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won’t work here.”
    “I probably do,” my dad agreed. Then he did
something that really surprised me; he took out a picture of my
mom.
    “I don’t suppose…” And he let the question
hang there for a while before finishing. “I don’t suppose you’ve
seen this woman anytime recently, have you?”
    A.J. took the photo of Mom and squinted at it
under the moon.
    “I haven’t seen anyone like that lately,” he
said at last.
    “Lately?” Dad asked.
    “It’s been a long life,” A.J. replied. Dad
kept looking at him. “But I’ll keep both eyes open for her.”
    Dad handed A.J. a slip of paper. “This is
where we’ll be in California,” he said.
    A.J. put it in his pocket without looking at
it. “That’s where you’ll be,” he said.
“But when will you be there?”
    “Just as soon as we can.” And a minute later,
Dad was steering the truck through the Oklahoma night, while I
tried to stay awake in the seat next to him.
    There was a lot I didn’t understand about
what had happened, but there was one question I had to ask first.
“Why did you show him Mom’s picture?”
    “Because, honey…” Honey ? He hadn’t called me honey in years. Since I was a kid. Now he was waving
his hand at the windshield, indicating the night, the stars, and
the moon. “I think your mother is still alive. Somewhere out there.
Someplace.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I think the lab accident put her somewhere
else in time, Eli. Some when else.”
    My stomach felt a little knotted up, like
when you get bad news. But maybe this was good news. How come he
never came out and told me any of this before?
    “How?”
    “There’s a lot to explain. Can we talk about
it in the morning, son?” He never called me son either. What was with him? “It’s a long night, and
I have a lot of driving to do. And you still have to get some
sleep.”
    “That’s not fair.” I decided to stay up and
keep asking questions, but somewhere in Kansas, I let my guard down
and drifted off.
    When I woke up, the sun was shining — it was
almost scorching hot — and we were a thousand miles down the road,
ready to eat a late breakfast in Arriba, Colorado.
     
     
     
    Chapter Four
    Eli: North of Joe
DiMaggio
    June 19, 2019 C.E.
     
    Thirty hours after Colorado — I had pancakes
there, even though it was near lunchtime — and more of my dad’s
high-speed driving (hydro-cell motors aren’t usually loud, but he
could really make ours scream), we arrived at the Valley of the
Moon.
    Like with most of our arrivals, we got there
at night.
    The only unusual thing that happened in that
last part of the drive was that I finally got a message from Andy.
We were driving through Nevada, and I was surfing around on my
vidpad when I saw I had some new mail. I’d been expecting a package
— a bunch of new Barnstormer character animations that Andy had
made himself or gotten on his roamer, or maybe a clip of him
talking to the screen. Instead, I was surprised to see that it was
just a typed sentence:
    How you doing?
    It wasn’t even his voice. Just the printed
words.
    “This whole trip has felt like the end of a
game,” I said, watching the words pop up on the vidpad as I
composed a reply. “Like the way Barnstormers always have to flee
town.” It was on account of a low tolerance for monsters in most of
the places they played. I was feeling a little bit on the run
myself.
    “But overall, not bad,” I added to the
message.
    Looking at those short sentences made me feel
farther from Andy, and from home, than the actual miles did.
    And anyway, the big game I was getting sucked
into was really just starting. Beginning with our arrival at
Moonglow.
    But what do you call a game that gets way too
serious?
    On the way out, since we were going to live
near San Francisco, I read up on local baseball history. Turns out
Joe DiMaggio came from there and played for an old minor-league
team called the Seals, and of course Willie Mays played for the
Giants in