"-see, maybe I don't care if he kills me, maybe that would be a blessing, just get totally drunk and let him kill me, so wasted I'd hardly notice when he does me," Sammy said, crowding them, moving to the left when they moved in that direction, to the right when they tried that way, insisting on a confrontation. "But then tonight, when I was deep in the bag, sucking down my second double liter, I realized who the ratman has to be, I mean what what he has to be-one of the aliens!" he has to be-one of the aliens!"

"Aliens," Connie said disgustedly. "Aliens, always aliens with you dim bulbs. Get out of here, you greasy hairball, or I swear to G.o.d I'm gonna-"

"No, no, listen. We've always known they're coming, haven't we? Always known, and now they're here, and they've come to me first, and if I don't warn the world, then everyone's going to die."

As he took hold of Sammy's arm and tried to maneuver him out of their way, Harry was almost as leery of Connie as he was of the b.u.m. If Sammy was an overwound clockwork mechanism ready to explode, then Connie was a nuclear plant heading for a meltdown. She was frustrated that the vagrant was delaying them from getting to Nancy Quan, the police artist, acutely aware that dawn was rushing toward them from the East. Harry was frustrated, too, but with him, unlike with Connie, there was no danger that he might knee Sammy in the crotch and pitch him through one of the nearby restaurant windows.

"-don't want to be responsible for aliens killing the whole world, I've already got too much on my conscience, too much, can't stand the idea of being responsible, I've let so many people down already-"

If Connie thumped the guy, they would never get to Nancy Quan or have a chance to locate Ticktock. They would be tied up here for an hour or longer, arranging for Sammy's arrest, trying not to choke to death on his body odor, and struggling to deny police brutality (a few bar patrons were watching them, faces to the gla.s.s). Too many precious minutes would be lost. Sammy grabbed at Connie's jacket sleeve. "Listen to me, woman, you listen to me!" Connie jerked loose of him, c.o.c.ked her fist.

"No!" Harry said.

Connie barely checked herself, almost threw the punch.

Sammy was spraying spittle as he ranted: "-it gave me thirty-six hours to live, the ratman, but now it must be twenty-four or less, not sure-"

Harry tried to hold Connie back with one hand as she reached for Sammy again, while simultaneously pushing Sammy away with the other hand. Then the dog jumped up on him. Grinning, panting, its tail wagging. Harry twisted away, shook his leg, and the dog dropped back onto the sidewalk on all fours.

Sammy was babbling frantically, now clutching with both hands at Harry's sleeve and tugging for attention, as if he didn't have it already: "-his eyes like snake eyes, green and terrible, terrible, and he says I got thirty-six hours to live, ticktock, ticktock-"

Fear and amazement quivered through Harry when he heard that word, and the breeze off the ocean seemed suddenly colder than it had been.

Startled, Connie stopped trying to get at Sammy. "Wait a minute, what'd you say?"

"Aliens! Aliens!" Sammy shouted angrily. "You're not listening to me, d.a.m.n it."

"Not the aliens part," Connie said. The dog jumped on her. Patting its head and pushing it away, she said, "Harry, did he say what I think he said?"

"I'm a citizen, too," Sammy shrieked. His need to give testimony had escalated into a frenzied determination. "I got a right to be listened to sometimes."

"Ticktock," Harry said.

"That's right," Sammy confirmed. He was pulling on Harry's sleeve almost hard enough to tear it off. "Ticktock, ticktock, time is running out, you'll be dead by dawn tomorrow, Sammy.' And then he just dissolves into a pack of rats, right before my eyes."

Or a whirlwind of trash, Harry thought, or a pillar of fire.

"All right, wait, let's talk," Connie said. "Calm down, Sammy, and let's discuss this. I'm sorry for what I said, I really am. Just get calm."

