"Last week, I received a phone call at school," Patricia said. "I can't tell you all about it, but I'm going to be gone for a couple of months, even longer. Paul knows about it, but I can't tell him any more than I've just told you." Paul entered the kitchen through the swinging doors.

"Who was it called you?" Ramon asked.

"Judith Hoffman."

"Who's that?" Rita asked.

"The woman on television?" Ramon asked.

Patricia nodded. "She's an advisor to the President. They want me to work on something with them, and that's as much as I can tell you."

"Why should they want you?" Rita asked.

"I think they want her to build a time machine," Paul said. Whenever he had said that before, Patricia had become angry, but now she shrugged it off.

She couldn't expect Paul to understand her work. Very few people did—certainly not her parents and friends. "Paul has some other crazy theories, too," she said. "But my lips are sealed."

"Like a clam," Paul said. "She's been hard to live with the past few days."

"If you wouldn't keep trying to get me to talk!" She sighed dramatically—she was doing a lot of that lately—and looked at the cream-colored ceiling, then turned to her father. "It's going to be very interesting. Nobody will be able to reach me directly. You can send mail for me to this address." She drew the phone pad across the table and wrote down an APO address.

"Is this important to you?" Rita asked.

"Of course it is," Ramon answered.

But Patricia didn't know. It sounded crazy, even now.

After the guests had left, she took Paul on a nighttime tour of the neighborhood. For a half hour, they walked in silence, passing from one streetlight glow to the next. "I'm coming back, you know," she said finally.

"I know."

"I had to show you my home, because it's very important to me. Rita, Ramon, the house."

"Yes," Paul said.

"I think I'd be lost without it. I spend so much time in my head, and what I do there is so different. . . so bizarre to most people. If I didn't have a center, a place to return to, I'd get lost."

"I understand," Paul said. "It's a very nice home. I like your folks."

She stopped him and they faced each other, holding hands at arm's length. "I'm glad," she said.

"I want to make a home with you, too," he said. "Another center, for both of us to come back to."

Her expression was so intense she seemed about to leap on him. "Cat's eyes," Paul said, grinning.

They circled back and kissed on the front porch before going in to join her parents for coffee and cinnamon cocoa.

"One last pit stop," she said as they prepared to drive back to Caltech.

She walked down the hall to the bathroom, past the graduation pictures and the framed contents page of the issue of The Physical Review her first paper had appeared in. She stopped in front of the cover and stared intently at it. Suddenly, her heart seemed to miss a beat, leaving a peculiar hollow in her chest, a brief, almost pleasant sensation of falling, fading, then returning to normal.