d my capacity to enjoy it with anyone but you. You destroyed me
and never even knew it."

"You could have gone out into the world," he said with a trace of
contempt. "Other girls have."

"Other girls are not me," Eve replied steadily. "Other girls don't give
themselves to a man as completely as I gave myself to you."

"What can I do now?" Coulter asked, running a hand through his newly
crew-cut hair. Recalling Eve at dinner, seeing her in the doorway,
holding her briefly in his arms--he had almost decided that in this new
life she was the partner he would carry with him.

Now, however, he was afraid of her. It was Eve who had, in some strange
way, brought him back twenty years for purposes she had yet to divulge.
One thing he knew, logically and intuitively--he could never endure life
with anyone of whom he was frightened.

She was no longer looking at the wall--she was looking directly at him
and with curious intensity. She said, "Do you have to ask?"

She was testing him, of course. Sensitive, brilliant, she might be--yet
she was a fool not to have judged the effect of his fear of her. He
walked around the table, took hold of her shoulders, turned her to face
him, said, "What has this particular evening to do with bringing
me--us--back?"

"Everything!" she said, her eyes suddenly ablaze. "_Everything_,
Banning! Can't you understand?"

He released her, lit himself a cigarette, seeking the calmness he knew
he must have to keep his thinking clear. He said, "Perhaps I understand
why--a little. But how, Eve, _how_?"

She got up and walked across the wide hearth, kicked a fallen log back
into place. Its glowing red scales burst into yellow flame. She turned
and said, "Remember my father's last work? His efforts to discover the
secrets of Time?"

"I remember he threw away what should have been your inheritance on a
flock of crackpot ideas," he told her.

"This wasn't a crackpot idea," she said, eyeing him as if he were
another log for the fire. "His basic premise that Time is all-existent
was sound. Time is past, present and future."

"I might have argued that with you--before today," he replied.

"It was like everything else he tried." She made an odd little gesture
of helplessness. "He went at it wrong-end-to, of course. Not until after
he died and Jim got back from M.I.T. did we get to work on it. I was
merely the helper who held the tools for Jim. And when we completed it
_he_ lacked the courage to try it