"How about dinner?" I ask her.

Barbara eyes me for a moment, looks me up and down. She shrugs and says, "No." I sigh and awkwardly stare around the room for a remaining shred of my pride.

"Pick-up Delta 77-9 coming up, Barbara," the intercom says. She quickly brings up the information about the agent pick-up on her screen and keys all the information in to the Daze Machine's console.

Barbara suddenly looks at me again appraisingly and says, "Maybe." I grin at the pretty blonde, her returning smile turns into a scowl as she double checks her information. I watch over her shoulder as her hands flit quick and sure against the dials and buttons of the console. The pickup is Patrick and Dwayne coming back from an A-priority from upstream. They must have left while I was on the banking mission.

She triple checks her data and then begins the Daze sequence. There's no machinery whirr or hum, but there's always build-up of tension before a Daze transference. When the timer counts down to the zero, they're suddenly out there on the pad. Patrick is sitting and Dwayne is lying down. For a moment, all is calm and seems normal.

Patrick begins to scream as pieces of his arms and face fall off in feathery strings, landing in a bloody gossamer pile in his lap. Dwayne just settles into a heap of unconnected flesh. They're both completely dead in a matter of moments.

The fright paralysis leaves me, and I turn away. They were somehow in the stream for too long and became too much a part of the locus they were visiting. The Daze doesn't bring back what's supposed to be at a particular locus. Half of every cell in their bodies must still be back at wherever the Daze took them from.

Barbara begins to throw up in a trashcan while making terrible retching noises. I stand stock still as my mind winds itself up in circles. I remember fathering the twins and going back to visit five days at a time, seeing them put on years like new clothing. I remember playing poker and getting drunk with them in the agent barracks, before I even knew they were my sons. My twin sons, unraveled and dead on the receiving pad like piles of bloody trash. Tears spring unbidden to my eyes.

With some foresight I check the numbers on Barbara's console while she's busy being sick. They match up exactly with the readout but I check them again before deciding it wasn't her error. The readout is obviously wrong, and for a single paranoid moment I wonder if InClock killed the two purposefully. InClock has a way of disappearing agents -- could they have done so with my sons just now?

I punch the plexiglas observation window and bruise my hand fairly badly. Someone was going to pay for my sons' deaths. Someone's head was going to roll. They were good agents, and good friends, and my sons.

Two hours later I was in Dr. Clark's office. It had taken a lot of bluster and pulling of seniority to get me here, and I knew my career was basically over for all the fighting it had taken. I was here though, and I was talking to the head of InClock affairs. I am actually yelling at him. "I SAW the readouts. They were CORRECT!"

He seemed to be molded from foam-rubber; Dr. Howard Clark is a fat and padded man with thick glasses and a bad toupee. His mind is sharp and quick, though. "Obviously not, Lincoln. You saw what happened to them." He shakes his head in a mock sadness that I didn't buy for a second.

"Barbara's console settings matched the readouts perfectly! If there was an error, it was in the readouts, not Barbara. I saw it!" My hands are white-knucked on my chair. I wonder if he knows the two were my sons.

"Sorry, Lincoln. We had proof otherwise, plus it's too late already." The look in his eyes gives me a sinking feeling. He's about to play his trump card.

"Too late? What do you mean?"

"We thought she was a rogue spy. We had her killed."

"ALREADY? It happened two hours ago! You call that an investigation?" I cry.

He smiles and makes an odd sliding motion in his chair. One of his hands is out of sight, and I guess that he had triggered the security button. "You of all people," he says with calm words, "should know that time -- two hours -- doesn't mean a whole lot."

The guards he signaled burst into the office and take my arms. "This isn't over," I growl. He shrugs, says, "I think it is." He smiles again as I'm pulled out of the room.

As soon as I'm clear of the doorways the room is filled with fire and shrieks. A force-shield pops over the doorway, normally there to keep such violence out but this time containing the napalm bomb in the office. Clark is dead without a doubt, and I wonder how he hadn't been forewarned of this with future information. Rogue treachery, no doubt; they have ways of keeping such things hidden.

InClock Security men ran around crazily. Some apprehend me and later question me under truth serums only to find I'm completely innocent. The next day I'm released back to the barracks, where I dig around in my footlocker for a certain piece of paper.

It did have another meeting scheduled on it, in this locus, along with instructions on how to keep my movements secret.

For a second I think about the bomb and Clark's death. If I had to kill him, it was a great way to do it. The paper in my hands feels weighty as I muse this over.

I make the decision and take a furlough day from InClock a week later and I don't come back when the day's up. Or ever.

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