"Deveraux," said the chief, a grizzled veteran of Iwo Jima and the Gaspay Salient, puffing on his cigar, adjusting the toga all staff wore at headquarters in Second Century A.D. Tiers. "Nice work with the Christmas Rebellion. Your promotion and decoration were temporarily held up. Seems you violated a couple of regulations."

He held up his hand in response to Roger Deveraux's expletive. "Spare me, Captain. I was raised on a horse farm in Kentucky. And I've seen lots of it. Mostly since leaving home. I've learned that the best answer to bureaucrats is action.

"The Commander-in-Chief was more than an aberration," he continued. "Rot has set in all along that Branch of Time. We've traced it to a particular world and a particular man. Lubenbacher. Styles himself as the Prophet. Mind control is his weapon. He's systematized and electronically coded it. Brain washing, Pavlovian conditioning, are rudimentary compared to what he's developed."

He pushed a box of cigars over to Deveraux who selected one. "I'm violating all kind of regulations. Agents have died getting this information. But if you're willing, I'll show you all we know and tell you what we intend."

Shortly afterwards, a night coach pulled by four matched bays rattled out of Varennes one spring night in 1787. A figure in a tricorn and cloak sat in one corner, eyes closed. The other passengers slept as he opened his eyes and whispered:

Passengers will please refrain
From waking as I catch a train.

Time shifted, the rhythm of sixteen shod hooves was replaced by the clacking of wheels. At Calais in 1902, a figure in an Inverness cape transferred to a Channel ferry. On the water, Roger Deveraux threw off the cape as he hooked onto a Pan Am Clipper and landed in a peaceful and prosperous Toronto in 1963. On Bloor Street in that city, an elderly gentleman with a military mustache sat behind a desk as Deveraux flashed a spiral medallion.

In 2016, a jetney powered by an atomic generator glided above the rail on a molecular cushion. It slowed to a stop at an elevated station. Posters, bright and cheerful, displayed the face of the Prophet and his words. TO ALL MY CHILDREN, TRUE CARE MUST BE GIVEN.

Seating on the jetney was arranged by hierarchy. Crowded in the rear, sitting if they could find seats, were Children of all ages in skimpy tunics. In the middle sat the Functionaries, clerks and technicians in gray uniforms, enlisted rank legionaries in black. All stared straight ahead not making eye contact with their betters. At the front, in white robes, the Votaries of Lubenbacher sat as near as they ever came to their ease. Each passenger had headphones firmly in place. All kept their eyes lowered before the Colonel of Wardens.

Right behind the driver sat Roger Deveraux, straight and tall in uniform. He wore headphones like all the others. Soothing music was interspersed on the hour and the half hour with the day's lesson. "Each mind is a world to be tamed as this world has been tamed," the Prophet began. A high school class got on the jetney, boys and girls in knee length tunics, tonsured so that the serial numbers tattooed on their skulls could be read. At each stop, Deveraux felt the glancing probe of a mind scanner searching for disruptive mental patterns.

From "The Prophet and the Last" by Daniel Ignace, Amazing Science Fiction, December 1961.

Flying west on Friday morning, Robert Logue, mildly hung over, reads the story. He has one scotch at lunch and whispers "Through the long dark into dawning" to himself. But the American Airlines flight out of New York remains a turbojet all the way to Kansas City. As the landing light goes on, he sticks the old magazine inside the plastic bag in which he bought it.

Heading north on Route 435, the rental Saturn does not transmute into a Conestoga wagon. The State University at Aline has a certain period charm. It was founded before Kennedy died and the Beatles sang and modern history began. But Robert realizes that he is older than the campus.

Styles are a few years behind New York. Aside from the girls' hair and the boys' jewelry, their attire is unisex shorts and sweatshirts. Robert spots no one in face paint. He parks the car and makes his way to a library bearing the name of a vaguely remembered Senator. An elevator takes him to Science Reference on the third floor.

At the center of the room is a circular desk lined with computer screens. Inside it, librarians are like a besieged garrison. Phones ring, printers hum. Around the desk are carrels with terminals. All these are busy. Students wait their turns to use them. In the middle distance are shelves of unbound journals. Farther away, receding into twilight, are tall, dusty stacks of books.

Robert's eyes follow the librarian who is clearly in charge. She appears to be in her late thirties. Her hair is lightly blond and tightly coiffed. She is tall and uses that well. In this place, a blouse, skirt, and high heels look like formal attire. Her voice is clear as a clarinet, "How serious a paper is this?" she asks a tiny, flustered girl. "Knowing that can save us both time."

