Yeah, I think I can go down there – I’ll ask my dad and call you tonight.”

At twelve, Kurt’s only significant yo-yo rival Davey Fontaine was older than Kurt and Joey and a grade ahead of them. Davey had won the school yo-yo contest the previous two years, both times barely outscoring Kurt, but Kurt had been practicing intensely and discretely every day at home and was confident he would defeat Davey this year for the Mason school championship. As Joey approached his next class, troubling changes in him and his friends dawned on him that had been stirred up by Mr. Sheridan’s lecture. It seemed like just the other day they were all just typical boys who enjoyed running, playing and little else. Frank had changed a lot recently, going far beyond child’s play with his adult-like language obsession; two of Joey’s other friends had become absorbed in math and art and Joey himself had changed perhaps the most because he had become grindingly competitive and was always not just thinking silently, but also engaging in what a Yaqui sorcerer had labeled an internal dialogue. He thought maybe his silent speaking was caused by worrying, which he never used to do.

He didn’t remember when it started – it could be a month or five years ago.

Maybe it was Mr. Sheridan’s fault, always harping on critical thinking until finally Joey had become inauspiciously imbued with it. Joey wondered if this and the fleeting anxiety he felt about his brother were early symptoms of the irremediable disquietude of modern life that Mr. Sheridan called angst. But, could Joey already be experiencing this at age ten? Joey became fiercely competitive around the time he took up surfing after his ninth birthday. Paul got Joey started in surfing but soon after gave it up himself when he got a full time job without finishing high school. Joey eventually bought a board, but without Paul to take him he only got the opportunity to surf a couple of times a month with teenage friends off the coast of Santa Cruz, eighty miles south of San Francisco; none of Joey’s friends his age were interested in surfing. Kurt, however, still seemed his normal old self. Kurt recently took a few lessons in guitar playing, but it wasn’t a passion for him, really just something his uncle

suggested. Kurt’s uncle once played base in a garage band, lo those many years ago, and got Kurt interested in guitarists who seemed arcane to Joey; rockers such as Eddie Cochran and Stevie Ray Vaughn and flamenco player Andre Segovia.

Kurt had only one guitar, an acoustic with a string that was slightly weird.

Joey offered to buy him a complete set of strings; knowing that Kurt was about to turn eleven, Joey recently thought, How awesome would it be if I could give Kurt a brand new Fender for his birthday? But Joey’s dad advised him that it could embarrass Kurt’s dad to see Kurt getting such an expensive gift that he himself couldn’t afford to buy for his own son. Kurt once mentioned to Joey that his parents never looked at his grades or asked how he was doing in school.

His dad worked long hours in construction and was therefore very tired by the time he got home late at night, and although Kurt’s mom was home earlier, after an entire day of lifting heavy boxes at work she also came home worn out. This contrasted to the life of Joey and his other friends, whose parents’ jobs demanded little physical exertion; and with highly paid professional dads, their moms could stay at home and also be very involved with the education of their children. Joey wondered if Kurt’s humble pecuniary condition was the key to his unflagging normalcy.

Perhaps kids who were better off financially had to respond to more expectations because many of them had parents for whom success was life’s summum bonum. This could cause the kids to start earlier in life the fear of failure that they observed in their parents. Be that as it may, sometimes even instead of to his own sister, Joey turned most often to Kurt when he needed someone to confide in, even if he had to ride the long distance from his house to Kurt’s on his bike. They were so close that when they were only six years old they took a solemn blood oath of friendship, which nearly five years neither of them had done with anyone else. Joey and Natalie both lamented the recently bygone days when they looked up to Paul as their protective and beloved big brother; the three of them had previously been almost inseparable.

They were emotionally unprepared when he began, with nary a mention to his family, to spend overnights somewhere with his pals instead of at home.

Gone were just about all the interests Paul previously had in common with his siblings. He erected a personality façade that obliged him to implicitly aver that his previous life had been naïve and mundane. In his newfound perspective, now that he associated with a biker gang he had transcended his jejune past.

Paul developed a predilection for anything that effectuated lucre with scant effort and a modicum of investment; and nowadays whiled away his free time

trolling for schemes that would enable him to clean up royally in poker games, horse races, online casinos and the like.

Lately, Paul was hanging around with pool hall characters, especially a young man everybody called Monkey who was always in trouble and was a peripheral member of the Northern Devils biker gang, which was based across the Bay in Oakland. Monkey had blond, rockabilly side burns and hair style and never failed to wear a black leather jacket like it was his uniform. Other Devils besides Monkey had monikers, such as Spidey, Genghis, Plauge, Slam, and Foo, most of them living across the Bay to the East, nearer to the club’s headquarters in Oakland. The Devils around here mostly lived in East Palo Alto where housing isn't so suburban – some of the housing there is scruffy and banged up, needing a paint job or exterior repairs. These characteristics and, notably, the absence of high-end appurtenances, made East Palo Alto housing more amenable to roughand-tumble bikers and far cheaper to rent than anything in the affluent surrounding communities. No local Devils lived in the City of Palo Alto, but many of them worked there. For instance, Monkey’s motorcycle repair shop, which he co-owned with two other bikers, was just three blocks from downtown Palo Alto, and Spidey drove delivery for an industrial outfit nearby. Perhaps the one saving grace was that none of these shady characters that Paul hung around with used crass language – at least they hadn’t when Joey was around them. The worst language Joey heard Paul’s friends use was friggin’ or sometimes freakin’.

In fact, Joey knew plenty of boys his own age who spoke nastier than Paul’s low-riding pals, and these boys also told lurid and gory stories that would stand their parents’ hair on end if they were unfortunate enough to hear them. All of the local Devils were raised in good families – both of Monkey’s parents taught at Stanford. Not a few folks suspected him of being a faux rebel, a poseur, but he could perhaps claim his credentials were unassailable by citing minor scrapes with the law on his record as evidence of his authenticity. One time, Joey overheard a couple of workers from a utility company who were smoking and talking next to their truck parked in the Mason parking lot. They weren’t even supposed to be smoking on the school grounds and they were cursing every other word, talking about women’s body parts and how great it was too slam their fists into them; and they also recounted being in jail and receiving restraining orders, laughing all through it. For Joey, it was horrible – like they were a different species from everybody he knew. Joey thought that maybe Monkey talked like that when kids weren’t around; but if he did, he would probably have slipped up and done it by now around a local youngster and Joey would have heard about it.

Joey worried about his own evolved strangeness, specifically his inability to accept losing – not only himself losing, but even his favorite sports teams. Like his dad, Joey was an avid follower of sports, but unlike his dad, he was strongly affected by wins and losses. Joey had become almost manic, anxious to win seemingly at any cost. He often listened to radio broadcasts of local sports events, with an avid partiality for baseball; and was virtually inconsolable when his favorite teams lost. He marveled at the recent changes he saw in himself and wished that he could revert to a simpler age when he was a happy-go-lucky kid without a worry in the world, interested in practically nothing but playing sports and hanging out with his brother and sister.

Joey finished his school day and rode his bike to Frank and Freddie’s house, reporting for a scheduled clubhouse meeting with his four main friends. Their unofficial roster was Joey, Kurt, Frank, Freddie and Phil. Joey parked his bike between hedges in the back and headed for the basement door, which was always unlocked. This basement was their clubhouse since they gave up the one in a tree in Joey’s back yard a couple of years ago. Before they built the tree house that precursed their current headquarters they hid behind bushes to do their nefarious deeds. They tried smoking tobacco, but they all gave it up the first time they tried it because of horrific coughing fits. They kept a medical magazine stashed that had a photo of a nude teenage girl. Keeping this magazine available served to protect them from the temptation to look for such images online; they knew other kids who wasted hours at a stretch hunting online for racy videos. All of them were supposed to meet at the clubhouse on this afternoon to decide what to do this weekend, but that had already been decided for Joey by the news from his mom, announcing the plan to visit Grandpa Karl. It seemed like forever since they went there, though it was only a few weeks.

This would be a double treat for Joey and Frank – not only a visit to a natural wonderland, but a chance to hear Grandpa Karl’s stories about years gone by as they warmed to the crackle of an outdoors fire or one in a cast iron stove – far more enjoyable than the fireplaces in their Palo Alto homes that weren’t even legal to use because of the pollution they discharged. They dedicated some of their clubhouse time to planning ocean pirating à la Long John Silver, with Phil as their leader. He was old-fashioned, deriving his inspiration from Treasure Island rather than from the futuristic and more adult fiction that was favored by his schoolmates.

Phil devised heuristic calculations of pirating scenarios on large waste sheets using colored pencils, showing islands where booty was buried, with plots of

maneuvers for getting to the islands without being waylaid. Phil’s work was so vivid and detailed it would put professional video game creators to shame. He posted each of these drawings of maps and data on the clubhouse walls as soon as it was done. Frank and Freddie equipped the clubhouse with a Pac-Man and a pinball machine they bought at a flea market, and they also installed three video game players. Kurt was the champion among them with the low-tech pinball machine, being able to roll it repeatedly – the others couldn’t even roll it once.

Magazines about fast cars and motorcycles were scattered around the clubhouse, part of a mess that never got cleaned up. Every once in a while, Frank and Freddie’s mom suggested a clean-up, but her words fell on deaf ears.

After all, if a boy can’t maintain a mess within his own purview, what is the point of having one? Or weren’t they no longer kids at age ten?

When Joey entered the clubhouse he saw Kurt firing away at alien creatures on a video game player, which surprised him because Kurt normally eschewed high-tech devices, which is one of the reasons he took up yo-yos. At any rate, the clubhouse provided Kurt’s only opportunity to seriously game because the player he had at home was antiquated, lacking the power of Frank and Freddie’s new machines. Frank was there also. He and Kurt both greeted Joey, and as usual Frank was excited to tell Joey about his latest linguistic conquests, but Joey had a pressing matter to discuss with Frank, so he cut short his newest grandiloquent elocution.

“Hey Frank,” Joey interrupted, “We’re goin’ down to Grandpa Karl’s this weekend. You wanna come Kurt already said he’s coming.”

Frank loved Big Sur as much as Joey did, with its wide expanse of nature and opportunity for adventure that included perilous climbs. Once, he, Joey, Paul and Natalie hiked a long distance in Big Sur through the Ventana Wilderness, all the way to the picturesque Tassahara temple, exploring the environs of the trail for a week en route. Along the way they enjoyed cool and clean refreshment from mountain streams that amazed Joey by tasting better than the best chocolate shake, and they spotted what looked like a jade boulder; they later learned that there is quite a bit of jade in Big Sur. They agreed afterwards that it was the greatest of their nature experiences. Joey had already backpacked in various locales, but this was Frank's introduction to serious hiking. Some seemingly innocuous turns on hiking trails have barely noticeable steep slopes next to them where a person who loses his or her balance due to a heavy backpack could suffer a fatal fall.

Every year there are many such falls on trails that don’t look dangerous; falls by ordinary hikers, not daredevil climbers. Joey once read in a book about a turn

someone came to while backpacking in the Himalayas. The turn was so narrow, the backpacker threw embarrassment to the winds and got down on his hands and knees to crawl around the turn on the narrow ledge that passed for a trail.

But Frank would have been unfazed because he lacked a healthy fear of high places and other dangers, so he would have rushed around the turn that had terrified the Himalaya hiker. Unfortunately, any concept of safety was lost on Frank, which had been pointed out to him by his family and friends more than once. Joey had become painfully aware of this brazen impetuosity when Frank endangered his life while they were on an outing together in Big Sur the previous year.

“For sure I wanna go,” Frank said; then he resumed his attempt at linguistic discourse. “Hey, did you notice that the word contumely looks like an adverb like slowly or nicely, but it’s actually a noun? To make an adverb you need to borrow one of Dostoevsky’s favorite adjectives contumacious, and then convert it to the adverb contumaciously."

“What? Dostoevsky didn't even write in English," protested Joey.

"Yeah, but he was translated. A lot of writers have favorite words, like for Robert Louis Stevenson it was alacrity and for Stephen King it’s truculent.” Joey normally glossed over Frank's literary remarks like this one, but Joey was a devoted King fan and therefore so couldn’t allow this assertion to go unchallenged.

“Stephen King doesn’t just like one word, he likes millions of words. Do you know how many books he wrote, it was, like 100 or something. What does truculent mean?”

“I think it means tough or mean, something like that.” All of this, as usual, sounded lame to Joey; he normally ho-hummed indifferent responses to Frank's feeble exegeses, but today was different because Joey was feeling tense, on edge.

Something was up with him emotionally, but he had no idea what it was. Unlike Frank, his twin Freddie wasn’t hooked on just language like his brother; in fact, there didn’t seem to be a subject that could carry his attention for long. He was rated as a genius, with a supposedly immeasurable IQ; and able to delve into complex subjects quickly and with phenomenal depth. He was even attending his first year at a community college already at the age of eleven.

Despite a lack of focus on subjects relevant to his classes, Freddie still got top marks in school and finished high school while Frank was still in Mason Elementary. Fortunately, there was no bitterness or rivalry between the twins caused by their radically contrasting intellectual prowess. Freddie had tried to put his studies to the test, spending many hours one summer experimenting

with chemistry, using equipment that he gathered in their basement, but he had to give it up after an incident that produced quite a bit of smoke. After that, his parents were all too willing to cede the basement to their sons for a less hazardous clubhouse, as long as they promised to bring no flammable, toxic or otherwise dangerous substances into it. And they liked and generally trusted all of the club members, Joey and the rest.

Grandpa Karl was an avuncular raconteur who fascinated Joey with stories about life in the twentieth century, from which Joey otherwise felt radically removed. Karl especially enjoyed regaling the boys with his recounting of primitive – by today’s standards – life in old cities back East. When Joey listened to Grandpa Karl’s stories, he tried to imagine life back then. He wondered how similar it was to life portrayed in movies like On the Waterfront or A Streetcar Named Desire – neighborhoods filled with old, gritty, grimy, red brick tenements with no front yard because their front steps descended straight onto the sidewalk – completely different from Joey’s squeaky-clean, suburban life that was always quality-controlled with perfectly green lawns and sparkling clean facilities for everything.

Grandpa Karl had also lived in foreign countries – a dozen of them for two or more years – and had traveled around the globe on three separate occasions, including travels all over Africa, Europe and South America. Joey told Grandpa Karl he’s been so many places and seen so much, he must know just about everything, but Karl was typically self-effacing – if rather crude – in his response: “No, actually I don't know so much. I’m even still trying to figure out the best way to use the bathroom, brush my teeth and blow my nose. I haven’t even figured out how much toilet paper to use or how to pee without splashing my shoes.”

Joey’s dad had inherited from Grandpa Karl his love of travel and had been able to obtain employment in foreign countries during the previous five years, in every instance bringing his family of five with him. They spent almost two years in Costa Rica and six months in Brazil and slightly more than that in Mexico.

When Joey got home with his family from Costa Rica he had the eerie sensation that, compared to Costa Rica, Silicon Valley looked like it was made out of candy.

He was able to retrieve at any moment this candy-like sensation and memory long after it had worn off and suburbia once again looked perfectly normal to him; it was indelibly stamped into his memory, as were the unique flavors of Costa Rican foods and the wonderful warmth of its people. He was less sanguine about his experiences in Brazil and Mexico, though he was favorable

towards both. After all of Grandpa Karl’s wanderings and residences from Rio to Paris, his home town San Francisco remained his favorite city, the place that most assuredly embodied his ideals.

Joey knew quite a bit about the history of San Francisco after preparing an oral presentation in school about it. His research for the presentation brought him to the main San Francisco library, where he perused some of its historical materials that are kept on a separate, dedicated floor. He found out that San Francisco is a city with a very colorful history: from its original native populations, to its dominance by Spanish Missionaries; the wicked Gold Rush Wild West days, the Barbary Coast era, the Vigilante movement and the earthquake in 1906 that destroyed nearly half of its buildings.

Many locals took to simply calling San Francisco The City. For someone living in a nearby community, announcing that, “I’m going to The City” connoted a flair that accords with its real-city skyline and its zesty, party-town image. Eventually, Oakland developed what was arguably the only other city skyline in the Bay Area, but applying the term to Oakland never caught on.

During his library studies Joey was shocked to learn that The City's past wasn’t nearly as liberal as more recent times. For instance, he learned during his research that during its earlier history many Asians including children were physically assaulted if they ventured beyond the invisible borders of Chinatown.

Joey imagined a little innocent child Joey’s age or even younger, unknowingly transgressing simply by crossing a street and finding himself pummeled by bigots. More recent police hostility or downright persecution included attacks on Ban the Bomb demonstrators of the '50s; on the beat generation, such as social satirist Lenny Bruce's arrests for the words he uttered and of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti for the ones he printed; of Peace and Love flower children for their substance indulgences; and of gay people. Though the police even in Joey’s time were known to still have horribly intolerant officers, such behavior by them had become effectively contained through the threat of dismissal from the force, so they had come a long way from their past unchecked bigotry by the time Joey did his research.

A major turning point was the police chief issuing an order holding back his officers who were chomping at the bit, wanting to spill into the streets to arrest and break the heads of gays with their truncheons during the White Night riot of 1979. Acceptance of gays advanced significantly after that day, and they never vented with destruction again, so this was a watershed event in The City's history. With his research and explorations, Joey learned that San Francisco is

culturally vibrant, with art schools and many galleries; and lots of theater and dance, both professional and amateur.

San Francisco wasn’t in the same league as New York, but nobody else is either, and it held its own, considering its limited, near-island geographic disadvantage. Joey didn't need library research to discover the major problem of homelessness in San Francisco – he saw plenty of evidence of it on the streets just by walking around. This became a topic on his list of future research and writing projects. He was always on the lookout for topics that he could write about; he had even entered an online fiction contest the previous year, at age 9.

In spite of the glaring disadvantage of his age, he was totally downcast after he learned that he didn’t win. Phil arrived at the clubhouse and told Joey he couldn't go to Big Sur this weekend.

Looking glum, Kurt told Joey, “I found out I can’t go either. My dad wants me to help him with some painting and stuff. You can’t change it to next weekend?”

“I don’t think so – I didn’t even think we’d get there this time.”

Kurt grimaced and said, “You shouldn’t even go down there, Joey, I got a bad feeling about it. Maybe you’re gonna have a car wreck or something. You know how it is when I get a bad feeling, like when I told Jake not to postpone his Chemistry test when he wasn’t feeling well and he wound up with a lousy grade.”

Joey guffawed, “That doesn’t mean anything, he just couldn’t really re-study the stuff because he was still sick with the flu.”

Kurt countered, “Yeah, you can say that, but what about when I told your cousin to check out the value of that beat-up old book she found in her attic, and it turned out to be worth three hundred dollars?”

Joey dismissed Kurt’s claims because it was clear to him that his examples of supposed prescience argued more for coincidence than for revelation. But on this occasion he was less confident than he made out to be because he had felt misgivings about this trip. He also knew that Kurt had been on the money with other predictions, albeit informal or indirect ones that could have been explained away if they failed. Another factor that fueled his professed skepticism is that he couldn’t bring himself to concede that Kurt may have a predictive talent that he himself lacked. Joey never used to feel any resentment towards anything that Kurt said or did, but the competitive spirit that had captured Joey affected even his esteem for Kurt; who was, in Joey’s opinion, the most honest and most sincere person he had ever met.

Life is just getting too complicated, he sighed to himself. After discussion was completed, it looked like Joey and his dad would have only Frank accompanying them down the coast unless his sister Natalie or brother Paul decided to join them. Joey actually wouldn’t mind so much if it was just him and his dad, because his dad was great to pal around with. Now that the personnel for the weekend trip was settled, Joey again felt that strange giddiness about it.

He couldn’t pin down the cause – it wasn’t like him to experience unexplained emotions. He had changed like his friends, but he thought he wasn’t that adult yet. Adults always seemed to Joey him to have markedly complicated emotions.

Once, at the ripe old age of six, Joey saw his father fuming about a mistake he made, and at that very moment Joey resolved that he would always study a problem thoroughly before making a decision about it, and knowing he had done the best he could to figure it out, he would never remonstrate with himself as he saw his father do. This became his fundamental creed that Joey stood by to this day five years later. He wondered if other kids his age also maintained such a tenet or even a full-blown ethos that they stood by, but he never did even an informal survey of his closest friend to find this out.

He never even asked his best friends about this, being afraid they would conclude he was strange.

2: DISCOVERY IN BIG SUR Joey was unable to discern why he felt apprehension about traveling to Big Sur, which previously had induced nothing but pure joy for him. Frank stayed overnight at Joey's to make sure they got an early start Saturday morning for the two-hour drive down the coast to Grandpa Karl’s digs. They brought along plenty of camping equipment. Grandpa Karl hated phones, so they weren’t concerned that he didn’t call to confirm he was back from his trip back east.

They would manage at his place even if he wasn’t there, sleeping in a tent and shopping for groceries further south along the coast highway. Karl lived in a one-room shack, and although they could all fit on his floor with sleeping bags, it was more fun to pitch a large tent and manage their own schedules. Unlike his life at home where he struggled to get up for school, Joey always jumped up at first light when he was in Big Sur. He loved the smell of moist pines and redwoods, the frigid, misty mornings, being surrounded by forest, within earshot of loudly barking sea lions cavorting along the ocean’s edge. Joey didn’t have to go far from Grandpa Karl’s to where he could watch these exotic creatures, as well as seals and sea otters, gallivanting and floating among the rocks and kelp.

Once he even saw Gray Whales passing by as they migrated south to their winter breeding grounds in Baja California. On their way to Big Sur they passed

by Carmel where tourists actually pay a road fee just to drive around Carmel looking at the plush homes that they heard celebrities like Doris Day, Clint Eastwood, or Paul Simon lived in at one time. But the drive further down the coast to and along Big Sur is a completely different story from carefully carved Carmel. The winding road is flanked by guard rails that don’t always prevent a car's plunge down a steep incline and even into the ocean. Just the previous week, a woman had gone off the road and down a steep embankment, and was only rescued two days later because she managed to get to her cell phone and call for help.

As Joey contemplated the woman’s plight, he thought of the famous rock musician who was reputed to be a physics genius; found dead in his car long after it went off a road and fell into thick brush. But that accident was far from the coast, somewhere east of LA. There were rumors about the last communications from the musician darkly suggesting his possible assassination because of some great mathematical discovery that he was on the verge of achieving. While pondering this, Joey developed a feeling of cold on the back of his neck; it seemed his body might be communicating a warning to him. What warning could it be? I’m no genius like that rock star. He shook his head and tried to dismiss the thought by looking out the car window at the scenery. Then Frank engaged him in conversation, and he forgot the strange sensation. It was a typically sunny day in the Bay Area when they started out in the morning, but it was drizzling in Big Sur. This was actually ideal from Joey’s view point because the flora looked especially beautiful with drops of rain on it and puddles everywhere, and the moisture brought out wonderful fragrances. Eventually, they turned off the coastal highway, wending their way along the bumpy, pocked private road that brought them to Grandpa Karl’s abode. He drove an ancient 1948 Ford truck that he managed to keep going by scavenging parts wherever he could. Because of this scavenging, there were quite a few auto parts near his shack, enough to ironically mimic a junkyard in the midst of a natural paradise.

