Air bases hit in or near the cities, including civilian airports which could be used for military purposes: fifty-three. All space centers around the world had been destroyed, even in noncombatant countries (again the footnote: "Spasm").

Patricia felt dizzy. The book seemed to recede from her. There was no tunnel vision, no loss of sensation, just a kind of isolation. She was Patricia Luisa Vasquez, twenty-four, and because she was young she would have a long time to live. Her parents, because she had known them all her life, would not die for a very long time—an inconceivably long time. And Paul—because they had just begun knowing each other, because he was the one man she had met who had even tried to know what she was about—Paul would be safe, too.

And all of them lived in zones that would be (might be) vaporized from the face of the Earth.

It was simple, really. She would take this book with her when she left, which would be soon, days perhaps. She would take it back to Earth and show people. (Perhaps something like that had already been done.)

And if the universes were close enough that a similarity in immediate futures was possible, then people would be forced to act. Faced with the prospect of nuclear war, people would start disarming, start apologizing, Jesus, I'm sorry we came so close; let's take this as a blessing and—

"Oh, CHRIST!" She closed the book and stood.

Lanier walked with her through the decrepit park near the library. She cried for five minutes, then pulled herself together. The questions she wanted to ask were so difficult to express in words. And if she knew the answers, she might go mad. . . .

"Has anyone made comparisons? I mean, between their history and our own?" she asked.

"Yes," Lanier said. "I have, and so has Takahashi."

"He knows as much as we do?" Lanier nodded.

"What did you find? I mean, are the universes similar?"

"The differences in the history records are small enough that they can be interpreted as differences of fact between two sources. No major differences. Until the Stone."

"And the situations these books describe—they sound like what's happening on Earth, now, don't they?"

"Yes."

"The Little Death didn't teach anybody a thing?"

"Perhaps not."

She sat beneath a dead tree, on a concrete planter wall. "Do they know, down on Earth?"

"Eleven people know, here and there."

"What are they doing about it?"

"All that they can," Lanier said.

"But the Stone can change things. It's the crucial difference. Isn't it?"

"We hope so. In the next few weeks, we'll need all the answers we can get—to questions about alternate time-lines, universes, where the Stone came from. Can you help?"

"You need to know why the Stone is here, and how similar the universes might be, to decide whether we're going to have a war on Earth?"

Lanier nodded. "Very important."

"I don't see how any results I get can be detailed enough."