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.