Ackerman stood up and stretched. "I am going to remove that sample," he said with an air of finality. "Then the time-fission will not take place, and there need be no ultimate conflict between the twin worlds."
"You mustn't," she breathed.
"No?"
"No," she told him. "For if you do, you shall not live. And we will never—" she let the sentence die.
He faced her squarely. "Tansie," he said, "It will be very easy for me to fall deeply in love with you. Given another day, and it would certainly obtain. Yet the lives and desires of two people must not prevail to the death and destruction of a world full of people. Though it mean death to me, I could not live knowing that billions of people died because I was selfish."
Tansie looked at him tearfully. "You'd sacrifice me?"
"You make it difficult," he said. "One life for a billion lives. And yet," he said, brightly, "you do exist; does that not prove something?"
"Only that in this world of probability and unreal existance, I am a definite probability."
"Yes," he told her. "This is the world of probability. I am not in the Real World, nor are you. If I do this, who is to tell me that we two may not go on forever in our own world of probability?"
"No," she said pleadingly. "Oh Les—I do so want—"