The car was doing seventy-five miles per hour when the left front tire blew.  It swerved, skidding and screeching into the oncoming lane, flipping once, twice, throwing up a cloud of broken glass and bits of twisted chrome.  It finally came to rest on its tires.  The black, three a.m. silence settled over the highway, broken only by the trickling of coolant from the smashed radiator. The driver’s door opened, the bent hinges protesting with a metallic groan.

 

        The man looked to be in his forties.  His gray suit was worn and wrinkled.  He slid from the driver’s seat and stood slowly, marveling at the sea of broken glass and metal that lay before him, testing himself, checking for broken bones and streams of warm blood.None. A machine of steel and chrome had been torn into pieces.  Yet he stood whole and unharmed. Intact. Capable of going on.

 

        There were no witnesses on this empty stretch of New England highway.  No lights in the distance.  No houses set back among the trees.  The night air felt clean and invigorating, and he pulled it deep into his lungs. The city was less than five miles away.  He could go the rest of the way on foot and still be inside the building an hour before sunrise.

 

        He walked back to the car, crouched down and felt beneath the driver’s seat.  Nothing.  He reached further, metal scraping back the skin of his thin wrist.  There it was.  He wrapped his fingers around the compact semiautomatic pistol, brought it out and slipped it into the waistband of his trousers.  The keys were still in the ignition.  He removed them, walked to the rear of the battered car, and after several tries with the lock, managed to open the trunk.  He took out the black canvas bag, slung it over his shoulder, and then carefully lifted the small, hard case.  The latches opened with sharp clicks.  He lifted the lid and satisfied himself that things were as they should be.  The pieces of the weapon glinted in the moonlight, safely nestled in their protective foam linings.

 

        He closed the case, secured the latches, and walked away from the wreckage, heading toward the trees by the side of the highway and the city that waited beyond.

*

        Josef Sanjowski was the kind of mathematician who, when he was still living and still active at the University of Chicago, published the sorts of articles that made other mathematicians smile.  They were neat, concise little pieces, always very clever, always casting light on some current problem.  But, at the same time, they were never earthshaking, never even particularly bold. Sanjowski did not blaze new mathematical paths.  He didn’t open doorways to theoretical landscapes never seen before.  He was known for less exalted skills: his abilities to polish and hone, to sand away the rough edges of theories created by his fellow mathematicians.  He was a fixer.  He left the conceptual ground-breaking to others.

 

        At least until eighteen months before his death.  It was then that an article of his, after being rejected for publication in the American Journal of Mathematics, appeared in the considerably less prestigious Journal of Probability and Statistics.  In it Sanjowski introduced, explained, and rigorously argued for an unusual theory of his own invention,  a theory he named Probabilistic Causal Duality.  Unlike his other work, this article did not produce smiles.  For the most part it was ignored.  And almost all who chose not to ignore it ridiculed it.  One noted mathematician offered his opinion in six words: “ingeniously constructed, impeccably stated, embarrassingly absurd”.  Probabilistic Causal Duality - “The Sanjowski Principle”, as it eventually came to be called - evolved into nothing more than a shibboleth for math professors at faculty get-togethers, an inside joke, brought up in conversation for the purpose of getting a few chuckles out of a few colleagues.  Nothing more.

 

        Before long, even that usage ended.  And so the last article that Josef Sanjowski wrote, at the end of a career that had lasted forty-two years, found its resting place in bound copies of the Journal of Probability and Statistics, a few pages in one of the thousands of volumes of bound journals that sit collecting dust on the shelves of university libraries across the country. More often than not the dust remains undisturbed.  The words go unread.  Each year the pages turn a little more yellow and a little more brittle.

