The first scene was the site of the DC-10 crash. The tank was almost black, punctuated by tiny, exquisitely lovely flames. The viewpoint zoomed in until most of the tank was filled by one worker looking dazed and dragging a plastic sack behind him. He stooped, picked up something, and started to put it in his bag. The picture froze and we zoomed in closer, to see the object in his hand. It was Ralph's stunner, much the worse for wear. Deep inside it a red light glowed.

"This is the first human contact with the twonky. It's nothing serious, as you can see. The man has no idea what he's handling. His anions are not altered enough to produce change in the timestream.

"The twonky is taken to this building, which has been set aside to collect the non-organic debris generated by the crash."

I let them study the interior of the building as displayed in the tank. I surreptitiously wiped my palms on my hips. "Non-organic debris generated ... "

This was all getting to me. I'd been around Martin Coventry too much, and, to make it worse, much of the time-windows we could look into in our study of Bill Smith had been consumed by endless meetings. And suddenly I was babbling fluent techspeak, that universal human gobbledegook patois designed by "experts" to overawe the unwashed. It probably got started about the time of the flint hand-axe and has been getting denser and Zore impenetrable ever since.

I couldn't help it. For twenty-four hours I'd been observing masters of the tongue outdoing themselves at the subsequent meetings and hearings and press conferences generated by the crash.

Still, I'd have to watch it. Before I knew it I'd be on speaking terms with bureaucrats and from there it's only one short step downward to the nadir of language, which, in the twentieth century, was known as The Law.

"We can't trace it in here," I went on. "We're hampered by the fact that no less than four distinct blank spots exist between the time the Gate was turned off at the end of the snatch, and the critical time, forty-eight hours later, when the paradox situation becomes inherent.

Naturally, we can't know for what purpose the Gate was used those four times. But we do know none of them are the result of operations conducted by us prior to this time."

Ali Teheran spoke up. "Ergo, they will be caused by excursions into the past yet to be taken."

For brilliant observations like this I hold the Council in Awe? Oh, well. I nodded, and went on.

"Skipping over that for now ... when we again pick up the twonky it is only in terms of probabilities."

That statement produced much the same reaction it had earlier when Martin Coventry made it; I even heard someone groan, though this time I was sure it wasn't me. I believe it was The Nameless One.

"Right now everything seems to hinge on the actions of this man. William "Bill" Smith, forty-something years old, chief onsite investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board."

In the tank, the image was of an unkempt, slightly rheumy, tall, brown-haired guy I'd come to know all too well in the last hours. I let him linger there while the Council studied the man who had suddenly become the pivot of history as we knew it. I couldn't help taking another look myself. He was not the guy I'd have ordered up from central casting to be the Man for All Seasons.

Oddly, he looked a little like Robert Redford, my Hollywood heartthrob. If Redford had been a heavy drinker weighed down by fifteen years of quiet despair and burdened with an unfortunate way of holding his mouth and a pair of slightly misfocused eyes straddling a nose that leaned to the left ... if Redford had been a rummy and a loser, he'd have been Bill Smith.

It was as if two people had built a model using identical parts, but one had followed the instructions and the other had just bashed it together and left glue oozing from the cracks.

I resumed.

"Smith's actions following the last of the blank spots are crucial. We have established that he entered the hangar containing the wrecked airplanes forty-eight hours after the crash itself.

When he emerges, he has come unstuck from the time stream: I let that sequence unfold in the tank. I was weary of talking.

We saw him come out, but he was no longer the sharp, perfect little model of a man he had been when he went in. He was fuzzy around the edges. He was like a badly focused film, a vidscreen tuned incorrectly, or, more to the point, a photographic quintuple-exposure.

"We have identified five distinct main lines of action from this departure point -- or cusp, if you will. In two of them he emerges from the hangar with the weapon -- at least we think he does. He's very hard to see. In one of those two, the weapon is not sufficient as a disruptive force in his life. He eventually reenters his predestined lifeline. In the other, finding the weapon changes his life forever, with consequences for us I need not detail.

"In three other scenarios he does not have the weapon when he comes out. In two of those, he once more reintegrates into the path of history. But again, in the fifth and last, he departs radically."

Even though he does not have the stunner," Peter Phoenix said. "That's right. We don't know why."

"Something happened to him in there," Yokohama said.

"Yes. Naturally, we tried to find out what it was, but since the event happened during a period of temporal censorship we're unlikely to ever know." I was assuming they didn't need that phenomenon explained to them, but perhaps a few more words about it are in order, since I was now bracing to hit them with my plan, and it hinged on the laws of censorship.

There is absolute temporal censorship, and there is the censorship of proximity. The presence of the Gate is the best example of the first; when it is in operation, when it has actually appeared at a particular time, we can neither see nor go anywhere in that time ever again.

The Proximity Effect is a bit different. My recent trip back to 1983 New York is a good example. The Gate appeared, I zapped Mary Sondergard back through it, and it vanished. It didn't reenter 1983 until the next day. But for almost twenty-four hours I had been living in the past. l became a sort of twonky. If I tried to look into those twenty-four hours in New York, I'd see nothing but static; f was a disruptive factor in the timestream. An inanimate twonky did the same thing, but much less so.

You can't meet yourself. As far as we know, that's an absolutely inflexible rule of time-

traveling. It extends even to seeing yourself, and further, to someone else seeing you and giving you a report. Thus, Martin Coventry could not look into that motel room where I spent the night and see anything but static, nor could anyone from my time. That area was sealed to us.

In fact, my presence in that room had created a zone of censorship that took in most of the Eastern Seaboard. We could still scan in California during that night; but we'd have no luck seeing what had been happening in Baltimore.

For much the same reason, we could no longer follow Smith very accurately after he got to California to begin his investigation -- and that's what my argument to the Council would be based around. In addition to the windows of absolute censorship that told us when the Gate would be used -- might be used -- there was a great deal of proximity effect to be seen.

This probably meant that one of us had been involved in the events in the hangar. It meant, to Coventry and me, anyway, that somebody from our time was going to be moving around in 1983, with the result that temporal censorship was preventing us from learning anything that could be useful in planning what we would do -- had done.

If you don't understand that, take fifty aspirin and call me in the morning.

"I take it you are in favor of a mission to repair this situation," Phoenix said, anticipating me.