supposed to pound in the gold spike slipped and fell in the mud.) I've seen the Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake. I was at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. (How far we have come since then. . . .) I saw the burning of Atlanta. And I've seen the original uncut versions of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance and Merian C. Cooper's King Kong and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was there the day the Liberty Bell cracked. And I saw the fall of the Alamo. I witnessed the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack. I attended a band concert conducted by John Philip Sousa. I heard Lincoln deliver his Gettysburg Address. I recorded it on tape. I've seen Paul Revere's midnight ride and the Boston Tea Party. I've met George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And I watched Columbus come ashore. I saw Ben Franklin flying a kite on a rainy day. I was there when Bell tested his first telephone. "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." I witnessed Galileo's experiment when he dropped two lead balls of different weights from the tower of Pisa. I have seen performances of plays by William Shakespeare. At the Globe Theater in London. I watched Leonardo da Vinci as he painted La Jac- onde, the Mona Lisa. (I will not tell you why she smiles.) And I watched as his rival, Michelangelo, painted the Sistine Chapel. I've heard Strauss waltzes, conducted by Strauss himself. I saw the disastrous premiere of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring. And Ravel's Bolero too. I've heard Beethoven's symphonies as conducted by Beethoven himself. And Mozart. And Bach. (I've seen the Beatles too.) And the beheading of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More. I've seen the signing of the Magna Carta. I have visited Imperial Rome. Nero and Tiberius and Julius Caesar himself. Cleopatra was ugly. And ancient Greece. The sacking of Troy was more than a myth. I have witnessed performances of plays by Sopho- cles and watched as Plato taught Aristotle and Aristotle taught Alexander. I saw Socrates drink the cup of hemlock. I have witnessed the crucifixion of one Jesus of Nazareth. He looked so sad. And more. I have seen dinosaurs. I have seen the thunder lizards walk the Earth. The Brontosaurus, the Stegosaurus, and Triceratops and the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the most fearsome monster ever to stalk the world. I have seen the eruption of Vesuvius and the death of Pompeii. I have seen the explosion of Krakatoa. I watched an asteroid plunge from the sky and shatter a giant crater in what would someday be Arizona. I've witnessed the death of Hiroshima by atomic fire. I've timeskimmed from the far distant past and watched as the Colorado River carved out the Grand Canyon a living, twisting snake of water cutting away the rock. And more. I've been to the year 2001 and beyond. I've been to the moon. I've walked its surface in a flimsy spacesuit and held its dust in my hands. I've seen the Earth rise above the Lunar Apennines. I've visited Tranquillity Base and flashing back to the past, I watched the Eagle land. I saw Neil Armstrong come ashore. And more. I've been to Mars. I've been to the great hotels that orbit Jupiter and I've seen the rings of Saturn. I've timeskimmed from the far past to the far future. I have seen Creation. I have seen how Entropy ravages everything. From Great Bang to Great Bang the existence of the Earth is less than a blink; the death of the sun by nova, almost unnoticeable. I've seen the future of mankind I like to think I understand, but I know that I don't. The future of the human race is as alien and incomprehensible to me as the year 1975 would be to a man of Charlemagne's era. But wondrous it is indeed, and filled with marvelous things. There is nothing that I cannot witness but there is little that I can participate in. I am limited. By my language, by my appearance, by my skin color, and my height. I am limited to life in a span of history maybe two hundred years in each direction. Beyond that, the languages are difficult: the meanings have altered, the pronunciations and usages too complex to decipher. With effort, perhaps, I can communicate; but the farther I go from 1975, the harder it is to make myself understood. And there are other differences. In the past, I am too tall. The farther back I travel, the shorter everybody becomes. And the farther forward I go, the taller. In the not-too-distant future, I am too short humanity's evolution is upward. And there are still other differences. Disturbing ones. There are places where my skin is the wrong color, or my eyes the wrong shape. And there is one time in the future when I am the wrong sex. There are places where people's faces are different. I can witness. I cannot participate. But witnessing is enough: I have seen more of history than any other human being. I have timeskimmed and timestopped and my journeys have been voyages of mystery and adventure. There is much that I don't understand. There are things that are incomprehensible to one who is not of the era and the culture. But still the proper study of humanity is humanity itself. History is not just old news. It's people. It's the ebb and flow of life. It's the sound of bells and horns, the stamp of boots in the street, the flapping of banners in the wind, the smell of smoke and flowers. It's bread and trains and newspapers. It's the acrid smell of the herd, and the press of the crowd. It's surprise and glory and fear. It's confusion, panic, and disaster and above all, history is triumphl It is the triumph of individuals creating, designing, building, changing, challenging never quitting. It is the continual victory of the intellect over the animal; the unquenchable vitality of life! Passion overwhelms despair and humanity goes on; sometimes seething, sometimes dirty, sometimes even unspeakably evil. But always despite the setbacks the direction is always upward. If I must taste the bitterness, it is worth it; because I have also shared the dreams. And the promise. I have seen its fulfillment. I know the truth and the destiny of the human race. It is a proud and lonely thing to be a man. * * * This part, I think, may be the hardest to record. It was inevitable, I suppose, that it happen, but it has caused me to do some serious thinking. About myself. About Dan. About Don. When Uncle Jim died, I thought my life would be changed, and I worried about the directions it might take. When I thought I had eliminated myself by a timebelt paradox, I realized how much I feared dying I realized how much I needed to be Dan to my Don and Don to my Dan. But this this makes me question the shape of my whole life. What am I? Who am I? What am I doing to myself? Have I made a wrong decision? Am I moving in a strange and terrible direction? I wish I knew. It started when? Yesterday evening? Time is funny when you don't live it linearly. When I get tired, I sleep, I flip forward or backward to the nearest nighttime and climb into bed. If I'm not tired, and itôs night, I flash to day and go to the beach. Or I jump to winter and go skiing. I stay as long as I want, or as short as I want. I stay for weeks or only a few minutes. I'm not a slave to the clock nor even to the seasons. What I mean is, I'm no longer living in a straight line. I bounce back and forth through the days like a temporal Ping-Pong ball. I don't even know how old I am anymore. I think I've passed my twentieth birthday, but I'm not sure. It's strange. . . . Time used to be a flowing river. I sailed down it and watched the shores sweep past: here, a warm summer evening, ice tinkling in lemonade glasses; there, a cool fall morning, dead leaves crunching underfoot and my breath in frosty puffs. Time was a slowly shifting panorama along the river bank. I was a leaf in the water. I was carried helplessly along, a victim of the current. Now I'm out of the river and standing on the bank. I am the motion and time is the observer. No longer a victim, I am the cause. All of time is laid out before me like a table, no longer a moving entity, but a vast and mutable landscape. I can leap to any point on it at will. Would I like a nice summer day? Yes, there's a pleasant one. Am I in the mood for a fall morning? Ah, that's nice. I don't have to wait for the river to carry me to a place where I might be able to find that moment I can go exactly to it. No moment can ever escape me. I've chased twi- light and captured dawn. I've conquered day and tamed the night. I can live as I choose because I am the master of time. I laugh to think of it. Time is an everlasting smorgasbord and I am the gourmet, picking here, choosing there, discarding this unnecessary bit of tripe and taking an extra piece of filet instead. But even this temporal mobility, no matter how unlimited it is, does not keep me from arbitrarily dividing things into "day" and "night." It must be a human thing to want to divide eternity into bite-sized chunks. It's easier to digest. So no matter how many jumps I make, anything that happened before my last sleep happened "yesterday," and everything since I woke up (and until I go to sleep again) is part of my "today." Some of my "todays" have spanned a thousand years. And "tomorrow" comes not with the dawn, but with my next awakening. I think I'm still on a twenty-four-hour life cycle, but I can't be sure. If I add a few extra hours to my "day" so as to enjoy the beach a little longer, I find my body tends to obey the local time, not mine. Perhaps humanity is unconsciously geared to the sun. At least, it seems that way. I don't get tired until after the world gets dark. (But like I said before, I'm not sure how old I am anymore. I've lost track.) Anyway. What I'm getting to is that this happened "yesterday." Don and I were listening to Beethoven. (The origi- nal Beethoven. I had gotten a recorder from 2050, a multichannel device capable of greater fidelity than anything known in 1975, and had taped all eleven of the master's symphonies. Yes. All eleven.) We had spent the day swimming skinny-dipping actually (it's strange to watch your own nude body from a distance), and now we were resting up before dinner. I have this mansion in the hills overlooking the San Fernando Valley; the view is spectacular. All fields and orchards. Even the bedroom has a picture window. It was dusk. The sun was just dipping behind the hills to the west. It was large and orange through the haze. Don had turned on the stereo and collapsed exhaustedly on the bed (a king-size water bed) without even toweling off. I didn't think anything of it. I was tired too. I made an attempt to dry myself off, then lay down beside him. (I'd gotten into a very bad habit with Don with Dan with myself. I'd discovered I didn't like being alone. Even when I sleep, I need the assurance of knowing there's somebody next to me. So more and more I found myself climbing into bed with one or more versions of myself. Sometimes there's a lot of horseplay and giggling. What did I want? Did I know? Is that why I did it? It extends to other things too. I won't swim alone. And several times we've showered together, ostensibly so we could scrub each other's back.) We were both stretched out naked on the water bed, just staring at the ceiling and listening to the Pastoral Symphony, that part near the beginning where it goes "pah-rump-pah-pah, rump-pah-pah . . ." (You know, where Disney's joyous trumpets announce a cascade of happy unicorns.) It was a good tiredness. Languorous. I was floating oh so pleasantly and the light show on the ceiling was swirling in red and pink and purple, shifting to blue and white. I'd been getting strange vibrations from Don all day. I wasn't sure why. (Or perhaps I hadn't wanted to