The Best of Kage Baker

The Catch





The barn stands high in the middle of backcountry nowhere, shimmering in summer heat. It’s an old barn, empty a long time, and its broad planks are silvered. Nothing much around it but yellow hills and red rock.

Long ago, somebody painted it with a mural. Still visible along its broad wall are the blobs representing massed crowds, the green diamond of a baseball park, and the figure in a slide, seeming to swim along the green field, glove extended. His cartoon eyes are wide and happy. The ball, radiating black lines of force, is sailing into his glove. Above him is painted the legend:

what a catch! And, in smaller letters below it:

1951, The Golden Year!

The old highway snakes just below the barn, where once the mural must have edified a long cavalcade of DeSotos, Packards, and Oldsmobiles. But the old road is white and empty now, with thistles pushing through its cracks. The new highway runs straight across the plain below.

Down on the new highway, eighteen-wheeler rigs hurtle through, roaring like locomotives, and they are the only things to disturb the vast silence. The circling hawk makes no sound. The cottonwood trees by the edge of the dry stream are silent too, not a rustle or a creak along the whole row; but they do cast a thin gray shade, and the men waiting in the Volkswagen Bug are grateful for that.

They might be two cops on stakeout. They aren’t. Not exactly.


“Are you going to tell me why we’re sitting here, now?” asks the younger man, finishing his candy bar.

His name is Clete. The older man’s name is Porfirio.

The older man shifts in his seat and looks askance at his partner. He doesn’t approve of getting stoned on the job. But he shrugs, checks his weapon, settles into the most comfortable position he can find.

He points through the dusty windshield at the barn. “See up there? June 30, 1958, family of five killed. ’46 Plymouth Club Coupe. Driver lost control of the car and went off the edge of the road. Car rolled seventy meters down that hill and hit the rocks, right there. Gas tank blew. Mr. and Mrs. William T. Ross of Visalia, California, identified from dental records. Kids didn’t have any dental records. No relatives to identify bodies.

“Articles in the local and Visalia papers, grave with the whole family’s names and dates on one marker in a cemetery in Visalia. Some blackening on the rocks up there. That’s all there is to show it ever happened.”

“Okay,” says the younger man, nodding thoughtfully. “No witnesses, right?”

“That’s right.”

“The accident happened on a lonely road, and state troopers or whoever found the wreck after the fact?”

“Yeah.”

“And the bodies were so badly burned they all went in one grave?” Clete looks pleased with himself. “So…forensic medicine being what it was in 1958, maybe there weren’t five bodies in the car after all? Maybe one of the kids was thrown clear on the way down the hill? And if there was somebody in the future going through historical records, looking for incidents where children vanished without a trace, this might draw their attention, right?”

“It might,” agrees Porfirio.

“So the Company sent an operative to see if any survivors could be salvaged,” says Clete. “Okay, that’s standard Company procedure. The Company took one of the kids alive, and he became an operative. So why are we here?”

Porfirio sighs, watching the barn.

“Because the kid didn’t become an operative,” he says. “He became a problem.”


1958. Bobby Ross, all-American boy, was ten years old, and he loved baseball and cowboy movies and riding his bicycle. All-American boys get bored on long trips. Bobby got bored. He was leaning out the window of his parents’ car when he saw the baseball mural on the side of the barn.

“Hey, look!” he yelled, and leaned way out the window to see better. He slipped.

“Jesus Christ!” screamed his mom, and lunging into the back she tried to grab the seat of his pants. She collided with his dad’s arm. His dad cursed; the car swerved. Bobby felt himself gripped, briefly, and then all his mom had was one of his sneakers, and then the sneaker came off his foot. Bobby flew from the car just as it went over the edge of the road.

He remembered afterward standing there, clutching his broken arm, staring down the hill at the fire, and the pavement was hot as fire, too, on his sneakerless foot. His mind seemed to be stuck in a little circular track. He was really hurt bad, so what he had to do now was run to his mom and dad, who would yell at him and drive him to Dr. Werts, and he’d have to sit in the cool green waiting room that smelled scarily of rubbing alcohol and look at dumb Humpty Dumpty Magazine until the doctor made everything all right again.

But that wasn’t going to happen now, because…

But he was really hurt bad, so he needed to run to his mom and dad—

But he couldn’t do that ever again, because—

But he was really hurt bad—

His mind just went round and round like that, until the spacemen came for him.


They wore silver suits, and they said “Greetings, Earth boy; we have come to rescue you and take you to Mars,” but they looked just like ordinary people and in fact gave Bobby the impression they were embarrassed. Their spaceship was real enough, though. They carried Bobby into it on a stretcher and took off, and a space doctor fixed his broken arm, and he was given space soda pop to drink, and he never even noticed that the silver ship had risen clear of the hillside, one step ahead of the state troopers, until he looked out and saw the curve of the Earth. He’d been lifted from history, as neatly as a fly ball smacking into an outfielder’s mitt.

The spacemen didn’t take Bobby Ross to Mars, though. It turned out to be some place in Australia. But it might just as well have been Mars.

Because, instead of starting fifth grade, and then going on to high school, and getting interested in girls, and winning a baseball scholarship, and being drafted, and blown to pieces in Viet Nam—Bobby Ross became an immortal.


