Oh, I’m no four-dimensional thinker; but, as I understand it, if people could go back to a more recent time, their actions would affect our own history, which would be a paradox or contradiction of facts. Can’t have that in a well-run universe, you know. 

1. Getting Away (Jan 1976) Galaxy
2. Predators (Oct 1976) The Ideas of Tomorrow
3. To 1966 (Spring 1977) Chacal
4. Spectator Sport (Jul 1977) Amazing
5. The Maw (Jul 1977) F&SF
6. Time and Hagakure (Winter 1977) Asimov’s
7. Where or When (Jan 1991) Asimov’s
8. The Glowing Cloud (Jan 1992) Asimov’s
9. Now That We Have Each Other (Jul 1992)   Asimov’s
10. One Kansas Night (Jun 1994) Asimov’s
11. Living It (Aug 1994) Asimov’s
12. Staying in Storyville (Dec 2006) in When or Where
13. Life’s Work (Dec 2006) in When or Where
14. The Here and Now (Mar 1998) Asimov’s

 What do you want me to do? Go back and find out where Captain Kidd buried his loot? 

—“Getting Away”

 I had to choose between a panic if the fathead got them to thinking, and a possible panic from the flash of the gun. But when a 20th gets to talking about his “rights” and what he is “owed,&rdauo; things can get out of hand. 

 In the weeks since the whole business of the time changes started, I had not been this close to being caught since that first day in the cabin northwest of Duluth, when I had, in fact, been caught without knowing what hit me. 

 Dr. Isaac Asimov
Director: Thiotimoline Research Foundation
Trantor MA31416 

 He swept out of the cell, through space and through time, at light-speed across unseen prairies, into the storms that raged down a great particle accelerator. 

 The tatoo was obviously her social security number, but it was preceded by an “A” and followed by a space and five additional digits. 

1. Backspace (Winter 1977) enter the backspace button
2. Balancing Act (16 Feb 1981) editing Pete’s bloopers and more
3. Backup System (26 Oct 1981) Sam’s death causes backspacing
4. Wrong Number (21 Dec 1981) aliens v. Russia

 My friend Sam is the only person I know who edits events. Which is to say, he does something in his head and the past changes; the alterations, of course also reflect into the present and the future. 

—“Backup System”

 To the Reader of this Work:
In submitting Captain Carter’s strange manuscript to you in book form, I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will be of interest.
My first recollection of Captain Carter is of the few months he spent at my father’s home in Virginia, just prior to the opening of the civil war. I was then a child of but five years, yet I well remember the tall, dark, smooth-faced, athletic man whom I called Uncle Jack. . . .
very sincerely yours,
Edgar Rice Burroughs 

—from the foreward to A Princess of Mars

 “I built it,” said Kelly, not without pride.
“What for?” I asked. “Time Travel?” I sneered.
“Yes,” he said. 

 Swimming strongly on my way back to what the sage called the remote future, my form began to flow and change according to time pressure. Sometimes my essence was like steam, sometimes like a mountain. 

 He went through every moment, every step, every ragged breath, every slow, wading, stumbling yard through the cold water to the beach. And it all felt the same, as though he were just a spectator. The shell exploded. Staefler died a second time. 

 Anything you can do to expediate the publishing of Vahl’s story will be most appreciated, so that he will feel free to return to his own time. 

 Having learned early of the dangers attendant upon being unable to move the Time Machine, I had added to its structure a set of wheels and a driving chain attached to the pedals originally meant simply as foot rests. In short, I converted it into a Time Velocipede. 

 Faust and Mephistopheles entered the tavern and shed their heavy overcoats. 

 We can’t be sure how accurate our estimates of time and place are, but you seem to resonate with someone in London in 1871. 

 So I told him.
From beginning to end (well not end, I didn’t tell him of his own funeral) and tried to leave nothing out that was pertinent to the plan. I didn’t know what else to do. The year 1939 may have been ready for Buck Rogers or Brick Bradford and his Time Top, but was it ready for the hard, cold reality of time travel? 

 “You’re angry because I stayed in fifteenth-century Italy so long?”
“I’m not especially mad,” you answered, growling. “but the Time Travel Overseeing Community wasn’t much pleased. You shouldn’t have dropped in on Leonardo da Vinci with those tips on aerodynamics.’ 

 Eat your heart out Harry Jones! 