At a moment when nobody is near the woman, Robert steps forward and asks, "What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs at evening?"

Without looking up from a screen, the librarian answers in an undertone, "Wrong question, Logue. You're far from being the Sphinx. And I'm not Oedipus. I'm Tiresias. As you'd know if you'd gotten an education instead of boasting on television about not having one."

"I just did that to make you mad, Ms. White."

"The truffle hound of homicide," Sandra White murmurs. A clerk approaches with something for her to sign. Several nursing students appear. "I'll be with you in a few minutes," she tells Robert. "You can spend the time looking up your press notices."

"Thanks, but I already have all the clippings at home."

Half an hour later they sit in a comfortable coffeehouse in the mildly shabby neighborhood that adjoins any large campus. They drink black coffee fortified with brandy from Robert's flask. "You're looking terrific, Sandra. It's been like, what? Twenty-four years since I saw you last?"

"Time is good to me. You look … prosperous."

"How long can you be away?"

"As long as this takes. I'm Head of Reference. I was at that desk because someone had jury duty and someone else had a dental emergency. I have a simulacrum that normally would deal with dull routine. But I knew, of course, that events would lead you to appear today without calling ahead. trying to catch me unaware."

"Like Tiresias, you know the future."

"As does anyone who doesn't allow hopes and fears to muddle their judgment."

"In that case why did you and the Sisterhood allow Olney and Gonzalez to get butchered?"

She grimaces at his simplicity. "I like my day job well enough, Logue. Answering questions. But answers can be dangerous things. Zeus and his wife Hera once argued about whether man or woman got the greater pleasure out of sex. Each claimed the other did. To resolve the dispute, they asked the one who had been both genders. The answer they received was, 'Women by the ratio of nine to one.' Hera became enraged and blinded Tiresias. Only then did Zeus bestow second sight, that most perilous of gifts."

She sips and sips again before continuing. "So far, I still have my eyes. But for a change, I'll ask the question, not answer it. How much do you remember, Robert?"

"More than I did just a couple of months ago. On the plane, I read a Time Ranger story I haven't seen since it came out. It's one where the Rangers have to clear up this branch of Time. It's polluted, full of bad stuff that has to be kept away from the Main Stream."

Sandra White leans forward expectantly, gestures for him to continue.

I remembered the first time I read that story. I was on a bus headed south through Connecticut. My family lived on Long Island, New York, and I was coming home from school in Boston for Christmas vacation. Sizing up my fellow passengers, I imagined a needle gun slung from my belt and a Ranger insignia on my jacket.

Kind of old for that kind of fantasy, maybe, but let's say I was a little immature. We pulled into the Port Authority Terminal. New York was eight million stories and at least that many deaths. And I could feel every death on my nerve ends. That was a little talent I had. One that had me traumatized.

But the city was also the place where I could get a drink with the draft card I'd been issued the week before. It took me a couple of hours to make my way the ten blocks from the Port Authority to Penn Station.

When I got there, I swaggered in the Seventh Avenue entrance and walked down the Arcade, trying to smoke a cigarette, looking for another bar sleazy enough to serve a kid who was eighteen going on twelve. I'd already found one or two.

All of a sudden, an arm looped around my left arm. Another had my right. Two uniformed cops, Irish and Italian, walked me into a doorway. The Italian took the duffel bag and opened it. The Irish cop pulled the butt out of my mouth and threw it away. "Don't you want to grow up big and strong? What's your name? Where are you going?"

The two of them thought, or pretended to think, that I was running away from home. The Irish cop scared me by saying, "Take this one to the youth center? See who claims him?"

But the Italian, big, intense, stared right in my eyes and nodded. "Ah, he's okay. Look at this." He held up the magazine. "You're looking for Roger Deveraux? He's not here. We're just simple enlisted men in the Time Wars. Let's take a walk, Bobby."

So we crossed the Main Waiting Room lit by lamps and winter light. The Irish cop carried my bag. And the Italian had his hand on my shoulder like I was, maybe, a cousin met by chance. "Oh yeah, the Stream flows all around here," he said.

Suddenly an emotionally damaged kid's interior life and the outside world had merged. Bedazzled, I walked downstairs between them. On the Long Island Railroad platform, before the train came, LaRocca hooked his fingers in my belt and swung me aside, the eternal dance of punk and cop.

He said, "I've got ways of telling which kids have potential. And you are one. What do you see, Bobby?"