“Well, that happened to all of us,” says Clete, shifting restively. “One way or another. Except I’ve never heard of the Company recruiting a kid as old as ten.”

“That’s right.” Keeping his eyes on the barn, Porfirio reaches into the backseat and gropes in a cooler half full of rapidly melting ice. He finds and draws out a bottle of soda. “So what does that tell you?”

Clete considers the problem. “Well, everybody knows you can’t work the immortality process on somebody that old. You hear rumors, you know, like when the Company was starting out, that there were problems with some of the first test cases—” He stops himself and turns to stare at Porfirio. Porfirio meets his gaze but says nothing, twisting the top off his soda bottle.

“This guy was one of the test cases!” Clete exclaims. “And the Company didn’t have the immortality process completely figured out yet, so they made a mistake?”


Several mistakes had been made with Bobby Ross.

The first, of course, was that he was indeed too old to be made immortal. If two-year-old Patty or even five-year-old Jimmy had survived the crash, the process might have been worked successfully on them. Seat belts not having been invented in 1946, however, the Company had only Bobby with whom to work.

The second mistake had been in sending “spacemen” to collect Bobby. Bobby, as it happened, didn’t like science fiction. He liked cowboys and baseball, but rocket ships left him cold. Movie posters and magazine covers featuring bug-eyed monsters scared him. If the operatives who had rescued him had come galloping over the hill on horseback, and had called him “Pardner” instead of “Earth boy,” he’d undoubtedly have been as enchanted as they meant him to be and he would have bought into the rest of the experience with a receptive mind. As it was, by the time he was offloaded into a laboratory in a hot red rocky landscape, he was far enough out of shock to have begun to be angry, and his anger focused on the bogusness of the spacemen.

The third mistake had been in the Company’s choice of a mentor for Bobby.

Because the Company hadn’t been in business very long—at least, as far as its stockholders knew—a lot of important things about the education of young immortals had yet to be discovered, such as: no mortal can train an immortal. Only another immortal understands the discipline needed, the pitfalls to be avoided when getting a child accustomed to the idea of eternal life.

But when Bobby was being made immortal, there weren’t any other immortals yet—not successful ones, anyway—so the Company might be excused that error, at least. And if Professor Bill Riverdale was the last person who should have been in charge of Bobby, worse errors are made all the time. Especially by persons responsible for the welfare of young children.

After all, Professor Riverdale was a good, kind man. It was true that he was romantically obsessed with the idyll of all-American freckle-faced boyhood to an unhealthy degree, but he was so far in denial about it that he would never have done anything in the least improper.

All he wanted to do, when he sat down at Bobby’s bedside, was help Bobby get over the tragedy. So he started with pleasant conversation. He told Bobby all about the wonderful scientists in the far future who had discovered the secret of time travel, and how they were now working to find a way to make people live forever.

And Bobby, lucky boy, had been selected to help them. Instead of going to an orphanage, Bobby would be transformed into, well, nearly into a superhero! It was almost as though Bobby would never have to grow up. It was every boy’s dream! He’d have super-strength and super-intelligence and never have to wash behind his ears, if he didn’t feel like it! And, because he’d live forever, one day he really would get to go to the planet Mars.

If the immortality experiment worked. But Professor Riverdale—or Professor Bill, as he encouraged Bobby to call him—was sure the experiment would work this time, because such a lot had been learned from the last time it had been attempted.

Professor Bill moved quickly on to speak with enthusiasm of how wonderful the future was, and how happy Bobby would be when he got there. Why, it was a wonderful place, according to what he’d heard! People lived on the moon and on Mars, too, and the problems of poverty and disease and war had been licked, by gosh, and there were no Communists! And boys could ride their bicycles down the tree-lined streets of that perfect world, and float down summer rivers on rafts, and camp out in the woods, and dream of going to the stars…

Observing, however, that Bobby lay there silent and withdrawn, Professor Bill cut his rhapsody short. He concluded that Bobby needed psychiatric therapy to get over the guilt he felt at having caused the deaths of his parents and siblings.

And this was a profound mistake, because Bobby Ross—being a normal ten-year-old all-American boy—had no more conscience than Pinocchio before the Cricket showed up, and it had never occurred to him that he had been responsible for the accident. Once Professor Bill pointed it out, however, he burst into furious tears.

So poor old Professor Bill had a lot to do to help Bobby through his pain, both the grief of his loss and the physical pain of his transformation into an immortal, of which there turned out to be a lot more than anybody had thought there would be, regardless of how much had been learned from the last attempt.

He studied Bobby’s case, paying particular attention to the details of his recruitment. He looked carefully at the footage taken by the operatives who had collected Bobby, and the mural on the barn caught his attention. Tears came to his eyes when he realized that the sight of the ballplayer must have been Bobby’s last happy memory, the final golden moment of his innocence.


“What’d he do?” asks Clete, taking his turn at rummaging in the ice chest. “Wait, I’ll bet I know. He used the image of the mural in the kid’s therapy, right? Something to focus on when the pain got too bad? Pretending he was going to a happy place in his head, as an escape valve.”

“Yeah. That was what he did.”

“There’s only root beer left. You want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Well, so why was this such a bad idea? I remember having to do mental exercises like that, myself, at the Base school. You probably did, too.”

“It was a bad idea because the professor didn’t know what the hell he was doing,” says Porfirio. The distant barn is wavering in the heat, but he never takes his eyes off it.