 “Oh, well—” He runs his pasty white hands through hispockets while Cole and the girl do the same. “I have a candy bar or two, I believe,” and he brings them out. “Cole, you have a bottle, don’t you?"
The guy with the black hat scowls at him, but brings a flask out of his hip pocket and lays it on the table. 

 I felt angry. I wanted to show that kid, but there wasn’t anything I could show him, with the possible exception of sentence structure. 

 In my storage case were volumes for his perusal—a concise history of the world through the year 2000, a selection of the greatest poets since the master, selected volumes of Shakespearean criticism, and the massive one-volume Armstead Shakespeare, the definitive Shakespeare, published in 1997. 

 The fabric of time is a delicate, almost whimsical thing. Our success rate runs at nearly eight-two percent, and within the industry that is an enviable rate. But we just can not guarantee success. 

1. Mandalay (Oct 1979) Asimov's
2. Out of Service (Jul 1980) Asimov's
3. Slowly By, Lorena (Nov 1980) Asimov's
4. Intersections (26 Oct 1981) Asimov's

 Clever people he worked for.
But not clever enough to preven the Fracture, when Augustan Romans had tumbled into the waters of the Spanish Main and bandannaed urban guerillas shot the hell out of the Sun King’s palace at Verasilles. Not clever enough to point the way to Homeline, except as a hundred-kilometer march from line to line through a hexagonal sewer in Space₄. 

—“Mandalay’

 There exists but one node of time/future open within the range of our frames. You must go there and prepare the way for our exodus. Else, the supernova shall extinguish us all. 

 Odd that the book-man should shrug off the value of books, but Pausanias had too much to do to ponder it, overseeing the copying, the shipping of the books up the Nile, the reorganization of his new estate, and of course there was taia, then a new—bride. 

1. Professor Cracker’s Antitelephone (Feb 1980) reverse-time phone
2. The Backward Banana (Jul 1980) fruit travels in time
3. The Queer Story of Gardner’s Magazine (Aug 1980) magazine from 2556
4. Parallel Pasts (26 Oct 1981) to the past in a parallel world

 Somewhere in the text is a block of letters which taken forward spell the last name of a top science fiction author who has written about time travel. 

—“The Backward Banana”

 Now wait a minute! I married—er, I’m going to marry—Betty-Ann? 

 Whatever. And as for the Time Patrol, why are we here in the boondocks instead of at the library of Alexandria? Why do we insist on so much privacy when we make our deals? Just so they won’t run across us. And they won’t. 

 THE ALLIANCE IS AN IMPOTENT SHAM, IT’S PRINCIPAL EXPORT BEING STUPIDITY AND TREACHERY. 

1. The Hotter Flash (13 Apr 1981) Menopausal time travel in Asimov’s
2. The Time-Warp Trauma (21 Dec 1981) Central Park time warps in Asimov’s

 Doctors don’t know anything. I lived through it, and I know that my hot flashes certainly were hotter. 

—“The Hotter Flash”

1. Time & Punishment (11 May 1981) first story in Asimov
2. Time on My Hands (Oct 1982) in Asimov’s
3. As Time Goes By (Feb 1984) in Asimov’s

 They all say that. “Why is it,” I asked her, “you seem to remember the, ah, original sequence? In a reality change, memories are altered along with everything else. How can you be certain that time has been tampered with?” That question usually ends it right there. 

 I frowned and made a mental note to buy an umbrella. 

 Thunder. Distant sound.
Questions posed shake universes like constructs , like universes, shake posed questions, sound distant thunder. 

1. “Fire Watch” (15 Feb 1982) Asimov’s
2. The Doomsday Book (1992) Kivrin Engle to 1320 Oxford
3. To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998)    Ned Henry to 1888 Oxford
4. Blackout (2010) Michael, Polly and Merope to WW II England
5. All Clear (2010) continuation of Blackout

 “But I’m not ready,” I’d said. “Look, it too me four years to get ready to travel with St Paul. St Paul. Not St Paul’s. You can’t expect me to get ready for London in the Blitz in two days.” 

 My friend Selka and I have devised a game in which we carefully alter the stream of time, to cause some subtle change in our own time period. This particular round, for example, concerns itself with the location of our city’s capitol building. 

 I’m not a seer. I’m a . . . traveler. From one time to another. Do you understand? I know when you’ll die, and where, and how, because it’s all written down in a history book. 