 

        But on a February night, while snow fell on an already snow-covered campus, a lone graduate student walked among the shelves of volumes that filled the fifth floor of the Harding Mathematics Library at Brimfield University.  She was looking for a diversion, a half-hour’s break from a problem that had turned brutishly unsolvable.  At random she plucked down a volume of the Journal of Probability and Statistics and returned to the desk by the window that looked out on the swirling snow and the black sky.  The binding, stiff with lack of use, resisted as she opened to the middle of the book.

 

        The article she had opened to was titled “Causal Duality in Singular and Multiple Probabilistic Events”.  It meant nothing to her, but she recognized the author’s name: Josef Sanjowski.  She had, years earlier, read two papers of his on the Vasquez Paradox – two of the clearest, most unambiguous papers she had ever then, or since then, come across.  She began reading, and what was intended to be a half-hour’s diversion became something much more than that. Four years and three months after that night, Mary McFarlane, mathematics professor at the University of Vermont in Burlington, sat at the window of a 747, craning for a better view through the thin clouds at the ground below.

*

        The man was lying on his back in the narrow ventilation shaft, breathing softly, feeling the beads of sweat ooze up from his pores and pool in the creases of his skin.  When they finally trickled across his forehead and ran down the sides of his face, he made no move to wipe them away.  He remained motionless, lying in the dark, in the soot and the grime of that small, hot space. The police were out of the building by now.  He’d heard them when they entered, and he’d heard them as they made their search.  Each room on each floor.  But one abandoned office, with its broken windows and peeling paint, must look very much like another.  They were gone.  He was safe. But he stayed where he was, on his back, waiting in the heat and the dark.

 

        He was thinking about the others.  Those much like himself.  Special men with special visions.  Men who had had the courage to change the world, to shape it, to turn their visions into reality.  They too must have done their share of waiting.  For that right moment.  That moment when everything falls into place.  All of the pieces fitting together.  He could hear it.  Clicking.  It was a soothing sound.  A soft clicking in his head.  Clicking.  It was the sound of the pieces as they interlocked.  It was the sound of history being written. His hands rested at his sides, one on the shoulder bag, one on the plastic case.

 

*

        The morning sun streamed through the classroom windows.  Mary leaned over to check the television monitor; it showed a split image.  The screen was filled with a close-up of the tabletop, while an inset at the upper right corner of the picture showed a longer shot of the table and the boy sitting at it.

 

        Mary pressed the record button and the video tape started rolling.  White numbers appeared at the screen’s lower left corner.  A precision chronograph showed the date and time being automatically recorded onto the tape.  Hours and minutes.  Seconds clicked by.  Tenths of seconds passed in an almost indistinguishable blur. “You can start whenever you want, Mitchell,” she said. The boy picked up the die, closed his hand around it, gave it a little shake and let it go.  It bounced across the tabletop and came to a rest. “Six,” Mitchell beamed, his ten-year-old’s voice squeaking with satisfaction. Mary checked the screen again.  The image was sharp and clear.  A six. Mitchell reached for the die, shook it, and gave it another throw.  Mary turned from the bank of video equipment and looked at the table.  The die flipped and tumbled.  It stopped. Six. He threw it again. Six.

 

        Mary took a deep breath and held it.  She glanced through the window at the sunshine and the blue sky, but for a fraction of a second she could only see the black of night.  Snow was swirling.  She was four years younger and a thousand miles away, on the fifth floor of the Harding Mathematics Library, pulling some dusty volume down from a shelf. She exhaled.  The image was gone.  She looked down at the table and saw that the boy had taken another throw.  The die rolled to a stop. “Another one.”  Mitchell looked up at her and smiled.  “Another six.”

 

*

        The lens was the size of a dime, the body of the camera housed in a small half-cylinder, two inches long and three-quarters of an inch in radius, with a short length of flexible tubing connecting the lens with the body.  Images would be relayed through optical fibers, allowing the lens to be pointed in any direction while the camera remained stationary.

