- 4 -

'The Philadelphia Story' starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart premiered in New York in December 1940. It was shown in select theatres in December, but MGM agreed to hold its general release until the following month in order to not compete with the stage play. So it also had a Los Angeles premiere in January 1941, where Dolores walked up the red carpet on the arm of Cary Grant, who she was currently dating. She looked amazing in her glittering silver gown with her glamorous Hollywood hair and make-up, and was clearly loving all the attention. As a crippled scientist Ultra-Humanite had chosen to operate only in the realm of the intellect, but becoming Dolores Winters had opened up a whole new world for her. There are beautiful women who resent being praised for their looks alone with no thought for their minds, but after years of being admired solely for her intellect she clearly revelled in being considered desirable and knowing she was lusted after by moviegoers the world over. She and Cary Grant stopped to talk to reporters, of course, and while most questions were directed to him they also had some for her.

"So are we ever going to see you in a movie again, Miss Winters?"

"Boys, boys, I'm retired," she chuckled, "but never say never. It is a lady's prerogative to change her mind, after all."

She gave them a dazzling smile and then she and Grant continued along into the movie theatre for the premiere, later going on together to the big party that followed. I'd always liked Cary Grant. When I subsequently learned he donated his entire $137,000 salary for the movie to the British War Relief Society I liked him even more.

Meanwhile I had begun working on Rita's face. Cosmetic and reconstructive facial surgery was still in its infancy at this point but would progress rapidly during the war years thanks to unfortunate necessity. My techniques were years ahead of everyone else's anyway, and the miracle gel's rapid healing meant I was able to achieve results that wouldn't be matched for decades. Unfortunately, I didn't have very much of it so I had to reserve it for Rita's surgeries alone.

At the end of 1940, a bunch of costumed mystery men had banded together as the Justice Society of America. In December 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the creation of the All-Star Squadron, an umbrella group incorporating the Justice Society and all the other garishly-costumed mystery men who'd emerged in their wake. By early 1942, Ultra-Humanite had been Dolores Winters for more than two years and appeared to be completely comfortable, confident and happy as her.

So it came as a big surprise when, in March of that year, the All-Stars accused her of conspiring against them a scheme that culminated in the death of scientist Terry Curtis in New York. However, Dolores had at that very moment been three thousand miles away at a glitzy Hollywood party. The crowd of famous people who had been partying with her attested to her presence there. Clearly that other woman claiming to be her, to be Ultra-Humanite in Dolores's body, had to have been an imposter. So it was concluded that while it may indeed have been that criminal mastermind it was not Dolores Winters's body, however remarkable the resemblance. Since I knew that Ultra-Humanite actually was inhabiting her body I knew that it had to have really been her. No-one could be in two places at the same time, yet somehow she had managed the trick.

The All-Stars were not stupid and so must also have strongly suspected this as well, but the evidence said otherwise and so they publicly apologised to Dolores. She graciously accepted the apology at a press conference in Los Angeles attended by a delegation of those costumed types - Green Lantern, Phantom Lady, and Tarantula. The reporters loved it when the boys hoisted her onto their shoulders. The famous photo one of them took was made into a poster and used to sell war bonds. There was a rumour that Dolores and Tarantula had a fling shortly afterwards, but I don't know how much stock I put in that.

During those years Dolores explored hedonism as a lifestyle and was rumoured on the grapevine to have taken sexual partners of both genders while no doubt continuing to secretly run her criminal empire. Nor was she the only one. Rita called upon me every time she needed me for one of her surgeries but in between those times she established several criminal enterprises of her own, proving she was both more resourceful than I imagined and that she had learned more observing Johnny Hartigan than he probably imagined. Sadly, all this also proved that I had been naive to imagine she was anything like the ingenues she portrayed in her movies. When it came to my surgical skills I was a genius, but when it came to Dolores I'd been as deluded as any other star-struck fan who confused an actor with the roles they played.