Many people in Big Sur were essentially bohemians who rebelled against pressure to conform to orthodox aesthetic standards. In this respect, they were like many residents of Bolinas on the coast above San Francisco, a town that is locally famous for its hippie and iconoclastic population, much of which likewise junkyard their otherwise picturesque properties. Bolinas is a beach town that isn’t tree-laden like Big Sur, but Mendocino, a short distance north, sports a mil ion of acres of dense forest. Big Sur residents became the subject of a

school report by Joey after the one he wrote about San Francisco. Many of them could be described as relics of the old 60’s counterculture.

For instance, the Esalen Institute, a short distance down the coast from Grandpa Karl’s place, had a world-wide reputation as an incubator for some of the hippieness – the free thinking-loving-living – that further enhanced San Francisco's international fame in the 60’s. There were hardly any rules that weren’t broken at Esalen, no taboos, no repressions.

When they arrived at Grandpa Karl’s they found his place empty; he and his truck were both absent. They jumped out of their car, dragged on their jackets and piled into the shack to see what the situation was. Not only was the shack unlocked, it had no lock installed on it, so they walked right in. There wasn’t a bit of firewood stacked near it, so their first chore would be to go out and gather some. Though this time he had been out of town, Grandpa Karl always stopped collecting firewood if he knew his relatives were coming so they would have something practical to do around his place as soon as they arrived.

“Okay Frank, let’s go get some firewood, it’s going to be a cold night around here,” said Joey based on his previous extensive experience in Big Sur. He unzipped his jacket and announced, “Leeeeeet’s go!” with an exaggerated circle motion of his arm, flamboyantly gesticulating that Frank should follow his lead. Joey got no admonishment from Joey’s dad, because both boys were seasoned hikers and knew this area well – and Joey had solemnly assured his dad more than once that he would never do anything hazardous just because Frank thought it was a good idea. Their normal practice was to pile up branches along a creek as they hiked next to it to gather up for firewood when they turned around and trudged back to the shack. They were wearing tough boots that afforded great protection if anything heavy struck their feet, but often in the past Joey had scampered in the area barefoot. The entire region was like a huge mattress made of quadrillions of moist leaves, so that even a clueless urbanite sporting city feet could run barefoot on them comfortably. This wasn’t true anywhere else in nature that Joey had visited. One time when Joey hiked with his parents to a glacier lake east of Seattle, he accidentally rolled a huge log onto his right foot that must have weighed half a ton; but no bone was broken because of these same rugged hiking boots, so he managed to painfully limp back down to camp.

They had hiked several hours to get to that lake, so for a while he worried that if his foot was broken, forest rangers would have to bring in a helicopter to rescue him – humiliating horror of horrors! Joey and Frank eventually veered away from the creek toward a deer trail that would lead them to familiar

landmarks. They scrambled through brush and accessed their preferred trail within minutes. As they marched, they kept their eyes open for anything unusual. Grizzly bears have long ago been eradicated from Big Sur, but black bears, coyotes, mountain lions, foxes, bobcats and other wildlife still abound throughout the forest and could give them trouble such as rabies. Right after they negotiated a switchback before emerging at the nearest beach, Joey glanced at a reddish ocean cliff beyond a gushing stream and stopped abruptly, feeling the trepidation that had struck him several times before.

He turned towards Frank and asked, “What do you think that is?”

Frank replied, “What is – an animal?”

Joey said, “Something is up there part way up that cliff.” but Frank said he saw nothing. They continued, gathered some wood, and headed back. As they passed by the same cliff, again Joey stopped and insisted something was up there.

Frank asked, “How do you know, can you see it or smell it, or what?”

“There’s a strange light up there. You can’t see it?”

“No, I don’t see anything unusual up there at all, it looks completely normal.

Should we climb it and get a closer look?”

“That’s okay, it’s not that big a deal. It’s getting late, so let’s just keep going back to Grandpa’s shack.”

Joey had quickly decided to come back and check it out later; now was not the time because he needed to do it in Frank’s absence. After getting back to the shack bearing armloads of branches, they gathered more nearby. Grandpa Karl had returned, bringing with him lots of groceries; there would be no shortage of provisions for the weekend. The three visitors set up their tent, did household chores, discoursed with Karl through the evening, and finally turned in for the night. The next morning after breakfast they hung around for awhile again chatting outside on Karl’s ad hoc patio furniture – rusty metal folding chairs and a couple of tree stumps. Joey asked Karl if he had baseball and soccer fields to play in when he was a child. Unlike Joey’s modern life, Grandpa Karl played as a child on the streets of gritty Pennsylvania inner cities, first in Philadelphia and later in Pittsburgh.

In those days,” Grandpa Karl explained to Joey, “kids could play on the streets all day in the summer until darkness, sometimes as late as nine at night and their mothers didn’t even worry about them. One of the greatest players in major league history played ball mostly on the streets when he was a kid. We also played simple street games that were fun to do all day, like Release and Hit the Bat. In Release, we formed two teams and drew a small box on the street

with chalk to make borders for a jail and then one team would individually chase the others until they tagged one of them, and then they escorted the captured boy back to the jail. When everybody was caught, the team that got caught had to turn around and do the chasing, and when a guy was tagged and put in the jail, if someone from his team could get close enough to the jail he tagged him, and that would release him so they had to chase him all over again. So there was always a guard to prevent breakouts from the jail. I’ll never forget the time I chased a boy for hours. I finally wore him down and tagged him, but by the time we got back to the jail everyone else had finished playing and gone home wondering what happened to us. I also liked to play Hit the Bat. We played it right on the street, same as Release. One guy would hit a baseball as far as he could, and if someone caught it on the fly he got to take over batting. If he didn’t catch it but was able to retrieve it the batter laid his bat on the ground and the guy with the ball threw it so that it was rolling by the time it got to the bat. If the rolling ball hit the bat, the boy who threw it got to take over batting same as if he caught it. So if someone was very good at catching or very accurate at throwing he could be more or less the king who was almost always batting. We played all those games right on the street. We had no park to play in and didn’t care about having one.”

“That must have been dangerous, Joey inquired, “playing on the street like that. You could get hit by a car.”

“Not really, people didn’t drive like maniacs in those days. I did hear that a boy I didn’t know was hit near my house, but I never found out what really happened.”

Grandpa Karl continued, “Some schools these days still have Four Square, with one server starting each play by hitting the ball to one of the three other squares. If the ball bounced in any square twice or if the guy in that square hit the ball outside of all of the other squares he was out and had to go to the end of the line of boys waiting to enter the first square. Each time someone was out, the kid who was in the first square advanced to the second one, and so did everyone ahead of him who wasn’t out. In that game, the king was a guy who was so good he was always serving, from the fourth square. One of my friends was a little guy, and there was a sort of mafia of bad kids that always tried to beat him, but they never could, even when they were able to gang up on him because they occupied all of the three other squares. No matter how softly they set each other up to slam into his square, he always returned successfully, sometimes from a place far outside of his square. If they tried to just tap it in because he was far away, he was so fast he always managed to get to it.”

Joey said, “Yeah, I played Four Square a few times but I didn’t like it because I could never make it to server so I kinda gave it up.”

Karl resumed, “In a different school I got in trouble because I wouldn’t serve a slow ball to the kingpin, whose name was Ruben. I didn’t try to beat him, but I wouldn’t serve slowly to him because it violated my sense of justice.

He signaled me to not challenge him by serving me slowly, but my ethical standard required me to treat him like I treated everybody else so I returned to him at the normal speed. This infuriated him and he started slamming the ball at me, so I took off the gloves, so to speak, and easily dethroned him, and he wound up picking a fight with me. But my friend Mark stepped in, and he and Ruben really had it out, ouch! Good thing Mark was there because Ruben would have beaten me to a pulp. For some reason, every time somebody picked on me one of my friends came to the rescue. Like the hippies say, Make love not war, and I was always a lover, not a fighter.”

They continued their conversation until late morning, then took care of housekeeping such as washing dishes. After that, Joey and Frank hiked to a swimming hole while Joey’s dad stayed back with Karl again. The sun was out and had warmed the boulders that created the swimming hole, so they undressed and dove in now and then, otherwise lying on the boulders; interspacing these two activities with short solo exploratory treks nearby. When they got back to the shack it was close to dusk, and Frank started retooling the tent; so Joey decided to sneak off on his own along the trail to the cliff. When he got near the cliff, at first he saw nothing, but then he saw a glint that went on and off several times where his attention was previously drawn. Joey thought, It’s flashing on and off, but the weather is overcast, so there’s no sun reflecting on it to cause that. The now familiar anxiety washed over him again. He had the odd feeling that he was at a crossroads in his life. A premonition told him, Maybe I’m going to fall off that cliff and die. He managed to get a couple of large branches across the gushing stream that was between him and the cliff, but they weren’t enough to assure that water wouldn’t get in his boots, and he didn’t see any close by that were big enough for the job. The creek was crystal clear, so he could see that there was nothing that he would step on which could injure his feet if he stepped on it, but he didn’t feel inclined to take his boots off.

This brought to mind his appreciation of Mexican huaraches with soles made from car tires, which are open sandals, so they don’t fill with water and are therefore better for schlepping through streams. In Mexico, while traipsing through jungle with friends, he felt superior with his expensive boots compared to their 25 cent huaraches until he found himself unable to wade through a

stream because his boots would fill with water – whereas his Mexican friends crossed it without hesitation. Would Indian moccasins work as well for this as huaraches, he wondered, contemplating the footwear of natives here many years before white men became prevalent in the area. Probably not, he decided. They wouldn’t dry as quickly as huaraches, but at least they wouldn’t soak socks inside boots that would then require extensive drying. Joey often pondered the life that natives had, hiking around in this beautiful land before it fell into Spanish dominion.

He wondered who fit better into forest land, a fictional Paul Bunyan with his massive boots or someone like Geronimo in moccasins. He thought, What a cool name, Geronimo! A name shouted through the ages! He wondered if Geronimo wore moccasins like the ones Joey saw in movies and museums.

Although native personalities like Geronimo were famous back east, Joey knew of no famous ones in the West. He had read about the natives who lived throughout northern California and couldn’t think of the name of any of them, only Spaniards, such as Junipero Serra.

Why was that? Was it because the Spanish were able to subdue indigenous populations without protracted resistance ... or was there violent resistance that didn’t get into the history books Joey had read? Joey was unaware of any western battles like the eastern ones such as Little Big Horn. He had recently read that, contrary to the impression most of the public has, many blacks in the south, though enslaved, were assertive about their true rights, considering themselves the rightful owners of the land on which they were forced to serve.

They didn’t match the compliant stereotype of “Yessuh, massuh”, Jack Benny’s Rochester; or Amos and Andy. So maybe historians missed the boat about the putative acquiescence of natives under Spanish rule in California; or maybe clashes were initially reported but didn’t get into history books. Was Joey’s ignorance about Western native heroes the result of his own failure to study, or was it because the British-ancestry whites further east engaged in fully documented running battles with the native Americans over decades? Joey made a mental note to research this subject when he got home. With his family he had visited landmark Spanish missions up and down the state, but he was uneducated about historical events in California under the Spanish; there were dates and names in history books about the Spanish era in California, but nothing memorable.

The conquistadores got plenty of history book write-ups about their conquests of what are now called Mexico and Peru, but not much about what is now the American Southwest. Only one person in the entire history of the

Spanish in the Americas impressed Joey favorably – the Dominican priest who early in the sixteenth century witnessed and subsequently inveighed against Spanish atrocities, including torture and genocide, that he saw inflicted on indigenous peoples. Only when he was in Big Sur could Joey truly ponder life in nature hundreds of years ago, and this was part of the wonder that Big Sur awakened in him. Back home in suburbia Joey was essentially closed into a world of pavement and modernity. He wondered if he would eventually end up as a near-hermit ensconced in woods, far from the maddening crowd like Grandpa Karl, and maybe he would let Joey live on his land when he grew up and leave it to him as an inheritance. Joey realized his mind was wandering, and that all these thoughts about huaraches and heroes were distractions from the task at hand.

He found thicker and longer branches and laid them next to the stream without trying to cross it because darkness was approaching and then headed back to Grandpa Karl’s shack. When he got back to the shack Frank was thankfully too engrossed in chores to ask Joey where he had gone or to ask about the cliff if he had figured out that Joey had gone there.

The next day, the Blakes and Frank hiked around the area, including a climb down a cliff for a close-up view of the foreboding ocean. On this overcast day they sat on a boulder most of the morning, cold and pensive, watching tumultuous waves sweeping in to challenge the land with a roar. Joey looked out at the horizon and thought how amazing it was that some people loved being far beyond it, floating in a small boat a thousand miles from the nearest shore. They had all arisen at the same time just after day break so Joey didn’t get a chance to go back to the cliff alone as he had decided was necessary, so he would have to wait for the next trip to Big Sur to investigate the cliff. He surmised that maybe by that time the strange flickering light would be gone, but he had a feeling it would still be there.

In the early afternoon they returned to Palo Alto, feeling restored to a great appreciation for nature as they always did after such a sojourn. On the way back Frank tried to draw Joey out about the cliff. Joey had always been honest before this, but he felt that he had to play this close to the vest so he dismissively and mendaciously implied that he had concluded that he didn’t really see anything there after all. Frank badgered Joey, but he held fast to his denials that he had discovered anything of consequence about the bright and shining object.

Joey quickly became reabsorbed into his daily Palo Alto routine and thought little more about the Big Sur cliff until he found himself in a spelling bee. Mr. Sheridan provided the words to spell and halfway through the hour Joey was one of two students left in the running to win it. Then Mr. Sheridan

pronounced a word that made no sense to Joey. Only when Mr. Sheridan repeated it for the other student, who spelled it correctly, did Joey finally recognize the word. Joey realized that he would have spelled the word correctly if Mr. Sheridan had enunciated it for him as he did for the other student; Joey was disappointingly foiled again. That was when he began to feel that his luck not just with spelling bees but with everything would improve if he could get back to Big Sur. This started out as a simple notion but it grew more intense until it came close to being an obsession. What does a shiny, empty bean can on a cliff have to do with success in a spelling bee or anything else? he asked himself. His feelings about this made no sense to him, but they persisted throughout his wait for the next trip south. This time he didn’t have to wait over a month to return to Big Sur, only until the following weekend – though it seemed to him an eternity. It was all he could do to keep from badgering his dad about when they were going to Grandpa Karl’s again. He managed to keep his cool, as though he were working on some plan. A plan about what? he again asked himself – Am I going crazy? Joey felt more relieved than joyful when his dad told him they were going south again. Friday night he gathered together climbing gear for the trip.

Among the items he packed it was his tightest shoes for maximum traction when he ascended the cliff.

3: BOY MEETS STONE Again only Frank could join Joey and his dad for their second consecutive weekend in Big Sur. Joey didn’t worry that this would become a pattern because he knew that summer would arrive soon and his other friends would have more time to accompany him south; and maybe to other places also such as Yellowstone. Joey’s dad had said he would make plans to visit the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and Wyoming during the summer.

Grandpa Karl had told them that if they visited him again within a couple of weeks they could help him plant his substantial vegetable garden, hoeing and putting in fertilizer and seeds. As with everything else, Karl followed few rules about planting; for instance, he tried to grow vegetables that his soil and climate contraindicated.

And as a result, his corn and peppers fared poorly every summer because of insufficient warmth. And he chronically failed to stagger his crops, so he had a hundred cucumbers and other vegetables all coming up at once, much of which he traded or was forced to bestow gratis on his grateful Big Sur neighbors rather than allow it to spoil. One thing Karl did right was planting vegetables in the sun that needed more of it, such as tomatoes, melons, squash, and some herbs.

The Palo Alto threesome arrived at Karl’s before noon they worked for several hours tilling, fertilizing and planting, so Joey and Frank weren’t free to hike until late afternoon; although they enjoyed the planting, they were eager to set off along the trail again. Joey led the way as usual, heading again towards the cliff. When they were near enough to see it, Joey again saw a gleam near the top, this time showing steady, not blinking, so he turned towards Frank and asked, “What do you think that is?”

“You saw something up there last time. Let’s climb up there.” But Joey demurred, saying he preferred to keep hiking. Frank saw neither glint nor gleam, though he had stood and gazed at the same spot that Joey was looking at. This baffled Joey, as the gleam was bright. They continued up the trail, gathered some firewood and headed back. As they passed the cliff again, Joey saw the same gleam coming from the same spot and again asked Frank about it, but again Frank said he saw nothing, so Joey asked, “How can you keep saying you see nothing? There’s something shining up there, like a can somebody threw out or something. But it makes no sense cuz it’s overcast, so there’s no sun shining on it.”

Still, Frank denied seeing anything and again suggested they climb the cliff.

Joey refused because Frank was no rock climber and could put them both in danger. Joey was mindful that Frank had carelessly snowboarded into a tree at high speed and his left knee remained gimpy to this day because of it. If he wrecked that knee climbing the cliff, it would be Joey’s fault for not trying to stop him from doing it. Frank was no keeper of the faith when it came to safety.

The co-founder of Esalen Institute, down the coast a ways, was killed by a falling rock one day when he was hiking with friends, and the same thing almost happened to Joey once because of Frank’s carelessness. While Joey was swimming in the Ventana River, he saw Frank climb straight up the nearest slope through chaparral until he disappeared into dense woods further up. Joey got curious, so he went to the spot where Frank started his climb. To follow Frank, Joey would have to clamber up a vertical section that was higher than his head, like a tiny cliff, and get his feet onto or beyond a thick tree root traversing the path that Frank had followed to continue upward.

Just as Joey was about to start climbing, a huge rock came barreling down the path. Taken by surprise, Joey froze in place as it came straight at him, and fortunately, it hit the thick tree root and bounced over his head. If the rock had hit Joey it might have killed him. Later, he told Frank what happened and Frank admitted he sent the rock down on purpose, just to watch it bounce and roll.

Frank then recited his own concocted law of the wilderness that You never go up

behind someone ifhe doesn’t know you’re following him. Joey retorted silently, How about a rule that you never roll a big rock down a slope unless you know it won’t hit somebody in the head! Frank deserved to be severely reprimanded, but in those days Joey was a reticent nine-year-old, so he didn’t verbally express his rejoinder to Frank’s absurd dictum. But he resolved to be more cautious in the future, being now fully cognizant of how perilous nature trips with Frank could be. The matter of the light in the cliff left in abeyance, Joey and Frank returned to the shack, and later Joey’s dad drove them into Pfeiffer for a hike on one of its scenic trails down to the ocean. After that they ate dinner at a restaurant nearby and got back to the shack after 8 PM. The next morning at first daylight, Joey woke up and saw that Frank was asleep, so he quickly and gathered his climbing gear and stole as quietly as possible towards the cliff. When he got close to it he saw the same gleam, coming out of shrubbery just below the top; and reckoned that he faced a risk of death if he fell from that height; on the other hand, if he fell and was too injured to return to the shack, it wouldn’t take Frank long to figure out where he was. He assembled the makeshift bridge across the stream with the branches he left there last time and crossed over. When he got to the base of the cliff, he decided not to use his climbing gear because it looked like there were good holds all the way up. The cliff wasn’t uniformly vertical; it had angling channels that could facilitate a safe ascent – and subsequent more difficult descent. Joey wasn’t an expert climber. He had done a few sessions of indoor bouldering, but that was with ropes to catch him and only about twenty feet up, maybe ten feet lower than he would have to climb to get to the shiny object. But he figured he had learned enough from the bouldering to handle the holds he saw on this cliff.

He could always return to the bottom and retrieve his gear if he hit a spot that was too hard for him to handle freestyle. However, he also knew that if he returned to his gear he might have Frank’s undesired company by the time he resumed his climb. An experienced free climber might have gone up that cliff in a minute, but Joey wasn’t experienced, far from it. He was careful not to make a mistake, climbing up gradually. Prior to each ascension he made sure of both his holds above and his ability to retreat downward before proceeding. Finally, he arrived at a ledge just below the shrubbery. He didn’t see an approach that would safely bring him any higher, so he decided to try to stretch upwards enough to reach the shrubbery from where he was, without losing his balance.

He knew he must maintain caution; if he reached into the shrubbery and a rattler, scorpion or tarantula sitting in it bit him, he could be so startled and injured that he might fall of the cliff and die – he had to brace himself for any

eventuality. He was at a critical juncture, so he paused and asked himself if this was worth the risk. Crucially, a dramatic inner voice informed him that the time had come, that he had arrived at his ultimate crossroads. Finally, he crossed his fingers mentally and reached up and into the shrubbery. He was surprised when he easily grasped and removed a smooth, cylindrical stone in roughly the shape of a watch but several times thinner.

The object didn’t weigh anything – no more than a similarly shaped feather would weigh. It was a pleasant beige color and as cold as marble; but marble is heavy, and this object was phenomenally light. Its surface was as dull as pumice, so he couldn’t imagine how it gave off or reflected the light that he saw from an appreciable distance. How did it wind up at this place that’s so hard to get to? he asked himself. Maybe somebody hiked or climbed to the top from the other side and then dropped it, and because it rolled into the shrubbery they couldn’t find it.

He pulled a napkin out of his pocket and rubbed the object with it, but no dirt came off on the napkin; it was perfectly clean after who knows how long it sat in this shrubbery. He stuck it in his back pocket and gingerly headed back down the cliff, which was far more difficult than climbing up; finally he reached the bottom. On the trail, as he turned the bend that put the cliff out of his view, along came Frank. Unsurprisingly, he asked, “You went back to the cliff, didn’t ya, did you climb it?” `“I went part way up, but I saw nothing shining, so I stopped and came back.”

Joey had always prided himself in being an honest person, so he was surprised to hear himself lying outright to one of his best friends, but he couldn’t stop himself. Frank did an about face and they hewed to the trail straight back to the shack. Later that day they drove back to Palo Alto. As they rode in the car, Joey insisted to Frank that because he saw nothing he decided there was no sense in risking his neck by continuing the climb. He had a feeling that Frank didn’t believe him, so he figured he must just be a bad liar, which was okay with him because he didn’t want to learn how to lie effectively and would have to fess up to Frank as soon as he could justify doing it.

But not yet ... not just yet ...

4: A SURPRISE IN CLASS Joey kept the stone in his book bag, and now that he had it he was blasé about it, feeling none of the consternation that had preceded its acquisition; he didn’t get around to examining it and was starting to forget that he had it until

several days later when he found himself in another spelling bee. Mr. Sheridan provided the words to spell and again Joey was one of just two students left in the competition when Mr. Sheridan again pronounced a word that made no sense to him, so he was forced to just guess, but guessed wrong. The other student spelled it correctly, and just like in the previous occasion, when Joey heard the word the second time he realized what it was and that he knew how to spell it.