Sammy must have thought she was insincere and merely trying to humor him into letting his guard down, because he didn't respond to the new respect and consideration she accorded him. He stamped his feet in frustration. His clothes flapped on his bony body, and he looked like a scarecrow shaken by a Halloween wind. "Aliens, you stupid woman, aliens, aliens, aliens!" Glancing at The Green House, Harry saw that half a dozen people were at the barroom windows now, peering out at them.

He realized what a singular spectacle they were, all three of them bedraggled, tugging and pulling at each other, shouting about aliens. He was probably in the last hours of his life, pursued by something paranormal and incredibly vicious, and his desperate fight for survival had been transformed, at least for a moment, into a piece of slapstick street theater. Welcome to the '90s. America on the brink of the millennium. Jesus.

m.u.f.fled music filtered to the street: the four-man combo was playing some West Coast swing now, "Kansas City," but with weird riffs.

The host in the Armani suit was one of those at the bar windows. He was probably silently berating himself for being fooled by what he now surely believed were phony badges, and would go any second to call the real police.

A pa.s.sing car slowed down, driver and pa.s.senger gawking.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid woman!" Sammy shouted at Connie.

The dog took hold of the right leg of Harry's trousers, nearly jerked him off his feet. He staggered, kept his balance, and managed to pull free of Sammy, though not the dog. It squirmed backward, striving with canine tenacity to drag Harry along with it. Harry resisted, then almost lost his balance again when the mutt abruptly let go of him.

Connie was still trying to soothe Sammy, and the b.u.m was still telling her that she was stupid, but at least neither was trying to hit the other.

The dog ran south along the sidewalk for a few steps, skidded to a halt in the downfall of light from a streetlamp, looked back, and barked at them. The breeze ruffled its fur, fluffed its tail. It dashed a little farther south, halted in shadows this time, and barked again. Seeing that Harry was distracted by the dog, Sammy became even more outraged at his inability to get serious consideration. His voice became mocking, sarcastic: "Oh, sure, that's it, pay more attention to a d.a.m.n dog than to me! What am I, anyway, just some piece of street garbage, less than a dog, no reason to listen to trash like me. Go on, Timmy, go on, see what La.s.sie wants, maybe Dad's trapped under an overturned tractor down on the f.u.c.king south forty!" Harry couldn't help laughing. He would never have expected a remark like that out of someone like Sammy, and he wondered who the man had been before he'd wound up as he was now. The dog squealed plaintively, cutting Harry's laugh short. Tucking its bushy tail between its legs, p.r.i.c.king up its ears, raising its head quizzically, it turned in a circle and sniffed at the night air.

"Something's wrong," Connie said, worriedly looking around at the street. Harry felt it, too. A change in the air. An odd pressure. Something. Cop instinct. Cop and dog dog instinct. instinct.

The mutt caught a scent that made it yelp in fear. It spun around on the sidewalk, biting at the air, then rushed back toward Harry. For an instant he thought it was going to barrel into him and knock him on his a.s.s, but then it angled toward the front of The Green House, plunged into a planting bed full of shrubbery, and lay flat on its belly, hiding among azaleas, only its eyes and snout visible.

Taking his cue from the dog, Sammy turned and sprinted toward the nearby alleyway. Connie said, "Hey, no, wait," and started after him.

"Connie," Harry said warningly, not sure what he was warning her about, but sensing that it was not a good idea for them to separate just then.

She turned to him. "What?"

Beyond her, Sammy disappeared around the corner.

That was when everything stopped.

Growling uphill in the southbound lane of the coast highway, a tow truck, evidently on the way to help a stranded motorist, halted on the proverbial dime but without a squeal of brakes. Its laboring engine fell silent from one second to the next, without a lingering chug, cough, or sputter, though its headlights still shone.

