look troubled, Danny. Would you like to talk about it?" I said
yes, but when we sat down on the  couch, he put his arm  around my shoulders
and tried  to pull me  close. I fled into yesterday Is that my future? Am  I
condemning myself to a life of that?)
     (Is condemning even the right word? There are
     times when I am lying in Danny's arms when I am so
     happy I want to shout. I want to run out in the middle of
     the street and scream as loud as I can with the over-
     whelming joy of how happy I am. There are times when I
     am with Don that I break down and cry with happiness.
     We both cry with happiness. The emotion is  too  much to contain. There
are  times when it is very good and I am happier than I have ever been in my
life. Is that condemnation?)
     (Must I list all those moments which I would never excise? The times we
went nude swimming on a California beach centuries before the first man came
to this continent. The night  when six of us, naked and giggling, discovered
what an orgy really was. [I've been to that orgy four  times  now does  that
mean  I  have to visit it twice  more? I hope so.]  I had  not realized what
pleasure could be )
     But  when I think about it logically, I know that its wrong. I  mean, I
think it's wrong. I'm not sure. I've never had to question it before.
     Man was made to mate with woman. Man was not made to mate with man.
     But does that mean man must not mate with man?
     No matter how many arguments I marshal against
     it, I am still outvoted by one overwhelming argument for
     it.
     It's pleasurable. I like it.
     So I rationalize.  I tell myself that  it's simply  a complex  form  of
masturbation. I know  it. This is  something more. I respond to Dan as if he
were another person, as if he  were not myself.  I am both husband and wife,
and I like both roles.
     Oh my God what have I done to myself?
     What have I done?
     Rationalization  cannot hide the truth. How can anything that has given
me such happiness leave me so unhappy?
     Please. Someone. Help.
     * * *
     I  put the pages down and  looked at Don.  The  mood of the  moment had
abruptly evaporated. "You've read this, haven't you?"
     He wouldn't meet my gaze; he simply nodded.
     I narrowed my  eyes in sudden suspicion. "How far ahead of me are you?"
I asked. "One day? Two days? A week? How much of my future do you know?"
     He shook his head. "Not much. A little less than a day."
     "I'm your yesterday?"
     He nodded.
     "You know what we were about to do?" I held up the papers meaningfully.
     He nodded again.
     "We would have done it if he hadn't stopped us,
     wouldn't we?"
     "Yes," said Don. "In fact, I was just about to "
     He stopped, refused to finish the sentence.
     I thought about that for a moment.  "Then you know if we are going to I
mean,  you know if  we did it." He said, "I know." His voice  was  almost  a
whisper.
     Something about the way he said it made me look at  him. "We did didn't
we?"
     "Yes."
     Abruptly, I was finding it hard to talk. He tried to look at  me, but I
wouldn't meet his gaze.
     "Dan," he  said.  "You  don't  understand.  You won't understand  until
you're me."
     "We don't have to do it," I said. "Both of us have free will. Either of
us can change the future. I could  say no. And you even though you have your
memory of doing it, you  could still refuse to do it again. You could change
the past. If you wanted to."
     He stretched out a hand. "It's up to you. ..."
     "No,"  I shook  my head. "You're the one who  makes the decisions.  I'm
Danny, you're Don.  Besides, you've already you've already done it. You know
what it's like. You know  if it will... be good, or if we should . . . avoid
it. I don't know, Don; that's why I have to trust you." I looked at him. "Do
we do it?"
     Hesitation. He touched my arm. "You want to, don't you?Ô
     After a  moment I nodded.  "Yes. I want to see what it's like. I I love
you."
     "I want to do it too."
     "Is it all right,  though?" I held my voice low. "I mean, remember  how
troubled Don looked?" "Danny, all I remember is how happy we were."
     I looked at him. There was a tear shining on his cheek.
     It was enough. I pressed against him. And we both held on tight.
     * * *
     I  put  the  papers down and looked at  Don.  "I had a  feeling we were
heading toward it," I said.
     He nodded. "Yes." And then he smiled. "At  least,  now  it's out in the
open."
     I met his gaze. "I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. ..."
     "Think about  it," he said. "It can't happen until Danny  is ready. Any
Don can try  to seduce him, but unless Danny wants  it to, it won't happen."
"So it's really me who's doing the seducing, isn't it?"