admit ) He kept looking at me oddly. His glance kept meeting mine and he seemed to be smiling about some inner secret, but he wouldn't say what it was. He touched me a lot too. There had been a lot of clowning around in the pool, and once I thought he had been about to (I must have sensed it earlier, I must have; but I must have also been refusing to recognize it.) The symphony had reached that point where it sug- gests wild dancing, with several false stops, when a soft pop! in the air made me look up. Another Don. I had long since gotten used to various versions of myself ma- terializing and disappearing at random. But I sat up any- way. He looked troubled. And tired. "Which one of you is Dan?" he said. He looked at me. "You are, aren't you?" I nodded. Don, beside me, raised up on one elbow, sending ripples through the bed, but his gaze was veiled. Don II looked at him but stepped toward me. He was holding a sheaf of papers I recognized it as my, no, his diary; that is, his version of my diary. "I want to excise something," he said. "What?" "That is, I think I want to excise it. I'm not sure " He looked at me. He sat down on the bed, and for a moment I thought he was close to tears. He was trembling. "Look, I don't know if this this thing is good or bad or what. Maybe the terms are meaningless. I just don't know. I'm not sure if I should tell you to avoid this or whether I should let you make your own decision." He looked at both of us. "I can't talk about it. I mean, I can't talk about it to you because you wouldn't understand. Not yet. That's why I have to do it this way. Here's my diary. Read it, Dan. Then you decide for yourself if if that's what you want. I mean, it's the only way. You shouldn't stumble into this. You should either go into it with your eyes open and be aware of what you're doing, or you should reject it because you're aware of its possibility. Either way, it's going to change your our life." He was very upset, and that made me very concerned. I reached out and touched his arm. He flinched and pulled away. "Tell me what it is " I said. He shook his head adamantly. "Just read the diary." "I will," I promised. "But stay here until I do, so you can talk to me about it." "No, I can't. I tried that once and we ended up doing exactly what I came back to stop. I mean, I mustn't be here if you're to make your own choice." And he popped out of existence. Back to his own future my future perhaps? I won't know till I get there. I picked up the papers and paged through them. The early parts were identical to mine, even up to the point where Don and I were listening to Beethoven, stretched out on the water bed * * * What I'm trying to get at is that it started almost accidently. Don rubbed himself abstractedly and then stretched and rolled over on his stomach. He reached over and grabbed a pillow above my head. "You want one?" I nodded. He fluffed it and shoved it under my head, then grabbed another one for himself. He didn't roll away; instead, he sighed and let his arm fall across my chest. Absentmindedly I reached up and stroked his arm. In response, he gave me a casual hug. And then he was looking at me and our eyes were locked in another of those glances. He was mysterious. I was curious. His smile was bottomless. "What is it?" I asked. In answer, he slid himself upward and kissed me. Just a kiss. Quick, affectionate and loaded with desire. He pulled back and looked at me, still smiling, watching my reaction. I was confused. Because I had accepted it. I had let him kiss me as if it were a totally natural thing for him to do. I hadn't questioned it at all. His eyes were shining, and I studied them carefully. He lowered his face to mine again. . . . This time the kiss was longer. Much longer. And he didn't just kiss me. He slid his arms around me and pulled me to him. And I helped. We stretched out side by side, facing each other on the water bed. We put our arms around each other. And we kissed. I realized I liked it. I liked it. "Don," I managed to gasp, "We shouldn't " He studied me. "But you want to, don't you?" And I knew he was right. "Yes, but " His face was so open, his eyes were so deep. "But it's wrong " "Is it? Why is it?" "Because it's not right " "Is it any worse than masturbation? You masturbated yesterday, Danny, I know. Because I did too. You were alone in the house, but you're never alone from yourself." "I I but masturbation isn't I mean, that's " "Danny " He silenced me with a finger across my lips. "I want to give you pleasure, I want to give you me, You have your arms around me. You have your hands on me. You like what you feel, I know you do." And he was right. I did like it. I did enjoy it. He was so sure of himself. "Just relax, Danny," he whispered. "Just relax." He kissed me again and I kissed him back. * * * I've done it twice now. I've been seduced and I've seduced myself. Or maybe I should say, after Don seduced me, I seduced Danny. I'm filled with the joy of discovery. A sense of sharing. My relations with Don with Dan have taken on a new intensity. There is a lot more touching, a lot more laughter, a lot more . . . intimacy. I look forward to tonight and yet, I also hold myself back. The anticipation is delightful. Tonight, tonight . . . (I begin to understand emotion. Now I know why there are love songs. I touch the button on my belt. I fly to meet myself.) * * * So this is love. The giving. The taking. The abandonment of roles. The opening of the self. And the resultant sensuality of it all. The delight. The laughing joy. Were I to describe in clinical detail for some unknown reader those things that we have actually done, the intensity and pleasure would not come through. The joy would be filtered out. The written paragraphs would be grotesque. Perverse. Because love cannot be discussed objectively. It is a subjective thing. You must be immersed in it to understand it. The things that Danny and I (Don and I) have done, we've done them out of curiosity and delight and sharing. Not compulsion. Delight. And joyous sexuality. We are discovering our bodies. We are discovering each other. We are children with a magnificent new toy. Yes, sex is a toy for grownups. To describe the things we have been doing would deprive them of their special intimacy and magic. We do them because they feel good. We do them because in this way we make each other feel good. We do it out of love. Is this love? It must be. Why didn't I do this sooner? * * * And yet, I wonder what I am doing. A vague sense of wrongness pervades my life. I find myself looking over my shoulder a lot Who's watching me? Who's judging my days? Is it wrong? I don't know. There is no one I can talk to about it, not even myself. Every Don I know every Dan is caught up in the same whirlpool. None of us is any closer to the truth. We are all confused. I'm alone for the first time in days. It makes no difference. I'm still talking to myself. I wish some Don from the future would come back to advise me but even that's a useless wish. Any Don who did come back would only be trying to shape me toward his goals, regardless of mine. (I did meet one once. I don't know if it was intentional or accidental. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, maybe older; there were tiny lines at the corners of his eyes. He was a little darker and a lot heavier than me. He said, "You look troubled, Danny. Would you like to talk about it?" I said yes, but when we sat down on the couch, he put his arm around my shoulders and tried to pull me close. I fled into yesterday Is that my future? Am I condemning myself to a life of that?) (Is condemning even the right word? There are times when I am lying in Danny's arms when I am so happy I want to shout. I want to run out in the middle of the street and scream as loud as I can with the over- whelming joy of how happy I am. There are times when I am with Don that I break down and cry with happiness. We both cry with happiness. The emotion is too much to contain. There are times when it is very good and I am happier than I have ever been in my life. Is that condemnation?) (Must I list all those moments which I would never excise? The times we went nude swimming on a California beach centuries before the first man came to this continent. The night when six of us, naked and giggling, discovered what an orgy really was. [I've been to that orgy four times now does that mean I have to visit it twice more? I hope so.] I had not realized what pleasure could be ) But when I think about it logically, I know that its wrong. I mean, I think it's wrong. I'm not sure. I've never had to question it before. Man was made to mate with woman. Man was not made to mate with man. But does that mean man must not mate with man? No matter how many arguments I marshal against it, I am still outvoted by one overwhelming argument for it. It's pleasurable. I like it. So I rationalize. I tell myself that it's simply a complex form of masturbation. I know it. This is something more. I respond to Dan as if he were another person, as if he were not myself. I am both husband and wife, and I like both roles. Oh my God what have I done to myself? What have I done? Rationalization cannot hide the truth. How can anything that has given me such happiness leave me so unhappy? Please. Someone. Help. * * * I put the pages down and looked at Don. The mood of the moment had abruptly evaporated. "You've read this, haven't you?" He wouldn't meet my gaze; he simply nodded. I narrowed my eyes in sudden suspicion. "How far ahead of me are you?" I asked. "One day? Two days? A week? How much of my future do you know?" He shook his head. "Not much. A little less than a day." "I'm your yesterday?" He nodded. "You know what we were about to do?" I held up the papers meaningfully. He nodded again. "We would have done it if he hadn't stopped us, wouldn't we?" "Yes," said Don. "In fact, I was just about to " He stopped, refused to finish the sentence. I thought about that for a moment. "Then you know if we are going to I mean, you know if we did it." He said, "I know." His voice was almost a whisper. Something about the way he said it made me look at him. "We did didn't we?" "Yes." Abruptly, I was finding it hard to talk. He tried to look at me, but I wouldn't meet his gaze. "Dan," he said. "You don't understand. You won't understand until you're me." "We don't have to do it," I said. "Both of us have free will. Either of us can change the future. I could say no. And you even though you have your memory of doing it, you could still refuse to do it again. You could change the past. If you wanted to." He stretched out a hand. "It's up to you. ..." "No," I shook my head. "You're the one who makes the decisions. I'm Danny, you're Don. Besides, you've already you've already done it. You know what it's like. You know if it will... be good, or if we should . . . avoid it. I don't know, Don; that's why I have to trust you." I looked at him. "Do we do it?" Hesitation. He touched my arm. "You want to, don't you?