1. 1. “Aquila the God’ (Jan 1982) Asimov’s
2. 1. “Aquila’ (Jan 1982) Asimov’s
3. 2. “Aquila the God’ (Apr 1982) Asimov’s
4. 3. “Aquila Meets Bigfoot’ (Jan 1983) Amazing
5. 4. “Aquila: The Final Conflict’ (May 1983) Amazing
6. 5. The Aquilad (Dec 1983) combines 1-4
7. 6. Aquila and the Iron Horse (May 1988) Volume II
8. 7. Aquila and the Sphinx (Dec 1988) Volume III

 I understood very little of what he was saying, but he went on to say that he was from the far future and that they had come in search of certain criminals who had to be brought to trial, who were guilty of attempting to tamper with the past . . . . 

 Here we have a time traveller, and her name is Jalian. Yes, Jalian d’Arsennette, except that there have been some changes. 

 Therefore, he was not surprised to see himself emerge from the chamber, wearing this very suit, a moment after he had formed the decision. 

 The comedian looked just like a living, breathing, three-dimensional human being, the reincarnation of Lenny Bruce, come to see the unhappy world end. 

 Locating his car, Dr. Breakdown extracted from the trunk a Phillips-head screwdriver, a toothbrush, his spare tire, five felt pens, and a plumber’s helper. With these materials he constructed a duplicate of the time machine in the university physics lab. 

 If our hypothesis is correct and the Corvini-Langstrum effect is a form of time travel . . . then you may be able to change the circumstances and prevent her death. 

 The story does not begin with Pilibosh. In a bewildering cosmological sense it does not begin at all, nor does it end. But that is a matter best left to the philosophers. 

 I did a lotta things in my life that I ought notta. 

 It falls our task to correct untoward trends in history, eliminating unhappy catastrophe. 

 Please let me explain, Mr. Meisner. I don’t want to marry Marcy now. I want to marry her in the future, ten years from now, when she’s eighteen. That is, I believe, an acceptable age. 

 “What the? . . .” He tipped up the envelope. Ashes spilled onto the floor. 

 What’;s happening? I’ll tell you what’s happening. Those “films” you see flying off surfaces and hitting your eyes—that’s how our friend here thought visions worked. And now we’re seeing it happen, as though it’s true. 

 A decade of peace and quiet and short hair was winding down; a time when people knew their place and stayed in it. For ten years nobody had wanted anything but a new car and a bigger TV set. Now all that was about to change. In a little over a year the Cuban missile crisis would send thousands of people into their back yards to dig bomb shelters, and “advisors” would start pouring into Southeast Asia. In another year the president would be dead. 

 Well, you see, most kites fly in the three dimensions that we’re familiar with in our world, but some kites flyu in four or even five dimensions and go a little bit outward and a little bit inward into time. 

 He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew. He knew that his name was Charles Phillips and that before he had come to live among these people he had lived in the year 1984, when there had been such things as computers and television sets and baseball and jet planes, and the world was full of cities, not merely five but thousands of them, New York and London and Johannesburg and Parks and Liverpool and Bangkok and San Francisco and Buenos Ares and a multitude of others, all at the same time. 

 Let’s put it this way—if you do persuade the lady to take a bite, you lose your legs. 

 The hamster is back. Also my wristwatch, which I strapped on its back. 

 “I said, have you got something going,” she repeated, still with the accent—the accent of my own time. 

 A wooly rhino appeared out of nowhere on the right side of the track, its red hide caked with mud and dust, and paced the car for two miles; then it slackened and turned away, was lost to sight. 

 As far as Harry was concerned, they were getting altogether too near his gigantic ancestor now. 

 Got the ship clear out of the atmosphere and hit this time warp or something. Nearly got eat by Vikings. Worse than the Mormons. Fixed up the ship and flipped it out again. Ended up in Medival Europe. Medicis and monks, all kinds of shit. Joined someone’s army in Naples. Got caught and picked olives for a duke. Lok at my face. They got diseases you never heard of there. 

 Even if you do come back. They say you really do travel in time and that you really can change things if you try hard enough. 

 Normal intestinal flora. Mutated and hybridized with amyotrophic lateral schlerosis. Infects via the GI tract and destroys the central nervous systems of higher primates. Neat. Grew it in the guts of an Australopithecine on the African veldt, two, three million years ago. Not easy, Jacob, not easy. When I woke up on that pallet at Centrum, I had bedsores, and a headache that lasted a month. Killed them all. Every last one of the buggers. Nothing left on this planet with more brains than an orangutan. 

