And then I smashed Professor Hadley’s time-transporter. I stamped on it, while Joe gazed stupidly at Ginny. I had reason to smash the device. Naturally! If anybody else traveled in time, they might not be as smart as I am, or their descendants might not be as dumb as you, Charles. Something might get messed up. Somebody might marry the wrong person somewhere in the next fourteen centuries, and Ginny might not get born. I wouldn’t risk that!
So, Charles, I am happy to report that everything ended nicely, or will end nicely. For everybody but you, and I must apologize for that. But surely you can understand that it is all for the best, can’t you, Charles? It would have been interesting to have gone beyond your rumpus-room in the thirty-fourth century, and see what a city of your time was like, and I’d like to see the spaceships and the ground-cars and the little personal fliers Ginny has been telling me about. But it doesn’t matter.
You look at them, Charles. I’ll look at Ginny.
You needn’t worry about her, though. That gal has brains! She only halfway believed this story until I fell on your head. But because she halfway believed, the morning she comes to your house with Harl and Stan and Laki, she’ll have made some tentative precautions. She brought along a whole bag full of crystallized carbon—all the costume jewelry around the house with carbon crystals in it. Merely trinkets, of course. You can buy them by the pound. Pretty beads. But back in the twentieth century they’re called diamonds and we don’t know how to make them yet. She even picked up a paperbacked book on electronics for beginners, aimed at ten-year-old kids. Some of it is over my head so far, but it’s pretty useful. With diamonds to start on and super-duper electronic principles to go on with, Ginny and I are in no danger of starving, even in these primitive times.
We’ve got a primitive house with old-style hot-and-cold water and a quaint old electric furnace, and we listen to our antique radio and watch primeval television, and we drive a car that burns that quaint old stuff called gasoline in its cylinders! But we manage. We don’t mind hardships. We have each other.
I was just finishing this letter, Charles, when Ginny came in. Somehow I find it very satisfactory to be married to Ginny. Lately it’s gotten even better. And she came in with something to show me that enables me to finish this note with an item of news that is highly important to all the family.
Ginny, beaming, took my finger and made me feel. And it’s so! We have a son, Charles. He looks like me, but Ginny seems pleased. And the thing I felt—Charles, just as I finished this letter, Ginny showed me that your great-great-great-grandfather fifty-one times removed, at the age of seven months and one week, has just cut his first tooth!
I’m sure you will be pleased!