He liked Mr. Sheridan, but this was the second time that his imperfect pronunciation caused Joey to lose a spelling bee. It was a déjà vu all over again that he sure didn’t need. Because this time the winner was headed for the allschool bee, Joey was incredulous and more frustrated than ever; he wanted to scream and tear his hair out. It seemed like nothing could go right for him, but just then, he heard a buzzing in his book bag. This surprised him because he was sure he had left his cell phone at home. He put his left hand into the bag and felt the stone vibrating like a cell phone. He feared it might have hatched into something dangerous, so he let it go immediately, then shone his pen light at it to see if it had changed in some way, but it looked the same as when he found it. He pushed it over with a pencil and saw that it was the same all the way around, so he finally it out with his right hand and was astonished to see on its face a detailed scene depiction on a split screen in full color. Then a larger screen appeared, hovering in front of him, showing on its left side himself, misspelling the word. On the right side, he was both hearing and spelling it correctly. Joey could differentiate the voices simultaneously on both sides of the split screen. He gawked at this impossible scene, and eventually a question mark appeared straddling both sides, signaling that Joey was to choose between the two outcomes.

Joey sat and stared at this, speechless, in shock, as unable to react as he was when Frank’s rock came tumbling down the path straight at his head. At that very moment, a totally unexpected thought occurred to Joey: My mission starts now. This was too much for him. Not knowing what else to do, he shoved the stone back into his bag without responding to its apparent offer. When he looked up from the bag he expected to see the bewildered or even horrified faces of other students all staring at him, but instead he saw that the larger screen had disappeared and everyone, including teacher and students, was frozen in place, unmoving – like inanimate objects. Then they suddenly started to move again, but were seemingly unaware of what happened and were just sitting placidly, focused on the teacher. Only Frank, sitting right next to Joey, was staring at him – everyone else was clearly oblivious to this astounding event –

and he whispered, “Jesus, Joey, you look spooked. Did you see a ghost, or what?”

Evidently hearing him, Mr. Richardson called for quiet, and Frank eventually turned away from Joey and towards Mr. Richardson. After class, Frank tried to get an explanation from Joey about what happened to him, but Joey begged off, saying he didn’t feel well and needed to go home and lie down. Instead of attending the rest of his classes, he rushed straight home and shut himself in his room, ignoring knocks on his door, feeling shaken throughout the evening. He didn’t talk to his family members, staying shut in, listening to his favorite music hoping it would bring him back to some kind of sane sense of reality.

H i s cell phone rang a few times but he was reluctant to respond to it, until he finally answered it, telling Frank that he was okay now and was just a tad ill when he was in the class. His best friend Kurt also cal ed to ask why he wasn’t at lunch and Joey told him the same made-up story.

Eventually he fell asleep fully dressed, which was to become a habit for him in the coming days as his life became increasingly dramatic.

5: FIRST BLOOD DRAWN The next day at Mr. Sheridan’s class Joey assured Frank that he felt somewhat better, so he would follow through with a plan they had made in the car on the way back from Big Sur, to go to the skateboard park near Frank’s house and practice tricks. Joey didn’t ride his skateboard around because he preferred his bike; he just wanted to learn competitive tricks at the park so he kept his board at Frank’s house. Both of them had only three weeks of experience since they bought their skateboards new at their local mall. Joey rode his bike to Frank’s after school but as soon as he entered Frank’s room.

Frank’s mom heard Joey’s voice and called out, “Frankie dear, could you straighten out your room a little bit before you go out?”

“Okay mom, I’ll do it right now, then we gotta go.”

Joey saw that he was stuck hanging around for however long it took for Frank to comply with his mother’s wishes so he wandered down the hall to Freddie’s room where Freddie was sitting at his computer as usual. Freddie’s back was to Joey, so he entered stealthily and pulled up a cloth covering a dry erase board next to the door to peek at what was written or drawn on it. Freddie kept the board covered so his room would look more like a normal kid’s room rather than the habitat of a total academic egghead. Written with a marker were long were long chicken scratch formulas with symbols of all sorts – lots of x’s

and y’s along with an alphabet soup of other characters and only one distinct equation: g = R (π X rpm)2 ____30____ 9.81 “Hey, Freddie, what’s up?” Joey asked, turning away from the board towards Freddie. He walked forward and plopped himself down on the bed, which was adjacent to the computer chair where Freddie was sitting.

“Oh yeah, everything is cool. Hey, do you know about the nano world?”

“You mean small, right?”

“Yeah, super small, subatomic. Our laws of physics don’t apply to that world.”

“You mean like the speed of light, gravity, stuff like that.”

“Right. For all we know, there could be different realities in the nano world, black holes containing other universes – phenomena we can’t even imagine.

Some cosmologists even say that there may be trillions of Big Bangs just like the one that started our universe happening every second and creating universes like ours or even exact duplicates of ours."

The thought occurred to Joey of showing Freddie the very strange object that was in his back pocket, but he decided it would be premature. Freddie was a genius, so he might know or could maybe figure out what this stone really was.

But Joey decided he would show it to him later after examining it himself; he hadn’t really done this in spite of what had already happened with it, just nonchalantly carried it around in his bag or pocket; Joey was nonplussed about the stone, simply hoping no more strange events would occur. He set those thoughts aside for the moment and asked Freddie, “So, what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, I can’t actually do much about it, but scientists are finding out more about it by doing experiments with supercolliders. For instance, in our macro world, everything can only be in one place at one time, but in the nano world a particle can be in two places at the same time. As you can see on my screen, I’m trying to depict a subatomic particle arriving at two places at once, but I’m not good at this 3D software. You know how to do 3D?” “Not really, but I can make a 3D screen saver.”

“That’s actually pretty good, but not enough for what I’m trying to do. Hey Joey, are you into cosmology? Do you know different adjectives for describing

the cosmos or the universe? How about inexorable, which means like, not possible to challenge, and immutable, for unchanging, and what else?“ ”How about UnBigWordAble, which means there’s no word that’s big enough to be able to describe it.”

“Yeah, I guess, but you made that one up. What do you think about ineffable for that meaning?”

Joey at this point was getting bored with the conversation and wishing Frank would show up to head for the skateboard park.

“Yeah, but anyway, I’m into action, not just words like you and your goofy brother.”

“I knew a precocious college student like me was wasting my time talking to a little grammar school kid.”

“Oh yeah? Let me see about that by buzzing your stupid college head!”

Joey exclaimed this as he dove onto Freddie and yanked him onto the bed.

They wrestled and Joey, though he came close, never quite got his knuckles onto Freddie’s head. After a protracted struggle they both fell back exhausted on the bed and laughing without Joey having accomplished his goal. Just then, they heard Frank calling out, “Hey Joey, where are you?”

Joey said, “See ya later, Freddie.” jumped up and fled to Frank’s room, where Frank was putting on his sneakers. They knew Freddie had no great interest in balancing acts like surfing, skateboarding or skiing, so they didn’t invite him. He did like other activities Joey and Frank shared such as backpacking. They grabbed their skateboards from Frank’s room and were down the stairs and out the door in a flash. Joey didn’t feel particularly bothered about the stone at this point. He had decided, Maybe it won’t happen again, maybe it never happened.

As they went, he pulled the stone out of his pocket and shoved it unceremoniously into his book bag where it might be more secure as he skateboarded around.

They skated four blocks to the park and on the way Frank tried to squeeze information out of Joey about the previous day’s incident in Mr. Sheridan’s class, but Joey was able to fend him off by claiming he was just il from something he ate. Joey could sense that Frank might not be convinced by this explanation, but Frank didn’t press the matter. They found a dozen boys practicing tricks at the park. As with just about everything else that was physical or required balance Joey was only okay on a skateboard. Joey had a driving ambition to be the best at everything but instead he was frustratingly mediocre at every sport he tried.

After seemingly hundreds of attempts he could now reliably fly off a single step and land on his board. But at least he seemed to be better at skateboarding than

at surfing. Often when he surfed he misjudged a wave and was thrown straight down, bouncing forcefully off the sea floor, whereas he knew other boys who seemed to be way past that. Because large waves often surprised him, Joey suspected a problem with his vision – he had to wear reading glasses when he read long pieces such as novels.

When he was a toddler he stared at the sun because it made his eyes water – he thought it was fun to cry without being sad. He later learned that the sun harms eyes that stare at it, but he didn’t know that when he was five years old.

At any rate, there weren’t any waves crashing into his skateboard, so he felt more confident on pavement than on water. And he was always cautious to avoid injury, unlike totally reckless Frank. As usual, today Frank was a whole ‘nother story, from Joey’s cautious nature. Frank flew off a top step, bouncing off a second and then a third before landing on the ground. After he cleared the bottom step, he and the skateboard parted company chaotically, with the board turning sideways so he couldn’t land on it. He crashed to the pavement hard on his back, which was painful but didn’t injure him.

He gave up on that trick but switched to another one that was even more difficult; he hadn’t come close to mastering an ollie, and yet here he was trying to pull off a popshuvit, which Joey thought should be plain impossible unless you did it once out of every ten thousand attempts out of sheer luck. A popshuvit is very difficult even for experienced skateboarders, what to speak of someone who only started skateboarding a couple of weeks ago. The second time Frank tried it, his leap went badly, landing on a skateboard that turned sideways, so he crashed to the ground without being able to break his fall. It looked like Frank had really done it this time. He ended up sitting on the ground, holding his knee, loudly exclaiming his pain. Joey walked over to Frank and helplessly looked down at him, hoping he was all right but fearing the worst, based on Frank's look of sheer agony, the blood seeping through his pants and his frightening protest. Then, Joey heard buzzing in his book bag. He put his right hand into the bag and felt the stone vibrating, which at first he thought was his cell phone; but then he remembered that he had left his cell phone at home when he left in the morning.

He turned away from Frank and walked close to a nearby fence so nobody could see what he was doing. He took the stone out, looked at its face and was again nearly bowled over by what he saw. Although the stone was only a couple of inches wide, he again clearly saw a detailed scene on its face in a split screen. On the left side of the screen he saw Frank landing crookedly on the board and on the right side, landing successfully. A yellow question mark

appeared as before, and Joey saw that he was again being prodded to choose. Fix it then, he thought or spoke – later in retrospect he wasn’t sure which he did.

The stone went blank but Joey continued to stare at it, not knowing what to expect.

After staring at the stone for a few seconds, Joey turned around and looked at Frank, who was no longer sitting, no longer expressing pain or bleeding; he was standing, holding his skateboard. That was a quick recovery, thought Joey ... or was it? Completely healing in thirty seconds? What just happened? Did I cure Frank's injury just by telling the stone to do it? He glanced around, hoping to find that he hadn't drawn anybody’s attention, and at first he thought that nobody was noticing him, as occurred in the classroom; this time even Frank was looking elsewhere. Then he saw that Bert Fontaine was swinging his gaze back and forth between Joey and Frank with a perplexed and disturbed look on his face. After a few seconds, Bert walked over to his buddies and spoke in his usual loud and abrasive voice, starting with, “Did you see that? Did you see that?”

Joey again stared at the still-blank stone for a couple of minutes, then decided he must have somehow hallucinated what he saw and put it back in his bag. He asked himself, Did somebody sneak a drug into a drink I had? He couldn’t remember the last liquid he drank; probably late morning – too long ago for any drug to finally hit him now, as far as he knew. But it all seemed so real, it was real, he had seen it happen … and somehow unhappen. No matter how implausible or even impossible it was, he had seen it; he had been offered it by a message on the stone and he had accepted it and the result that the stone showed him had actually occurred. There wasn’t any doubt in his mind about any of that, so there was no point in him thinking he was mesmerized like some character in the Matrix book and movie. He knew somehow that this stone was on his side, and had done this for him because he cared about his friend Frank.

He became concerned about Bert mouthing off and maybe suspecting something was up with Joey, like some kind of magic that he used to cure Frank, who was obviously uninjured and Bert was excited and might cause him trouble.

Joey precipitously abandoned the park without another word to Frank, skating away but not headed anywhere at first due to his confusion; and he decided he didn’t wan to run into Freddie and maybe talk to him about what had happened, at least not at this time. He had hoped that the spelling bee incident would be the only one, but here was another. He didn’t speak to Frank and again, deciding to pretend he didn’t know anything about what was happening or had happened to him, and at first went to the outskirts of the park and watched the kids from

a distance. Bert was still raising Cain with his buddies and pointing at Frank as he shouted at them, but Joey couldn’t hear what he was saying.

He skated straight home as fast as he could go without looking back and for the time being leaving his bicycle at Frank’s house.

6: NIGHTMARE Joey turned off his cell phone on his way home in case Frank called him to ask bothersome questions that he didn’t feel inclined to answer. He wasn’t ready to deal with Frank or even Kurt about this yet. Kurt would try to protect Joey but he might slip up and someone could find out from him about Joey’s bizarre stone, so it was better to just keep him in the dark for now. Natalie, come home! he silently beseeched her. He felt like he could tell her about the stone and thought about calling her cell phone, but then realized he should wait and tell her in person when he could also show it to her. He wished she had picked some other time to go to the Inland Empire for that educational seminar. Just a few weeks ago he would have turned to Paul, but that was no longer the case because the Paul he knew then was different than the one he knew now. It occurred to Joey that he may have gone daft because of his mania that forced him to turn into competition virtually anything he did. Or was it possible that the mania was just symptomatic of what also brought on the stone hallucinations?

Whatever was happening to him, it was getting worse and he had no clue what to do about it. Joey got home and went straight to his room without looking for his family members. He had no lock on his door, so he shoved a piece of furniture against it because he felt too disturbed to talk to anyone if it could be avoided; blocking his door was something he had never even thought about doing before, but he never had stones talking to him before either. He remembered the strange thought about his mission starting now. He asked himself, What mission? How can going crazy be a mission? He decided to jump online and look for clues.

Almost every evening he listened to a local radio show about paranormal phenomena called Moonlight, but he had always thought of it as only entertainment; that show might be useful for shaping efficacious search terms, had he afforded it more serious attention when he listened to it in the past. He typed in hallucinations seen on objects and read about nonsensical reports such as people who perceive Mother Teresa’s face on potatoes. Next, he tried strange devices, and read most of an article about sentient machinery before discovering

it was satire. After an hour of searching but remaining clueless he gave up and lay down on his bed with his pillow over his head. Later, he rolled over on his back and supinely covered his eyes with his left hand as though he could perforce stave off a debacle.

When he moved his hand to his chest he realized his heart was racing – usually a bad sign for someone who was languidly reposed. Joey felt himself sinking into a profound and potentially dangerous malaise. Loudly – but not so loud his family would hear him – he exclaimed, "Go away, leave me alone! Go bother some other kid, go bother a grown-up, anyone, just not me!" The fear and trembling that he had felt repeatedly momentarily overcame his sense that the stone was his friend, that it was on his side. Meanwhile, the book bag with the stone in it silently lay next to his feet at the foot of his bed. He looked at it and at his scruffy sneakers with their untied strings. His mom had noticed this and repeatedly warned him to tie them or he would trip and fall. Okay mom, he thought, you’re so smart, explain this weird stone! He shifted his right foot, bumping his book bag, and the stone rolled out. He stared at it as though expecting it to talk to him. In a sense, it had, telling him he had a mission and showing him how to win and how to fix Frank. But why had it done so? And it paused for his assent to the options it showed him. And did Joey’s assent really have an effect?

It was impossible for a stone or anything else to roll back and revise reality, impossible for it to do anything to anybody, except to fall on somebody without volition, by sheer dint of gravity. Is it alive? Did the stone get planted like a seed and grow out of the cliff where I found it? Joey then thought back to the inexplicable crossroads consternation he felt the first time he saw the cliff, and the anxiety before and after he saw the stone – like he unconsciously knew he was going to go through all this. There were a million questions in his head, but it looked like he had little or no hope of answering any of them.

Finally, after all this contemplation he reached for the stone, grabbed it, held it, and stared at its now-blank surface for a long time. He passed it back and forth between his hands, sensing no variation in its tactile experience or its room-temperature ordinariness that previously felt cold. Its weight wasn’t ordinary, it weighed almost nothing; a piece of styrofoam the same size would weigh more. Now it had become totally blank, uncommunicative. Where’s your screen? Joey silently demanded of it. In sleep mode? After a while, he tossed it into the air; he didn’t worry about it being damaged because he sensed that it was indestructible. At first when he tossed it up it stayed at its peak height momentarily and then floated down slowly. He tossed it up repeatedly, noting its

changing behavior. Sometimes it didn’t float back down, it just slowly floated up when he tossed it and then stayed in one place as though influenced by a draft of air; but it sometimes remained completely stationary when it reached its highest point, which feathers never did, as far as he knew. He waited almost ten minutes at one point while it stayed in place, finally reaching up and grasping it.

Was it dangerous? Could it suddenly erupt in a wrenching fireball, maybe even a nuke or Armageddon? It didn’t seem menacing or dangerous in any way – far from it, it seemed at least benign and arguably, even friendly – but looks can deceive. He felt far too stressed and burdened by al this for a little kid to handle.

He thought, Even a perfect adult like my parents couldn’t cope with this! His mom knocked on his door and asked him to come to dinner, but he yelled through it that he wasn’t hungry. After a while, he stopped tossing the stone and just lay there holding it in his right hand until he eventually fell asleep, fully clothed, on top of his bed covers.

Some time during the night, Joey awoke to see that his long, dark, hooded coat hanging on his closet door was moving, at first almost imperceptibly. Its movement became more pronounced as it began to twist and crinkle, seemingly exerting effort to free itself from the clothes hanger it was on, which it finally did. It began to glide towards Joey with the hood up and filled out as though it were covering an unseen head. The long, dangling sleeve of its right arm rose slowly, lifting forward toward Joey. A sharp object began to protrude from the sleeve, an obvious weapon that moved toward Joey, continuing to extend from the sleeve as the coat neared him. Within seconds, the weapon was inches from Joey’s face, freezing him in terror as he lay helpless on his bed. Suddenly, the stone appeared out of nowhere between Joey and the cloaked figure. On the left side of the stone’s face it showed the coat brandishing its weapon, while on the right side the coat hung on the closet door as normally did. Joey exclaimed, Stop it! and the vision immediately vanished. Neither menacing coat nor counterchecking stone remained before him; the coat hung innocently on the closet door. Joey felt the stone, still in his right hand.

At that moment, he woke up and realized it had all been a nightmare. He had previously managed to control his nightmares to some extent; for instance, he stood up to a monster that had chased him every night for a week and it disappeared and he never saw it again. But this time Joey had been helpless, unable to banish the monster; he needed intervention from the strange stone to subdue it. The next morning before heading for school Joey wrapped the stone in clothes and put it in a dresser drawer, leaving it at home in order to avoid any more public incidents. Later that day in the school gym he participated in a

standard dodge ball skirmish in which dozens of students threw volleyballs at each other from opposite sides of the gym. Anyone who touched or was touched by a ball and failed to catch it was out. Joey desperately wanted to be one of the three or four last players so he could be admired for his agility, but instead he was out early as always. He thought that if he’d had his lucky stone, he would have had a better chance. When he got home, he put the stone back in his bag and carried it around with him as before, including to school. The vague trepidation and tension he felt before he retrieved it from the cliff never fully returned; but it remained, in a specific sense, in relation to Paul. Joey ruminated over this but nothing came to him about what this had to do with his brother.

Joey was now more anxious than ever to talk to Natalie, who was due to return home in a couple of days.

7: SWIMMING IN VICTORY Natalie was back the next day but Joey had decided not to confide in her yet.

I can’t talk even to Natalie because Paul could find out about it from her. He didn't really understand his caution about Paul, but regardless of the reason, it was real. Joey was frustrated, because he was unable to break through and trust anybody with this seemingly unbearable burden. He went through his classes in a haze of distraction. After school he competed in an intramural swim meet.

Joey was one of three students in a fifty-yard freestyle event. He had never beaten Rodney Barnes during several previous races between them, though each time he had come close, and Joey was more determined than ever to beat him.

Knowing that Rodney was one of Bert’s most impudent cohorts was an additional, perpetual incentive for Joey.

The race was on. Rodney faulted, diving before the whistle blew, giving him an unfair advantage. The coach should have called a false start, but he didn’t.

Rodney turned at the other end after Joey, so Joey thought this time he had the win, only to be disappointed as Rodney touched just ahead of him, again defeating him, and for the aggravating fifth straight time. Joey knew that without the unpenalized fault, would have won. Rodney was raucously and triumphantly greeted by Bert and his other boisterous confederates as he climbed out of the pool. Joey was forced yet again to endure the sight of Rodney’s name posted on a board as the winner. Bert, ever the paragon of good sportsmanship, sidled up to Joey and said, “Too bad, loser.” and laughed, with his associates cackling mirthfully in agreement, besotted with schadenfreude. Joey was chagrined as he pulled himself out of the pool and walked into the locker room. He didn’t even

bother to shower, feeling dispirited and therefore needing to get dressed immediately and get away from this fiasco.

As he pulled his clothes out of his locker, Joey heard the stone buzzing.

Crazy stone cell phone! he thought, this time bemusedly, without the rancor of previous occasions. But he was at first afraid to retrieve it from the back pocket of his pants, thinking someone might unexpectedly come around a corner and see it. He reached into the pocket and put his right hand around the stone while looking around, wary of the possible appearance of anyone from Rodney’s usual cadre of ruffians. Although it stopped buzzing when he grasped it, the stone vibrated until he finally pulled it out and looked at it. Sure enough, there it was again, the screen that should have been too small to see. This time Joey wasn’t awed as he viewed the scene because he instantly knew that what he saw could dispel his frustration about the race. On the left side he saw Rodney winning and on the right he watched a video of the entire race, and this time Joey was declared the winner.

“Yes!” he exclaimed excitedly, disregarding the impossibility of what he was seeing. Right after Joey said this, several of Joey’s friends came into the locker room. Each of them congratulated him as though he had won. He smiled weakly and nodded without thanking them, and then locked his clothes and the stone into his locker and went out to look at the board. Where it had said “Rodney Barnes, First Place” he saw “Joey Blake, First Place” instead, just before the words were removed for the next race. Bert was nowhere in sight, having left right after Rodney clambered out of the pool – so thankfully, there were no exclamations of surprise from him this time after seeing a dramatic change of an event. Joey went home feeling satisfied because he knew he deserved to win; but was also disconcerted, unable to understand fully if he really did; he was flummoxed by what had evidently transpired. He remembered Rodney winning, actually winning, and Rodney’s name on the winner’s board, but in spite of the previous incidents with Mr. Sheridan and Frank he didn’t know if what he remembered happening truly happened, or if was he was still in the process of going crazy. Maybe I really did win that race, but because I was so uptight about it I imagined that I didn’t. Or maybe my need to win all the time has driven me nuts.

Even though his failure to shower was initially caused by his disappointment that was now fully mitigated, when he re-entered the locker room he again decided to skip the shower and go home straightaway, in case Bert showed up indignantly hollering about what happened; Joey quickly threw his clothes on and left the school. When he got home he went straight to his room even

though he knew Natalie had returned. His mom and dad might be noticing his recent hermit-like behavior, but he hoped they were distracted by other matters and didn’t notice this yet. He turned on some music, essentially using it for background noise but also vaguely hoping against hope that it might help return him to reality.