 “It’s nothing personal,” I say. “It’s strictly a scientific question . . .” 

 Full coverage in event of death due to suicidal, time-traveling grandsons . . . 

1. Travel is possible only into the past.
2. The object transported will return to exactly the time and place of departure.
3. It is not possible to bring objects from the past to the present.
4. Actions in the past cannot change the present.

 They might send someone else, but they might not. The tampering might have already changed things too much. 

 Have you sold a ring recently, in the shape of a serpent with its own tail in its mouth? 

 Harry bought a pair of socks, thick gray wool, for 89 cents. When the man took his dollar, Harry held his breath: each first time made a little pip in his stomach. But on one ever looked at the dates of old bills. He bought two oranges for five cents each, and then, thinking of Manny, bought a third. At a candystore he bought G-8 and His Battle Aces for fifteen cents. At The Collector’s Cozy in the other time they would gladly give him thirty dollars for it. Finally, he bought a cherry Coke for a nickel and headed towards the park. 

 “Because,” and here he struck his chest a resounding thump, “the burning memories of youthful snubs and spurnings remain unavenged and, indeed, forever unavengable.” 

 Don’t change the past or the past will change you. The time laws. You lawyers understand this kind of thing. You, and you alone, are responsible for any dislocation of past events, persons or things, et cetera et cetera. Read the small print and sign. 

 RG-32 was a rather old-fashioned robot, eminently replaceable. He could observe and report, perhaps without quite the ingenuity and penetration of a human being—but well enough. He would be without fear, intent only on following orders, and he could be expected to tell the truth. 

 The scientists had been arguing for half a century over the nature of the K-T Event. Some said a comet or a planetoid hit the Earth; others, that one or more of those big super-volcanoes, like the one that mad your Yellowstone Park, cut loose with an eruption that blanketed the Earth with ash and smoke. 

 One day this bloke Standish came in with his friend Hofmann, saying they wanted a time safari to cave-man days, to shoot dinosaurs the way our ancestors used to do. 

 It will demonstrate that all these prehistoric beasts, whereof your clients bring home heads, hides, and photographs, did not live in succession, but all at the same time. 

 That left the incest angle, and I asked him about that. He says that making it with your great-great-granddaughter from the twenty-first century is not much different from making it with your clothes-designer neighbor from across the hall. 

1. There and Then (Nov 1993) Asimov’s
2. The Age of Mud and Slime (Mar 1996) Asimov’s
3. A Silurian Tale (May 1996) Asimov’s
4. The Wind Over the World (Oct/Nov 1996) Asimov’s
5. The Real World (30 Aug 2000) Sci Fiction
6. Chain of Life (Oct/Nov 2000) Asimov’s
7. The Despoblado (22 Nov 2000) Sci Fiction
8. Cloud by Van Gogh (Dec 2000) F&SF
9. Half a Loaf (Jan 2001) Asimov’s
10. Five Miles from Pavement (21 Mar 2001) Sci Fiction
11. The World Without (Jul 2001) Asimov’s
12. Walking in Circles (Jan 2002) Asimov’s
13. Treading the Maze (Feb 2002) Asimov’s
14. Foodstuff (Feb 2002) F&SF
15. Beyond the Sea (29 Aug 2002) Revolution SF
16. Exile (Aug 2003) Asimov’s
17. Chaos and Gods (18 Aug 2003) Revolution SF
18. Invisible Kingdoms (Feb 2004) F&SF
19. Babel (Mar 2004) Analog
20. Another Continuum Heard From! (2 Apr 2004)   Revolution SF
21. A Paleozoic Palimpsest (Oct 2004) F&SF
22. The Wave-Function Collapse (Mar 2005) Asimov’s
23. Promised Land (Jul 2005) F&SF
24. Silv’ry Moon (Oct/Nov 2005) F&SF
25. Diluvium (May 2006) F&SF
26. All of Creation (18 Jan 2008) Cosmos
27. The World Within the World (Mar 2008) Asimov’s
28. The 400-Million-Year Itch (Apr 2008) F&SF
29. Variant (Summer 2008) Postscripts
30. The Woman Under the World (Jul 2008) Asimov’s
31. Slug Hell (Sep 2008) Asimov’s
32. Lost Places of Earth (Jan 2009) in We Think, Therefore We Are
33. The Tortoise Grows Elate (Mar/Apr 2012) F&SF
34. The End in Eden (Oct 2012) Analog
35. The Gift Horse (Fall 2012) in The 400-Million-Year Itch
36. Sidestep (Spring 2013) in Invisible Kingdoms

 Where’s he going to run to? Home is four hundred million miles away. 

