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time turns out to be the dead past, come alive again, reanimated for me and the snatch team.
    I could devote a billion words to the experience of stepping through the Gate and not come close to the actuality.
    At the same time, what happened is that I stepped through. Simple. One foot in the dead future, the other in the living past (with my ass on the line: one cheek in the land of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the other in the Last Age—or my face in the fifties and my fanny in Tomorrowland).
    Those two feet of mine were connected by legs. Yet they were some thousands of miles apart in space and billions of years apart in time.
    One of the feet was not even my own, but that’s neither here nor there.
    I shall simply say I stepped through. It should be taken to mean I went through a terrifying ordeal that I had become used to, to the point that I managed to convince myself it was routine.
    I stepped through the Gate.
    I emerged in the lavatory of the Lockheed Constellation in 1955, and immediately had to duck as two members of the snatch team threw a screaming woman over my head. Her scream cut off when her head went through the Gate. It would finish in the far future, and by then it would probably be a dilly. The situation was simply not going to make sense to the poor dear.
Greetings! Your descendants are proud to welcome you to Utopia!
    I stepped out of the lav as two more snatchers dragged a bulky man in a torn gray suit toward the door. He struggled feebly; probably stunned at low power. It didn’t take long to see not much was going right with this snatch. For one thing, the passengers were rebelling.
    Of course, we expect hysteria, eventually. No snatch is going to come off without some screaming and the involuntary release of a few pints of urine. If I got snatched, I’d probably piss, too.
    But it struck me that the mayhem stage of this snatch had arrived ahead of schedule. There were still too many conscious goats against a handful of snatchers.
    It was easy to distinguish the snatch team members from the goats. The snatchers were all dressed like stewardesses. In 1955, on this airline, that meant pert little caps and skirts reaching halfway between knees and ankles and precarious, high-heeled shoes.
    They also wore blood-red lipstick. They looked like vampires.
    1955. I had to take their word for it. When you’ve been to as many times as I have the styles blur. They
all
look weird. But I had no reason to doubt the date. Outside, down below us in the world, cars were sprouting tail fins. Chuck Berry was recording “Maybellene.” Phil Silvers and Ed Sullivan were on the vidscreens, which were being called television sets. Nashua would win the Preakness this year, and the Brooklyn Dodgers would win the World Series. I could have been a rich woman in 1955if I could have found a way to get a bet down. Tomorrow’s newspapers, for instance:
Constellation Crashes in Arizona Desert…
    Wanna bet?
    But this little section of 1955 was not a healthy place to be. Even without the chaos the snatch operation had become, this airplane did not have much flying time left.
    I shook my head to clear it. Sometimes that works. I get vague for a few seconds after a trip through the Gate. I forced myself to concentrate on what needed doing this second, and the next, and the next…
    Jane Birmingham was hurrying down the aisle. I snagged her arm. Things were falling apart around her and I guess the last thing she needed was to have the boss show up to joggle her elbow.
    “It’s a mess back there,” she said, gesturing to the curtain separating first-class from tourist. I heard shouts and the sounds of a struggle.
    “We were shorthanded when we went in on them,” Jane was still explaining. “Pinky discovered her gun was missing not too long after we took off. We tried to locate it quietly; didn’t work. I had to start the snatch. I let Pinky look while we started caulking the folks up front.” She looked away from me, then