"I didn't. Not really by TV either. The fact is—she isn't born yet."
I backed away from him. When he was a kid and blew up our kitchen, I didn't like it. When he wrote poetry, I was kind of ashamed and didn't want my pals to know he was my brother. Now, I was really scared. Everything he had been saying in the last ten minutes began to make sense, but a screwy kind of sense.
He saw how I felt. "Don't worry, George, I haven't gone crazy. Her time is 2973, more than a thousand years from now. The only way I've seen and talked to her is on a time-contact machine."
"Come again?"
"A kind of time machine. It can't send material objects back and forth across time, as far as I know, but it can send certain waves, especially the kind we use to transmit signals. That's how she and I could talk to each other and see each other."
"Perry, I think you ought to see a good doctor."
"It's a remarkable device," he said, paying no attention to how I was trying to help him. "She's the one who first constructed it and contacted me. It's based on an extension of Einstein's equations——"
"You think you can explain so much," I said. "Okay, then, explain this. This dame isn't going to be born for a thousand years. And yet you tell me you're in love with her. What's the difference between you and somebody that's nuts?" I asked, as if anybody knew the answer.
He certainly didn't. In fact, he went ahead and proved to me that they were the same thing. Because for the next couple of weeks, the only thing he'd talk about, outside of equations I couldn't understand, was this dame. How smart she was, and how beautiful she was, and how wonderful she was in every way that a dame can be wonderful, and how she loved him. For a time he had me convinced that she actually existed.
"Compared with you," I said, "Romeo had a mild case."