There was a short silence in the room. A couple of my people looked skeptical -- hell, maybe I was, myself, in a way. But it was hard to believe, looking at him, that he was lying.

He went on; still calm.

"And then, see, when the computer got them straightened out, there was just time for the alarm to go off, and I looked down and you couldn't tell the blips apart anymore. They were just one blip.

"And the blip dropped right off my board."

Testimony of Louise Baltimore

Sherman took me in hand when I finally got home. He didn't ask any questions, and he didn't say anything. A very quiet machine, is Sherman. I suppose it's a result of his near-total identification with me, his near-perfect reading of my moods and his near-perfect knowledge of what is best to do about them. One might even he moved to call it empathy, if one wasn't such a cynical bitch.

And of course he read that, too.

"I talk to you when you need talk, Louise," he said. "And for you, cynicism is probably a necessary armor."

Maybe I need to talk now, I thought. This, after an hour soaking in a hot tub as Sherman scrubbed and scrubbed at the blood that had vanished long ago but still needed cleansing.

Out, damned spot.

"Maybe you do need to talk," he said.

"Ah ha! You do read minds, you devious android."

"I read bodies. The print is much clearer. But I know your thought processes, and your education. You just thought of Macbeth."

"Lady Macbeth," I said. "Tell me why."

"You know, but it would be easier to hear me tell it."

"So I won't let you. Keep washing while I talk; maybe you can get the guilt out."

"You're indulging yourself. But if you wish to wallow in it a little longer, who am I to object? Merely a devious android."

"Wallowing in it? Bite your tongue."

"I was speaking of the bathwater."

I knew what he was speaking about, but I still needed to talk.

"It was Ralph's stunner. He's dead, of course, so he can't be blamed. But then who should be? Lilly was second in command; no point in trying to find her for a drumhead trial and execution. That leaves me. I was in command; I should have brought the stunner back with me. Two stunners left behind in one day!"

Sherman continued to scrub. I looked at his blank face, for once wishing there was an expression I could read.

"Honorable behavior," he said, finally, "demands seppuku. Do you want me to go get the knife?"

"Don't ridicule me."

"There's not much else I can do. If you insist that someone die for the mistake you all made in a chaotic situation, you are the logical choice."

"That's what I told the others."

"And what did they say?"

I didn't answer him. I was still confused about it. What they said was, fine, Louise, but we'll have to be killed, too. They maintained -- every one of them -- that responsibility for overlooking the stunner was spread out among all of us. They further pointed out that Ralph and Lilly were already dead, and it would be terribly wasteful to kill everyone else, too.

I didn't know about that, but I did know that if any of them ever needed my hide for a doormat, I'd cheerfully skin myself. There are rewards in being a leader, dammit.

"Haven't you been scrubbing there a little too long?" I said.

"I'm not distracting you, am I?"

"I don't need that. It's not the right time."

As usual, I was wrong.

And that is how William Archibald "Bill" Smith entered my life.

Not therein the bathtub, of course; later, back at the Gate, in the first anxious hours as we all waited as best we could while the temporal technicians took the pulse of the timeline, checking for damage.

Martin Coventry explained it tome and Lawrence and few of my top operatives and Lawrence's deputy gnomes. He gathered us all around a time tank he had set up near Lawrence's console and outlined the situation.

I had to admit I liked Coventry. He was a walkie, and a worker, but not a snatcher. His field was temporal theory, which made him one of about a dozen people on the planet who could claim to understand a little of what time travel was all about.

What first made me like him was his skinsuit. I'm not sure how old he was, but it must have been the early twenties. It was rumored that he had just about every mutated disease it was possible to have and still retain a brain, but then one hears those rumors about a lot of people. I thought it likely he was closer to gnomehood than I was, even though I was older.

And yet he chose to wear a skinsuit that made him look like a man in his early sixties.

That's rare. Even I have fallen prey to the cultural imperative of our day that says if you're going to lie about how you look, then really lie. The face I wear could grace magazine covers -- had done so, in fact. And my body was a twentieth-century adolescent's dream.

Then here comes Martin Coventry mugging at the world behind a face that only a mother could love, pretending he's older than anyone has actually been for thousands of years.

But he couldn't have made a more brilliant choice. The drones probably back away from him in horror, but he doesn't have to deal with them any more than I do. The people he works with are all involved in time travel. We know what age looks like, and deep down where we aren't even aware of it there is something that still respects the wisdom of the Elder. Coventry plays on that for all it's worth. With that face and that bearing, he was able to stand before us and lecture us as if we were a bunch of schoolkids. I can't think of another person I'd have taken that from.

"Let us consider the case of the first twonky," he said. "The stunner lost in 1955, over Arizona.

"In 1955, accident investigation was the responsibility of the Federal Aviation Administration. In addition to FAA personnel, members of the sheriffs" departments of Coconino and Navajo counties in Arizona, and of Kane and San Juan counties in Utah visited the site in an official capacity. Constables, police, and volunteer firemen from Red Lake, Cow Springs, Tonolea, Desert View and several other tiny Arizona communities arrived within six to twelve hours, in addition to units from Flagstaff. United States Park Service rangers from the nearby Grand Canyon National Park were there and thought they were the first, but actually the site had been already seen by members of the Hopi and Navajo nations.

These were ethnic groups living in subjugation in the wasteland.

"Over the next several days people from the Federal Bureau of Investigation -- a sort of national police force who maintained extensive fingerprint files -- the Lockheed Aircraft Company, Trans World Airlines, and the Allison Corporation, manufacturers of the powerplants, visited the site. Several trucking firms were engaged to haul away the major or interesting portions of the wreckage, but a great deal of assorted trash was left behind as not worth carrying out. Seven local mortuaries were hired to cart away the organic debris generated by the crash, with eventual disposal and burial in fifteen of the United States and two foreign countries.

"In all, a total of five hundred and twelve people came and went at the crash site in the seven days following the crash. Another twenty-two, mostly morbid curiosity-seekers, came in the subsequent seven days, and the numbers tail off drastically from that point.

"We have done a scan over the ensuing three centuries. We have observed thousands of Navajos and Hopis, hundreds of hikers, and tens of thousands of coyotes in that time, and the Big Computer is following up on each potential contact. However, as you must realize, a completely thorough search of each person's life from the time he contacted the wreckage would take longer than the real-time events themselves; we must be content with a scan.