       

        The man was sitting on the floor of the old office, near the broken window that faced out onto the intersection four stories below. He put the camera down and emptied his shoulder bag, arranging the contents neatly before himself: a miniature closed circuit television monitor not much larger than a cigarette pack, six feet of shielded mini-cable, connectors, a battery pack and power cord, and a mass of softened modeling clay wrapped in waxed paper. With great care he threaded the copper connectors to the outlet on the camera’s side and the input of the monitor.  These he joined

with the length of mini-cable, working slowly, making sure the contacts were good and tight.  The battery pack had a dual prong connector on it and he guided it into the matched socket in the back of the tiny monitor.  The screen immediately glowed to life, showing the image the camera was sending: a black and white, lopsided view of the radiator at the man’s side, as seen from the dirty floor. It was a good, sharp picture.

 

        He peeled the wax paper from the modeling clay and began working the mass in his hands.  The small quantity of epoxy resin he’d blended into the clay left it unusually soft and tacky.  He formed a rectangular slab with the material and pressed it firmly against the flat bottom of the camera, smoothing it, ensuring a good seal.  Contact with air was already beginning to harden the resin.

 

        The man got to his knees and peered through the window. The morning sun had climbed above the buildings.  Traffic idled at lights on the street below.  Slowly, he lifted the camera and passed it through the broken pane of glass.  He placed it down on the ledge outside the window, pressing hard, sandwiching the slab of clay between the camera and the concrete. He turned his head and looked at the small monitor.  There was an image on the screen of the also-abandoned building directly across the street.  The man had placed the camera so that the lens extended just beyond the end of the window’s ledge, and he reached carefully outside and played with the flexible tubing.  The picture jumped and changed with each little adjustment.  When he was satisfied with the image on the screen he stopped and drew his hand back inside.

 

        Down on the street, four stories below, the camera was hidden from view by the window ledge.  Only the small lens was visible, inconspicuous from such a distance. The man neatly folded the waxed paper that the clay had been wrapped in and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.  He settled back against the wall, away from the window, and placed the monitor on the floor by his feet.  The screen showed a clear shot of the intersection below.  East-west traffic had the light.  A battered city bus came into view, eastbound, rolling slowly across the intersection.  Black exhaust poured from its tail pipe.  The man watched intensely as it passed out of camera range and left the screen.

 

*

        It was a small, odd mix of an audience: most of the school’s math teachers, a few from other departments, the principal and the lower school dean, two graduate students of math from the university nearby, and Mitchell’s mother.  They were settling into their seats.  Mary sat at the front of the room, waiting, talking with her friend Jeanne.  When it appeared that all who were going to attend were present, Jeanne rose to make the introduction and the buzz of a handful of conversations faded.

 

        “I made a long-distance telephone call yesterday,” she began.  “It was to my friend Mary.”  She paused while the audience briefly shifted its attention to the guest speaker. “We met three years ago in Rhode Island,” Jeanne went on, “at Brimfield University.  I was an undergraduate; she was working towards her doctorate.  Despite her brilliance, and despite my envy of that brilliance, we became good friends.  Our paths parted one year later when she received her Ph.D. and went on to join the faculty at the University of Vermont.  But we’ve kept in touch since then. “Why I called her yesterday, and why she then flew over a thousand miles, arriving here less than ten hours after my call, I’ll leave for her to explain...”

 

*

        He tightened the last screw.  The weapon was assembled.  He dropped the small wrench and screwdriver into one of the foam recesses inside the plastic case, closed the case, and snapped the locks shut. It was an American-made weapon, a hand-held, short-range missile launcher designed for neutralizing armored personnel transport. The shell was dual-function, explosive and incendiary, housing a primary payload for blowing open a target, and a second stage for incinerating anything within. He loaded the weapon.  There was only one shell.  He would get only one shot.

 

        The clicking was stronger now, and it echoed in his head with a mechanical sound.  Triggers and hammers and shells.  History written in fire and smoke.  History written with a single shot.

