Many of my books were a long time getting finished, but unless I live to be a hundred, this one is the record setter.
I was in high school in the fifties when I asked my self the classic science fiction question, "What if?" In this case, it was what if time travel were really possible? I wasn't concerned with the paradoxes that other writers had explored to more than completion. I was wondering what else you could do with it.
My first attempts at writing were pretty amateurish. I didn't know much about writing, but having cut my teeth on Robert Heinlein juveniles, I knew good writing from bad. Wisely, I kept my smudged pages to myself. Anyway, I was too busy flunking out of Senior English to have much time for anything else. Back then, I had some truly wretched English teachers, who forced the poetry and Shakespeare that I had loved down my throat so hard that I soon hated it and him—and them. I eventually regained my love for it and him, but never for them. It never occurred to me that I would end up as a professional writer.
Not when I had some really great science teachers, who knew their subjects and taught them well. A career in science, technology, and/or maybe business seemed to be my obvious life path.
Still, the thoughts kept on welling up, like bubbles in a cesspool. If you could move something, maybe even yourself, from one position in the space-time continuum to any other position, then you would immediately have effectively infinite wealth and power. You could always win the lotteries, always buy the best stock on the market, always bet on the winning horse.
So, with that going for you, what would you do with your life, aside from getting filthy rich? Well? No quick answer? I didn't have one either. It took me forty-three years to work it out, and even then it took the help of my good friend, Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman to finally give me a good ending for the story.
I hope you enjoy it.
—Leo Frankowski
Tver, Russia
2002