Bobby’s other doctors didn’t know what the hell they were doing, either. They’d figured out how to augment Bobby’s intelligence pretty well, and they already knew how to give him unbreakable bones. They did a great job of convincing his body it would never die, and taught it how to ward off viruses and bacteria.

But they didn’t know yet that even a healthy ten-year-old’s DNA has already begun to deteriorate, that it’s already too subject to replication errors for the immortality process to be successful. And Bobby Ross, being an all-American kid, had got all those freckles from playing unshielded in ultraviolet light. He’d gulped down soda pop full of chemicals and inhaled smoke from his dad’s Lucky Strikes and hunted for tadpoles in the creek that flowed past the paper mill.

And then the doctors introduced millions of nanobots into Bobby’s system, and the nanobots’ job was to keep him perfect. But the doctors didn’t know yet that the nanobots had to be programmed with an example to copy. So the nanobots latched onto the first DNA helix they encountered, and made it their pattern for everything Bobby ought to be. Unfortunately, it was a damaged DNA helix, but the nanobots didn’t know that.

Bobby Ross grew up at the secret laboratory, and as he grew it became painfully obvious that there were still a few bugs to be worked out of the immortality process. There were lumps, there were bumps, there were skin cancers and deformities. His production of Pineal Tribrantine Three was sporadic. Sometimes, after months of misery, his body’s chemistry would right itself. The joint pain would ease, the glands would work properly again.

Or not.

Professor Bill was so, so sorry, because he adored Bobby. He’d sit with Bobby when the pain was bad, and talk soothingly to send Bobby back to that dear good year, 1951—and what a golden age 1951 seemed by this time, because it was now 1964, and Bobby had become Robert, and the world seemed to be lurching into madness. Professor Bill himself wished he could escape back into 1951. But he sent Robert there often, into that beautiful summer afternoon when Hank Bauer flung his length across the green diamond—and the ball had smacked into his leather glove—and the crowds went wild!

Though only in Robert’s head, of course, because all this was being done with hypnosis.

Nobody ever formally announced that Robert Ross had failed the immortality process, because it was by no means certain he wasn’t immortal. But it had become plain he would never be the flawless superagent the Company had been solving for, so less and less of the laboratory budget was allotted to Robert’s upkeep.

What did the Company do with unsuccessful experiments? Who knows what might have happened to Robert, if Professor Bill hadn’t taken the lad under his wing?

He brought Robert to live with him in his own quarters on the Base, and continued his education himself. This proved that Professor Bill really was a good man and had no ulterior interest in Robert whatsoever; for Bobby, the slender kid with skin like a sun-speckled apricot, was long gone. Robert by this time was a wizened, stooping, scarred thing with hair in unlikely places.

Professor Bill tried to make it up to Robert by giving him a rich interior life. He went rafting with Robert on the great river of numbers, under the cold and sparkling stars of theory. He tossed him physics problems compact and weighty as a baseball, and beamed with pride when Robert smacked them out of the park of human understanding. It made him feel young again, himself.

He taught the boy all he knew, and when he found that Robert shone at Temporal Physics with unsuspected brilliance, he told his superiors. This pleased the Company managers. It meant that Robert could be made to earn back the money he had cost the Company after all. So he became an employee, and was even paid a modest stipend to exercise his genius by fiddling around with temporal equations on the Company’s behalf.


“And the only problem was, he was a psycho?” guesses Clete. “He went berserk, blew away poor old Professor Riverdale and ran off into the sunset?”

“He was emotionally unstable,” Porfirio admits. “Nobody was surprised by that, after what he’d been through. But he didn’t kill Professor Riverdale. He did run away, though. Walked, actually. He walked through a solid wall, in front of the professor and about fifteen other people in the audience. He’d been giving them a lecture in advanced temporal paradox theory. Just smiled at them suddenly, put down his chalk, and stepped right through the blackboard. He wasn’t on the other side when they ran into the next room to see.”

“Damn,” says Clete, impressed. “We can’t do that.”

“We sure can’t,” says Porfirio. He stiffens, suddenly, seeing something move on the wall of the barn. It’s only the shadow of the circling hawk, though, and he relaxes.

Clete’s eyes have widened, and he looks worried.

“You just threw me a grenade,” he says. Catching a grenade is security slang for being made privy to secrets so classified one’s own safety is compromised.

“You needed to know,” says Porfirio.


The search for Robert Ross had gone on for years, in the laborious switchback system of time within which the Company operated. The mortals running the 1964 operation had hunted him with predictable lack of success. After the ripples from that particular causal wave had subsided, the mortal masters up in the twenty-fourth century set their immortal agents on the problem.

The ones who were security technicals, that is. The rank-and-file Preservers and Facilitators weren’t supposed to know that there had ever been mistakes like Robert Ross. This made searching for him that much harder, but secrecy has its price.

It was assumed that Robert, being a genius in Temporal Physics, had somehow managed to escape into time. Limitless as time was, Robert might still be found within it. The operatives in charge of the case reasoned that a needle dropped into a haystack must gravitate toward any magnets concealed in the straw. Were there any magnets that might attract Robert Ross?