Her brief and lucrative, though largely unmemorable acting career slipping further and further into the past Dolores Winters only retained any sort of fame because of her lifestyle, with its round of glitzy and glamorous Hollywood parties, and for the movie premieres attended on the arm of her latest boyfriend. Then, in 1948, Death came for her in the form of an inoperable brain tumour.

- 5 -

Dolores lay on what everyone believed would be her deathbed in New York's Mt. Sinai hospital. The cancer treatments had taken her once glorious head of hair, but a light fuzz had begun to grow back now that they had stopped. She was not expected to last the night, yet miraculously she not only survived but rallied. The doctors came the next morning to find the tumour gone and Dolores looking the healthiest she had in months. Complete remission! They had no explanation for her cancer vanishing and called it a miracle. I didn't believe that for a second and determined to finally get to the bottom of the mysteries surrounding Dolores Winters.

After she was released from the hospital, Dolores returned to Los Angeles and to her Hollywood mansion. The following day I broke into the joint. I climbed over the wall closest to the mansion, covering the ground between by moving from tree to tree and so staying out of view. Trusting to chance I sprinted across the final few yards to the side door I'd determined should be my point of entry. I'd brought a set of lock picks with me but these proved unnecessary as the door was unlocked. It gave access to a scullery, which I quickly traversed, pausing at the far door and peeking around it into the grand entrance foyer beyond. There was a maid going about her work. When she went into one of the downstairs rooms I quietly crossed to the stairs, climbing them on tip toe, and ducked into the first bedroom I came to.

It was a child's room, the walls covered in a Disney wallpaper featuring the usual characters. There was a small vanity table and the closet was filled with pretty little dresses, including a copy of the one worn by Snow White in the Disney cartoon movie. There was nothing of interest to me here, so I exited the room. Which was when I heard the door to the basement open downstairs. It was Dolores Winters, and she was carrying a small child. Since her destination was obvious, I ducked into the adjacent bedroom as she began to climb the stairs. Fortunately there was a connecting door between that one and this, which I left slightly ajar.

I watched as Dolores placed the sleeping child on the bed then dressed her a little pink dress, white ankle socks, and mary janes. She tied a large ribbon in the girl's hair then stepped away. Seconds later the child awoke, looked around her, then stared down at herself in disbelief. She dropped down from the bed, allowing me to estimate her age at four-year old.

"It's late 1948," said Dolores Winter, who had been standing in the doorway watching the girl, "and this is our Hollywood mansion on Tolucca Lake."

"You're me," said the girl, noticing Dolores for the first time, "so why this?"

Wait, what?

"To give you the childhood we should've had, but never did."

"So just like that, I'm supposed to relive my childhood?" the girl said, incredulously.

"I did, and it completed the healing process our life with Clark did so much for."

Clark? Who was Clark?

"Clark," said the girl, choking up.

Dolores knelt down, her arms open, and the girl ran into them. What was going on? How could this little girl also be Dolores Winters?

"I know, I know," cooed Dolores, stroking the girl's hair and comforting her. "It's been twenty-one years for me, and I still miss him."

I was confused. Winters was in her early-30s, so was this Clark someone she knew when she was a child?

When the girl's sobbing subsided, she pulled herself away and looked Dolores square in that oh so beautiful face.

"So how does this work?" she asked.

"You're four years old, you'll go by the name Debra, and I'm your mother."

"Does that mean I have to call you 'mom'?"

"Only when there are others present. Whenever it's just the two of us we'll converse as adults."

"And how do you explain my presence in your life?" she asked. "I'm a Dolores Winters clone so the resemblance can only be explained away by my being a blood relative, but she didn't have a four year old child last time I was in 1948."

"Niece," replied Dolores, "daughter of a distant, now deceased cousin. I've adopted you and, thanks to the time bubble, all of the relevant paperwork will soon have been in all of the relevant files at the relevant agencies all along."

Time bubble? Clones? What the hell had I stumbled onto?

"Good. So what next?"

"Tomorrow you begin at kindergarten."

"'Kindergarten'? I'm a genius, a very old genius. What am I supposed to get out of kindergarten?"