He tried to analyze himself, thinking, If this stuff keeps happening I'll go crazy if I'm not already, so sooner or later I'll have to talk to somebody about it. I can’t go on keeping it secret. Something bizarre was going on, and it wasn’t just the stone, but also his reaction to it. He was glad that he won the swim race, even if the stone stole it for him, but in his opinion the stone actually corrected an injustice by rectifying the theft of the race from him; he swam faster than Rodney and deserved to win. In fact, the mispronunciation at the spelling bee ... Frank getting hurt ... losing to Rodney ... were all followed by the stone offering corrections from what did happen to what should have happened. Did this mean that the stone could work in reverse and cause an injustice instead of fixing one? If it can’t, that means it knows right from wrong, and that means it’s thinking.

Then again, it may be programmed to only do right – assuming there is such a thing as a morality program. Although the creation of such a program seemed doubtful to him, if this stone truly performed these reality changes all bets were off and just about anything was possible, including – obviously – a morality program. And although the stone had only protected Joey from harm in a dream and not in a true waking event, he increasingly felt that the stone’s rescue of him in it was germane, not an incidental glitch in a typically irrational nightmare. Joey remembered Freddie’s spiel about contrasting realities in the nano world. He thought, Boy, would Freddie be surprised to learn about this one in our normal, macro world. Maybe this stone was a nano phenomenon that had been accidentally expanded to macro size? Were Freddie with his physics or Grandpa Karl with his knowledge of mushroom-induced realities a key to what was happening? Or was there a third explanation that he hadn’t yet thought of ?

On the other hand, maybe this was completely unrelated to what either of them had discussed with Joey. He knew that 60’s hippies ate so-called mindaltering mushrooms, so he once asked Grandpa Karl point-blank – because always seemed favorably disposed to those folks – if he ever ate any. His reply was that he did, in southern Mexico, and then Karl changed the subject; Joey wanted to know more details, but he realized it might be rude to badger his grandpa about it if he didn’t want to discuss it. Joey thought, The stone came from a mountain where native people may have eaten mind-altering plants. And maybe these plants can go beyond altering a mind – maybe they can actually alter reality. Thinking about all

this, Joey was mentally talking to himself, as he often did. He wondered if this silent talking was what was described in books as internal dialogue by the UCLA anthropologist who claimed his Yaqui guru had performed miracles that included reality manipulations via psychedelic substances.

Joey had once heard his dad label the famous anthropologist a fictionpologist, which Joey assumed meant his dad didn’t believe the accounts of Yaqui miracles. Joey had never read the books, but he had read about them. Last year Joey considered doing research on this subject but eventually decided the subject matter was too mature for him. He postulated other people finding stones like this one, shocked in the same way he was by visions on them; using them to change events; keeping them hidden from adults and from other kids.

But it seemed unlikely this had happened very often if at all: it was too big a secret to keep without someone letting it out for the world to discover. On the other hand, the secret could have gotten out and died on the vine because evidence was disregarded, suppressed or lost. He had read about important discoveries like efficient electric cars being patented only to have the patent bought up to keep them out of the market; and historically entities such as churches and governments also had the power to suppress science. In fact, scientists may be secretly holding a thousand of these magical stones recovered from space aliens in Area 51, for all Joey knew.

That evening, Joey vapidly watched music videos on top of his bed covers until, as was lately becoming his wont, he eventually slept fitfully, still wearing all of his clothes.

8: AND THE WINNER IS...

The next day, Joey was totally distracted at school, unable to focus on his classes. One thing he could focus on, however, was the school yo-yo contest in the auditorium. He no longer felt strong qualms about the stone. It was sinking in to him that the stone was going to do him no harm, that it wanted to or was programmed to only help him; maybe even programmed by alien abductors who were experimenting and watching everything that happened to Joey from a flying saucer floating invisibly ten feet above the White House. Joey let his imagination go wild with the possibilities, but after awhile he was tired of thinking about it and glad to be divested of this speculation by the yo-yo final that was scheduled for 11 AM, the last period before lunch. Any student could get a pass to attend this major school auditorium event. Davey was a good kid, but his brother Bert was bellicose, and didn’t hesitate to intimidate other kids at

Mason. Al the teachers knew about this, so when Mr. Sheridan happened along just as Bert was in the act of accosting and belligerently rebuking Kurt for his intention to dethrone Bert’s brother as yo-yo champion the next day; and noting Bert’s menacing tone, Mr. Sheridan immediately but only rhetorically pounced on him. This became a case of incensed instructor being primed to upbraid a brazen bully.

“Bert, you don’t want to be labeled by others as a querulous knave, do you?”

Mr. Sheridan asked. He continued, waxing alliterative, “or a hellacious, heinous hooligan, a deranged, disreputable dummkopf, a reprehensible, reprobate rapscallion, an abrasive, appalling, abhorrent antagonist, a caddish, contemptible, cretinous cur, a villainous, vitriolic, vituperative vexer, an obstreperous, onerous, odious overlorder, a narcissistic, nihilistic, noxious, nefarious ne'er-do-well, or an ignominious, iniquitous, impudent, irascible, impertinent, insuperable imp, do you?”

Kurt was instantly grateful that Mr. Sheridan had propitiously intervened with this demonstration of targeted erudition. At lunch in the cafeteria later, Frank told Kurt he had heard about the incident and was ready to follow up rhetorically. He nodded towards the nearby table where Bert’s arrival was awaited by his buddies and with mock solemnity intoned, “Behold Lord Bert’s minions – his coterie of cowering, craven, vassals, trucklers and sycophants!”

For Kurt, though he didn’t hear a single word he understood, this was a hoot that helped assuage his nerves wrangled by the impending yo-yo shootout with Bert’s brother Davey. Later, Bert was sitting on the school steps with his cadre of cohorts when Kurt walked out of the school. Clearly unfazed by Mr. Richardson’s earlier chastisement, Bert acerbically announced to him, “Hey Kurt, I hope you practiced your defeat speech for when you lose tomorrow.”

This comment, occurring without the knowledge of Frank’s previous sarcastic remark about his buddies, provoked a round of exaggerated laughter from Bert’s coterie of nabobs. Kurt said nothing because he knew his triumph against Bert’s brother would be an adequate response. There were three other challengers to Davey’s yo-yo crown; all other participants had already been eliminated, and this was the final round for the school championship. Rumors had gone around the school’s yo-yo enthusiasts about Kurt’s pertinacious regimen of practice, so they eagerly anticipated a battle royale between Davey and Kurt. The contest coming when it did was perfect for Kurt because he felt as ready as he was going to get. Joey got a pass from his teacher and entered the auditorium, taking a seat two rows behind Bert and his cronies. Frank and Phil arrived later, when the auditorium was almost full, so they had to sit in the back,

far behind Joey. The contest began, and after two stages it was narrowed down to Kurt and Davey; both with near-perfect routines while the eliminated contestants scored 90 or less. Now it was just these two again for the championship, and Davey performed before Joey but was cautious, picking a relatively easy cradle that scored him 97 points. Kurt went all-out with a complicated partial trapeze. The yo-yo wobbled at one point for a split second, but Kurt controlled it. The audience applauded wildly amid a clear consensus that it was more impressive than what Davey did because of the much greater difficulty. When the final scores of 97 for Davey and 96 for Kurt went up, Davey’s friends stood up and cheered and Bert shouted and jutted his pudgy clenched fist into the air.

Bert turned around looked right at Joey mocking him, wiggling his stubby middle finger down from his right eye as though wiping away a tear. Bert’s buddies, sitting all around him, watched this and laughed uproariously. Joey defiantly stared back at him, silently declaring, Not so fast, Berty-boy! Joey was infuriated. The audience had applauded far more for Kurt, who had clearly won, considering the complexity of what he did. The cheering and laughing of Bert and his buddies outraged Joey, so he was happy to hear buzzing coming from his stone. Quickly he pulled it out of his book bag, and sure enough, on its face he saw he expected to see: on the left side Kurt with a score of 96 on the screen behind him; and on the right, showing he scored 98 with Davey at 97. Joey squinted and mentally yelled at the stone, Yeah! Do it! and immediately thereafter the auditorium erupted into pandemonium. Kurt grimaced rather than smiled, even as the audience shouted, KURT! KURT! KURT! and an adult walked up to him with a large ribbon that said, FIRST PLACE, YO-YO CHAMPIONSHIP, MASON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL and pinned it on the front pocket of his shirt. Davey, looking discomfited but unlike his brother always a good sport, walked over to Kurt and shook his hand.

With a look of shock and dismay on his face, Bert abruptly turned around and faced Joey again. He did it so fast and unexpectedly that Joey still had the stone prominently viewable in his left hand, virtually on display. Bert had previously seen Joey looking down at his hand before an event changed at the skateboard park, and now he accusingly pointed at the stone. Over the din of applause, Joey could hear Bert shouting at him, “What's that thing? What did you do? What did you do?”

Joey closed his hand over the stone and stuffed into his pocket. There was a humongous smirk struggling to get out of him, but he managed to suppress it, otherwise he might find himself in a real fight. Joey had taken to heart Grandpa

Karl’s hippie motto of Make love, not war. Kurt looked disconcerted in his moment of triumph, less like a winner than like someone confounded by an imbroglio. He walked down a small flight of steps from the stage and positioned himself in front of it, where his friends could join him. Joey, all smiles now, summarily squeezed past other students to get to the aisle and approach Kurt.

The audience filed out, loudly buzzing about the event. The entire class period had transpired, so most students headed out promptly after Kurt won to avoid being late to lunch. Bert at first stood in the aisle, protesting to his friends and to Davey, but Davey grabbed his arm and helped the crowd push him backwards towards the exit until he gave up, turned around and exited the auditorium, disgruntled and continuing to loudly register his disapproval. He wound up in the hallway shouting epithets about Joey until a faculty member who happened along broke up his impromptu meeting with his buddies and shooed all of them away.

Joey said, “Great, Kurt, that was great!” but Kurt replied blandly without returning Joey’s smile saying, “Thanks, Joey.”

Kurt’s nearly morose countenance caused Joey to wonder if maybe a great victory is sometimes overwhelming in ways that were unfamiliar to him, like when Joey won the swim race ... or does Kurt know or suspect that it was changed? And maybe Bert and others also know? Judging by Bert's reaction to the skateboard incident and to this contest, it appeared that other people besides Joey could perceive that an event had been changed; though apparently not in all cases, such as when Bert didn't see Joey win the swim event – if he had, Joey should have heard about it by now. Or, he thought, maybe Bert found out when he was blocks away because Joey didn’t change the event until several minutes after it occurred? Did Bert find out and go back only to learn that Joey was already gone? Anyway, there was no doubt at this point that Bert suspected or knew that Joey was causing these changes. Bert sure acted like he knew. How had Joey transformed from being astonished by this stone to enthusiastically invoking its magic in such a brief span of time? Where is all this headed? he wondered. But for now, this consideration was dwarfed by the pleasure of Kurt’s victory – and Bert’s defeat. Nobody among Joey’s closest buddies – Kurt, Frank or Phil – was in any of his afternoon classes, so Joey attended all of them.

After school, Joey turned off his cell phone to avoid hearing from baffled friends, fearing they might grill him about Kurt's victory. He went straight home by a circuitous route in case Bert was laying for him and first looked through Natalie’s open door into her room, but she wasn’t there. He then retired to his own room, carefully stashed the stone, turned on blaring rock music and took

up work on a model airplane that he had spent about fifteen minutes a day building for the last month; he only got to it when he had nothing else to do, and at the moment he hoped it would distract him from the yo-yo controversy.

As he did this he also watched a baseball game that was being broadcast online.

Joey loved baseball, so he watched it every chance he got. His dad knew staff members of a Stanford alumni startup that had an alpha service for interrupt popups of preset live feeds from specific online sites. The service was so new that their family’s home was one of only a dozen that had it. It enabled him to enjoy games of his local teams that were broadcast online without having to visit their sites because the service kicked in and interrupted with a popup as soon as the game program commenced. Joey and his dad sometimes used this service to watch live-stream baseball games from other countries including Mexico, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

The popup was unobtrusive because its window was small and the viewer could either expand or close it. One preset had just opened when Joey entered his room showing the start of an exhibition game between two Mexican baseball teams playing in Guadalajara. Joey had chosen this preset because he knew enough Spanish to understand most of the pre-game discussion of teams, players, managers, etc. as well as the play-by-play during the game. He didn’t bar the door this time because he didn’t no longer felt like he was going crazy and guys like Bert who suspected something would never dare show up at his home – and if he did he would have to contend with a 40-ounce baseball bat because Joey had no intention of giving up his stone without an all-out knock-down fight to the finish. Soon, he recognized Kurt’s reliably anemic knock on his door that he could barely hear, so Joey opened it with a smile.

Kurt came in and sat on Joey’s bed and immediately said in a plaintive tone, “Joey, I gotta talk to you about what happened today. This is gonna sound strange to you, but I’m not really sure I won today against Davey.”

Joey first looked away from Kurt, down at his carpeted floor. “Whaddaya mean, you got 98 points, one more than Davey. And every kid there knew you won, you heard them cheering for you. Davey was good, but you were better.”

Kurt put his face in his hands and rubbed it like a wizened old man who hadn’t had enough sleep, then said, “Yeah, but I know I had 96, I remember it, and I remember Davey winning with 97 and he was declared the winner, and then suddenly my score changed to 98. I know it sounds crazy, it’s the weirdest thing I ever saw, and it’s not just me. Frank and Phil said they saw the same thing.”

Kurt's protestations weren't a surprise to Joey because there had been plenty of signs that multiple people could remember how events were before they were changed. Joey realized that he was going to have to make Kurt the first one to be in the know about the stone; Kurt was his best friend apart from Natalie, but she wasn’t available to become the first one to know the truth. He figured the stone wasn’t invisible to all other people because it was pretty obvious that Bert had pointed right at it. He thought, But maybe it was invisible to some people and not to others. There could be huge variations in how other people perceived or experienced the stone or its works. He thought, I need to observe Kurt now to see if this is the same for him as it is for me.

He told Kurt, “Okay, you’re right. Watch this game, I’m going to try to do something that will show you what happened.”

He felt some qualms about changing an event in the game although he knew that he wouldn’t be changing baseball history because it was an exhibition game, so no statistic from this game would significantly endure. If it had been an official game he would have left it alone. Still, he would do this with reluctance because changing any baseball event seemed almost like sacrilege to him. He just didn’t have time on this short notice to figure out something to do that would be absolutely innocuous. On the other hand, there was no way of knowing with certainty that even using the stone to reattach a piece of toenail after it was clipped off was completely innocuous.

There could be ripples or reverberations that showed up later, perhaps even a world-ending cataclysm caused by that toenail restoration. Joey remembered Mr. Sheridan lecturing in class about how there might have been an advanced sentient civilization a trillion years before ours, but when someone using a communications device got a popup on it warning that clicking OK on a popup that appeared on it would be a fatal error, he went ahead and clicked it and inadvertently destroyed his entire universe. Notwithstanding these alarming conjectures, Joey had to bring Kurt into his confidence, and he had to do it now.

This was no time to get cold feet because of hypothetical baseball sacrilege, toe nail Armageddons or any other implausible doomsday scenarios. Kurt was impatient and asked Joey to just tell him, never mind the baseball game, but Joey explained to Kurt that he had to see this with his own eyes to believe it, and Joey knew no other way to show him at this moment since Kurt was so suddenly insisting on knowing.

Joey said, “Just wait a short time and you’ll understand everything.”

Until now, Joey had only reacted to the stone, and he wasn’t certain that he could do something proactive with it but he felt confident that he could. Every

time the stone had offered to change something, it was something that Joey was upset about, so this time Joey would pretend to be upset and hope that the stone would buy into it. Maybe it could only detect his feelings, but not read his mind, but anyway Joey thought either way it would simply do what he wanted. He decided to wait for something dramatic to happen in the baseball game before he invoked his stony friend. His previous reservations about doing this had vanished, and Joey had become comfortable partnering with the strange wizard.

Interviews and analysis had culminated and the game was about to start, so this was ideal timing for a Lucky Stone demonstration.

The very first pitch of the game was blasted over the center field wall for a home run, but the pitcher seemed to settle down and easily dispatched the next three batters. In the bottom half of the inning with a runner on, the cleanup hitter smacked his bat straight into the meat of a pitch and launched a line drive towards the left field stands. The left fielder backed up to the wall and leaped into the air, but the ball glanced off the top of his glove and landed in the seats for a home run. The scoreboard changed from 0-1 to 2-1. Joey closed his eyes and imagined a fake disappointment that the fielder missed the ball, and the stone began to buzz. Joey took it out of his book bag and stared at its face.

Within seconds, the split screen appeared that Joey now accepted as normal, showing the ball being missed on one side, caught on the other. Joey turned the stone toward Kurt, expecting a reaction of amazement, but Kurt only asked, “What’s that, a rock?”

Joey turned the stone towards himself again. The face still showed the left fielder missing on the left side and catching it on the right, but Joey didn’t wait for the question mark because now he knew now how it worked. Right, that’s it, catch it, he muttered, and what followed on the broadcast screen was the fielder being ecstatically greeted by his teammates as he ran in towards the dugout after catching the fly ball. The scoreboard once again showed the fielding team leading 1-0 because home run had been erased from it. Joey turned to Kurt again and asked, “Did you see what I did?”

Kurt gawked at the screen, his eyes wide open, and shouted, “You did that?

What did you do? How did you do that?”

Joey thought, Good! Kurt knows what really happened and he knows what I changed it to. Then he asked, “Didn’t you see what was on the stone when I showed it to you?”

Kurt looked at Joey with worry on his face and said, “It’s a round stone, so what?” and Joey now knew for sure that Kurt hadn’t seen the baseball scene on it.

“You look spooked, Kurt. I can explain what happened.”

Kurt answered, “I don’t know what’s going on. I gotta go, Joey, see ya tomorrow.” and ran out of the room, catching Joey by surprise and disregarding his entreaties to wait, to stop, to come back so he can explain it to him.

When Kurt opened the front door he almost crashed into Paul, who was coming in and asked him, “Hi, Kurt, where’s the fire?”

Kurt just said, “Sorry, see ya Paul.” and kept going.

He hopped on his bike and rushed straight to the clubhouse, where he found Phil alone. He excitedly recounted the events to Phil, who was dumbfounded by the story in spite of the previous events that he had already heard about. He was busily drafting another pirate scenario, so his first question was whether Kurt thought Joey had obtained the ability to discover sunken treasure, though piracy wasn’t really anything more than a hobby for him and his real passion was to study the effect of climate change on the world’s ecology. He was at the auditorium where he saw the changed verdict in the yo-yo contest and afterwards heard confirmation from Frank and others that they saw what he saw. He nevertheless quizzed Kurt skeptically about what transpired at Joey’s house because he wasn’t there, so he couldn’t attest to what Kurt said he saw. In spite of the agreement of Joey and Kurt’s closest friends about what happened, they noticed that other students they talked to expressed total ignorance about the change and said they only saw Kurt’s score once and that it had been higher than Davey’s. This discrepancy between various accounts had caused them to wonder if they had been so anxious to see their friend and clubmate win that they had incorrectly perceived a winning score by Davey at first that never occurred. Basically, even though they all liked Davey, they hated his brother Bert and would have given their right arms to see him grovel in defeat, and in fact they were overjoyed to see him protesting histrionically after Kurt was declared the winner.

Phil listened to Kurt’s story about the baseball game and then told him what he and other close friends had concluded, that there was no change in results and that the perception that there was had been brought on by anxiety and wasn’t real. Kurt then went home and waited to hear from his other friends when they heard what happened, and also presumably from Joey. He began to feel pangs of guilt about running away from his best friend in a cowardly manner, but his shock at seeing the baseball event change after something just like it happened at the yo-yo contest had been more than he could bear.

Paul asked Joey after Kurt left, “What’s up with Kurt? He looked like he seen a ghost. You got a ghost in your room? If you do I bet it’s Mickey Mantle.”

Paul said this in a rather sardonic tone, knowing that Joey idolized the Yankee star, but it didn’t go over well with Joey, who simply shrugged as though he were himself mystified by Kurt’s behavior, and ignored both Paul’s question and his remark; and went to the kitchen for a glass of milk. When he returned to the living room Paul wasn’t there, so he went back into his room, thinking I let the cat out of the bag and maybe opened up a can of worms. He quickly ran out of metaphorical adages to explain to himself what had just happened with Kurt, who had seen nothing on the stone but had seen the change in the baseball play of the online broadcast. But he reassured himself, thinking, Who would believe Kurt even if he told people about it? Nobody! Not even their best friends … maybe … or maybe they would …

Joey then asked himself again if this could be black magic. Was he selling his soul to the devil by using the stone instead of getting rid of it? Why did he fluctuate between believing the stone was on his side and that it might be evil?

Is that why Kurt ran away like he was being chased by a herd of rhinos? Again Joey wished he could talk to Natalie about it, but she still wasn’t home. To him, she was as smart as an adult and probably more trustworthy about something like this. Joey was sure that Kurt would calm down and ultimately stand by him as he had always done in the past, but this whole thing was becoming too complicated and too big for kids to handle; the pressure on Joey was on its way to becoming impossible to tolerate. Joey again slept fitfully on his bed that night, again wearing all his clothes.

He left his cell phone turned on, hoping Kurt would call him, but it didn’t ring the entire evening, not even once.

PART II ENTER THE FEDS 9: MOONLIGHT In his radio station located a few miles west of San Jose, California, Forrest Jenkins shook his head as he washed his hands shortly before he was due to go on the air with his nightly radio show he called Moonlight. He was thinking about the call he got on his show last night, from a fellow named Jake who claimed to have invented a device that could detect life within a light year of the earth. Jake said he scanned the skies with it and determined that there were two different alien groups lingering outside our atmosphere, both of them usually

ensconced on the dark side of the moon. Not only had he found them, he knew what they looked like and what their mission was. He said they periodically visited the earth and abducted humans for experiments. He said his alien detector was a prototype and that when he stabilized it he would make it available for Jenkins to test for authenticity ... it wasn’t unusual for fakers to sweeten the deal by asseverating an impending authentication of their claims that subsequently was repeatedly postponed and never actually occurred.

Jake’s story was way out, but Jenkins listened respectfully to him, as he had decided long ago to never evince the slightest bit of skepticism when he heard fantastic stories from his callers. He had heard it all, just about, and knew much if not all of it had to be some kind of hoax or fantasy; but if he reacted negatively to any one of them, some others might not call him at all. And he needed all their calls, they were his bread and butter. Jenkins maintained the same noncommittal regard towards all callers, including the ones who said they had ghosts haunting them or aliens visiting them or had calculated or discovered when the earth would end, usually based on secret codes gleaned from the Bible or an obscure hieroglyphic. Often Jenkins heard from the same caller for months, only to lose touch with him, presumably because of what Jenkins called phenomenon surfeit. Anyway, he suspected that one or more of the way-out stories he had heard were accurately conveyed descriptions of reality that weren’t scientifically provable. It was time to go on the air, so Jenkins sat down, put his headset on and waited as the intro music announced the beginning of his program.