     Don  grinned.  He  rolled  over  on his  back and spread  his  arms  in
invitation. "I'm ready."
     So was I. I moved into them and kissed him.
     And wondered why previous versions of myself had been so afraid.
     I wanted to do it. Wasn't that reason enough?
     * * *
     Evolution, of course.
     I had provided a  hostile environment for those of me with doubts about
their sexuality. They had excised themselves out of existence.
     Leaving only me. With no doubts at all.
     Survival of the fittest?
     More likely, survival of the horniest.
     I know who I am. I know what I want.
     And I'm very happy.
     If I'm not, I know what I can do about it.
     * * *
     As I was going up the stair,
     I met a man who wasn't there.
     He wasn't there again today.
     I wish, I wish he'd go away!
     Hughes Mearns
     The Psychoed
     * * *
     only, the little man was me.
     I  keep running  into versions of myself who  have  come back from  the
future to  tell me to be  sure to do something or not to do something. Like,
do not fly American Airlines Flight 191 from O'Hare to LAX on  such and such
a date. (It's a DC-10 and the engine falls  off.)  Or, do not go faster than
seventy  miles per hour on the freeway today.  (The highway patrol is having
radar checks.) Things like that.
     I used to wonder about all those other Dans and Dons even though I knew
they weren't, it still seemed like they were eliminating themselves. They're
not, but it seems that way.
     What it is, of course, is that I am the cumulative  effect of all their
changes.  I  that  is, my  consciousness  have never  gone  back  to  excise
anything. At least I have no memory of ever having done so.
     If they didn't exist to warn me, then I wouldn't have been warned and I
would have  made the  mistake they would have warned me against, realized it
was a  mistake and gone back to warn  myself. Hence,  / am the result of  an
inevitable sequence of variables and choices.
     But that precludes the concept of free will. And everything I do proves
again that I  have the ultimate free will I don't have to be responsible for
any of my actions because I can erase them any time. But does the erasure of
certain choices always  lead to a  particular one, or  is  it just that that
particular  one is the  one  most suitable for this version of me?  Is it my
destiny to be homosexual and some other Danny's destiny to not be . . . ?
     The real  test of it, I guess, would be to try  and excise  some little
incident and see what happens see what happens to me. If it turns  out I can
remember excising it, then that would prove that I have free will.
     If not  if  I find  I've talked myself out  of something else  then I'm
running  along a  rut, like a  clockwork  mechanism,  doomed to  play out my
programmed actions for some unseen cosmic  audience, all the  time believing
that I have some control over those actions. The test
     * * *
     was simple. And I passed it.
     I simply went back to May 21, 1975,  and talked myself out of going  to
the races. ("Here todays paper," I said. "Go to  the races yesterday." Danny
was startled, of course, and  he must have thought me a little crazy, but he
agreed not to go to the races on May 21.)
     So. I  had excised  my first trip to the track. In this world  I hadn't
made it at all.
     Just to double-check, I  drove out  to the race track. Right. I  wasn't
there. (An  interesting  thing happened though. In  the fourth  race, Harass
didn't  bump Tumbleweed and wasn't disqualified. If I had been there to bet,
I would  have lost  everything or would I? The  Don  I might have been might
have foreseen that too. But why had that part of the past been changed? What
had happened? Something  I must have done on one of my other trips must have
affected the race.)
     But I'd proved it to my own satisfaction. I had free will.
     I had all of my memories of the past the way I had  lived it, yet I had
excised part of it out of existence. I hadn't eliminated myself and I hadn't
had any of my memory magically erased. I remembered the act of excising.
     There might  have  been  differences  perhaps  even  should  have  been
differences in  my world when I  flashed forward again.  Perhaps the mansion
should  have disappeared, or  perhaps my fortune should have  been larger or
smaller; but both were  unchanged. If there were any differences, they would
have to be minor. I didn't go looking for them.
     The reason?
     The mansion had been built in 1968, a good seven years before Danny had
been given  the timebelt. (I  had done that  on  purpose.)  Because  it  had
already existed in 1975,  it was beyond his  (our? my?) reach to undo unless
he went back  to 1967. The same applied to my financial empire. It should be
beyond the reach of any of my casual changes.