"By studying the other children and copying them you'll learn how to pass convincingly as an infant. It will be important to play the age you appear to be at every point during this childhood, and that you make allowance for those of your peers who actually *are* that age. This will also help you make friends. Not being known as a 'freak' as we were during our first childhood makes a huge difference, believe me."

"And you," she said, "you've been me, been the child, but now you get to be the mother so you've already seen what's going to happen to you."

"As much as any child sees of a parent's life, yes. I know that she'll shortly meet her new husband, an amazing man who was a wonderful father, that'll he'll give her a son and a daughter in the next few years who I knew as the beloved siblings we never had. Now they're about to become my children when I give birth to them."

Dolores paused to let that sink in.

"We cut ties with our criminal organisation, divested ourself of our illicit income, when we believed we were dying of cancer, but we have a logical new source of income."

"The stock market," said the girl, nodding. "I'll read the financial pages every day, memorise them, and apply that knowledge when I become you."

"Obviously."

Dolores regarded her for a moment.

"You're a four year-old child now," she said, "which means you'll be six when the fifties begin and sixteen when they end. Sixteen was just the right age to be when the sixties opened, particularly because we had money and I'd loved the music of the period since discovering it for the first time in the early twenty-first century. I moved to England early in the decade, saw the Beatles at the Cavern, and early, pivotal performances by all the major 'British Invasion' groups. In the middle of that decade I lived in London and was there for the 'Swinging London' era, becoming a Mary Quant and Carnaby Street regular. In late 1966 I moved to San Francisco so I'd be there in time for the Summer of Love. I flew back to London on 29th January 1969 in order to see the Beatles final, unannounced concert from the rooftop of their Apple Corps headquarters, flying back home the next day."

"That sounds amazing!" said the girl, sounding genuinely excited at the prospect.

"It was, and I envy you for still having all that ahead of you. I was at Woodstock in August, of course, and then it was time to become Mom. She was waiting for me with the time bubble at our New York apartment when I got back from the festival. After a tearful farewell between us, I travelled back in time to a few days ago and that same apartment. Leaving the time bubble there, I disguised myself and made my way to Mt Sinai hospital, where we were dying. Taking great care not to be seen by anyone, I watched through a crack in the door as Degaton and Despero made their offer. As soon as they took that earlier version of us and vanished into the future, I shed my disguise and climbed into the bed. The next time doctors came round and examined me..."

"Complete remission?"

"One of them called it a miracle. They kept me in a few days for observation, but as soon as I was able to check myself out I did."

There was a sound at the door of the bedroom I was in. The maid! I desperately wanted to hear what else Dolores and the child had to say and to find out who Degaton and Despero might be, but not wanting to be discovered I had no choice but to quickly conceal myself behind the door then slip out onto the landing unseen when the maid entered. There was nothing for it but to head back downstairs, which I did, intending to get out while the going was good. But when I was at the front door I paused. Dolores Winters had carried the child up from the cellar. If she was to be believed they had travelled here via a time machine, so if it existed that must be where it was.

The basement was large enough to contain several rooms, only one of which was locked. I took out my lockpicks and soon gained entry. And inside, there it was...

I'm not sure what I'd expected, but the large glass-like sphere I found inside was an arresting sight. It hovered an inch or two above the ground and a door at the front of the thing allowed you within, giving access to its controls. These were labelled in a language I didn't recognize but would later learn was called Interlac. Fortunately, Dolores had taped labels in English next to each of these. The controls appeared simple enough. You could set a destination for any date and location you wanted, but there were also a number of presets and one labelled 'Return'. I decided this must mean that wherever you went this would return you to where you'd set out from, so if I went to a preset destination and hit 'Return' when I got there it should return me to this time and place. There was of course only one way to find out. One of the resets that particularly caught my eye was labelled 'Cloning Facility'. I knew that plant physiologist Herbert J. Webber had coined the term "clone", from the Greek klon, in 1903. He used it to refer to the technique of propagating new plants using cuttings, bulbs or buds. At some point in the future someone would learn how to clone human beings. Disgraced or not I was still a medical man and the idea fired my imagination, so that was the preset I activated...

