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 suffered. But then, when the Time machine was finished and Jim was afraid to use it, I put the things in it—and waited. It's been a long wait."

"How did it reach me while I was still miles away?" he asked.

"Jim always said its working radius was about five miles," she said. "When you drove within range, it took over.... But let's go back upstairs, darling—we have our lives to plan."

To change the subject Coulter said, when they emerged from the basement, "You must have had a time picking the right moment for this little reunion—or was it hit or miss?"

"The machine is completely accurate," she said firmly. She stood there, the firelight making a halo of her dark hair. There was urgency in her, an expectation that the remark would mean something to him. It didn't.

Finally she burst out with, "Banning, are you really so forgetful? Don't you remember what tonight was ... don't you?"

Coulter did some hasty mental kangaroo-hopping. He knew it was important to Eve and, because of the incredible thing she had accomplished, he felt a new wave of fright. From some recess of his memory he got a flash—Jim was in Cambridge, the housekeeper asleep in the rear ell of the old farmhouse, he and Eve were alone.

He drew her gently close to him and kissed her soft waiting lips as he had kissed them twenty years before, felt the quiver of her slim body against him as he had felt it twenty years before. He should have known—Eve had selected for their reunion the anniversary of the first time they had truly given themselves to each other.

He said, "Of course I remember, darling. If I'm a little slow on the uptake it's because I've had a lot of things happen to me all at once."

"The old Banning Coulter would never have understood," she said, giving him a quick hug before standing clear of him. Her eyes were shining like star sapphires. "Banning, you've grown up!"

"People do," he said drily. There was an odd sort of tension between them as they stood there, knowing what was to happen between them. Eve took a deep unsteady breath and the rise and fall of her angora sweater made his arms itch to pull her close.

She said, before he could translate desire into action, "Oh, I've been so wrong about so many things, darling. But I was so right to bring you back. Think of what we're going to be able to do, you and I together, now that we have this second chance. We'll know just what's going to happen. We'll be rich and free and lord it over ordinary mortals. I'll have furs and you'll have yachts and we'll ..."

"I'm a lousy sailor," said Coulter. "No, I don't want a yacht."

"Nonsense, we'll have a yacht and cruise wherever we want to go. Think of how easy it will be for us to make money." Her eyes were shining more brightly still. "No more standing in a teller's cage for me. No more feeling the life-sap dry up inside me, handling thousands of dollars a day and none of it mine."

She stepped to him, gripped him tightly, her fingernails making themselves felt even through the heavy material of his jacket. She kissed him fiercely and said in a throaty whisper, "Darling, I'm going upstairs. Come up in ten minutes—and be young again with me."

She left him standing alone in front of the fire....

Coulter filled his pipe and lit it. His mother had said we when she talked of her plans, as if her son were merely an object to be moved about at her whim. Pick up my lighter at MacAuliffe's ... going to take a trip abroad this summer ... not going to be foolish about her.... He could see the phrases as vividly as if they were written on a video teleprompter.

And then he saw another set of phrases—different in content, yet strangely alike in meaning. Nonsense, we'll have a yacht ... lord it over ordinary mortals ... a long wait. He thought of the voodoo and the fingernail parings, of the savage materialism of the woman who was even now preparing herself to receive him upstairs, who was planning to relive his life with him in her image.

He thought of his wife, foolish perhaps, but true to him and never domineering. He thought of the Scarborough house and the good friends he had there, hundreds of miles and twenty years away. He wondered if he could go back if he got beyond the five-mile radius of the strange machine in the basement.

He looked down with regret at his slim young body, so unexpectedly regained—and thought of the heavier, older less vibrant body that lay waiting for him five miles away. Then swiftly, silently, he tiptoed into the hall, donned coat and hat and gloves, slipped through the front door and bolted for the Pontiac.

He drove like a madman over the icy roads through the dark. Somehow he sensed he would have to get beyond the reach of the machine before Eve grew impatient and came downstairs and found him gone. She might, in her anger, send him back to some other Time—or perhaps the machine worked both ways. He didn't know. He could only flee in fear ... and hope....

At times, in the years that had passed since his abrupt breaking-off of his romance with Eve Lawton, he had wondered a little about why he had dropped her so quickly, just when his mother's death seemed to open the path for their marriage.

Now he knew that youthful instinct had served him better than he knew. Somehow, beneath the charm and wit and beauty of the girl, he had sensed the domineering woman. Perhaps a lifetime with his mother had made him extra-aware of Eve's desire to dominate without its reaching his conscious mind.

But to have exchanged the velvet glove of his mother for the velvet glove of Eve would have meant a lifetime of bondage. He would never have been his own man, never....

He could feel cold sweat bathe his body once more as he sped past the Brigham Farm. According to his wristwatch just eight and a quarter minutes had elapsed since Eve had left him and gone upstairs. He