So I told him the kind of stuff that ran through my brain day and night. "Back when the building got put up, a workman got crushed right about where we're standing. He slipped and a railroad car full of rocks ran him down. There's a graveyard over there." I gestured towards Eighth Avenue. "It's filled up with old people, children. Everybody. They died in a kind of plague back in colonial times."

LaRocca seemed fascinated. He handed me a slip of paper with a telephone number on it and said, "I want you to call the next time you pass through town."

I was hooked. By the time Spring semester ended, I'd seen LaRocca half a dozen times, told him stuff I never thought I'd tell anyone. Burke was usually around. I'd met Angie and her boyfriend Teddy Benez and a big kid named Eddie Brown. There were hints of secrets. Scary ones. But then again, just about everything scared me.

By the end of May, my college career was over. Somehow, school hadn't caught my attention. Not the way death did. Walking through the Penn Station Arcade, I noticed that half the stores were vacant. The station was due to be torn down. That's where LaRocca met me. Today was going to be my initiation.

LaRocca was off duty, wearing a sports jacket and a shirt open at the neck, but still looking like a cop. With him was a preppy in a school blazer and horn rims.

"Alan Goodman's going to Columbia in the fall. He's coming with us." Alan nodded, remote. As we crossed the Main Waiting Room, Angie and Ed joined us. We went into the Concourse where the roof was all steel and glass and trains ran under the floor.

Downstairs, the Broadway Limited to Chicago was boarding passengers. We were on the platform as the train, once legendary, now tired and bedraggled, began to roll. We walked alongside it. Everyone but me had done this before. An arm went around my shoulder, a hand touched my back. Someone hummed Casey Jones very softly. The train picked up speed and it felt like I was standing on a conveyer belt.

In the Time Ranger stories there were Portals, places where traffic came and went. The constant movement flattened molecules and created a fusion that pulled past and future in all their variations into a vast Stream. Or something like that.

With my next step, I stumbled on broken concrete. Above me, the former Concourse was roofless. A cold winter sun shone down on rubble and ruin. "A few years Upstream. And in a much different world," LaRocca whispered. I was aware that something massively awful had happened. Lots of violent deaths. LaRocca went up the wrecked stairs and we followed him. It wasn't just Penn Station. Ruin stretched in all directions. Angie took out a camera and the rest of us posed. Right then everything I had consumed that day decided to come up and see the world.

They laughed because I was shivering and green. After a few minutes they brought me back Downstream. I promised LaRocca I'd be back, but I knew I was too scared to see him again. It felt like I'd lost my best chance of finding a group I could be part of.

Stunned by what I had just seen, I rode the Long Island Railroad. At my stop, my parents waited downstairs with the car, worry and anger on their faces. That summer, I was in bad shape. I remember lying awake at night, feeling a lonely suicide in a farmhouse that had once stood in the development where we lived, a couple dead a few years before in a traffic accident. That fall, I didn't go back to school. I lost the ability first to leave the house, then to leave my room.

In that simple, stupid place and time, kids who didn't function properly were sent to the hospital for rewiring. Lots of awful things happened to me there, among them shock treatment. My brain got wiped clean. Memories returned only if something evoked them. Lots of stuff I was content to let slide. Especially certain events that occurred when a visitor got me out on a day pass.

My special talent remained. It was terrifying, but it was all I had when I left the hospital. By then, I'd begun to learn how to tame it. Slowly, I made a career discovering and solving old murders.

About twenty years ago, I was in Cleveland, working on the case I called The Noonday Witch when a woman called Sandra White asked to speak to me. Sandra was attractive and as haunting as déjà vu. She knew flattering amounts about my career. We had dinner and I had plenty to drink.

Everything was going fine. Except that out of nowhere flashed a memory so old and hidden that it could have been a dream. In it, I was young and I stood under a harsh light in a stuffy room. Two other kids were with me. We had all been stripped and were being interrogated. I realized the other two were Alan Goodman and Ed Brown and that we were Upstream.

Sandra asked me what was wrong and I said it was nothing. I remember feeling again that I had seen her before. We went up to my room. I opened the door and remembered Alan and Ed leading me back and forth through what I knew was the ruins of New York. I was scared and they were too. It was dark and we were in tunics and rubber sandals. Like Lubenbacher's Children wore in the story I read today. The ground held plenty of deaths but we were looking for very specific ones.

This memory shook me. But, when Sandra asked, I said everything was fine. Then we were in bed and I put it aside. An hour or so later, I got up to use the bathroom. I looked in the mirror and saw night in those Upstream ruins. Near a mound of rubble topped by the statue of a broken eagle, I felt LaRocca, Burke, Teddy Benez, and a girl I didn't know.

