Detective Daniel Lawless never returned to his apartment for his things, abandoning impressive shoe and CD collections, and has never contacted his mother or touched his bank account. Everyone assumes he's dead, perhaps eaten by the monster like Deputy Sandra Jensen.

Lots of people wanted to talk to him once word got out he was a psychic who communicated with the monster. The tabloids, lacking any real information, fabricated lies, doctoring file photos until they had Lawless having sex with something that looked like a cross between a huge boa constrictor and a giant bat.

Only one man knows what happened to Daniel Lawless: Dave Baskel, detective for the Modesto Police Department.

When Baskel left the golf course, Lawless was unresponsive but crying. Baskel took him home and put him on the bed in the spare room, then went directly to the liqueur cabinet and got out a thirty-year-old scotch.

He was on his third when his wife, Joanna, got home at three-thirty. The kids got home at four and were promptly farmed out for the evening. Baskel told his wife everything. She called him a crazy drunk, then a stupid crazy drunk, but after several demonstrations of his new mind-reading and mind-talking talents, she was convinced. Of what she wasn't exactly sure, but it was obvious something had happened to her husband.

Her husband's mind reading parlor trick aside, Joanna had noticed something distinctly different the second she walked through the door that afternoon. It was difficult to place at first, but when her husband took her to see Lawless after their long talk, the feeling intensified when she entered the room. She felt peaceful and all the animosity toward her husband left. Not knowing how, but not really caring, she knew Lawless was responsible. She told her husband Lawless could stay as long as he needed to.

Lawless spent only one week with the Baskel family, but during that week no one argued about what television show to watch or complained about washing the dishes or taking out the trash. The peace left with Lawless.

In Carmel, California, at the Valley of the Sun Care Facility, things began running smoothly the day the comatose man they knew as Brad Costa settled into room twelve. Nothing earth shaking, but a lot of little things. The Alzheimer's patient in room ten recognized his wife when she came to visit that afternoon, making her cry. Nurse Melba Blatson stopped bitching about having to change the diaper on the man in room five. Three days later the man regained control of his bowels. The lucid patients quit complaining about their meds and how no one comes to visit anymore. Relatives started visiting more. The landscaping outside the facility flourished. The stubborn mold problem in the staff bathroom cleared up.

No one got younger or grew back full heads of hair, but if you counted you would have found fewer gray hairs. The two diabetics still had to take their insulin, but less was needed.

Lawless never woke up, but it was clear from what happened around him that a small spark of something remained in his physical shell, a spark that required a monthly dose of sun energy. Baskel drove to Carmel every month, signed in at the front, closed the door to Lawless's room and opened the blinds. Lawless's eyes transformed into silver collection discs and Baskel pulled out a book or took a nap while Lawless charged up.

It was during one of these solar feeding sessions, nine or ten months after the monster's demise, that a strange thing happened. Baskel thought he saw something on Lawless's hand and reached over to brush it off. When he touched Lawless, energy of some kind passed from Lawless to Baskel. He felt it and quickly withdrew his hand.

When he left the care facility later, he noticed he was catching other people's thoughts again; the ability to read and project thoughts had gradually disappeared in the month following the final showdown at the golf course.

Baskel had been disappointed when the abilities faded. When it was apparent they would completely disappear, he started thinking about how he had gotten them in the first place. They started when Lawless took him to the place Jensen said "the threads of time meet," and he'd been holding Lawless's hand the entire time. This was after Lawless and Jensen had recharged in the sunny bedroom.

He theorized Lawless had given him some of the juice he got from the sun through physical contact, and that it was this juice that had given him the ability to read and project thoughts. Using the abilities used up the sun-juice, and since he couldn't recharge like Jensen and Lawless, his tank was on empty.

When he shared his theory with Joanna several months after his psychic powers disappeared, she told him it was best they forgot any of it had ever happened. She also wanted him to stop the monthly trips to Carmel, suggesting he let the state take over Lawless's care.

But he couldn't do that. He'd been taken somewhere and seen something that he would not, could not, forget, and he felt Jensen had given him some kind of charge when she told him to make sure no one ever forgot what Lawless had done for humanity, the sacrifice they - Baskel knew both played crucial roles in the death of the monsters - had made.

He just had no idea how to go about telling the world what he knew without sounding loony.

After he touched Lawless's hand in Carmel, and the thought-reading started up again, it only lasted a few days because the touch had been brief. Even though he wasn't catching others' thoughts a week later, he had plenty to think about.

He had a choice: if he wanted to lead a normal life all he had to do was avoid touching Lawless when he was sunning. There would be no psychic powers and no trips to the wherever. He would be an ordinary guy with a not-so-ordinary experience he could use to scare his grandkids.

However, if he wanted to take up Jensen's charge - exactly what that meant, he didn't know - he just needed to hold Lawless's hand and let fate run its course.

