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''Three Days to Never'' is a 2006 fantasy novel by Tim Powers. As with most of Powers' novels, it proposes a secret history in which real events have supernatural causes and prominent historical figures have been involved in supernatural or occult activities. The novel was shortlisted for the Locus Fantasy Award in 2007〔(【引用サイトリンク】 2007 Award Winners & Nominees )〕 as well as the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature in the same year. == Plot == The action mostly takes place in Southern California, in a few days during August of 1987. Frank Marrity (a widower) and his loving twelve-year-old daughter, Daphne, are drawn into a dangerous occult world when his grandmother (affectionately called "Grammar") dies in bizarre circumstances. Soon, Frank and Daphne are pursued by agents who know much more about their lives than they do — for example, that Grammar is Lieserl Maric, the daughter of Albert Einstein, and that she was friends with Charlie Chaplin — and that all three of them had discovered secrets to time travel and had found how to change prior events, perhaps to please themselves. Frank and Daphne, who wish to live their normal lives (he teaches English at University of Redlands, she is also fond of English literature), find their lives invaded by secret agents and an old man who introduces himself to Frank as his missing father. In reality, he is an older Frank, from the year 2006, who has found himself in a miserable alcoholic life, but remembers an earlier time-line in which he was happy. Because Daphne died in that time-line, old Frank thinks that if she dies now, he will return to 2006's happy life. Lieserl "Grammar" Marrity, with the help of her father Einstein and her friend Chaplin, had created a time machine (a "''maschinchen''"), which she keeps in a small outbuilding called the Kaleidoscope Shed. The machine's components are a swastika of gold filaments; a (fictional) cement slab with Chaplin's handprints, footprints and signature, dated 1928, from the forecourt of the Grauman's Chinese Theatre; a videotape of ''A Woman of the Sea'', a lost film Chaplin made in 1926; and a pack of letters from Einstein to Grammar. The time machine, as described, works mystically as well as scientifically. This sort of synthesis of modes of speculative fiction (and of MacGuffins) is typical of Powers's combined-science-fiction-and-fantasy novels. The Chaplin film has been recorded over a commercial VHS tape of ''Pee-wee's Big Adventure''; when Daphne watches it, she reacts with such horror and fear that she strikes out pyrokinetically and burns both the tape and her teddy bear in her bedroom upstairs. This psychic action attracts the attention of two groups of foreign agents who are searching for the time machine. The apparently sympathetic agents are of the Mossad, one member of whom wishes to travel back in time to change certain events during the Six-Day War, which left him crippled, whereas an opposing group, called the Vespers, wants to murder Frank Marrity for reasons he cannot understand. Old Frank warns young Frank and Daphne not to eat in an Italian restaurant, but they disregard this and go to lunch at Alfredo's. Daphne chokes on a bite of food and Frank performs an emergency tracheotomy, saving her life. When she is hospitalized, they are visited by Oren Lepidopt, a Mossad katsa, who pretends to be Eugene Jackson of the National Security Agency. While there, he sees a ''dybbuk'' appear on the hospital room television and attempt to possess Daphne, but Lepidopt rescues them. Believing his statements, Frank and Daphne, by default, join the Mossad team. The Vespers attempt to kidnap the Marritys by co-opting Frank's brother-in-law, Bennett, to deliver them for $50,000. Bennett leads them to Grammar's house, but then changes his mind and saves Frank and Daphne from assassination. Bennett brings Frank, Daphne, and his wife Moira (Frank's sister) to a house in Hollywood Hills. Frank contacts Lepidopt and tells him how to find the ''maschinchen'' in Grammar's Kaleidoscope Shed. By a matter of minutes, Lepidopt's team fetches the machine before the Vespers and old Frank can get to it. In Hollywood Hills, the Vespers group successfully kidnaps Daphne, at which point one of them, Charlotte Sinclair, a blind psychic, switches sides and joins Frank to save Daphne. Having lost her eyesight in an accident at the age of 19, she wants the time travel machine in order to cancel her present time-line and start over, avoiding both the accident and her conflicted present life. She and Frank are romantically attracted to each other. The Vespers bring Daphne to their hideout in Palm Springs. The Mossad team, with young Frank and Charlotte, bring the time machine components to the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino, California in order to use it as an aid for a séance, each of them hoping to accomplish their various goals. They experience a sort of hallucination of Powers's fanciful history of what "really" happened to Einstein, Chaplin and Lieserl during the 1920s and 1930s, including a psychic/time travel explanation of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. Daphne, captured and tied up by the Vespers, uses her mental powers to set their headquarters on fire. They tranquilize her and flee, but Frank's telepathic link has alerted him to what she did. The Mossad agents imprison Frank and Charlotte in the back of their van and head for Palm Springs, where Lepidopt is intended to time-travel to the Six-Day War; both teams, using different magical abilities, gradually converge upon each other. Lepidopt, with his hands on the Chaplin concrete slab, hesitates, and the Vespers surround the Mossad van. The novel climaxes with a shootout at the El Mirador Medical Plaza in Palm Springs, in which several major characters are shot and killed. Lepidopt finally gets up the nerve to "jump" but travels back only two minutes in time; still, this is enough for him to change the time-line and to save Frank, Daphne and Charlotte, though he himself dies. The details are wrapped up in the Epilogue, when the three attend Grammar's funeral. Bennett Bradley shares the $50,000 with the Marritys. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Three Days to Never」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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