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travel."
    "That's right! You're the gentleman we met at the time stage. When you . . . arrived."
    Vannice blushed.
    "My name is Genevieve Faison." She touched August's arm. "My father, August."
    "I'm Owen Vannice."
    "A pleasure, son," August said. He appraised the cloudy skies. "I wish it were warmer."
    "It will be, sir. It due to be a very nice afternoon."
    The guide broke them into twos and threes so as to attract less attention. They walked through the muddy streets of midmorning Rome. Genevieve and August got themselves paired with Owen.
    "What I don't understand," Genevieve asked him, "is, with all these tourists going back to see the same assassination, why aren't there hundreds of us gathered here? Tours have been going on for years, haven't they? By now most of the people in the Roman Senate chamber ought to be from the future."
    "It would be that way if time weren't quantized," Owen said. "But every instant of time is discrete, separated from every other instant. If we affect a single instant, by coming here for example, it does change the future proceeding from that instant. But the adjoining instants have entirely separate futures, which are unaffected."
    Gen played the innocent. "I'm afraid I don't follow you."
    "Okay, suppose we arrive in Rome at exactly ten a.m. local time. We go out on our tour and see the assassination, come back and return to the hotel in Jerusalem of the settled moment universe. Another tour group comes tomorrow, and they arrive at exactly one minute after ten. Because 10:01 is an entirely separate time quantum from 10:00, they don't even see us. In our stream we're still standing around the rainy atrium; in theirs the place is empty except for them. So they go to the senate and see the assassination too, but in a way it's a different assassination than the one we saw."
    "How clever!"
    Vannice became more excited the more he got into his explanation, and his awkwardness faded. Or didn't fade exactly, but changed from a detriment to an asset.
    "Each moment of time is connected to an entirely different time continuum. In practice the size of the quanta depend on the reciprocal of the fine structure constant--137.04 Moment Universes are packed into every second. So in a way there are a 137 separate worlds per second, and simply by sending each tour group to a slightly different arrival moment, we in effect send them to a different--but identical--past. So we never meet any of the other tour groups."
    "But doesn't this mean that we can do anything we want without affecting the future?"
    "In a lot of ways we do. Even more so in a settled M-U. Look at how changed our Jerusalem is."
    "So why do the Chronological Protection people make such a fuss?"
    "Well, some are worried that if we effect too many changes in adjacent time streams we'll cumulatively degrade the whole period. The number of time streams isn't infinite, just very large. We can get away with changing individual streams for awhile, but if time travel is done irresponsibly we will ultimately affect the entire time environment. That's what the CPC thinks, anyway."
    They reached a street of multi-story apartments with shops at the street level. On the mezzanine of one a pair of girls were playing, singing a song. Within a market colonnade cooks haggled with vendors while their slaves waited, carrying baskets of figs, vegetables, freshly slaughtered poultry. Even the tallest of the Roman men, like most historicals, were half a foot shorter than Owen Vannice, and his height alone was attracting attention, to say nothing of his babbling on in some strange tongue. Owen was so intent on his explanation he noticed none of this. He stepped on the tail of a dog that was lapping water from a mud hole in the middle of the street. The dog squealed and ran off, and Owen tromped into the mud, splashing August's calves. "I'm sorry, sir!"
    Genevieve watched August repress his annoyance. "Quite all right, son. You seem to be more scholar than