"I remember he threw away what should have been your inheritance on a flock of crackpot ideas," he told her.
"This wasn't a crackpot idea," she said, eyeing him as if he were another log for the fire. "His basic premise that Time is all-existent was sound. Time is past, present and future."
"I might have argued that with you—before today," he replied.
"It was like everything else he tried." She made an odd little gesture of helplessness. "He went at it wrong-end-to, of course. Not until after he died and Jim got back from M.I.T. did we get to work on it. I was merely the helper who held the tools for Jim. And when we completed it he lacked the courage to try it out." There was the acid of contempt in her voice at her brother's poltroonery.
"I don't blame him," said Coulter. "After all ..." He changed the subject, asked, "Where is Jim?"
"He was killed at Iwo Jima," she told him.
"What's to keep him from walking in here tonight—or to keep you from walking in on us?" he asked.
"Jim's in Cambridge, studying for exams," she replied. "As for my meeting myself, it's impossible. It's hard to explain but in coming back here I became reintegrated with the past me. Just as you are both a present and a past you. You must have noticed a certain duplication of memories, an overlapping? I have."
"I've noticed," he said. "But why only we two?"
"I'll show you," she said. "Come." She led him down rough wooden cellar stairs to a basement, unfastened with pale and dexterous fingers a padlocked wooden door behind the big old-fashioned furnace with its up-curving stovepipe arms, under which he had to stoop to avoid bumping his head.