"I guess that makes two of us. Somehow we've got to dig up the parts for another Contraption. And then—" He let the sentence drift into silence.
"And then, Doug?"
"Well maybe with the exact same set-up—same everything, I could do it again. I don't know. But if they so much as try to turn the other one off, try to change anything, we'll lose this point of reference in space-time for good."
Slowly, Dot nodded understanding. "The parts," she said then. "Can we find the things you need?"
"I'll give it the old college try, sweetheart."
"How long—"
He shrugged. "A few days maybe. Depends."
They were silent for a moment, looking through the wide window, watching the beautiful vehicles as they slid silently past, re-examining what they could see of the colorful world beyond the rolling lawn. Doug felt an aching in his jaws, a tightness through his lips. God, it was so silly—standing there, trying to explain, when he didn't even know what had happened, where they were or—or when they were. He'd been after travelling light to bring back pictures of the past—every home should have one. Nuts. The future—no, it wasn't supposed to be that way. Unless you accepted past, present and future as the components of one great unit, and progression from one to the other nothing more than illusion, like the illusion of movement given by the hundreds of still frames on a film-strip. If time was like such a film-strip, and you found a way to jump forward along it, bypassing the frames that were in immediate succession—
But then what about the possibility-probability pattern theory, in which time was supposed to exist as an infinite number of possibility and probability paths, intersecting, paralleling, diverging, splitting with each new decision, each new action—Lord it was getting insane.