's a wonderful life for a while. The only
thing is that I miss Rabelais coming in at five-ten for his beer.

In '54 I get elected Mayor like he said. My business gets remodelled
and all is swell.

* * * * *

Then one night I go to sleep in my new house and I wake up in the
middle of the night feeling a cold draft. When I turn over I roll onto
a lump in the mattress and I know it was all a dream and I'm Mike
Murphy, bartender, again.

The next a.m. I pick up the paper and it's the summer of '53, the day
of Rabelais and my thirty-first anniversary and I'm back at the old
stand. It was a fine dream, I says, and go to work.

At five-o-nine, though, I can't help looking at the clock. And sure
enough, Rabelais comes in, walks up to the bar like he owns it and
roars at me, "Two beers, Mike!"

I can't help saying, "Look, haven't we done this before?"

He grins at me. "And we may have to do it again a few times," he says.

By now I know him pretty well, I think--or maybe I dreamed I know him;
I'm not sure. Anyway, I give him the two beers and wait for him to get
around to telling me whatever is on his mind.

He goes through the same act as before--only I can't be sure he did go
through the act or I dreamed he did. "Beer for the house," he yells.

"Take it easy," I cautions. "Take it easy, Rabelais."

"You never called me by my first name before, did you, Mike?"

I open my mouth to remind him that he told me to back in 1953 and then
I remember it is 1953. That confuses me because I remember, too, that
in 1954 I was--or maybe it's that I'm going to be--mayor. I just close
my mouth and wait.

Rabelais takes his time. When the early rush clears out, he gets me
off to one end of the bar and says, "Sorry to keep you waiting, Mike,
but we have to do it all over again."

"Then it wasn't a dream?"

"No dream," he says.

"But everything was going fine."

"Up to a point," he says. "Up to the sixties."

Then he explains the way his machine works. But all I get out of what
he says is that there's a law of probability so he can't go back and
shoot his grandfather when the old man is a boy or juggle stocks in
'47 to pay off and make him rich in '53 and things like that. That is
why he wouldn't let us go back into the past. He was afraid we would
do something to change history and--bingo.

And he wouldn't let us go into the future very far because up a way
the atom bomb gets loose and it is