At the appropriate moment, he interrupted and faded the music, then explained to his listeners who he was and what his show was about. He started the show with a brief monologue during which he reported on recent earthquakes and other disasters that may portend the end of the world, then went into his calls. The first one was none other than good old Jonesy from St. Louis who began with “Mr. Jenkins, I called you a few times before about my ability to follow the progress of aliens that hover near the earth. I just thought you would want to hear about the latest data that I’ve picked up with my remote viewing.” Jenkins thought, Jonesy should get together with Jake. They’re like peas from the same pod. Jonesy went on to describe aliens as having skin of various colors and that some of them were from the Orion Nebula and the others from Andromeda.

After Jonesy was done, there were body-snatch calls and others about ghosts before a fellow named Tex checked in from Orlando with a treatise about time in our universe, which he alleged is different than time in other universes. Tex

said he had called Jenkins a few weeks before; Jenkins didn’t remember that call at all but he politely pretended to vaguely recollect it. Tex explained some of his theories about time, much of it learned from his late mentor who showed him how to rigorously track ancient time stretches in the Americas. Then Tex said, “The reason I’m calling you is because I’ve discovered disturbances in our current time’s progress.”

“And what would those disturbances be?” asked Jenkins engagingly.

“As you may recall, I have certified extra sensory perception, including the ability to view remotely, and I can trace the movement of time in several universes. I’ve recently located multiple local disturbances, something I only saw once before in 10 years of tracking time,” explained Tex. “Do you remember the recent reports about the appearance of large moving orange lights in a dozen places around the world?” Jenkins acknowledged that he did and Tex continued, “Well, I looked at some of those places and I found that the time disturbances are also located in those same regions. There were actual time reversals occurring intermittently in those regions during the last month. I haven’t been able to pinpoint the locations precisely – only the regions, which are awful big, some of them are hundreds of square miles. I do have one particular city in mind, but I’m still working on that one, I’m not at all sure about it. But I’m confident that the time disturbances are really happening because I detected and located them before I even heard about the orange lights.”

Jenkins asked Tex how he would compare his experience to those of other remote viewers such as the ones he previously had on his show Moonlight.

“Mr. Jenkins, I’ve heard them other viewers on your show but I didn’t really pay them much mind. I don’t necessarily keep up with everything that’s going on with paranormal phenomena like other viewers and those lights because I usually stay focus first on my own pursuits such as my own viewing so I can show others that I’m not influenced by related events. I already know I’m not influenced by them but other folks would think I was, so I carefully document the times and places to be able to show which happened first. That’s why it was only after I viewed these recent time stretches, as my late mentor used to call them, that I looked for corroborative evidence. I can send you the graphs and other data showing the correlations.”

Jenkins asked Tex to fax or email this to him, then went on to converse with various other callers. About half an hour later, Tex’s data arrived in Jenkins’s fax machine. It didn’t bother Jenkins that Tex claimed to be a remote viewer – so did lots of his callers; the claim wasn’t by itself a disqualification from Jenkins’

point of view. It’s like the humorous adage that says, Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t someone out to get you. Similarly, just because these callers fantasized didn’t mean one or more of them weren’t at some point actually seeing aliens or actually and successfully remotely viewing.

He saw that the crudely prepared graphs did indeed show correlations with the orange lights – if the lights were accurately placed. But were the time stretches valid? This was something to ponder but perhaps never figure out definitely. He often received data that looked good, but which he could neither ultimately confirm nor disconfirm. He had discovered during his conversations with his good friend Jorge Donovan that they both had this repeated experience in common. At any rate, he asked his interns to have a look at the graphs and see if they could come up with something; if they didn’t, nothing was lost.

Checking the story could be a fairly lengthy assignment because they couldn’t naively accept Tex’s claims of where the orange lights were previously seen – they would have to start out by researching news reports to find out when and where they were observed around the world. With his huge listening base that included paid subscribers to his podcasts and his archived shows, Jenkins had a nine figure income and could therefore afford a paid staff of four workers, including a secretary – who was his wife – and currently he also had a pair of unpaid interns who were interested in breaking into the radio business.

They were bright college students who were more interested in practicing research than they were in the topic of paranormal phenomena, but in spite of their evident skepticism they always did a good job, in Jenkins’ view. Soon they reported mixed results to Jenkins; yes, there were orange lights over upstate New York a few years back, but no, there were no reports that they found about strange events such as the clock that changed time or the stone that was found in a dead man’s grip. And when they plotted the more recent spate of orange lights they turned out to be exactly the same as the one Tex faxed to Jenkins.

They also found a news blurb about an amazing stone with special powers that was found in a fish by a boy but then stolen from him and purportedly acquired by terrorists, but there were evidently no further details available about exactly who, what, where and when.

Just before he put the graphs, charts and maps away Jenkins noticed that one of the regions Tex had spoken of was in Jenkins’s own neck of the woods, about fifty miles south of San Francisco.

10: WHO, ME?

The day after showing Kurt what his lucky stone could do, Joey managed to avoid his friends and Bert at school, including Frank, by skipping Mr. Sheridan's class; he was in no mood to be grilled by anybody about recent events. He more or less sneaked home, where he was disappointed to again find that Natalie wasn’t home. Strangely, she had been home for twenty-four hours but he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her yet. Meanwhile, his closest friends met at Frank’s clubhouse and deputized Freddie, as the smartest among them, to approach Joey by himself as their emissary; they didn’t want to risk alienating him by storming his home en masse.

Paul, who lately seemed to live elsewhere most of the time, was in the midst of one his rare visits to their family home, but he was in his room and didn’t hear Freddie knock on the front door. Joey answered it and Freddie him into his bedroom and sat down on Joey’s bed, the only other sitting place besides the chair at the desk where Joey continued to sit at his computer watching a music video as he was doing when Freddie arrived.

“Joey, Kurt is going nuts and saying crazy stuff about you, that you can change events on the Net. What in the bejeezis is going on?"

Joey made an impromptu decision to play dumb, responding with, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” and then pretended to return his attention to the video he was watching that he actually didn’t care about, telling Freddie to watch the baseball game with him that was being broadcast live. But Freddie persisted, and in a more insistent tone due to his perception that Joey might be wanting to give him some kind of runaround instead of responding directly to what Freddie was telling him.

“Kurt says you have some way to use a video to change reality. I can’t even believe I’m even saying that! Kurt, Frank and Phil told me what happened when Kurt won the yo-yo tournament, but it has to be mass hysteria because it’s not possible it’s real." Freddie bellowed, obviously losing his cool, "Tell me what’s going on!” and Joey at this point realized the game was up and decided to reveal the truth to Freddie. And maybe he could help Joey figure out what, if anything, to do about the mysterious stone.

Because Paul’s room was close enough for him to detect Freddie’s strident plea, his curiosity was aroused. Out of curiosity, he came out of his room across the hallway from Joey’s and positioned himself outside of his door, which Freddie hadn’t completely closed when he entered the room; but Paul could neither adequately hear nor see what went on in Joey’s room because Joey always played his radio quite loud even when he was simultaneously hearing a play-byplay announcement of a sports event. He nudged himself as close to the door

as he could while positioning himself to look like he was about to knock on it, in case someone came along or the door was opened from within. He could see Joey’s computer monitor and part of Freddie’s back but he could see no part of Joey at all.

Joey explained to Freddie the history of the stone and what it could do.

Then he showed him another sports example, with a change he was able to make to a football game re-run that was being broadcast online which he had Freddie find on his own, without input from Joey. The video showed a wide receiver just barely missing a last-second pass from the quarterback, then, as he did with Kurt, Joey turned the stone toward Freddie when the stone displayed the options, but Freddie said he saw only a blank round stone. A few seconds later after Joey stared at the stone the same video showed the same receiver catching the pass for a touchdown. Joey didn’t consider the implications of changing an event by accessing it on a video long after the event occurred; he knew the passing team had lost by three touchdowns, so he assumed that the ultimately losing team scoring one wouldn’t change the outcome of the game.

Nor did he bother to consider whether what he just did changed the actual event or only changed the recorded video, because he had seen that the stone's track record up to this time was to change actual events – actual, historical facts.

Because the judges all knew their scores and would notice a discrepancy, he believed that Lucky didn’t change only Kurt’s yo-yo score but rather changed one or more of the minds of judges, forcing a changed calculation of the score.

Freddie watched the event that transpired without commenting and silently contemplated it for a while afterwards; at a loss for words, not wanting to challenge either Joey’s integrity or his sanity. Joey was his friend whom he up to this moment had always trusted and believed. Finally, he said, “Joey, this better not be a trick, you can't do that to us. We’re your friends and brothers, so I can’t bring myself to doubt you. Even though we’re just kids in a club together, I know you and I have as much faith and respect for you as I do for my own brother Frank and the rest of my family. So okay, you did change the guy so he caught the ball ... somehow using that thing in your hand. Did you have this device when you came to see me? I thought I was describing something unbelievable to you about the nano world, but maybe you had something in your pocket that’s way beyond all of that. There has to be a rational explanation for this because there’s no crystal balls or magic stones in real life. And don’t forget that if it’s real somebody could steal it from you and use it for bad ends.

Besides, you don’t know what it might do – maybe it will destroy our whole

world for all we know. You may be playing with fire ... or worse. If this thing is for real you gotta turn it over to scientists.”

Joey knew this question of turning it over to adults was going to come from his friends sooner or later, but he had already thought about it and had no intention of giving up the stone, at least not yet. For one thing, although he liked science, he didn’t trust scientists; although many of them were great humanitarians like the most famous example Albert Einstein, but many of them could be cold-blooded Darwinists, according to what he had read. There was no guarantee that the government wouldn’t use science to manipulate the stone and turn it into a nation-destroying weapon that would become the worst scourge in history. Moreover, he knew that this stone was his ticket to freedom from humiliating defeats by the likes of Bert and his thug friends. And he was thinking with growing confidence that the stone was with him for a mission, though exactly what that was still escaped him. He and Freddie bantered back and forth about the miraculous stone, and then Freddie left after assuring Joey that his friends would stand by him no matter what and help him deal with this incredible experience. When Freddie turned abruptly and opened the door to leave he ran smack into Paul, still stationed there; Paul didn’t get a chance to lift his hand as though he were about to knock as he had planned to do if he knew Freddie was approaching it. He and Freddie exchanged greetings, and after Freddie left Joey’s bedroom and the house, Paul came in and asked, “Joey, what did I just see? You played two different videos, right? If you didn't, you got something we could really use!”

Joey didn’t want to answer any of Paul’s questions, so he grabbed his bag and pushed past him saying, “I didn’t do nuthin! I gotta go, I’ll be back and talk to you later.”

He ran out of the house into the world that the stone had made crazy. Paul followed him, practically ranting and raving, but Joey sped off on his bike, leaving Paul grumbling on the driveway. What’s happened to Paul? he asked himself. Only a few weeks ago he would have been the first person I would turn to about all this, and here I am having to run away from him!

Joey was amazed. Just yesterday he was the only person who knew about the stone, and now all his friends knew about it and his brother wanted to use it for something stupid. Pretty soon maybe the whole school would know about it and after that the whole world. And then what would happen? Would the government take it away from him and lock him up? It was time to make a plan of some sort; he needed to avoid being caught unawares.

But there was no crisis yet in his estimation, as nothing was likely to happen so fast. He decided he needed Kurt to get over his shock and help him protect the stone. Joey wanted to talk to Kurt first by phone, so they could arrange to meet at a discreet location, such as the library branch where Joey was now headed.

However, Kurt didn’t answer Joey’s calls, so he would just have to go to Kurt’s house and hope to find him there.

11: I SPY Dr. Jorge Donovan was a covert National Security Agency operator living in Phoenix. No, not a spy or a hit man, just a researcher, and he enjoyed his work.

He was amply paid by the NSA to keep tabs on paranormal phenomena – aliens from Mars, astral projection, faith healers, fortune cookies ... whatever suited his fancy as long as he could justify it in his reports. He was kind of like men in black but without police powers or contact with actual aliens. If someone came along who could read the mind of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or our ambassador to China the feds didn’t want to be the last ones to know about it; or to hear a rumor about it but have no capability to track the rumor’s source down until it was too late to prevent calamitous damage to our national security.

For instance, someone might converse with a crucial figure who was long gone such as Yasser Arafat and learn something that could compromise American foreign policy. Donovan had noticed indications that there were at least two other NSA psychologists like him, keeping tabs on paranormal phenomena, and of course the feds covertly funded university research on the subject. He had only a few patients for his own clinical psychology practice and therefore plenty of patience to fetter out the facts in these phenomena. He had become very knowledgeable in the arena and had done lots of direct investigations, followed by his meticulously prepared reports of academic quality that he sent via secure communications to his superiors, primarily to his immediate boss Vernon Preston in Washington.

He took his job seriously, maintaining an office in his home that was exclusively devoted to his job, not shared with a hodgepodge of sundry pursuits.

But it was, admittedly, easy work, much of which consisted of surfing online at home. Occasionally, he had to personally investigate; for example, he recently traveled to Colombia and the Philippines. But the traveling in both cases was pleasurable, not a burden on him by any means. He found out while listening to the Moonlight radio show about practitioners who engaged in faith healing and

contacting the dead in the Philippines. He flew there and found a compound devoted to faith healing, but he wasn’t impressed. However, in his report about it he came to no airtight conclusion about the efficacy of the practices that he observed in the compound.

Later, in Colombia he examined stories about zombies, and after interviewing pathologists there he concluded that the so-called zombies were still alive and victims of a drug that had disabled them mentally. His monthly reports about his investigations were often inconclusive. He wondered how often anybody actually really read his diligently cogitated explications. On the other hand, not only was he paid by the NSA for these reports, he managed to double-dip by getting them published by national publications that paid him for the articles he submitted to them. Up to now, the NSA had never refused him permission to publicly publish a report about a topic that he had prepared for them. He was always mindful of debunkers. Many years before in Germany, for instance, journalists interviewed dozens of prominent fortune tellers and found that not one of them had foretold the Princess Diane tragedy – so much for fortune tellers predicting the future! He regularly kept tabs on well-known debunkers of magic to see what they came up with. Could someone really cover a jumbo jet with a huge blanket that would then collapse because the plane disappeared? Well, no, these are tricks, gimmicks, legerdemain, sleight of hand ... er ... sleight of jumbo jet. But he was dubious about debunkers who seemed to ascribe an immorality to believing people could contact their long-lost loved ones.

To him there was an important distinction between being damagingly deluded and being benignly and even perhaps beneficially illuded. Harboring a benevolent illusion had defensible emotional benefits, in his opinion, and during his various interviews by journalists as an expert on paranormal phenomena he had recently begun making this assertion, to the dismay of other psychologists who publicly disputed it. As far as he knew, this could be a position on the topic that was unique to him, but he hadn’t taken the time to research and see if other psychologists agreed with him or originated this notion before him. At any rate, he was mostly grateful to debunkers because they helped him refine boundaries for his work. In a new NSA message he just received he read the cryptic words, “Check Tex on Moonlight last night. FULLY INVESTIGATE.” The message came as always from Preston and was only the second time he had received a full investigation order during his five years working for the NSA. He immediately replied to confirm he was commencing this new assignment.

The capitalized words in the message were good news because it meant he had

carte blanche to travel anywhere required to do the job – even to Nepal or to New Zealand. He would love to come up with a Nepalese or New Zealand angle on this, but he didn’t even know if Tex was in Texas or Australia or where.

Preston surely knew from Donovan’s previous reports that Donovan taped and sped through the Moonlight show several times a week. In fact, he had appeared on Moonlight a dozen times as a guest to analyze and discuss paranormal phenomena from the point of view of a clinical psychologist.

He wondered why this investigation had such high priority, but he figured maybe (or maybe not) he would later find that out. Preston was more than Donovan’s supervisor, they were good friends and had spent plenty of time golfing and lunching together during the two years that Donovan was based in Washington. Donovan always pushed the humor envelope with Preston, kidding him with racial jokes about his Nigerian ancestry every chance he got. And in kind, Preston’s rejoinders focused on Donovan’s illegal Mexican heritage. Due to this friendship, their banter back and forth, whether in letters, phone calls or messages was always replete with gags, but this new message from Preston was uncharacteristically terse.

When Donovan first lunched with Moonlight’s host Forrest Jenkins in San Jose to discuss the possibility of him appearing on Moonlight, they had hit it off enormously due to the similarity of their tastes. Both of them loved boating, skiing, the Sierras and specifically Lake Tahoe. Donovan became both Jenkins’ friend and his favorite guest on Moonlight. Eventually, Donovan went as far as telling Jenkins that he received federal funding for his paranormal research, but not that he was a covert NSA agent. When Donovan appeared on the show Jenkins was proud to recite to his listeners Donovan’s impressive credentials – especially the Harvard and Princeton doctorates because it bolstered Jenkins’ own putative legitimacy. Whenever Donovan made extended visits to the Bay Area they often dined together and several times they jointly visited the Sierras, bringing their wives.

They shared many weekends at Jenkins’ beautiful home at Lake Tahoe, boating in the summer and skiing in the winter. Not that Jenkins had the only beautiful home at Tahoe – it seemed to Donovan that all of the mountains around Tahoe were panoramas of large and beautiful homes. And Tahoe has not only a true winter with snow, but a true arboreally deciduous autumn, unlike the ubiquitous evergreen that Donovan had seen everywhere else in that state.

He wistfully remembered the good old days when he and his wife joined Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins as a foursome for entertainment.

That was before Rita made her unannounced and unexplained disappearance from Donovan’s life, taking both of their kids with her. Donovan constantly groused over this unexpected development in what he had thought was his blissful life, and drastically swung back and forth between continued compassion towards his troubled wife and fierce resentment that she never revealed to him the demons that must be haunting her. He kept a stiff upper lip at his office and accepted the commiserations he received from his friends and acquaintances with an apparent equanimity that he wasn’t truly feeling, but nobody would benefit from him emoting about something over which he had no control; in fact, if he did he suspected that it would only enhance the concern of those around him who may already worry about him having some kind of breakdown.

He retrieved and played his Moonlight recording from the previous evening.

Mostly, Moonlight was about ghosts, Area 51, the Face on Mars, invisible structures on the moon and other creature features that had saturated the paranormal journalista scene. He didn’t know what to think about Area 51 – it certainly was a dishonest government story, but the government may have had another reason to lie other than to hide dead or living aliens from space.

Donovan had a copy of a recorded telephone conversation decades after the incident between the first intelligence officer who recovered material from the crash site and his son. He obviously had been forced to take part in a charade in which the crash craft was falsely portrayed as a weather balloon. What it actually was remains a mystery today.

The caution exhibited by the father during that conversation was palpable, presumably arising from a need to avoid mentioning something that he had been forbidden to discuss. But if this man was holding a secret about the site he took it to his grave. Donovan had never had an assignment that threw light on the famous Area 51 incident and doubted that the secrets about it would be revealed during his lifetime. He speed-played the audio recording until he got to Jenkins talking to Tex about half an hour into the program and noted that he said he was calling from Orlando. Unfortunately, the recording filled with static a minute into the interview, so Donovan could only catch the beginning and the end. It was time to give his friend Jenkins a ring. He would first call his office and then try his home number. Jenkins’ wife Wanda was also his secretary and answered the office phone when Donovan called.

“Oh, hi Jorge, it’s been awhile, where you been hiding?”

“Hi, Wanda. I’m still in Arizona, nothing much exciting going on here lately, no mysterious Phoenix lights or space invasions to crow about.”

“Yeah, same here, mostly bumps in the night. Any news about Rita?”

“No, I’m still waiting to hear from her. But anyway, I heard a guy named Tex on your show last night, and he might provide me with an excuse to come and visit you. What he said sort of chimes in with some other reports I’ve heard. Do you remember him?”

“I’m sorry, Jorge, I didn’t hear that segment. Let me get Forrest, you talk to him. He asked me this morning if you called, so maybe he’s becoming a clairvoyant now. Come to think of it, he got a fax from someone named Tex. It sure is nice to hear from you. When are you coming to see us?”

“I hope I can come over there soon. I’m looking forward to seeing both of you also. In fact, I’m sure I will, based on a new assignment.”

“Great, hold on. He’ll be right with you.”

After waiting on hold a few minutes, Donovan heard the mellifluous, baritone voice of Forrest Jenkins on the line saying, “Hey, Jorge, what’s up, long time no hear.”

“Not much going on Forrest, we’ll have to get together. I’m in my less than happy home in hot dry and arid Phoenix right now as usual. I'm interested in what that caller named Tex had to say last night on your show. I’m hoping he’ll become my excuse to come over to the coast and visit you.”

“Oh, you mean the time guy? Yeah, he sent me a data fax last night.”

“Well, I’d like to see his data and talk to him if I could.”

“Are you going to shut him up so he can’t expose a nefarious government operation?” asked Jenkins in jest.

“No, nothing like that Forrest. You know me, I just do research. If you could get me in touch with him, I would really appreciate it.”

“I just hope you get to him before the aliens do. We’ve had quite a spate of alien stories the last few days. I think it’s sparked by the orange lights that were seen all over the place in the last couple of weeks. It could be we’re on the cusp of a major upheaval, a Close Encounter With The Real McCoy!” “Whoa podner, I wasn’t calling about Tex bringing in space invaders, this is just a curiosity angle for me at this point.”

“Just kidding, you know I take all of this with a pound of salt – but I'll thank you if you never tell my audience that while you're on my show as a guest.

Okay, I’ll have Wanda give you his contact info. Don’t be a stranger, young feller, I’m always ready to put you on my show, y’know. Come on over to California every now and then, for krissakes! In fact, come on the show tonight and talk about Tex. If I could get free I’d come over there to see you over there in Arizona. Any luck finding Rita?”

“No, I haven’t heard from her yet, but I haven’t given up hope. Thanks, Forrest. I really will get back to you very soon. I may be onto something that will hopefully send your ratings through the roof.”

“In that case, I did receive some data from Tex by fax, and my researchers have more or less confirmed their validity, at least in terms of the locations of phenomena and some tidbits about events nearby. I’m willing to send you a copy without consulting him because he made no stipulation that I refrain from distributing them to anyone without his consent. Still, I would need you assurance that you won’t splash them all over the front of a web page with the caption of Tex from Orlando under it in big bold font. Does that sound like a fair set of parameters for you to work with?”

“Sure, no problem, I can roll with that. Can you email them to me or are they too big a file for normal email. I don’t have any big-file email services.”

“Lemme look at the folder. Three megabytes, any service could handle that much, don’t you think?”

“Excellent. I’ll look forward to seeing them and then hopefully seeing you and Rita, probably within the week.”

Donovan had heard about time peculiarities or disturbances a couple of times but hadn’t bothered to document what he heard. Not that he felt like he had been missing the boat on something important, because having received a specific inquiry from his bosses, even with Full Investigation status, didn’t necessarily mean there was something to it; he figured it was just the usual wild geese, which is what happened with the previous such investigation order. He talked to Wanda again after she found Tex’s phone number for him and called Tex right away. Tex answered the phone and Donovan identified himself honestly as a clinical psychologist who was a paranormal researcher for periodicals and asked him if he could visit him to discuss his experiences.