—The End in Eden

 Time travel should not be possible in a rational universe. 

 For a while I lived in this little town by the sea. Boy, it was a soft job. Santa Barbara had become civilized by then: no more Indian rebellions, no more pirates storming up the beach, nearly all the grizzly bears gone. Once in a while some bureaucrat from Mexico City would raise hell with us, but by and large the days of the old Missions were declining into forlorn shades, waiting for the Yankees to come. 

 I was stupid. I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know how to take care of her. 

 What we should do is gather up a group of people, and train them, and then travel back in time and conquer the Roman Empire. 

 The wormholes were the port’s very reason for existing, the center of Cheena’s universe. 

 One man with a sunstroker can be overwhelmed by savages equipped with nothing more than neutron bombs—if there are enough of them, and they don’t mind dying! 

 I don’t know many captains, but she immediately recognized me. 

 Sure. Researchers. Tourists. Criminals altering their present by manipulating the past. Religious pilgrims. Collectors. Who knows what motivates people a million years from now? 

1. A. Diving into the Wreck (Dec 2005) Asimov’s
2. B. Room of Lost Souls (Apr/May 2008) Asimov’s
3. The Spires of Denon (Apr/May 2009) Asimov’s
4. Diving into the Wreck (Nov 2009) includes parts of A and B
5. Becoming One with the Ghosts (Oct/Nov 2010) Asimov’s
6. Becalmed (Apr/May 2011) Asimov’s
7. City of Ruins (May 2011)
8. Stealth (Oct/Nov 2011) Asimov’s
9. The Spires of Denon (Apr/May 2009) Asimov’s
10. Boneyards (Jan 2012)
11. Skirmishes (Apr 2013)
12. Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls (May 2013) Asimov’s
13. The Application of Hope (Aug 2013) Asimov’s
14. Encounter on Starbase Kappa (Oct/Nov 2013) Asimov’s
15. The Runabout (May/Jun 2017) Asimov’s

 Later, he learned that the anacapa malfunctioned, buringing him and his crew five thousand years into their future. 

 Some assert that the realm of quantum mechanics is so removed from the realm of our senses we’re unequipped to judge. 

 She was strectched out on one of the deck chairs on the balcony of their apartment. They had rented it temporarily until they could cash in a few more diamonds, pretty much worthless in their own time but extremely valuable here, and buy a house. They were rich of course. Why would they come back poor?

Cork was standing at the railing pointing at his bell bottoms. “People are looking at me funny,” he said. “Nobody else is wearing these.” Their pre-migration research indicated people did, but they could have been a couple of years off. 

 When can you make the machine work? 

 Prove it then. Prove it by doing something for me. Something special. 

 It is possible to create a set of coherent relationships between individual tachyons, similar to quantum entanglement. 

 It is the future. 

 Termite Trouble? You Can Turn Back Time! 

 We have a hard time getting to sleep—except for Elliot. 

 If you actually wanted to change things—say, to tell your mother lies about your father so she’d marry someone else, so you wouldn’t be born because you hate your life in the present—you wouldn’t be able to do it. 

 (Imagine our relief to learn of Waterloo.) 

 At worst, we’ll be absorbed into the super-consciousness, learning and seeing all knowledge at once in a single stupendous flash. More likely, we’ll find a tunnel to an underground civilization of pygmies or a portal through time. 

 The world was on the brink of nuclear war, and no one knew it yet. Almost no one that, is. 

 “There are several futures, Emil,” Real Haneul said. ”Each one is trying to reach back to shape the past so it can be.” 

 It’s like Schroedinger’s Subway Rider. He’s both here and twenty minutes away at the same time and you don’t know which until he meets his girlfriend. 

 It was supposed to trigger a rewind when her heart stopped. If he’d misconfigured it, Irena’s consciousness would have died in an immutable present. 

 The reason her parents had put an ad in the paper offering free room and board and a small stipend to a college student was to have someone around to look after their children, especially Cyril, who wouldn’t be ready to go to school that fall, not even to kindergarten, and might never be. 

