from the Third Arthropod Era. There was a bond between us more intimate than that between any Earthly mother and child, or between any Earthly pedogenetic clone-parent and clone-sibling.
I felt perfectly happy, for the first time in my adult life.
Then the others burst in, all armed with ugly ray guns, and shot the thing to pieces.
Imhotep tried to stop them, and was gunned down too.
That was when I started screaming.
I must have blacked out soon afterwards, presumably because whatever was in charge of my drip feed doctored the input with a powerful narcotic. When I woke up, I was back in my own bed.
The clock on my bedside table said that it was twenty past three, but it wasn’t—not so far as I was concerned.
It wasn’t the end of the world, either, but it certainly wasn’t twenty past three—not for me.
I remembered everything, probably because the confusion aboard the alien timeship had been too great to allow them to do the memory-wipe properly. My brain might have attempted its own kind of memory-wipe, but there was never any possibility of it taking effect. Nor was there any possibility of my confusing the experience with a dream or a nightmare. It was real. It took no time, according to the clock, but it was real. It was more real than Mike, more real than the divorce, more real than the ovarian cysts, more real than the hysterectomy, more real than any of the thousand diseases and hundred deaths I witnessed week by week and year by year at the hospital. It was the realest thing I ever experienced, or ever will.
It’s possible, I suppose, that the time-travelers got the wrong idea. It’s possible that they thought that the adult was attacking me, and that the hand it put to my throat was about to strangle me. It’s just about conceivable that they thought they were doing the right thing, the ethical thing. They were, after all, afraid of what Imhotep and I might have wrought…and, for that matter, of anything and everything else that their project might yet produce.
They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand.
They were not, after all, adults themselves.
I am an adult. I do understand. I understand better than they did, and better than Imhotep did. Nothing can ever take that away from me, even though it’s no longer my secret, my private torment, my heaven and hell on Earth. Whatever anyone says, it wasn’t twenty past three to me.
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