Making Good Time

Making Good Time
The kid got on at Springfield, clutching a cardboard box as if it held the secret of life. I got a good look at him as he picked his way down the aisle of the bus. He was pale and thin and hungry-looking. Seventeen, maybe eighteen, but then everyone under thirty looks eighteen to me. His clothes were new and stiff, as if they had been on shelves at Wal-Mart only a couple of hours ago. He was wearing nothing special: jeans and cheap sneakers and some kind of football team sweatshirt. But just before he dropped into the seat in front of me, I noticed the Cleveland logo -- which struck me as odd, since the Browns had jumped to Baltimore last year and turned into Ravens. I'm no sports fan, but Edgar was pissed off for three straight months, and I'd had the bruises to prove it.
The kid sat with his back to the window and stretched his legs across the two seats. He kept the box on his lap. He watched as the driver muscled the bus away from the terminal, then turned to me and smiled.
"Excuse me, lady, what year is this?"
I sighed. On a plane, people don't ask you questions like that. They don't complain about the fluoride that Unitarians put into lowfat milk, or tell you all about the night Elvis spent with Jackie Kennedy. Unfortunately, I didn't have plane fare. All I had with me was a suitcase filled with old clothes and twenty- some years of lousy memories.
"1996," I said.
At the sound of my voice, something started to scrabble inside the box. It sounded like a cat, clawing to get out.
"Ssh!" The kid gave the box a gentle shake.
"What is it?" I knew that it was probably a mistake to ask this, but I had six hours of Greyhound-flavored boredom ahead of me.
He glanced around the bus and then leaned close. "It's a female compsognathus."
"Oh?," I said. "And what's that in English?"
"A dinosaur," said the kid.

Sent By:James Patrick Kelly on Wednesday, November 20, 1996 at 15:20:38.

I laughed. I couldn't help myself, I know when people say things like that, the last thing you're supposed to do is laugh, but I just couldn't help it. And then I said it. "Oh God," I said, "my son would sure love one of those. He's crazy about dinosaurs." The moment the words came out, I caught my breath. Damn. Damn! It'd been years since I'd...since I'd forgotten.
I used to do that all the time. I'd be talking with Ginny, my neighbor, and she'd say something about taking her kid to the zoo, and I'd say, "Why don't we go together? Billy's never been to the zoo." Sometimes I'd catch myself right away and just want to run in the house and hide. But sometimes Ginny, or whoever it was, would stare at me for several seconds before I'd think, "Oh no, I've done it again." Forgotten.
My shrink used to call it "grief-induced amnesia." Edgar had other names for it. "Stupid." "Sick." "Twisted." And then he'd remind me--once again--that if I'd been paying attention that day, "if you didn't always have your head up your ass," I would have seen Billy run into the road. I would have seen the car coming.
But that was all so long ago. I was sure I'd gotten over it. Even Edgar didn't bring it up anymore. He had plenty of other ways to show what he thought of me.
I shook my head, trying to get rid of the memories like a dog flinging off water. Smiling at the kid, I said, "That must be pretty nice. Having your own dinosaur, I mean. What'd you do, grow her out of a piece of amber?"
"Nah," the kid said, "that only works in the movies. If you want a real dinosaur--you know, a living one?--you've got to go back for it."
"Back?"
"Yeah, sure, you know."
It took me a moment to get it, and then I thought, oh brother. But it could have been worse. I could have sat next to one of those people who think space aliens have captured them through kinky sex ads. I said, "So you've invented your own time machine?"
He shook his head. "Uh uh." Then, looking around, as if someone might overhear and report him, he said, "I stole my Mom's."

Sent By:Rachel Pollack on Monday, November 25, 1996 at 11:30:25.

For about two seconds, I believed him. He said it with such guilt and self-consciousness that my gut-level reaction was to buy into his sincerity.
Then I remembered how I'd promised myself I wasn't going to buy into sincerity any more. Edgar had done sincere about as well as anyone -- I'll never hit you again, honey, honest. Honest. This is the new me, you'll see. I'd seen, all right, but only after the ice bag brought down the swelling.
"You know," I said, "that's a lot more serious than stealing money from your mother's purse to go buy candy or drugs or something."
"I know that," he said snappishly. "You think I don't know that? Besides, I never stole anything from my mom or anyone else before, I swear." He paused. "And I don't do drugs. I know what that stuff leads to." He lowered his voice confidentially. "Regret. I'm never gonna regret anything I do."
I laughed again, so loud that several passengers turned to look. "Then what on earth do you need a time machine for?"
He frowned at me, offended, and clutched the box protectively. There was more scrabbling and I saw the lid lift a little.
"And while we're at it, what do you need a dinosaur for?"
He gave me a dirty look and then turned his head away, leaned back against the window, and closed his eyes. The lid on the cardboard box lifted again and before he could push it down I had the briefest glimpse of a perfectly-formed and most definitely reptilian claw.
I went got and cold all over in successive waves. Iguana, I thought. That had to be what it really was, an iguana. I'd seen lots of iguanas, mostly on TV and in the movies. The girl in the first Terminator movie, she'd owned an iguana, or her roommate had, or something. She'd had a son, too, and everyone had thought she was crazy, but no, that wasn't till the second movie --
The claw was not an iguana claw. It was the wrong shape and the wrong color. At least, just from what I could remember. I knew nothing about dinosaurs and the only reptiles I'd ever met personally were snakes. But those had no limbs and most likely much different habits than iguanas. Except for those two habits that all living creatures shared. I remembered how Billy had tried to hide the rat snake in his room and how he might have gotten away with it. Except.
"Young man," I said, more sharply than I had really meant to, "did you remember to feed that -- that compos mentis before you got on this bus?"
He looked at me as if I were crazy. "Well, of course."
"Then did you also remember to walk it? Or did you expect it to use the onboard john, or wait till the next stop?"
Now he looked panicky. "Oh, jeez --"
He dashed for the tiny little john with the box, slipped inside, and slammed the door. Just in time, by the sound of it -- whatever had been in the box was out now, and bouncing off the walls and making a terrible racket. The other passengers were all turning round and look over the tops of the seats or around them and someone tipped the driver off. He pulled the bus into the breakdown lane.
"What's the trouble?" he said to no one in particular as he came down the aisle. He was young and more than a little homely, and his irritation over having a situation didn't help his looks any. He stopped and looked at me expectantly. I stared back at him. An enormous thud from the john suddenly shook the whole bus and made him jump.
"Hey!" he yelled. "What's going on in there?"
There was a series of thumps, a lot of scratching, and a choked cry of pain, just audible over the hissing.
The bus driver looked incredulous. "Are you in there with an animal?"
Someone toward the front of the bus said, "Ewwwww!" in a loud voice and someone else giggled.
The driver shook the door handle but the kid had managed to put on the lock. "All right, whoever you are, I want you and your animal to come out right now. You're going to have to vacate this vehicle until such time as you can produce a Department of Transportation approved animal carrier that --"
More scrambling noises, as the creature went into high gear again, desperate for escape.
"Excuse me," said a voice, and I was startled to realize it was my own. "If there is an animal loose in there, it sounds pretty upset. I think we ought to all, uh, vacate ourselves." The driver started to object. "If it got loose and bit somebody? And then the bus company would get sued and you --"
The driver had the rest of the passengers off the bus in something like thirty seconds, deaf to all protests. I trailed after them, feeling a little strange, and then stopped at the top of the steps.
"Well?" demanded the driver, reaching up to hand me down.
"I'm going to stay on board, help the boy catch his pet and box it up again."
"Nothin' doin'. You're the one who mentioned lawsuits."
"I waive the right to sue. The faster we get the comp -- the creature contained, the sooner we'll all be on our way." Before he could raise another objection, I shut the door in his face, locking him and the others out, and closing myself in with some kind of wild animal and a kid who seemed to really believe it was a dinosaur. I marveled at myself as I tiptoed back up the aisle. First leaving Edgar, now this. What next?
"Hello?" I asked the bathroom door. Thump. Thud. "Ow!" Scrabble, thump. "How soon do you think you'll be able to get your, um, compos mentis back in the box?"
"Just as a rough estimate, never. I've got an idea, though." He grunted.
"Forget it. You can't ride all the way to wherever you're going locked in a Greyhound john."
"That wasn't my idea." Pause. "Can you drive a bus?"
I could, having driven a Sunday school bus a time or two back before Billy. How different could a Greyhound be?
But I couldn't. Strand all those people, maybe get the driver fired?
"I know you don't believe it's a dinosaur," the kid said heavily. "But you can hear how it's going nuts. I can't let it get loose, I can't let it hurt anyone, and more important, I can't let it get hurt --"
Before I knew what I was doing, I was in the driver's seat, reaching for the key in the ignition. A movement in the side view mirror caught my eye.
Someone was running along the breakdown lane on the other side of the road, hollering and making shoo-ing motions. I could hear the voice, a woman's voice, faintly, shouting, "Go! Go! Hurry! Go now!"
I twisted the key hard, stomped on the accelerator, and somehow found the right gear. The driver and the other passengers started shouting and pounding on the side of the bus as I pulled out onto the highway again and floored it, my whole body tingling with, I don't know, excitement and terror and the damnedest, most intense case of deja-vu I'd ever had.
The figure of the woman diminished to nothing in the side view mirror. I was glad. She had looked and sounded too much like, well, me.