æ After a moment I nodded. "Yes. I want to see what it's like. I I love you." "I want to do it too." "Is it all right, though?" I held my voice low. "I mean, remember how troubled Don looked?" "Danny, all I remember is how happy we were." I looked at him. There was a tear shining on his cheek. It was enough. I pressed against him. And we both held on tight. * * * I put the papers down and looked at Don. "I had a feeling we were heading toward it," I said. He nodded. "Yes." And then he smiled. "At least, now it's out in the open." I met his gaze. "I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. ..." "Think about it," he said. "It can't happen until Danny is ready. Any Don can try to seduce him, but unless Danny wants it to, it won't happen." "So it's really me who's doing the seducing, isn't it?" Don grinned. He rolled over on his back and spread his arms in invitation. "I'm ready." So was I. I moved into them and kissed him. And wondered why previous versions of myself had been so afraid. I wanted to do it. Wasn't that reason enough? * * * Evolution, of course. I had provided a hostile environment for those of me with doubts about their sexuality. They had excised themselves out of existence. Leaving only me. With no doubts at all. Survival of the fittest? More likely, survival of the horniest. I know who I am. I know what I want. And I'm very happy. If I'm not, I know what I can do about it. * * * As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd go away! Hughes Mearns The Psychoed * * * only, the little man was me. I keep running into versions of myself who have come back from the future to tell me to be sure to do something or not to do something. Like, do not fly American Airlines Flight 191 from O'Hare to LAX on such and such a date. (It's a DC-10 and the engine falls off.) Or, do not go faster than seventy miles per hour on the freeway today. (The highway patrol is having radar checks.) Things like that. I used to wonder about all those other Dans and Dons even though I knew they weren't, it still seemed like they were eliminating themselves. They're not, but it seems that way. What it is, of course, is that I am the cumulative effect of all their changes. I that is, my consciousness have never gone back to excise anything. At least I have no memory of ever having done so. If they didn't exist to warn me, then I wouldn't have been warned and I would have made the mistake they would have warned me against, realized it was a mistake and gone back to warn myself. Hence, / am the result of an inevitable sequence of variables and choices. But that precludes the concept of free will. And everything I do proves again that I have the ultimate free will I don't have to be responsible for any of my actions because I can erase them any time. But does the erasure of certain choices always lead to a particular one, or is it just that that particular one is the one most suitable for this version of me? Is it my destiny to be homosexual and some other Danny's destiny to not be . . . ? The real test of it, I guess, would be to try and excise some little incident and see what happens see what happens to me. If it turns out I can remember excising it, then that would prove that I have free will. If not if I find I've talked myself out of something else then I'm running along a rut, like a clockwork mechanism, doomed to play out my programmed actions for some unseen cosmic audience, all the time believing that I have some control over those actions. The test * * * was simple. And I passed it. I simply went back to May 21, 1975, and talked myself out of going to the races. ("Here todays paper," I said. "Go to the races yesterday." Danny was startled, of course, and he must have thought me a little crazy, but he agreed not to go to the races on May 21.) So. I had excised my first trip to the track. In this world I hadn't made it at all. Just to double-check, I drove out to the race track. Right. I wasn't there. (An interesting thing happened though. In the fourth race, Harass didn't bump Tumbleweed and wasn't disqualified. If I had been there to bet, I would have lost everything or would I? The Don I might have been might have foreseen that too. But why had that part of the past been changed? What had happened? Something I must have done on one of my other trips must have affected the race.) But I'd proved it to my own satisfaction. I had free will. I had all of my memories of the past the way I had lived it, yet I had excised part of it out of existence. I hadn't eliminated myself and I hadn't had any of my memory magically erased. I remembered the act of excising. There might have been differences perhaps even should have been differences in my world when I flashed forward again. Perhaps the mansion should have disappeared, or perhaps my fortune should have been larger or smaller; but both were unchanged. If there were any differences, they would have to be minor. I didn't go looking for them. The reason? The mansion had been built in 1968, a good seven years before Danny had been given the timebelt. (I had done that on purpose.) Because it had already existed in 1975, it was beyond his (our? my?) reach to undo unless he went back to 1967. The same applied to my financial empire. It should be beyond the reach of any of my casual changes. Of course, from a subjective point of view, neither the mansion nor the money existed until after I'd gotten the timebelt but time travel is only subjective to the traveler, not the timestream. Each time I'd made a change in the timestream, it was like a new layer to the painting. The whole thing was affected. Any change made before May 21, 1975, would be part of Danny's world when he got the timebelt. Unless he later on went back and excised it in a later version of the timestream. And if he did, it still wouldn't affect me at all. It would be his version of the timestream and he would be a different person from me, with different memories and different desires. Just as there were alternate universes, there were also alternate Dannys. My house already existed. My investments in the past were also firmly in existence. He could not erase them by refusing to initiate them, he would only be creating a new timestream of his own, one that would be separate from mine. In effect, by altering my personal past, I am excising a piece of it, but I'm not destroying the continuity of this timestream. I'm only destroying my own continuity except that I'm not, because I still have my memories. Confusing? Yes, I have to keep reminding myself not to think in terms of only one timestream. I am not traveling in time. I am creating new universes. Alternate universes each one identical to the one I just left up to the moment of my insertion into it. From that instant on, my existence in it causes it to take a new shape. A shape I can choose in fact, I must choose; because the timestream will be changed merely by my sudden presence in it, I must make every effort to exercise control in order to prevent known sequences of events from becoming unknown sequences. This applies to my own life too. I am not one person. I am many people, all stemming from the same root. Some of the other Dans and Dons I meet are greatly variant from me, others are identical. Some will repeat actions that I have done, and I will repeat the actions of others. We perceive this as a doubling back of our subjective timelines. It doesn't matter, I am me, I react to it all. I act on it all. From this, I've learned two things. The first is that I do have free will. With all that implies. If I am a homosexual, then I am that way by choice. Should it please me to know that? Or should it disturb me? I don't know I'm the me who likes it too much to excise. So I guess that's the answer, isn't it? And that's the second thing I've learned that every time I travel into the past, I am excising. I am erasing the past that was and creating a new one instead. I didn't need to excise my first trip to the races to prove that I had free will I'd already proved it the first time I was Don, when I'd worn a windbreaker instead of a sweater. Every time I excise, I'm not erasing a world. I'm only creating a new one for myself. For myself meaning, this me. Because every time I excise, I am also creating versions that are not me. There are Daniel Eakinses who are totally different people than I am. The Danny that I told not to go to the races he'll go off into a timestream of his own creation; he'll have different memories, and eventually, different needs and desires. His resultant timestreams may be similar to mine, or, just as likely, they'll be different. And if he can be different from me then there are an infinite number of Dannys who are different from me. Somewhere there exist all the possible variations of all the possible people I could be. I could by any of them but I cannot be all. I can only be one of the variations. I will be the variation of myself that pleases me the most. And that suggests that my free will may be only an illusion, after all. If there are an infinite number of Dans, then each one thinks he is choosing his own course. But that isn't so. Each one is only playing out his preordained instructions excising, altering, and designing his timestream to fit his psychological template and following his emotional programming to its illogical extreme . . . * * * But if each of us is happiest in the universe he builds for himself, does it matter? Does it really matter if there's no such thing as free will? * * * It bothers me this me. I need to know that there is some important reason for my existence. There must be something special about me. * * * I will find the answer! * * * Yes. Of course. * * * I know what my mission is. I know who I am. I should have realized it when the timebelt was first given to me. I am destined to rule the universe. I am God. * * * But I must never let them find out, or they will try to kill me. * * * I think I will kill them first. * * * If I ever get out of this room, I will kill them all! * * * I made a point of cautioning Danny, "I don't know if he can be cured. But I am sure we can never trust him with a timebelt again. I think we'll have to be very careful to see that he doesn't get out. A paranoid schizophrenic running amok through time could be disastrous not only for the rest of the world, but for us as well." Danny was thoughtful as he peered through the one-way glass. "It's lucky that we caught him in time." His voice caught on the last word; I think I know he was a little shaken at seeing the drooling maniac he might have become. I hadn't gotten used to the sight either. I said, "I think he wanted to be caught. We got him at a point where he was still conscious of what was happening to himself." "If he ever does get his hands on another timebelt," Danny asked, "he could come back and rescue himself, couldn't he?" I nodded. "That's partly why it was so hard to trap him. We had to get him into a timeline where he had no foreknowledge of where he was going, otherwise he would have jumped ahead to help himself against us. We wouldn't even have known about him if he hadn't kept coming farther and farther back into the past; one of us must have eventually recognized what was happening and gone for treatment, then come after this one who was still rampaging around. That's when I was called in to help. We had to deny him any chance to look into his own future until we could get the belt off him. The fact that he hasn't been rescued yet is a pretty good sign that this is the end of the line for this variant." Danny grinned. "Well, just the fact that we're standing here talking about it proves that." "Uh-huh," I said. I put my hand on his shoulder. "I'm from a line where they caught it in me before it got this far. I never went through that." I pointed at the glass. "You, you're a variant too. You're from even earlier. Neither of us is in there. He could be incurable and if that's the case, then he has to stay in there. Forever. He and I mean all of us has to be either completely safe, or the timebelt must be held beyond his reach. The consequences " I didn't have to finish the sentence. Danny bit his lip. "You're right, of course. It's just that I don't like seeing him there." "It's for his own good," I said. "More important, it's for our good. If time travel is the ultimate personal freedom, then it's also the ultimate personal responsibility." "I guess so," he said and turned away from the glass. I didn't add anything to that and we left the hospital for the last time. * * * Today President Robert F. Kennedy announced that "in response to recent discoveries, the United