- 6 -

The air before me started to shimmer, and the basement beyond the sphere was transformed into a swirling kaleidoscope of colour. If I'd given the matter any thought I'd probably have expected traveling through time to take no time at all, but several minutes passed for me within the bubble before the swirling colours resolved themselves into a large chamber of some kind. When I stepped out of the sphere I obviously activated a sensor because that dimly lit chamber suddenly became fully illuminated.

I had materialised in the corner of what I soon discovered was the main cloning chamber. It contained a dozen large tubes hooked up to a bank of machines. Two of these were empty and one had what appeared to be a recently fertilized human ovum growing in it. The others contained naked human bodies, identical copies of Dolores Winters at various ages, about two years apart. The oldest appeared to be around 20 years old and the youngest 2 years old - her clones.

They were all immersed in what had to be some sort of nutrient fluid that kept them alive as they grew and which must also somehow be supplying them with oxygen. The facility was obviously set up to be fully automatic and self-sustaining. Which was just as well. While the mechanism for releasing a clone from her tube looked fairly straightforward to activate, I had no idea how anything else worked or how I might grow clones of anyone else. Which meant this would remain what it was now: a factory turning out copies of Dolores Winters.

Elsewhere in the chamber was a futuristic looking operating table big enough to hold two people and incorporating all manner of equipment I didn't recognise. It was vacuum sealed under a sterile transparent wrap and clearly had never been used. In an anteroom I found a double bed, a dressing table laden with cosmetics, a cheval mirror, a clothing rack bearing a couple of dresses from the 1940s (one red, one green) with matching shoes beneath, and drawers containing female undergarments and hosiery. On a shelf above the bed were several books, among which were an instruction manual for the operating table and a large volume with a yellow cover titled A GUIDE TO TEMPORAL MECHANICS. Below the title, for some unfathomable reason, was a photo of one of those blue telephone boxes with the light on top used by British bobbies. Out of curiosity I opened the book and started reading the introduction:

"Remember first encountering quantum mechanics and how trying to apply common sense logic to it made your head hurt? Well, welcome to temporal mechanics, and be sure to bring some aspirin with you."

Paging ahead I paused at a chapter headed 'Time Spirals and the Resetting Illusion', which sounded intriguing.

"In the last chapter we looked at time loops, how in defiance of all logic there can be things that appear to only exist within those loops, and cause and effect both precede and follow each other. In popular fiction the term is used to describe a situation in which the protagonist is living the same day over and over, and remembers doing so. Time resetting like that is what appears to happen in a time spiral, but if anyone was trapped within one they would never know it because their memory would reset, too. Fortunately, most people only ride the spiral, but since they experience time as a linear progression while doing so this causes the Resetting Illusion.

"As a time traveller encountering a typical spiral, you will meet your older self. When your older self leaves and your younger self arrives you've now become that older self from his perspective. More importantly, you are also now back at that earlier point in time, that earlier point on the spiral. Because you experience time as a straight line rather than the spiral it is in this situation, his arrival will appear to you to reset things to how they were at that point. Hence, the Resetting Illusion.

"While a Resetting Illusion is a relatively benign and even amusing thing to experience, crossing your own timeline is something that needs to be done with extreme caution. Make a mistake and you could unravel your own existence and wipe yourself from history. Or perhaps even worse, you might create an Infinite Recursion [see Chapter 10: Infinite Recursions]. Whatever you do, do not visit your future then return to the past and try to change things to produce different outcomes. The results are seldom what you expect and in extreme cases can produce the unravelling of your existence alluded to above. So only become part of your own past if you already are.

"Now, as for how to initiate a time spiral..."

I was beginning to appreciate that crack about aspirin in the introduction, but since I clearly needed to understand what all the pitfalls of time travel were before getting too adventurous with the time machine that book was coming back with me, as was the manual for the operating table.

