“I’m not playing with timeflow here because there’s not too much I can do. The only paths visible to me are your own—your own since the jump, when this version of the ship came into being. Nothing from the outbound voyage.”

“And you need these paths to travel in time?”

“I need them to travel into the past. I also suspect I’ll need them to get us back into the normal timeflow.”

“So you have to get back to where there are more people and therefore more paths.”

“Yes. And I need to get to a place where the past is deeper, reaching much farther back.”

“That still doesn’t solve the exploding starship problem,” said Ram Odin.

“If I can find a path at all that’s going the right way,” said Noxon, “it will be farther in the past. Therefore, when I jump to it, the original ship will already be somewhere else, so we won’t be in the same space and time.”

“Oh. Yes, of course.”

“If I can do this at all,” said Noxon, “I’ll make sure I jump us back to a time when there were no starships. No satellites. Nothing for us to collide with. And nobody on Earth prepared to think of this starship as anything other than a point of light—a meteor or planet or previously undiscovered star.”

“Yes, that would be a stealthy return to Earth,” said Ram Odin. “But then?”

“If we’re going the right direction, then I can slice time forward so that in a few days, we can return to a more useful time.”

“But then the starship will appear in a time when people will notice it.”

“I didn’t say I’d bring the starship forward into the future with us,” said Noxon. “We can stash it in the past and go back and get it when we need it again.”

Ram Odin shook his head. “I’m just not used to thinking of the past as a place where things can be stashed.”

“I’ve had a few years,” said Noxon. “You have no idea how strange it can get.”

“Going backward in time was pretty strange. I kept trying to find ways to communicate with myself. You know, the outbound me, the one who—”

“I know who you mean,” said Noxon.

“But the ship I’m in isn’t the ship he’s in. We occupy the same space but not the same . . . direction.”