13

It was, in a sense, a family reunion—and spiced, like all such reunions, with memories of what had happened in the past. But this was a family reunion with its own allotted time and place. They were safely back on the Gondwana estate in A.D. 1999, and the time train was standing, with all the appearance of an ancient monument, where once children, Joe’s grandchildren, had played. The family gathered by the poolside, where Mina was pouring them celebratory drinks.

The train stood in an area they called the Beach. A gray stone wall had isolated the play area from the pool. There, long ago—but how long is long?—Molly and Dick’s orphaned children had played, and had buried a machine, and bees had buzzed in the jasmine.

Joe Bodenland carried these memories in his brain, along with many less pleasant things. Now Molly and Dick’s dear kids were at school. They’d be back. And what governing fantasies would they have in their minds, to help them play out their brief span on the stage of life?

Never travel in time. It was too stern a reminder of the brevity of individual life. It was like swimming out into a dark Pacific Ocean, leaving the coast behind, leaving the day, the continental shelf, everything …

He realized that he was getting a little drunk on his—well, how many of Mina’s tall margaritas had gone round as they sat about the swimming pool? And he was content—or as content as he ever could be.

Let Kylie chatter. Any girl that looked that good in a bikini did not have to make too much sense. Let Bram Stoker ramble on, making them laugh with his theater gossip a century old. Let his darling Mina talk about her next skydiving festival in the Rockies. Let Larry brag about the way he had bought up a Softways chain, whatever that was, so that he had control of distribution as far as Denver. Let it all go by.

Washington could wait till Monday. This weekend would be passed in a haze. A pretty triumphant haze, by god.

Lazily, he picked up the silver bullet lying on the table by his right hand, where the near-empty glass stood.

“It’s all over,” he said. “Just return old Bram—and you, young Spinks—to Victorian England, and the whole damned thing’s over and done with.”

Spinks, clad in a pair of trunks bestowed by Larry, was the only one listening to him.

“Sir, apart from my old mother in the village, I have no attachments, as you might say. No young lady I’m walking out with. I would like to stay and serve you. I could do your gardens. Or I could join the police force, if they use guns.”

“You’re young. Why not? America’s a land of opportunity.”

“I didn’t find life all that interesting in 1896, just being a gardener, much though I respect Mr. and Mrs. Stoker.” He kept his voice low. “I think that the United States in 1999 looks—well, sir, a bit more fun. You see—”

“Go on, Spinks. Have another drink. Help yourself.”

“I would like to watch your amazing television and see other inventions. Also—well, Mr. Bodenland, I really liked the way we dropped the bomb on those bloody vampires. That was fun, wasn’t it?”

“Not for them.”

Spinks laughed. “I mean for me it was. Remember I asked you how those vampires appeared happy in daylight, whereas in later ages they couldn’t stand it? You didn’t answer, so I worked it out for myself. They were all looking up, weren’t they, when the F-bomb went off what done ’em in. Looking up at the Very light. So that horror of light and disintegration was—inherited. A folk memory. Isn’t that so, don’t you reckon?”

Bodenland sat up in alarm.

“Jesus, Spinks, you may be right … If so, some of them survived, or no one would inherit anything. You’d better keep quiet about this. Don’t tell the family.”

“’Course they survived, sir. They came calling soon as you and Mr. Clift dug up them two coffins.”

This last remark was overheard by Bram Stoker, who strolled over, a towel draped round his hairy ginger shoulders.

“Yes, Joe, I meant to ask you. Do your fractals account for the way those two coffins managed to get from Canada to Utah—given they were the same two?”

The family, Mina, Larry, and Kylie, were laughing at something Larry had said. Bodenland glanced approvingly at them, and stood up.

“Look, guys, it’s all over. I don’t know the answers. Despite science, much remains a mystery. Don’t ask me. Ask some genius from the fiftieth century. I just want to hold my family together on an even keel.”

Stoker patted his shoulder and held it firmly.

“Joe, you are the best of fellows. But you are never going to rest quiet while you still have proof that Dracula still exists and goes about his rotten business.”

“Meaning?”

Stoker indicated the time train, standing silent in the Texas sun.

“Unlike the F-bomb, that train is not an evil weapon. You are yourself its part-inventor, and I regard you as a force for good. But what you need to do, when you have delivered me back to my wife and Irving, is to destroy the train. Eradicate it. Sever that one link between the remote past and the present and future which gave Dracula his chance.”

“Bram, I can’t do that. I need to get people working on the train, to see if we can duplicate the technology. I can’t destroy it. It’s too precious.”

Stoker shook his head vigorously. “You must destroy it. Do not allow your people to work on it. Don’t you understand—forgive my brutal nineteenth-century mind—don’t you understand that if they worked on it, you would then solve all this fractal business I don’t understand, and you would be entirely responsible for travel through time. You’d be another Frankenstein. And you would know that at some point the train would pass into Dracula’s hands. That’s what must never happen.”

Once he was persuaded, Bodenland acted swiftly. He took Bram Stoker safely back into the arms of Florence, and bid them both an affectionate farewell. Aided by Larry and Spinks—who now became part of the Bodenland entourage—he prepared the time train for its final journey through the Escalante Desert.

So it was that, going forward in time, the train met itself traveling in the opposite direction.

Two strange attractors intersected.

All the windows in Enterprise were shattered by this spectacular collision. The plate glass in the mortician’s was shattered and lay scattered over the coffins inside. The train was entirely destroyed and pieces of metal no bigger than confetti were later discovered over the Old John site.

“It was pretty simple to arrange,” Joe told Mina.

“No, it was genius,” Larry said, as his father embarked on a technical explanation. Smiling, Kylie switched on the television as she went over to the other side of the room to unpack her baggage; technical explanation was not for her.

“And,” Bodenland concluded, “as I learned from Larry, much can be done by remote control. We soon rigged that up.”

Mina squeezed his hand. “The less remote we all are in future, the better.”

“Right,” said Larry, laughing, as he broke away to see what Kylie was doing.

As he reached his wife’s side, to put an arm round her waist, she unzipped a side pocket of her baggage, and out tumbled her well-thumbed copy of Stoker’s famous novel, published and bound, and now signed by its author.