Tex was congenial, gave Donovan his home address and welcomed him to come on down to Orlando to see him any time. After booking a flight, Donovan headed to the Phoenix airport without a second thought about his domestic travails; he wished he still had a family so he could enjoy Disney World with them while he was in Orlando. Ultimately, he was glad to be traveling for the first time since Rita disappeared. She had been gone over a month, and at this point he needed to go beyond just sitting on his living room couch, looking at the front door with desperate hope in his heart. Here he was, reputedly an expert in psychology, yet without a clue about his own wife Rita’s psychology – or for that matter, his own. However, he knew there were other psychologists with psychological problems, nobody was perfect.

He had no sense that Rita was going to return to Phoenix with their kids any time soon – if they were elsewhere – and walk into their home. After she up and vanished with their two children a court issued an arrest warrant for her, but Donovan thought getting arrested was exactly what Rita didn’t need right now.

He always knew she was fragile, so he thought it was his fault that she left him, by compounding her insecurity, perhaps by not being home enough. He was never angry or abusive towards her, and objectively he couldn’t discern any way that he failed to nurture her. But he nevertheless beat himself up emotionally every day in craven self-flagellation about what he could have done that would have prevented her from leaving him. He needed a trip to distract him from his misery, and this was it.

His plane lifted off in the afternoon on a direct flight to Orlando.

12: ORLANDO Donovan had previously been in Orlando a couple of times briefly but never really saw much of the state except from the air. After landing he rented a car and arrived at Tex’s small house less than an hour after his plane skidded to a halt. Tex greeted him warmly and wasted no time getting into his explanation about the time disturbances he described on Moonlight. “I’m a retired engineer, and about 10 years ago I met an old fellow right here in town, name of Franklin Cooper, through that Moonlight radio show before it was called that, and before Mr. Jenkins was runnin’ it. This fellow was a retired college professor who was getting on in years and wanted somebody to keep on with his research, ‘cause he thought some day it might turn out to be important. He had tracked what he called time stretches going back hundreds of years to the Central and South American Mayas, Toltecs, Incas, all of them natives of the Americas. I got all his papers in the next room if you wanna see them. Anyway, he was a philologist, so he was into all that hieroglyphics and stuff, but it went over my head like a lead balloon. My only relevant knowledge was my ability to do remote viewing. I was able to get a glimpse of ancient native cultures in my viewing, but nothing about the time thing. He thought there were clues to the demise of empires in these time disturbances. I liked his enthusiasm, and he was smart, with contacts all over the U.S., mostly through the radio show. That was before all those onlines and web sites and all, y’know. He became my best friend, and I promised him I would try to carry on his work after he died. So after he kicked the bucket I went through his papers and decided to try to modernize it all a little bit cuz I really thought he was onto something. For the last eight years I’ve been getting

modern data – not just from the Inca or Aztec eras – piped in to me from folks in lots of places, especially San Francisco, Chicago and New York. I track the time data they sent me and then plot it on a graph. A whiz kid youngster fixed it up for me to do it by computer, but I couldn’t get the hang of it so I still do it manually. Now I’m as older than what that professor was when I met him, and I’ve got nobody to take this over, but I’m working on that, there’s lots of other folks who believe in this project. Anyway, six years ago, I heard about orange lights above the Adirondacks Mountains in upstate New York, and within several weeks after that I found out that several times the time around there had supposedly backed up and changed, just like the old professor said happened hundreds of years ago in the early Americas. So after I visited my son in New York City I went upstate to a town near where they had that famous rock festival, and went through the archives of the local paper. Sure enough, there was a front-page 2006 story about bright orange lights headed north and a couple of weeks later, at a county fair, another local news article said people claimed that time backed up and changed somehow. It actually talks about all this in the local newspaper. A man who was at a fair and swooning over some girl managed to fall off his horse and went off a bridge and drowned – is that weird, or what? When they pulled his body out of the river they found a round stone tightly gripped in his right hand, except they said it looked like a stone but it was something else – whatever that means. The guy had no family or friends around, and some folks wanted to bury the stone thing with him, but it wound up in the local museum because there was something weird about it. So I went on over there, and the curator said she remembered it. She said it was beige marble with pretty patterns on it, but she didn’t know where it wound up. She said she would look for it and let me know when she found it, but she emailed me later that she never found out what happened to it. The museum’s undisplayed collection is all in two barns and such a mess she wouldn’t be able to find a full size canvas of Picasso’s Guernica in it – not that Picasso did much of his painting around there, mind you. Younger folk weren't too helpful, I guess they were too busy to notice much, so I wandered around and asked some old timers about all this in coffee shops and whatnot, and finally I found a fellow settin’ on a park bench who said he was at that fair and he remembered the drowning along with some kind of time disturbance – though he didn't have that high fallutin' term for it – that's what I'm calling it. Anyway, he didn’t know about any stone. He said he was settin’ right there on that same bench and saw a shimmering around the town clock, and the time on it shifted backwards about ten minutes. This was right before or after that fair incident when the guy fell

off the horse, he couldn’t remember which. And he said some other weird thing happened with time that folks around there buzzed about for awhile, but he had no specific recollection about what it was and couldn't even remember if maybe he actually heard specifics at the time that he afterwards forgot. Sometimes, y'know, you can remember that you heard specifics, but you can't remember what they were. He thought it might have been about the appearance of the weight of the stone that was found on the horse guy. Anyway, that’s all I could get out of those folks. And now we have these orange lights and disturbances again, only mainly on the west coast this time. Just yesterday there were a couple of time disturbances near San Francisco – that makes maybe half a dozen since the orange lights over Big Sur, south of there on the coast. I sent a copy of the graphs to Mr. Jenkins.”

“Okay, I get your interest in it, but to me this clock incident sounds an awful lot like a plot by a certain fiction writer up in Bangor, Maine, which is not so far from upstate New York, matter of fact. Anyway, what do you think it means?

What’s actually happening, if anything?”

“I dunno, the end of the world, maybe?” Tex smiled and winked as he said this. “Actually, I don’t think this sounds like the end of anything, but maybe it’s the start of something. Or maybe it’s just a ripple that happens now and again and means nothing.”

Tex’s wry tone seemed to Donovan to perhaps incorporate some sort of crafty adumbration, so his eyes narrowed as he said, “I get a sense that you’re telling me less than you know about this.”

“No, I’m not, really. I’ve got a notion that the stone is the key, but that goes beyond the facts; I don’t want to talk about it like it’s an actual theory. And don’t forget: I’m really mainly piped into three cities, and these orange lights were seen all over the world. I’m getting only sketchy reports from everywhere except San Francisco, that’s where the big time disturbances just happened. It looks like something over there is more definite – biggest event since Adirondacks six years ago. And my remote viewing keeps bringing me out there, but I never get anything specific from that.”

“So, what have we got?” asked Donovan. Maybe something was disturbing time in New York in some way, and now something’s doing it around San Francisco. I just have to interview a couple of million people in California. And we don’t even know what it all means even if I do track it down. And it may or may not be connected to a small stone. Great!”

He said this with a smile, not wanting to appear to chastise Tex, who was a true gentleman. He thanked him for his hospitality and made copies of a dozen

additional graphs that Tex hadn’t sent to Jenkins with a portable scanner before he left his house. He also expressed his appreciation for the shoe leather Tex pounded in Woodstock, though he didn’t really know how thoroughly Tex checked out the incident there. If Donovan still had a few friends around Woodstock as he did when he was in college he might like to run up there, but they had seemingly scattered to the winds and now he didn’t know where any of them were. On the other hand, Donovan was no Sherlock, so if he went there he probably would miss the same clues that Tex missed.

He decided to file a preliminary report about Tex and let his supervisor make the call as to whether Donovan or someone else should go to Woodstock.

Perhaps an experienced detective was needed for that task. He had been ordered to fully investigate, and all he had going on at the moment was the recent San Francisco time disturbances, so he would go there next. If this wasn’t a Full Investigation he certainly couldn’t justify traveling there – the information from Tex was totally vague. He could look around San Francisco, make some contacts and file a report, thereby performing his duty mandated by his NSA contract, then hang out with Wanda and Forrest before returning to Phoenix. Off hand, he had no clue about how he would sniff out a so-called time disturbance when he got to the delightful City By The Bay, but going there could be therapeutic for him because Wanda and Forrest they knew Rita very well and could counsel him, thereby perhaps somewhat assuaging his emotional pain.

Unfortunately, he didn’t currently have a family to impede his travels, so he caught his second flight of the day, this time directly to San Francisco without stopping by Phoenix.

13: PAUL CHANGES THE GAME After Freddie visited Joey and he ran away from Paul he went to a library branch across town for a couple of hours where he could read King Arthur books and expect to run into nobody he knew while he bided his time before returning home. His reading didn’t go well because he was too agitated and distracted. And it didn't help to know that he was basically living King Arthur, which he knew was a mere myth. He finally gave up reading and took a long route home so he could get there just before dinner and maybe not have to deal with Paul. Their mom almost always had dinner on the table at precisely 6 PM, and thankfully, today was no exception.

Although Paul was eighteen years old and therefore emancipated, he still had his own room in the house and could keep it as long as he wanted it. His whole

family loved him and wanted him to stay home as long as he wanted to. Though worried about him, they maintained an attitude towards him of unflinching commiseration about his coming of age. They knew he was hanging around with questionable characters, but they never admonished him about it, hoping that he would wise up and become the old Paul once again.

Joey knew Paul’s interest in what Joey was up to was piqued, so Paul would be at dinner, and he was. He kept looking at Joey after they both sat down, but got no reaction from him. Joey didn’t look at him, pretending nothing happened earlier that day and instead chatting with his parents about mundane school matters. Joey worried that Paul might mention the day’s events to someone who might try to sneak into my room looking for the stone. Joey didn’t know how much Paul heard when he was outside his door, or whether he was listening from the beginning, but he had heard enough for his greed to perk up.

Does he know for it was a stone that changed everything? Joey would have to start guarding or hiding his lucky stone, that was for sure. Whatever it was used for, it wouldn’t be some kind of gambling, which is what he figured Paul would want to use it for. Joey liked horses and even owned one for a few months once, but he hated the sleazy, cigar-smoking racetrack scene – pool halls, bars and race tracks, yuck! He couldn’t see how Paul, who grew up clean cut and athletic, wound up in such a sordid, unhealthy life, smoking cigarettes and running around with women Joey’s friends called biker chicks. He didn’t really like that label because it sounded like a pejorative. He and Kurt met one who got off a bike some Devil was riding that they didn’t recognize, and as she walked through the park she stopped to chat with them; they both thought she was just about the sweetest lady they had ever met and decided they would never use that term again.

He thought, Maybe when I’m as old as Paul I’ll do the same thing, heaven forbid!

Their parents were university graduates, but Paul barely finished high school by passing a GED. By his senior year he was spending more time waxing his 1957 Chevy than he spent on his studies; the change in him had come radically and suddenly. Joey expected to emulate his parents rather than Paul when he himself finished high school, almost a decade hence. He had to find a way to secure Lucky –he now thought of him as having the name Lucky – where he would be safe from theft and especially wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. He thought about trying to get a safe deposit box, but he didn’t know how to do that without having to explain why he needed one to his dad, and he didn’t feel ready to do that yet. Kurt was the ticket for this because he was Joey’s best pal, and they had even made a pirate oath in blood in their clubhouse to always stand by

each other. Someone who heard about Lucky from Paul wouldn’t know that one of Joey’s friends had him. Joey could give Lucky to Kurt, and if they just stopped hanging out together for a while except in the clubhouse no one should be the wiser. To Paul and others, Kurt was just one of Joey’s pals, he didn’t really know how close they were.

After dinner, Joey again rolled furniture in front on his door, listened to music, and finally fell asleep; and had another spectacular dream, but this time it more than a dream.

14: DREAMING OF EMPIRES In Joey’s new dream he was on one end of a valley that was about a mile in length and a quarter mile across. He looked straight ahead and far in the distance directly in front of him he saw hundreds of native men brandishing spears and other long weapons pouring over a mountain headed towards him, shouting blood-curdling war cries. Then he heard wailing in panic and fear to his right, and looking in that direction he saw a large crowd of terrified natives near him ... as many as a thousand women, children and old men. He realized that they were his people and that they were doomed because many of their warriors were gone hunting. Joey stood his ground, and when the warriors arrived they began to slaughter everyone in sight. To his right he saw one of his fellow warriors and others further away, all of them bearing spears, shields and helmets – only a few dozen against hundreds, maybe thousands of the enemy.

Although virtually alone opposing a huge army, Joey and his friend next to him didn’t hesitate to charge into the nearest attackers, fighting valiantly, both of them screaming with ferocious wrath as they rushed headlong into the fray. One of the attackers lunged at him swinging an axe and Joey instinctively put up his left arm to block the blow; he found a shield on that arm that blocked the axe, and a spear in his right hand that he ran into the warrior, felling him. Seeing the massive muscles on his arms he realized that he was a full-grown man, not a child. Joey was quickly surrounded. He felt burning below his waist and he knew this must be from weapons cutting into his flesh, but he had no time to see how bad the injuries were. His legs began to weaken, but he stayed on his feet and continued to fight.

He saw close motion to his left and raised his shield to block the blow; he speared that man, pulled it out and speared another man, but this time he couldn’t get it out, it was stuck. An axe bounced off the top of his shield and also struck his helmet, stunning him. Down he went, falling flat on his back. He

saw a spear lying next to him and grabbed it. He ran it up into the man standing over him, and that man fell away; but it was just luck that Joey didn’t miss the man altogether because he was dizzy and saw only blurs. In spite of the din of warrior and victim cries, he recognized a woman’s voice, and looked to one side to see her with a spear thrust into her back; on her stomach and reaching out towards him, calling to him. Joey was unable to get up in spite of strenuous effort, and two enemy warriors were above him now, ready to plunge their spears into him one last deadly time.

They both brought their spears down at Joey’s chest and stomach, and he knew it was over for him and all his people. He clenched his teeth and closed his eyes as the spears came down hard. An eternity went by as he braced for the killing blows, but none came, and after what seemed like forever, he finally opened his eyes. One spear had stopped just inches from his chest, and the other had penetrated his skin, drawing blood, but both spears and their bearers were stationary; the warriors’ silent faces were frozen, contorted into ghastly, twisted masks of hatred and triumph. Joey lay there for a few seconds, disbelieving, staring up at the warriors. Finally, after concluding that no further movement by his attackers appeared to be forthcoming, he pushed his skin down around the point of the penetrating spear, and managed to slide out from under it, further cutting himself in the process.

He stood up wearily and warily, and looked around. Everyone, warriors and his people were all frozen in place. Joey thought, So this is what happens, everyone around you stays where they were the moment you died. He sensed something behind him, and turned around to see what it was. It was Lucky!

Floating at eye level, Lucky was still blank. Suddenly, he switched on, and Joey saw the now-familiar format. On one side of his face, Lucky showed the warriors attacking the women and children in the valley, striking them wantonly and mercilessly with their weapons, and others rushing toward Joey, their faces bearing the horror of murderous rage. He saw the slaughter of his people as though he were watching a movie. But on the right side, the enemy warriors were all still on the mountain, and it was coming apart and crashing down on all over them.

“Yes!” he shouted, but no sound came out that he could hear.

“Yes.” he whispered with pained struggle, exhausted and still bleeding profusely from his wounds. He tried again, trying to shout, “Destroy”. But a man’s voice came out of him in a different language, at first hoarsely, then louder, and finally a third time at maximum volume. Twice he barely managed to utter “Kasu!” but with his third attempt his voice boomed “KASU!!!!” so loud it

seemed to fill the valley, and instantly the distant mountain imploded, crushing in a roar everyone on or near it.

Joey looked at his people, now safe and joyously watching the spectacular destruction of a mountain, awed by thankfulness mixed with fear as they saw their enemies crushed. The roar of the collapsing mountain was deafening; an enormous boulder rolled towards Joey, but stopped short of him. Its position after it stopped shielded Joey and his people from smaller debris that came crashing forward from the dying mountain. Joey was exultant, continuing to leap and shout, KASU!!!! KASU!!!! KASU!!!! but his people could hear only the thunderous sound of millions of tons of violently churning rock.

One of the women near him who previously had a spear in her back was now clearly uninjured. She and another young woman ran to him and embraced him, but he didn't look at them because his eyes remained fixed on the debris and dust rising and rushing towards them from the perishing, eviscerated mountain. Dust rapidly overwhelmed the valley and soon he could see almost nothing. He and his people backtracked, coughing, choking, and filed out of the valley into cleaner air through a tunnel opening formed by a stream eons before.

Outside of the valley the dust should have been as pervasive but it was far less thick and only partly obscured the sky.

Joey again saw Lucky floating near him, expanded to a size bigger than a man’s chest. On Lucky, this time Joey saw what looked like a tranquil village scene. In the background there was a cliff with foliage covering it, and several people in the foreground of the village scene were embracing. Then he saw a yellow streak race across the screen and then a gray mass or mist appearing in front of the sun and growing before Lucky went blank and began drifting upward. As he rose he accelerated, then angled over toward a small orange ball high up in the sky. Lucky met the orange ball and disappeared into it, and then the ball itself receded until it was gone. He and Kurt, who was also an adult and had been the man who was fighting the attacking warriors, decided not to retreat back to the south from where they came after water near their village at become to scarce. They knew they were safe now from their only known enemies because they had miscalculated by throwing every warrior they had at Joey’s people and had been obliterated. Joey had already received a scout report of a large gushing river further south in an area that appeared to be uninhabited except for a local small group that received them in a friendly manner, so they would continue in that direction with confidence.

After trudging only another half hour they came across a splendorous waterfall that their scouts hadn’t reported to Joey, perhaps because they had

taken a circuitous route to return to the river a second time after first spotting it.

They decided to camp near the foot of the waterfall where they could hear the sound of tumultuous and reassuring nature. The memory of the harrowing experience in the valley already began to lift, and Joey, Kurt, Frank, Freddie and Phil called a powwow to discuss what happened; they all confirmed that the warriors were killing them and then suddenly disappeared from sight and evidently were all destroyed moments later by the collapsing mountain, since the attacks ceased altogether. Their hunters soon arrived with plenty of meat to go around, and they celebrated and thanked their gods for their salvation that night, feasting and dancing until the dawn. Joey woke up then and remembered every detail of the dream. More than any time that he could remember before in his short life, he felt utterly protected, he felt happy, he felt fulfilled. He lay on his bed for a while, savoring the victory that protected his people. Eventually he fell asleep again and the rest of the night he slept like a baby. His previous Lucky dream had been an ambiguous nightmare of unresolved terror, even though Lucky saved him. That was far from what happened in this dream. This one changed Joey’s entire life.

Even as it ended, it instilled in Joey a love for Lucky, because he knew that this wasn't just a dream – it was a memory.

15: LONG LOST ENEMIES Monkey was shooting pool and had just broken a rack without pocketing even one ball when Paul joined him. Paul knew he was a little too worked up, too worried about money to concentrate. After they both had shot three times neither of them had pocketed a single ball, which was unprecedented for these two fairly adept billiards players. Paul then fired the cue ball at the six, but the ball glanced away after hitting both corners of the pocket – a shot that he had made the previous eighteen attempts before today. He breathed a sign of relief when he eventually pocketed a ball with a trickier shot than the ones that he had missed up to that point.

Although Monkey didn’t say so, he was as distracted as Paul was, and for the same reason. He wasn’t really into drugs, but he had been offered a deal for five ounces that would have brought him enough moolah to pay the rent on my bike shop for two months. The economy was in recession, so more bikers were postponing needed maintenance on their bikes and consequently during the previous two months the shop pulled in barely half of what it needed just to break even.

Monkey and his partners were home boys with no quarrels between them, but they were all becoming anxious about their near future – never mind the viability of their careers in the long run if the recession took ten years to get over as they had heard from their customers might happen. Monkey was severely disappointed when the coke deal fell through, but he tried to console himself with the fact that time in jail would put him even deeper in the hole if he got caught. He almost hooked up with a Hell’s Angel who he thought was the biggest Ecstacy dealer in the state, but that fell through too. I’m like, the world’s worst dope dealer, and I’m sure not going to pay my bills by selling boosted hardware to that ten-year-old brat Bert Fontaine, he thought as he missed another easy shot.

Paul said, “You should have seen what went on at my place yesterday. One of Joey’s friends came crashing in to complain to him about something. I came out of my room and listened in, and they were saying he changed some event or something. Like he had some kind of video that could change things after they already happened.”

“Aw, that’s ridiculous. Blimey, Paul, did you forget they’re just kids? You gotta get a grip. Whadda they know? Nuthin’ about nuthin’.”

“Yeah, but the kid Joey showed this to is the genius Freddie Shapiro, and I think I did see a change. Joey showed him a guy that missed a catch in a football game and it looked like he changed it to where he caught it. There’s no media player that can do something like that and manipulate it.”

“Come on, whaddaya mean, nobody can do that except by editing the video.

He didn’t change nuthin’. Or maybe it was an online broadcast that he saw before and he only played the first part the first time. There was some kind of gimmick involved, you can bet on that. Nobody can do what you just said.”

“I dunno, I just know what I saw. Joey wouldn’t fake something like that.

He’s not no smart ass, he’s a good kid. I don’t even really know why I been so negative towards him these days.”

“Nah, he just rigged it. Don’t fall for crap like that. But keep tabs on this magic video, I could think of some uses for it,” guffawed Monkey with a big grin on his chops.

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too. But I guess I’m getting too desperate and going for any bunk story.”

“That’s it in a nutshell. We better get on the ball and find some bucks, one way or another. Things are getting tight around here. We gotta get something goin’ if we don’t wannna be broke for the rest of our lives.”

For some reason, Paul and Monkey recently thought of Joey as their adversary, even though there had been no conflict between them, like they had a

grudge against him for something, which was the main reason Paul had started to stay away from home, but he couldn’t divulge that to anybody in his family, especially not to his brother.

16: TESTING, ONE...TWO...THREE Kurt sat in his room looking down at his chess set. He could never be an accomplished player because he couldn’t think ahead more than a couple of moves. He was no brain at this, and even his 7-year-old cousin had beaten him a couple of times. But he liked to practice, and he tried to study the moves made by experts, to try to figure out their strategies, gain some insight. At this moment he was looking at a set, starting with one player employing the Giuoco Piano, then taken advantage of by the Kostics Trap that won in just seven moves. Kurt was distracted, worried about Joey, but he decided to wait for Joey to contact him rather than vice versa. Just before he started playing chess he discovered the battery in his cell had died. Angry and frustrated that it would pick a time like this to die, he plugged it in immediately.

Kurt had implicit faith in Joey as his best friend, so he had uncritically accepted everything Joey had asserted as they watched the baseball video; though he had been so shocked by its ramifications that he had immediately rushed to the clubhouse and told Phil. But even though Phil had personally seen the yo-yo reversal, he thought it must be some kind of weird glitch that had some rational explanation, so he rejected Kurt's baseball video story as impossible, and Kurt on his way home calmed down and decided Phil was right.

