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.

The sharp sting of dead furnace-ashes was in his nostrils as he looked
at the strange device. The strange cage-like device, the strange
jerry-built apparatus was centered in a bizarre instrument panel that
seemed to hang from nothing at all. He said, eyeing a bucket-seat for
the operator, "It looks like Red Barber's cat-bird seat, Eve."

"And we're sitting in it, just you and I, darling," she replied. "Just
you and I out of all the people who ever lived. Think of what we can do
with our lives now, the mistakes we can avoid!"

"I'm thinking of them," said Coulter. Then, after a brief pause, "But
how in hell did you manage to get _me_ into the act?"

She stepped inside the odd cage, plucked things from a cup-like
receptacle that hung from the instrument panel, showed them to him.
There were a lock of hair, a scarf, what looked like fingernail parings.
At his bewilderment her face lighted briefly with the shadow of a smile.

She said, "These are _you_, darling. Oh, you _still_ don't understand!
Lacking the _person_ or _thing_ to be sent back in Time, something that
is part of the person or thing will work. It keys directly to individual
patterns."

"And you've kept those things--those pieces of me--in there all this
time?" He shuddered. "It looks like voodoo to me."

She put back the mementos, stepped out of the cage, put her arms
fiercely around him. "Banning, darling, after you left me I _did_ try
voodoo. I wanted you to suffer as I suffe