The River of No Return

more in groups. Maybe he was working with some other people. And Nick, he didn’t notice.”
    Alice frowned. “That’s a possibility.” She turned to Nick. “If we work together in a group, we can influence someone for a short period of time. But in a carefully managed environment. Not walking down a street in the middle of the city, surrounded by Naturals. Even when we work together, we aren’t controlling anyone’s mind. We are controlling time, in an interlocking series of microenvironments. It is very complex and requires a team of highly trained people. We aren’t invading anyone’s actual thoughts.”
    “Well, he did.” Nick closed his eyes, trying to remember. “It wasn’t exactly my thoughts he was controlling. It was my feelings. I could think whatever I liked, but I felt what he wanted me to feel. Feelings that weren’t really my own. Fear the first time, when I tried to cross Euston Road, and a profound despair the second, when he put his hand on me in Guilford Street.”
    “Feelings, not thoughts,” she said.
    “Right. And I really don’t think there was anyone working with him. I kept a relatively close eye on him all morning.”
    “Let me try something on you.” Alice stared at him intently, her lips pressed tightly together. Soon her eyelid began to twitch.
    He watched her, finding it increasingly difficult not to smile. “What are you doing?”
    “I’m trying to make you feel desperate to kiss me!” She threw her head back and laughed.
    Nick grinned. “Oh, go on, Alice. You run a secret global organization of time travelers. Surely you can get me to kiss you.”
    “Well, yes, I probably can.” Alice held out her hand. “My lord, would you be so kind?”
    Nick sketched her a bow and lifted her elegant fingers to his lips. He kissed them, just above the big ring with its yellow stone.
    “Please,” Arkady said. “Can we talk about the serious thing? The bad feeling, and the way this Mibbs person tried to push Nick through it?”
    “Yes, of course.” Alice drew her hand away. “But surely that isn’t the scariest thing about Mibbs. Controlling Nick at Euston Road was far worse. In Guilford Street he was just reaching out for a feeling. Taking another time traveler through time with him. We do that regularly. It’s how you’ll bring Nick back.”
    “Yes, yes,” Arkady said. “But Nick shouldn’t have felt what Mibbs was doing. And on top of that, Nick described despair. Despair, Alice. We can travel on every emotion, every thread of feeling—except despair.”
    “Why not?” Nick asked. “Unhappiness is pretty powerful.”
    “Unhappiness, yes. Unhappiness is powerful and we can travel on it if we must. It is not so nice a trip, perhaps. But despair?” Arkady leveled his eyes at Nick. “Was it unhappiness you felt today? Or was it total? Was it crushing?”
    “It was total,” Nick said.
    “You see?” Arkady turned to Alice, spreading his hands. “Despair.”
    “What’s so impossible about despair?”
    “It has to do with how we feel across time, and how feelings stretch across time,” Alice said. “You think you’re the same moment to moment. You’re a guy with kind of a wild life story. But you’re pretty much just a dude. Right?”
    “Um, I guess so.” Nick pictured his gravestone, in some bleak, lawn-mowed American expanse: JUST A DUDE .
    Alice continued. “But in fact, at every instant you are actually in the process of recalling who you were a second ago and becoming yourself again the next second. In each moment your emotions reinterpret you, invent you anew, move you forward—remember, they are your time machine. Despair is different. The self that has no possibility is in despair. It cannot move. It cannot reinvent itself. It sinks into death.”
    “That was death? I might have died?”
    “I don’t know. Might you have? Did it feel that way?”
    “Yes.”
    Arkady and Alice looked at one another, then back at Nick, their faces sober. “Where was this place, this spot on Guilford Street?” Alice asked. “You mentioned it a moment ago. It might be important to what happened.”
    “The Foundling Hospital. Now it is a park: Coram’s Fields. But in my old life it was a home for abandoned children. Unmarried women could bring their babies there and leave them.”
    Alice stood up. “We must go to Guilford Street right away. I need to feel this place.” She held a hand out to Arkady. “It will be hard for you, my darling. But we must