 

        He placed the weapon on the floor, leaned himself against the wall and removed the semiautomatic from the waist of his trousers. He placed that at his side as well. A breeze blew through the broken window, cool and sweet, bringing the sound of traffic into the room.  He looked at the small screen.  Traffic was heaviest going west, toward midtown.  A southbound cab was discharging a fare at the light.  Pedestrians moved along the sidewalks, staring into store windows, counting change, arranging hair, all caught up in thousands of insignificant details.

 

        Fire and smoke.  There would be lots of fire and smoke.

 

*

        Mary reached over and pressed the stop button on the VCR.  The monitor screen went blank.

 

        “So,” she said, “the simplest answer is to say that I came all the way here because a ten-year-old boy keeps rolling sixes with a die.”  She paused and watched varying degrees of puzzlement flicker across the faces of the audience.  “But that’s not such a great answer because it immediately conjures up questions like so what?  What’s so important about rolling a lot of sixes?  Those are the questions I hope to answer.

 

        “I’ll begin by giving you a puzzle.  Imagine that someone offers to give you a million dollars if you correctly perform a simple task.  You’re given a choice of two tasks to perform.  One is to reach inside a box that contains ten marbles.  Nine are black and one is red.  Without looking, you must remove the red one.  Then you have to drop the red one back in, shake the marbles up, reach in and pull the red marble out again. “Or you can try the other task.  You have to reach inside a box that contains one hundred marbles.  Ninety-nine are black and one is red.  You have to pull out the red one, but this time only once. “The question is which task should you pick?  If you really want to win that million dollars what should you do?  Go with the ten marbles and pick the red one twice?  Or go with the one hundred marbles and get it over with in one pick?”.

 

        “They’re the same.”  It was one of the two graduate students near the back of the room. Mary nodded.  It was the answer she wanted. “That’s right,” she said, “they’re the same.  At least as far as the probability for success goes, they’re the same.  Each task has a probability of one in one hundred of being completed correctly.  It doesn’t matter which one you choose.  Your chances of winning the one million dollars are the same either way.”

 

        She paused for several seconds.  “But let’s forget about probability for a moment and think about the tasks themselves.  It’s obvious that they are not the same.  The first required making two picks for the red marble, the second only required one pick. “All events involving probability can be divided into two classes: singular events and multiple events.  Singular events are those that involve one, and only one, juncture: one pick of a marble, one roll of a die, one flip of a coin.  Multiple events are those that involve more than one juncture: two picks of a marble, ten flips of a coin, whatever.  It’s important that you see the difference between these two types of events.

 

        “Which brings us to the question, so what?  To answer that, I’m going to have to explain something to you that’s called the Sanjowski Principle.”  Mary leaned back, half sitting on the desk at the front of the room.  “Fifteen years ago a man named Josef Sanjowski had a pretty strange idea about probabilities, about singular and multiple events.  He came up with a theory he called Causal Duality. “No one bought it.  No one paid any attention.  They all laughed and nudged each other and shook their heads.  They dubbed it the Sanjowski Principle and then put it in the dumpster with the rest of the garbage. “That was dumb.  It’s a great piece of work.  The mathematical argument is irrefutable.  What bothered them was the premise, and the premise was this: probabilistic events occur in pairs, one singular, one multiple, and both members of a given pair are of equal probability.  In other words, every singular event has a sister - a multiple event.  Or, the other way around, every multiple event has a sister of its own - its singular counterpart.  Both sisters share a common trait: identical probabilities.  Sanjowski argued that these sister events are causally linked.  Nature dictates that you can’t have one without the other.  And, without getting bogged down in a lot of mathematics, I’ll ask you to trust me when I tell you that it seems to be true.  At least mathematically.  It’s just a hard idea to swallow conceptually.  How could you see something like this?  Experience it?  How could you possibly test something like this?”