States is initiating a high-priority research program to investigate the possibilities of travel through time." So in order to protect myself (and my one-man monopoly), I had to go back and unkill Sirhan Sirhan. Dammit. The "recent discoveries" he was referring to were some unfortunate anachronisms which I seem to have left in the past. I thought I had been more careful, but apparently I haven't. One of the Pompeiian artifacts in the British Museum has definitely been identified as a fossilized Coca-Cola bottle from the Atlanta, Georgia, bottling plant. Well, I never said I was neat. . . . I don't remember dropping the Coke bottle, but if it's there, I must have. Unless some other version of me left it there That is possible. The more I bounce around time, the more versions of me there are; many of us seem to be overlapping, but I have observed Dans and Dons doing things that I never have or never will at least I don't intend to so if they exist in this timeline, they must be other versions, just "passing through." Either they're around to react to me, or I'm supposed to react to them. Or both. Certain fluxes must keep occurring, I guess I assume there are mathematical formulae for expressing them, but I'm no mathematician which necessitate two or more versions of myself coming into contact: such as the Don who came back through time to warn me against winning three million dollars at the race track on May 20. That one was a situation where three versions of me had to exist simultaneously in one world: Dan, Don, and ultra-Don (who was excising himself). Other situations have been more complex; the more complex I become, the more me's there are in this world. The whole process is evolutionary. Every time Daniel Eakins eliminates a timeline, he's removing a nonviable one and replacing it with one that suits him better. The world changes and develops, always working itself toward some unknown utopia of his own personal design. My needs and desires keep changing, so does the world. (I must be about thirty now. I have no way of keeping track, but I look about that age.) I have lived in worlds dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure sexual fantasies come true. I had lived in other worlds too, harsher ones, for the sense of adventure. World War II was my private party. But always, whenever I create a specialized world, I make a point of doing it very, very carefully with one or two easily reversed changes. I do not want to get too far from home meaning my own timeline. I do not want to get lost among alternate worlds with no way to get back and no way to find out what changes I made to create that alternate world. So I make my changes one at a time and double- check each one before introducing another. If I decide I do not like a world, I will know exactly how to excise it. (I thought I had done right when I kidnapped the baby Hitler and left him twenty years away from his point of origin, but that had serious repercussions on the world of 1975, so I had to put the baby back. Instead I let Hitler be assassinated by his own generals in 1939. Much neater all around.) For a while I was on an anti-assassination kick. I have had the unique pleasure of tapping Lee Harvey Oswald on the shoulder (Yes, I know there were people who had doubts about who did it but I was there; I know it was Oswald) just before he would have pulled the trigger. Then I blew his head off. (John Wilkes Booth, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan were similarly startled. In two cases, though, I had to go back and excise my removal of the assassins. I didn't like the resultant worlds. Some of our heroes serve us better dead than alive.) Once I created a world where Jesus Christ never existed. He went out into the desert to fast and he never came back. The twentieth century I returned to was different. Alien. The languages were different, the clothing styles, the maps, everything. The cities were smaller; the buildings were shorter and the streets were narrower. There were fewer cars and they seemed ugly and inefficient. There were slave traders in the city that would have been New York. There were temples to Gods I didn't recognize. Everything was wrong. I could have been on another planet. The culture was incomprehensible. I went back and talked myself out of eliminating Jesus Christ. Look. I confess to no great love for organized religion. The idea of Christianity (with a capital C) leaves me cold. Jesus was only an ordinary human being, I know that for a fact, and everything that's been done in his name has been a sham. It's been other people using his name for their own purposes. But I don't dare excise that part of my world. I might be able to make a good case for Christianity if I wanted. After all, the birth of the Christian idea and its resultant spread throughout the Western Hemisphere was a significant step upward in human consciousness the placing of a cause, a higher goal, above the goal of oneself, to create the kingdom of heaven to be created on Earth. And so on. But I also know that Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century itôs been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it's voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big and takes on that damned capital C- they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.) Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths. So why am I so determined to preserve the Church? Because, more than any other force in history, it has created the culture of which I am a product. If I eliminate the Church, then I eliminate the only culture in which I am a native. I become, literally, a man without a world. Presumably there are worlds that are better than this one, but if I create them, it must be carefully, because I have to live in them too. I will be a part of whatever world I create, so I cannot be haphazard with them. Just as a time-traveling Daniel Eakins keeps evolving toward a more and more inevitable version of himself, then so does the world he creates. It's a pretty stable world, especially in the years between 1950 and 2020. Every so often it needs a "dusting and cleaning" to keep it that way, but it's a pretty good world. Just as I keep excising those of me which tend to extremes, so am I excising those worlds which do not suit me. I experiment, but I always come back. I guess I'm basically a very conservative person. * * * Once in a while I wonder about the origins of the timebelt. Where did it come from? Who built it and why? I have a theory about it, but there's no way to check for sure. Just as I am unable to return to the timeline of my origin, so is the timebelt unable to return to its. All I can do is hypothesize . . . But figure it this way: At some point in some timeline, somebody invents a time machine. Somebody. Anybody. Makes no difference, just as long as it gets invented. Well, that's a pretty powerful weapon. The ultimate weapon. Sooner or later some power-hungry individual is going to realize that. Possession and use of the timebelt is a way for a man to realize his every dream. He can be king of the world. He can be king of any world every world! Naturally, as soon as he can, he's going to try to implement his ideas. The first thing he'll do is excise the world in which the timebelt was invented, so no one else will have a belt and be able to come after him. Then he'll start playing around in time. He'll start rewriting his own life. He'll start creating new versions of himself; he'll start evolving himself across a variety of timelines. Am I the trans-lineal beneficiary of that person? Or maybe the timebelt began another way It looks like a manufactured product, but very rugged. Could it have been built for military uses? Could some no longer existent nation have planned to rule throughout history by some vast timebelt-supported dictatorship? Am I the descendant of a fugitive who found a way to excise that tyranny? Or and this is the most insane of all is it that somewhere there's a company that's manufacturing and selling timebelts like transistor radios? And anyone who wants one just goes to his nearby department store, plunks $23.95 down on the counter, and gets all his dreams fulfilled? Crazy, isn't it? But possible. As far as the home timeline is concerned, all those people using timebelts have simply disappeared. As far as each subjective traveler knows, he's rewriting all of time. It makes no difference either way; the number of alternate universes is infinite. The more I think about it, the more likely that latter possibility seems. Consider it's the far future. You've almost got utopia the only thing that keeps every man from realizing all of his dreams is the overpopulation of the planet Earth. So you start selling timebelts you give them away pretty soon every man is a king and the home world is depopulated to a comfortable level. The only responsibility you need to worry about is policing yourself, not letting schizoid versions of yourself run around your timeline. (Oh, you could, I suppose, but could you sleep nights knowing there was a madman running loose who wanted to kill you?) The reason is obvious you want to keep your own timelines stable, don't you? Is that where it started? Is that where Uncle Jim came from? Did he buy himself a timebelt and excise the world that created it? I don't know. I suspect, though, that a timebelt never gets too far from the base timeline, and that the user-generated differences in the timelines are generally within predictable limits. Because the instructions are in English. Wherever it was manufactured, it was an English- speaking world. With all that implies. History. Morals. Culture. Religion. (Perhaps it was my home timeline where the belt began, perhaps just a few years in my future.) Obviously the belt was intended for people who could read and understand its instructions. Otherwise, you could kill yourself. Or worse. You could send yourself on a one-way trip to eternity. (Read the special cautions.) If the average user is like me, he's too lazy to learn a new language (especially one that might disappear forever with his very next jump), so anyone with a timebelt is likely to keep himself generally within the confines of his own culture. His changes will be minimal: he'll alter the results of a presidential election, but he won't change the country that holds that election. At least not too much. So the timebelts remain centered around the English-speaking nexus. Those users who do go gallivanting off to Jesus-less universes will find themselves in worlds where English never developed. If they elect to stay, making it their new homeline, they can continue to spin off any number of themselves. But when the last version dies, that's where the belt stops. There's no one in that timeline who can read the directions. A timebelt either stays close to home, or it stops being used. Should anyone attempt to use the belt, they'll probably eliminate themselves. You can't learn time-tracking by trial and error. It's crude, but effective. It's an automatic way of eliminating extreme variations of the homeline. Just what the homeline is, though, I'll never know. I've come so far in the ten or more years I've been using the belt that I'm not sure I even remember where I started. I wish I could talk to Uncle Jim about it, but I can't. He's not in this timeline. Too late I went looking for him, but he wasn't there. I don't know what it was, I've made so many changes, but something I did must have excised him. I don't know what to undo to find him. I've removed myself from my last real contact with with what? Reality? I've never been so lonely in my life. * * * Maybe I'm lost in time. It's a fact, I don't know where I am. I went looking for Uncle Jim and couldn't find him. When I realized that I must have accidentally