Ironically, Phil had second thoughts after talking to Kurt, leading to Freddie being appointed and visiting Joey. But Kurt disregarded Freddie’s confirmation, sticking with his assumption that Joey had somehow fooled his friends. It sure wasn’t like Joey to do this, but obviously he had done it for reasons he would later reveal. Joey was playing some kind of weird joke, so everything was cool for Kurt again. He didn’t even feel embarrassed about being taken in and telling Phil this wild tale. He just wished he’d had a chance to talk to Joey at school today, but he didn’t see him. It looked like Joey ran off right after school and didn’t talk to anybody.

Joey pulled up on his bike behind Kurt’s house; he saw Kurt through his bedroom window on the second floor and they waved at each other. Joey came in the back door like he lived there, and really that was how it was for both Kurt and his parents. Kurt’s parents seemed to like Joey as much as they liked Kurt himself, and always approved if Joey wanted to stay overnight. Joey had stayed

overnight at Kurt’s half a dozen times already this year, and it was only April.

Just outside of Kurt’s open bedroom door Joey said, “Hey Kurt.” and Kurt responded with “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

Kurt was sitting at his desk. Joey entered, plunked himself down on the bed and said, “Kurt, I gotta talk to you about Lucky. You’ve seen him, but you haven’t actually met him.”

Joey pulled Lucky out of his bag and presented him to Kurt for the second time, and Kurt protested, “Joey, are you going to start talking about changing stuff again? ‘Cuz if you are, I’m not buying it. Nobody can do that ... nobody.

You gotta getta holda yourself.”

“Kurt, this is really serious. We may not have a lot of time to figure out what to do and then do it. We have to protect him.”

“Him? So now you call it him and it has a name?”

“That’s hard to explain ... let’s not get into that. You gotta understand, Kurt, Lucky did change stuff. He changed your yo-yo championship, that’s why you thought you didn’t really win. And anyway, you really won, but the judges were wrong. Lucky changed things for me in a swim race. He also fixed Frank when he wrecked his knee at the skateboard park. He’s already done a lot of stuff that’s real, not something I’m dreaming up.”

“Frank wrecked his knee? I see him every day, he looks okay and isn’t limping or anything. Why didn’t he tell me about it?”

“That’s because Frank thinks it didn’t happen ... I mean, he doesn’t know that it happened and then didn’t...I mean, he thinks he knows that...AAARRRGGGGHH!” Joey plunged face first onto the bed, covering his head with Kurt’s pillow.

Kurt heard Joey’s muffled voice beseeching him, crying out, “Help! Help! Dr. Kurt, shrink my head, help me!”

Kurt was anxious to provide relief from the anguish that was beleaguering his best friend. He set himself to the task, totally skeptical and only humoring him. He was already online, sitting at his desk, so he quickly found some abstruse terms and said, “You’re suffering from neuralgia-inducing cavitational osteonecrosis. You gotta start brushing your teeth, the germs are going up into your brain and rotting it. Wait, I got it!”

“Got what?”

“Your general diagnosis! Fifty per cent of you is crazy, and the rest of you is nuts!” Kurt threw a pencil and paper on the bed next to Joey and said, “Here.

Write down your exact diagnosis.”

Joey, momentarily glad for the distraction, sat up and got ready to write. He put lead on the paper, ready to scribble whatever Kurt told him.

Kurt then intoned somberly, “You have fybromic andurated retrocuspidal nodular thrombotic whatchamacallit.”

“How do you spell whatchamacallit?”

“Any way you like.” said Kurt as Joey threw down the paper and pencil, with a sudden urgency to get back to his real problem and pleaded, “This is real, Kurt, and right now it’s just stuff around the neighborhood and around the school. We don’t know what else Lucky can do. Maybe he can stop a tornado or a plane crash, a building collapsing, a glacier melting, we don’t know what his limits are or even if he has any.”

“Now that it’s your buddy and you named it, I guess that means you’re not gonna get rid of it and maybe it’s God? I doubt that it could stop a tomato, what to speak of a tornado.”

“He’s not God, he’s my friend. I can’t get rid of him, Kurt. You don’t understand. Me and Lucky been together a long time. I can’t explain that, but it’s true. I can’t tell you how I know, I just know. I swear it on my heart.”

“So what are you gonna do, wait ‘til Monkey or Bert comes along and beats you up and takes it away from you?”

“That’s why I’m here now. Paul heard Freddie when he came and asked me about Lucky. Freddie practically crashed through my door when he came in, and Paul got curious I guess, so he was right outside the door when Freddie went out, and I think the door was partly open anyway, so Paul heard everything, or a lot. I think Paul knows what Lucky can do, and he’ll for sure tell Monkey if he does. I’m sure Paul wanted to take Lucky to the stupid racetrack! I need you to help me safeguard Lucky when he’s not with me. And I don’t know why you still doubt Lucky after what I showed Freddie in my room.”

“Yeah, but Freddie told me today at lunch that he’s not really sure what happened at your place. Anyway, what do you want me to do, hide the stone here? I can’t carry it around with me because I’m with you half the time, so there wouldn’t be any difference. Any thug who searched you for it would probably search me too.”

“I don’t know – I haven’t even thought that part out yet. But I need to know if you’ll help me.”

“We made a blood oath, Joey. You’re my best friend and I’ll help you with anything. But I don’t see what to do. How do you know I didn’t win that contest? You can’t lose and then turn around and unlose, unless there's a recount or an instant replay or something.”

“Lucky did it, I saw him do it, and it is a type of instant replay, but not like the ones on tv. Everybody saw it. You saw it. When I don’t like how something is going, Lucky starts buzzing or vibrating, and when I look at him, he’s got two choices that I can see plain as day, one bad and the other good. I didn’t choose the first time, but all the other times I told Lucky to go ahead and change it to something good, and he did it.”

“You know I always believe you, Joey, but do you hear yourself ? There’s nothing or nobody can do what you’re saying, nothing or nobody in the whole world. Freddie says there’s no scientific basis for this.”

“I know it sounds impossible, I feel like squeezing my head ‘til it breaks.

How could I be imagining all this? It would mean I’m crazy, and I don’t think I’m crazy. Maybe we gotta go out together somewhere and test Lucky on something really important, like a crime. No matter how impossible it is, if it’s real we got to deal with it. Lucky’s not just going to go away, at least I don’t think he is until I fulfill my mission.”

“What do you mean your mission?”

“I don’t know what my mission is, I just know I have one. Kurt, you don’t understand. I love Lucky, I trust him. He’s full of good, not harm or trouble.”

“Well, it sure looks like maybe you are in trouble now, and he’s the one causing it as far as I can see. And if we go out and test it like that and it works, maybe that’ll be like witchcraft, and we’ll go to hell or something.”

“He only helps me, he’s not evil, don’t worry about that. Let’s just go out and change something serious, something bad. We’re not getting anywhere flapping our jaws and lollygagging in your house. Let’s go to the mall. Maybe we can stop a carjacking in the parking lot.”

“Fat chance of that, there’s no carjackings around here.”

“C’mon, let’s go!”

Kurt remained skeptical, but he had to be there for his best friend, so he agreed. Both of them went out and hopped on their bikes, heading for the Pleasant View Mall. As they rode away from Kurt’s house, Joey smiled and said, “Don’t worry, if you get hit by a car, I’ll have Lucky unhit you.”

“Sure, and what if you get hit. Will he fix that?”

“I betcha he will. Four Blue Angels and an Osprey says he will.”

“Okay, you’re on, but I hope you live long enough to pay up! If you’re still alive when the EMTs come you gotta tell them you owe me those cards so I can get them after your funeral.”

Both of them laughed. Joey was back to his sense of comfort about having Lucky in his life, and this was immediately contagious, basically converting Kurt

from someone who had just protested in disbelief into someone who trusted in their prospects with Lucky in tow. As they rode towards the mall, they discussed Lucky’s floating screen and the fact that only Joey saw any screen at all; also, that in some but not all cases, people remembered an event as it was before Lucky completely changed it.

Joey said, “Frank couldn’t even see Lucky’s light up on the cliff even though it was practically as bright as the sun. It’s like Lucky only wanted me to see him.

And Frank didn’t know what happened to him at the skateboard park, but it seemed like Bert did, which is strange. You would think that the guy it happened to would be at least one of the people who knew, but instead it was a thickheaded goof who was standing around doing nothing.”

They thoroughly discussed the subject but made no headway on how Lucky worked, Joey went on, explaining that “People don’t always see it ... like I think Bert saw Frank getting hurt and then unhurt but he didn’t see or didn’t remember the change when I won the swim race – if he had we would have heard about it by now. But I don’t actually know that, he might actually know I lost and then unlost. Most or all students who watched it probably remember you losing that yo-yo contest, but they also know you won it, and you've got the ribbon to prove it. Only Phil and Frank besides us have said they saw it, but you heard the audience buzzing like crazy when it was over, so I figure just about everybody saw and remembered what happened before Lucky changed it.”

"Yeah, other students told me they saw something weird happen but they weren't sure what it was, just something about my score changing."

When they got near the mall they saw a couple of their schoolmates, Carmen and Yolanda and Kurt shouted, “Hey Carmen, you seen Natalie or Paul around?”

“No, but I saw Monkey's truck over at that shopping center.” she replied as she pointed across the street.

“So are you both gonna get all A’s and show the rest of us up as a bunch of dummies and losers again?”

“No Joey, we’re thinking of both of us getting one B just to make you feel better.” and her comment aroused laughter all around.

Joey retorted, “Either way, you’ll still be a few years behind Freddie.”

Carmen replied, “Don’t rub it in, I’m jealous enough already!” They all laughed again as the boys started back up riding. They headed for the doughnut shop at the shopping center and almost banged into Monkey coming out of an auto parts store, so he protested, “Hey, you guys're breakin' speed records through here!”

“Sorry, Monkey.”

“Yeah, well just gaze into your crystal ball and get rid of these broken bones you just gave me,” he winked.

“If I had one, I would.”

“Well, I heard you got one, that right?”

“No way. I’m not Merlin the Magician, that’s King Arthur stuff.”

Monkey smiled, still winking, and said, “Well, Merlin Junior, just keep me posted on that, I could use some special assistance!” and then hopped into his old Ford pickup and was off, peeling rubber as he pulled out onto the street.

The boys turned serious then.

“So Paul already told him. I don’t know.” said Joey. “But he doesn’t seem to know much ... but he’s too cheerful, makes me suspicious.”

“You can’t suspect him for being cheerful, maybe he’s just happy about something.”

“Yeah, maybe I'm his happy ticket to a big pile of money. Anyway, we’re not gonna get anywhere here. Maybe we should go to the court house and change a verdict.”

“Change a verdict? You wanna play with fire like that? Anyway, they won't let kids in a courtroom. Can’t we figure out some other kind of test, like saving a drowning man or somethin’?”

“You see any place around here anybody could drown?” asked Joey.

“I don’t feel like going to a public swimming pool. We could go to Santa Cruz, maybe somebody’s drowning at one of the beaches there. Even if nobody’s drowning, something else could happen, like a car accident. Or we could go to a hospital ER and bring someone back to life after they’re declared DOA.” “What, you want to make zombies now?”

“They wouldn’t be zombies, dufus, it would be like they never would have died in the first place. Did I say that right? Maybe there's no way to say it right.”

“Listen to you!” Kurt protested. “You can’t be like you never died. Either you never died, or you didn’t never die, period!”

“Yeah, that’s the weird thing. People saw you die with a spear right through your heart, and they might remember it, but you actually never died, you’re walking around with no wound at all, good as gold for another fifty years or whatever.”

“Or you did die, and then you undied. You become the undied ... oh my God, the undead! I don’t like this – using that stone to create the land of the undead.” chortled Kurt. The smile with mock horror on Kurt’s face made it

plain to Joey that Kurt was engaging in levity, but this remark raised an important question for him. Joey knew that Lucky could permanently undo a fatality – that Lucky could undo just about anything.

“It’s too hard to get to Santa Cruz. Let’s go to The City, it’s got plenty of ocean all around it and sometimes people drown at Baker Beach.”

“Okay, let’s take Caltrain up there tomorrow morning,” agreed Kurt.

“Come to think of it, tomorrow's the Bay to Breakers, it’s not in May like usual 'cuz of some kind of road project.”

“Yeah, we can watch who won and then make a different winner! I’m tired of those Kenyans winning that race year after year, let’s give it to someone from somewhere else for a change.”

“So you don’t like Africans?”

“I like them fine. I just want some variety, I don’t mind if a different African wins, like a Nigerian or maybe a Zambian or something. Take Lucky and guard him with your life .... With your life!”

Joey lifted Lucky to his shoulder height while intently looking Kurt in the eyes so Kurt couldn't underestimate his gesture that followed; he shoved Lucky into Kurt's left shirt pocket and headed home.

17: SUSPICIONS GROWING Paul answered his noisily ringing cell phone. It was Monkey.

“Hey check this out, Paul. I just sold Bert some stuff, and he’s spinning a weird tale. He says he was at a park, and some kid tore up his knee or something and was sitting there screaming in pain and bleeding, and he saw Joey standing over the guy, and suddenly a split second later, the guy was landing on his board again and walking around like nothing ever happened to him. And he says that his brother Davey actually won a yo-yo contest yesterday. He saw Davey declared the winner, but he says Kurt and Joey fixed it and changed it some way or other and stole it from Davey. And then ...”

“You can’t believe anything Bert says,” interrupted Paul. “He’s a lying little brat, of course he’s gonna say his brother was cheated. Didn’t you just get done telling me the same thing I just said about him like, yesterday?”

“I wouldn’t normally believe him, I’m no dummy Paul. But it ties into what you said about your brother and his video and some other stuff I been hearing.

Listen, if this is for real, we gotta corner Joey and get the goods.”

“You mean so we can do what he’s doing?”

“What? Win yo-yo contests? Are you crazy?” Monkey’s voice broke because he was instantly exasperated.

“No, I don’t mean yo-yos. I mean, just, like, changing different stuff after it happens. You know as well as I do there’s a lot goin’ on around here that needs changing, starting and ending with our incomes.”

“That’s precisely what I’m talking about. I haven’t mentioned it to you before but my shop is barely hanging on. We only got half of next month’s rent and I don’t see how it’s gonna get any better. In fact, it could even get worse – it probably will get worse, in fact.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m not doing so good either. They cut my hours back at work and I’m grateful as all get-out that I have my parents’ house to fall back on, but I can’t bring Susie home to live with me if she loses her job and her crib, so I may be about to find myself between a proverbial rock and a hard place.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. We need to get something going, every damn thing is falling through for me, like I’m jinxed or something. You wouldn’t believe it, every damn thing comes up looking good and then burns and crashes.”

“So what you got in mind? We’re not going to jack up my brother, that’s for sure. Stay away from him Monkey, I’ll wring your neck. You know I’m bigger than you are and I was the heavyweight wrestling champ in this town my junior year.”

“Naaah, don’t get all worked up Paul. I’m all for your little brother, he’s as cute as a bug and I wish him nothing but the best. I just wanna know if he has something he doesn’t need that we need more than Mother Teresa needed religion. You get my point, don’t you?”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. You and I go back a long way, Monkey.

Sometimes I get the feeling we go back like thousands of years for some reason, but I draw the line at Joey’s shoes – don’t get any closer than them to him or it’s coitans for you, I mean that to my soul. Hey, what you selling Bert? He’s only eleven, for krissake!”

“Relax, Paul, it’s nothing like that, just a couple of headsets I got at a discount.”

“Yeah, like a 100% Five-Finger Discount?”

“Well anyway, if we hear more stories, maybe that shows there really is something special about your cute little brother.”

“All right, I’ll let you know if I find out anything. But keep away from them li’l chillun, y’hear?”

“I hope I don't know Bert when he grows up. Maybe I’ll move to Bosnia just to get away from him, he’s like super bad news.”

They both hung up.

18: BAY TO BREAKERS When Joey told his dad he and Kurt wanted to go to The City, he said he would like to go up there also and offered to take them up in his car, if they didn’t mind his company. They could have lunch in Fisherman’s Wharf or Chinatown, or go over to Berkeley for one of the Indian buffet restaurants that abounded in that town. And they could also take in a free exhibition game between two local favorites – the Giants and A’s playing at the Giants stadium in the afternoon. Joey was tickled that his dad was coming, no matter how that might complicate his and Kurt’s plans for Lucky. They started out before dawn because the race was over by 8:30 and they wanted to try to get close enough to see the winner cross the finish line.

They arrived in Ocean Beach, where the race culminated, before 7 AM, and hopped a local bus to get near to the finish line. Joey and Kurt didn’t mention to Joey’s dad that they were thinking of adjusting some reality. They trusted Joey’s dad, so it made no sense that so many Mason students seemed to know what was up, but not Joey’s dad. Anyway, they didn’t know how an adult would react to Lucky, so they let that slide. They figured the time for Joey's dad finding out about Lucky would arrive on its own. But they hadn’t counted on the huge crowds. Upwards of 100,000 people participate in this foot face, most of them playfully, as a huge party. Some folks run with no clothes on, or wearing bizarre costumes, or hoisting six-packs of beer to keep them hydrated and amused.

Luckily, they found a way through the crowd, as adults seemed to realize kids needed to be either on someone’s shoulders or up front to see anything; and so had left a small space to squeeze through. Also, they knew that if someone had a medical emergency the medics needed space to get through the crowd quickly.

As the three of them stood where they could see the winner crossing the finish line, about thirty feet from them, Joey and Kurt exchanged knowing glances without letting on to Joey’s dad that anything unusual might happen.

Awed by the momentous implications of changing what thousands of people would see, Kurt asked Joey in a low voice, “Are you really going to change this?”

Joey replied, “I don’t know yet.”

But Joey was ready for action, so he reached out with his right hand and Kurt put Lucky in it. He knew that he may be overly audacious by changing

sports history, so he reconsidered whether to go through with it but concluded that he didn’t feel much concern about it in this case. He really was resentful that guys from the other side of the world in one particular country, living about 20 miles away from each other were able to dominate this marathon year after year.

Even though the only runner expected to challenge them lived on the same continent as them, at least he was from a different country. Still, Joey didn’t feel right about truly cheating the Kenyans by slowing them down or speeding up the Moroccan runner artificially. He even wondered if maybe Lucky had that morality program that Joey thought about earlier, and would balk at doing something unfair like that, and if it was unethical for Joey to ask Lucky to do something like that. After a while, they heard the cheering from a block away as the finishers approached, and soon after were surprised to see three of them coming around the bend shoulder-to-shoulder. Two of them were short and black, so Joey figured they were the Kenyans who won this race the last four years. The third was the Moroccan who had been expected to challenge them.

Everybody near Joey’s mini-entourage burst into applause and cheering as they saw the three runners neck and neck with the Moroccan slightly ahead during the last stretch, lasting half a block.

The three of them turned on whatever burst of speed they still had left, but then one the Kenyans bumped the Moroccan, causing him to stumble during the last few strides. Both Kenyans hit the tape just ahead of him. All three continued running after crossing the finish line, slowing down and finally walking to keep their limbs from cramping after the arduous 7-mile endeavor.

Lucky signaled Joey in advance this time, so Joey watched the two options before the runners actually hit the ribbon. This time Kurt was also able to see the screen, showing the Moroccan stumbling on the left. He watched as Joey chose the right side, which showed the Moroccan not stumbling. They were looking at Lucky even after the finish occurred. When they looked up, they couldn’t tell what happened because people rushed up to all three runners like they all won.

Joey said, “Dad, can we go now?”

His dad was surprised. “Wait, we don’t even know who won yet. My gosh, did you see that right at the end? What happened? Was that a three-way tie or did somebody win? Don’t you want to see the ceremony for the winner?”

“Not really. If we get going there’ll be less crowds.”

“You’re right. I thought I was going to suffocate packed in with so many people on that bus. I hadn’t even thought about the massive crowds for this

race. Let’s see if we can get out of here. We’ll find out who won on the news.

We’re not far from Fisherman’s Wharf if you feel like going over there for a sea food brunch. Then we’ll head for the stadium, we’re still way early to go there now, the game doesn’t start for three more hours.”

“Sure, why not. They got some cool stuff over there, like a wax museum and sea lions that hang out with the tourists.”

“Are the sea lions still there? I thought they did something about that.”

“I dunno, maybe they did. Let’s go, Is that okay with you, Kurt?”

“It’s cool with me.”

Joey's dad added, to Kurt. "If we leave right away we can see more places before we go to the stadium."

They took a local bus back to where they left their car and then drove to the stadium, where they knew they could find all-day parking, and stopped by the box office there to purchase tickets for the game. They then walked along the Embarcadero next to the ocean all the way to Fisherman's Wharf. With stops along the way, this was an hour-long walk, but they had plenty of time to kill before the game started at noon. They stopped at a couple of interesting places along the way, including the multi-block shopping center right off Market, which is the main street through downtown San Francisco. But they didn’t find it very interesting because it was mostly high-end goods, and even if Mrs. Blake had been with them she wouldn’t have cared about it because she wasn’t a big shopper like some of her equally affluent friends and was unenamored with hoy paloy/upper end/haut couture. What they liked about it though was the mammoth size, with a theater complex and covering several entire blocks.

Joey asked his dad how The City could have Nordstrum and Bloomingdale and Macy’s all close together and not have one of them go broke and he answered with a shrug and, “Beats me. I guess people come from all around, and even from foreign countries just to rent expensive hotel rooms and shop in San Francisco. They even have special staff to escort the super rich clientele around the stores.”

By the time they finally arrived at Fisherman's Wharf they were hungry, so they bought a crab lunch – a traditional tourist staple at the wharf because there are still fishing boats docked there. After that they grabbed some Italian ice cream and visited a chocolate vendor; and later were surprised to find that Pier 39 had more attractions than they had previously heard about, such as an arcade and a theater with hydraulic seats that were synchronized with events on the screen. They took the ferry to Alcatraz, which they had never visited before and toured the prison, which was kind of a kick for them even though prisoners

spent many years suffering in it, including the most famous of them all, Al Capone. Joey enjoyed the outing, but he had a feeling that somehow this was in spite of its light and carefree nature as they walked around, some kind of momentous day. He wondered again if he was getting a screw loose, with all the weird unfounded anxieties he was experiencing the last few days. When they got back from Alcatraz they went into the Ferry Building right at the end of Market Street next to the ocean and found there a whole slew of interesting restaurants, but they were no longer hungry, so they left it without eating.

Finally, it was time to head back to the ballpark, where unknown to Joey, the biggest drama of his life was going to unfold.

19: THE STADIUM MIRACLE Eventually they walked back all the way to the stadium on this breezy but warm, beautiful day, stopping for refreshments on the way. They entered the stadium just after 1 PM. Day games normally didn't draw large crowds, but both teams were in first place and had individuals who were chalking up impressive statistics. The Giants pitcher won all six games he pitched in the exhibition season, and the Dodgers had two hitters who were coming off .350 batting averages the previous year. Presumably because of these factors, the crowd was fairly impressive for an afternoon day game, even between these two longstanding rivals – over thirty thousand strong. There was only one area of the stadium where Joey could see an empty space. Joey, his dad and Kurt filed in and settled into their seats in the lower deck to the left of home plate.