 

        “Which takes us up to yesterday, when my friend Jeanne was introducing her fourth grade math class to the concept of probability.  Her idea was simple.  Each student was given a die, and each would roll it ten times.  The results would be tabulated on the board.  The idea was to show the class that, over a large range of throws, each of the six numbers on the dice came up about the same number of times, showing all to be equally likely, or equally probable. “But when she asked one of her students, Mitchell Garner, to read off the results of his ten throws, he reported ten sixes.  She assumed the boy had misunderstood the idea and asked him to try again.  Sure enough, while she watched, he threw another ten sixes.”

 

        “A loaded die?” someone asked.  A few chuckles echoed across the room. Mary shook her head.  “Nope,” she answered.  “Jeanne gave it a few throws.  I’ve tried it myself.  It’s a normal die.  Anyway, Mitchell took the die again and threw it thirty more times.  Thirty more sixes. “Class ended and Jeanne went straight to the nearest phone and called me at my office.  She’d remembered a long, late-night discussion we had when I first learned of Causal Duality Theory.  And so, here I am, a thousand miles from home, anxious, exhausted, and more than a little thunderstruck.

 

        “This morning, Mitchell was nice enough to let me make the video tape I just showed you.  He came by and introduced himself like a perfect gentleman, and, in the few minutes he had before his history class, sat down and rolled a six.  Thirty times.  Thirty.” She paused and took a breath.  “And that takes me to that last question: what’s so important about rolling a lot of sixes?”  She lifted herself off of the desk, slipped her hands into the pockets of her skirt, turned and looked away for a moment, out the window, to the billowing white clouds and a flock of blackbirds.  Her voice suddenly sounded muted, distant.

 

        “What if he was right?”  She waited.  No one said a word.  “What if old Sanjowski was on to something?”  She turned back to her audience.  “What if this Causal Duality stuff is more than a bunch of little scribble in some long-forgotten article?”  Again she paused, and again the audience sat silent, waiting for her to go on.

 

        “I think he was on to something.  And I think that we may be witness to something that almost never comes along.  So far, this little boy, Mitchell Garner, has thrown a die eighty times, and each time that die has come up a six.  I don’t know if you’re aware of how absolutely incredible that is, how unbelievable the probability of such an event is.  But it’s happening, right here, right now.  This, as I’m sure Sanjowski would have agreed, is the granddaddy of multiple events.  I don’t know why it’s happening.  I can hardly believe it is happening.  But it is. “And if this Sanjowski Principle is correct, then this multiple event has a sister: a singular event waiting to be born.  A very, very improbable event.”

 

        She stopped speaking.  No one said a word.  There was a strange, almost audible silence in the room.  People breathing.  People trying to grasp the meaning of what they had just heard. At last one of the math teachers raised his hand. “A question?” Mary asked.

 

        “Yes,” he responded.  “Two questions, really.  One, when would this singular event occur, and two, just how improbable would it be?”

 

        “Good questions,” Mary said.  “Sanjowski proposed that the termination of the multiple event must be the instant when both events truly occur, when the twin sisters are actually born.  Till then, the multiple event is really just an open-ended occurrence of potentially infinite improbability.

 

        “So, to answer your first question, the singular event should occur at the very instant that Mitchell rolls something other than a six.  As to just how improbable this event will be, well that all depends on the number of junctures - the number of sixes he has already rolled - at the time that he finally rolls something other than a six.

 

        “But consider things as they stand so far.  Mitchell has rolled eighty sixes in a row.  The probability of rolling eighty sixes in a row is about... one in ten-to-the-sixtieth power.  That’s a hard number to get a grip on.  One in ten-to-the-sixtieth power...”  She paused.  “I could try to come up with analogies.  Winning a world-wide lottery.  Picking a particular grain of sand off a beach.  Guessing a stranger’s birth date, phone number, and social security number correctly.  But they don’t come close.  I meant it when I said before that something is happening here...”

 

        A hand went up in the audience.  Mary nodded acknowledgment.

