Duff and Linda’s apartment in Alphabet City was carpeted with junk: valves, bolts, tools, copper piping, batteries. A welder’s helmet and torch sat on a titanium workbench. There was little else about the contents of their living room I could recognize beyond a battered love seat, one leg held up by the Encyclopedia Britannica, H to M, which Duff had stolen from the New York Public Library for its thickness. On what looked like a squat portable TV set — but I now realize was a hand-built PC — a strange scene was playing itself out: a headless, four-legged robot pranced like a horse, its multi-jointed legs leaping up and down tirelessly. After a few seconds, the horse was replaced by another giant metal animal, running in snow on canine legs.
“Military robots. Duff says armies can’t march on mutated DNA,” explained Linda, sitting wearily at a battered table to remove a pack of cigarettes from her purse. She lit up with a shaking hand. “How’re Mom and Dad, Debbie? And Nonna Peppy?”
“She died last year.”
Linda looked grief-stricken. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
Yeah, you’re sorry. Right, I thought bitterly.
I said, “Mom and Dad basically spent their lives worrying themselves sick about you. Nonna Peppy even hired a detective. When that didn’t work out, she tried a psychic. Mom’s been hoping for divine intervention.”
Linda put her face in her hands. “I couldn’t come back after Amchitka. They were looking for us.”
I sat down across from her in a broken plastic chair. “They who?”
“They everyone. CIA. Interpol. Those ShipCo goons. Probably the fucking KGB, for all I know. They may act all lovey-dovey with Greenpeace, but anyone actively involved with the movement is on a watch list.” Her eyes finally managed to meet mine. “It hasn’t been easy for me, either, Debbie. Duff’s been dropping in and out of my life for years. When I go to bed at night, I never know whether he’ll be there in the morning. Half the time, he’s on a time hop — either forward to the MIT lab in 2019 to do more research or backwards to Shipman’s Corners in the ’60s. Trying to help someone save the world, apparently.” She gave me a resentful glance through a pall of cigarette smoke.
“When did you start smoking?” I asked.
She exhaled and pushed the pack of Merits in my direction; I shook my head. “Everyone smokes in Alaska. I quit a couple of years ago when I started singing in bars, but a few weeks ago I started up again. Stress.” She left the explanation at that. “What does it matter? The world is coming to an end.”
“Who says?” demanded Kendal. “You still buying Duff’s bullshit, Linda?”
Ash dropped off the end of her cigarette onto a huge stack of magazines: The New Yorker, Swingin’ Bachelor Pad, Paranoid Mechanics, TIME, LIFE, LOOK, Rolling Rock, The Economist, Citizens of Science.
“Open your eyes, Kendal. The press keeps writing about how we’re on the brink of all-out war. Mutual assured destruction. Or haven’t you had the pleasure of a full anti-radiation suit drill in New York yet?”
“We were in a drill at the Excelsior,” I said. “No anti-radiation suits, though.”
“The Excelsior? That’s freak central. A hotel for Twisties. What’re you doing there?” said Linda.
Kendal wandered restlessly around the apartment, picking his way over bits of machinery. From the bathroom, he called, “Debbie, you’ve got to see this.”
I left Linda smoking at the table to join Kendal. The bathtub was piled full of solenoids, copper pigtails just like the one I remembered Duff pawning in Cressie’s.
“Duff’s stash of secret weapons,” murmured Kendal.
“They’re not weapons. They’re tools,” said a voice behind us.
We turned to see Duff in the doorway. He looked like he’d been hit by a train, his skin a patchwork of pits, scabs and sores. Gaunt and emaciated, he seemed to have aged twenty years in the last eight. He leaned heavily on a wooden cane.
There was no hello, no exclamations of surprise, no hugs of greeting. I knew why, too. We had been expected.
“Solenoids aren’t a weapon, kids, just the interface between the mechanical devices of your time and the digital systems of mine. Handy, when you’re trying to make do with archaic technology. That’s how I kept the air-raid siren going so long. Programmed it.”
