Free The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold Page B

to an alternate timestream. As far as you are concerned, though, it’s the only timestream, because you can’t get back to the original one.
    So when you use the timebelt, you aren’t really jumping through time, that’s the illusion; what you’re actually doing is leaving one timestream and jumping to—maybe even creating—another. The second one is identical to the one you just left, including all of the changes you made in it—up to the instant of your appearance. At that moment, simply by the fact of your existence in it, the second timestream becomes a different timestream. You are the difference.
    When you travel backward in time, you’re creating that second universe at an earlier moment. It will develop in exactly the same way as the universe you just left, unless you act to alter that development.
    That the process is perceived as time travel is only an illusion, because the process is subjective. But because it’s subjective, it really doesn’t make any difference, does it? It’s just as good as the real thing. Better, even; because nothing is permanent; nothing is irrevocable.

    The past is the future. The future is the past. There’s no difference between the two and either can be changed. I’m flashing across a series of alternate worlds, creating and destroying a new one every time I bounce.
    The universe is infinite.
    And so are the possibilities of my life.

    I am Dan. And I am Don.
    And sometimes I am Dean, and Dino, and Dion, and Dana. And more....
    There’s a poker game going on in my apartment. It starts on June 24, 2005. I don’t know when it ends. Every time one of me gets tired, there’s another one showing up to take his place. The game is a twenty-four-hour marathon. I know it lasts at least a week; on July 2, I peeked in and saw several versions of myself—some in their mid-twenties—still grimly playing.
    Okay. So I like poker.
    Every time I’m in the mood, I know where there’s an empty chair. And when. Congenial people too. I know they’ll never cheat.
    I may have to get a larger apartment though. Five rooms is not enough. (I need more room for the pool table.)
    Strange things keep happening—no, not strange things, things I’ve learned not to question. For instance, once I saw Uncle Jim—he looked surprised and vanished almost immediately. It startled me too. I was just getting used to the idea of his death. I hadn’t realized that he would have been using the timebelt too. (But why not? It was his before it was mine.)
    Another time I heard strange noises from the bedroom. When I peeked in, there was Don in bed with—well, whoever it was, they were both covered by the blanket, I couldn’t tell. He just looked at me with a silly expression, not the slightest bit embarrassed, so I shrugged and closed the door. And the noises began again.
    I’m not questioning it at all. I’ll find out. Eventually.
    Mostly I’ve been concentrating on making money. Don and I (and later, Danny and I) have made a number of excursions into the past, as well as the future. Some of our investments go back as
far as 1850 (railroads, coal, steel), 1875 (Bell Telephone), 1905 (automobiles, rubber, oil, motion pictures), 1910 (heavy industry, steel again), 1920 (radio, insurance companies, chemicals, drugs, airlines), 1929 (I picked up some real bargains here. More steel. Business machines. More radio, more airlines, more automobiles). 1940 (companies that would someday be involved in computers, television, and the aerospace industry), 1950 (Polaroid and Xerox and Disney), 1960 (More Boeing stock, some land in Florida—especially around Orlando). Turned out that 1975 was a good year for bargains too. It was a little too early to buy stock in something called Apple, but I could buy IBM and Sony and MCA shares. Oh, and we also picked up some stock in 20th Century Fox.
    Down through the decades, I bought