Simultaneously a Volvo about a hundred feet behind the truck also stopped and fell mute. In the same instant, the breeze died. It didn't wane gradually or sputter out, but ceased as quickly as if a cosmic fan had been switched off. Thousands upon thousands of leaves stopped rustling as one. Precisely in time with the silencing of traffic and vegetation, the music from the bar cut off midnote. Harry almost felt he had gone stone deaf. He'd never known a silence as profound in a controlled interior environment, let alone outdoors where the life of a town and the myriad background noises of the natural world produced a ceaseless atonal symphony even in the comparative stillness between midnight and dawn. He could not hear himself breathe, then realized that his own contribution to the preternatural hush was voluntary; he was simply so stunned by the change in the world that he was holding his breath.

In addition to sound, motion had been stolen from the night. The tow truck and Volvo were not the only things that had come to a complete standstill. The curbside trees and the shrubbery along the front of The Green House seemed to have been flash-frozen. The leaves had not merely stopped rustling, but had entirely ceased moving; they could not have been more still if sculpted from stone. Overhanging the windows of The Green House, the scalloped valances on the canvas awnings had been fluttering in the breeze, but they had gone rigid in mid-flutter; now they were as stiff as if formed from sheet metal. Across the street, the blinking arrow on a neon sign had frozen in the ON position.

Connie said, "Harry?"

He started, as he would have at any sound except the intimate m.u.f.fled thumping of his own racing heart.

He saw his own confusion and anxiety mirrored in her face.

Moving to his side, she said, "What's happening?"

Her voice, aside from having an uncharacteristic tremor, was vaguely different from what it had been, slightly flat in tone and marginally less inflective.

"d.a.m.ned if I know," he told her.

His voice sounded much like hers, as though it issued from a mechanical device that was extremely clever- but not quite perfect-at reproducing the speech of any human being.

"It's got to be him doing it," she said.

Harry agreed. "Somehow."

"Ticktock."

"Yeah."

"s.h.i.t, this is crazy."

"No argument from me."

She started to draw her revolver, then let the gun slide back into her shoulder holster. An ominous mood infused the scene, an air of fearful expectation. But for the moment, at least, there was nothing at which to shoot.

"Where is the creep?" she wondered.

"I have a hunch he'll show up."

"No points for that one." Indicating the tow truck out in the street, she said, "For G.o.d's sake . . . look at that."

At first he thought Connie was just remarking on the fact that the vehicle had mysteriously halted like everything else, but then he realized what sight had pushed the needle higher on her astonishment meter. The air had been just cool enough to cause vehicle exhaust (but not their breath) to condense in pale plumes; those thin puffs of mist hung in midair behind the tow truck, neither dispersing nor evaporating as vapor should have done. He saw another but barely visible gray-white ghost suspended behind the tail pipe of the more distant Volvo. Now that he was primed to look for them, similar wonders became evident on all sides, and he pointed them out to her. A few pieces of light debris-gum and candy wrappers, a splintered portion of a popsicle stick, dry brown leaves, a tangled length of red yarn-had been swept up by the breeze; although no draught remained to support the items, they were still aloft, as if the air had abruptly turned to purest crystal around them and had trapped them motionless for eternity. Within arm's reach and just a foot higher than his head, two late-winter moths as white as snowflakes hung immotive, their wings soft and pearl-smooth in the glow of the streetlamp. Connie tapped her wrist.w.a.tch, then showed it to Harry. It was a traditional-style Timex with a round dial and hands, including not only hour and minute hands but a red second hand. It was stopped at 1:29 plus sixteen seconds.

Harry checked his own watch, which had a digital readout. It also showed 1:29, and the tiny blinking dot that took the place of a second hand was burning steadily, no longer counting off each sixtieth of a minute.

"Time has . . ." Connie was unable to finish the sentence. She surveyed the silent street in amazement, swallowed hard, and finally found her voice: "Time has stopped . . . just stopped. Is that it?"

"Say what?"

"Stopped for the rest of the world but not for us?"

"Time doesn't . . . it can't . . . just stop."

"Then what?"

Physics had never been his favorite subject. And though he had some affinity for the sciences because of their ceaseless search for order in the universe, he was not as scientifically literate as he should have been in an age when science was king. However, he had retained enough of his teachers' lectures and had watched enough PBS specials and had read enough bestseller-list books of popularized science to know that what Connie had said did not explain numerous aspects of what was happening to them.

