Seize the Night

gave me the Mystery Train cap.
    “This can't exist,” I said.
    If the entire building that housed the project had unraveled from existence, why would the cap have been made in the first place?
    “It doesn't exist,” he said. “But something else does.”
    Baffled, I turned the cap in my hands, to look at the words above the bill. The ruby-red stitching didn't form Mystery Train anymore.
    Instead, the two words were Tornado Alley.
    “What's Tornado Alley?” I asked.
    “You find it a little …”
    “Not uncreepy?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Maximo weird,” I said.
    Maybe Randolph and Conrad and others were out there in Wyvern or some other part of the world, working on the same project, which now had a different name. No closure.
    “Gonna wear it?” Bobby asked.
    “No.”
    “Good idea.”
    “Another thing,” he said. “What did happen to the dead me?”
    “Here we go again. He ceased to exist, that's all.”
    “Because I didn't die.”
    “I'm no Einstein.” He frowned. “What if I wake up some morning, and beside me in bed is that dead me, all rotting and oozing slime?”
    “You'll have to buy new sheets.”
    When we were packed and ready to party, we drove out to the point of the southern horn of the bay, on which Bobby's cottage—a beautiful structure of weathered teak and glass—is the only residence.
    On the way, Sasha stopped at a pay phone, disguised her voice by doing a Mickey Mouse imitation—God knows why Mickey Mouse, when any of the characters from The Lion King would have been more apt—and tipped the police to the scene at the Stanwyk house.
    When we were on the move again, Bobby said, “Bro?”
    “Yo.”
    “Who left that Mystery Train cap for you in the first place? And who slipped Delacroix's security badge under the windshield wiper on the Jeep last night?”
    “No proof.”
    “But a suspicion?”
    “Big Head.”
    “You serious?”
    “I think it's way smarter than it looks.”
    “It's some mutant freak,” Bobby insisted.
    “So am I.”
    “Good point.”
    At Bobby's place, we changed from street clothes into wet suits, then loaded a cooler full of beer and a variety of snacks into the Explorer.
    Before we could party, however, we needed to resolve one issue—so we could stop glancing nervously at the windows, looking for the crazy conductor of the Mystery Train.
    The oversize video displays at the computer workstations in Bobby's home office were ablaze with colorful maps, bar graphs, photos of the earth taken from orbit only minutes ago, and flow charts of dynamic weather conditions worldwide. Here—and with the help of his employees in the Moonlight Bay offices of Surfcast—Bobby predicted surf conditions for subscribers in over twenty countries.
    As I am not computer compatible, I stood back while Bobby settled into one of the workstations, rattled his fingers across the keyboard, went on-line, and searched a database listing all the leading American scientists of our time. Logic insisted that a mad genius obsessed with the possibility of time travel, determined to prove that parallel worlds existed alongside our own and that these lands could be reached by a lateral movement across time, would have to become a physicist, and a damned good one, enormously well funded, if he had any hope of applying his theories effectively.
    Bobby found Dr. Randolph Josephson in three minutes. He was associated with a university in Nevada, and he lived in Reno.
    Mungojerrie sprang onto the workstation to peer intently at the data on the screen. There was even a photo. It was our mad scientist, all right.
    In spite of the widespread base closures that had followed the end of the Cold War, Nevada had been left with a few sprawling facilities.
    It was reasonable to assume that on at least one of them, top-secret research projects in the Wyvern vein were still being undertaken.
    “He might have moved up there to Reno after Wyvern closed,” Sasha said. “That doesn't mean he's still alive. He could have come back here to snatch these kids—and died when that building … came apart.”
    “But maybe he never worked at Wyvern at all. If the Mystery Train never happened, then maybe he's been up there in Reno all along building—Tornado Alley or something else.”
    Bobby called directory assistance in Reno and obtained a listed number for Dr. Randolph Josephson. With a felt-tip pen, he jotted it on a notepad.
    Though I knew my imagination was to blame, the ten digits seemed to have an