The Time Keeper Part 17

He saw the fourteenth-richest man in the world unloaded like a delivery and taken inside.

It was an hour before midnight on the last night of the year. Roger and Jed lowered the side rails of Victor's bed. A doctor and a coroner whispered to each other. They held doc.u.ments. A huge tub was nearby, larger than a human body and filled with ice.

Victor was barely conscious, his breath coming in short spurts. The doctor asked if he wanted a sedative, but he shook his head.

"Is the paperwork right?" he mumbled.

The coroner told him yes, and Victor inhaled deeply and shut his eyes. The last thing he was aware of was Jed, the cryonics man, removing a pocket watch from his grip and saying, "I promise to take care of this."

Four hands went under his body, to lift him up.

But Dor was standing in the corner.

He turned his hourgla.s.s.

Meanwhile, in a garage in the suburbs, Sarah Lemon had turned the key in the ignition of the blue Ford Taurus.

Now all she had to do was wait. The fumes would take care of the rest. So easy. She deserved something easy. She took a gulp from the vodka bottle and spit some down her chin and s.h.i.+rt. Through her cell phone the sad song played again and again, barely audible over the engine noise.

I wake up in the morning and I wonder Why everything's the same as it was I can't understand, no I can't understand How life goes on the way it does.

"Leave me alone," Sarah murmured, picturing Ethan and his c.o.c.ky posture and his thick hair and the way he walked. He'd be sorry, she told herself. He'd feel guilty.

Why does my heart go on beating?

She was terribly woozy.

Why do these eyes of mine cry?

She slumped backward.

Don't they know She coughed.

it's the end of the world?

She coughed again.

It ended when you said good-bye.

Her eyes began to close. Then everything seemed to stop. Through the winds.h.i.+eld, she thought she saw a man moving closer. She thought she heard him scream.

63.

Dor screamed in frustration.

Having turned the hourgla.s.s, what else was he to do? He could slow time, but never stop it completely. The cars he'd examined had always been moving, just at infinitesimal speed. The people he'd studied still breathed, just so slowly they would never know he was there.

The power of the hourgla.s.s had let him bend and squeeze the moments around him-a power beyond comprehension when granted-but Dor realized it was not enough. Eventually, time would pa.s.s. Eventually, Victor would be covered in ice and cut open. Eventually, carbon monoxide would spread through Sarah's bloodstream, cause hypoxia, a poisoned nervous system, heart failure.

This could not have been why he was sent to Earth-to watch them die. They were Dor's mission, his destiny. Yet both had taken extreme measures before he could affect anything. He had failed. It was too late.

Unless ...

It is never too late or too soon, the old man had said. It is when it is supposed to be.

Dor crouched in front of two garbage cans. He put his hands together, pressed them to his lips, and shut his eyes, the way he used to do in the cave, trying to isolate the voice within from the millions of voices outside.

It is when it is supposed to be.

This moment? But then, how did he stay in this moment? Dor thought back on all that he understood about time.

What was the constant?

Movement. Yes. With time there was always movement. The setting sun. The dripping water. The pendulums. The spilling sand. To realize his destiny, such movement had to cease. He had to stop the flow of time completely ...

His eyes opened. He quickly rose. He reached inside the car, and lifted Sarah by her knees and shoulders.

The old year was nearly over. A new year was minutes away. Father Time carried the dying girl out into the snow; you could count the flakes hanging in the moonlight.

He walked through a winter landscape of traffic and party lights.

He walked with Sarah's head rolled into his chest, her eyes half-opened, looking up at him. He felt sorry for this girl. One who wants too little time. That's how the old man had described her.

Dor thought about his own children. He wondered if they'd ever become this unhappy, wanting to give up on the world. He hoped not. But then, hadn't he wished his own life would end many times?

He walked along an expressway and through a tunnel and past a crowded stadium parking lot whose sign read NEW YEAR'S HIP-HOP ALL NIGHT CELEBRATION. He walked for two days on his clock, barely a second on ours, until he reached a darkened industrial park and the cryonics building.

He had to bring Sarah and Victor together. If this moment was when it is supposed to be, then Dor could no longer traverse two existences.

He carried Sarah to the warehouse with the large storage cylinders inside. He rested her against a wall. Then he went to the room where Victor was being prepped. He lifted Victor's body from the bed surrounded by others, and brought him to the warehouse, too, placing him next to Sarah. He put a thumb to each of their wrists, and eventually felt the slowest b.u.mp of a pulse. They were suspended, but still alive.

That meant Dor's idea had a chance.

He crouched between them and pulled their hands to the hourgla.s.s.