Sent By:Pat Cadigan on Thursday, November 28, 1996 at 05:17:41.

I drove about a mile, maybe two, all of it in a daze. Then I pulled the bus onto a side road that led to another, heavily wooded road with no visible houses. I turned off the engine. And just sat there.
Even I, who have operated all my life from emotion rather than logic (why else would anyone marry Edgar?)--even I had reached some sort of jumping-off point. Some steep cliff edge.
I tried to consider the last ten minutes.
There was a kid with a dinosaur in the john.
I had just stolen a bus because the kid told me to.
I had seen myself running alongside the bus, urging myself on.
Billy was dead, Edgar wasn't, and I was obviously in some strange state halfway in-between, dreaming, or hallucinating, or maybe finally psychotic, just like Edgar always said I'd be.
Only I wasn't psychotic. How did I know that? I just did. I studied the daisies growing by the road, and listened to the birdsong in the trees, and felt my heart slowly calm down. I wasn't psychotic. I was just different than I'd ever been before, and so wouldn't you expect that a different me would operate in a different world? Of course you would. The best thing I could do, then, was just go along with what was happening. Treat it as normal for this place, and try to figure out the best thing to do next, and be this different person who didn't live anymore with Edgar and who was capable of making decisions on her own. In short, I decided to trust my instincts.
I didn't realize it then, but that decision would change my life.
"Hey," the kid said shyly, coming up behind me. "You okay?"
"I'm fine," I said, and it was true. "I don't hear any noise back there."
"No. Gnathy doesn't need to... anymore...I mean, she..."
"She shit and calmed down."
The kid laughed. "Yeah. In fact, she went to sleep in the sink. So I slipped out."
"Good move," I said. Outside the bus, a car passed as if we were nothing unusual.
"Thanks for saving Gnathy and me," the kid said. "What do you think we should do now?"
The kid looked expectant; clearly he thought I, hijacker of buses for the sake of the Late Cretaceous, should have the answers. How long had it been since anyone had thought I had answers to anything?
Since Billy had run out into that road.
"You're not..." His young face had clouded. "I mean, now that you got us away from that crowd, you're not leaving us, are you?"
"No," I heard myself say. Trust your instincts.
His gangly body relaxed. "Okay. So now what? They'll be after us, you know. The bus people."
And Edgar. I didn't say it aloud. From the back of the bus came a low, contented crooning.
"Gnathy's awake again. Not much of a nap, was it? So what do we do now, Mrs...uh...Miss..."
"Terry," I said. "Just 'Terry.' And now we go back to get your mom's time machine."
Sent By:Nancy Kress on Monday, December 2, 1996 at 12:45:26.

