they seemed hot and ready to serve, a waiter came up and carried them all away. Moving backward, always backward.

Darrel felt nauseated by the unnatural process. He got up and left the restaurant abruptly. Wide eyes followed his progress to the door.

He moved with the crazy crowd that went back-side first. Ahead was a parkway that had normal, stationary benches. He would sit on one.

He had been sitting on the bench, watching this incredible world of retropulsion a half hour when he caught sight of the girl in the yellow tunic.

She came walking toward him backwards, stopped, turned, and smiled radiantly. She spoke, and her talk was the same nonsensical chattering.

Darrel blinked.

The girl had just been standing there, standing still, when a crumpled-up piece of paper flew up from the ground and into her hand—magically. With a rustling sound, the paper opened in her hand like a flower unfolding. She held it out to him. There was writing on it.

It was intelligible. Darrel grasped the paper. Stunned, he read it again.

"I love you, Darrel," it said. "You have lost your memory of me by this time, I know. We understood this yesterday, you and I, perfectly. Now, as we are drawn further apart from each other, I remember and you do not yet know. Ours is a strange and sad union, Darrel."

It made no sense. None whatever. Darrel rubbed his ear vigorously. Dammit! There was intimacy in this note. It seemed to suggest that they had a mutual past and that he had forgotten it or—did not yet know. What did it all mean? He looked helplessly at the girl.

She was sitting beside him now, on the bench, writing, it seemed, on the sheet of paper he had just read.

He twisted his head to watch ... and found himself staring in fascination.

The pen in the girl's hand glided rapidly over the page. Everything normal except that it began at the bottom of the page, moving from end to the beginning of the message, erasing as it went! One by one the letters and words disappeared under the swift strokes of the pen until the sheet was clean and unblemished. Then the girl placed it in her bag.

Darrel relaxed. "What the devil...." There! It happened again. A ball of paper, defying all familiar 

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