“Baseball!” croaked Professor Riverdale, when Security Executive Tvashtar had gone to the nursing home to interview him. “Bobby just loved baseball. You mark my words, he’ll be at some baseball game somewhere. If he’s in remission, he’ll even be on some little town team.”

With trembling hands he drew a baseball from the pocket of his dressing gown and held it up, cupping it in both hands as though he presented Tvashtar with a crystal wherein the future was revealed.

“He and I used to play catch with this. You might say it’s the egg out of which all our hopes and dreams hatch. Peanuts and Crackerjack! The crack of the bat! The boys of summer. Bobby was the boy of summer. Sweet Bobby…He’d have given anything to have played the game…It’s a symbol, young man, of everything that’s fine and good and American.”

Tvashtar nodded courteously, wondering why mortals in this era assumed the Company was run by Americans, and why they took it for granted that a stick-and-ball game had deep mystical significance. But he thanked Professor Riverdale, and left the 1970s gratefully. Then he organized a sweep through Time, centering on baseball.


“And it didn’t pan out,” says Clete. “Obviously.”

“It didn’t pan out,” Porfirio agrees. “The biggest search operation the Company ever staged, up to that point. You know how much work was involved?”


It had been a lot of work. The operatives had to check out every obscure minor-league player who ever lived, to say nothing of investigating every batboy and ballpark janitor and even bums who slept under the bleachers, from 1845 to 1965. Nor was it safe to assume Robert might not be lurking beyond the fruited plains and amber waves of grain; there were Mexican, Cuban and Japanese leagues to be investigated. Porfirio, based at that time in California, had spent the Great Depression sweeping up peanut shells from Stockton to San Diego, but neither he nor anyone else ever caught a glimpse of Robert Ross.

It was reluctantly concluded that Professor Riverdale hadn’t had a clue about what was going on in Robert’s head. But, since Robert had never shown up again anywhere, the investigation was quietly dropped.

Robert Ross might never have existed, or indeed died with his mortal

family. The only traces left of him were in the refinements made to the immortality process after his disappearance, and in the new rules made concerning recruitment of young operatives.

The Company never acknowledged that it had made any defectives.


“Just like that, they dropped the investigation?” Clete demands. “When this guy knew how to go places without getting into a time transcendence chamber? Apparently?”

“What do you think?” says Porfirio.

Clete mutters something mildly profane and reaches down into the paper bag between his feet. He pulls out a can of potato chips and pops the lid. He eats fifteen chips in rapid succession, gulps root beer, and then says: “Well, obviously they didn’t drop the investigation, because here we are. Or something happened to make them open it again. They got a new lead?”

Porfirio nods.


1951. Porfirio was on standby in Los Angeles. Saturday morning in a quiet neighborhood, each little house on its square of lawn, rows of them along tree-lined streets. In most houses, kids were sprawled on the floor reading comic books or listening to Uncle Whoa-Bill on the radio, as long low morning sunlight slanted in through screen doors. In one or two houses, though, kids sat staring at a cabinet in which was displayed a small glowing image brought by orthicon tube; for the future, or a piece of it anyway, had arrived.

Porfirio was in the breakfast room, with a cup of coffee and the sports sections from the Times, the Herald Express, the Examiner, and the Citizen News, and he was scanning for a certain profile, a certain configuration of features. He was doing this purely out of habit, because he’d been off the case for years; but, being immortal, he had a lot of time on his hands. Besides, he had all the instincts of a good cop.

But he had other instincts, too, even more deeply ingrained than hunting, and so he noticed the clamor from the living room, though it wasn’t very loud. He looked up, scowling, as three-year-old Isabel rushed into the room in her nightgown.

“What is it, mi hija?”

She pointed into the living room. “Maria’s bad! The scary man is on the TV,” she said tearfully. He opened his arms and she ran to him.

“Maria, are you scaring your sister?” he called.

“She’s just being a dope,” an impatient little voice responded.

He carried Isabel into the living room, and she gave a scream and turned her face over his shoulder so she wouldn’t see the television screen. Six-year-old Maria, on the other hand, stared at it as though hypnotized. Before her on the coffee table, two little bowls of Cheerios sat untasted, rapidly going soggy in their milk.

Porfirio frowned down at his great-great-great-great-(and several more greats) grand-niece. “Don’t call your sister a dope. What’s going on? It sounded like a rat fight in here.”

“She’s scared of the Amazing No Man, so she wanted me to turn him off, but he’s not scary,” said Maria. “And I want to see him.”

“You were supposed to be watching Cartoon Circus,” said Porfirio, glancing at the screen.

“Uh-huh, but Mr. Ringmaster has people on sometimes, too,” Maria replied. “See?”

Porfirio looked again. Then he sat down beside Maria on the couch and stared very hard at the screen. On his arm, Isabel kicked and made tiny complaining noises over his shoulder until he absently fished a stick of gum from his shirt pocket and offered it to her.

“Who is this guy?” he asked Maria.

“The Amazing No Man,” she explained. “Isn’t he strange?”

“Yeah,” he said, watching. “Eat your cereal, honey.”

And he sat there beside her as she ate, though when she dripped milk from her spoon all over her nightgown because she wasn’t paying attention as she ate, he didn’t notice, because he wasn’t paying attention either. It was hard to look away from the TV.

