A dazzling streak of lightning, a mighty clap of thunder, and Paul Feron, suddenly awakened, sprang to his feet with white face and staring eyes. What had happened? God, what had happened?

Never before had it occurred to me to ask myself why the sun should rise each morning on a new day instead of upon the old day over again; or to wonder how much of what I did was really my own to do. It may be that here on this earth we are not grateful enough for our ignorance, and our innocence. We think that there is only one road, one direction—forward; and we accept it, and press on. We think of God, we think of the mystery of the universe, but we do not think about it very much, and we do not really believe that it is a mystery, or that we could not understand it if it were explained to us.

There’s something different about that child. I wondered if my pencil could catch it.

I saw the ghost in my own living room, alone, between three and four in the morning, and I was there, wide awake, for a perfectly sound reason: I was worrying.

"Oh, Professor," half chided Helen Crane, "You don’t mean to say that you believe in these dreams. That the past can actually come back into the present."

I tossed the few bits of gravel and did the thing that had never been done, ever in my life.

Old Doug: Doug, Doug. . . . Come on out and play.

We had talked about SF literature, books on the theme of going back in time. This was related to the activities of the day. During the convention, one of the guest scientists had stated that time travel was impossible.

Had she somehow crucially alterted her own present by changing Alice’s future? The thought that she might have started some terrible chain of events that she could not possibly have foreseen, nor known about, worried her more and more. It was only in the small hours of Wednesday night that an answer came to her that seemed to make sense. The present that she knew, the way things were in her time, could only have come about if she had traveled back to the past. Her finding the chatelaine, her answering Alice’s call for help, those things were necessary to shape the past and bring about the future as it was. She had to believe this. It did work. She was a part of how things had turned out, not an alternative version, but the one she was meant to live in. If she hadn’t gone back, hadn’t taken the decision to help Alice, well, that wouldhave resulted in a different future from the one she knew.

Reece, it isn’t just clarvoyance or neurosis, either.
She’d tell him in person, the thing they should have come out and admitted from the start.
It’s time travel.

Each jump, as you call them, is accompanied by a specific sensation—a deep cringe that starts inside you and expands outward until it feels like the entire universe is cringing.