For one thing, if time had really stopped, why were they still conscious? How could they be aware of the phenomenon? Why weren't they frozen in that last moment of forward-moving time just as the airborne litter was, as the moths were?

"No," he said shakily, "it's not that simple. If time stopped, nothing nothing would move-would it?- would move-would it?- not even subatomic particles. And without subatomic movement . . . molecules of air . . . well, wouldn't molecules of air be as solid as molecules of iron? How would we be able to breathe?" Reacting to that thought, they both took deep and grateful breaths. The air did have a faint chemical taste, as slightly odd in its way as the timbre of their voices, but it seemed capable of sustaining life.

"And light," Harry said. "Light waves would stop moving. No waves to register with our eyes. So how could we see anything but darkness?"

In fact, the effect of time coming to a stop probably would be infinitely more catastrophic than the stillness and silence that had descended on the world that March night. It seemed to him that time and matter were inseparable parts of creation, and if the flow of time were cut off, matter would instantly cease to exist. The universe would implode-wouldn't it?-crash back in on itself, into a tiny ball of extremely dense . . . well, whatever the h.e.l.l dense stuff it was before it had exploded to create the universe.

Connie stood on her toes, reached up, and gently pinched the wing of one of the moths between thumb and forefinger. She settled back on her heels and brought the insect in front of her face for a closer inspection.

Harry had not been sure if she would be able to alter the bug's position or not. He wouldn't have been surprised if the moth had hung immovably on the dead-calm air, as fixed in place as a metal moth welded to a steel wall.

"Not as soft as a moth should be," she said. "Feels like it's made out of taffeta . . . or starched fabric of some kind."

When she opened her fingers, letting go of the wing, the moth hung in the air where she had released it.

Harry gently batted the bug with the back of his hand, and watched with fascination as it tumbled a few inches before coming to rest in the air again. It was as motionless as it had been before they had toyed with it, just in a new position.

The ways in which they affected things appeared to be pretty much normal. Their shadows moved when they did, though all other shadows were as unmoving as the objects that cast them. They could act upon the world and pa.s.s through it as usual but couldn't really interact with with it. She had been able to move the moth, but touching it had not brought it into their reality, had not made it come alive again. it. She had been able to move the moth, but touching it had not brought it into their reality, had not made it come alive again.

"Maybe time hasn't stopped," she said. "Maybe it just slowed way, way down for everyone and everything else except us."

"That's not it, either."

"How can you be sure?"

"I can't. But I think . . . if we're experiencing time at such a tremendously faster rate, enough faster to make the rest of the world appear to be standing still, then every move we make has incredible incredible comparative velocity. Doesn't it?" comparative velocity. Doesn't it?"

"So?"

"I mean, a lot more velocity than any bullet fired from any gun. Velocity is destructive. If I took a bullet in my hand and threw it at you, it wouldn't do any damage. But at a few thousand feet per second, it'll punch a substantial hole in you."

She nodded, staring thoughtfully at the suspended moth. "So if it was just a case of us experiencing time a lot faster, the swat you gave that bug would've disintegrated it."

"Yeah. I think so. I'd have probably done some damage to my hand, too." He looked at his hand. It was unmarked. "And if it was just that light waves are traveling slower than usual . . . then no lamps would be as bright as they are now. They'd be dimmer and . . . reddish, I think, almost like infrared light. Maybe. And air molecules would be sluggish. . . ."

"Like breathing water or syrup?"

He nodded. "I think so. I don't really know for sure. h.e.l.l's bells, I'm not sure even Albert Einstein would be able to figure this if he was standing right here with us."

"The way this is going, he might show up any minute."

