“It was a good refresher, once it actually ended,” said Noxon. “I didn’t stay there forever, though it felt like it. And now I have a much clearer memory of what I experienced at the time. How paths look when they’re not moving. The nineteen with the potential to move away from me into the future. And the one with the potential to move into the past.”

“What about the one that got me to that point?” asked Ram.

“The others all attached to that one,” said Noxon. “They were all continuations of that.”

“So you saw some going back and some forward,” said Ram.

“That’s not the difference. They were all going into a future. But this one was heading into . . . an unproductive future. A place with no causal potential.”

“So look for that.”

“But at that point I wasn’t seeing paths at all. Nothing was moving. They were all alike—I can’t explain why the one was different from the others. It just was. The point is that I know what an unpath looks like, a slice of path, because they all looked like that. But in order to see it, I have to be completely stopped in time.”

“Still as death,” said a mouse.

“Yes,” said Noxon.

“And how do you come back from that?” asked a mouse.

Such a good question. Not sarcastic at all. Well, a little sarcastic, as if a human could hardly be expected to come up with such an important question on his own.

“The way I got out of that moment was to attach to one of the paths. The one going the wrong way.”

“Answering the mice?” asked Ram.

The expendable explained, ending with, “So there’s a good chance that if Noxon can slow down enough to see the paths, it’ll be impossible for him to come out of it without attaching.”

“But I don’t know if I even can get to that point myself,” said Noxon. “Remember that I got there by following Ram Odin’s path backward—the path of the Ram from Ramfold. I could never have slowed myself down that much.”

“So if you have to be completely stopped,” said the expendable, “then there can be no experimentation. You have to do it holding on to the mice, to Ram Odin, and to the ship and all its contents, and you have to do it at the time when it’s most convenient to make the jump, and you have to attach to exactly the right path so we jump into the past, long before spaceships.”

“Except that I have no idea if I can slow down enough to get to that condition.”

“So the alternative,” said the expendable, “is that you will start to detect the backward path of outbound Ram—the individual nubs of each instant—before you get to a complete stop in time. If you can slow down to such a degree, but not lose the ability to snap yourself back to this timeflow, then we’ll know that this venture is possible.”