“When? I never taught a class in Gothic.”

“Just now,” said Noxon. He turned to Ram Odin. “Georgia doesn’t understand how I could have learned Gothic from him, after hearing him speak it for ten seconds.”

“Not possible,” said Georgia. “Not even for a savant.”

“Not possible,” echoed Noxon, “and yet you just saw it.”

“For all I know, being a time traveler, you spent a year with a tribe that spoke Gothic with a particularly wretched accent.”

“Georgia Wheaton is well known to be tone deaf,” said Deborah. “No ear for accents.”

“Not true,” said Young Wheaton. “I speak like a native.”

“Dead languages, so nobody could check,” said Old Wheaton. “Perhaps another reason I abandoned philology. When I had a child to support.”

With theatrical flamboyance, Young Wheaton buried his face in his hands. “He knows all my secrets. Why are you here?”

“To save the life of your brother Arnold and his wife,” said Ram Odin. “And to save Deborah’s eyesight.”

Young Wheaton looked at Deborah. “You’re the baby?”

“All grown up,” she said. “You—he—raised me.”

“Well, aren’t I nice,” said Young Wheaton. He looked at Old Wheaton with some admiration now, instead of annoyance.

“Tomorrow afternoon they will set out on a car trip,” said Old Wheaton. “They’ll get onto the freeway and die in a fiery crash. Deborah is dragged out of her rear carseat by a passerby, but her eyes were already burnt out.”

“He’s the only father I ever knew,” said Deborah. “We’ll continue to exist—without my eyes, without his philology—but you won’t have to devote yourself to raising a baby, and my parents will get to raise a much prettier and better-functioning version of me.”

“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.”