"You people sure made a mess of things," he commented.

I couldn't believe my ears.

"We?" I said. "We made a mess of things? You can't believe we managed to do all this."

"Then how did it happen?"

"It started with your great-grandfather and the industrial revolution. But it was you, you unspeakable son-of-a-bitch, your fucking generation that really got things going. Did you really think there'd never be a nuclear war? There have been nineteen o f them. Did you think nerve gases were going to just sit there, that nobody would ever use them?"

"Easy, Louise," Sherman said.

The hell with that.

"CBN, you called it. Chemical, Biological, Nuclear. You made plans just as if the world could survive it, just like it was another you could win. Well, goddam it, we held out a long time, but this is what we came to.

"The plagues were the really cute part. Add laboratory-bred " microbes to a high level of background radiation, and what you get is germs that mutate a hell of a lot faster than we can.

We've done our best, we've fought them with everything we have. But your great-

grandchildren came up with genetic warfare. So now the plagues are locked up right in our genes. No matter how hard we fight them, they change. Did you think we started the Gate Project for fun? Can't you see what it is? It's a last-ditch, hopeless effort to salvage something from the human race. And it isn't going to work."

"It will work, Louise," Sherman said.

"Okay, Sherman," I said. "Here's the big question. Here's where you tell me the last thing you held out on me, or I sign out and let the rest of you zombies handle the world from now on. How does it work?"

"You remember I spoke of perspective."

"I remember."

"That Bill Smith believes he is in the future, when in actuality, he is in the present, as are you and L"

"You're not telling me anything new."

"The answer is simple. We will send all the people we have collected into the future."

I opened my mouth to answer. That's as far as I got.

"That's stupid," I finally managed to say. "The Gate won't go to the future."

"Not quite correct," the BC said. "The Gate exists in the future. It brings people to the future every time it retrieves one of your snatch teams."

"Yeah, but I was told we can't go forward from here. From this instant."

"That is almost true," the BC said. "To send anything uptime from here would destroy the Gate. Some side effects of this process would also destroy this city, and leave a crater in the earth's surface twenty miles deep. In other words, travel from an arbitrary present to a theoretical future is something that can be done only once, as the Gate would no longer exist after the trip."

"That's what I said. You can't ... "

And I stopped. If there has been a constant in my life, it has been the Gate. An earlier generation would have spoken of the constancy of the stars in the sky, or of the regularity of the sunrise. I had much less confidence in these phenomena than I had in the Gate.

"We don't need it anymore," the BC said.

One trip. One big whammo trip to the future.

"You'd better make it a long ways into the future," I said.

"I shall," said the BC.

There were a few procedural details for the last twenty-four hours. It also took some convincing. At this point, I don't know if I have been fed a bunch of lies.

Why won't the paradox still wipe them out, even if they go a million years into the future? The sleeping goats are still the result of operations that, because of the paradox, never took place, weren't they? Not so, said the BC. Not if we go far enough into the future. The resilience of the timestream is greater than we had thought. Fifty thousand years is the blink of an eye compared to the journey the BC was contemplating. Things would even out again, and it would be as if the goats had emerged from a different universe.

I wondered how long the BC had known this -- if, indeed, it really did know it- and why it hadn't mentioned it before. I was, at this point, mistrusting just about everything. All in the world I wanted to do was say a peaceful good night and here was the BC saying we still had a chance.

The BC was monumentally unenlightening about this point "I know," it said, and would not be moved from that simple statement.

I wanted to know how we were going to move two hundred thousand sleeping goats through the Gate in .the short time allowed. The BC said we'd simply load them aboard the ship. It was already doing so. While the ship was not capable of reaching a distant star, as we had originally planned, it was surely capable of flying across the city. All it had to do was fly into the Gate, and come out of the other end, three or four million years in the future. Then all the goats would be awakened and they co uld rake their best shot at making a world that wouldn't self-destruct in a couple thousand years.

So nice. So simple. Why did I feel I was being conned?

Bill Smith was another problem. He embraced the wild scheme with all his heart, and before long he was talking about this and that "we'd" do when "we" got there. The poor bastard really thought I could go.

Well, why should I spoil his party? I wasn't anxious to tell him how sick I really was, how what he saw was simply a skinsuit, and that I was .a child of my times: withered, pitiful, terminal. So h found myself assuring him that when it came time for the ship to leave, I'd be there at his side, slam-bang into the future with all the other goats.

I had not the slightest intention of doing so. There comes a time to draw the curtain. If they found a world they could live in, millions of years down the road, it would be a world that would kill me. I need a lot of things that are poisonous to the healthy bastards I'd spent my life rescuing. I might make it for a year in such an environment, but what was the point? Bill thought he was in love with me, that he couldn't go on without me, but I doubted it. !f he ever got a good look at me-at the real me-he'd get over his infatuation pretty fast.

And I spent my last hours doing what I'd done all my life: being a good girl. Sherman had told me and Bill that we must tell our stories. We must tell everything. Everything we'd seen and felt and thought. He'd been quite insistent, and I wasn't in a real hurry to end it, so I have done it. Here it is.

Bill is somewhere else, doing the same thing. I hope he's enjoying it.

So now I'm finished.

I was actually on the railing of the balcony outside my apartment when I was disturbed by the Call of Destiny. The story of my life.

I guess you'd call it a mailman. It was a robot, and it had come from the Post Office at the Fed, and it was carrying the opened time capsule inscribed to me with the instructions that it be opened on the Last Day.

"BC, on-line," l said.

"I'm here."

"Why did you send this over? I had decided not to mess with it."

"It's an interesting message, Louise."

"You've been reading my mail? Shame. But what the hell? You've been writing it, too."

"Guilty. Certain things had to be done in a certain way."

"I'm not complaining. I'm a good soldier to the end. But why should I read this? And why should I believe. it?"

"It's entirely up to you, Louise."

How curious can someone be who is two seconds from jumping ninety stories to her death? Fairly curious, I discovered.

The message read:

It's me again.

You'll be wondering how you can be getting a message from a future version o f yourself, considering what you were about to do when this message arrived. You will be concluding it is more trickery from Sherman, or from the BC, or maybe from a practical-joking God.