“Why all the secrecy, then?” asked Kendal.
Duff grunted as he dropped heavily onto a rolling desk chair, resting his cane on his knees. His skin was so degraded, it looked like it was sliding off his face.
“Because solenoids are only allowed in the hands of the military and the industrial complex that works for them. I was under the radar in Shipman’s Corners until some bright bulb connected me with a missing solenoid from Bell Labs. Early use of a cross-border license plate matching database. They were trying to catch cigarette and booze smugglers and came up with me. Gotta be one for the history books. Hope you thought to ditch my car.”
“Don’t worry, we figured out that much,” said Kendal.
Linda was standing behind Duff now, hands on his shoulders. The two of them were ground down, sick, exhausted. Linda looked as if she’d been stretched on a rack, her arms stick thin. The prettiness of her face had sunken into the hollow-cheeked gauntness of a woman who smokes and drinks too much.
“So much for saving the planet,” I said bitterly. “I guess scaring the shit out of everyone and breaking our parents’ hearts was all for nothing.”
“It’s not over yet,” said Duff. “The solenoids aren’t the key to stopping World War Three. You are, Debbie.”
He pressed a button on the PC and the robot animal warriors faded to grey. “MIT wanted me to design military robots. Boots on the ground that never wear out. Believe it or not, they’re still fighting land wars in the future. But I wanted to focus on reversing the negative effects of nuclear fallout. Environmental degradation. Starvation. All the disgusting mutations replicating themselves in the general population like fungi. How’d you like to have a baby who starts out looking healthy and normal, then turns into a yeast culture one night in its crib? It’s no picnic living in a nuked world, kids. Only solution seemed to be: leave this fucked-up time behind and hop into one marginally safer. But first, we had to find an Ion Tagger.”
“What the hell’s that mean?” demanded Kendal. “And what makes you think my wife is one?”
I glanced at Kendal. His habit of referring to me as “my wife” was getting on my nerves.
“Apparently, you’ve forgotten what I told you back when we first met. An Ion Tagger is someone who has the ability to bring history to an end game and drag everyone in it to another continuum. Like a global game of tag, with the Tagger as It. Think of it as tagging every human being on Earth at once. Taking them out of the game, so to speak. Their timeline collapses and everyone in it merges with their alternate selves in a parallel world. They barely realize anything has happened to them. Then the game starts again in another continuum, with everyone carrying on as if they’d been living their lives there all along.”
“But how do you know I’m ‘it’?” I asked.
“We worked out an algorithm, modelling for certain mutations at the cellular level that I found on your cheek swab back at Plutonium Park. And there’s something else.” Duff hesitated, as if he didn’t want to go on.
“Tell her, Duff,” urged Linda.
I shivered at the touch of the cold shawl of destiny draping over my shoulders.
Duff sighed. “The Tagger can’t exist in the target timeline. Because if she did, her very presence would disrupt the flow of time in the new continuum. Who knows where that could lead. While others achieve a singularity with their alternate selves, the Tagger remains as she was in her original timeline.”
“Are you saying I won’t exist anymore because I was never born in the other continuum?”
Duff and Linda exchanged looks; I had the feeling that there was more she wanted him to tell me.
“Something like that,” mumbled Duff. “Tell you the truth, I’m not really sure what tagging would do to you.”
“But what exactly do you expect me to do?”
Kendal looked alarmed that his wife was taking Duff seriously. “Deb . . .”
Duff said, “Come with me to 254 West 54th Street. Midnight. We’ll meet up with my colleague, Gabriel. If Debbie follows his instructions, we’ll all wake up tomorrow in a better world.”
Kendal laughed sarcastically. “Let’s get this over with now. I want Debbie to see what a crap artist you are, so we can go back to our honeymoon.”
Duff shook his head. “We can’t get in ’til midnight. And we’ll never get in looking like this.”
“What do we do ’til then?” I asked.
Duff said gravely, “We go shopping.”