He wrapped their fingers around the braided posts, hoping this would connect them to the source of its power. Then he stretched his own hand over the top, gripped hard, and turned.

The top came loose. He pulled it away. It floated into the air, casting a blue light over the three of them. Looking into the upper bulb, Dor saw the white sand exposed, so fine and sparkly it refracted like diamonds.

Herein lies every moment of the universe.

Dor hesitated. Either he was right, and his story had a yet untold ending, or he was wrong and his story was over.

He placed his thumb and forefinger close together, and, whispering the word "Alli"-should he perish, he wanted that to be the last thing he said-he pushed into the sand, toward the narrow funnel that separated what had fallen from what had not.

Instantly, his mind went dizzy with a billion images. His fingers tingled as the flesh melted off the bones, and they elongated into stick-like digits, growing thin as pins until they slid through the hourgla.s.s stem. Every instant of the universe was pa.s.sing through Dor's consciousness; his mind was traveling through that gla.s.s as well, traversing what had already transpired and what was yet to be.

Finally, with a power that did not come from man, he pinched his pin-like fingertips together. His eyes seemed to explode in color. His head was thrown back.

He had plucked a single falling grain of sand, just as it was about to hit bottom.

And this is what happened next ...

On seash.o.r.es from Los Angeles to Tripoli, ocean waves froze in mid-curl.

Clouds stopped moving. Weather locked. Raindrops in Mexico hung in the air, and a sandstorm in Tunisia became a permanent grainy billow.

There was not a sound on Earth. Airplanes hung silently above runways. Puffs of cigarette smoke remained solid around their smokers. Phones were dead. Screens were blank. No one spoke. No one breathed. Sunlight and darkness divided the planet, and New Year's fireworks remained splattered in nighttime skies, drizzled purples and greens, as if children had been drawing on the firmament then had run away.

No one was born. No one died. Nothing drew closer. Nothing went away. The proverbial march of time had gone to its knees.

One man.

One grain of sand.

Father Time had stopped the world.

STILLNESS.

64.

Victor had expected more pain.

Beyond the cancer, beyond his rotting liver, the shock of a sudden body freeze would be, he imagined, traumatic. He'd once had a bucket of ice water dumped on his head at a sporting event-part of a celebration-and his nerve endings felt as if they'd been raked with knives. He could only imagine the effect of full ice immersion. When he'd closed his eyes in the cryonics facility, he'd braced for that.

Instead, there was a sudden lightness to him, and a freedom of movement he had long ago forgotten. He gripped one side of the bed-only he saw now that it was not the bed he was gripping but an ... hourgla.s.s of some kind, and he was in the warehouse with the huge fibergla.s.s cylinders and ... what happened?

He stood up.

No pain.

No wheelchair.

"Who are you?" a girl's voice asked.

65.

Sarah had thought she was gripping the steering wheel.

But as her vision cleared, she saw her hand was on the post of a strange-looking hourgla.s.s. A dream, she figured. It had to be. A room she'd never seen before? Some old guy in a bathrobe, asleep on the floor? She felt OK, not even dizzy from the alcohol, so she stood up and looked around, free and light, the way you feel in dreams when your feet don't touch the ground.

Wait ...

She stomped her feet. She did not feel the ground.

Wait ...

Where did the garage go? The car? That song? She suddenly remembered the darkness that had strangled her, so thoroughly she wanted to die. But had she? Where was she?

She moved out of the warehouse, down a hallway to a smaller room. She looked inside and recoiled. She thought she saw four men around a big tub-only they weren't moving. There was no sound. Suddenly this felt like one of those zombie dreams, and she hurried back to the big room where she'd awakened, only to see the old guy was up and moving around.

"Who are you?" she screamed.

He glared at her.

"Who are you?" he snapped back. "How did you get in here?"

She hadn't expected a response-certainly not a scolding one. She felt suddenly terrified. What if this wasn't a dream? What had she done? She saw a single open door near the loading area, and she ran through it into the snowy night. A car down the street had its lights on but was not moving. A gas station seemed open, but a customer held the hose in his arms, like a guard on sentry duty. Strangest of all, the snowflakes were stuck in the sky. When Sarah swatted at them, her hand pa.s.sed through.

She dropped to the ground and curled her body into a ball, covering her eyes, squeezing them shut, trying to understand if she was dead or alive.

66.

Victor wondered if he was between worlds.

He had heard tales of people who floated in near-death experiences. Perhaps it happened when you were frozen alive. Your body locked, but your soul was left to wander. No wheelchairs? No canes? It was not the worst thing to be free of flesh and bones until science beckoned for your second act.