“What’s that?” demanded your father dazedly. “Great-great—”
Hari and Stan tried to explain, together. I opened my eyes and saw Ginny. My last previous view had been of a hamlike fist gaining momentum before my nose. Ginny was a welcome change. I sat up, staring at her. My mouth dropped open.
I heard myself saying earnestly: “Look, angel! It’s not true there’s no marrying in Heaven, is it? With you around that would be a dirty trick.”
And Ginny kissed me. It was quite proper. She had read this letter, and she knew that she was going to marry me—knew it in fact the instant she saw me—and even that nearly two years later I would still be bragging about it. In fact, I would be—I am—gloating over it in a quite unseemly manner. So her engagement to you, Charles, was automatically terminated by my arrival. In its place an arrangement of much longer standing matured. And while I do not believe in long engagements as a rule, Ginny’s and mine of some fourteen centuries’ duration has worked out all right.
You stirred and rose. I was still there. Ginny was very close to me. You howled and leaped toward me again. I got in one gratifying punch on the nose—which does resemble mine, by the way—and then Harl and Stan and your father grabbed you, and Ginny grabbed me. When she touched me, all my belligerent impulses died. I felt infinite love for all the world. I might even have forgiven you, Charles, temporarily, for being my rival as well as my fifty- two-times removed grandson.
Your father said desperately, “Let me understand this thing!” He pushed you into a chair and looked unhappily at me. My costume was eccentric. Harl and Stan again tried to explain.
But you, Charles, bellowed, “It’s a lie! It’s a trick! It’s a stupid practical joke! I’ll kill—”
Laki said shakily, “Suppose we let the police settle it. If he really is who the book says—”
You bounced up and roared, “I’ll get ’em! You hold that faker here, Father, and I’ll teach these idiots to play jokes.” You rushed out. Your father mopped his face.
I said mildly to Ginny, still standing close by me, “Where am I, anyhow? Not that it matters.”
Ginny reached out her hand to Stan. As if somnambulistically, he handed her a book. It was an ancient, crumbling, tattered volume of fiction. Ginny opened it with fingers that trembled only a very little. I read:
To: Charles Fabius Granver
Sector 233, Zone 3, Home 1254, Radii.
The Thirty-Fourth Century, a.d.
My dear great-great-great-etc.-grandson
Charles:
Ginny said softly in my ear, “Read it! Fast!”
I read.
I heard your father saying harassedly, “His face does look familiar…”
I handed him the book and bowed benignly. I said, “Sir, I am very happy to have met you. It is a rare privilege.”
And so it was. And will be. One does not meet even a fifty-one-times-removed grandson every day.
There was a scraping sound. Hari turned pale. Stan jumped. Somehow, I think that up to this moment they had not quite fully believed. But that scraping sound… Ginny had competently untied a piece of sash cord from my belt in the back and fastened it to a chair. It had reached up to the ceiling. Having admitted my failure to notice that Joe—back in the laboratory—had tied a cord to my belt with a very clumsy granny-knot, I don’t feel I have to justify my not connecting the facts of time-travel with that piece of rope. Not up to this moment. But Ginny had realized from the beginning. She’d been previously informed. I’m informing her now. She’d tied the cord to a chair, and some fourteen centuries away my colleague Joe was dragging on the cord. He’d taken his time about it!
Ginny said shakily, “I—guess we’d better hurry…”
She was a little bit scared. To tell the truth, so was I. I said somehow hoarsely, “I’ll stay here if you’d rather—”
But I’d read this letter. And I felt—well, Charles, perhaps you can never understand how magnificent I felt when Ginny smiled at me and put her hand in mine and said to Laki, “You might try to explain to Uncle Seri for me.”
The chair tied to the sash cord stirred again. I lifted Ginny to a table and climbed up beside her. Harl—again somnambulistically—handed me a chair. I twisted the sash cord about myself very carefully. I made a good strong knot—much better than Ginny had untied—and Ginny, trembling, let me pick her up in my arms. I stood on the chair on the table and jerked at the sash cord.
Your father, Harl, Stan, Laki—she seemed a very nice girl—the rumpus-room, the dynamic mural and the hartlegame bat—all vanished in a luminous puce-colored mist. I still felt a tugging at my waist. But for a moment Ginny and I were private in the brownish-purple mist that is characteristic of—hmmm—let us say “nowhere.” And in that moment I kissed Ginny and she kissed me back.
Then I walked out into the laboratory with Ginny in my arms and said thoughtfully to Joe—whose jaw dropped down to here—“Joe, this hurts me more than it does you.”
And then I smashed Professor Hadley’s time-transporter. I stamped on it, while Joe gazed stupidly at Ginny. I had reason to smash the device. Naturally! If anybody else traveled in time, they might not be as smart as I am, or their descendants might not be as dumb as you, Charles. Something might get messed up. Somebody might marry the wrong person somewhere in the next fourteen centuries, and Ginny might not get born. I wouldn’t risk that!
So, Charles, I am happy to report that everything ended nicely, or will end nicely. For everybody but you, and I must apologize for that. But surely you can understand that it is all for the best, can’t you, Charles? It would have been interesting to have gone beyond your rumpus-room in the thirty-fourth century, and see what a city of your time was like, and I’d like to see the spaceships and the ground-cars and the little personal fliers Ginny has been telling me about. But it doesn’t matter.
You look at them, Charles. I’ll look at Ginny.
You needn’t worry about her, though. That gal has brains! She only halfway believed this story until I fell on your head. But because she halfway believed, the morning she comes to your house with Harl and Stan and Laki, she’ll have made some tentative precautions. She brought along a whole bag full of crystallized carbon—all the costume jewelry around the house with carbon crystals in it. Merely trinkets, of course. You can buy them by the pound. Pretty beads. But back in the twentieth century they’re called diamonds and we don’t know how to make them yet. She even picked up a paperbacked book on electronics for beginners, aimed at ten-year-old kids. Some of it is over my head so far, but it’s pretty useful. With diamonds to start on and super-duper electronic principles to go on with, Ginny and I are in no danger of starving, even in these primitive times.
We’ve got a primitive house with old-style hot-and-cold water and a quaint old electric furnace, and we listen to our antique radio and watch primeval television, and we drive a car that burns that quaint old stuff called gasoline in its cylinders! But we manage. We don’t mind hardships. We have each other.
I was just finishing this letter, Charles, when Ginny came in. Somehow I find it very satisfactory to be married to Ginny. Lately it’s gotten even better. And she came in with something to show me that enables me to finish this note with an item of news that is highly important to all the family.
Ginny, beaming, took my finger and made me feel. And it’s so! We have a son, Charles. He looks like me, but Ginny seems pleased. And the thing I felt—Charles, just as I finished this letter, Ginny showed me that your great- great-great-grandfather fifty-one times removed, at the age of seven months and one week, has just cut his first tooth!
I’m sure you will be pleased!
