"Why, Danny, how cruel! Besides, guinea pigs don"t have tails."
She seemed to think that proved something. I should never have tried to explain.
But Ricky is not one to fret over things that aren"t important. Seeing that I was upset, she said softly, "Come here, dear." She rumpled what hair I have left and kissed me. "One of you is all I want, dearest. Two might be more than I could manage. Tell me one thing-are you glad you waited for me to grow up?"
I did my darnedest to convince her that I was.
But the explanation I tried to give does not explain everything. I missed a point even though I was riding the merry-go-round myself and counting the revolutions. Why didn"t I see the notice of my own withdrawal? I mean the second one, in April 2001, not the one in December 2000. I should have; I was there and I used to check those lists. I was awakened (second time) on Friday, 27 April, 2001; it should have been in next morning"s Times. But I did not see it. I"ve looked it up since and there it is: "D. B. Davis," in the Times for Sat.u.r.day, 28 April, 2001.
Philosophically, just one line of ink can make a different universe as surely as having the continent of Europe missing. Is the old "branching time streams" and "multiple universes" notion correct? Did I bounce into a different universe, different because I had monkeyed with the setup? Even though I found Ricky and Pete in it? Is there another universe somewhere (or somewhen) in which Pete yowled until he despaired, then wandered off to fend for himself, deserted? And in which Ricky never managed to flee with her grandmother but had to suffer the vindictive wrath of Belle?
One line of fine print isn"t enough. I probably felt asleep that night and missed reading my own name, then stuffed the paper down the chute next morning, thinking I had finished with it. I am absent-minded, particularly when I"m thinking about a job.
But what would I have done if I had seen it? Gone there, met myself-and gone stark mad? No, for if I had seen it, I wouldn"t have done the things I did afterward-"afterward" for me-which led up to it. Therefore it could never have happened that way. The control is a negative feedback type, with a built-in "fail safe," because the very existence of that line of print depended on my not seeing it; the apparent possibility that I might have seen it is one of the excluded "not possibles" of the basic circuit design.
"There"s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true. There is only one real world, with one past and one future. "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen." Just one... but big enough and complicated enough to include free will and time travel and everything else in its linkages and feedbacks and guard circuits. You"re allowed to do anything inside the rules... but you come back to your own door.
I"m not the only person who has time-traveled. Fort listed too many cases not explainable otherwise and so did Ambrose Bierce. And there were those two ladies in the gardens of the Trianon. I have a hunch, too, that old Doc Twitch.e.l.l closed that switch oftener than he admitted... to say nothing of others who may have learned how in the past or future. But I doubt if much ever comes of it. In my case only three people know and two don"t believe me. You can"t do much if you do time-travel. As Fort said, you railroad only when it comes time to railroad.
But I can"t get Leonard Vincent out of my mind. Was he Leonardo da Vinci? Did he beat his way across the continent and go back with Columbus? The encyclopedia says that his life was such-and-such-but he might have revised the record. I know how that is; I"ve had to do a little of it. They didn"t have social-security numbers, ID cards, nor fingerprints in fifteenth-century Italy; he could have swung it.
But think of him, marooned from everything he was used to, aware of flight, of power, of a million things, trying desperately to picture them so that they could be made-but doomed to frustration because you simply can"t do the things we do today without centuries of former art to build on.
Tantalus had it easier.
I"ve thought about what could be done with time travel commercially if it were decla.s.sified-making short jumps, setting up machinery to get back, taking along components. But someday you"d make one jump too many and not be able to set up for your return because it"s not time to "railroad." Something simple, like a special alloy, could whip you. And there is that truly awful hazard of not knowing which way you are going. Imagine winding up at the court of Henry VIII with a load of subflexive fasartas intended for the twenty-fifth century. Being becalmed in the horse lat.i.tudes would be better.
No, you should never market a gadget until the bugs are out of it.
But I"m not worried about "paradoxes" or "causing anachronisms"-if a thirtieth-century engineer does smooth out the bugs and then sets up transfer stations and trade, it will be because the Builder designed the universe that way. He gave us eyes, two hands, a brain; anything we do with them can"t be a paradox. He doesn"t need busybodies to "enforce" His laws; they enforce themselves. There are no miracles and the word "anachronism" is a semantic blank.
But I don"t worry about philosophy any more than Pete does. Whatever the truth about this world, I like it. I"ve found my Door into Summer and I would not time-travel again for fear of getting off at the wrong station. Maybe my son will, but if he does I will urge him to go forward, not back. "Back" is for emergencies; the future is better than the past. Despite the c.r.a.pehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands... -with tools... with horse sense and science and engineering.
Most of these long-haired belittlers can"t drive a nail nor use a slide rule, I"d like to invite them into Twitch.e.l.l"s cage and ship them back to the twelfth century-then let them enjoy it.
But I am not mad at anybody and I like now. Except that Pete is getting older, a little fatter, and not as inclined to choose a younger opponent; all too soon he must take the very Long Sleep. I hope with all my heart that his gallant little soul may find its Door into Summer, where catnip fields abound and tabbies are complacent, and robot opponents are programmed to fight fiercely -but always lose-and people have friendly laps and legs to strop against, but never a foot that kicks.
Ricky is getting fat, too, but for a temporary, happier reason. It has just made her more beautiful and her sweet eternal Yea! is unchanged, but it isn"t comfortable for her. I"m working on gadgets to make things easier. It just isn"t very convenient to be a woman; something ought to be done and I"m convinced that some things can be done. There"s that matter of leaning over, and also the backaches-I"m working on those, and I"ve built her a hydraulic bed that I think I will patent. It ought to be easier to get in and out of a bathtub than it is too. I haven"t solved that yet.
For old Pete I"ve built a "cat bathroom" to use in bad weather-automatic, self-replenishing, sanitary, and odorless. However, Pete, being a proper cat, prefers to go outdoors, and he has never given up his conviction that if you just try all the doors one of them is bound to be the Door into Summer.
You know, I think he is right.
The End