excised him (probably by one of my "revisions" in this world), I went looking for myself. If I caught myself on May 19, 1975, when I was given the timebelt, perhaps I could keep myself from editing out my uncle. But I wasn't there either. I do not exist in this timeline. There is no Daniel Eakins here, nor any evidence to indicate that he ever existed. In this world I have no more past than I did in the Jesus-less world. I have no origins. And no future either. If I cannot find younger versions of myself, perhaps there are older versions but if there are, where are they? I have met no one in this timeline, at least no one whom I have not become within a few days. Where is my future? The house has never seemed so empty. The poker game is deserted, the pool table is empty, the bedroom lies unused. The stereo is silent, the swimming pool is still, and I feel like a ghost walking through a dead city. The crowds of me have vanished. My past has been excised, and I have no future. Am I soon to die in this timeline? Or do I just desert it? Is that why I'm no longer here? (Am I hiding from myself why doesn't a Don come back to help me?) If this timeline is a dead end, then where am I going? I wish I had my Uncle Jim. I wish I had my Don. Or even my Dan. Sweet Dan . . . I've never been so scared. Don, if you read this, please help me. * * * I must be logical about this. One of two things has happened is about to happen. The me I am about to become has obviously found a new timeline. Either he doesn't want to come back to this one, or he is unable to. Perhaps he has made some change that he can't undo. Perhaps he doesn't even know what that change is. Is it a change in the world timeline? Has he created a universe where Aristotle never existed? Or did he accidentally kill Pope Sextus the Fifth? Maybe it was something subtle, like stepping on a spider ... or fathering a child who shouldn't have been. Whatever it was, has the Daniel Eakins I am about to be lost himself in some strange and alien timeline? I keep remembering the timeline where Jesus never lived am I to be lost in a world like that? Or is the change something else? Is it in me instead? Am I about to make some drastic alteration in my personality? Something I can't excise? Something I won't want to excise? Something I am unable to excise? What if I turn myself into a paraplegic? Or a mongoloid idiot, incapable of understanding? Or am I on the verge of killing myself? Or worse? For the first time since I was given the timebelt, I am unable to see the future my own personal future and it scares me. Now I know what those other people feel. The ones who aren't me. * * * Suppose just suppose that I wanted to meet another version of myself: I travel through time and there I am, an earlier or later Dan. I can stay as long as I want and without any obligation to relive the time from the other side. After all, we're really two different people. Really. The first time I used the timebelt I met Don. Then I had thought that there was only one of me and that the seeming existence of two of us was just an illusion. Now I know that was wrong. There's an infinite number of me, and the existence of one is an illusion. An illusion? Yes, but the illusion is as real to me and my subjective point of view as the illusion of travel through time. I still feel like me. As far as I'm concerned, I'm real. I think I exist, therefore I exist. I think. And so do all others. Now. How do I go about meeting one of them? One of those other versions of myself, one of the separate versions? Not one who is simply me at some other part of my subjective life as so many of the Dons and Dans are but a Daniel Eakins who has gone off in some entirely different direction. How would I meet him? The problem is one of communication. How do I let him know that I want to meet him? How do I get a message across the timelines? Well, let's see . . . I could put something in the timebelt itself, a date and location perhaps, then substitute it into Uncle Jim's package . . . No. That part of my past no longer exists in this world. I excised it remember? Well, then, how about if I left a message far in the past . . . No, that wouldn't work. Look at the trouble the Coke bottle almost got me into. Where would I leave it where only I would discover it? How would I how would he know where to look for it? How could I even be sure of its enduring for the several thousand years it might have to? (Besides, I'm not sure it would exist in any of the timelines that branched off before I got myself into this dead end. Changes in the timestream are supposed to be cumulative, not retroactive.) I guess the answer to my question about getting a message across the timelines is obvious: I don't. There simply isn't any working method of trans-temporal communication. At least none that I can think of that's foolproof. But that doesn't mean I still can't meet another version of myself. I meet different versions of myself all the time. The mild variants. The only reason I haven't run into a distant variant is that we haven't been tramping a common ground. If I want to find such a variant, I have to go somewhere he's likely to be. Suppose that somewhere there's another me a distant me who's thinking along the same lines: he wants to meet a Daniel Eakins who is widely variant from himself. What memories do we have in common? Hmm, only those that existed before we were given the timebelt . . . That's it, of course! Our birthday. * * * I was born at 2:17 in the morning, January 24, 1956, at the Sherman Oaks Medical Center, Sherman Oaks, California. Of course, in this timeline, I hadn't been born wouldn't be born. Something I had done had excised my birth; but I knew the date I would have been born and so did every other Dan. It was the logical place to look. In 1977 the Sherman Oaks Medical Center was a row of seven three- and four-story buildings lining Van Nuys Boulevard just north of the Ventura Freeway. In 1956 it comprised only two buildings, one of which was strictly doctors' offices. I twinged a little bit as I drove down Van Nuys Boulevard of the mid-fifties. I'd been spending most of my time in the seventies. I hadn't realized . . . The two movie theaters were still the Van Nuys and the Rivoli. Neither had been remodeled yet into the Fox or the Capri and the Capri was soon to be torn down. Most of the tall office buildings were missing, and there were too many tacky little stores lining the street. And the cars my god, did people actually drive those things? They were boxy, high, and bulky. Their styling was atrocious Fords and Chevys with the beginnings of tail fins and double headlights; Chryslers and Cadillacs with too much chrome. And Studebakers and DeSotos and Packards! There was a big vacant field where I remembered a blue glass, slab-sided building that stretched for more than a block. But the teenage hangout across the street from it was still alive, still a hangout. I twinged, because in 1977 I had left a city. This was only a small town, busy in its own peaceful way, but still a small town. Why had I remembered it as being exciting? As I approached the Medical Center itself, I real- ized with a start that something was missing. Then it hit me in 1956 the Ventura Freeway hadn't been built yet, didn't extend to Van Nuys Boulevard. (I wondered if the big red Pacific Electric Railroad cars were still running. I didn't know when they had finally stopped, but the tracks had remained for years.) I'd seen Los Angeles in its earlier incarnations, but the Los Angeles of 1930 had always seemed like another city, like a giant Disneyland put up for Danny the perpetual tourist. It wasn't real. But this this I recognized. I could see the glimmerings of my own world here, its embryonic beginnings, the bones around which the flesh of the future would grow. I parked my '76 'Vette at the corner of Riverside Drive and Van Nuys, ignoring the stares of the curious. I'd forgotten what I was doing and brought it back with me. So what? Let them think it was some kind of racer. I couldn't care less. I was lost in thought. I'd been living my whole life around the same three years. Sure, I'd gone traveling off to other eras, but those had been just trips. I'd always returned to 1977 because I'd always thought of it as home. I'd folded and compressed my whole life into a span of just a few months. Consequently, I lived in a world where the landscape never changed. Never. They'd been building the new dorm for the college for as long as I could remember. They'd been grading for the new freeway forever. (Oh, I knew what the finished structures would look like. I'd even driven the new freeway; but the time that I knew as home was frozen. Static. Unchanging.) I'd lived in the same year for over ten subjective years. I'd grown too used to the idea that home would endure forever. For me, the San Fernando Valley was a stable entity. I'd forgotten what a dynamically alive city it was because I'd lost the ability to see its growth because I no longer traveled linearly through time. Other people travel through time in a straight line. For them, growth is a constant process, perceived only when the changes are major ones, or when there is something to compare them against. To me, growth is it doesn't exist. Every time I jump, I expect the world to change. I never equate any era with any other. Until now, that is. I knew this city; I'd grown up here but I'd forgot- ten that it existed. I'd forgotten what it was like to be a part of the moving timestream, to grow up with a city, to see it change as you change. . . . I'd forgotten so much. So much. * * * There was no one at the hospital, of course. That is, I wasn't there there were no other versions of Daniel Jamieson Eakins waiting to meet me. I should have known it, of course. My birthday fell within the range of changes I'd been making. I was the only me in this timeline. If I wanted to find another me, I'd have to go outside the scope of my temporal activity. I'd have to go into the past. Deep into the past. The only way to escape the effects of any change is to jump back to a point before it happened. I'd been making changes for the past two hundred years. If I was to meet a variant Dan, we'd both have to go back beyond that span. But how far back? I stood by the car, jingling my keys indecisively. The one location I was sure of was this hospital; the one date, my birthday. Okay This spot. The middle of the San Fernando Valley. The date: January 24. My birthday. one thousand years ago. Exactly. I got in the car, set the timebelt to include it, and tapped twice * * * POP! I'd been expecting it, but the jump-shock was still severe. The pain of it is directly proportional to the amount of mass making the jump. Rubbing myself ruefully, I opened the door and got out. My Corvette and I were in the middle of a flat brown plain. Scraggly plants and bushes all around. I recognized the Hollywood Hills to the southeast. Crisp blue sky. Unreal; no smog. And dry, almost desertlike ground stretching emptily to the purple-brown mountains that surrounded the valley. The San Bernardino range had never looked so forbidding; those black walls at the far northeast end were undimmed by human haze, undwarfed by human buildings, unscarred by human roads. I gazed in awe; I'd never really noticed them before. "Well?" said a female voice behind me. "Are you going to stand there and admire the view all day?" I whirled she was beautiful. Almost my height. Hair the same color brown as mine. Eyes the same color green, soft and downturned. The same cast of features, only slightly more delicate. She could have been my sister. She indicated the car with a nod and a giggle. "Are you planning to drive somewhere?" "I uh, no that is I didn't know what I was planning. I Hey, who are you?" "Diane." "Diane? Is that