e gave me.

The world of this dimension had developed some remarkable parallels to
Earth. I mean our Earth, which falls into what I have designated
Timeline One Point One, since it's the Earth with which I am most
familiar. Every other world that has a language calls itself Earth,
too. I had to visit briefly hundreds of the lateral worlds, hovering
over primordial swamps, limitless oceans, insect kingdoms and
radioactive planetoids, before I found the one that was truly
parallel.

It existed in Timeline Seventeen Point Zero Eight, and it had
refrigerators, platinum blondes, automobiles, airplanes, apple pie,
tabloids, television, scotch and soda--just about everything we think
makes life worthwhile. But it had its little differences, which was
only to be expected in a timeline where the bionomics could create a
new world each time someone changed his mind.

Thus, the cobless-corn man was driving what looked to me like a
Chevrolet, but which was a Morton in his world. He let me off near a
downtown restaurant where, thanks to our little exchange of talent
talk, I had enough money for breakfast. It was considered unethical to
swap talent talk outside the limits of certain rigidly defined groups,
so I didn't try to out-impress the waitress.

* * * * *

Fed, and filling my stolen clothes a bit better, I walked to the
recorder's office and spent the rest of the morning looking up old
documents. There was nothing there for Krasnow, as I had expected. But
for me there was a very pretty file clerk. Talking to her, I verified
my impression that human instincts and relationships were much the
same in this dimension as in my own--except in the one basic respect
that interested Krasnow, of course.

The file clerk and I lunched together and then I spent the afternoon
in the library. But I didn't find anything there, either, and then I
had dinner with her. She said her name was Julie. I told her mine was
Heck, for Hector, which it is. She thought this was "awfully cute" and
we got along fine.

[Illustration]

Julie had a delightful apartment and a matching sense of hospitality.
The following day, when she went to work, I stayed home and washed the
dishes and made the bed and used the telephone.

I ran up quite a bill with my long-distance calls, but I found out
what I needed to know. I impressed a lot of people with my elephant
story and pretended to be impressed hardly at all with what they