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“Who are you?” I asked. “And why do you call me Jimla? Jim LaDue is a long way from here,
mister.”
“I don’t know who Jim LaDue is,” the Green Card Man said. “I’ve stayed away from your string as
much as—”
He stopped. His face contorted. The sides of his hands rose to his temples and pressed there, as if
to hold his brains in. But it was the card stuck in the band of his hat that captured most of my
attention. The color wasn’t entirely fixed. For a moment it swirled and swam, reminding me of the
screensaver that takes over my computer after it’s been idle for fifteen minutes or so. The green
swirled into a pale canary yellow. Then, as he slowly lowered his hands, it returned to green. But
maybe not as bright a green as when I’d first noticed it.
“I’ve stayed away from your string as much as possible,” the man in the black overcoat said, “but it
hasn’t been entirely possible. Besides, there are so many strings now. Thanks to you and your friend the
cook, there’s so much crap.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” I said, but that wasn’t quite true. I could at least figure out the
card this man (and his wet-brain forerunner) carried. They were like the badges worn by people who
worked in nuclear power plants. Only instead of measuring radiation, the cards monitored . . . what?
Sanity? Green, your bag of marbles was full. Yellow, you’d started to lose them. Orange, call for the
men in the white coats. And when your card turned black . . .
The Green Card Man was watching me carefully. From across the street he’d looked no older than
thirty. Over here, he looked closer to forty-five. Only, when you got close enough to look into his eyes,
he looked older than the ages and not right in the head.
“Are you some kind of guardian? Do you guard the rabbit-hole?”
He smiled . . . or tried to. “That’s what your friend called it.” From his pocket he took a pack of
cigarettes. There was no label on them. That was something I’d never seen before, either here in the
Land of Ago or in the Land of Ahead.
“Is this the only one?”
He produced a lighter, cupped it to keep the wind from blowing the flame out, then set fire to the
end of his cigarette. The smell was sweet, more like marijuana than tobacco. But it wasn’t marijuana.
Although he never said, I believe it was something medicinal. Perhaps not so different from my
Goody’s Headache Powder.
“There are a few. Think of a glass of ginger ale that’s been left out and forgotten.”
“Okay . . .”
“After two or three days, almost all the carbonation is gone, but there are still a few bubbles left.
What you call the rabbit-hole isn’t a hole at all. It’s a bubble. As far as guarding . . . no. Not really. It
would be nice, but there’s very little we could do that wouldn’t make things worse. That’s the trouble
with traveling in time, Jimla.”
“My name is Jake.”
“Fine. What we do, Jake, is watch. Sometimes we warn. As Kyle tried to warn your friend the
cook.”
So the crazy guy had a name. A perfectly normal one. Kyle, for God’s sake. It made things worse
because it made them more real.
“He never tried to warn Al! All he ever did was ask for a buck to buy cheap wine with!”
The Green Card Man dragged on his cigarette and looked down at the cracked concrete, frowning
as if something were written there. Shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH said the weaving flats. “He did at
first,” he said. “In his way. Your friend was too excited by the new world he’d found to pay attention.
And by then Kyle was already tottering. It’s a . . . how would you put it? An occupational hazard.
What we do puts us under enormous mental strain. Do you know why?”