all?" She twinkled. "Diana Jane Eakins. Hey, what's the matter? Did I say something wrong?" "I'm Dan!" I blurted. "Daniel Eakins. Daniel Jamieson Eakins " "Oh " she said. And then it sunk in. "Oh!" * * * The silence was embarrassing. "Uh . . ."I said. "I have this timebelt." "So do I. My Aunt Jane gave it to me." "I got mine from my Uncle Jim." She pointed to a gazebo-like affair about a hundred yards off. "Would you like to sit down?" "Did you bring that with you?" "Uh-huh. Do you like it?" I followed her through the weeds. "Well, it's different." Judging from its distance and the angle from the car, she had put it up in the hospital parking lot. "It's more comfortable than a sports car," she said. I shrugged. "I won't deny it." I recognized the gazebo as a variation of the Komfy-Kamper (1998): "All the comforts of home in a single unit." I wondered if I should reach out for her hand. She was looking strangely at me too. I reached out . . . We walked side by side the short remaining distance. "Why did you come back here?" I asked. "To see if anyone else would," she said. "I was lonely." "Me too," I admitted. "I suddenly discovered I couldn't find myself. I'd excised my past and there didn't seem to be any me in the future " "You too? That's what happened to me. I couldn't even find my Aunt Jane." " so I thought I'd come looking for a variant Dan and find out what happened." I stopped abruptly. I certainly had found a variant Dan. About as variant as I could get ... I wondered what I was shaped like under those clothes. She let go of my hand and took a step back; she cocked her head curiously. "Why are you looking at me like that?" "You're very pretty." She flushed, then she recovered. "You're kind of cute too." She peered closely at me. "I've always wondered what I would look like as a boy. Now I know; I'd be very handsome." Impulsively she put her hands on my chest. "And very nicely built too not too much muscle, not so many as to look brutish; just enough to look manly." Now it was my turn to be embarrassed. I dropped my gaze to her breasts. "You can touch me if you want." I wanted to. I did. Her breasts were nice. "I don't wear a bra," she said. "I noticed." "Do I pass inspection?" she whispered. "Oh, yes," I said. "Very much so." She pressed close to me, she moved her face up to mine. . . . The kiss lasted for a very long, long time. * * * The sun was lowering behind the western hills. The sky was all shades of purple and orange. Twilight was a gray-blue haze. We'd been talking for hours. We'd stopped to eat and then we'd talked some more. We had pulled the shades on three sides of the gazebo and turned the heat up. We sat naked in the glow of the electric fire and watched the sunset. "The more I look at you, the prettier you get," she murmured. "You too." I stretched across the heater and kissed her. "Careful," she said after a moment. "Don't burn anything off. We may want to use it again." "I hope so." I kissed her again, while she cupped me protectively. I moved closer. We lay there side by side for a while. "I can't get over how good you feel." Her hands stroked up and down my back, my sides, my legs; my hands held her shoulders, her breasts. I kissed them gently, I kissed her eyelids too. She looked up at me. "I liked having you inside me. It was very good." "I liked being inside you." She hugged me tight. "I could stay like this forever." "Me too." There was silence. The night gathered softly. Our words hung in the air. Finally I said, "You know, we could. We could stay here forever." "Do you want to ... ?" "Yes," I whispered. I began to move again. "Oh, yes." "Oh, Dan," she gasped. "Oh, my darling, my sweet, sweet Dan " "Oh, baby, yes " I rearranged my position on top of her and again the silvery warmth tingled Exploded. Delighted. * * * slid into me. He was around me and inside me, his arms and legs and penis; we rocked and moved together, we fitted like one person. He filled me till I overflowed, kindled and inflamed We gasped and giggled and sighed and soared and sang and laughed and cried and leaped and flew and dazzled and burst, exploding fireworks, surging fire We rustled and sighed. And died. And hugged and held on. He was still within me. Sweet squeeze, warmth. I held him tight. I loved the feel of him, the taste of him. I loved the smell of him the sweaty sense of masculine man. Musky. I melted, under him, around him. Loved him. * * * January night. Cold wind. We pulled the last shade. There was just one more thing. I had to make it complete. "Dan," I whispered. "I have to tell you something." "What?" In the pink light, his face was glowing. I took a breath. "I I'm not exactly a virgin." "Of course not," he grinned. "We just took care of that." "No, that's not what I meant. I wasn't a virgin before." "Oh?" "I mean " I forced myself to go on. I had to tell him everything or it wouldn't be any good. "I was only a 'technical virgin.' I'd never done it with a boy before. You were the first." "Yes, of course," he said quietly. "I should have realized. You only did it with ..." "Only Donna and Diana. I mean, I only did it with myself. When I was Donna, I " He cut me off gently, "I know." "Is it all right?" I had to know. "You're not disappointed in me?" "Of course not. I understand." "I only did it because I was lonely." "No," he said slowly, shaking his head. "You wanted to do it and you enjoyed it. You did it because you're the only person you can trust, the only person you feel completely at ease with, and you wanted to express your feelings and your affection. You did it because you loved yourself" "I yes, you're right." I couldn't deny it. "Diana," he whispered. "Think a minute. About me. I'm both Don and Dan. I'm the male reflection of you." His eyes were bright. "Did you ?" I couldn't finish the question. But he knew what I meant. He nodded. "We did I did." I thought about that. Dan. Diane. Dan. Diane. Boy, Girl. Same. Person. And suddenly I was crying. Crying, sobbing into his arms. "Oh, Dan, I'm so sorry " He stroked my hair. "It's all right, sweetheart. There's nothing to be sorry about, nothing at all." "I'm so stupid " "No, you're not. You were smart enough to come looking for me, weren't you?" "Oh, no I didn't know what I was looking for. I just didn't want to be alone anymore." "Neither did I. I didn't know what I wanted either, but you're just perfect " "So are you " I wiped at the tears on his chest. I didn't know what I was feeling anymore. I felt ripped up and ripped open. I felt so vulnerable. And at the same time, I felt everything was all right too. He wasn't me. But he was. And I couldn't get enough of him. He tasted good. Was I in love or just infatuated? Or was I trying to prove something to myself? I don't know. But he was the first man I ever felt I could trust. I started crying again, I don't know why. "Hold me, Dan, hold me tight. Don't let go. I want you inside me again." "Oh, yes, baby. Yes, yes. Yes Oh, Danny, I love you." "Diane, I love you too!" * * * The sensuousness of sex. The maleness of me. The femaleness of her. The physical sensations of strength and warmth. Flesh against smooth flesh. Firm resistance, supple yielding. Sex with Diane is different from any kind of sex I have ever had before. There is something boyish about her that I find strangely attractive, yet deliciously feminine. I put my arms around her and she is neither male nor female, but a little of each. And there is something feminine in me that she responds to. (Perhaps it is a quality that is common to both of us and independent of physical gender. An androgynous quality. My body may be male or it may be female, but I am neither I am me.) I keep thinking of Danny, and it is hard not to make comparisons between the two of them, even though I know it is unfair to both. But Danny and I (Don and I) have been through so much together, have meant so much to each other. Diane lacks Danny's intensity (yes), but Danny could never match her sensuality. The sheer physical delight of her body, the perfect matching of male to female, the tenderness of her response to mine; all of these combine to make sex with her an experience that is new to me. I delight in being with her, in being inside of her, just as she delights in opening to me. I admit it, I am fascinated by her body, by the femaleness of her, the geography, the open depths that I plunge into, again and again. ... I lose all consciousness. All that exists is the feeling, the incredible wallow of emotion and silly talk and discovery after discovery. I know what is happening to me and I don't care. I admit it happily. I have become a horny little schoolboy, not just discovering sex but inventing it fresh and new, as if it had never existed before. Well, it hasn't. Not for us. I see her as something special. Not a new person, no, but another reflection of myself. Another Danny perhaps and in the most different guise of all. Yes. Danny with a vagina. Think of her as he. It is the quality of Danny-ness I see in him that is so intriguing, so independent of sexuality. There is a Danny trapped inside that female body screaming to let me in. Just as there is a Diane inside me. I cannot help but like it. We enjoy our physical roles as we have never en- joyed them before; at least I know I do; but deep inside is a sense of loss. I think I loved my Danny more. And I think I know why. With Danny, the physical forms were identical; the mental roles could be arbitrary. It was just me and him. We could choose our roles, we could take turns, we could be pansexual. I didn't have to be male, I didn't have to be dominant. With Don I could be weak, with Don I could cry. With Diane, it is different. I feel limited. And in a sense, I am. I am limited to the role given me by fate, by gender. My sex is the one thing about myself I cannot alter. Our bodies determine and define our roles at least to the extent that I must be a man to her woman. Despite all the different roles either of us are capable of playing for each other, ultimately we can only return to the ones already assigned us. (If this is Danny, then Danny is the only woman here. There are no tradeoffs anymore. Danny has limited our roles.) There is no other relationship for either of us. At least, that's how I perceive it. The relationship is not unenjoyable. Indeed, it is the most joyous of all. But still, there is that sense of loss . . . * * * We have been together how long? Months, it must be. We have a home on the edge of prehistory, a villa on the shores of what someday will be called Mission Bay. It's a sprawling mansion on a deserted coast, a self-contained unit; it has to be, because we brought it back to the year 100,000 B.C. A honeymoon cottage for the outcasts of time. The sea washes blue across yellow sands. Seagulls wheel and dive, cawing raucously. The sun blazes bright in an azure sky. And the only footprints are ours. We live a strange kind of life in our timeless world. Loneliness is unknown to us; yet neither of us ever lacks for privacy. We see each other only when both of us want it. Never can either force himself on the other. That's part of being a time traveler. I cannot journey to her future, nor can she to mine. When we bounce forward, I am in Danny's world, she is in Diane's. The only place we can meet is in the past, because only the past is unaffected by both of us. Should either of us need to be alone, we simply bounce to a different point in time. (I have seen the ruins of this mansion standing forlorn and alone, swept by the sands and washed by the sea, while the sun lies orange in the west. These walls will be dust by the time of Christ.) Returning, I am in her arms again. I am there because I want to be there. She vanishes too, but only momentarily; she returns in a different dress and hair style. I know she has been gone longer than I