The twin propellers of a Beechcraft Baron E55, diving though the air above Amarillo, Texas. The left prop describes a broken circle, while the right is a spiral jetty stretching out some twenty three years into the future: Interstate 25 near the Air Force Academy in Colorado, a Jeep Cherokee is rolling after a collision.
“It’s the realisation that you will never fulfil your goals,” Seymour explains. “History is full of these what-ifs.”
Robert shrugs. “And what did you leave incomplete.”
“A vastly expensive paperweight. For fifteen minutes it would have been the fastest processor in the world, or rather the fastest massive array: 1024 chickens rather than two strong oxen.”
“On the geological scale we’re all quite irrelevant. My ramp would have eroded in a matter of maybe centuries. The long perspectives are beyond the bounds of resolution.”
The broken circle to the left is a wormhole. Forty years before Seymour’s collision, an Oldsmobile lies smashed beside a lonely stretch of road near East Hampton, Long Island.
Jackson, at first intimidated by his eloquent compatriots, turns the twisted mess first one way and then the other. “I see it. I can finally see it.”
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