May 10, 1996

I met with Senator Feinstein at the steakhouse atop Transamerica Pyramid. Not ever having had dinner with a United States Senator, I made sure to order the filet mignon with the garden salad with balsmaic vinaigrette and the scalloped potatoes, washing it down with very expensive red wine.

I had told her about how I had tried to make Mr. Mallory's sliding generator work.

"Imagine what you can accomplish if you had billions of dollars in funding and a team of the best scientists in the world," said Senator Feinstein. "When I go back to Washington on Sunday, I'll add the funding to this science bill we're considering."

I can still recall the first time I saw the wormhole, back in September of 1994. I wondered if we should study it. Instead, I and Mr. Mallory and Miss Welles decideded to slide, taking Mr. Brown with us.

I thanked the Senator after we were done. Back home in Castro Valley, I was thinking.

On my third slide, we landed on a very similar world. I thought it was mny homeworld until Mr. Mallory's father came home. We stayed in that world for a few months, using the basement as a base of operations to try to find home, until an encountner with spiderwasps in January of '95 led us on a journey of random sliding.

I wondered what would have happned if we stayed there, studying the wormhole, perfecting the technology, developing a tracking system. I understood why we were so eager to just use the machione in that world to slide, because we wanted to reunite with our loved ones, and yet maybe we would have had a better chance had we decided to stuidy sliding itself.

I'll pour myself a glass of wine and gulp it down before going to sleep.