have seen, but I know she comes back to me with her desire at its fullest. I open my arms. We have never had an argument. It is impossible when either of you can disappear at the instant of displeasure. All of our moments are happy ones. Life with Diane is almost idyllic. Almost. Today she told me she was pregnant. And I'm not sure how I feel about that. There is a sense of joy and wonder in me but I am also disturbed. Jealous that something else, someone else, can make her glow with such happiness. The look on her face as she told me I have seen that intensity only in her climax. I know I shouldn't be, but I am bothered that I cannot give her such prolonged intensity of joy. And I am bothered that someone else is inside of her, someone other than me. And yet, I'm happy. Happy for her, happy for me. I don't know why, but I know that this baby must be something special. It must be. * * * The baby proves something that I have suspected for a long time. My life is out of control. I am no longer the master of my own destiny. There is little that I can do with this situation. Except run from it. Or can I . . . ? * * * Being pregnant is a special kind of time. Within me there is life, helpless and small; I can feel it move. I can feel it grow. I wait eagerly for the day of its entrance into the world so I can hold it and touch it, love it and feed it, hold it to my breasts. This is a special baby. It will be. I know it will be. I am filled with wonder. I see my body in the mirror, swollen and beautiful. I run my hands across my bulging stomach in awed delight. This is something Donna could never have given me. (I miss her though; I wish she were here to share this moment. She is, of course. She will be here when I need her.) Oh, there is discomfort too, more than I had expected the difficulties in bending over and walking, the back pains and the troubles in the bathroom, the loginess and the nausea but it's worth it. When I think of the small beautiful wonder which will soon burst into my life, the whole world turns pink and giggly. I feel that I'm on the threshold of something big. * * * The baby was born this morning. It is a boy. A beautiful, handsome, healthy boy. I am delighted. And disappointed. I had wanted a girl. A girl ... * * * In 2013 the first genetic-control drug was put on the market. It allowed a man and woman to choose the sex of their unborn child. In 2035 in-utero genetic tailoring became practical. The technique allowed a woman to determine which of several available chromosomes in the egg and sperm cells would function as dominants. The only condition was that the tailoring must be done within the first month of pregnancy. In 2110 extra-utero genetic tailoring was widespread. The process allowed the parent to program the shape of his offspring. A computer-coded germ plasma could be built, link by amino-acid link, implanted into a genetically neutral egg, then carefully cultured and developed, eventually to be implanted inside a womb, either real or artificial. I do not want to design a whole child. I just want a baby girl. I want her identical to me. I will have to go back and see Diane before she gets pregnant, but that should be the easy part. I will not tell Dan this. I think this is a decision that I have to make myself. The baby is mine and so is the decision. My son will be a girl. * * * The baby was born this morning. It is a girl. A beautiful, pink little girl. I am delighted. And disappointed. I had wanted a boy. A boy . . . * * * I will not tell Diane this. I think this is a decision that I have to make myself (And there are ways that it can be done so that she will never know. I know when the child was conceived and I know which drugs to take beforehand. I will have to either replace Danny, or make him take the injection, but she will never suspect.) My daughter will be a son. * * * Why do I keep coming back? I get on her nerves, she gets on mine. We argue about the little things; we make a point of fighting with each other. Why? Last night we were lying in bed, side by side, just lying there, not doing anything, just listening to each other breathe and staring at the ceiling. She said, "Danny?" I said, "Yes?" She said, "It's over, isn't it?" I nodded. "Yes." She turned to me then and slid her arms around me. Her cheeks were wet too. I held her tight. "I'm sorry," I said. "I wanted it to work so much." She sniffed. "Me too." We held on to each other for a long time. After a while I shifted my position, then she shifted hers. She rolled over on her back and I slid on top of her. She was so slender, so intense. We moved together in silence, hearing only the sound of our breathing. We remembered and pretended, each of us lost in our own thoughts, and wishing that it hadn't come to this. The sheets were cool in the night and she was warm and silky. If only it could be like this all the time. . . . But it couldn't. It was over. We both knew it. * * * I'm not going back anymore. Whatever there was between us is gone. We both know it. The bad moments outweigh the good. There is no joy left. Besides, she isn't there all the time anyway. I have brought my son forward with me. I will find him a home in the twentieth century. And I will watch over him. I will be very careful not to accidentally excise him. He is all I have left. It's not without regret that I do this. I miss my Diane terribly. But something happened to us. The magic disappeared, the joy faded, and the delight we had found in each other ceased to exist. The last night... we made love mechanically, each seeking only our own physical release. Somehow, my feelings had become more important to me than hers. I wonder why? Was it because I knew that I would never could never experience it from her side? Perhaps. . . . Love with Diane was . . . sad. I could see the me in her, but I could never be that me. And that meant that she wasn't really me. Not really. She was somebody else. I couldn't communicate with her. We used the same words, but our meanings were different. (They must have been different. She wasn't me.) I'm sorry, Diane. I wanted it to work. I did. But I couldn't reach you. I couldn't reach you at all. So. I'll go back to my Danny. He'll understand. He's been waiting patiently for so long. . . . * * * Oh God, I feel alone. * * * Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made . Robert Browning Rabbi Ben Ezra, from stanza 1 * * * It's been years since I last added anything to this journal. I wonder how old I am now. I really have no way of telling. Forty? Fifty? Sixty? I'm not sure. The neo-procaine treatments I've been taking in 2101 seem to retard all physical evidence of aging. I could still be in my late thirties. But I doubt it. I've done so much. Seen so much. I've been living linearly semi-linearly. Instead of bouncing haphazardly around time, I've set up a home in 1956, and as it travels forward through time at its stately day-to-day pace, I am traveling with it. Oh, I'm still using the future and the past, but not as before. Before, I was young, foolish. I was like a barbarian at the banquet. I gulped and guzzled; I ate without tasting. I rushed through each experience like a tourist trying to see twenty-one European cities in two weeks and enjoying none of them. Now, I'm a gourmet. I savor each day. I taste the robustness of life, but not so hurriedly as to lose its delicate overtones. I've given up the hectic seventies for the quiet fifties the fifties are as early as I dare go without sacrificing the cultural comforts I desire. They are truly a magic moment in time, a teeterboard suspended between the wistful past and the soaring future. * * * I have not abandoned the use of the timebelt. I use it for amusement. (The lady who cut me off on the freeway this morning. She suddenly had four flat tires.) And justice. The man who walked into a schoolyard and started firing his rifle. He thought he had cleaned it, but somehow a wad of wet modeling clay had been jammed up the barrel. The gun exploded in his face. (I like that trick, I use it a lot. There are an awful lot of exploding guns in the world.) I read the news every day. I don't like seeing tragedies. I don't like plane crashes and murders and kidnappings and bizarre accidents. So, they don't happen anymore. I go and I see and I fix. Planes that might have crashed get delayed for odd reasons. One of my insurance companies watchdogs the airlines, demanding fixes of things that might not be discovered until after a plane goes down. Murderers and kidnappers disappear. Missing children are found. Terrorists have their bombs blow up in their faces. Rapists never mind, you don't want to know. Serial killers never get a chance to start. Devastating building fires don't happen without warning. People who start accidental forest fires get caught. Famous actors do not die in car crashes. Great rock stars don't lose their talent to drugs. Sometimes it's tricky, but I like the challenges. I like making things better. And I never leave any evidence. I can't fix it all, but I do my part. The odd thing is, I don't do it because I care. I can't care. These people aren't real to me. They're pieces on the playing board. I just do it because it satisfies my sense of rightness. Because it makes me feel a little bit more like a god to be doing something useful. And because I want my son to have a reason to respect me. * * * The fifties are a great time to live. They are close enough to the nations adventurous past to still bear the same strident idealism, yet they also bear the shape of the developing future and the promise of the technological wonders to come. Transistor radios are still marvelous devices and color television is a delicious miracle, but blue skies are commonplace and the wind blows with a freshness from the north that hints at something wild and suggests that the city is only a temporary illusion, a mirage glowing against a western desert. Brave highways crisscross the state and (I thank myself again) with a minimum of billboards. The roads are still new; they are the foundation for the great freeways of the future. This is the threshold of that era, but it is still too soon for them to be overburdened with traffic and ugliness. Driving is still an adventure. The hills around Los Angeles are still uncut and green with the city's own special color of vegetation. The dark trees hover, the dry grass smell permeates the cool days. The fifties are a peaceful time, a quiet sleeping time between two noisy bursts of years, a blue and white time filled with sweet yellow days, innocent music, and bright popcorn memories . . . * * * It is 1961 as I write this. The fifties have ended and their magic is fading quickly. A young President has stamped a new dream on the nation and the frenetic stamp and click of the seventies can already be heard rustling in the distance. The years are impatient; they tumble over each other like children, each rushing eagerly for its turn and each in turn tumbling inexorably into the black whirlpool of forevertime lost. Well, not forever lost, not to me. I have watched the fading of the fifties three times now, and perhaps I shall return again for a fourth. Perhaps . . . * * * Last week, in a mood of wistfulness for times lost, I went jaunting again. I went back to the past, to the house where Diane and I lived for such a short, short, long time. One of the walls had collapsed and the wind blew through the rooms. A fine layer of clean, dry dust covered everything. The pillars and drapes stood alone on the cold plain. My own doing, of course. I had not come back far enough, but I was afraid if I journeyed too far back, I would see her again. And yet I do want to see her again. Just a little bit farther back . . . * * * And this time, the house was not ruined. Just abandoned. It stood alone, empty and waiting. My