A wizened little person wandered to and fro before the camera, singing nonsense in an eerily high-pitched voice. Every so often he would stop, as though he had just remembered something, and grope inside his baggy clothing. He would then produce something improbable from an inner pocket: a string of sausages. A bunch of bananas. A bottle of milk. An immense cello and bow. A kite, complete with string and tail.

He greeted each item with widely pantomimed surprise, and a cry of “Woooowwwwww!” He pretended he was offering the sausages to an invisible dog, and made them disappear from his hand as though it were really eating them. He played a few notes on the cello. He made the kite hover in midair beside him, and did a little soft-shoe dance, and the kite bobbed along with him as though it were alive. His wordless music never stopped, never developed into a melody; just modulated to the occasional Wowww as he pretended to make another discovery.

More and more stuff came out of the depths of his coat, to join a growing heap on the floor: sixteen bunches of bananas. A dressmaker’s dummy. A live sheep on a leash. An old-fashioned Victrola, complete with horn. A stuffed penguin. A bouquet of flowers. A suit of armor. At last, the pile was taller than the man himself. He turned, looked full into the camera with a weird smile, and winked.

Behind Porfirio’s eyes, a red light flashed. A readout overlaid his vision momentarily, giving measurements, points of similarity and statistical percentages of matchup. Then it receded, but Porfirio had already figured out the truth.

The man proceeded to stuff each item back into his coat, one after another.

“See? Where does he make them all go?” asked Maria, in a shaky voice. “They can’t all fit in there!”

“It’s just stage magicians’ tricks, mi hija,” said Porfirio. He observed that her knuckles were white, her eyes wide. “I think this is maybe too scary for you. Let’s turn it off, okay?”

“I’m not scared! He’s just…funny,” she said.

“Well, your little sister is scared,” Porfirio told her, and rose and changed the channel, just as Hector wandered from the bedroom in his pajamas, blinking like an owl.

“Papi, Uncle Frio won’t let me watch Amazing No Man!” Maria complained.

“What, the scary clown?” Hector rolled his eyes. “Honey, you know that guy gives you nightmares.”

“I have to go out,” said Porfirio, handing Isabel over to her father.


“You were living with mortals? Who were these people?” asks Clete.

“I had a brother, when I was mortal,” says Porfirio. “I check up on his descendants now and then. Which has nothing to do with this case, okay? But that’s where I was when I spotted Robert Ross. All the time we’d been looking for a baseball player, he’d been working as the Amazing Gnomon.”

“And a gnomon is the piece on a sundial that throws the shadow,” says Clete promptly. He grins. “Sundials. Time. Temporal physics. They just can’t resist leaving clues, can they?”

Porfirio shakes his head. Clete finishes the potato chips, tilting the can to get the last bits.

“So when the guy was programmed with a Happy Place, it wasn’t baseball he fixated on,” he speculates. “It was 1951. ‘The Golden Year’. He had a compulsion to be there in 1951, maybe?”

Porfirio says nothing.

“So, how did it go down?” says Clete, looking expectant.


It hadn’t gone down, at least not then.

Porfirio had called for backup, because it would have been fatally stupid to have done otherwise, and by the time he presented his LAPD badge at the studio door, the Amazing Gnomon had long since finished his part of the broadcast and gone home.

The station manager at KTLA couldn’t tell him much. The Amazing Gnomon had his checks sent to a post office box. He didn’t have an agent. Nobody knew where he lived. He just showed up on time every third Saturday and hit his mark, and he worked on a closed set, but that wasn’t unusual with stage magicians.

“Besides,” said the mortal with a shudder, “he never launders that costume. He gets under those lights and believe me, brother, we’re glad to clear the set. The cameraman has to put VapoRub up his nose before he can stand to be near the guy. Hell of an act, though, isn’t it?”

The scent trail had been encouraging, even if it had only led to a locker in a downtown bus station. The locker, when opened, proved to contain the Amazing Gnomon’s stage costume: a threadbare old overcoat, a pair of checked trousers, and clown shoes. They were painfully foul, but contained no hidden pockets or double linings where anything might be concealed, nor any clue to their owner’s whereabouts.

By this time, however, the Company had marshaled all available security techs on the West Coast, so it wasn’t long before they tracked down Robert Ross.

Then all they had to do was figure out what the hell to do next.


Clete’s worried look has returned.

“Holy shit, I never thought about that. How do you arrest one of us?” he asks.

Porfirio snarls in disgust. His anger is not with Clete, but with the executive who saddled him with Clete.

“Are you ready to catch another grenade, kid?” he inquires, and without waiting for Clete’s answer he extends his arm forward, stiffly, with the palm up. He has to lean back in his seat to avoid hitting the Volkswagen’s windshield. He drops his hand sharply backward, like Spiderman shooting web fluid, and Clete just glimpses the bright point of a weapon emerging from Porfirio’s sleeve. Pop, like a cobra’s fang, it hits the windshield and retracts again, out of sight. It leaves a bead of something pale pink on the glass.

“Too cool,” says Clete, though he is uneasily aware that he has no weapon like that. He clears his throat, wondering how he can ask what the pink stuff is without sounding frightened. He has always been told operatives are immune to any poison.

“It’s not poison,” says Porfirio, reading his mind. “It’s derived from Theobromos. If I stick you in the leg with this, you’ll sleep like a baby for twelve hours. That’s all.”