     Of course, from a subjective point of view, neither the mansion nor the
money existed  until after I'd gotten the  timebelt but time travel is  only
subjective to the traveler, not the timestream. Each time I'd  made a change
in the timestream, it was like a new layer to the painting.  The whole thing
was affected. Any change made before May 21, 1975, would be part  of Danny's
world when he got the timebelt. Unless  he later on went back and excised it
in a  later  version  of the timestream. And  if he  did,  it still wouldn't
affect me at all. It would be his version of the timestream and he  would be
a different person  from  me, with different memories and different desires.
Just as there were alternate universes, there were also alternate Dannys.
     My  house already existed. My investments in the past  were also firmly
in existence. He could not erase them by refusing to initiate them, he would
only  be  creating a new timestream of his own, one that would  be  separate
from mine.
     In effect, by altering my personal past, I am excising
     a piece of it, but I'm not destroying the continuity of this
     timestream. I'm only destroying my own continuity
     except that I'm not, because I still have my memories.
     Confusing? Yes, I  have to keep reminding  myself not to think in terms
of only  one  timestream.  I  am not  traveling in time.  I am creating  new
universes. Alternate  universes each one identical to the one I just left up
to the moment of my insertion into it. From that instant on, my existence in
it causes it to take  a  new shape. A  shape I  can choose  in fact,  I must
choose; because the timestream will  be changed merely by my sudden presence
in  it, I must make  every effort  to exercise control in order  to  prevent
known sequences of events from becoming unknown sequences.
     This applies to my own life too. I am not one person. I am many people,
all stemming from the same root. Some of the other  Dans and Dons I meet are
greatly variant from me, others are identical. Some will repeat actions that
I have done,  and I will repeat the actions of others. We perceive this as a
doubling back  of our  subjective  timelines. It doesn't matter, I am me,  I
react to it all. I act on it all.
     From this, I've learned two things.
     The first is that I do have free will.
     With all that  implies.  If I am  a  homosexual, then I am that way  by
choice. Should it please  me to know  that? Or should it disturb me? I don't
know I'm  the me  who likes it too  much to  excise. So  I guess  that's the
answer, isn't it?
     And that's the second thing I've learned that every
     time I travel into the past, I am excising. I am erasing the
     past that was and creating a new one instead. I didn't
     need to excise my first trip to the races to prove that I
     had free will I'd already proved it the first time I was
     Don, when I'd worn a windbreaker instead of a sweater.
     Every  time I excise, I'm not erasing  a world. I'm only creating a new
one for myself.
     For myself meaning, this me.
     Because every time I  excise, I am also creating  versions that are not
me.
     There are Daniel Eakinses who are totally different people than I am.
     The Danny that I told not  to  go to  the races  he'll  go off  into  a
timestream  of   his  own  creation;  he'll  have  different  memories,  and
eventually, different  needs and desires. His resultant  timestreams may  be
similar to mine,  or, just as likely, they'll be different. And if he can be
different from me
     then there are an infinite number of Dannys who are different from me.
     Somewhere there exist all  the possible variations  of all the possible
people I could be.
     I could by any of them but I cannot be all.
     I can only be one of the variations. I  will be the variation of myself
that pleases me the most. And that suggests
     that my free will may be only an illusion, after all.
     If there are  an  infinite number of Dans, then each one thinks  he  is
choosing his own course. But that isn't so. Each one is only playing out his
preordained instructions excising, altering, and designing his timestream to
fit  his psychological template and following his emotional  programming  to
its illogical extreme . . .
     * * *
     But if each of  us  is happiest in the universe he  builds for himself,
does it matter?
     Does it really matter if there's no such thing as free will?
     * * *
     It bothers me this me.
     I need  to know that there  is some important  reason for my existence.
There must be something special about me.
     * * *
     I will find the answer!
     * * *
     Yes. Of course.
     * * *
     I know what my mission is. I know who I am.
     I should have realized it when the timebelt was first given to me.
     I am destined to rule the universe.
     I am God.
     * * *
     But I must never let them find out, or they will try to kill me.
     * * *
     I think I will kill them first.
     * * *
     If I ever get out of this room, I will kill them all!
     * * *
     I made a point of cautioning  Danny, "I  don't know if he can be cured.
But I am sure we can never trust him  with a  timebelt again. I think  we'll
have  to be  very careful  to  see  that  he  doesn't  get  out. A  paranoid
schizophrenic running amok through time could be disastrous not only for the
rest of the world, but for us as well."
