But, he realized, if I’ve already done this then why is there still a Bureau now? An uneasy fear began to grow in him.
“Hurry up and finish that report,” Mahler told the medic.
“I don’t know what the rush is,” the medic said. “Unless you like it on the Moon.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Mahler said confidently. “If I told you who I am, you’d think twice about—”
“Is this thing your time-rig?” the medic asked boredly, interrupting.
“Not really. I mean—yes, yes it is,” Mahler said. “And be careful with it. It’s the world’s only two-way rig.”
“Really, now?” said the medic. “Two ways, eh?”
“Yes. And if you’ll take me in to your Chief—”
“Just a minute. I’d like to show this to the Head Medic.”
In a few moments the medic returned. “All right, let’s go to the Chief now. I’d advise you not to bother arguing; you can’t win. You should have stayed where you came from.”
Two guards appeared and jostled Mahler down the familiar corridor to the brightly lit little office where he had spent eight years. Eight years on the other side of the fence.
As he approached the door of what had once been his office, he carefully planned what he would say to his successor. He would explain the accident, demonstrate his identity as Mahler, and request permission to use the two-way rig to return to his own time. The Chief would probably be belligerent at first, then curious, finally amused at the chain of events that had ensnarled Mahler. And, of course, he would let him go, after they had exchanged anecdotes about their job, the job they both held at the same time and across a gap of years. Mahler swore never again to touch a time machine, once he got back. He would let others undergo the huge job of transmitting the jumpers back to their own eras.
He moved forward and broke the photoelectronic beam. The door to the Bureau Chief’s office slid open. Behind the desk sat a tall, powerful-looking man, lean, hard.
Me.
Through the dim plate of the spacesuit into which he had been stuffed, Mahler saw the man behind the desk. Himself. Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. The man who had sent four thousand men to the Moon, without exception, in the unbending pursuit of his duty.
And if he’s Mahler—
Who am I?
Suddenly Mahler saw the insane circle complete. He recalled the jumper, the firm, deep-voiced, unafraid time jumper who had arrived claiming to have a two-way rig and who had marched off to the Moon without arguing. Now Mahler knew who that jumper was.
But how did the cycle start? Where did the two-way rig come from in the first place? He had gone to the past to bring it to the present to take it to the past to—
His head swam. There was no way out. He looked at the man behind the desk and began to walk towards him, feeling a wall of circumstance growing around him, while he, in frustration, tried impotently to beat his way out.
It was utterly pointless to argue. Not with Absolutely Inflexible Mahler. It would just be a waste of breath. The wheel had come full circle, and he was as good as on the Moon. He looked at the man behind the desk with a new, strange light in his eyes.
“I never dreamed I’d find you here,” the jumper said. The transmitter of the spacesuit brought his voice over deeply and resonantly.
NEEDLE IN A TIMESTACK
In the summer of 1981 I was at a science fiction convention, chatting with my good friend Bill Rotsler, when a young man came up to us and started making himself obnoxious. Bill turned to him and said, “Go away, kid, or I’ll change your future.” At which I said, “No, tell him that you’ll change his past,” and suddenly I realized that I had handed myself a nice story idea. An intricate time travel plot unfolded itself for me with marvelous clarity, one that very vividly demonstrates the perils of being able to fool around with things that have already happened if one postulates that the past is not a sealed book, but is, in fact, a fluid thing subject to retroactive manipulation. I wrote it in January 1982 and sent it to Alice Turner, Playboy’s brilliant fiction editor in those days, who bought it immediately and published it in the July 1983 issue.
Some years later, a major American movie company bought it also. They gave me quite a lot of money, which was very pleasant, but did nothing about actually making the movie and eventually gave me back the rights. Then, a few years later, they bought it again and once again did not get around to filming it. Now a different company is planning to do the film. This is a very jolly loop to be caught in, bringing me one nice paycheck after another, but I hope someone does finally make the movie, sooner or later. It’s one science fiction movie I’d actually like to see.
BETWEEN ONE MOMENT AND THE next, the taste of cotton came into his mouth, and Mikkelsen knew that Tommy Hambleton had been tinkering with his past again. The cotton-in-the-mouth sensation was the standard tip-off for Mikkelsen. For other people it might be a ringing in the ears, a tremor of the little finger, a tightness in the shoulders. Whatever the symptom, it always meant the same thing: your time track has been meddled with, your life has been retroactively transformed. It happened all the time. One of the little annoyances of modern life, everyone always said. Generally, the changes didn’t amount to much.
But Tommy Hambleton was out to destroy Mikkelsen’s marriage, or, more accurately, he was determined to unhappen it altogether, and that went beyond Mikkelsen’s limits of tolerance. In something close to panic, he phoned home to find out if he still had Janine.
Her lovely features blossomed on the screen—glossy dark hair, elegant cheekbones, cool sardonic eyes. She looked tense and strained, and Mikkelsen knew she had felt the backlash of this latest attempt too.
“Nick?” she said. “Is it a phasing?”
“I think so. Tommy’s taken another whack at us, and Christ only knows how much chaos he’s caused this time.”
“Let’s run through everything.”
“All right,” Mikkelsen said. “What’s your name?”
“Janine.”
“And mine?”
“Nick. Nicholas Perry Mikkelsen. You see? Nothing important has changed.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes, of course, darling. To you.”
“Keep going. What’s our address?”
“11 Lantana Crescent.”
“Do we have children?”
“Dana and Elise. Dana’s five, Elise is three. Our cat’s name is Minibelle, and—”
“Okay,” Mikkelsen said, relieved. “That much checks out. But I tasted the cotton, Janine. Where has he done it to us this time? What’s been changed?”
“It can’t be anything major, love. We’ll find it if we keep checking. Just stay calm.”
“Calm. Yes.” He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. The little annoyances of modern life, he thought. In the old days, when time was just a linear flow from then