“Oh. Okay,” says Clete, and it very much isn’t okay, because a part of the foundation of his world has just crumbled.

“You can put it in another operative’s drink, or you can inject it with an arm-mounted rig like this one,” Porfirio explains patiently. “You can’t shoot it in a dart, because any one of us could grab the dart out of the air, right? You have to close with whoever it is you’re supposed to take down, go hand to hand.

“But first, you have to get the other guy in a trap.”


Robert Ross had been in a trap. He seemed to have chosen it.

He turned out to be living in Hollywood, in an old residency hotel below Franklin. The building was squarely massive, stone, and sat like a megalith under the hill. Robert had a basement apartment with one tiny window on street level, at the back. He might have seen daylight for an hour at high summer down in there, but he’d have to stand on a stool to do it. And wash the window first.

The sub-executive in charge of the operation had looked at the reconnaissance reports and shaken his head. If an operative wanted a safe place to hide, he’d choose a flimsy frame building, preferably surrounding himself with mortals. There were a hundred cheap boardinghouses in Los Angeles that would have protected Robert Ross. The last place any sane immortal would try to conceal himself would be a basement dug into granite with exactly one door, where he might be penned in by other immortals and unable to break out through a wall.

The sub-executive decided that Robert wanted to be brought in.

It seemed to make a certain sense. Living in a place like that, advertising his presence on television; Robert must be secretly longing for some kindly mentor to find him and tell him it was time to come home. Alternatively, he might be daring the Company problem solvers to catch him. Either way, he wasn’t playing with a full deck.

So the sub-executive made the decision to send in a psychologist. A mortal psychologist. Not a security tech with experience in apprehending immortal fugitives, though several ringed the building and one—Porfirio, in fact—was stationed outside the single tiny window that opened below the sidewalk on Franklin Avenue.

Porfirio had leaned against the wall, pretending to smoke and watch the traffic zooming by. He could hear Robert Ross breathing in the room below. He could hear his heartbeat. He heard the polite double knock on the door, and the slight intake of breath; he heard the gentle voice saying “Bobby, may I come in?”

“It’s not locked,” was the reply, and Porfirio started. The voice belonged to a ten-year-old boy.

He heard the click and creak as the door opened, and the sound of two heartbeats within the room, and the psychologist saying: “We had quite a time finding you, Bobby. May I sit down?”

“Sure,” said the child’s voice.

“Thank you, Bobby,” said the other, and Porfirio heard the scrape of a chair. “Oh, dear, are you all right? You’re bleeding through your bandage.”

“I’m all right. That’s just where I had the tumor removed. It grows back a lot. I go up to the twenty-first century for laser surgery. Little clinics in out-of-the-way places, you know? I go there all the time, but you never notice.”

“You’ve been very clever at hiding from us, Bobby. We’d never have found you if you hadn’t been on television. We’ve been searching for you for years.”

“In your spaceships?” said the child’s voice, with adult contempt.

“In our time machines,” said the psychologist. “Professor Riverdale was sure you’d run away to become a baseball player.”

“I can’t ever be a baseball player,” replied Robert Ross coldly. “I can’t run fast enough. One of my legs grew shorter than the other. Professor Bill never noticed that, though, did he?”

“I’m so sorry, Bobby.”

“Good old Professor Bill, huh? I tried being a cowboy, and a soldier, and a fireman, and a bunch of other stuff. Now I’m a clown. But I can’t ever be a baseball player. No home runs for Bobby.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Porfirio saw someone laboring up the hill toward him from Highland Avenue. He turned his head and saw the cop.

The too-patient adult voice continued: “Bobby, there are a lot of other things you can be in the future.”

“I hate the future.”

Porfirio watched the cop’s progress as the psychologist hesitated, then pushed on: “Do you like being a clown, Bobby?”

“I guess so,” said Robert. “At least people see me when they look at me now. The man outside the window saw me, too.”

There was a pause. The cop was red-faced from the heat and his climb, but he was grinning at Porfirio.

“Well, Bobby, that’s one of our security men, out there to keep you safe.”

“I know perfectly well why he’s there,” Robert said. “He doesn’t scare me. I want him to hear what I have to say, so he can tell Professor Bill and the rest of them.”

“What do you want to tell us, Bobby?” said the psychologist, a little shakily.

There was a creak, as though someone had leaned forward in a chair.

“You know why you haven’t caught me? Because I figured out how to go to 1951 all by myself. And I’ve been living in it, over and over and over. The Company doesn’t think that’s possible, because of the variable permeability of temporal fabric, but it is. The trick is to go to a different place every time. There’s just one catch.”

The cop paused to wipe sweat off his brow, but he kept his eyes on Porfirio.

“What’s the catch, Bobby?”

“Do you know what happens when you send something back to the same year often enough?” Robert sounded amused. “Like, about a hundred million times?”

“No, Bobby, I don’t know.”

“I know. I experimented. I tried it the first time with a wheel off a toy car. I sent it to 1912, over and over, until—do you know where Tunguska is?”

“What are you trying to tell me, Bobby?” The psychologist was losing his professional voice.

“Then,” said Robert, “I increased the mass of the object. I sent a baseball back. Way back. Do you know what really killed off the dinosaurs?”

“Hey there, zoot suit,” said the cop, when he was close enough. “You wouldn’t be loitering, would you?”

