n recall is
the affable character handing over a big roll and saying, "Lucky for
me more guys don't sell America short," and trying to separate the
money into the right amounts and put them into the right envelopes,
while stumbling out the door, when everything changed and I was
outside a bank again.

I thought, "My God, what a hangover cure!" I was as sober as if I
hadn't had a drink, when I made that deposit.

There were more envelopes to mail and more deposits to make and bets
to put down on Singing Wood in 1933 at Belmont Park and Max Baer over
Primo Carnera, and then Cavalcade at Churchill Downs in 1934, and
James Braddock over Baer in 1935, and a big daily double payoff,
Wanoah-Arakay at Tropical Park, and so on, skipping through the years
like a flat stone over water, touching here and there for a few
minutes to an hour at a time. I kept the envelopes for May Roberts and
myself in different pockets and the bankbooks in another. The
envelopes were beginning to bulge and the deposits and accrued
interest were something to watch grow.

The whole thing, in fact, was so exciting that it was early October of
1938--a total of maybe four or five hours subjectively--before I
realized what she had me doing. I wasn't thinking much about the fact
that I was time traveling or how she did it; I accepted that, though
the sensation in some ways was creepy, like raising the dead. My
father and mother, for instance, were still alive in 1938. If I could
break away from whatever it was that kept pulling me jumpily through
time, I could go and see them.

The thought attracted me enough to make me shake badly with intent,
yet pump dread through me. I wanted so damned badly to see them again
and I didn't dare. I couldn't....

_Why_ couldn't I?

Maybe the machine covered only the area around the various banks,
speakeasies, bars and horse parlors. If I could get out of the area,
whatever it might be, I could avoid coming back to whatever May
Roberts had lined up for me.

Because, naturally, I knew now what I was doing: I was making deposits
and winning sure bets just as the "senile psychotics" had done. The
ink on their bankbooks and bills was fresh because it _was_ fresh; it
wasn't given a chance to oxidize--at the rate I was going, I'd be back
to my own time in another few hours or so, with $15,000 or better in
deposits, compound interest and cash.

If I'd been around 70, you see, she could have sent me back to the
beginnin