A few years before, they had been ambushed on that spot. Burke got off a shot before he was gunned down. The others surrendered. Their eyes were put out and they were executed on the spot. They screamed as they died. When I choked out a description of this, Ed Brown and Alan Goodman looked at each other and each raised a triumphant fist.

That night in the hotel room in Cleveland, I looked in the mirror and froze. The woman in the bed behind me, had caught my eye and made that gesture. At that moment, I realized that Sandra White and Alan Goodman were the same person.

Over the years I'd been acquainted with a few surgical sex changes. What I was seeing was something else. Alan had definitely been a boy. You were a woman.

You told me to sit down and I did. You explained a few things and told me what I was going to do. I followed your instructions, including making every effort to forget what had happened when it was over.

Recent events with Olney and Gonzalez have made that impossible. Yesterday, I spoke to our old friend Angie. She says Gonzalez knew you. I'd like to ask you about that. I need your help.

It's dusk outside. Robert and Sandra's cups have been refilled for what will be the last time. A dinner crowd drifts in.

"Mortal man, mortal man," she shakes her head, refuses the brandy and almost smiles. "This is the third time you have crossed my path. For many of your sex, one encounter is more than is allowed.

"With Maria Czerny, you even surprised us. And lived. You appeared on TV claiming to have found a decades-old missing-child pattern in an immigrant Czech community outside Cleveland. A series of little girls had all disappeared without a trace. At midday. You identified a certain Maria Czerny as the murderess, described how years before she had kidnapped children in broad daylight and eaten their hearts.

"Old Bohemians believed in a witch that stole children at noon. Their fears had made them reluctant to cooperate too closely with the authorities. You called Czerny 'The Noonday Witch.' Quite catchy.

"For the Sisterhood, witch hunts are a nightmare comparable to the Holocaust for Jews, lynchings for African-Americans. We were confronted by two facts. Maria Czerny was still alive, though senile and in a mental hospital. And in Europe, before the Great War, she had been one of us. We had severed our ties, then lost track of her.

"Of course, I recognized you and knew how you had actually sniffed out the crimes. Twenty years before, I'd passed up the chance to dispose of you. In a sense, you were my responsibility.

"So I visited Cleveland and used my powers of persuasion. It was too late to do anything about the name you had given the case. But I convinced you to make every effort to show that, in fact, so-called witches were harmless. Benevolent even. And that, in any case, no proof existed that Maria Czerny ever was one."

"And when you were finished with the evidence, that was true," Robert says. "Powers of persuasion? Try terror. You snapped your fingers and fifty miles away, Ms. Czerny died in her bed. Stacks of letters turned to ash inside locked safes. Then there was the way you reminded me of our prior meeting."

"I wanted you to see both my manifestations. Even when I was Alan, you aroused my sentimental side, Robert. And I find it amusing when you are afraid. Like now."

Robert says, "Tiresias, in one legend, sees two sacred snakes coupling and breaks them up with his staff. As punishment, the gods turn him into woman."

"As always, the patriarchs have it criminally wrong. Tiresias was righting an error along the Winding Stream you call Time. Womanhood was the reward, not the punishment. In my birthplace, the Sisterhood is the one thing worth aspiring to. An assignment arose for which only a boy would do. I was offered a rare chance, full of danger. I took it and triumphed.

"As Alan Goodman, I walked through Penn Station until I was 'discovered.' LaRocca had certain abilities. He found you but didn't know how to use you. The Sisters did. Eventually, I came, I won't say to like, but to feel sorry for LaRocca and Burke and even Benez."

"But not Sally Dere? Because she was a witch gone bad?"

"Too wise is too soon gone, Robert."

"Ignorance isn't a life-saver, either. Look at Olney and Gonzalez. Bright kids with very little idea of what they were getting into. You must have known what was going to happen. Why didn't you stop it?"

Sandra is impatient. "Mortal man, even to question us is unwise! Two deaths are nothing along the Winding Stream. It was their fate and it served a purpose. You will shortly learn more than you will want to about the politics of Time."

She unzips a soft leather case. "As before, Robert, you arouse my protective side. It has made me generous." She pushes Xeroxed pages toward him. "Here's something you will want to read before you arrive at your next interview."

Sandra rises before Robert can. She leans over, kisses him hard on the cheek and says in a low, clear voice, "This will remind you, when you 'solve' the case, not to speak in any way of the Sisters."