Further exploration took me to a large metal door that wouldn't have been out of place in a bank vault. This obviously led to the outside world, but the wheel needed to turn the opening mechanism had been removed and the handle torn off. Whatever was out there I wasn't going to get to see. A pity. I'd like to know what the world of the future looked like. Or perhaps I wouldn't. There had to have been a reason for the door to be disabled like that, after all.

My final discovery was the best of the lot. In a storeroom I found tub after tub labelled 'medical biogel' - so that's what the miracle substance was called. I loaded up the time bubble with as much of this veritable goldmine as it would carry. Having seen all I needed to, I hit 'Return' and the bubble dematerialized into the timestream. The journey was not as uneventful this time. Just before it was over a klaxon sounded, followed by a mechanical voice:

'WARNING! WARNING! PARTICLES OF UNKNOWN TYPE PENETRATING TIME BUBBLE SHIELDING!'

I had no idea what to do in response to this and would have panicked had we not we arrived back in 1948 immediately afterwards, apparently none the worse for wear. I was shaking and needed a stiff drink, but before that could happen I first had to move the time bubble. I allocated an unused preset to the current time and place, then came the big test that would prove whether or not I understood the controls as well as I thought I did. By some means I didn't pretend to comprehend, the bubble could call up a three-dimensional representation of where it currently was, in this case the Hollywood mansion of Dolores Winters. By then moving a sort of tracking ball embedded in the control console I could move the image I was seeing, sending it out of the mansion, across Los Angeles, and into my garage. Fortunately this was empty, my Buick being in the shop. I moved the time dial to ten minutes in the future and activated the bubble once more. Since the travel involved such a tiny movement in time and space it really did seem all but instantaneous this time, taking me to the point I had designated.

I was elated! I now had a time machine in my garage and all the biogel I should ever need. There was one more small trip I needed to make so, after unloading all the biogel, I set 'Return' to my current time and place. Being cautious, I then called up the three-dimensional representation of where I was, scrolled this across to a nearby park, and set the time dial to twenty years in the future. As I hoped, the park still looked much the same, so I scrolled across the city until finding a vacant house for sale near a bookstall, then materialised within this. I wasn't planning on staying in 1968 longer than I had to, having come here purely to buy a sporting almanac covering the past twenty years of sports results and a copy of the Financial Times. Which I did. The newspaper headlines were full of news about a war in some place called Vietnam, wherever that was. I had no interest in finding out, just in making my purchases and heading back to the time bubble. I was surprised by how casually dressed everyone on the street was and that the young men all had long hair, but again none of this was anything I wanted to know more about. It seemed to me that as long as I didn't know about it then, for me, the future remained in a state of indeterminacy, but the more I knew about it then the more it became 'fixed'. Having yet to read all of A GUIDE TO TEMPORAL MECHANICS I had no idea whether or not this was actually the case, but I was taking no chances.

Back in 1948, I exited the time bubble with my acquisitions, a big smile on my face. Half the money I'd make from betting using the results in the almanac could be invested in companies that were nothing much now but would be enormous by 1968, as listed in the Financial Times. When you had access to time travel there was no reason for you not to be rich so long as you didn't overdo things and accrue so much wealth you started warping financial systems, which I had no intention of doing. For once in my life, things were going my way.

Over the next few days I diligently read my way through the books I now had and after getting to grips with the intricacies of temporal mechanics was confident of my ability to avoid the major pitfalls of time travel. However, this didn't mean I immediately went off gallivanting through time. No, I decided it was safer and more sensible not to use the time bubble unless I had a really good reason for doing so. It eventually had to return to Dolores's mansion in 1948, of course, but until then it could sit unused in my garage for years if necessary.

The final time I leafed through the books before storing them away in the time bubble I made a discovery. It was easy not to notice since they should be blank end papers - and Ultra obviously hadn't - but the rear two pages of the temporal mechanics book were stuck together. Taking a scalpel I prized these apart and discovered a photo and dedication that stunned me.

"God damn!" I said.

I had no idea what it meant yet, but things had just gotten a lot more complicated.