With eleven years of marriage behind them, Ted and Alice’s fantasies frequently start with a time machine and end with killing one or another of their spouse’s ancestors before they can procreate. So naturally, they each end up at Temponautics, Ltd. Oh, and Ted’s grandpa has some racy fantasies of his own.
In Silverberg’s
Something Wild Is Loose (Vol. 3 of his collected stories), he posits that this story is “probably the most complex short story of temporal confusion” since Heinlein’s “
By His Bootstraps” (1941) or “
—All You Zombues—” (1959), but I would respectfully disagree. In particular, I would describe Heinlein’s two stories as the most complex short stories of temporal
consistency in that there is but a
single, static timeline and (in hindsight) every scene locks neatly into place within this one timeline. By contrast, Silverberg story involves multiple time travel choices by the characters in what I would call
parallel universes. The confusion, such as it is, stems more from what appears to be alternate scenes in disconnected universes rather than temporal confusion per se.
—Michael Main If you went back to, I would guess, 1946, and worked to prevent your parents’ marriage in 1947, you would still have existed in that year; you would not go out of existence just because you had influenced events. The same would apply even if you had only been in 1946 one microsecond before shooting the man who would otherwise have become your father.