"No, no, it's not that simple. We can't go to it. We have to wait for it to come back to us."
"Why? Where is it?"
"Not where? When."
I tried not to be annoyed at him. "Okay, when is it?"
The words spilled out, as if he were relieved to be telling his story to someone, anyone. "Well, you see Gnathy got away just after I locked into this downtime and I had to chase after her so I left the time machine and it obviously waited as long as it could then snapped uptime again because it wasn't there when I got back so it's probably at Mom's lab at the university, recharging."
"Obviously? Or probably?"
"Okay, I'm not sure what happened." He shivered. "I'm just hoping."
I patted his hand. "You know the nice thing about a bus? If you park it, you can pretty well count on it staying parked. So tell me again why your time machine ran off and left you."
"Well, Mom says it's like a rubber band. To get to the past you have to distort spacetime, kind of stretch it, see. But you know how it takes energy to stretch a rubber band and then keep it stretched out? Same when you stretch time, only you need more energy. A whole lot more. There's only so long the time machine can maintain a temporal anomaly before it exhausts its batteries, so it has to snap back uptime for a recharge."
"But it will come back for you?"
"It should. I mean it's supposed to come back in ..." he pressed a button on what looked like a cheap Timex sportswatch "... ten hours, forty-seven minutes and eleven seconds."
"Okay. And where do you plan on catching it?"
He pressed another button and the watch chirped twice. "The longitude is eighty-four degrees, nine minutes and thirty-two seconds and the latitude is ..."
I held up a hand for a time out. "Look, kid -- wait, what's you name?"
"Twicken."
I wondered what kind of mother would name her kid Twicken and then leave a time machine lying around for him to play with, but I held my tongue. "Twicken, I'm sure those numbers mean something to someone, only that person isn't me. I need the name of a town."
This took a little longer to sort out, but eventually the watch chirped. At that point, I was pretty sure he hadn't bought it at Wal-Mart. "Is there a place called Casstown?" he said.
I stared at him for a moment. I wanted to tell him that there was a little nowhere called Casstown but if that's where he had wanted to go, what the heck was he doing on the bus to Columbus, which is almost exactly in the opposite direction? I didn't say anything because he had this stricken look that said if he got one more piece of bad news, he'd melt right there in front of me. He was lucky to have found me or else he might never had made it to his time machine. "Sure, I know Casstown. We'll get you there, Twicken." I liked that. I was his luck.
But I wondered if he was my luck. Casstown was back the way I'd just come. Edgar's direction.
I guess I hadn't realized how quiet it had gotten in the john until the door swung open and Gnathy stepped out. She was about the size of a Perdue Oven Stuffer Roaster only she wasn't chicken-colored: she was green. She walked on two legs with an odd, mincing gait, like her jeans were too tight, but of course she wasn't wearing jeans. A long,slender tail whipped behind her.
"She's just a baby," I said, backing down the aisle.
"Oh, no," said Twicken. "She's fully grown."
"I thought you said you locked her in."
"I did," he said proudly. "But she's smart."
"I never doubted it."
"No, I mean, much smarter than she's supposed to be. That's the whole point."
"It is?"
"Yes," he said impatiently. "Uncle Strego enhanced her intelligence and Mom was going to send her back to the Jurassic so that maybe instead of getting bigger and dumber in the Cretaceous, dinosaurs might've spent all that time getting smaller and smarter so when the meteor hit, some of them might've survived. Only they wouldn't let her."
"Oh," I said. Gnathy had been listening to Twicken, now she turned to eye me. She had a lot of teeth for such a little creature -- teeth that looked like fish hooks. "What does she eat?" I said. "Not fingers?"
He considered. "She might, if you offer her one. Mostly she eats lab rats. She had a frog for lunch."

Sent By:James Patrick Kelly on Thursday, December 5, 1996 at 11:27:34.

I took a step back, eyeing Gnathy carefully. "I hope lunch wasn't too long ago," I said. "I'm fresh out of frogs. Rats, too, I'm afraid."
He went over and patted her on the head. "She's fine for now," he said. Just like a boy and his dog, I thought. There was something young and innocent about him. I could imagine Billy acting like that. If he'd lived long enough.
Keep your mind in the present, I told myself. "I'll tell you what," I said, and sidled past them. Gnathy turned her head to watch me. She had a curious expression on her face, almost as if I was the subject of some experiment. I found myself wondering just how much Uncle Strego had boosted her intelligence. "I'll tell you what," I said again. "Let's head for Casstown and along the way maybe we can stop for some food. Maybe she'd like a hot dog."
He looked sceptical. "A dog? That's a lot bigger than a rat."
"Forget it." I sat down in the driver's seat. "The important thing is, we get to Casstown and find somewhere to wait for ten hours. I don't think it's safe to stay in this bus any longer than necessary."
We were several minutes down the road before I could get up the nerve to ask the question that had begun pushing itself at me. I glanced in the rearview mirror. He was sitting a couple of rows back with Gnathy alongside him. The little creature was leaning against him, and I suddenly realized I was becoming kind of fond of the enhanced compo whatever. "Twicken," I said. "Umm, just where--just when are you from?"
He said nothing at first, then shrugged. "The fifth circle."
"The fifth who?"
It took me a moment to get the special look of discomfort that came over him. And then I pegged it. It was the look of a polite young man who has to explain something to a stupid adult. He said, "Circle. It's um, just a different way of looking at time."
"Well, what year does that mean?"
"It doesn't. You just have to understand. Years don't mean anything." Now his voice had a pleading quality, as if he really was saying, "Just drop it, lady, before you make a total fool of yourself."
But hell, that never stopped me before. I said, "You asked me what year it was."
"Sure, that's because we're in this circle. My Mom calls it the circle of linear time. Once we get outside this circle everything changes. I used to think that, you know, people just changed the way they looked at things. But now that I'm here, in this circle, I'm not sure. It sure feels different. Anyway, my Mom says that when people changed the way they looked at time, that's what made time travel possible." He hesitated, and I could see him pondering. "Of course, she also says time travel caused people to look at time differently."
"Too deep for me," I said, and then asked, "Just one more question and then I promise to shut up. If you're from the fifth circle, what circle is this? The linear one full of us dumbies who think in years?"
"The fourth."
"Fourth? Does that mean the change comes out of our time?"
"Uh huh."
"So when does it happen?"
"Well--"
"Don't tell me. Years don't mean anything."
"See, it's not like years just suddenly end. Inside this circle, years go on forever, just like you think they do. But once people move into the fifth, it's a total break."
The sight of a gas station kwik-e-mart saved my head going around in circles. "Let's stop here a moment," I said. "We can get some food. Keep Gnathy from fantasizing about fingers."
I lurched the bus into the edge of the parking lot, then sat for a minute shaking my head. When I turned around Twicken was stroking Ganthy's back. I said, "Maybe you'd better put our friend there back in the box and take her inside. I'm a little nervous about leaving her alone."
"Sure," Twicken said, and went for the box. Gnathy gave me a look and then followed him.
Inside, Twicken looked around, kind of amazed while I looked around kind of disgusted. What should I get, bologna? I was wondering why you could never find a box of lab rats when you needed them, when Gnathy made a noise, something between a growl and a twerp. I looked in her direction--then past her, to where a cop car was pulling into the parking lot.
It's all right, I told myself. No need to panic unless they start examining the bus. Cops stop at these places all the time. But even so, I pulled Twicken with me behind some shelves and told him not to make any noise. I considered telling him to act normal but decided not to push my luck.
I stared at the car. There was something weird about it... And then I realized. It was changing! Shifting its color between blue and black, shifting its logo... It was like some hologram of a cop car that couldn't make up its mind which police force it wanted to belong to. Shit, I thought, what's going on here? The doors opened and a pair of cops stepped out-- And they kept changing too, subtle things, like the shade of the hair, or the contours of the forehead. Twicken made a noise. "It's them!" he whispered.
Before I could ask who "them" might be, the back door opened, and someone stepped out. A tall heavyset man, with hands perpetually curled, as if about to turn into fists. "Oh my God," I whispered, "it's Edgar!" Only--he looked older. He looked like he'd aged fifteen years overnight. Or maybe--maybe this was Edgar from fifteen years down the line.
Desperately, I looked around. There were some doors in back. I grabbed Twicken's hand and yanked him with me. The third door opened to the outside and we rushed outside.
A car was waiting there, engine running. A plain white Camry that blessedly avoided changing into a Chevy or a motorcycle. The driver flung open the passenger door. "Get in," she said. "Hurry. There's no time."
Oh no, I thought. No! It was her. The woman who'd run alongside the bus. Her! Me.
Sent By:Rachel Pollack on Wednesday, December 11, 1996 at 10:12:39.

