The door opened and Hezekiah pattered in, with a folder tucked beneath his arm. He handed the folder to Vickers and stood to one side, waiting.

Vickers opened the folder with trembling fingers and it was there upon the page.

_Vickers, Jay, b. A ug. 5. 1937. 1.t. June 20, 1956, h.a., t., i.m., lat._

He studied the line and it made no sense.

"Hezekiah."

"Yes, sir."

"What does all this mean?"

"To what do you refer, sir?"

"This line here," said Vickers, pointing. "This l.t. business and the rest of it."

Hezekiah bent and read it:

"Jay Vickers, born August 5, 1937, life transferred June 20, 1956, hunch ability, time sense, inherent memory, latent mutation. Meaning, sir, that you are unaware."

Vickers glanced at the line above and there he found the names, the place on the bracketed lines that indicated marriage, from which the line bearing his own name sprouted.

_Charles Vickers, b. Jan. 10, 1907, cont. Aug. 8, 1928, aw., t., el., i.m., s.a. Feb. 6, 1961._

And:

_Sarah Graham, b. Apr. 16, 1910, cont. Sept. 12, 1927, aw., ind. comm., t., i.m., s.a. Mar. 9, 1960._

His parents. Two paragraphs of symbols. He tried to make it out.

"Charles Vickers, born January 10, 1907, continued, no, that wouldn't be right…"

"Contacted, sir," said Hezekiah.

"Contacted August 8, 1928, aware, t., el., what's that?"

"Time sense and electronics, sir," said Hezekiah.

"Time sense?"

"Time sense, sir. The other worlds. They are a matter of time, you know."

"No, I didn't," Vickers said.

"There is no time," said Hezekiah. "Not as the normal human thinks of time, that is. Not a continuous flow of time, but brackets of time, one second following behind the other. Although there are no seconds, no such things as seconds, no such measurement, of course."

"I know," said Vickers. And he did know. Now it all came back to him, the explanation of those other worlds, the following worlds, each one encapsulated in a moment of time, in some strange and arbitrary division of time, each time bracket with its own world, how far back, how far ahead, no one could know or guess.

Somewhere inside of him the secret trigger had been tripped and the inherent memory was his, as it always had been his, but hidden in his unawareness, as his hunch ability still was largely trapped in his unawareness.

There was no time, Hezekiah had said. No such thing as time in the terms of normal human thought. Time was bracketed and each of its brackets contained a single phase of a universe so vastly beyond human comprehension that it brought a man up short against the impossibility of envisioning it.

And time itself, Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past — except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.

Back on Man's original Earth, there had been speculation on traveling in time, of going back into yesterday or forward into tomorrow. And now he knew that you could not do it, that the same instant of time remained forever within each bracket, that Man's Earth had ridden the same bubble of the single instant from the time of its genesis and that it would die and come to nothing within that self-same instant.

You could travel in time, of course, but there would be no yesterday and no tomorrow. But if you held a certain time sense you could break from one bracket to another, and when you did you would not find yesterday or tomorrow, but another world.

And that was what he had done when he had spun the top, except, of course, that the top had had nothing to do with it — had simply been an aid.

He went on with the line.

"s. a. What is s.a., Hezekiah?"

"Suspended animation, sir."

"My father and my mother?"

"In suspended animation, sir. Waiting for the day when the mutants finally achieve immortality."

"But they died, Hezekiah. Their bodies…

"Android bodies, sir. We must keep the records straight. Otherwise the normal ones would suspect."

The room was bright and cold and naked with the monstrous nakedness of truth.

Suspended animation, His mother and his father waited, in suspended animation, for the day they could have immortality!

And he, Jay Vickers, the real Jay Vickers, what of him? Not suspended animation, certainly, for the life was gone from the real Jay Vickers and was in this android body that sat in this room holding the family record in two android hands.

"Kathleen Preston?" Vickers asked,

Hezekiah shook his head. "I do not know about Kathleen Preston," he said.

"But you got the Preston family record."

Hezekiah shook his head again. "There is no Preston record. I searched the cross-index, sir. There is no Preston mentioned. No Preston anywhere."

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

HE had made a decision and now the decision was no good — made no good by the memory of two faces. He closed his eyes and remembered his mother, remembered every feature, a little idealized, perhaps, but mainly true, and he recalled how she had been horrified by his adventure into fairyland and how Pa talked to him and how the top had disappeared.

Of course the top had disappeared. Of course he had been lectured about too much imagination. After all, they probably had a hard enough time keeping an eye on him and knowing where he was without his wandering into other worlds. An eight-year-old would be hard enough to keep track of on one world, let alone a hundred.

The memory of his mother's face and of his father's hand upon his shoulder, with the fingers of the hand digging into his flesh with a manly tenderness — these were things a man could not turn his back upon.

In utter faith they waited, knowing that when the blackness came upon them it would not be the end, but the beginning of an even greater adventure in living than they had even hoped when they banded themselves with the little group of mutants so many years before.

If they held such faith in the mutant plan, could his be any less?

Could he refuse to do his part toward the establishment of that world for which they had done so much?

They themselves had given what they could; the labor they had expended, the faith they had lavished must now be brought to realization by the ones they had left behind. And he was one of those — and he knew he could not fail them.

What kind of world, he wondered.

Suppose the mutant listeners finally were able to track down the secret of immortality, what kind of world would you have then?

Suppose it really came to pass that Man never need to die, but could live forever and forever?

It would not be the same world then. It would be a different world, with different values and incentives.

What factors would be necessary to make an immortal world keep going? What incentives and conditions to keep it from running down? What opportunity and interest, continually expanding, to save it from the dead-end street of boredom?

What would you need in an immortal world?

Endless economic living room, for one thing; and there would be endless economic living room. For now all the following and preceding worlds lay open. And if that were not enough, there would be the universe, with all its suns and solar systems, for if one earth of a single planet had following and preceding earths, then so must every star and planet in the entire universe be repeated endlessly.

Take the universe and multiply it by an unknown number — take all the worlds there were in all the universe and multiply them by infinity and you would have the answer. There would be room enough, room enough forever.

You would need endless opportunity and endless challenge and in those worlds would lie opportunity and challenge that even eternal Man could not exhaust.