“…You can wear a hole in the fabric of space and time,” Robert was saying. “And it just might destroy everything in the whole world. You included. And if you were pretty sick of being alive, but you couldn’t die, that might seem like a great idea. Don’t you think?”

There was the sound of a chair being pushed back.

Porfirio grimaced and reached into his jacket for his badge, but the cop pinned Porfirio’s hand to his chest with the tip of his nightstick.

“Bobby, we can help you!” cried the psychologist.

“I’m not little Bobby anymore, you a*shole,” said the child’s voice, rising. “I’m a million, million years old.”

Porfirio looked the cop in the eye.

“Vice squad,” he said. The cop sagged. Porfirio produced his badge.

“But I got a tip from one of the residents here—” said the cop.

“Woooowwwww,” said the weird little singsong voice, and there was a brief scream.


“What happened?” demands Clete. He has gone very pale.

“We never found out,” says Porfirio. “By the time I got the patrolman to leave and ran around to the front of the building, the other techs had already gone in and secured the room. The only problem was, there was nothing to secure. The room was empty. No sign of Ross, or the mortal either. No furniture, even, except a couple of wooden chairs. He hadn’t been living there. He’d just used the place to lure us in.”

“Did anybody ever find the mortal?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact,” Porfirio replies. “Fifty years later. In London.”

“He’d gone forward in time?” Clete exclaims. “But that’s supposed to be impossible. Isn’t it?”

Porfirio sighs.

“So they say, kid. Anyway, he hadn’t gone forward in time. Remember, about ten years ago, when archaeologists were excavating that medieval hospital over there? They found hundreds of skeletons in its cemetery. Layers and layers of the dead. And—though this didn’t make it into the news, not even into the Fortean Times—one of the skeletons was wearing a Timex.”

Clete giggles shrilly.

“Was it still ticking?” he asks. “What the hell are you telling me? There’s this crazy immortal guy on the loose, and he’s able to time-travel just using his brain, and he wants to destroy the whole world and he’s figured out how, and we’re just sitting here?”

“You have a better idea?” says Porfirio. “Please tell me if you do, okay?”

Clete controls himself with effort.

“All right, what did the Company do?” he asks. “There’s a plan, isn’t there, for taking him out? There must be, or we wouldn’t be here now.”

Porfirio nods.

“But what are we doing here now?” says Clete. “Shouldn’t we be in 1951, where he’s hiding? Wait, no, we probably shouldn’t, because that’d place even more strain on the fabric of time and space. Or whatever.”

“It would,” Porfirio agrees.

“So…here we are at the place where Bobby Ross was recruited. The Company must expect he’s going to come back here. Because this is where he caused the accident. Because the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime, right?” Clete babbles.

“Maybe,” says Porfirio. “The Company already knows he leaves 1951 sometimes, for medical treatment.”

“And sooner or later he’ll be driven to come here,” says Clete, and now he too is staring fixedly at the barn. “And—and today is June 30, 2008. The car crash happened fifty years ago today. That’s why we’re here.”

“He might come,” says Porfirio. “So we just wait—” He stiffens, stares hard, and Clete stares hard, too, and sees the little limping figure walking up the old road, just visible through the high weeds.

“Goddamn,” says Clete, and is out of the car in a blur, ejecting candy bar wrappers and potato chip cans as he goes, and Porfirio curses and tells him to wait, but it’s too late; Clete has crossed the highway in a bound and is running across the valley, as fast as only an immortal can go. Porfirio races after him, up that bare yellow hill with its red rocks that still bear faint carbon traces of horror, and he clears the edge of the road in time to hear Clete bellow: “Security! Freeze!”

“Don’t—” says Porfirio, just as Clete launches himself forward to tackle Robert Ross.

Robert is smiling, lifting his arms as though in a gesture of surrender. Despite the heat, he is wearing a long overcoat. Its lining is torn, just under his arm, and where the sweat-stained rayon satin hangs down Porfirio glimpses fathomless black night, white stars.

“Lalala la la. Woooowww,” says Robert Ross, just as Clete hits him. Clete shrieks and then is gone, sucked into the void of stars.

Porfirio stands very still. Robert winks at him.

“What a catch!” he says, in ten-year-old Bobby’s voice.

It’s hot up there, on the old white road, under the blue summer sky. Porfirio feels sweat prickling between his shoulder blades.

“Hey, Mr. Policeman,” says Robert, “I remember you. Did you tell the Company what you heard? Have they been thinking about what I’m going to do? Have they been scared, all these years?”

“Sure they have, Mr. Ross,” says Porfirio, flexing his hands.

Robert frowns. “Come on, Mr. Ross was my father. I’m Bobby.”

“Oh, I get it. That would be the Mr. Ross who died right down there?” Porfirio points. “In the crash? Because his kid was so stupid he didn’t know better than to lean out the window of a moving car?”

An expression of amazement crosses the wrinkled, dirty little face, to be replaced with white-hot rage.

“Faggot! Don’t you call me stupid!” screams Robert. “I’m brilliant! I can make the whole world come to an end if I want to!”

“You made it come to an end for your family, anyway,” says Porfirio.

“No, I didn’t,” says Robert, clenching his fists. “Professor Bill explained about that. It just happened. Accidents happen all the time. I was innocent.”

