Everything froze as the time-helix actuated and I was whipped into time with that pained expression on my face. That expression lasted 20,000 years, which was exactly how I felt.

BLAM! It was like falling into a steam bath—and falling was the right word for it. Hot clouds of vapor rushed past us, and the invisible surface could be ten meters or ten miles below us.

“Switch on your grav-chute,” I shouted. “Mine’s back in the nonexistent nineteenth century.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have shouted because Angelina turned the thing on at full lift and slithered up out of my fond embrace like an oiled eel. I clutched madly and managed to grab one of her feet with both hands—whereupon the boot part of the one-piece space suit promptly came off her foot.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she called down to me.

“I agree with you completely,” I answered incoherently through tight-damped and grating teeth.

The suit stretched and stretched until the leg was twice its normal length and I bobbed up and on down as though I were on the end of a rubber band. I took a quick look, but there was still only fog visible below. Space suit fabric is tough, but it was never designed to take a strain like this. Something had to be done.

“Cut your lift!” I called out, and Angelina responded instantly.

We were in free fall, and as soon as the tension was relieved, the leg fabric contracted and snapped me back up to Angelina’s waiting arms.

“Yum,” I said.

She looked down and shrieked and hit the grav-chute power again. This time I wasn’t ready and I slipped right down and out of her embrace and was falling toward the solid-looking landscape that had suddenly appeared below.

In the small fraction of a second left to me I did what little I could. Twisting in the air, spreading my arms and legs wide, trying to land square on my back. I had almost succeeded when I hit.

Everything went black, and I was sure I was dead, and darkness overwhelmed my brain as well, and my last thought flashed before me. Not only did I regret anything I had ever done, but there were a few things I wished I had done more often.

I could not have been unconscious more than a few instants. There was foul tasting mud in my mouth, and I spluttered it out and rubbed even more of it from my eyes and looked around me. I was floating in a half-liquid sea of mud and water from which large bubbles rose and broke with slow plops. They stank. Sickly-looking reeds and water plants grew on all sides.

“Alive!” I shouted. “I am alive.” I had struck flat out on the syrupy surface, dividing the blow over the entire back surface of my body. There were some aches and bruises, but nothing seemed to be broken.

“It looks very nasty down there,” Angelina said, hovering a few feet above my head.

“It’s just as nasty as it looks so, if you don’t mind, I would like to get out of it. Can you sort of drop down so I can grab your ankles, which will permit you to drag me out with a wet sucking sound?”

It was a large wet sucking sound as the decaying quagmire fought to hold onto me, parting only reluctantly with a slobbering sigh. I hung from my love ’ s ankles as we drifted over an apparently endless swamp which vanished in the fog in all directions.

“There, over to the right,” I called out. “Looks like a channel with running water. I think a wash and brushup are in order.”

“Since I am upwind of you, I couldn’t agree more.”

The current was moving slowly, but still moving as I could tell by a tree trunk that drifted by. In the middle of the sluggish stream was a golden sandbar that seemed made for us. I dropped as Angelina came low, and even before she had settled down herself, I was out of the noisome clothes and scrubbing the muck off in the water. When I bobbed up, spluttering, I saw that she had peeled off the sweltering space suit and was combing out her long hair, which happened to be blond at the present moment. Very lovely and I was thinking the most romantic thoughts when fierce fire pierced my gluteus maximus, and I shot straight up out of the water, yipping like a dog whose tail has been caught in the door. As attractive and feminine as she was, Angelina was still Angelina, and the comb vanished to be replaced by a gun, and almost before I touched the sand, she had fired a single well-aimed shot.

While she was applying a bandage to the double row of tooth-marks in my derriere, I looked at the fish, half-blown apart but still twitching, that had mistaken me for lunch. Its gaping mouth had more teeth than a dental supply house, and there was a definitely evil look in its rapidly clouding eye. Grabbing it by the tail to evade its still-gnashing jaws, I threw it far out into the water. This started a tremendous flurry of action under the surface, and from the size of some of the things that leaped out and smacked back down I saw that I had been attacked by one of the smaller ones.

“Twenty thousand years has done no good at all to this planet,” I said.

“Finish rinsing off that mud, and I’ll stand guard. Then we’ll have some lunch.” Ever the practical woman.

While I scrubbed, she shot up the pescatorial predators who came after me, including one large fish with fat flanks and rudimentary legs that waddled out of the water in an attempt to have me for lunch. We had it instead; the flanks concealed some fine thick filets that roasted well over a low-set heat projector. Angelina had had the foresight to bring a flask of my favorite wine, which made the meal a memorable one. After which I sighed, eructated, and wiped my lips with satisfaction.

“You have saved my life more than once in the last twenty thousand years,” I said. “So I no longer am brimful of anger for being whisked to this steambath world rather than back to the Corps. But can you at least tell me what happened and what Coypu told you?”

“He tends to mumble a good deal, but I got the gist of it. He has been working on his time tracker or whatever he calls it and followed your jumps through time, as well as someone he referred to as the enemy, the one you call He. The enemy did something with time, created a probability loop that lasted about five years, then terminated. Then He left this collapsing loop—and you didn’t. That’s why Coypu sent me back, to the minutes just before it ended, to bring you out. He gave me the setting for the time-helix that would enable us to follow He to this time. I asked him what we were supposed to do here but he kept muttering, ‘Paradox, paradox,’ and wouldn’t tell me. Do you have any idea of what is supposed to happen?”

“Simple enough. Find He and kill him. That should put paid to the entire operation. I’ve had two tries at him, shooting once and thermite bombs the second, and haven’t succeeded. Maybe this will be lucky three.”

“Perhaps you ought to let me take care of him,” Angelina said sweetly.

“A fine idea. We’ll blast him together. I have had just about enough of this temporal paper chase.”

“How do we find him?”

“Simplicity itself, if you have a time energy detector with you.” She did, Coypu’s foresight, and passed it over. “A simple flick of this switch and the moving needle points to our man.”

The switch flicked but did nothing more than release a little condensed water that ran out into my palm.

“It doesn’t seem to be working,” Angelina said, smiling sweetly.

“Either that or they are not using the time-helix at this particular moment.” I rummaged in my equipment. “I had to leave my space suit and some other things back in 1807, but Slippery Jim is never without his snooper.”

I was proud of the gadget and had designed it myself, and it was one of the few things He hadn’t taken from me. Rugged, it could resist almost anything except being dropped into molten metal. Compact, no bigger than my hand. And it could detect the weakest of flickerings of radiation across a tremendous range of frequencies. I turned it on and ran my fingers over the familiar controls.