Again outside the ship, he spun the space lock that sealed her in. The ship's walls were now growing opaque and he could no longer see inside.

His communications box was jangling furiously in a dozen different keys, and anxious, querulous voices were pouring through it into the room. He snapped it off, loosened his collar, filled his glass to overflowing with the last of the terif, and cut off the table luminar. His stereop projector next had his attention.

He lay on his couch in the darkness of his death cell, studying with the keenest satisfaction his wife, son, and father, while they waved at him happily from the radiant stereop sphere.

Those Terran mentors had planned well. The escape ship would not be affected by the nearing cataclysm, because it was really in a different time plane—at least five years in the past. The catastrophe would simply release it to its original continuum, whence it would proceed with its precious cargo to the Tharn suns.

Odd effect, that time shift. He wished now he'd read more of the theories of that ancient Terran, Einstein, who claimed that simultaneity was an illusion—that "now" here could be altogether different from "now" in other steric areas. His son, unborn as yet "here," was more than four years old "there"—on the planet. Tharn-R-VII, where the lad played in his grandfather's gardens.

And then there was the mystery of the rings. The old count had not had another ring made of course. The ring the count had sent with the stereop coils must have been the same one that Perat had just placed on the finger of his bride. The ring sent with the stereops was merely his original ring brought back in the relooping of a time-line. In his "now" there was only one ring—the one he was wearing. In Evelyn's "now" there was the same ring, but that was logical, because her "now" would soon be five years earlier than his. Owing to this five-year relooping of time, it had been possible for the ring to exist in duplicate for six weeks. But very soon, in his "now," it would be destroyed for good.

He pressed the repeat button on the stereop and started the coil again. The boy had an engaging grin, rather like his own (he would indulge a final vanity), but without the scar. He hoped there would never be another war to disfigure or kill his son. It was up to the next generation.

As he swirled his terif, he smiled and thought of the note he had left on the pilot's pad: Name him after your father—Gordon.

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