That's one theory. It's the best one. The worst ...

It could very well be that if a grandfather paradox really gets going and history from the point of the twonky forward starts to come unglued ...

... we all softly and suddenly vanish away.

Not just you and me, but the Sun, Jupiter, Alpha Centauri, and the Andromeda Galaxy.

And so forth.

This is known as the Cosmic Disgust Theory. Or: If you're going to play games like that, I'll take my marbles and go home. Signed, God.

Coventry went on with quite a bit more eyewash about the Herculean effort his department was carrying out, peering into the intimate moments in the lives of around six thousand people who had been dead for millennia. It seemed to me like a good time to get some sleep. I probably would have, too -- let's face it, in just ten hours Coventry and his team had done a remarkable job, and so far seemed to have ruled out the 1955 accident as a source of temporal disturbance. I was feeling much relieved.

Then he got to the second twonky.

"Here," he said, "the situation seems hopeless."

Did you ever have the short hairs on the back of your neck stand up? Mine did. I heard a roaring in my ears, a sound of thunder like an earthquake building up steam, or the winds of change blowing through the ruins of time. I could hear God clearing his throat: Okay, folks, l warned you ...

"Ralph's stunner came down with the DC-10 in a pasture north of Interstate 580, not far from Livermore, California. There it was picked up by a recovery worker and taken with the rest of the wreckage to a hangar at Oakland International Airport, where it sat for about forty-

eight hours. At the end of that time, it seems to have come into the possession of a Mister William Archibald "Bill" Smith, an employee of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Of all the people who might have found the weapon, he is probably the worst possibility. He has technical training and an inquisitive mind.

"What he learned from his examination of the weapon is impossible for us to determine.

All we know is that he entered the hangar where the weapon was being stored at eleven P.m. on the night of December 13. We can observe him inside the hangar for only a short time; then a temporal blank intervenes, a period of censorship lasting two hours. When he emerges from the hangar, we can describe his actions only in terms of probabilities."

Somebody groaned -- it might even have been me. There was exerted talk, worried looks thrown back and forth, haunted eyes, the old smell of fear. You could hardly blame us. When we have to speak in terms of probabilities concerning events in the immutable past it means the shit has already hit the fan and the only reason we don't smell it is it hasn't hit us yet.

I won't go on quoting Martin. It's not really fair to him; he was as scared as the rest of us, and with him, fear shows up as pedantry. He got even more insufferably, prissily dry and didactic as he told us the story leading up to the casting of Bill Smith as the Most Important Man in the Universe, using the time tank as a visual aid.

My first thought when I finally saw Bill Smith there in the tune scanner was maybe I should go back and kill him.

Not the best way to begin a relationship. But if killing him would prevent him from upsetting the framework of fated events, I would have done it without batting an eye.

Naturally, that was the worst thing I possibly could have done. According to Martin's scanning, Smith had years to live. He was supposed to die in 1996, by drowning, and to kill him in Oakland could not fail to affect the timestream.

I sat and listened to the buzz of conversation after Coventry's exit, but I didn't join in. I was having an idea, and I didn't want to force it.

Finally, still not sure what I was doing, I left the others and went to a terminal.

"Listen up ... " I started, then decided ( was in no mood for those sorts of games just now.

"BC on-line, please," I said.

"On-line," it replied. "Am I addressing Louise Baltimore?"

"Yes, and don't sound so damned shocked. I'd like a straight answer."

"Very well. What is the question?"

"What do you know about Jack London Square?"

"Jack London Square is/was an area near the waterfront of Oakland, California. It was named for a famous writer. It came into being as an urban redevelopment project in the mid-

twentieth century, and was something of a tourist attraction for those few people who visited Oakland for reasons of tourism. Do you want more?"

"No, I think that's enough."

I found Martin Coventry on the balcony outside the Gate building, looking over the derelict field. Or, as we snatchers sometimes call it, the Bermuda Triangle. In another age the place might have qualified as a museum. In our day, it was simply an historical junkyard. I joined Coventry and stood with him looking at the debris of five hundred years of Gate operations.

How would you go about snatching a one-Beater fighter plane? What about a plane that gets into trouble over the ocean and vanishes without a trace? Or a Spanish galleon going down in a hurricane? Or a space capsule that falls into the sun, killing all aboard? The best way to handle those types of disasters is to take the entire vehicle through the Gate. If it's a jet fighter, we field it in the retarder rings. The plane slows to a stop, we take the pilot off usually quite confused -- and then, depending on where he was going to crash, either catapult his wimp-piloted plane back a thousandth of a second later than we took it, or just dump it in the derelict field. Any vehicle which will never be found ends up out there on the field. Why send it back? It takes a lot of energy to send an ocean liner back through the Gate. There's a very good reason why nobody's ever found the wreck of the Titanic: it's sitting out there rusting away.

Right next to the pride of Cunard is a starship from the twenty-eighth century.

The derelict field is roughly triangular, five miles on a side, and is chock-a-block with every land, sea, air, and space vehicle imaginable. Right in- front of me were four propeller-

driven aircraft that, if memory serves, actually did come from the Bermuda Triangle."

They were in pretty bad shape. We'd taken them about fifty years ago and, like everything else on the field, the chemicals in the air had not done them any good. A rain shower :n the Glorious Future I call home is not something to take lightly.

"I was born to be an historian," Coventry said, unexpectedly. I looked at him. I couldn't have been more befuddled if he'd told me what he wanted Santa Claus to bring him for Christmas.

"Were you?" I said, helpfully.

"I was. What more honorable profession in the Last Age than that of historian?"

And what more futile, t thought, but kept it to myself. Historians, as I understood, existed to pass down knowledge and lore to future generations. Without descendants, the compilation of history struck me as a fairly dry business. But he was way ahead of me.

"I know I was born in the wrong age for it," he conceded, looking at me for the first time.

"Still, this breaks my heart. What a memorial this could have made. What a testament to the human will to keep going. Look at that."

He was pointing to what remained of a Viking longboat rd helped snatch no more than six months before. The thick fluid we are pleased to call air had eaten gaping holes in it already; out here, you might as well build something out of cheese as to build it of wood.

"Can you imagine setting out to row across the Atlantic Ocean in that ... that ... "

"Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean," I said. "But what you don't know is it was a real ship of fools. You didn't have to deal with a berserk Captain. Lars, Cleaver-of-Heads, he was called. He told me that Thor had called him to sail to Greenland. He hadn't messed with navigation, even though he knew more about it than you'd think, because it was a divine sailing. I picked up him and his crew becalmed in the horse latitudes, rowing to beat the band.