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?Ф
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
itТs 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