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

I guess the answer to my question about getting a message across the timelines is obvious: I don’t.
There simply isn’t any working method of trans-temporal communication.
At least none that I can think of that’s
foolproof.
But that doesn’t mean I still can’t meet another version of myself.
I meet different versions of myself all the time. The mild variants. The only reason I haven’t run into a
distant variant is that we haven’t been tramping a common ground.
If I want to find such a variant, I have to go somewhere he’s likely to be.
Suppose that somewhere there’s another me—a distant me—who’s thinking along the same lines: he
wants to meet a Daniel Eakins who is widely variant from himself. What memories do we have in
common? Hmm, only those that existed before we were given the timebelt . . .
That’s it, of course!
Our birthday.
* * *
I was born at 2:17 in the morning, January 24, 1956, at the Sherman Oaks Medical Center, Sherman
Oaks, California.
Of course, in this timeline, I hadn’t been born—wouldn’t be born. Something I had done had excised
my birth; but I knew the date I would have been born and so did every other Dan.
It was the logical place to look.
In 1977 the Sherman Oaks Medical Center was a row of seven three- and four-story buildings lining
Van Nuys Boulevard just north of the Ventura Freeway. In 1956 it comprised only two buildings, one
of which was strictly doctors’ offices.
I twinged a little bit as I drove down Van Nuys Boulevard of the mid-fifties. I’d been spending most of
my time in the seventies. I hadn’t realized . . . The two movie theaters were still the Van Nuys and the
Rivoli. Neither had been remodeled yet into the Fox or the Capri—and the Capri was soon to be torn
down. Most of the tall office buildings were missing, and there were too many tacky little stores lining
the street. And the cars—my god, did people actually drive those things? They were boxy, high, and
bulky. Their styling was atrocious—Fords and Chevys with the beginnings of tail fins and double
headlights; Chryslers and Cadillacs with too much chrome. And Studebakers—and DeSotos and
Packards!
There was a big vacant field where I remembered a blue glass, slab-sided building that stretched for
more than a block. But the teenage hangout across the street from it was still alive, still a hangout.
I twinged, because in 1977 I had left a city. This was only a small town, busy in its own peaceful way,
but still a small town. Why had I remembered it as being exciting? As I approached the Medical
Center itself, I realized with a start that something was missing. Then it hit me—in 1956 the Ventura
Freeway hadn’t been built yet, didn’t extend to Van Nuys Boulevard. (I wondered if the big red Pacific
Electric Railroad cars were still running. I didn’t know when they had finally stopped, but the tracks
had remained for years.)
I’d seen Los Angeles in its earlier incarnations, but the Los Angeles of 1930 had always seemed like
another city, like a giant Disneyland put up for Danny the perpetual tourist. It wasn’t real. But this—
this I recognized. I could see the glimmerings of my own world here, its embryonic beginnings, the
bones around which the flesh of the future would grow.