No one had gotten out of either the tow truck or the Volvo, which indicated to Harry that the occupants were as trapped in the changed world as were the moths. He could see only the shadowy forms of two people in the front seat of the more distant Volvo, but he had a better view of the man behind the wheel of the tow truck, which was almost directly across the street from them. Neither the shadows in the car nor the truck driver had moved a fraction of an inch since the stillness had fallen. Harry supposed that if they had not not been on the same time track as their vehicles, they might have exploded through the windshields and tumbled along the highway the instant that the tires precipitously stopped rotating. been on the same time track as their vehicles, they might have exploded through the windshields and tumbled along the highway the instant that the tires precipitously stopped rotating.

At the barroom windows of The Green House, six people continued to peer out in precisely the postures they had been in when the Pause had come. (Harry thought of it as a Pause rather than a Stop because he a.s.sumed that sooner or later Ticktock would start things up again. a.s.suming it was Ticktock who had called the halt. If not him, who else? G.o.d?) Two of them were sitting at a window table; the other four were standing, two on each side of the table. Harry crossed the sidewalk and stepped between the shrubs to examine the onlookers more closely. Connie accompanied him. They stood directly in front of the gla.s.s and perhaps a foot below those inside the barroom.

In addition to the gray-haired couple at the table, there was a young blonde and her fiftyish companion, one of the couples who had been sitting near the bandstand, making too much noise and laughing too heartily. Now they were as quiet as the residents of any tomb. On the other side of the table stood the host and a waiter. All six were squinting through the window, leaning slightly forward toward the gla.s.s.

As Harry studied them, not one blinked an eye. No face muscles twitched. Not a single hair stirred. Their clothes draped them as if every garment had been carved from marble. Their unchanging expressions ranged from amus.e.m.e.nt to amazement to curiosity to, in the case of the host, perturbation. But they were not reacting to the incredible stillness that had befallen the night. Of that, they were oblivious because they were a part of it. Rather, they were staring over Harry's and Connie's heads, at the place on the sidewalk where the two of them had last been standing after Sammy and the dog had fled. Their facial expressions were in reaction to that interrupted bit of street theater.

Connie raised one hand above her head and waved it in front of the window, directly in the line of view of the onlookers. The six did not respond to it in any way whatsoever.

"They can't see us," Connie said wonderingly.

"Maybe they see us standing out there on the sidewalk, in the instant that everything stopped. They could be frozen in that split second of perception and not have seen anything we've done since."

Virtually in unison, he and Connie looked over their shoulders to study the dead-still street behind them, equally apprehensive of the unnatural quietude. With astonishing stealth, Ticktock had appeared behind them in James Ordegard's bedroom, and they had paid with pain for not antic.i.p.ating him. Here, he was not yet in sight, although Harry was sure that he was coming. Returning her attention to the gathering inside the bar, Connie rapped her knuckles against a pane of gla.s.s. The sound was slightly tinny, differing from the right right sound of knuckles against gla.s.s to the same small but audible degree that their current voices differed from their real ones. The onlookers did not react. sound of knuckles against gla.s.s to the same small but audible degree that their current voices differed from their real ones. The onlookers did not react.

To Harry, they seemed to be more securely imprisoned than the most isolated man in the deepest cell in the world's worst police state. Like flies in amber, they were trapped in one meaningless moment of their lives. There was something horribly vulnerable about their helpless suspension and their blissful ignorance of it.

Their plight, although they were almost certainly unaware of it, sent a chill along Harry's spine. He rubbed the back of his neck to warm it.

"If they still see us out on the sidewalk," Connie said, "what happens if we go away from here, and then everything starts up again?"

"I suppose, to them, it'll appear as if we vanished into thin air, right before their eyes."

"My G.o.d."

"It'll give them a jolt, all right."

She turned away from the window, faced him. Worry lines creased her brow. Her dark eyes were haunted, and her voice was somber to an extent not fully attributable to the change in its tone and pitch. "Harry, this b.a.s.t.a.r.d isn't just some spoon-bending, fortune-telling, sleight-of-hand, Vegas lounge act."