 

        “What is it you’re expecting?”  It was one of the history teachers.  He sounded uncomfortable.  “What sort of... singular event are you waiting for?  Is someone going to do something incredible?  Is someone going to guess some number?  Is someone...”

       

        “It doesn’t have to be a someone.”  Mary cut him off.  “Humans aren’t the only agents nature has to choose from in matters of probability.  Every atom, every subatomic particle, sits at Mother Nature’s blackjack table.”

 

        “Then what are you looking for?” the history teacher asked.  There was a touch of desperation in his voice.  “What are you waiting for to happen?”

 

        Mary was suddenly silent.  She looked away, turned her head and gazed into the far corner of the room.  For a long time she said nothing.  She was obviously pondering the question, searching inside herself, looking for the best answer.  At last she turned her gaze back to the history teacher, and when she spoke, she spoke slowly and clearly.

 

        “I have absolutely no idea.”

 

*

        It had been an hour since the police had set up the wooden barricades.  Pedestrians still walked along the sidewalks, but the streets were empty of traffic.  A three-legged dog hobbled across the intersection.  A few pages of that morning’s newspaper drifted along a gutter.

 

        He took in every detail on the screen.  It was a waiting game now.  A matter of time.  Soon the crowds would start to form.  A cluster or two at first.  Then a few more.  And then there would be a mob.  Shouting.  Cheering. And the screen would show the sunlight and shadows where Clarke intersected Morehead.

 

*

        Another six.

 

        She looked at the young boy and suddenly noticed how drawn and tired he looked.

 

        “We can stop now if you want to,” she offered.

 

        “Just one more time,” Mitchell said.  He picked up the die and tossed it.  It bounced and rolled.  When it stopped, the picture on the television monitor was clear.

 

        Six.

 

        He reached for the die again.

 

*

        He could hear the distant sound of a brass band warming up.  It was muffled.  A little sour.  Trumpets and trombones.  Warbling notes.  There was a crisp roll of a snare drum.  The monitor showed the image of the crowd, growing with each minute, milling about, shuffling.  Waiting.

 

*

        Staggering odds.  For once she knew what those words truly meant.  One hundred and twenty-two rolls of a die.  One hundred and twenty-two sixes.  Staggering with a capital S.

 

        The boy grabbed the die again.

 

        “Why don’t we stop for today, Mitchell?” Mary asked.  She didn’t like the lack of color in the boy’s face.  She didn’t like the sweat on his brow or the lost look in his eyes.  “Let’s continue tomorrow, okay?”

 

        “Just one more time,” he answered and tossed the die.

 

        Six.

 

*

        The motorcade was nearing the intersection of Clarke and Morehead.  The crowd roared and cheered.  Flags waved.  Brass bands competed for attention.  Newspeople shoved and hustled for better camera angles.  Children laughed and cried and stood in silent awe of the spectacle, watching as the vehicles made their way slowly past: the motorcycles, the long black cars, the large bulletproof Plexiglas van in the center of the motorcade, the two men behind the glass, waving to the crowds, smiling.

 

        Some of the children asked who they were, those men in the glass box.  Were they astronauts?  Were they trapped inside that glass box?  Did they want to be in there?  Some of the parents answered their children’s questions.  Many couldn’t hear them over the noise of the crowd and their own shouting.

 

        The intersection of Clarke and Morehead.  For the men and women of the Secret Service it was the worst part of the route through the city.  Abandoned office buildings.  One on the northeast corner, one across Morehead on the northwest corner.  Earlier that morning the city police had made a thorough search of the buildings.  Nothing had been found.  A uniformed officer had been posted at the entrance to each.  No one had entered either of the buildings since.  No one had even tried.

 

        Still, more than thirty agents from the Secret Service were present.  About half were in the procession, most of them walking rapidly along side the bulletproof van, constantly sweeping the crowd with their eyes, looking for the sudden move, the hand grasping a weapon, the psychotic stare.

