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 doublecheck 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 it’s 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.)