 What happened in Hatcher’s room? 

 “This web site, Bob,” he said to me, shaking the snow off his black beret, sitting down beside me at the bar, ”it’s a time travel site. Time travel?” 

1. Something Real (Apr/May 2012) Asimov’s
2. At Palomar (Jul 2013) Asimov’s

 But I have to admit I’m not real sure what’s going on here. 

 Grandma and I have a theory about how John Carter found his way to Mars. We think we can explain it with Schrödinger’s equation. 

 I do not have to be a physicist, and I certainly am not one, to recall Einstein’s words: “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubborn, persistent illusion.” 

 To her all times are one, all distances are one. 

1. The New Guys Always Work Overtime (Feb 2013) Asimov’s
2. There Was No Sound of Thunder (Jun 2014) Asimov’s
3. Where There Is Nothing, There Is God (Dec 2016) Asimov’s

 Anyway, we tried, me and Deke. I personally tried four different times. But Hitler is a really charismatic baby. 

 Werner Heisenberg’s controversial uncertainty principle was one of the cornerstones of quantum physics. Heisenberg postulated that it was possible to know a particle’s position or that it was possible to know how fast the particle moved, but no one could know both the position and movement of the particle at the same time. Berg had spent quite a bit of time in Oxford, talking with leading scientists as he prepared for this job, and one of them used a description that moved away from particles into theory, which Berg appreciated. That scientist had told Berg that at its core, Heisenberg’s principle meant this: The act of observing changes the thing being observed. 

 I’m you. You from the future. 

 They already have warrantless wiretaps and indefinite detention. Imagine if they could go back in time and spy on you in the past. Or kill people as little children. 

 The only difference, apparently, is the major dressing used on a roast beef club sandwich at a place called Garalfalo’s. 

 And you’ll discover something else when you’re tinkering with that drive. 

 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, . . . 

 No. No travel is involved. A user cannot affect anything that has happened, ever. All the Chrono does is show on a screen what is already there, was there, will always be there. 

 You can’t go back there, no matter how much you pay. 

 Contained within the poem was a way to close a loop of time, pinch it off, and discard it. I’d broken time. 

 Actually it wasn’t cool, but I threw the scarf around my neck and headed for the Cloisters, inertia being my guiding principle. 

 AAPL, AMZN, GOOG, NFLX 

 On their way, the Force had discovered the time gates, a pair of artificial wormholes connected across eleven years of time. All the ancient wormholes were incalcuably valuable; their possession was the defining feature of the patron nations. Finding a wormhole was the Union’s chance to slip from beneath the yoke of the Congregate. 

 This day, the next hour, were the reasons he had built the device. Not so that graduate students in religion could travel back to Christ’s cruxifixion to see if it really happened as the Bible said. Not so that historians could add to their dissertations by actually speaking to Thomas Jefferson. Not so that techs could fruitlessly try to modify the device so that someone could finally shoot Hitler. 

 This Commander Parsec show is pretty ridiculous. The commander is always rescuing bimbos and defeating the bad guys all over the Galaxy. 

 Mother had gone on ahead, Ancesters only knew where. So there was no way forward. But somewhere in the starlit hours of the past—somewhere in the days when the Citadel still existed, and Bright Princess Ngoc Minh’s quarrel with the empress was still fresh and raw—Mother was still alive.
There was a way back. 

 A child doesn’t fully mature until it self-consciously overcomes the mistakes its parents and its community made in raising it. What we are doing is saying to our ancestors, ‘Here and here you were wrong. We refuse to accept these errors. We are taking command of our own history.’ This is part of the maturing of human culture. 

 Will this whole dream last through all that drive and any time after they get there? Is he losing it, maybe, the way Niamh is? Are they both lying in a mortuary somewhere, dead and cold, and this is some kind of afterlife? Has time been changed somehow, so he can do better for her this time around? Jesus, would that even work? Could he be better. do better, given the chance? 

 Correct, little algorithm, but we are not in your present. We transmitted ourselves by tachyons into the past, back into the stelliferous period, to one of the first galaxies. We have been working here in the morning of the Universe for twelve million years. 

 “The odd ones from the future and the past,” she said, matter-of-factly. “The ones who taught us that the past and future are not one simple path but more like a basket full of loose threads. And all these threads are strung together with different starting points and different events, like knots, along the threads.”