"What do you mean, there's no time?" I said. "What should it matter if you have a time machine?"
Twicken gave me a hard shove and I went head first into the front seat, almost putting my eye out on the stick shift. Then he and the dinosaur were crouched in the back seat and the car was moving, skidding out of there. I managed to pull my feet in just before the door would have slammed shut on my ankles. I hate when that happens.
She--the driver--I gave me a quick grin as she shifted much more smoothly and expertly than I could ever remember doing. "Bus-driving experience gives you skills," she said, "but you don't really think you can drive a bus around and not have anyone notice, do you?"
"You--we--have a point," I conceded.
"I have a point," she corrected me. "You'll have it later and then you can say 'we.' Now listen carefully, there really isn't much time. And stay down," she added as I started to sit up. "When it comes to time machines, timing is everything. Time, and tempo. And you, woman, are just a little too slow. Pick up the pace, or everything is going to collapse in the biggest temporal chain-reaction fender-bender since--well, you wouldn't remember."
"I do!" said the boy from the back seat. "Since--"
"Shut up,Twick, you're not in school now, you don't have to show off how much you know." We took a hard left around a corner.
"Who's chasing us?" I asked. "Is it them?"
I recognized that look of alarm on her face; So that's what I look like when I'm on the verge of panic, I thought. "I didn't think you knew about them at this point," she said. "But it doesn't matter. If you know, then you know how important it is that we hurry. Did you see them changing? Were they changing a lot?"
"No," Twicken said nervously. "Their car was all shifty, but they were only a little bit."
"Well, that's mercy," she said, a classic me-ism if I'd ever heard one, although I got the feeling she was making the effort to sound more like me so that I would feel less scared, trust her more. "Surfing collapsing wave-fronts, I must be nuts."
If you say so, lady, I thought, feeling giddy. Maybe it was the way the car roaring down the road--
"It isn't," she said, matter-of-factly. "It's the proximity of the collapsing wave-front. It makes you a little high and no, I'm not reading your mind, it's because I was right where you are now not too long ago. No, actually, it was too long ago, for our purposes. Woman, you have got to put a move on!" She was downshifting now, and suddenly she swerved across the road and slid into the breakdown lane on the other side. "OK," she said, and jumped out of the car. The next thing I knew, she was dragging me out of the passenger seat. "Take the car and drive as fast as you possibly can to Casstown. Do not stop for any reason."
"But where are you going?" I said as she pushed me around the front of the car to the driver's side.
"I've got to scare a woman into driving a bus faster so that she gets to a certain place two minutes sooner than she did when I was scared." She turned to look down the highway. I followed her gaze and my mouth dropped open. There was a big Greyhound bus at the side of the road. People were just starting to get off and were standing around next to the bus, looking puzzled and irritated.
"Go!" she shouted at me. Terrified, I jumped into the car, pulled a technically perfect if completely illegal U-turn and floored it. In the rear view mirror, I could see her running toward the bus making shoo-ing motions. I couldn't hear her this time, and she had her back to me, but it was spooky enough to make me press the accelerator even harder to the floor, all the same.

Sent By:Pat Cadigan on Monday, December 16, 1996 at 12:23:09.

"Hey, that was pretty neat," Twicken said admiringly. My U-Turn had thrown both him and Gnathy against the car door, but he didn't seem to mind. Gnathy only shook her...head. Or snout. Or whatever that thing was.
"Getting myself out of here to make myself go faster to get myself here--that was neat?" I snapped. I was feeling very strange.
"No, not that," he said scornfully. "Anybody could do that. But making the car do that reverse sine-curve thing--that was neat."
"Right," I said. "'I've always been good at reverse sine-curve things. Now hang on, we've got...um...only some a little to get to your mom's lab at Casswell."
"How much time?" he asked, but I knew better than to get into that.
For the next half-hour I drove in silence. I also drove like a woman pursued by demons, or temporal cops, or Edgar, which maybe I was. That had been Edgar I'd seen back in the Kwik-e-mart--I was sure of it. Or an Edgar. My Edgar, or some other one? It had certainly looked like my Edgar, with his fists balled ready to...but on the other hand, something about him had looked different. Shimmery, or not quite all there. But then, was any man all there who beat his wife as a form of grief therapy over his son?
We tore past a cop car in semi-hiding behind a bridge abutment. . I slowed down and held my breath, but he didn't follow us. I couldn't afford to think about Edgar or Billy, I had to keep my mind on what I was doing...whatever it was. I hunched over the wheel and drove.
"Look out!" Twick said from the back seat. A 1989 Lincoln suddenly swerved into my lane, and I realized that in fact I was in his lane. I wrenched the wheel back, missing the Lincoln by inches. The driver gave me the finger.
"You've got to drive faster in this avenue of transport," Twick said helpfully. "The slower avenue is the one over there."
"Thanks," I snapped. "Are you okay?" My hands shook on the wheel. What happened if one of me died while two others were fussing around with a Greyhound bus?
"I'm fine," Twick said, "and so's Gnathy."
"Then why's she making that awful noise?"
"Oh, she's just in temporal energy-conservation phase. She likes to do that when things get dull."
"Right," I said, too carefully. "Here's Caswell. Now what?"
He gave me directions to his mother's lab and I followed them carefully, trying not to think about multiple Edgars, multiple me's, collapsing wave fronts, or dinosaurs with temporal energy-conservation phases. In a few minutes we came to a nondescript building, cinderblock and wood, with a chain-link fence around it. The gate was open. A small discreet sign said WILLIAMS LABORATORIES.
"Now what?" I said to Twicken, but he didn't answer. No one was visible around the building, including--thank heavens--no shifting cop cars. In fact, the place could have been deserted.
"Twicken? Now what?" When he still didn't answer, I twisted in my seat to look at him. The kid had gone suddenly rigid, pale as oatmeal. I looked back at the building. Nothing was happening.
"Twicken? What's wrong? What is it?"
"The lab," he choked out. "Don't you see? It's not...it's different. It already...we're too late!"
"Too late for what?" I cried, and looked back at the building. Nothing. Cinderblocks, wood, open fence, small sign. Only...hadn't the sign said WILLIAMS LABORATORIES a minute ago? Then how had that apostrophe appeared between the M and the S?
"I'll never see my mom again!" Twick said, and burst into tears. Without thinking about it, I scrambled out of the front seat and flung open the back door of the car. There are maternal responses you just don't forget, no matter how much time has passed. I crawled in next to Twicken, put my arms around the sobbing boy. "No, no, don't cry, honey, there there..."
The noise woke up Gnathy. Or maybe something else woke her--how would I know? But those scaly lids slid slowly up, and she looked at the cinderblock building. A good long look.
She let out a shriek like nothing I'd ever heard before and hope to never hear again. Then she went into action.
Sent By:Nancy Kress on Thursday, December 19, 1996 at 15:53:27.