     Danny  was  thoughtful  as  he peered through the one-way  glass. "It's
lucky that we caught  him  in time." His  voice  caught on  the last word; I
think I know he was a little shaken at  seeing the drooling maniac he  might
have become. I hadn't gotten used to the sight either.
     I said, "I think he wanted to be caught. We got him at a point where he
was still conscious of what was happening to himself."
     "If he  ever does get his hands on another  timebelt," Danny asked, "he
could come back and rescue himself, couldn't he?"
     I nodded. "That's partly why it was so hard to trap him. We had to  get
him into a timeline where  he had  no foreknowledge of where  he was  going,
otherwise he would have jumped ahead to help himself against us. We wouldn't
even have known about him if he hadn't kept coming farther  and farther back
into the past; one of us must have eventually recognized what  was happening
and  gone for  treatment, then come  after this one who was  still rampaging
around. That's when I was  called  in to help. We had to deny him any chance
to look into his own future  until we could get  the belt off him.  The fact
that he  hasn't been rescued yet is a pretty good sign that this is  the end
of the line for this variant."
     Danny  grinned.  "Well, just the  fact that we're standing here talking
about it proves that."
     "Uh-huh," I said. I put my hand on his shoulder.
     "I'm from a line where they caught it in me before it got
     this far. I never went through that." I pointed at the
     glass. "You, you're a variant too. You're from even earlier.
     Neither of us  is in there. He  could be  incurable  and if that's  the
case, then he has  to stay in there. Forever. He and I mean all of us has to
be either completely safe,  or the timebelt  must be  held beyond his reach.
The consequences " I didn't have to finish the sentence.
     Danny bit his lip.  "You're  right, of course.  It's just  that I don't
like seeing him there."
     "It's for his own good," I said. "More important, it's
     for our good.  If  time travel is the ultimate  personal freedom,  then
it's also the ultimate personal responsibility."  "I guess so," he said  and
turned away from the glass.
     I didn't add anything to that and  we left  the  hospital for the  last
time.
     * * *
     Today President Robert F. Kennedy announced that
     "in response to recent discoveries, the United States is
     initiating a high-priority research program to investigate
     the possibilities of travel through time."
     So  in order to protect myself (and my one-man monopoly),  I had  to go
back and unkill Sirhan Sirhan. Dammit.
     The  "recent  discoveries" he was  referring  to  were some unfortunate
anachronisms which I seem to have left in the past.
     I thought I had been more careful, but apparently I haven't. One of the
Pompeiian  artifacts in the British Museum has definitely been identified as
a fossilized Coca-Cola bottle from the Atlanta, Georgia, bottling plant.
     Well, I never said I was neat. . . .
     I  don't  remember dropping  the Coke bottle, but if it's there, I must
have. Unless some other version of me left it there
     That is possible. The more I bounce around time,
     the more versions of me there are; many of us seem to be
     overlapping, but I have observed Dans and Dons doing
     things that I never have or never will at least I don't
     intend to so if they exist in this timeline, they must be
     other versions, just "passing through."
     Either they're around to react to me, or I'm supposed to react to them.
Or  both.  Certain fluxes must keep  occurring, I guess  I  assume there are
mathematical formulae for  expressing them, but I'm  no mathematician  which
necessitate two or more versions of  myself coming into contact: such as the
Don  who came back through time  to  warn me against winning  three  million
dollars at the race track on May 20.
     That  one was  a situation where  three  versions of me  had  to  exist
simultaneously  in  one  world:  Dan, Don,  and ultra-Don  (who was excising
himself).  Other  situations  have  been  more complex;  the more complex  I
become, the more me's there are in this world.
     The whole  process is evolutionary. Every time Daniel Eakins eliminates
a  timeline, he's removing  a  nonviable one and replacing  it with one that
suits him better. The  world  changes  and develops,  always  working itself
toward some unknown utopia of his own personal design.
     My needs and desires keep changing, so does the world. (I must be about
thirty now.  I have no way of keeping  track, but  I look about that age.) I
have lived  in worlds dedicated to the pursuit  of pleasure sexual fantasies
come true. I had lived in other worlds too,  harsher  ones, for the sense of
adventure. World War II was my private party.
     But always,  whenever I create a specialized  world, I  make a point of
doing it very, very carefully with one or two easily reversed changes.
     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 double-
     check 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
itÒs  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.)
     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.
