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plane, then she saw it. Which meant we could find it.
    While we looked, the conscious goats were busy dragging the sleeping goats to the front of the plane. When they got there somebody was directing them to toss their loads through the Gate and go back for more. It quickly became a routine. They huffed and they puffed, but there’s hardly anything stronger than a 20th. They abuse their bodies, drink, smoke too much, don’t exercise, let the flab build up, and they think they’re worn out after they’ve licked a postage stamp. But they’ve got muscles like horses—and the brains to match. It’s amazing the physical feats they can do if we push them hard enough.
    There was one guy pulling his share of the load, and I swear he must have been fifty years old.
    Jesus!
Fifty!
    The plane was soon emptied. As each walker carried his last body to the Gate he was shoved through himself. Then there was only the snatch team. Even the pilots had been caulked this time. We really hate to do that, and we usually can’t. One of my people was flying now. If she didn’t do exactly what the pilot would have done the plane would come down miles from where it ought to. However, this one was on autopilot and would remain so until the explosion in the engine. There was not going to be anything the pilot could have done (if you can thrash your way through that thicket of verb tenses) to alter anything once that wing fell off.
    Which was fortunate. There is one more trick I can use on a flight where the cockpit crew becomes aware of the snatch before it’s finished, but I
really
hate to use it.
    We could bring in a man from my Very Special Team. (I’m speaking 20th Amerenglish; “man” includes “woman,” or so it says in my
Strunk and White
.) This would be a man with a bomb in his head to insure no teeth survived for identification. A man who was willing to fly an airplane into the ground.
    Did I hear someone say flight recorder? Ah, yes. Those people up front
do
chatter when they get into trouble. There is an interesting solution to that problem. Uptime, it was already being prepared, had been set in motion as soon as the cockpit crew came through and we knew it might have to be used. It was an elegant solution. More than a little puzzling, but elegant.
    With our time scanners we can look anywhere, anytime. (Well, almost.) That’s how we knew this plane would go down. We scanned newspaper stories and found accounts of the crash. It might have been nice to look inside the plane and see how the operation was going to go off, but unfortunately we can’t look into any place or time where we’ve been, or will be. (Time travel is tough on verb tenses.) So we couldn’t know we’d have to take the pilot. But we could now scan ahead to the investigation afterward. (See what I mean about verb tenses? This was happening
now
—if that word retains any meaning—uptime, inthe future. They were scanning events a couple days in the ’55 future: my future, at the moment.)
    At that investigation the tape from the cockpit recorder would be played. So we’d make a recording of that recording, put it on a self-destructing tape player, like the ones on
Mission: Impossible
, and leave that in the cockpit where it would play into the original recorder.
    Paradox!
    Because of what we were doing now or had already done, those words would never be spoken by the man whose voice everyone would hear. They would have been/will be/had been merely recorded from the recording itself, which had never been made, because of what we were doing or had already done.
    Look at this sequence hard enough and you realize that cause and effect become a joke. Any rational theory of the universe must be shitcanned.
    Well, I shitcanned all my rational theories a long time ago. You may hold on to whatever makes you happy.
    *    *    *
    I was getting nowhere with my search for the missing stunner. I looked up, saw we were the only ones left, and yelled.
    “Hey! All