footsteps echoed hollowly across the marble floors. Was she here? Had she been here at all? There was no way of knowing. I found my way to her rooms. Despite the acrid sunlight, her chambers were cold. I opened closets at random, pulled out drawers. Many of her silks were still here. Forgotten? Or just discarded? A shimmering dress, ice-cream pastel and deep forest-green I pressed my nose into the sleek shining material, seeking a long-remembered smell, a sweetlemony fragrance with an undertone of musk. The clean smell of a woman . . . Her smell is there, but faint. I dropped the dress. I am touched with incredible sadness. And then a sound, a step I ran for the other room, calling. Perhaps, perhaps, just a little bit farther back. The day after the last day I was there. So many years ago . . . * * * The air conditioner hums. The house is alive again. And my Diane is beautiful, even prettier than I remembered. Her auburn hair shimmers in the sunlight. She moves with the grace of a goddess, and she wears even less, a filmy thing of lace and silk. I can see the sweet pinkness of her skin. She hasn't seen me yet. I am here in the shadows, deep within the house. It has been too long. It hurts too much to watch. Abruptly, puzzlement clouds her face. She comes rushing in from the patio. "Danny? Is that you?" Eagerness. "Are you back?" And then she saw me. "Danny? What's happened? Are you all right? You look" and then she realized "old." "Diane," I blurted. "I came back because I loved you too much to stay away anymore." She was too startled to answer. She dropped her eyes and whispered, "I loved you too, Danny." Then she looked at me again. "But you're not Danny anymore. You're someone else." "But I am Danny " I insisted. She shook her head. "You're not the same one." I took a step forward. I reached as if to embrace her. She took a quick step back. "No, please, don't." "Diane, what's the matter?" "Danny " There were tears running down her cheeks. "Danny, why did you stay away so long? Look what you've done to yourself. You've gotten old. You're not my Danny anymore. You're you're not young." She sniffled and wiped quickly. "I came back, Dan. I couldn't stay away either. I came back to wait for you and hope that you'd come back too. But look at you. You waited too long to come back." "Diane, you loved me once. I'm still me. I'm still Danny. I have the same memories. Remember how you cried in my arms the last night we were together? Remember how we used to fix dinner together in the kitchen? Remember the " "Stop. Oh, stop. Please " And suddenly she was in my arms. Crying. "I loved you so much. So much. But you went away. How could you how could you stay away so long? I thought you loved me too." "Oh, sweetheart, yes. I did. I do. I love you too much. That's why I came back " I held her tightly to me. She was so warm. "But why not sooner? Why did you stay so long?" "I was stupid. Forgive me. Let me be with you, please. That's all that's important." My hands could feel the tender silkiness of her skin. I remembered how I used to caress her and I slid into the motions almost automatically. Her breasts were soft. Her hips were boyish. Her skin was so smooth "What are you doing?" She made as if to pull away. "Oh, baby, baby, please " "Oh, no not now, I couldn't. Please don't make me." "Diane, I still love you " The youthfulness of her body . . . "Oh, no. It's only words. You're only saying them as if they're some, kind of magic charm to get me into bed." She backed away, wiping at her eyes. "I'm sorry, Danny, I really did love you, but I can't anymore. You've" she hesitated here "changed. You're someone else. You don't really care about me anymore, do you?" She grabbed a robe and pulled it about her. "No, don't come any closer. Just listen a moment. There's a poem. It goes, 'Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made . . .' I had thought hoped that was how it would be for us." Her voice caught. "But you've ruined it. It only took you a day to destroy both of our lives." "No." I shook my head. "It didn't take a day. It took years. Diane, I'm sorry! Couldn't we ... ?" But she was gone. She had fled into the bedroom. "Diane " And then the gentle pop! of air rushing in to fill an empty space told me how completely she was gone. How far she-had fled. * * * Oh God. What have I done? I could try again. All I need to do is go back just a little earlier. I wouldn't make the same mistake this time. I want my Diane. I must have my Diane. I will have my Diane. * * * He's tried to talk me out of it, but I'm not going to let him stop me. I know why he wants to keep me from going back. He's jealous of her. Because she'll have me and he won't. But his way is wrong. I know that now. A man should have a woman. A real man needs a real woman. Diane, sweet Diane. Please don't reject me again. I'm not old. I'm not. And you're so young . . . * * * Oh God, why? Am I really that old and ugly? No. I can't be. I can't be. Do I dare go back and try again? * * * And again he tries to talk me out of it. Damn him anyway! * * * Somewhere there is a Dan who is getting older and older. And he's working his way back through time, chasing Diane. And each time Diane is that much younger and he's that much older. The gulf between them widens. Oh, my poor, poor Dan. But he won't listen. He just won't listen. I'm afraid to think of where he is heading. He'll work his way back through all the days of Diane, and every day she'll reject him. And Dan, poor Dan, he'll experience them all. Each time she rejects him will be the last day she'll spend in the fading past. So every day he'll go back one more day, and every day he'll be too old for her Until he gets back to the very first day. And then she'll be gone. There won't be any Diane at all. Just a memory. And, in the end, he'll be there waiting for her even before the first Danny. Waiting patiently for her first appearance, trying to re-create his lost love. But she won't show up. No, she'll have warned herself. Don't go back in time looking for a variant Diane. A grizzled old ghoul waits for you. No, she'll never come back at all. Poor Dan. Poor, poor Dan. * * * And yet, the one I feel sorriest for is young Dan. He'll never know what he's missing. Because, when he gets there, there won't be anyone there at all. He'll never have a Diane. Ever. Old Dan will have chased them all away. * * * I wish I could change it all. I wish I could. But I can't. Dammit. Now I know what it's like to have an indelible past one that can't be erased and changed at will. It's frustrating. It's maddening. And it makes me wish I had been more careful and thoughtful. But when you can erase your mistakes in a minute, you tend to get careless. Until you make one you can't erase. I feel uneasy because I think I didn't try hard enough, and yet, I can't think of anything I didn't do. I tried everything I could do to stop old Danny. But it wasn't enough, and now I'm left with the results of what he's done. We're all left with those results. I could find young Danny in a minute, and I could warn him to go back to Diane right away, before it's too late, before he gets too old; but it wouldn't do any good. All he would find would be old Danny, sitting and waiting. Sitting and waiting. Diane is gone. Forever. There's no way we can reach her. Old Danny has seen to that. And there's no other place to look for her. Any time. Any place. Any when that Diane might have thought to visit, there's an old Danny. Sitting and waiting. I'll never see my Diane again. (Can I content myself with Danny? My Danny? I'll have to.) * * * And yet, I wonder . . . Perhaps somewhere there is an older Diane, one who has aged like me. . . . I wonder how I might find her. Ah, but that way lies old Danny and madness. It's not the answer. * * * There is a party at my house, the big place in 1999. A hundred and fifty-three acres of forest, lake, and meadow. I don't know how many me's there are. The number varies. The party is spread out across the whole summer. Several days in April and May, quite a few in June and July, and also some in August. I think there may be a few in September too. Generally it starts about ten in the morning and lasts until I don't know when. It seems as if there's always a constant number of Dans and Dons arriving and leaving. It's like Grand Central Terminal, with passengers arriving and departing all the time, to and from destinations all over the world. Only, all the passengers are all me and all the destinations are the same place, only years removed. The younger Dans show up in May and June. They like the swimming and water-skiing and motorcycling. They like the company of each other. I prefer July. Most of the younger versions have faded by then. They're too nervous for me and they remind me too much of Diane. They're too active, I can't keep up with them, and sometimes I think they're talking on a different plane. I prefer the men of July; they're more my age, they're more comfortable, and they're more moderate. We still do a lot of swimming and riding; I remember, I used to enjoy that very much; but most of the time we just like to take it easy. * * * I don't like the men of August. I've been there a few times, and they're too sedentary. No, they're too old. They just sit around and drink. And talk. And drink some more. Some of them look positively wasted. Actually, itôs the men of late August I really don't like. The men of early August aren't that bad. It's just the old ones that bother me. Some of them are filthy. Their minds, their mouths, their bodies. They want to touch me too much. And they call me their Danny, their little boy. (Several of them even seem senile.) The men of early August are all right. They make me a little uncomfortable, but lately I've been visiting them more and more. Partly because it seems as if the younger men are taking over July and partly because I'm in August enough now to compensate for the older ones. Several of them are very nice though. Very understanding. We've had some interesting talks. (And that surprises me too that there are still things I can talk about with myself. I had thought I would have exhausted all subjects of conversation long ago. Apparently not.) In the evenings we go indoors (there's a pool inside too) and listen to music (I have several different listening rooms) or play poker, or billiards, or chess. When I get tired (and when I want to sleep alone), there's a chart on the wall indicating which days and which beds are still unused. (The chart covers a span of several years. Well, I have to sleep somewhere . . .) I make a mark in any space still blank and that closes that date. Then I bounce to that point in time. (Generally I try and use those days in serial order. I have servants in the house then and it wouldn't do to confuse them.) I'm still doing most of my living in the fifties, but when I'm in the mood for a party and that's been more and more lately I know where to find one. The poker games, for instance, are marathons. Or maybe it's only one poker game that's been going on since the party started. Whenever I get tired and want to quit, there's always a later me waiting for the seat. But my endurance isn't what it used to be. I get tired too fast these days. That's why I find the men of August so restful. * * * On August 13 a very strange thing happens. Has happened. Will happen. I'd known about it for some time that is, I'd known that something happens, because I don't attend the party linearly. I stay in a range of a week or two and bounce around within it. There's more variety that way. After August 13 the mood of the party is changed. Subdued. Almost morbid. Most of me seem to know why, but they don't refer to it very often. The last time something like this happened was just before I met Diane when all the other versio