She flipped onto her back, her tail switching frantically, and began to pound the rear driver's side door with her feet. Thump-thump, thumpthump. Her claws shredded the vinyl and raked the window and door handles. Her howling was so loud, I thought my brains might melt and ooze out of my ears.
"Gnathy," I said, "calm down!"
"She doesn't like them," Twicken shouted. "She knows what they're going to do to her."
"Who?"
Before he could answer, she hooked the door handle and pulled. It was a seemingly random act, but the mechanism clicked and the door cracked slightly ajar.
"Shut it, Twicken! She's ...."
Gnathy gathered herself and leapt at the door. It swung open maybe a foot; she hurled herself through the gap and was gone.
"... out of here," I said weakly.
"You see?" Twicken sobbed. "It isn't my fault, none of this is. You see how quick she is? That's just how it happened the first time she got away. When she wants to go, she's gone."
"She's fast, all right." I gave him a squeeze. "But nobody's blaming you."
"Mom will." He sniffled. "She'll probably think that I deserved to be stuck in the fourth circle."
"I don't know your mom," I said, "so I could be wrong, but I don't think I am. Because if I were her, there's no way I'd let my son be stuck anywhere. Especially if he were a great kid like you. I'd come for you, if I had to rip time right down the middle."
"You would?" he said, brightening.
"And so would she," I said. "Trust me, it's a mom thing."
"But if she comes, how will I find her?"
"She'll go to where you're supposed to be."
He frowned. "That's there." He pointed at the deserted building with a faded sign that read WILLIAM'S LABORAT. The ... ORIES was now illegible. "But they've thrown up a block so it can never be a time machine again. All it can be is what it is in this circle."
"So someplace near here then."
"But they're going to know that and be looking for us, too. They're probably on the way."
I couldn't argue with his logic, so I decided to ignore it. "Which is why we need to collect Gnathy and find a place to lay low until the time cavalry comes to the rescue."
"There's no cavalry," he said. "Just mom and maybe Uncle Strego."
I nudged toward the door that Gnathy had left open. "Get, you." I slid out the other side of the Camry. "Remember, we're looking for a dinosaur, a hiding place, or your mom. Meet me back here in ten minutes."
We split up, heading in opposite directions around the building. I kept hoping that I'd run into my older, smarter self, who seemed to understand what was happening here, but there was no sign of her. Where was I when I needed me?
There was a rustling in a thicket off to my left. "Gnathy?" I hissed.
The silence was too sudden and complete. There was something in there.
"Here dino, dino, dino." What did I have to entice her out into the open? I glanced down at my hands and immediately curled them into fists. "Nice dinosaur."
"It's not the way he says it is." The words stabbed into me like an icepick. I spun around. The cop looked to be about seven feet tall. His uniform started black but then shaded to blue. Mirrorshades grew out of the sides of his head and knitted together over his nose.
"He who?" I said. My tongue felt as thick as a sponge.
"The boy."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
The cop's mouth gaped and gaped; first it swallowed his nose, then his eyes. The blue uniform shimmered and became bib overalls and I had a glimpse of Edgar's ugly face before the fist came out of the sky and caught me on the cheek and I fell.
I'm not exactly sure what happened then except that there was a whole lot of rustling behind me and then Gnathy sprang out of the thicket onto the thing that looked like Edgar. He got very bright and just about impossible to look at, except that I could see some dark part of Gnathy striking at him again and again, maybe it was her head or one of her legs. Then the brightness collapsed into a kind of puddle and for a second I could see the ground shimmer like the surface of a pond and then not-Edgar and Gnathy faded away.
I lay there for a moment, crying. All I could think of was what Twicken had said about her. When she wants to go, she's gone. If she could get away from us, maybe she could get away from them, too -- whoever they were.
I stood up, brushed myself off, daubed at the corners of my eyes. I decided not to tell Twicken what had happened, at least not anytime soon. Things were bad enough.

Sent By:James Patrick Kelly on Monday, December 23, 1996 at 14:44:01.

And then he was there, looking at me with worried eyes. "I didn't find her," he said. "Or anything." He looked really scared, like someone who was in way way over his head. At that point I did something which maybe in retrospect was a little dumb--except, then again, maybe it wasn't. After all this -- time -- I'm still not sure. What I did was, I put my arm around Twicken's shoulder and said, "Let's go inside."
He looked doubtful for a moment, and then he just nodded. It struck me that he was so scared, so eager for some smart Mom-substitute to take charge, he would have done anything I suggested. Somehow this did not comfort me.
Inside, the building looked even worse than I thought it would. Bare floors and walls and empty benches and work stations are depressing enough. But the place looked like no one had entered it in years. Mold and water stains covered half the walls. Dust lay thick on the floor. Hadn't Twick said this was a working lab just a short time ago? Short time ...
I remembered how the last syllable on the sign had just faded away -- over minutes -- and I wondered how much we'd see of it if we went outside now. And I wondered as well if maybe getting outside wasn't a really good idea. Yet somehow I couldn't make myself do it.
A moan from Twicken disturbed me. "I just wish we could find Gnathy," he said.
Okay, Terry, I thought. Bullet-biting time. I said, "Um, Twick? Let's sit down. I want to tell you something." We pulled a couple of metal chairs into an open space and sat facing each other. "I'm afraid I've got some bad news." His eyes widened in fear. As I launched into what happened I could see him fight not to cry. But then, when I got to the point I considered the terrible clincher, when the cop and Gnathy vanished, Twicken surprised me by not crying, or shrieking, or anything. He didn't exactly smile, but his face actually lightened a little. He didn't say anything and I didn't want to rock the boat so I didn't ask.
We sat there for just a few moments until the silence got too loud for me. "Tell me about those cops," I said. "What do they do, patrol the timeline -- excuse me, the circles?"
Twicken shrugged. "Kind of. They're not really cops, you know. They're probably not even people. No one knows for sure where they came from. My Mom says they might even be a kind of side effect of time travel. Weird, huh? All I know is they're real creeps. Put themselves in charge of everything and shove all these rules down our throats. I hate them! My Mom does too. She calls them "crypto-fascist pigs."
I stared at him. For someone from the far future, Twicken's Mom sounded a lot like the 1970's.
I didn't have time to think about it. My chair started to wobble, and when I looked down I could see that one of the wooden legs was so weak it looked about to topple over. I jumped up as if the chair had bit me. That chair had been metal, I was sure of it. I was about to say something when things got worse. A lot worse.
The walls started shaking. Not like in an earthquake, but like some flimsy construction about to collapse under its own weight. I took Twicken's hand. He was looking all around. "Wow," he said, and for the first time in awhile I thought I could hear hope in his voice. "I thought -- I thought it was just inert. But something's making it devolve. That means --"
Instead of finishing the sentence he gasped in pain. So did I. A low noise, a kind of growl, but not like anything alive, filled my head. And then the door opened, and they came in. Three of them.
At first they all looked like Edgar. Edgar at different ages. But then the two on the ends did that shape shifting thing, and the one in the middle didn't.
Next to me, Twicken was holding his ears and grimacing in pain as that damn noise shook our bodies. Edgar, the real one, came up to me, the corner of his mouth turned up in that smirk he gets whenever he finds an excuse to hit me. I wondered if they'd given him ear plugs, or if his head was just too thick for anything to bother it.
Without a word, he punched me in the belly. Twicken tried to rush him but Edgar knocked him aside as if Twicken was hardly even there. In the middle of everything I thought how the Fifth circle must be a nicer place than our miserable Fourth, because Twick clearly knew nothing of violence.
Edgar said, "They want to know what you did with their buddy. And the little zoo reject."

