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their language: Thanks, but how do I turn it off?
    I’m not sure if that message was
from Eli or his father. I didn’t have time to find out; one of the
shell-protectors posted by the central authorities was making his
rounds, and I barely got away. Somebody has been getting
glimpses of me, though. In one of the Dumpsters, I found a news
tally, a paper one, printed on tree fiber — such an extravagant use
of a tree! — called the National Weekly Truth . The headline
read: DINO-MAN OF THE WOODS? There was a
crude rendering next to it that looked vaguely like me.
    The snout was much too long,
though, and the eyes too close together and dull.
    Still, it would seem that outlaws
are sometimes famous in spite of themselves. As the saying goes,
“All the eggs look the same, but some hatchlings make more noise.”
Not only was I scrambled, I was getting noisier.
    This time, instead of a quick stop,
I thought of climbing to the roof. If I could tap on the hothouse
window and get Eli the boy’s attention, I could actually talk to
him. We hadn’t spoken since Howe and his corps of shell-protectors
tried to corner us at Wolf House. That’s when Thea escaped in my
time-vessel and I fled into the woods.
    When I arrived at the lab, the
squabble-roars between Howe and Sandusky-sire had already erupted.
I pieced together that I had missed my friend Eli again: He’d gone
back through the Fifth Dimension to find his nest-mother, who
herself had become displaced in time due to an earlier lab
accident.
    “ You told me he agreed to let you
keep that hat under lock and key! That you’d talked him out of
using it by himself! I should have seized it! It’s a
national-security asset!” Howe’s face gets damp and purple like a
horned Saurian when he stays angry too long.
    “ It’s a boy’s baseball cap,”
Sandusky-sire says. “And you wanted me to keep testing his
reactions to the particle charge. Anyway, I thought he had agreed
to let me keep it locked up.” Eli’s dad isn’t squabble-roaring at
all now. “He’d become obsessed with the note his mother
sent.”
    “ WHY WON’T ANYONE SHOW ME THIS
NOTE!?” It was, apparently, a subject that caused Mr. Howe much
agitation, among the many subjects that prompted such a response in
him. A night-faring bird fluttered away, itself agitated by the
noise from Mr. Howe.
    “ He took it with him. It was
written on Fairmont Hotel letterhead,” Sandusky-sire adds. “It was
dated 1941. She’s been back there a long time.”
    “ That’s the year we entered World
War Two,” Howe says, looking a bit more scared than a moment ago.
“We can’t have your boy back there changing things
around.”
    “ Why not? Maybe so many families
won’t be blasted apart this time. The way I’ve lost
mine.”
    Howe doesn’t respond to that. Not
directly. “Why did Eli think he could even find her back
there?”
    Sandusky-sire doesn’t say anything
about the chrono-compass. I wonder if he perfected it. I wonder if
he discovered the quantum trace-prints of matter yet, as a way of
pinpointing times, beings, and places.
    “ I was wrong to have been so lax.”
Howe remains unquiet. “You should have told me about the note
immediately. I shouldn’t have to hear these things from agents. I’m
having you watched twenty-four hours a day now, Sands. We needed
that boy for new missions. World War Two is already fought and done
with.”
    “ Is that why you came here tonight?
To send my son on an errand of your own?”
    “ No. No.” Howe becomes a little
distracted, like he’d lost something in his pockets. “I came here
because I really am having you watched, but not just with
guards. We’ve been planning this for a while anyway — I didn’t
realize how necessary it had become.”
    “ More surveillance?” Sandusky-sire
sounds like he doesn’t much care. “You already know I don’t say
anything important into any of my phones or Comnet
devices.”
    “ Yes, well, speaking of Comnet,
we’ve