 

        The rest were part of the crowd.  Wearing jeans, baseball caps, light nylon jackets, running shoes, they made their way along the crowded sidewalks.  Very few people noticed the miniaturized walkie-talkies or the bulge of a shoulder holster beneath a jacket.  These plainclothes agents stayed slightly ahead of the motorcade, moving east down Clarke Street, acting as a preliminary sweep, mingling with the people, ready to give early warning should they spot anything unusual.

 

        The tip of the motorcade, five police motorcycles in vee formation, rolled into the sunlight of the intersection where Morehead Street crossed Clarke Street.  Next would come a high school marching band and the limousines bearing the mayor of the city and his councilmen.  These would be followed by a pair of police cruisers flanked by two officers on horseback.  And finally, approximately forty seconds after the first motorcycle had entered into the clearing at the intersection, the president and vice-president of the United States, smiling and waving behind two and a half inch thick, bulletproof polymer-composite walls, surrounded by more than a dozen stone-faced, ever-vigilant Secret Service agents, would roll slowly into the afternoon sun.

 

        A glint.  A small, bright flash at the fourth-floor window of the abandoned building on the north east corner.  It lasted only a fraction of a second, but the plainclothes agent had seen it.  The barrel of a weapon.  He lifted his walkie-talkie just as someone in the crowd jostled him from behind.  The radio fell onto the concrete sidewalk, unnoticed by the people that pressed around him.  It was kicked deeper into the crowd.  Trampled.  He didn’t have time to retrieve it, to see if it still functioned.  He shoved his way through the crowd and raced across Morehead Street toward the building.  The crowd was even thicker there, more tightly pressed.  He elbowed his way between them.  It was difficult.  He was losing time.

 

*

        The boy looked even paler.  There was a sheen of perspiration on his forehead and his upper lip now.  Mary wanted it to stop.

 

        “Mitchell?  Are you feeling all right?” she asked.

 

        He nodded a small, half hearted nod.

 

        “Do you want to stop now?” she asked.

 

        He seemed to consider the idea this time.  He looked at the die in his fingers, turning it, feeling the patterns of black indentations on the faces.  At last he turned and looked at Mary.

 

        “Just one more time,” he said softly.

 

        Just one more time.  Only this time the words had a special quality.  It was in the sweet, tired tone of his voice, in the slight darkening of the skin beneath his eyes.  It was in the sweat on his forehead and the pallor of his face.

 

        It was time to go home.  For Mitchell, it was time to get on his bicycle, time to return to his family, to his house, his backyard and his dog.  For Mary McFarlane, it was time to pack up her video equipment and get on a plane, time to return to her office at the University, to her books and her apartment.

 

        She reached down and tousled the boy’s hair.

 

        “Just one more time,” she said.

 

        The boy wrapped his fist around the die and drew back his arm.

        He threw it.

 

*

        The agent was inside the building.  There was a staircase on the right and he ran to it.  He raced up the stairs, taking three with each stride.  On the second floor landing he pulled his pistol from its shoulder holster.  He didn’t miss a step, didn’t slow down.  There was a broken window on the third floor landing.  The sounds of the cheering crowd on the street below poured through.  One more flight.  He was on the fourth floor in seconds.

*

        Hopping.  Skipping.  The die danced across the tabletop.  Mary watched it, knowing there would be no six this time.  She felt a drop of sweat rolling slowly down her brow and she wiped it away with a finger.

 

        The die bounced one last time and stopped.

 

*

        The agent ran to the last door at the western end of the hall and, without stopping, brought up his foot and kicked with all his power just beneath the doorknob.  The door exploded inward.  His momentum propelled him into the room and he dropped to his knees, turned, swinging his weapon up in both hands toward the southwest corner.

 

        A man.  Crouching by the window.  A weapon in his hands.