They were glad they had followed the long-standing local axiom that said, No matter how hot the weather is, if you go to San Francisco, carry a jacket; they had left their jackets in the car when they walked along the Embarcadero, but they stopped by the car park and retrieved them, which turned out to be a good calculation because here in the stadium they had to don them to be adequately warm and would have been chilled without them. To sort of simulate a rivalry, Joey wore a Giants jacket and Kurt one from the Dodgers; in fact, they were both Giants fans; though Kurt without the diehard fanaticism of Joey. There had been some concern about gangs who attended these games and physically assaulted someone wearing the insignia of the opposing team, but this had only occurred to adults so far, leaving one fan who attended a game with brain damage and a prognosis of needing attendant care for the rest of his life.

They spotted vendors nearby and bought hot dogs and sodas, and were enjoying the bravura of three consecutive Dodgers smashing home runs in the

third inning, when they heard a tremendous boom like a bomb went off nearby.

Right after that, their seats started to wiggle, then the entire undercarriage of the bleachers they were sitting on started to weave back and forth. It was an instantly terrifying experience and fans throughout the stadium shouted in fear.

Memories of a previous San Francisco stadium earthquake hit many of them and some had actually been in the stadium during that very serious quake that killed dozens of people.

Joey's father shouted over the din, "It’s an earthquake, stay in your seats, don't move, we have to ride this out!"

That’s when a nightmare scenario unfolded right before their eyes. As Joey sat there in disbelief, the upper deck to his right shook left, then right, back and forth several times. As this happened, large sections of support around it peeled off. A huge girder came loose and tumbled end over end, right down onto the crowd, ending up on first base, and then the deck sagged before giving way and crashing down with a tremendous roar. Joey heard screaming to his left, and realized that debris from the upper deck above him had come loose and landed on spectators one aisle away from him.

With his trademark buzzing, Lucky signaled Joey, who immediately yanked him out to see the options Lucky had for him. But Lucky remained blank, puzzling Joey, who stared at Lucky in desperate anticipation.

Finally, after seemingly a forever of futile and desperate wide-eyed staring, Joey glanced at his dad and saw that he was standing motionless, looking across at the mayhem of the collapsed upper deck, an expression of incredulous shock on his face. Joey turned to Kurt, who was also still in his seat and looking at Joey, and also speechless, but moving. Looking around, Joey saw that the entire scene except for Kurt and him was frozen as happened in the warrior dream. A few rows behind him a huge slab of concrete had frozen in place above a man who was looking up at it in horror as it plunged down to destroy him, just like when Joey looked at Frank’s rock in Big Sur. Finally, to Joey's indescribable relief, Lucky perked up, showing Joey the destruction on his left side and on the right, everything, including the upper deck across from them, completely intact, looking perfectly normal. Joey desperately thought, or said, "Fix it, Lucky! Please fix it! Please!"

Lucky fixed it.

20: DONOVAN CONFIRMS

Donovan took a cab from the airport to a San Francisco hotel at 6 am and settled in without a clue as to how to commence his investigation. He looked through the local newspaper while breakfasting in the hotel restaurant, and found nothing remarkable, at least nothing suggesting any kind of time warp.

He returned to his room and went online with his laptop. There he likewise found no news reports about local sightings. It looked like he might have to resort to contacting Tex's local remote viewers, which he was reluctant to do because of his skepticism about that particular talent. The most famous socalled remote viewer had correctly predicted President Clinton having a momentous event on a certain day, but then added that from that day on Clinton would go totally downhill to ruin, whereas in reality Clinton left office hugely popular. It was an ambiguous combination of a home run and a strikeout on the same pitch, a complication Donovan wasn't in the mood for. He turned on the news, waiting for local reports. By the time the news got to the sports, he was feeling distracted.

Even when the reporter mentioned a “bizarre ending” of a marathon race, Donovan was unimpressed, but he watched the video of the finish while he hung his clothes in the closet. According to the report, officials said there was no doubt that the Moroccan, Khalid Boutayeb had won, but they said there was some kind of weird glitch in the video, which seemed to show the runners in two different endings, with two different winners, one after the other. The victory was awarded to the second winner. The decision to declare the second winner as the ultimate one was unsurprising to Donovan. As a psychologist, he was familiar with the human cognition exigency mandating recency as superseding primacy. The video of the finish was shown from several different angles, but Donovan didn’t see who won in any of them. Then the sports report moved to a discussion of baseball, which was the major league sport du jour.

This was something highly unusual, but was it a time disruption like the ones Tex was tracking, or just a glitch in the video? Although he couldn’t see who won in the sports news videos, he decided to go with the sports announcer’s claim of the winner changing from one to another. It was as much of a time warp as anything else that he knew about at the moment, so he put in calls to a couple of the local television station news departments to see what he could find out. He had to artificially adopt an official NSA demeanor, so he first practiced a somber tone sitting there speaking into the phone, repeating his statement of official inquiry several times before actually placing the call.

It had been quite a while since he had presented himself to anyone as NSA – he almost always was able to work as a clinical psychologist and a researcher

rather than a federal spook. When he got through to someone at each station, he didn’t mince words. He informed the person receiving the call that he was on official NSA business and that they could call Vernon Preston’s number in Washington, which he gave them, so they could verify the importance of assisting him with the matter. He also informed them that they could independently look up the NSA phone number and call it for the verification.

About half an hour later, he received a call from a station confirming that they would help him to the extent that their ethical and legal boundaries permitted them, so he was welcome to come to the station.

This was good enough for Donovan, who just wanted to see their sports report video race footage; he had seen the videos too briefly to definitively assess them. He received similar confirmation from the other main stations, and then headed out to visit them; except for one in San Jose, all were in or close to San Francisco. He rented a car and visited the first station that granted permission. After he identified himself at the front desk, the clerk called someone and asked him to sit down and wait what the clerk said would be a very short while. She was right because within five minutes a woman came out and greeted him in a quite friendly fashion.

“Hello, Dr. Donovan,” said the woman, "My name is Marjorie Maythorpe, I'm the station’s media advisor. I hope we can help you, if it is within bounds of our ethical standards. You’ve already been cleared and we have a room where you can view our footage. What specifically are you looking for?”

Donovan pulled out his Special Agent ID that he always felt uncomfortable using, and showed it to her as he said, “Well, Ms. Maythorpe, I don’t have any unusual requests, just to look at the peculiar finish at the Bay to Breakers today that I happened to catch on the news. This looks like a fairly routine matter.”

“That seems easy enough. Have a seat and we’ll have someone prepare a viewing room for you. Sometimes even such a non-controversial even draws protesters. You’re not going after free speech demonstrators, are you?”

“No, nothing like that. I’m just interested in the glitch or whatever it was that seems to have created confusion at the end of the Bay to Breakers. It has nothing to do with whatever ancillary events were going on among people who weren’t running in the race. You do know that there was a strange occurrence right at the end, don’t you?”

“No, I didn’t hear about that, but we’ll do what we can for you.”

About twenty minutes later, Donovan was ushered into a room where a staff person began showing him raw footage. “I’m mostly interested in the finish, when the three of them broke the ribbon at the same time,” he explained.

The technician was able to focus fairly quickly on the last few seconds of the race. Donovan watched the different angles repeatedly, and it looked to him like there was a split second at the end when the positions of the runners seemed to suddenly change. The sports report had said that one moment the Kenyans were maybe a nose ahead of the Moroccan and one of them won, but a split second later he was ahead and hit the ribbon first. However, none of the newscasts had shown the finish repeatedly so the viewers could definitely determine that something strange had happened.

Watching the footage, Donovan couldn’t really make out definitely who won, glitch or no glitch, no matter what angle footage he saw. He eventually gave up on the glitchy finish and started to look at the spectators instead. It occurred to him that the changed-finish conclusion of the report he saw on the news probably came from the official finish-line camera, not from the media cameras.

Being no detective or a major league sports enthusiast, he hadn’t thought of that, so he only now realized that he would need to contact the race officials to look at angles from the official camera that was right next to the finish line.

Although he had settled in with a leisurely pace at the hotel, he had also basically just flown all over the country during the previous day or so, and was feeling increasingly fatigued. Consequently, he had to strain to summon any Sherlock expertise that he could muster. He didn’t want to miss anything that would force him to come back and look at these videos all over again, so he applied himself as rigorously as he could to the task. In the very first section of one angle the camera panned fairly slowly from right to left as though made to order for Donovan’s assignment. After it finished panning he had it replayed.

Over and over he had the staff person display the crowd and buildings near the finish line, but he didn't spot anything particularly unusual during the many viewings. He was about to give up when he finally did notice two boys wearing thick open jackets and one a white T-shirt and a black cap while the other wore a light blue shirt and nothing on his head. They were barely within the view of the camera, but he could see both of them and two adults who seemed to be with them.

The boy wearing the blue shirt next to a male adult was looking down at his left hand instead of watching the runners like everybody else was doing; his hand was in front of his stomach with the palm towards him. The other boy was also looking at the boy’s hand instead of watching the runners. Donovan decided it was worth noting – since nothing else was – that the boys were the only people in the crowd who weren't cheering and applauding; in fact, they weren't even watching the exciting finish. The video that showed the boys and

the two adults next to them only lasted about fifteen seconds. They appeared to be standing about ten or fifteen yards past the finish line, so the leading runners jogged close to them after breaking the ribbon. Oddly, the boys didn’t even look up as the runners passed close to them, one of them no more than about five feet. It seemed strange that they seemed to have come to watch a race but didn’t watch it, though no doubt this was explainable in ways that didn’t occur to Donovan at the time.

As the runners crossed everyone around the boys was applauding wildly, but these two appeared oblivious to the event, even as the runners came near enough for them to reach out and touch at least one of them. The man to the right of the white-shirted boy wore a gray sweatshirt that said Stanford across the chest. It sure seemed likely that the man was with the boys. But if they were local boys who lived within a mile of where they were standing, they wouldn’t necessarily have a chaperone such as that man for a weekend street event – and probably wouldn’t want one. So he might only appear to be with them.

The two boys were pretty obviously together, but they may have come there alone and not know the man or the young woman who was standing to the right of the Stanford man. She was wearing a Cal Berkeley sweatshirt, which was unremarkable, since the University of California Berkeley campus is right across the bridge in the East Bay. The fact that these adults were wearing shirts from nearby campuses wasn’t definitive, in fact maybe even meaningless: Anyone could buy these, not just students from those schools. But a student or faculty from one of these campuses might advertise his or her connection to the school, because both of the major local universities had reason to legitimately instill pride; both having major college sports teams and being highly ranked academically, and both with a reputation for churning out Nobel Prize winners in multiple academic and scholastic disciplines.

It looked like at one point the man and the woman turned towards each other, perhaps sharing comments about the race or may be discussing their plans for what to do afterwards. Having found nothing else unusual in any of the videos, Donovan decided to focus on the boys and the two adults next to them. He asked the staff to show them to him in slomo a couple of times. He considered that one of the boys could be alone, not connected to the man, woman and the other boy, but he didn’t see any other children at all in the crowd, so he figured maybe the two adults and two kids came together. If two were a dad and son, it looked like the dad imposed this attendance on his son, since the boy wasn’t even interested in watching the finish; instead he was

fiddling around with something that he had in his left hand, most likely a game device.

If some paranormally talented magician did this glitch on purpose, it would be a trained adult, he mused, not a mere child. But he had no other wild geese to chase, so he asked the staff to prepare him some stills of the four subjects, both individual photos and as a group, after reviewing the other spectator footage again and finding none that also showed these four individuals who were of interest to him. That’s all he had to go on. Ms. Maythorpe came into the viewing room when Donovan informed the staff he was done. She obtained his hotel information and said she would have the stills personally brought to him there ASAP. Right across the station was a café, so he went in there for a pickup and to gather himself and his new information. Donovan called the marathon office, but was unable to make any headway on an appointment for viewing their finish-line footage. Whoever was in charge of them was supposed to call him back, but the day wore on without any word from them. He knew he could get action by turning up there with his NSA badge, but he wasn’t really in the mood to continue playing G-man. He wondered if he was getting too far out of his realm. He was a researcher, not a private investigator. Maybe a police detective or a PI would have seen something else in those videos that provided a clue. On the other hand, why throw a PI salary into the mix, to be paid for by the unfortunate, unsuspecting and abused federal taxpayer for another wild goose chase?

He would just send in a report and leave it to his supervisors to decide about that headache. He was glad he didn't have to make administrative decisions like that one. He got on his laptop and zipped off a preliminary report to his buddy and supervisor Vernon Preston, then had an early lunch and went back to the hotel. Soon after arriving there, he received a call from Ms. Maythorpe saying the stills he requested were ready. He said he’d come there later to pick them up, but Ms. Maythorpe asked, “You’re at Cavalier on Market, right?” He affirmed, and she offered to bring the stills by his hotel because she was headed near there in a few minutes.

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you like that.” he protested.

But she insisted, “I really want to bring them if you don’t mind. I’ve never been in the Cavalier, I’ve heard it’s beautiful and I’d like to see it.”

They agreed to meet in half an hour in the hotel’s main lobby. After she hung up, he realized that she was actually quite cute and looked a bit younger than he was. But he was a married man, or at least he was last time he heard.

Life was just too complicated. Donovan headed down to the lobby just before the appointed hour. He saw Ms. Maythorpe walking into the lobby, but he pretended to be preoccupied with official paper work that was actually a letter from his mom that he was using as a prop. He needed to play a little bit hard-toget, and in fact he needed to actually be hard-to-get. Somewhere he had a wife and children to be faithful to. When Ms. Maythorpe got close enough, he acted like he finally spotted her in the midst of a huge crowd of two or three people.

He rose from the sofa and greeted her, shaking her hand politely, smiling, trying to be as gracious but at the same time as discreet as a married man could be. She had dispensed with the white smock he saw her in at the station, and wore a yellow summer blouse and green miniskirt, really looking to him like the personification of a fabulous summer. And it was indeed like a summer day, with temps in the high 70’s. He really saw now attractive she was and how wonderfully shaped her legs were. Whoa, Nelly! he thought, after their first exchange of words, and he looked quickly away from her towards the street as if he had heard some strange sound or saw an unusual event out of the corner of his eye. By looking away, he tried to hopefully, sort of, kind of, in some way maybe display a hint of disdain or disinterest in her attractiveness. She handed him a manila folder and said, “I hope this works for you. I didn’t look at them, but our staff does wonders.”

“I’m sure they do. Would you like to have some coffee before you run off ?”

“Sure, let’s do that. Could we do it in your room? I’m not coming onto you, I’m sure you’re married and I’m not looking for a boy friend, I just want to relax a little bit and fix my hair. The station is running me ragged, I’ve been going full tilt since 5 o’clock this morning.”

This was certainly unexpected, but he thought sincerity, ceremony and etiquette would see them through; they just had to behave properly. She was certainly bold to ask him if she could go to his room, but he didn’t want to rudely turn her down and kick himself for it later. They walked together to the elevator, Donovan trying to seem as nonchalant and debonair as possible, Ms. Maythorpe smiling all the while. When they got off the elevator, his room was a few paces away, but to him it looked like they had to cross an unbridgeable gulf.

If he was careful, it was possible that he wouldn’t stumble during those several strides from the elevator and bang his head straight into the door knob. His imagination went wild with all sorts of Marx Brothers absurdity descending on him just when he had to be proper and controlled. The situation brought unfortunately to mind a comedic character who was, like him, a bumbling, insecure psychologist. He made it to the door, unlocked it and pushed it open so

Ms. Maythorpe could enter first; he assumed that was the proper etiquette. This was a budget room, and the only sitting furniture was the king-size bed – he had forgotten about that, and felt instantly embarrassed. All hotel rooms have at least one chair, sometimes several. This hotel was no exception, so there must have been a mix-up with the furniture, perhaps borrowed for some reason and the return forgotten.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Maythorpe, there’s no sofa or anything in here. I’ll call room service and have a chair brought in. I didn’t even notice this, it’s obviously an oversight because rooms always have some furniture.”

She sat down on the bed and cooed, “That’s okay, I don’t mind sitting here, and you can call me Marjorie. I’m going to make myself comfortable if you don’t mind. I feel like I could collapse any minute. Is that okay? I know we don’t know each other, but judging by your business card, we’re both from somewhere else, so we’re sort of in the same boat. I live in Chicago, I’ve just been here three days on an assignment.”

“You’re not as new in town as I am, I just got here last night,” he proffered with a smile. “But I’ve been here before.”

He put the manila folder with the photos in it on an end table and continued to stand, thinking it untoward for him to sit next to her on the bed, considering this etiquette stuff. But finally he did, otherwise he would have to just stand there looking ridiculous, like a guy in a damn Marx movie, and finally and awkwardly said, “I’ll call down for the coffee.”

Miraculously, he called for the coffee without stammering or yammering on the phone: Completing that call without stammering or blabbering like an idiot was a great victory! he silently announced to himself before continuing his conversation with Ms. Maythorpe.

She asked him, “So you came here for the Bay to Breakers today? Or was that just a coincidence. I’m sorry, I forgot you’re NSA, you can’t tell people anything.”

“No, that’s okay. Listen, I’m not really a Special Agent, at least I don’t feel like one. I went through the formality of training, including the use of firearms, but really I would shoot myself in the foot. In reality, I’m a licensed clinical psychologist. I got the word to check out some phenomena that is apparently intriguing the boys in Washington. But don’t tell anybody any of this about me, you’ll blow my cover, such as it is.”

“A Psychological Agent, and a secret one, to boot. This is the first time I’ve met a Secret ... Special ... Psychological ... Agent.” and they exchanged smiles about this discovery and her difficulty in stringing the words together.

“Actually, I don’t mind telling you what I’m doing in San Francisco. I don’t think it’s anything serious, really, just some coincidental crossover stuff. I’ll probably draw a blank and be done with this in a day or two.”

“So that’s how fast I lose my only San Francisco friend – figures.” she said in demure lamentation.

“Well, I won’t be rushing out of town after I conclude the NSA stuff because I have some personal business to attend to around here before I go. I am married like you said, but I may be here for a couple of weeks even after wrapping up this assignment, and being married doesn’t mean I have to starve for human company while I’m here.”

“That’s for sure, I’m glad you don’t mind a platonic venture. This is such a great city, with lots to do, but I have nobody to do it with!”

“Like I said, this is like, platonic stuff, we could do something together here like tourists if you want. I mean, we just met a few minutes ago, so I’m sorry if I’m offending you.”

“No, don’t feel like that, I’d like to do all that. I don’t want to return to Chicago completely empty-handed, forlorn and forgotten. I don’t need to paint the town red, I just want to do some normal stuff that normal people do, like go out to a restaurant. This city is a cuisine kingdom. Have you seen some of these ethnic restaurants, from Senegal, from Barcelona, from Anatolia, from everywhere? They don’t just have restaurants from different countries, they have them from specific places within the countries. Where is Anatolia, anyway?”

“Beats me, maybe Turkey? I’m not exactly an A student in geography. I haven’t even sorted out all those Baltic or Balkan Thesekus-tans and Those-kustans yet.” and as he spoke he switched on the tv, which was tuned to the Giants game. He continued, “Like I said, this isn’t my first time here. I even lived here for a couple of years. I love the restaurants also, it’s way beyond Phoenix, I tell you that.”

“I can believe it, and not as hot in the summer, or humid like Chicago!” and as she said this there was startling, loud crowd noise coming from the tv that didn’t sound like baseball cheering.

They both looked at the tv as they felt a frightening swaying in their building. “It’s an earthquake!” said Marjorie. “Oh my God, we're going to die!”

The crowds in the stands were shouting, and the sportscaster told anyone who could hear him, “Hang on, folks, I’ve been through this before and it should be over in a minute.”

But it wasn’t over that quickly. Either the camera was moving, or the bleachers were, Donovan couldn’t tell which, until he saw a whole deck start to

come apart. But even more suddenly, the deck was again completely intact, still moving but not falling.

Donovan said, “What was that? It looked to me like a big bleacher collapsed but it didn’t. What the hell! I need to get prescription glasses.”

“No, you’re right. I saw the same thing, I saw it collapse ... and I heard it collapse, but now it’s okay. Thank God!” They could hear several voices in the tv – maybe the sportscasters – muttering to each other, essentially the same verbiage as Marjorie and Donovan.

Somebody on the tv said, “Did you see what I saw? How the hell did that happen? What the hell is going on here. Are we dying?”

At that moment, the tv went blank, as the power failed. “This could be the time guy,” interjected Donovan.

“What time guy, what are you talking about?” she asked as the hotel continued to sway back and forth menacingly. “Oh my God, the one time I come to San Francisco, and this happens! Oh no, my worst fear! Is this building going to collapse? I’ve never been in an earthquake, I’m frightened! Can you hold me?”

He reached over and did so, as dispassionately as possible. Both of them were among the folks who are absolutely terrified of earthquakes, including not a few San Francisco residents. Some people, on the other hand, take quakes in stride or get shook up but don’t worry much, figuring the quake will end soon without endangering them. Donovan’s father once told him he was in a big one in South America. Like a lot of other people he ran outside, but some unfortunates who were outside ran inside and were crushed by collapsing buildings. Donovan thought the Cavalier was built with a fairly modern design and therefore should hold up okay. He felt bound by gallantry to reassure Marjorie, and this could also help him overcome his own fear. So he feigned calm while his heart seemingly pounded so loud it could be heard in the lobby.

“Don’t worry, I know about these quakes.” Donovan assured her. “I’m sure it’s over already. It’s okay, nowadays buildings are designed to sway. Let’s just stay put for a while and wait this thing out.”

She went limp, and embracing her, he kissed her lightly on the cheek, then laid her down, stretching his arm around and under her head, and pulled a pillow under his own; exhaustion exacerbated by this crisis had caught up with both of them. She followed his lead, lying down and snuggling against his shoulder. They quickly went from being emotionally overwrought to being physically spent as the grind during the last couple days caught up with him.

With no radio or tv functioning to inform them, nowhere to go and nothing to

do, they fell asleep in each other’s arms. The earthquake was therapeutically, thankfully far from their minds now, though they knew it would soon intrude again into their lives in a big way. Earthquake? What earthquake, Donovan thought, as he drifted off to sleep with his new girl friend cuddled in his arms.

A half hour later, they woke up hearing the news blaring on the telly. Damage was extensive in The City with several buildings partially collapsed and at least a dozen people injured. But all municipal services were still in operation, almost all streets and traffic signals functioning normally. Donovan drove Ms. Maythorpe back to her job and on the way there he received a message from the marathon race office informing him that he could come there any time to view their videos.

He went there after dropping Ms. Maythorpe off, and watching them confirmed beyond any doubt in his mind that there had been an impossible split-second reversal of winners at the end of the race.

PLEASE PURCHASE BOOK FOR CHAPTERS 21-33