Time Enough for Love Read Online Free Page B

he told her. “In fact, my phone call to World Airlines saved lives. The way it really happened—the way I remember it happening the first time around—the bomb didn’t go off until the plane was coming in for a landing. It took out an entire terminal at Heathrow. Five hundred people on the ground died, as well as the three hundred and forty-two passengers on the plane.”
    “Where did you get those clothes?”
    He could tell from the look in her eyes that she wasn’t buying any of this. Okay. They’d start small. They’d start with his clothes.
    “That was easy. I went home. To
Charles
’s home. I know where I used to hide the key, and his clothes are all my size—because I’m him. This shirt is a color I never liked—I won’t miss it. The jeans I’ve already missed. I remember that I wondered what happened to them. See, there’s this strange memory thing that happens when you change the past. You get something called residual memories and—”
    “Just stop!” she said fiercely. “Stop with the time-travel crap. I want to know who you really are. I want to know the
truth
.”
    “Maggie, I swear, I’ve told you nothing but the truth.”
    Maggie spun away from him, heading toward the pay phone that was under the overhang of the convenience-store roof. “That’s it. I’m calling the police.”
    He caught her arm. “Don’t. Please. I didn’t have anything to do with that plane crash. I was just trying to show you that I
am
from the future by telling you what was going to happen.”
    Maggie was scared. She didn’t know what to think, what to do. She wanted this out of her hands.This man looked so normal, dressed in jeans and a casual faded-green polo shirt. His hair was neatly combed and his chin was smooth from a recent shave. He didn’t look like any kind of a madman today. He looked like the kind of man who would stand out in a crowd—the kind of man she’d make an effort to meet face-to-face.
    Well, she was face-to-face with him right now, all right.
    “Let go of me or I’ll scream,” she whispered.
    “Two more days,” Chuck said. His gaze was steady but no less intense as he looked into her eyes. “Please, Mags. Give me just two more days to change your mind.”
    She shook her head. “Two days isn’t going to make a difference in the way I feel.”
    “Yes, it will. I remembered something else that happened. The news came just two days after the reports of the downed jet.”
    She closed her eyes. “Oh, please, don’t tell me anyone else is going to die—”
    “Not if I can help it,” he told her. “I already called the seismology center in California, telling them to release a warning. There’s going to be an earthquake—a pretty bad one. The epicenter’s in Whittier. The reports should be coming in right about this time on Sunday.” He smiled then, a slighttwisting of his lips. “Even
you
’ve got to admit that there’s no way I could be responsible for an earthquake.”
    Maggie stood in her living room, staring at the television.
    An earthquake. The TV news anchors were reporting an earthquake, just the way the madman had said.
Exactly
the way he had said.
    The epicenter
was
in Whittier. The quake registered a 6.2 on the Richter scale.
    Amazingly, the news anchors reported, as far as they knew at this point, no one had been killed or even badly injured. Apparently, an unidentified caller had predicted the quake. Since this was California, they said with a smile, and conditions for an earthquake had been right, the caller had been taken seriously enough for them to use the emergency broadcast system to warn the city’s residents.
    Oddly enough, the call was traced to a pay phone in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, of all places.
    Maggie slowly sat down, right in the middle of her living-room floor.
    She’d spent the entire weekend trying to work, but barely able to. She’d kept coming back to the TV and the news reports of the plane crash. To thepictures of the people who had