By the light of the moon

have
prevented his mother's murder.
    Sixteen minutes.
    He refused to think about what might have been. Dared not.
    Nineteen-year-old Dylan O'Conner closed the door behind him,
without bothering to switch on the lights, walked through a
startled Jilly Jackson. He put a couple books on the kitchen table
and headed toward the dining room.
    'Fold us out of here, Shep,' Dylan said.
    In the dining room, the younger Dylan spoke to the younger
Shepherd: 'Hey, buddy, smells like we have cake tonight.'
    'Fold us home, Shep. Our own time.'
    In the adjacent room, the other Dylan said, 'Buddy, are you
crying? Hey, what's wrong?'
    Hearing his own tortured wail when he found his mother's body
would be the camel-crippling straw. 'Shep, get us to hell out of
here now, now .'
    The dark kitchen folded away. A bright place folded toward them.
Crazily, Dylan wondered if Shepherd's fantastic trick of travel
might not be limited merely to journeys through space and time, but
if it might extend to dimensions unknown to the living. Perhaps it
had been a mistake to say 'to hell' just before they left 1992.

36
    The kaleidoscope tweaked. Around Jilly the sunlit
kitchen folded in through the outgoing night kitchen, and fell into
place in every bright detail.
    No delicious smell of freshly baked cake. No shimmering black
energy underfoot.
    The smiling ceramic pig on the wall clasped its front hooves
around the clock in its belly, which read 1:20, twenty-four minutes
after they had folded out of the besieged motel room in Arizona.
The present had progressed equal to the amount of time that they
had spent in the past.
    No open gateway loomed behind them, giving a view of the dark
kitchen in 1992, nor a radiant tunnel. She had the feeling that the
tunnel had been a travel technique that Shepherd didn't need to use
anymore, that it was crude compared to his current method, by which
he moved them from place to place without maintaining a tether to
the location that they had departed.
    Impressed by her own aplomb, as though she had just stepped out
of a conveyance no more extraordinary than a common elevator, Jilly
put the laptop on the kitchen table. 'You didn't change the place
much, did you? Looks the same.'
    Dylan shushed her, cocked his head, listening intently.
    A pool of stillness flooded the house until the refrigerator
motor kicked on.
    'What's wrong?' Jilly asked.
    'I'm going to have to explain this to Vonetta. Our housekeeper.
That's her Harley in front of the garage.'
    Looking out the kitchen windows, Jilly saw the garage at the end
of the backyard, but no motorcycle. 'What Harley?'
    'There.' Dylan turned, pointing through a window to a place
where no Harley stood. 'Huh. She must've gone to the store for
something. Maybe we can get in and out of here before she's
back.'
    Shepherd opened the refrigerator. Perhaps he was looking for a
consoling piece of cake.
    Still assimilating their journey into the past, unconcerned
about the housekeeper, Jilly said, 'While Proctor's enemies,
whoever they are, were closing in on him, he was tracking down you
and Shep.'
    'Last night when he had me strapped in that chair, he said he
was so eaten away with remorse that he was empty inside, but it
didn't make sense to me then.'
    'The creep's always been empty inside,' Jilly said. 'From day
one, from the cradle, if you ask me.'
    'The remorse is bullshit. He's got this self-deprecation shtick
that makes him feel good about himself. Sorry, Jilly.'
    'That's okay. After what we've been through, you've got every
right not to say diaper dump.'
    She almost got a laugh out of him, but 1992 was still too much
in their minds for Dylan to manage more than a smile. 'No. I mean,
I'm sorry you got caught up in this because of me. Me and
Shep.'
    'Proctor just had an extra dose of his hell juice, he needed
someone to screw over, and there I was, out for a root beer.'
    Standing at the open refrigerator, Shepherd said, 'Cold.'
    'But Proctor wouldn't have been there,' Dylan said, 'if Shep and
I hadn't been there.'
    'Yeah, and I wouldn't have been there if I hadn't spent all of
my relatively short, so-called adult life trying to be a standup
joke jockey, telling myself that performing is not just a
meaningful life but the only life. Hell, I don't have to worry
about my ass getting big, 'cause I'm already a big ass. So don't you start with your own remorse shtick. It happened, we're
here, and even with the nanobots supposedly building the New
Jerusalem inside our skulls, being