He had me relate to him everything that had transpired with the children after we left the house. He made me repeat several points and questioned me closely. He was interested particularly in what Summer had said, how she had said it and how she had acted. The whole thing was so clearly impressed on my mind, as it is today, that I'm sure I made few errors. "Well," he said, when I had finished, "we'll never see either of them again, but I think I can say definitely they weren't killed in that explosion." "I don't see how you can say that!" I exclaimed. "You remember what I told you--that if Summer's existence had been reversed in time after she was born, she was existing somewhere else at the same time? Living normally as a younger child in one place, and as we knew her in reverse?" I did remember it. "Well, she was. But we thought she'd be a girl in both instances. When her time direction was reversed, so was her sex. _Mark and Summer were the same person!_" I gasped. Wyn took a piece of hotel stationery from the rickety desk and scratched a zigzag on it with his pen. It was a figure like the one he had drawn in the library of our home, except that the top arm of this Z was very short. He labelled the top arm of the Z "Mark," and the diagonal "Summer." "My mistake was that I thought my energy explosion would be at B, throwing Summer back into a normal time direction. Instead, it was at A, reversing the time direction of Mark's existence: and the reversed Mark was Summer." "But Mark was Summer's son." I exclaimed. "Curious, isn't it?" he agreed, smiling strangely. "She gave birth to herself, like the phoenix. Nor is that all. She conceived herself!" With a firm hand, he wrote "Wyn" above the bottom arm of the Z! The diagram looked like this: MARK -------- /EXPLOSION / / /SUMMER / / / WYN STORM ------------ "The re-reversal!" His blue eyes were a little self conscious as they looked at me now. "Don, I was born Mark Storm. This explosion today reversed my time direction and I became Summer Storm, to give birth to myself nine years ago. And in a terrific burst of natural energy that you yourself saw, a crucible so fiery that it could wrench the very inner fabric and physical form of the body, the time flow for me was twisted back to its proper direction that night in the park and I became myself--to father myself six years later! "I was my mother. I am my own father and my own son!" * * * * * There it is. Wyn believes he sprang from nothingness, from himself. Amid the wreckage of the laws of cause and effect that this whole thing involves, it's possible, I suppose. But a couple of details still bother me, details I haven't mentioned to Wyn.