 

        The agent took this all in in less than a second.  The weapon blocked a clear chest shot so he sighted the side of the man’s head and squeezed the trigger.

 

        Something was wrong.  The agent caught himself.  He released the pressure on the trigger.  A shot wasn’t necessary.  It would only alarm those out on the street, cause panic.

 

        For a moment he thought it was a dummy in the corner, a mannequin, propped up at the window, in a worn gray suit with a weapon balanced in its arms.  He approached slowly, never lowering his pistol, keeping the barrel pointed at the head.

        It looked real.  The hair looked real.  The skin looked real.  The eyes stared off into space, unblinking, the white of one stained a deep blood red.

 

        It was a dead man.

 

*

        Black sky fills the windows on the starboard side as the plane banks into a turn.  Through the port windows the city below sparkles with thousands of yellow and orange lights.  Mary McFarlane is on her way back home.

 

        She isn’t admiring the lights, nor is she reading the book that she brought along for the flight.  She’s running a scene over and over in her mind, the same scene that she watched over and over on the video monitor hours earlier.

 

        She leans forward and, for the third time since boarding the plane, checks to see that the video cassette is there in her bag.  It is.

 

        She closes her eyes and runs the scene one more time in her mind: the die hits the table, bounces.  It skips and tumbles in slow motion for what seems to be too long a time, and finally comes to rest.  For a fraction of a second the black indentations are clearly visible.  A three.

 

        And then the die is gone.

 

        Nothing dramatic.  No vanishing in a puff of smoke.  No flames, no lights.

 

        It just isn’t there any longer.

 

        One moment there, one moment gone.  No longer existing.  Or, if existing, then existing like some arrow shot blindly into the air.  An arrow that might never come down, an arrow that might spend an eternity flitting from one end of the universe to another.

 

        Or an arrow that might come down anywhere.

 

        Anywhere.

 

        Mary McFarlane tells herself that she’s lost in the trivial.  What matters is what has happened, what she has seen, what she has on the tape in the bag at her feet.

 

        As to whether or not it will be believed, that too is trivial.  She believes.

 

        Sanjowski was right.  The skeptics can all go to hell.

 

        She takes a deep breath and glances through the window at the receding lights of the city below, then checks, one more time, to see if the tape is in the bag beneath the seat in front of her.

 

*

        It’s late, nearly two a.m.  The two men from the Secret Service have said very little.  One is in the examination room, one is in the hallway outside.  The doctor knows that the body on the table is that of a man who tried to assassinate the president and the vice-president that afternoon.  All else that he knows, he has learned since he began the autopsy: male, Caucasian, approximately forty years of age, five feet eight inches, one hundred and thirty-three pounds.  No identifying features other than a circular birthmark, five millimeters in diameter, at the base of the spine, and a jagged scar, three centimeters long, on the inside of the right forearm.

 

        The right eye interests him.  The pupil is dilated and the cornea is red.

 

        Hemorrhage.  Stroke.

 

        He has already opened the man’s head, and, delicately, he inspects the right cerebral hemisphere, gently probing between the soft, pulpy tissue of the cortex and the inner wall of the skull.  A focused penlight shows him vivid detail of the surface of the brain.

 

        He sees something.  A mass.  A clot perhaps.  Ten, maybe fifteen millimeters across.  He touches it gently.  Just how deeply imbedded in the brain tissue it is he can’t tell.  He takes forceps and grasps it, moves it.  With great care he extracts the mass.  It is surprisingly firm, resisting the pressure of the forceps with a hardness he wasn’t expecting.  Beside the autopsy table there is a small sink.  A jet of water flows from a spout, and he washes the object in it.

 

        He takes a good look at it and unwittingly loosens his grip on the forceps.  The object falls onto the floor of the examination room.  It bounces along the tiles, clicking as it flips and tumbles, finally coming to rest near the scuffed shoes of the government agent.

 

        Six.