Sent By:Rachel Pollack on Wednesday, January 8, 1997 at 16:40:08.

I wanted to ask him what he was doing here, if he really was Edgar, and why he was referring to the other two as them when he was obviously part of the group. Or I would have, if I'd been able to talk. I had almost forgotten what it was like to take a punch to the midsection. There is no other bodily sensation to compare it to, few others as bad and damned few others that are worse. If despair were a physical trauma, it would feel like a punch in the stomach. I knelt on the floor, bent over, one shaky arm holding myself up, the other pressed against my stomach. Tears welled up in my eyes; in my blurry vision, the floor seemed to be shifting more and more rapidly.
"Did you hear me?" Edgar asked, in a tone of voice that suggested he was being reasonable and patient in the face of hostility. Face. I wanted to see his face. I wanted to spit in it, I wanted to take the hand I could barely see through my tears, the one only just keeping me from collapsing altogether and push it into his face, push hard, push him all the way back to where he came from, push, push, push--
And then I was pushing, and although I had meant to push myself up to my feet, pain or no pain, instead I was pushing against a door and I saw that I was not on the floor in that room with Edgar and the time goons standing over me and Twicken lying in a crumpled heap several feet away. I was in the doorway, standing behind Edgar and the goons.
I started to put my hand to my mouth and realized I was holding something. It was a Frisbee. Not just a Frisbee, but a mood Frisbee. Various colors kept undulating through it. Maybe it was actually a lava Frisbee, I thought, feeling something close to hysterical. What was I supposed to do with it, try to distract the temporal storm troopers with a sudden game of frisbee keepaway?
And then I realized two things at once: (1) I had better keep this thing away from them, and (2) nobody in the room could see me. I didn't know the exact reason for either, but the latter was obvious: the woman--the me--bent over on the floor had now raised her head so that she was facing me directly, and gave absolutely no sign that she had seen me. I could be a good actress when I wanted to be, but I knew that suppressing all reaction to the sight of anyone entering the room just then, let alone me was beyond my amateur thespian abilities. ...She calls them "crypto-fascist pigs."
Bingo. Eureka. The eagle has landed. Elvis has left the building. I almost dropped the thing in shock. I clutched it to my front with both hands and tried to think. All right, this must mean that the woman--the me who knew what was going on--had managed to scare the me driving the bus into arriving two minutes earlier than I--this me standing in a doorway hugging a time machine that looked like a frisbee in a color-identity crisis--had originally managed. And so I had recovered the time machine and Twicken--
Was this still Twicken? Was that still me?
Edgar was still his horrible, ugly self. He walked over to Twicken and yanked him up by one arm. The poor kid dangled in Edgar's grip and it was all I could do not to rush him. I couldn't make a wrong move now, no matter what happened next, or those two minutes, the little dinosaur, all of Twicken's efforts, my whole life, for that matter, would all be for nothing.
"You always did have all the charm of a punching bag," Edgar said to the me crouching on the floor, now looking tearfully at Twicken hanging limply from Edgar's big fist. I knew she--I--was still in too much pain to move. "Not to mention the intellect. I always had to explain everything to you about a dozen times, and never a week went by when you didn't need a reminder beating. But maybe if I demonstrate a few things on your precious little baby here--" he shook Twicken like a rag and both of me cried out "--you'll get smarter faster. Where's the lizard and their pal?"
Suddenly, I realized that the frisbee had grown warm against my chest. I held it away to look at it and found myself staring into the concave side, which had gone a pure and flawless silver, like a perfect mirror. Except it was not my face I saw reflected there, but Billy's. The car that had come down the road at exactly the wrong moment was receding from him and he was staring after it with mild interest on his little face. And then I saw that he was being held by someone, by a woman, and the woman was me--not a me, or a me that never was but me. I knew it as surely as I knew anything because the time machine was telling me via some sort of induction. Because I had used the time machine and gone back to save him, and at that moment, the woman I had been in the moment before Billy's death and the woman I was now had fused. That woman would forget that there had been a time machine at all, or a tiny dinosaur, or a boy named Twicken--
But the man named Edgar, he was right there, and although things may have changed for me and Billy, everything was the same with Edgar. The time machine showed me that, too. The fact that Billy hadn't died made no difference in how Edgar treated me. Every beating, every humiliation remained, and that wouldn't have been so bad, except that it wasn't long before he turned his abuse on Billy.
Well, at least I had enough character to pack up and leave immediately. Thank heaven I wasn't so battered that I would continue to allow Edgar to hurt an innocent child. And that turned out all right as well, even if there were some lean times. I made a life for us, Billy and me; pretty soon, he was calling himself Bill and talking about colleges. We didn't have enough money but that didn't matter because Bill's grades were so good that there was a plump scholarship--pre-med at Tufts. I could feel myself swelling with pride, and then determination. I could save him now. I could save him and I would save him, I would--
"You could save him, but you won't."
I jumped and almost dropped the time machine again, thinking that Edgar had seen me after all and knew everything. But no, he was still talking to the me across the room, still holding Twicken up by one arm. Twicken was squirming, obviously in pain, trying to free himself from Edgar's grip. The whole interlude with the time machine had taken all of two seconds. "You could have prevented this by just telling us what we want to know, but you didn't," Edgar went on. "You made me do this with your stubbornness and your utter stupidity. You'll just never change, will you, you old bag. You old punching bag." Edgar chuckled and pulled Twicken up so he could grab ahold of the front of his shirt with his other hand. The two goons didn't move. Perhaps they didn't know what to do, either, I thought, half hysterical. I looked down at the time machine; it was showing me Billy's face again and now he looked a little like Twicken as he stared after the car that hadn't hit him. No, he looked a lot like Twicken, I should have noticed that to begin with, shouldn't I? Or was I just imagining it?
And the time machine told me the thing that I had to know, that I had to understand before I made any decisions about what to do with it--namely, that because the wave front was collapsing, I could either save Billy or save Twicken, but I could not do both. If I saved Billy, I could not be on that bus to meet Twicken, I could not steal the bus and get us away, nor arrive two minutes earlier at a convenience store to dodge time crypto-fascists, recover a time machine and stand in this very doorway deciding whether I should rescue my only son or save some other woman's son.
But this was a time machine, I thought desperately. Sure there were ways around such a contradiction?
Sure there were, the time machine told me in its silent and wordless way. If I rescued Billy, Twicken and the dinosaur and the time machine would all disappear from my awareness. Or rather, I would be the one who disappeared from theirs. No Terry to steal the bus, drive to Casstown, look for a time machine. Something else would happen to Twicken and Gnathy, possibly something good, more likely not.
Why, I thought miserably. Why had I been given this perfect device and then plunked down in what was most definitely not a perfect world? Why couldn't I have just been able to rip time in half for that wonderful little boy, that sweet young man, that brilliant pre-med student--or just my son, no matter what he was or would be. If I were her, there's no way I'd let my son be stuck anywhere. Especially if he were a great kid like you. I'd come for you, if I had to rip time right down the middle.
In the room, Edgar was drawing back his fist. It was going to land square in the middle of Twicken's face and the damage was going to be sizable.
Why do I have to make this decision, I thought, and felt tears threaten again. Not because I didn't know what to do, but because I did. But I still didn't know how. Edgar's arm had just about reached the farthest point of pull back before it would travel forward, propelling his big, ugly fist into Twicken's delicate face. Desperate, I looked down at the frisbee again hoping that instead of tormenting me with Billy's features, it might show me something useful. Like how to interrupt the next five seconds.

