“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.”