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gas station and the convenience store, so maybe three or thee-thirty? Why?”
    Dr. Erdmann didn’t answer. He was silent for so long that Carrie grew uneasy. She shouldn’t have come, it was a terrible imposition, and anyway there was probably a rule against aides staying in residents’ apartments, what was she thinking —
    “Let me get blankets and pillow for the sofa,” Dr. Erdmann finally said, in a voice that still sounded odd to Carrie. “It’s fairly comfortable. For a sofa.”

    SIX

    Not possible. The most ridiculous coincidence. That was all—coincidence. Simultaneity was not cause-and-effect. Even the dimmest physics undergraduate knew that.
    In his mind, Henry heard Richard Feynman say about string theory, “I don’t like that they’re not calculating anything. I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation. . . . The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Henry hadn’t liked Feynman, whom he’d met at conferences at Cal Tech. A buffoon, with his bongo drums and his practical jokes and his lock-picking. Undignified. But the brilliant buffoon had been right. Henry didn’t like string theory, either, and he didn’t like ideas that weren’t calculated, checked, and verified by experimental data. Besides, the idea that Henry had somehow killed Jim Peltier with his thoughts . . . preposterous.
    Mere thoughts could not send a bolt of energy through a distant man’s body. But the bolt itself wasn’t a “cooked-up” idea. It had happened. Henry had felt it.
    DiBella had said that Henry’s MRI looked completely normal.
    Henry lay awake much of Thursday night, which made the second night in a row, while Carrie slept the oblivious deep slumber of the young. In the morning, before she was awake, he dressed quietly, left the apartment with his walker, and made his way to the St. Sebastian’s Infirmary. He expected to find the Infirmary still crammed with people who’d vomited when he had yesterday afternoon. He was wrong.
    “Can I help you?” said a stout, middle-aged nurse carrying a breakfast tray. “Are you feeling ill?”
    “No, no,” Henry said hastily. “I’m here to visit someone. Evelyn Krenchnoted. She was here yesterday.”
    “Oh, Evelyn’s gone back. They’ve all gone back, the food poisoning was so mild. Our only patients here now are Bill Terry and Anna Chernov.” She said the latter name the way many of the staff did, as if she’d just been waiting for an excuse to speak it aloud. Usually this irritated Henry—what was ballet dancing compared to, say, physics?—but now he seized on it.
    “May I see Miss Chernov, then? Is she awake?”
    “This is her tray. Follow me.”
    The nurse led the way to the end of a short corridor. Yellow curtains, bedside table, monitors and IV poles; the room looked like every other hospital room Henry had ever seen, except for the flowers. Masses and masses of flowers, bouquets and live plants and one huge floor pot of brass holding what looked like an entire small tree. A man, almost lost amid all the flowers, sat in the room’s one chair.
    “Here’s breakfast, Miss Chernov,” said the nurse reverently. She fussed with setting the tray on the table, positioning it across the bed, removing the dish covers.
    “Thank you.” Anna Chernov gave her a gracious, practiced smile, and looked inquiringly at Henry. The other man, who had not risen at Henry’s entrance, glared at him.
    They made an odd pair. The dancer, who looked younger than whatever her actual age happened to be, was more beautiful than Henry had realized, with huge green eyes over perfect cheekbones. She wasn’t hooked to any of the machinery on the wall, but a cast on her left leg bulged beneath the yellow bedcover. The man had a head shaped like a garden trowel, aggressively bristly gray crew cut, and small suspicious eyes.