I heard your father saying harassedly, “His face does look familiar…”
I handed him the book and bowed benignly. I said, “Sir, I am very happy to have met you. It is a rare privilege.”
And so it was. And will be. One does not meet even a fifty-one-times-removed grandson every day.
There was a scraping sound. Hari turned pale. Stan jumped. Somehow, I think that up to this moment they had not quite fully believed. But that scraping sound… Ginny had competently untied a piece of sash cord from my belt in the back and fastened it to a chair. It had reached up to the ceiling. Having admitted my failure to notice that Joe—back in the laboratory—had tied a cord to my belt with a very clumsy granny-knot, I don’t feel I have to justify my not connecting the facts of time-travel with that piece of rope. Not up to this moment. But Ginny had realized from the beginning. She’d been previously informed. I’m informing her now. She’d tied the cord to a chair, and some fourteen centuries away my colleague Joe was dragging on the cord. He’d taken his time about it!
Ginny said shakily, “I—guess we’d better hurry…”
She was a little bit scared. To tell the truth, so was I. I said somehow hoarsely, “I’ll stay here if you’d rather—”
But I’d read this letter. And I felt—well, Charles, perhaps you can never understand how magnificent I felt when Ginny smiled at me and put her hand in mine and said to Laki, “You might try to explain to Uncle Seri for me.”
The chair tied to the sash cord stirred again. I lifted Ginny to a table and climbed up beside her. Harl—again somnambulistically—handed me a chair. I twisted the sash cord about myself very carefully. I made a good strong knot—much better than Ginny had untied—and Ginny, trembling, let me pick her up in my arms. I stood on the chair on the table and jerked at the sash cord.
Your father, Harl, Stan, Laki—she seemed a very nice girl—the rumpus-room, the dynamic mural and the hartlegame bat—all vanished in a luminous puce-colored mist. I still felt a tugging at my waist. But for a moment Ginny and I were private in the brownish-purple mist that is characteristic of—hmmm—let us say “nowhere.” And in that moment I kissed Ginny and she kissed me back.
Then I walked out into the laboratory with Ginny in my arms and said thoughtfully to Joe—whose jaw dropped down to here—“Joe, this hurts me more than it does you.”