"I do know where it is," Mayer said.

"I want you to tell me, Doctor." She looked at him, and he said nothing. She sighed -- I can't begin to describe how weary she seemed -- and stood up again.

"Doctor Mayer," she said. "Let's dispense with the threats. I think you've figured out that I have no intention of hurting you. I don't claim it's because I'm such a sweet person; if it would preserve the project, I'd slice you up thinner than baloney, and never blink an eye."

"We all realize how cold-blooded you are, Ms Baltimore," Mayer said.

"Okay. I can't hurt you. I admit it. It would make things worse than they already are. I'm down to pleading, and, I hope, to reasoning. Do you understand what I said about paradox?"

"I believe I do."

"And you're still ready to jeopardize everything?"

"I don't acknowledge that as proven. You said yourself the damage has already been done; you're striving now only to minimize it. By your own admission, you yourself will be erased from reality no matter what happens here tonight. Bill has already caused the paradox.

It's unstoppable. Isn't that right?"

Louise gave me a reluctant nod. Then she rallied again.

"But it's still possible to choose between two disasters. One of them is terrible, but the other is absolute."

Mayer shook his head.

"I don't believe you know that."

From the expression on Louise's face, I started to wonder if Mayer had his own built-in polygraph.

"Maybe I don't," she admitted. "But why won't you tell us where the rest of the stunner is?"

"Because it's all I have left," Mayer said, quietly. "I don't intend to spend my few remaining years wondering if you pulled some temporal con-game on me. You said my daughter is alive in your world. I demand that you prove it. Take me there. Then I'll tell what I know."

Do you believe a drowning man sees his entire life flash before his eyes? I didn't; I still don't. I've talked to too many people who thought they were about to die, and then survived, and while they recalled some scattered images and went through some experiences that might be called religious, there was no sequential review, no actual reliving of anything.

Nevertheless, something a lot like that happened to me then. It didn't take more than a second. I was clearheaded as I reviewed where I had been, where I was now, and what I might expect from the future.

Then I stood up, and as Mayer finished saying, Then I'll tell you what I know, I said, "I want to go, too."

Louise did not seem surprised. I suspected it was impossible to surprise her at that point; I supposed she had seen everything that would happen here this night, and was going through this conversation for reasons unfathomable to me. I was right-she could no longer be surprised -- but I was also wrong, as I found out later; she didn't know what was going to happen. She proved it by turning to Sherman with a helpless look.

"What do I do now?" she asked him.

I think Mayer was as startled by this as I was. Suddenly, things shifted around, and I don't know if any of us really knew who was in charge.

Unless it was Sherman. You don't know what inscrutable is until you've tried to figure out what a robot is thinking. Mayer seemed to have the same thought. At least, when he went on with his pitch, he aimed it at Sherman, not Louise.

"What's the difference?" he said, with a pleading note }n his voice. "You've got three alternatives. You go back with the insides of that stunner, and you leave me here. You go back without the stunner, and you leave me here. Or you go back, take me, I tell you where the stunner's insides are, you come back to get them-"

"We don't know if we can do that," Sherman reminded him. "There may not even be enough time for another trip."

"That's your problem," Mayer said. "l want you to tell me what happens. What are the results of my actions?"

"Immediately? Nothing at all. We will leave, and you and Mister Smith will go back to your lives. They have been disrupted, but you will never notice a thing. Life will continue to seem as it always has done; reality will not be altered for you. Eventually you both will die."

It's funny how one word will bring something home that you may have understood intellectually but haven't yet felt in your gut. Louise and Sherman came from a place where I had been dust for a thousand years.

"As a result of the changes introduced into your lives by the things you have seen and heard in the last month or so, you will each do things much differently than you would have done in what we like to think of as the "preordained" order of things. Those changes will affect the lives of others. The effects will spread over the years and centuries. It is probable, approaching certainty, that these events will wipe out our time machine. And, of course, Louise and myself and all our contemporaries, but that isn't important.

"The important thing for you, Doctor Mayer, is that if Louise didn't exist, then she never went back to 1955. She never boarded that airplane -- at considerable risk to her own life, I might add and never rescued your daughter. It would mean that your daughter did indeed die in the Arizona desert."

Mayer was shaking his head.

"And yet you said you have her, alive, right now."

"'Now' is a rather slippery concept in this context."

"I can see that. But you didn't tell me what difference it would make. If the paradox is already here, how can my telling you about the stunner change anything? And on the other hand, how can my disappearance from this time make things any worse? People disappear all the time."

"Yes, but we know why. It's because we've taken them. And we know ... " Sherman paused, and seemed to reassess "Very well. I'll be honest. We don't know whether it would be worse to take you or leave you here."

"I thought not. And in that case, I stand firm. You see- ... when you get right down to it, I don't believe you have my daughter. I won't until I see her. And having seen her, I won't believe I could lose her again."

Sherman looked at him for a long time.

"The universe is, so far as I know, Doctor Mayer, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve."

"I know that, too. I've spent my life accepting the answers I've found in the universe.

Until I began to investigate and to really think about the nature of time. And then something changed. I don't believe ... I don't believe there is nothing behind it all. Maybe I'm saying I believe in God."

"And he's on your side. Is that it?"

Mayer looked abashed.

"I put it badly. I -- "

"No, don't apologize," Sherman said. "Oddly enough, I do too." He looked from Mayer, to Louise, to me. By then I was feeling like a relatively unimportant member of the peanut gallery, there to applaud when the sign flashed.

"Do you believe in a god, Mister Smith?"

"I don't know. I don't believe reality is as fragile as you're trying to say it is. And I still want to go."

He looked at Louise, who was shaking her head hopelessly.

"Very well," Sherman said. "Let's all go back."