“So you’re going to this trouble for someone else,” said Young Wheaton.
“It would always be someone else,” said Deborah. “The undamaged baby. The only issue was whether to extinguish me or not.”
“And we don’t have any guarantee that they won’t all get hit by a bus a week from now,” said Noxon. “We’re not going to keep coming back to fix things. People die and things go wrong. We have work to do.”
“Heartless,” said Young Wheaton.
“Don’t judge,” said Ram Odin. “Every change he makes undoes everything that happens in other people’s futures. He tries to create minimal mess. But somebody won’t get a job because Deborah’s father isn’t dead to create the opening. Somebody won’t live in a certain house because Deborah’s family will be living there. Lots of changes that we can’t predict and won’t understand. Maybe somebody else will now die, hit by the same incompetent driver.”
“OK, I get all that,” said Young Wheaton. “He has to be heartless, to a degree. I can see that.”
“And now we need you to help us persuade your brother and sister-in-law to listen to us,” said Ram Odin.
“I can’t even persuade them to listen to me,” said Young Wheaton.
“All we need is an introduction, with both parents and the baby in the same room. We can take it from there.”
“Lanae is perfectly capable of refusing to believe the evidence of her own eyes,” said Young Wheaton.
“But Arnold can bring her around,” said Old Wheaton. “And she’s superstitious, as I recall. Tell her it’s bad luck to make the trip.”
“Not my job,” said Young Wheaton. “I’ll get you into the house. You take it from there.” He looked at Deborah. “I assume you have the same fingerprints as are on the birth certificate.”
“A little bigger now,” said Deborah.
“You’ll do fine,” said Young Wheaton.
“And then, after we’ve all saved their lives together,” said Old Wheaton, “we’ll go away and come back in about twenty years so we can live with you while we figure out how to prevent planetary genocide.”
That led to another explanation, but in the end, everything went according to plan. It took a couple of hours to get Lanae Wheaton to stop yelling and demanding that they leave the house, then weeping over Deborah’s missing eyes while murmuring, “My baby, my beautiful baby.” Then Noxon had Old Wheaton, Ram Odin, and grown-up Deborah hold hands and he jumped them back into the future.
A different future now. One in which Young Wheaton lived in a different city, because he was a professor of ancient languages at a different university. “My vids of the Erectids!” cried Old Wheaton. “I left them in the house! They’re gone forever!”
Deborah opened her purse and showed him the memory chips. “I thought of that and took them with us.”
“You see why I couldn’t part with her?” Wheaton said. “She’s my brain.”
“External storage,” said Ram Odin.
“Nice to be needed,” said Deborah.
They had a little money with them, but not enough for airfare. Wheaton’s credit cards were for accounts that had never been opened, with numbers that belonged either to no one or to somebody he’d never heard of. Again, Deborah’s purse was their salvation, but she only had about a thousand dollars. “I took it from your stash,” she told Wheaton.
“My stash?” he asked.
“Remember I had you put a thousand dollars into a hiding place so we’d have emergency cash?”
“No.”
“Well, I did, and you did, and this is it,” she said. “Busfare, maybe?”
“A plane ticket for one, and the rest of us slice time?” asked Noxon.
“Better than two days on a bus,” said Ram Odin.
“I’ve walked farther,” said Noxon. “It’s not as hard as you might think.”
“We’d get arrested,” said Wheaton. “It’s very suspicious to be cross-country pedestrians wearing civilian clothes.”
“And we can’t live off the land,” said Ram Odin. “All the land belongs to somebody, and there are still plenty of people who shoot trespassers.”
“What an unfriendly country,” said Noxon.
“Different time, different place,” said Wheaton. “We think we’re a very welcoming country. Generous and kind. Unless we don’t like your language or the way you look.”
Noxon knew he had the language right, so it had to be the facemask.
They reached Young Wheaton’s apartment in Ithaca, New York, rather late at night. Not having cabfare, they had walked for more than an hour from the airport. At least they had no luggage. And they refused to let Noxon snare and cook food along the way. “Not legal here,” said Ram Odin. “Not without a license.”
“Well,” said Deborah, “you can take small animals without a license.”
“Possum,” said Wheaton. “Coon. Squirrel.”
“But we wouldn’t eat those,” said Deborah.
They talked for a while about why they would disdain perfectly good meat, until they got so tired from walking it stopped being fun to argue about nothing.
Philologist Wheaton was exactly Anthropologist Wheaton’s age now, of course, but they looked different. Philologist Wheaton was a little plumper. Softer. Paler. No outdoor life. Nobody looking after him. Noxon realized that Deborah really had made a difference in her adoptive father’s life.
“You knew we were coming,” complained Anthropologist Wheaton. “This is all the room you arranged for?”
“I have beds for everybody,” said Philologist Wheaton patiently, “and I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“No,” said Noxon. “I’ll sleep on the floor. I prefer it.”
“The couch is softer,” said Ram Odin.
“Soft beds give me a backache,” said Noxon.
“The old house was completely paid for,” said Anthropologist Wheaton. “I grew up there.”
“It was also in another state,” said Philologist Wheaton. “The commute would have killed me.”
“Do you have enough money to feed us all? We aren’t sure how long we’ll be here,” said Ram Odin.
“I have plenty of money—I saved the amount I would have spent raising a blind daughter,” said Philologist Wheaton dryly. “And if I start running low, you can skip into the future, avoid a few meals, right?”
“Not with any precision,” said Noxon. “And we need time to assess the situation here in order to figure out how to prevent the destruction of my world.”
“I wonder if I’m going to have trouble deciding whose side I’m on,” said Philologist Wheaton. “I mean, maybe they have a good reason for attacking your world.”
“Not attacking,” said Noxon. “Garden has no defenses whatsoever. It’s global destruction of an unresisting enemy.”
“Except here you are, resisting.”
“Right of self-defense,” said Ram Odin.
“You aren’t defending yourself,” said Philologist Wheaton to Ram. “You’re from here.”
“But the planet Garden is full of my family,” said Ram Odin. “Descended from my twin brothers.”
“Defense of family,” said Anthropologist Wheaton. “A basic principle of anthrope survival from the beginning.”
“I’m against genocide in principle,” said Philologist Wheaton. “I’m just saying, there might be two sides to the story.”
“That’s why we didn’t send Earth a one-hundred-percent-fatal plague,” said Noxon cheerfully. “That’s why I came in person. To find out the other side.”
“You have the toxins to wipe out life on Earth?” asked Philologist Wheaton.
“Not with me,” said Noxon. “But I do know where to find a couple of dozen sentient mice who I’m sure know exactly how to re-engineer the virus.”