On his next trip to Carmel, he held Lawless's hand the entire time Lawless sun-charged, about two hours. What could it hurt? When he left, he didn't feel any different than when Lawless had shown him the vision, which is to say he felt like he always felt.

The physic powers returned and he enjoyed having them, but were gone by the time he saw Lawless again the next month. He was anxious to get recharged but wanted to try something different; he wanted to see what would happen if he charged two days in a row.

He sunned with Lawless on Saturday and then again on Sunday. His abilities returned and lasted through the month.

He continued this routine for two years and his abilities never changed. How long they lasted was determined by how long he held Lawless's hand while Lawless sunned.

In the third year after the death of the monsters, Baskel got the idea to take his family to Monterey for a two-week vacation. He would sun with Lawless for two or three hours every day while the kids and Joanna played.

Baskel grew accustomed to his psychic powers and craved the energizing sessions with Lawless. Not once did he consider what all this extra energy might do to Lawless, or Lawless's shell. He'd supposed from what Jensen had said that Lawless, the man and the Assassin, was dead; the fact that his body lived on was immaterial.

Two hours into a sun-charging session, on a cold Monday morning, the ninth consecutive day of being powered up, Lawless grabbed Baskel's hand and took him to where the threads of time meet. Moving through the tunnel, while still thrilling, seemed familiar to Baskel, as if he'd been there only yesterday. This time he knew better than to try and pull meaningful words or images out of the blur of sound and light. Instead, he allowed the experience to wash over him, unrestricted or restrained in any way. He looked about him in wonder, filled with awe that such a thing could happen.

Arriving at what appeared to be the very hill he had stood on before, he looked out at the reels of the past and the possible futures flickering before his eyes, moving from left to right on their never-ending journey. He found he could pick out individual threads whereas before he'd only been confused by the jumble of faces and life that twinkled by.

The thought struck him that he should question the purpose of this journey, and so he looked to his right to see if Lawless was there as he had been the first time. He was, dressed in the bed clothes from the care facility. But there was no life in his eyes.

("Lawless,") he thought to the man holding his hand. Lawless did not respond. He was gone and all that remained was some kind of power plant that continued to operate when you stuck it in the sun.

That still left the question of why and how he, Baskel, was there on the hill before the threads of time. He thought about that, and heard the answer come into his mind, ("This is your place of instruction, Advocate.") There was a term he hadn't heard in years. The voice was an adult female, soft and reassuring. Comfortable. Personal but not too friendly. The kind of voice he was certain he could listen to for hours.

("Advocate?").

("Yes. You are an Advocate and the Seer has brought you here to be instructed in the ways of the Leader.").

("Whoa, slow down. Who said I was an Advocate? I'm not from your, their, planet. I'm an Earth boy, remember?").

("The Facilitator chose you to be the Advocate.").

("Did she? I don't remember giving her an answer-").

("Look!").

A reel moved forward from the throng of flickering images, coming at him until it filled his vision and he could see nothing else.

He saw people, humans beings as far as he could tell, fighting.

And he saw...

Carmel was too much of a drive to do every weekend, and it wasn't reasonable for Baskel to live in a motel half the month, so he moved Brad Costa to a facility in Patterson, a small town thirty miles west of Modesto, five years after the Assassin killed the monster.

Six months ago, he realized he could no longer be a policeman as he had more important things to do, so he took an early retirement.

Joanna wasn't exactly sure what was happening to her husband, but she knew it was good. He was changing, but it somehow seemed right. He didn't tell her much of what he did when he went to visit Lawless, and she didn't ask. She could think of no reason she needed know those details.

The feeling of peace returned to their house, this time brought in by her husband. Everyone could feel it. When guests came to visit, they found it hard to leave the profound peace they felt within the walls of the Baskel home.

Lawless took Baskel places, not physically but mentally - spiritually. They went to Lawless and Jensen's planet where Baskel observed their history, as Lawless and Jensen had done as children when they received the instruction they needed to fulfill their destinies. He visited many planets where other Advocates had been sent, to observe how their people had reacted to the teachings of the Leader. The visits were usually pleasant and ended happily. But when the people rejected the Leader's teachings, he had to witness the annihilation of a race. Sadly, he came to believe that few planets were populated by people as violent as those he lived among. His hope for his people waned.

The most important trips Baskel took were the ones where he observed the life of the Leader, the man who forever changed the future of the planet he was born on, as well as hundreds of other planets who accepted and followed his teachings. It was when he observed these reels that he changed, abandoning the mundane and meaningless, embracing the ways of peace.

He stopped being Dave Baskel, and started becoming.

It would be a process, but he felt - knew - the people of Earth needed him, needed the ways of the Leader, if they were to escape the many cataclysmic endings he has seen for them while standing on the hill where the threads of time meet.

end.