Mullens and Jackson dragged him over to the passenger side and stuffed him in, even before the powered door was fully open, like two toddlers trying to stuff a quilt into a shoebox. That would have really hurt if he was not already so numb from the beating, and the field goal Tina had kicked with his head.

He had managed to squirm around so that he could look out the window to determine what was happening. There she was standing over Mullens and Jackson as they squatted like great dogs, panting, with their tongues lolling out of their mouths. Tina, exotically resplendent in her pink Love Police bikini & hat, bent and kissed each man on the lips. As she walked away, they rose in a seeming state of confusion. Tina slid into her seat through the open door and it shut of its own accord.

By now the two cops were looking at Pozer through the windshield with anger and confusion in their eyes. Just as they began to reach for their guns, Tina spoke in a low sultry whisper, “Make love, not war pretty boys.”

She then turned to Pozer with a wicked smile on her heart-shaped lips, “Do you want to join them Posie-boo?”

He then turned his gaze back on the two cops—the tall muscular black man and the short stocky white man—and saw that they were kissing with intense passion, caught up in a gyrating embrace, Jackson grabbing ass and Mullens holding the taller man’s face between his hands, “Oh God! That stuff is wrong Tina!”

She tickled his neck with his forefinger and smacked her lips, “That could be you out there Posie-boo.”

“No Tina, no!”

Her eyes lit up and she pursed her lips, “How beautiful am I Posie-boo?”

“Very, very beautiful!”

She then held his chin between her thumb and forefinger and looked deeply into his eyes with her own black almond eyes. Her voice was a hiss, as she winked toward the gay action on the asphalt turn around, “How would you like to be in the middle of that. I see you as the double-stuffing in a man-love cookie, Posie-boo.”

“No!”

She then began to caress his bald head, “Does that mean my sexy Posie-boo is going to be obedient, and listen to what Tina say?”

“Absolutely!”

She then kissed him on the forehead like she had when she took him to the movies and the salon, when he was a teenager, after she had become his guardian with Mom’s passing. “You hets are so easy to handle. But those two, they have issues.”

She looked leadingly at the two necking, groping cops. She then smiled and whispered with a long husky hiss, “Oh just get to it boys!”

The cops began to tear each other’s clothing and equipment off and he had to avert his eyes as he gasped, “Please Tina, let’s get out of here.”

She now looked ahead, suddenly not beautiful, but somewhat metallic and serpent-like, and hissed, “Men! Give them a piece of fruit and they take over the whole garden.”

She started the car and zoomed off in reverse, not even looking behind them, or in the mirror, but keeping her eyes on something distant. They soon spun out onto the secondary street and were off; hitting ninety just before she ran a red light, a red light where a county sheriff sat obliviously in his cruiser, making no move to give chase. He regarded her and noticed an inhuman quality about her driving intensity, giving himself a moment to meditate on the condor, a moment to wash the gathering worry from his mind.

He woke in a clear-minded haze, having set down on a mountaintop in his condor nap. The car was parked at a basketball court on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Tina was standing before the car looking out over the lapping water, regarding a distant sail and an even more distant island. He stepped out beneath the door that was already raised, and then stepped to her side.

She looked at him and then smiled, speaking to herself in some strange language—the language that The Man in the Gray Suit had spoken sometimes. Her breasts began to deflate, and the bikini with it, as did her butt and the inadequate attire. She sighed, “I love big breasts, but not on me. I’m so glad I’m not an org or some fixed augment.”

She then whistled and her bikini and Love Police belly patch all retreated into one pink belly button stud.

Tina then looked farther out into the distance, “I’d love to Posie. But then I’d have to kill you. Do you want me to kill you Posie?”

“No Tina.”

“Good boy.”

She then spoke a word in that language again and the belly button ring turned black and began to spread over her entire body, forming a neck-to-ankle bodysuit. She kicked her heels into the bay, and the suit expanded to sheathe her feet. She then turned to Pozer and spoke coldly, “I am your wrangler. You are one of my time-jumpers. I’ve kept you on the shelf as long as possible. Luckily you cracked your imbedding parameters just as one of my other units was malfunctioning. You’re my second string chronologist. Welcome to the game.”

