Sirius

“These,” said Pete calmly, “are my fiancée.”

“Great Snell!” he gasped. “So that was it! I ran into a temporal snag!”

Sorry. Not Harry. Name is Ellen Abbot. Female. 26 years old. Year 2442. Five feet ten inches tall. Blonde hair, blue eyes—semantician and dimensional research expert. Sorry. Not Harry.

How did it happen? Can you remember nothing at all?

Your time scale has been altered. A minute in the outer world would be a year in this room.

Figuring backward brought him quickly to the equivalence he wanted: one second in ship time was two hours in Garrard time.

Got himself killed is right. Eleven-fifteen at night in Times Square—the theaters letting out, busiest time and place in the world—and this guy shows up in the middle of the street, gawking and looking around at the cars and up at the signs like he'd never seen them before.

Time for listening to the oracle is past; you’re beyond the stage for omens, you’re now headed in for the kill, yours or his; superstition has had its little day for today; from now on, only this windy nerve of yours, this shakey conglomeration of muscle entangled untraceably beneath the sweat-shiny carapice of skin, this bloody little urge to slay the dragon, is going to answer all your orisons.

When I opened you, I found a mess. I sent for the Chief of Surgery while I got the baby out, then we held a consultation with you on the table—and worked for hours to salvage what we could. You had two full sets of organs, both immature, but with the female set well enough developed for you to have a baby. They could never be any use to you again, so we took them out and rearranged things so that you can develop properly as a man.

He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew. He knew that his name was Charles Phillips and that before he had come to live among these people he had lived in the year 1984, when there had been such things as computers and television sets and baseball and jet planes, and the world was full of cities, not merely five but thousands of them, New York and London and Johannesburg and Parks and Liverpool and Bangkok and San Francisco and Buenos Ares and a multitude of others, all at the same time.