     Suppose that  somewhere there's another me  a distant me who's thinking
along the same lines: he wants to meet a Daniel Eakins who is widely variant
from himself.
     What memories do we have in common?
     Hmm, only those that existed before we were given the timebelt . . .
     That's it, of course!
     Our birthday.
     * * *
     I was  born  at 2:17 in the morning, January  24, 1956, at the  Sherman
Oaks Medical Center, Sherman Oaks, California.
     Of course, in  this  timeline, I  hadn't been  born  wouldn't be  born.
Something I had done had excised my birth; but I knew the  date I would have
been born and so did every other Dan.
     It was the logical place to look.
     In 1977 the Sherman Oaks Medical Center was a
     row of seven three- and four-story buildings lining Van
     Nuys Boulevard just north of the Ventura Freeway.
     In 1956  it  comprised only two buildings,  one of  which  was strictly
doctors' offices.
     I twinged  a little  bit as  I  drove  down  Van Nuys Boulevard of  the
mid-fifties. I'd been spending most of  my time in the seventies.  I  hadn't
realized . . .
     The  two movie theaters were still the Van Nuys and the Rivoli. Neither
had been remodeled yet into the  Fox or the Capri  and the Capri was soon to
be torn down. Most of the tall office buildings were missing, and there were
too many tacky little stores lining the street.
     And the cars my god, did people actually  drive those things? They were
boxy, high, and bulky. Their styling was atrocious Fords and Chevys with the
beginnings of tail fins and double  headlights; Chryslers and Cadillacs with
too much chrome. And Studebakers and DeSotos and Packards!
     There  was  a  big  vacant  field  where  I  remembered a  blue  glass,
slab-sided building that stretched for more  than a  block. But  the teenage
hangout across the street from it was still alive, still a hangout.
     I twinged,  because in 1977 I  had left a city.  This  was only a small
town, busy  in its own peaceful  way,  but  still a  small  town. Why had  I
remembered it as being exciting?
     As I approached the Medical Center itself, I real-
     ized with a start that something was missing. Then it hit
     me in 1956 the Ventura Freeway hadn't been built yet,
     didn't extend to Van Nuys Boulevard. (I wondered if the
     big red Pacific Electric Railroad cars were still running. I
     didn't know when they had finally stopped, but the
     tracks had remained for years.)
     I'd seen  Los Angeles in its earlier incarnations, but the Los  Angeles
of 1930 had always seemed like another city, like a giant Disneyland put  up
for Danny the perpetual tourist. It wasn't real. But this this I recognized.
I could see the glimmerings of my  own world here, its embryonic beginnings,
the bones around which the flesh of the future would grow.
     I parked my  '76 'Vette at the corner  of Riverside Drive and Van Nuys,
ignoring  the stares of  the  curious. I'd  forgotten  what I was  doing and
brought it back with me. So what? Let them think it  was some kind of racer.
I couldn't care less. I was lost in thought.
     I'd been  living my whole life  around the same  three years. Sure, I'd
gone traveling off to other eras,  but those had been just trips. I'd always
returned to 1977 because I'd always thought of it as home.
     I'd folded  and  compressed  my whole  life into a span of  just  a few
months.
     Consequently,  I lived in  a world where the  landscape  never changed.
Never.
     They'd been  building the new dorm for the  college for  as  long  as I
could remember. They'd been grading for the new freeway forever. (Oh, I knew
what  the  finished structures would look  like.  I'd  even  driven  the new
freeway; but the time that I knew as home was frozen. Static. Unchanging.)
     I'd lived in the same year for over ten subjective years. I'd grown too
used to the idea that  home would endure  forever.  For me, the San Fernando
Valley was a  stable entity. I'd forgotten what a dynamically  alive city it
was because I'd lost the ability to see its growth
     because I no longer traveled linearly through time.
     Other people  travel through time in a straight  line. For them, growth
is a constant process,  perceived only when  the changes are  major ones, or
when there is something to compare them against.
     To me, growth is
     it doesn't exist. Every time  I jump, I expect  the world  to change. I
never equate any era with any other. Until now, that is.
     I knew this city; I'd grown up here but I'd forgot-
     ten that it existed. I'd forgotten what it was like to be a
     part of the moving timestream, to grow up with a city, to
     see it change as you change. . . .
     I'd forgotten so much.
     So much.
     * * *
     There was no one at the hospital, of co