“I don’t under—”

A bright light blasted the back of his head and the place above the forehead hurt, hurt bad! Images of The Man in the Gray Suit reminding him that he was special and would be called upon to do great things flooded into his mind. These were followed by images of Tina sitting with him watching movies, and even tattooing the cord around his wrist.

Tina then reached beneath her flowing black hair and produced a platinum hoop in her left hand. She worked a small dial on the hoop. The hoop hummed and the tattooed cord on his wrist tugged. He felt a warm tingling sensation in his wrist, that spread around his body. He wanted to see if it lit up, but it was still cuffed behind his back.

“What—”

She cut him off cruelly, “You take orders, accomplish directives, deliver reports, and await fresh orders. Understand?”

Tina tossed the hoop in the air, and, rather than fall, it hovered, with a dull ‘whomp, whomp, whompeded’ sound.

“God yes, your God, no. Jump through your arms.”

He jumped through his hands and stood now with his cuffs before him. Tina, his exact height without her heavy metal ho heels, grabbed the bracelets behind his thumps, each between a forefinger and thumb, and broke them apart as if they were made of fresh play dough. She then kissed him lightly on the lips and hissed, “Don’t let me hold anything you don’t want to keep.”

She then stepped back and tossed the cuffs, stepped around the hoop, and blew a kiss into it, which caused it to regulate its position directly between them.

Her voice was now clinical, “Your favorite actor?”

“Yule Brenner.”

“Why?”

"The Man in The Gray Suit brought me the movies, The Magnificent Seven, Catlow, West World, The King and I—I think that was a taped play. You and I watched them together.”

“Why Posie?”

“I don’ know.”

“Boxing has not exactly done your brain good. Posie Lucas Senski, you are his replacement. The lead time-jumper on this recovery project is a clone of the ancient actor Yule Brenner.”

“Ancient. He died like twenty years ago from smoking. I saw his video.”

She eyed him coldly and whispered, “You were generated in 2333, a mid-range time-jumper. Your augmentations are accessible through your condor construct.”

“What?”

He folded in half around her foot and was launched onto the hood of the pink Italian masterpiece. Before he could raise his head, or even suck in the air that had been driven from his lungs, she was there, hissing into his ear, “His name is Jay Bracken. We launched him deep with a load of experimental augmentations. He’s gone native, thinks he’s one of them. Until you get a handle on your augmentations avoid him. If you can’t avoid him take advantage of his retardation nexus—we implanted a stupidity safeguard. Do not deal with him on an instinctual level.”

She then grabbed him under the armpit and hurled him at the hovering hoop, which he grabbed reflexively in his left hand, the hand that had the glowing cord tattoo around the wrist. She walked up to him with her hands on her hips and said matter-of-factly, “Just now though, you need a training jump. Do you see the eight-digit dial with the blued number?”

He looked at the weightless hoop and saw four dials, three platinum, and one blued. One of the platinum dials was set to 10,800. The other two were blank, as was the blued one.

“Yes.”

“Grip the hoop over the dated dial and match the master dial. The blank plates mark the A.D. B.C. Median. You are going B.C. I require a male and female person of breeding age. The Younger Dryas Event is about to wipe the Clovis Culture out. The hoop jumps three. Do not return to this location. Somewhere along the Eastern Continental Divide will do.”

“You said I was mid-range. Cavemen sounds pretty deep to me.”

She shrugged her shoulders like a little girl, for once looking momentarily innocent. Her voice softened, “If I could have traded you in for the next generation I would. But I’m marooned here on the Island of Unwanted Toys. I’ll just have to make do with you Posie-boo.”

“Now Pozer!”

He swallowed hard and set the dial, one painstaking digit at a time, not even wanting to consider what horrible thing might happen if he set the wrong date—then he was hit by a lightning bolt.