“Yeah, but Professor Bill lied to you, didn’t he?” says Porfirio. “Like, about how wonderful it would be to live forever?”

His voice is calm, almost bored. Robert says nothing. He looks at Porfirio with tears in his eyes, but there is hate there, too.

“Hey, Bobby,” says Porfirio, moving a step closer. “Did it ever once occur to you to come back here and prevent the accident? I mean, it’s impossible, sure, but didn’t you even think of giving it a try? Messing with causality? It might have been easy, for a superpowered genius kid like you. But you didn’t, did you? I can see it in your eyes.”

Robert glances uncertainly down the hill, where in some dimension a 1946 Plymouth is still blackening, windows shattering, popping, and the dry summer grass is vanishing around it as the fire spreads outward like a black pool.

“What do you think, Bobby? Maybe pushed the grandfather paradox, huh? Gone back to see if you couldn’t bend the rules, burn down this barn before the mural was painted? Or even broken Hank Bauer’s arm, so the Yankees didn’t win the World Series in 1951? I can think of a couple of dozen different things I’d have tried, Bobby, if I’d had superpowers like you.

“But you never even tried. Why was that, Bobby?”

“La la la,” murmurs Robert, opening his arms again and stepping toward Porfirio. Porfirio doesn’t move. He looks Robert in the face and says: “You’re stupid. Unfinished. You never grew up, Bobby.”

“Professor Bill said never growing up was a good thing,” says Robert.

“Professor Bill said that because he never grew up either,” says Porfirio. “You weren’t real to him, Bobby. He never saw you when he looked at you.”

“No, he never did,” says Robert, in a thick voice because he is crying. “He just saw what he wanted me to be. Freckle-faced kid!” He points bitterly at the brown discoloration that covers half his cheek. “Look at me now!”

“Yeah, and you’ll never be a baseball player. And you’re still so mad about that, all you can think of to do is to pay the Company back,” says Porfirio, taking a step toward him.

“That’s right!” sobs Robert.

“With the whole eternal world to explore, and a million other ways to be happy—still, all you want is to pay them back,” says Porfirio, watching him carefully.

“Yeah!” cries Robert, panting. He wipes his nose on his dirty sleeve. He looks up again, sharply. “I mean—I mean—”

“See? Stupid. And you’re not a good boy, Bobby,” says Porfirio gently. “You’re a goddamn monster. You’re trying to blow up a whole world full of innocent people. You know what should happen, now? Your dad ought to come walking up that hill, madder than hell, and punish you.”

Robert looks down the hillside.

“But he can’t, ever again,” he says. He sounds tired.

Porfirio has already moved, and before the last weary syllable is out of his mouth Robert feels the scorpion-sting in his arm.

He whirls around, but Porfirio has already retreated, withdrawn up the hillside. He stands before the mural, and the painted outfielder smiles over his shoulder. Robert clutches his arm, beginning to cry afresh.

“No fair,” he protests. But he knows it’s more than fair. It is even a relief.

He falls to his knees, whimpering at the heat of the old road’s surface. He crawls to the side and collapses in the yellow summer grass.

“Will I have to go to the future now?” Robert asks piteously.

“No, son. No future,” Porfirio replies.

Robert nods and closes his eyes. He could sink through the rotating earth if he tried, escape once again into 1951; instead he floats away from time itself, into the back of his father’s hand.

Porfirio walks down the hill toward him. As he does so, an all-terrain vehicle comes barreling up the old road, mowing down thistles in its path.

It shudders to a halt and Clete leaps out, leaving the door open in his headlong rush up the hill. He is not wearing the same suit he wore when last seen by Porfirio.

“You stinking son of a bitch defective,” he roars, and aims a kick at Robert’s head. Porfirio grabs his arm.

“Take it easy,” he says.

“He sent me back six hundred thousand years! Do you know how long I had to wait before the Company even opened a damn transport depot?” says Clete, and looking at his smooth ageless face Porfirio can see that ages have passed over it. Clete now has permanently furious eyes. Their glare bores into Porfirio like acid. No convenience stores in 598,000 bc, huh? Porfirio thinks to himself.

“You knew he was going to do this to me, didn’t you?” demands Clete.

“No,” says Porfirio. “All I was told was, there’d be complications to the arrest. And you should have known better than to rush the guy.”

“You got that right,” says Clete, shrugging off his hand. “So why don’t you do the honors?”

He goes stalking back to his transport, and hauls a body bag from the back seat. Porfirio sighs. He reaches into his coat and withdraws what looks like a screwdriver handle. When he thumbs a button on its side, however, a half-circle of blue light forms at one end. He tests it with a random slice through a thistle, which falls over at once. He leans down and scans Robert Ross carefully, because he wants to be certain he is unconscious.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs.

Working with the swiftness of long practice, he does his job. Clete returns, body bag under his arm, watching with grim satisfaction. Hank Bauer is still smiling down from the mural.

When the disassembly is finished, Porfirio loads the body bag into the car and climbs in beside it. Clete gets behind the wheel and backs carefully down the road. Bobby Ross may not be able to die, but he is finally on his way to eternal rest.

The Volkswagen sits there rusting for a month before it is stolen.

The blood remains on the old road for four months, before autumn rains wash it away, but they do wash it away. By the next summer the yellow grass is high, and the road as white as innocence once more.