And the only thing that bothers me is that I just had to read this in the month of my own sixtieth birthday. Oh, that no-goodnick Silverberg!
Warning: The first publication of the story in that ultimate anthology (Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology) was “cut to shreds” by a ham-handed editor at Charterhouse, so your best bet is to read it in one of Silverberg’s later collections.
This was the first book that I read in the rare books room of the University of Colorado library from the Brian E. Lebowitz Collection of 20th Century Jewish American Literature.
Time travel and alternate histories often overlap, usually when some incident of time travel to the past creates the alternate timeline. This story is an intriguing alternative where a supposedly alternate past history is discovered through the two-way transmission through time, but the origin of the alternate timeline remains a mystery.