"I didn't think you liked older women."
"I love them as long as they are you. You were lonely?"
"Hideously. Which is why I volunteered to go after you. Inskipp had another volunteer, but he broke his leg."
"My darling—I'll bet I know how that happened!" She is not the blushing type, but she did lower her eyes at the thought.
"We are getting ahead in sequence," Coypu said. "But that is what happened. We traced you from 1975 to 1807—and traced He and his minions as well. There was a loop in time there, an anomaly of some kind that eventually sealed itself off. We could tell that it was about to collapse with you sealed inside of it and succeeded at last in forcing enough power into the helix to penetrate the sealed time loop just before it went down. That is when Angelina went back with the coordinates for your next skip in time, the long twenty-thousand-year jump after He. You had to go after him because the time paths were there to prove that you had followed him. Though of course history was clear by that point, and we knew how it would all end."
"You knew?" I asked, feeling I had missed the point somewhere.
"Of course. The entire nature of the attack was clear, though you all of course had to fulfill your destined roles."
"Could you spell it out again? And slower."
"Of course. You managed to destroy He's operation twice in the remote past and eventually reset his machine and sent him forward to the twilight days of Earth. Here he spent an immense amount of time, almost two hundred years, climbing his way to power and uniting all of the planet's resources. He was a genius, albeit a mad one, and could do this. He also remembered you, Jim, fading memories and half-insane ones after two hundred years, but he remembered enough to know you were the enemy. Therefore he launched a time war to destroy you before you could destroy him, trapping you as he thought on a planet about to be destroyed by atomic explosion. From there he returned to 1975 to attack the Corps. You came after him and he fled to 1807 to lay the time loop trap for you. I don't know where he planned to go from there, but his plans appear to have been altered, and he went instead twenty thousand years ahead."
"I did that, altered the setting on his machine just before he left."
"That is all there is to it. We can relax now that it is over, and I do believe I'll join you in that drink."
"Relax!" The words emerged from my throat with a singularly nasty, grating sound. "From what you have said it sounds like I started the whole attack on the Special Corps by altering the setting on the time-helix that sent He to the world where he launched his campaign to destroy the Corps."
"That's one way of looking at it."
"Is there any other? The way I see it He just bounces in a circle in time forever. Running from me, chasing me, running from me… Arrrgh! When was he born? Where does he come from?"
"Those terms are meaningless in this sort of temporal relationship. He exists only within this time loop. If you wish to say it, though it is most imprecise, it would be fair to state that he was never born. The situation exists apart from time as we normally know it. Such as the fact that you returned here with the information to be sent to yourself about the settings on the atomic bombs. Where did this information come from originally? From yourself. So you sent it to yourself in order to send it to yourself to inform yourself about the settings on the bombs in order…"
"Enough!" I groaned, reaching for the bottle with trembling hand. "Just mark the mission as being accomplished and put me in for a fat bonus."
I refilled all the glasses and only when I came to Angelina's did I realize she was no longer present. She had slipped away without a word while I was suffering over having instigated the whole time war, and I was just beginning to miss her and wonder where she had gone when she returned.
"They are fine," she said.
"Who, who?" I said in my best owl imitation. But when I saw the narrowing of Angelina's eyes, I knew I had made a big mistake and I racked my time-trodden brain until understanding burst upon me. "Who indeed! Ho-ho-ho! You must excuse the small joke. Who is fine, you say. Why, our twin, cherubic, gurgling babies are fine. With true maternal instinct you have rushed to their side."
"They are here with me."
"Well, wheel the pram in!"
"The babies," she said as they entered, with what I detected as a strong note of irony.
They were going on six years of age, a little fact that I had neglected to remember. They moved easily, solid chaps with the disconcerting knack of walking in step with each other. Well muscled, their father's firm heritage, I am happy to say, with a tempering of their mother's looks.
"You've been away a long time. Dad," one of them said.
"Not by choice, James. The universe isn't saved in a day."
"I'm James, he's Bolivar. Welcome back."
"Well, thanks." Did I kiss them or what? They settled this by sticking out their hands, and I shook them each quite seriously. Good grips. This family thing was going to take some getting used to. Angelina beamed proudly, and I melted under that look and realized that it was all probably worth it.
"Angelina, I think you have finally convinced me. The joys of married life seem to be worth the price of giving up the happy and carefree occupation of free-lance thief…"
"Thief is the correct word," a nauseously familiar voice cried out. "And crook, con man, blackmailer, briber, and more." Inskipp stood in the doorway waving his florid face and a sheaf of papers in my direction. "Five years I have been waiting for you, diGriz, and this time you are not getting away. No excuses like time wars now. You crook, you steal from your own buddies, urggh!"
He said Urggh! because Angelina had popped a sleep capsule under his nose, and he folded over while the boys—good reflexes there—stepped forward and eased him gently to the floor. Angelina relieved him of the sheaf of papers while he went by.
"After five years I need you more than this nasty old man does. Let's burn this file and steal a ship before he comes to. It will be months before he can find us, and by that time something else will have happened that will need straightening out badly, and he will have to put us back to work again. Meanwhile, we can have a lovely crooked second honeymoon."
"Sounds great—but what about the boys? This is not the sort of trip one takes children on."
"You're not leaving without us," Bolivar said. Where had I seen that unshakable scowl before? In the mirror I guess. "Where you go, we go. If it's a matter of money, we can pay our own way. See."
I saw indeed as he extended a great bundle of credits that could pay his way right across the galaxy. But I also had a quick glimpse of a familiar golden wallet.
"Inskipp's money! You robbed that poor old man while you should have been helping him." I flicked a quick look at James. "And I suppose you will be able to tell time during the trip with his wristwatch that I see suddenly on your arm?"
"In their father's footsteps," Angelina said proudly. "Of course they come with us. And don't concern yourself with expenses, boys. Daddy can steal enough for all of us."
It was too much. "Why not!" I laughed. "Here's to crime!" I raised my glass.
"Here's to time," Coypu said, getting in the spirit of the thing.
"Here's to time crime!" we cried together and drained our glasses and broke them against the wall, and Coypu smiled avuncularly after us as we grabbed the children's hands and leaped lightly over Inskipp's snoring body and were out the door and away.
There's a bright and glorious universe out there, and we are going to enjoy every single bit of it.