Sent By:Pat Cadigan on Wednesday, January 8, 1997 at 16:43:10.

But it didn't. Or at least I don't think it did.
I can't take any credit for what I did. There was no conscious thought involved -- I didn't have a plan. It was all instinct. You see, I hadn't forgotten the time Edgar had broken my nose. It had taken months to stop hurting and more than a year to heal. Even now, on a windy winter's day, I can feel cold needling my sinus. And the shot he was about to deliver to the middle of Twicken's sweet face would make the stomach punch he had given the other me seem like a love tap.
My right hand, the one holding the time machine, dropped to my side.
And this was a kid I cared about. A lot. Can you love someone you've only met a few hours ago? There was no one to save him but me.
My wrist cocked.
I didn't have a gun or a knife or a baseball bat. I could've thrown myself at Edgar, except that there was no time. No time and the only possible weapon I had was ....
Before Edgar, I went to Kent State for a year. In the spring we used to sunbathe on the lawn in front of the library and flirt with the boys. They were always trying to coax us to play touch football with them or maybe toss a frisbee. I never did learn how to pass, but I could catch a frisbee behind my back.
... a silver disk, with the size and heft of a glass pie plate. It had been thirty years since I had let a Frisbee fly, but it's something you never forget how to do, like kissing or riding a bike.
I snapped my arm toward Edgar.
No, that wasn't right. It had been much less than thirty years since the last time I had thrown a Frisbee. As I let the time machine go, I flashed on a scene with Billy. I was teaching him how -- his arm drew back just that same way, the childish muscles pulling across the skin of his tanned little arm. We were on our lawn and he was trying to throw it to the dog next door, who had romped and played on the bright summer grass with my bright summer boy. Billy's throw was wobbly but King James had leapt and caught it nevertheless and my son had broken into delighted laughter...
The time machine sailed forward and caught Edgar directly in the neck. Then it kept on going, in the same pure arc as I'd thrown it, not at all deflected by the collision with Edgar...could that happen? Didn't some law of physics say the thing had to be deflected?
Sent By:James Patrick Kelly on Friday, January 17, 1997 at 15:27:30.

Deflected or not, the time machine/frisbee did its job, and a lot better than I'd even hoped, for Edgar crumpled to the floor, lying there like the bag of shit he always was. Somehow, I knew, without having to feel for a pulse or anything, that Edgar was dead. It's not possible I told myself. That thing, the time machine, it just didn't weigh that much.

But I had no time to panic, or even think about it. Because even before the un-deflected "frisbee" could land, Gnathy appeared, with not even a puff of smoke. She materialized in mid-air, mid-flight, as if she had leapt forward from a foot away, just like King James so many years ago when he used to leap up for Billy's frisbee. Gnathy caught the disk in her mouth, landed neatly on her little dinosaur feet, and pirouetted around to face me. She wobbled forward, staring at me, prodding me with her eyes.

A memory came to me. In the midst of all that craziness, with Edgar dead, and that other me trying to recover, and the crypto-pig shape changers likely to smash in at any moment, I remembered Billy walking towards me, a lot like Gnathy. Because you see, he was only two and a half and he couldn't walk too well, he kind of wobbled, even more so when he tried to run. So we had this game, Billy and I. I'd stand across the room and he would run to me, and to get him excited I would laugh and clap my hands and say, "Quick! Quick!" Oh, he loved that game.He would shriek with laughter. Only--he couldn't say "Quick" very well. When I went "Quick! Quick!" my precious wonder would call back "Twick! Twick!"

It was that memory more than anything else that did it. Later I found out about other things--the connection between Gnathy and the time machine, the effects of Gnathy biting down on the disk--but I know, I'll always know, that it was the memory that really and truly broke the circle.

What circle? Why, the fourth, of course. The circle of time consciousness that says only one reality is possible, that if you're in one place you can't be somewhere else, that time is a straight line with causes always spilling over into effects, that there is only one you, forever and ever, and every choice you make excludes every other choice, forever and ever.

Instead, I started to see all the different mes, overlapping, weaving in and out of each other. And all the different Billys too, some in worlds just like mine, some in worlds very different.

I saw a me who saved a Billy from that car only to have to save him again, from Edgar (it made me feel good about myself to discover there were no versions of me that allowed Edgar to beat up Billy the way he'd beaten me all those years). I saw a Billy inspired by that close call with death to study medicine and go on to found a bio-tech empire called simply "William's laboratories." And I saw a Billy, a William, who somehow understood that his life might have gone very differently, might even have ended before it really began, if not for an intervention out of a possible future. That Billy gave up medicine to turn all attention to time, to creating a way to move through the circles of time with only a disk connected to a network of circuitry. A network centered in--of course--William's Laboratories.

