Theodore, but don’t let that worry you; Woodrow and Theodore are both Lazarus Long,
who is an odd one in any universe – don’t let me forget to tell about the time that
Lazarus quite unintentionally got three women pregnant at once, a grandmother, her
daughter, and her granddaughter… and thereby had to make some unusual arrangements
with the Time Corps in order to carry out the first commandment in his own private
decalogue, which is: Never leave a pregnant woman to face her destiny unsupported.
Since Lazarus has been knocking them up over centuries in several universes this has
taken up quite a bit of his time.
Lazarus quite innocently broke his own first commandment with respect to my
grandson’s mother, and this mishap resulted indirectly in my grandson marrying my
sister wife, Hazel Stone, who was on leave of absence from our family for that
purpose… for you see (or perhaps you don’t) Hazel had to marry Colin Campbell so
that these two could rescue Mycroft Holmes IV, the computer that led the Lunar
Revolution on time line three, code ‘Neil Armstrong’. Let’s skip the details; it’s
all in Encyclopaedia Galacta and other books.
`The operation was a success but the patient died.’ It was almost that way. The
computer was saved and is alive and well and happy in Boondock today. All of the
raiding party got away without a scratch… except Colin and Hazel Campbell and the
kitten, Pixel, all of whom were terribly wounded, and were left dying in a cave in
Luna.
I must digress again. In that raiding party was a young officer, Gretchen Henderson,
great-great-granddaughter of my sister wife, Hazel Stone. Gretchen had had a baby
boy four months before this raid, which my grandson knew.
What he did not know was that he was the father of Gretchen’s son.
In fact he knew beyond doubt that he had never copulated with Gretchen and knew with
equal certainty that he had left no sperm in any donor bank anywhere/when.
Nevertheless Hazel, dying, had told him firmly that he was the father of Gretchen’s
child.
He had asked how; she had answered, ‘Paradox.’
A time paradox Colin could understand. He was a member of the Time Corps; he had
been through time loops; he knew that, in a time paradox, it was possible to turn
around and bite oneself in the back of one’s own neck.
Therefore he now knew that he was going to inseminate Gretchen somewhere forward on
his own time line; somewhere backward on her time line – the inverted loop paradox.
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But `God helps those who help themselves’. That would happen only if he lived
through this squeeze and made it happen.
When the three were rescued shortly after this revelation, Colin had piled up new
corpses and had been wounded twice more – but all three were still alive. They were
flashed two thousand years into the future to the greatest physicians in any
universe: Ishtar and her staff. My sister wife Ishtar won’t let a patient die as
long as the body is warm and the brain is intact. It took some doing, Pixel
especially. The baby creature was held at Kelvin nought point three for several
months while Doctor Bone was fetched from another universe and a dozen of Ishtar’s
best including Ishtar herself were put through a crash course in feline medicine,
surgery, physiology, etc. Then they raised Pixel to simple hypothermia, rebuilt him,
brought him to blood temperature and wakened him. So today he is a strong, healthy
tom, still travelling as he pleases and making kittens wherever he goes.
In the meantime Hazel arranged the time loop and Colin encountered and wooed and won
and tumbled and impregnated a somewhat younger Gretchen. So she had her baby, and
later on (by her personal time line) she joined Hazel and Colin in saving the
computer Mycroft Holmes.
But why such extreme effort over a kitten? Why not give a dying kitten the release
he needs to end his pain?
Because, without Pixel and his ability to walk through walls, Mycroft Holmes would
not have been rescued, all of the raiding party would have died, and the future of