There isn't much more to be said. Voting Ricky's Hired Girl stockÄit was still the largest single block-I had McBee eased upstairs to "Research Engineer Emeritus" and put Chuck in as chief engineer. John is boss of Aladdin but keeps threatening to retire-an idle threat. He and I and Jenny control the company, since he was careful to issue preferred stock and to float bonds rather than surrender control. I'm not on the board of either corporation; I don't run them and they compete. Competition is a good idea-Darwin thought well of it.

Me, I'm just the "Davis Engineering Company"-a drafting room, a small shop, and an old machinist who thinks I'm crazy but follows my drawings to exact tolerance. When we finish something I put it out for license.

I had my notes on Twitchell recovered. Then I wrote and told him I had made it and returned via cold sleep...and apologized abjectly for having "doubted" him. I asked if he wanted to see the manuscript when I finished. He never answered so I guess he is still sore at me.

But I am writing it and I'll put it in all major libraries even if I -k have to publish at my own expense. I owe him that much. I owe him much more; I owe him for Ricky. And for Pete. I'm going to title it Unsung Genius. Jenny and John look as if they would last forever. Thanks to geriatrics, fresh air, sunshine, exercise, and a mind that never worries, Jenny is prettier than ever at...well, sixty-three is my guess. John thinks that I am "merely" clairvoyant and does not want to look at the evidence. Well, how did I do it? I tried to explain it to Ricky, but she got upset when I told her that while we were on our honeymoon I was actually and no foolin' also up at Boulder, and that while I was visiting her at the Girl Scout camp I was also lying in a drugged stupor in San Fernando Valley.

She turned white. So I said, "Let's put it hypothetically. It's all logical when you look at it mathematically. Suppose we take a guinea pig-white with brown splotches. We put him in the time cage and kick him back a week. But a week earlier we had already found him there, so at that time we had put him in a pen with himself. Now we've got two guinea pigs... although actually it's

just one guinea pig, one being the other one a week older. So when you took one of them and kicked him back a week and-"

"Wait a minute! Which one?"

"Which one? Why, there never was but one. You took the one a week younger, of course, because-"

"You said there was just one. Then you said there were two. Then you said the two was just one. But you were going to take one of the two... when there was just one-"

"I'm trying to explain how two can be just one. If you take the younger-"

"How can you tell which guinea pig is younger when they look just alike?"

"Well, you could cut off the tail of the one you are sending back. Then when it came back you would--"

"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. 1 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 Saturday, 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 Twitchell 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 declassified-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 latitudes 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.