And then there were wilder versions as well, including one where a Billy--a Twicken, to use his childhood nickname--grew up in a world that already contained a time machine, brought there by a Mom who had used it to go back in time and snatch him from a speeding car.

World after world. Time after time. Overlapping and weaving. I saw them, and I saw something else. It was possible to move from one world to the other. Hadn't I pushed myself from the terrified me lying on the floor to the one standing in the doorway, the one already holding the time machine?

That was all you had to do, push. Ah, but that push required something a lot more than just gritting your teeth or grunting. It required an overwhelming need, a desperate yearning. The fuel that powered the time machine was love.
Sent By:Rachel Pollack on Thursday, January 23, 1997 at 11:13:53.

Everything vanished and I stood outside a plain, deserted cinder block building, alone, blinking in ordinary sunlight.
I shook my head, dazed. Then I tiptoed to the window and peeked through. Edgar's body lay on the floor, dead. Gnathy leaped, caught the Frisbee--the time machine--in her jaws, landed neatly on her little dinosaur feet, and pirouetted to face the astonished woman by the door. Time froze; I watched it freeze. It was beautiful, really, like the Northern Lights redone as a helix of semi-precious dinosaurs, contained in a field glowing like an opal. It wasn't just the beauty but the absolute perfection of that beauty that brought tears to my eyes.
"Have a kleenex." The sharp-faced woman pushed a box at me across the table. The light in the room was mercilessly bright. Nothing could hide from it. I took a tissue and dabbed at my cheeks.
"You're not one of us," I blurted.
"No, I'm not," she said frankly. "And I have to say, I hope I never am."
"You do?" I looked around for some means of escape. There was nothing. This room was a box with a light in the center of the ceiling. And a mirror--
"Well, of course. But the sad truth is, in the time that I've been with the police department here, I've talked to enough battered women that I feel as if I have if not an inside understanding of what it's like, then something that is the next best thing. So even though I haven't been abused myself, please don't think that I am completely devoid of understanding."
"All right," I said, wondering if she had any idea how smug she looked. Probably not. Her back was to the mirror. I was the one who could see our reflection. "But I get the feeling you're not a parent, either." Smiling at my reflection, I pushed the box of tissues back toward her.
Twicken's mom smiled back at me and put one arm around her son.
The room was gone, I was on my way again and Twicken's mom was explaining. She was the one from the Fifth Circle and knew the most. The Third- and Fourth-Circle me's were no slouches--you can't be, to run alonside a bus and force me to drive faster--but they didn't know as much as Fifth-Circle Terry, so she was answering most of the questions.
"I know it's hard having to pick things up on the fly like this," she said, "but things have been set in motion now and we have to go with the flow. All of us."
No Camry, no bus. No means of transportation. But it didn't matter. They'd allowed me time to walk home.
"Three hours," Twicken's mom said. "That's how long you've been in the police station telling them about Edgar's last assault on you. Long enough for you to walk home and be there before the rubber band effect breaks off and that you ricochet back. You can do it, Terry, can't you--convince them you're her?"
"Yes," one of the three other women said. One of the three who looked like me. "After all, I am her. Even if in a different circle."
Beneath my feet,, the pavement was starting to feel more solid all the time. Time. Ripped up the middle, time was knitting itself back together. Just like one of those late-night ads for miracle gadgets--REWEAVES FABRICS SO WELL THAT TEARS, BURNS, AND STAINS BECOME COMPLETELY UNDETECTABLE! ISN'T THAT AMAZING! HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY FOR A GADGET THAT CAN PERFORM A MIRACLE LIKE THAT? How much wouldn't I pay. Only everything I had, everything I have now, everything I ever will have.
But of course, if it's you wielding the miracle gadget, nothing can be undetectable, can it?
"Pay attention, Terry," she said as I floated along, re-uniting with the fabric of reality. But she spoke in a kindly way. She understood how I was feeling so dreamy, so dreamlike, because she was one of us. "Gnathy is the key. Part of the time machine is wired into her. Well, you can see that we had to do that--what if making dinosaurs a little bit smarter turns out not to be such a good idea after all? We need controls to undo the experiment at our end. When you threw the TM, Terry 4, naturally Gnathy snapped back to rejoin it, that's one of the hard-wired response mechanisms in her brain."
"Naturally," I said, my feet touching the ground. "And she bit down on it..."
"Well, yes, to restore everything the way it was before. Or, rather, will be. Only not everything, because the people caught in the actual TM field were outside of time at that moment. So they don't participate in the return to what was. Or will be."
I strode along, making good time. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of something disappearing around the corner of a house. Something small. And green. A little girl runs out of the house, whistles hard between her fingers. "Calgary! Here, girl! Here, girl!" She sees me and breaks into a sunny smile, waving. Her name is Ginger. I've been babysitting her practically from the time she was born. She calls me her honorary auntie. "Have you seen Calgary?" she calls to me. "It's time for her eye-drops. The vet said she had to have them twice a day."
I pointed to the far side of the house. Ginger made the OK-sign at me and tiptoed over to catch her recalcitrant pet. Calgary will probably know I ratted her out and next time I'm over to sit with Ginger, she'll probably bite me. But not hard. She's not vicious. I often get the feeling that memory, some kinds of memory, can survive even collapsing wave fronts and worse.
"Well, of course," Twicken said. Now that he had his mom back, he'd regained his teenage cockiness. It was sort of engaging. "Newton's law of equal reaction applied, but by the time the TM reached Edgar it was already traveling in time, so its mass was changing, and in fact its mass was so great by then that relative to it, Edgar's mass was nothing. It was like a feather not deflecting an asteroid."
This must have something to do with memory but--ha, ha--I can't remember what. Doesn't matter. I'm almost home now. We're almost home. All of us, just as all of us are talking to the cops and hugging a child in the middle of the road and rushing to work as a bus driver, while we all ground a protesting Twick for stealing the TM. I don't understand how long he's grounded for, since time isn't linear in Fifth Circles, but it doesn't matter. There, Twick and I know. All of us, together. Outside of time.
Including our little reptilian friend, part time machine, part frisbee-catcher extraordinaire, lean and green and not so terribly mean. Gnathy was caught outside time along with the rest of us, which means--
Well, skip all the technical stuff. Ultimately what it means is that as I walk past Ginger, what I see her struggling to hold onto as she waves at me is a very ordinary household pet, here in my home circle. Little Calgary, very cute, of a species as common as kudzu. Ginger's pet dinosaur.
The End

Sent By:Pat Cadigan and Nancy Kress on Wednesday, January 29, 1997 at 11:26:28.

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