The-Man-Who-Folded-Himself-David-Gerrold

There’s a poker game going on in my apartment. It starts on June 24, 1975. I don’t know when it ends.
Every time one of me gets tired, there’s another one showing up to take his place. The game is a
twenty-fourhour marathon. I know it lasts at least a week; on July 2,1 peeked in and saw several
versions of myself—some in their mid-twenties—still grimly playing. Okay. So I like poker.
Every time I’m in the mood, I know where there’s an empty chair. And when. Congenial people too. I
know they’ll never cheat.
I may have to get a larger apartment though. Five rooms is not enough. (I need more room for the pool
table.)
Strange things keep happening—no, not strange things, things that I’ve learned not to question. For
instance, once I saw Uncle Jim—he looked surprised and vanished almost immediately. It startled me
too. I was just getting used to the idea of his death. I hadn’t realized that he would have been using the
timebelt too. (But why not? It was his before it was mine.)
Another time I heard strange noises from the bedroom. When I peeked in, there was Don in bed with
—well, whoever it was, she was covered by a blanket; I couldn’t see. He just looked at me with a silly
expression, not the slightest bit embarrassed, so I shrugged and closed the door. And the noises began
again. I’m not questioning it at all. I’ll find out. Eventually.
Mostly I’ve been concentrating on making money. Don and I (and later, Danny and I) have made a
number of excursions into the past, as well as the future. Some of our investments go back as far as
1850 (railroads, coal, steel). 1875 (Bell Telephone). 1905 (automobiles, rubber, oil, motion pictures).
1910 (airlines, heavy industry, steel again). 1920 (radio, insurance companies, chemicals, drugs). 1929
(I picked up some real bargains here. More steel. Business machines. More radio, more airlines. More
automobiles). 1940 (companies that would someday be involved in computers, television, and the
aerospace industry). 1950 (Polaroid and Xerox and Disney). 1960 (More Boeing stock, some land in
Florida—especially around Orlando). Turned out that 1975 was a good year for bargains too. It was a
little too early to buy stock in something called Apple, but I could buy IBM and Sony and MCA shares.
Oh, and Don said I should also pick up some stock in 20 th Century Fox. There was a nifty little movie
coming up in 1977 that would make a bit of money.
Down through the decades, I bought a little here, a little there—not enough to change the shape of the
world, but enough to supply me with a comfortable lifelong fortune. It was a little tricky setting up an
investment firm to manage it, but it was worth the effort. When I got back to 1975, I found I was worth
—
• one hundred and forty-three million dollars.
Hmm.
Actually, the number was meaningless. I was worth a hell of a lot more. It turned out I owned an
investment monopoly worth several billion dollars, or let’s say I controlled it. What I owned was the
holding company that held the holding companies. By the numbers, its value was only one hundred and
forty-three million, but I could put my hands on a lot more than that if I wanted. What it meant was
that I had unlimited credit. Hell! If I wanted to, I could own the country! The world!
Believe it or not, I didn’t want to.
I’d lost interest in the money. It was just so much numbers. Useless except as a tool to manipulate my
environment, and I had a much better tool for that.
Those frequent trips to the past had whetted my appetite. I had seen New York grow—like a living
creature, the city had swelled and soared; her cast-iron facades had become concrete; her marble towers
gave way to glass-sided slabs and soaring monoliths. And beyond that, she became something