"Lost?" asked Barlow more friendly.
Valnar hesitated. "Well, not exactly. I'm always able to find out where I am, but I can't find my own time. Right now, for instance, figuring from the Birth of Christ as many of the people I've met do, I should be in the year 1974. Is that right?"
"Nineteen seventy-three," Barlow corrected.
The man named Valnar seemed shocked. "Another error," he murmured. "If I don't do better than that, I'm going to find myself out in space, freezing to death."
"I thought you said you were time-traveling," Barlow questioned.
"Certainly," said Valnar. "But traveling in time requires considerable knowledge of astronomy. Both the Earth and the Sun move in space. If I were to travel twenty-four hours into the future, without moving in space, I'd find myself out in the void. But luckily the earth seems to exert an attraction which compensates for numerous errors, though it upsets my calculations concerning the time."
"What time are you from?"
"1974."
"That's next year! That means there are two of you in the world now—that is impossible!"
"No," Valnar disagreed impatiently. "I told you this wasn't my time—maybe I should say, space-time continuum. Time is like a tree with a lot of branches—too damn many of them. In my own time, we calculate that dimension from the Year of the Subsidence. I slid down my branch of that space-time continuum, and now I can't find it again. My people are the descendants of an Atlantean colony established in what you call Florida, but evidently that colony had few chances for survival—perhaps only one. That would make it a single small branch and difficult to find—which it is," he concluded feelingly.