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sigh he put down his cup of coffee. He made his decision. Stretching time would make it rather difficult for them to stop him from getting the details for himself. Since they would not allow him to work out a solution with them, he must follow a different course of action. The more he thought about it, the more the idea crystallized in his mind.
    He knew what he had to do, and he even thought that he knew how to do it. With more than a little nervous excitement he began preparing himself. There were several things that he did not yet have. He wrote out to-do lists, started preparing to rebuild technology that had not existed in a long while, and started pulling information from his dead wife’s computer, which he had hacked long ago. It was an arduous task, preparing to pit himself against the Time Corp, but he would finally be getting answers.
    Time: Classified
    Operation: Classified
    Wanda sucked in a breath between clamped teeth as she watched her husband walk into the trial in place of the prosecuting attorney. What was he doing here? Had he seen her? She had to fight the urge to abort the mission on the spot. What the hell was he doing here? She looked closely at him and was surprised to see that he looked about ten years older. His frame was about the same, no weight lost or gained, but his hair had started to go to a silver-white in streaks here and there. And his eyes …
    His eyes were very different. They were not the warm playful eyes that she remembered. Instead, they now looked like the eyes of a lifelong insomniac, with permanent dark rings below them. His smile wrinkles were gone. She used her Optical HUD contacts to confirm his identity. It was a positive match. Ten years older. Well then. Perhaps field control had given him a secondary mission. But why would they send a scientist into a field situation? Her HUDs weren’t showing him as chipped with an active mission, so odds were against him being here on legitimate business.
    The only conclusion that she could jump to was that he was acting independently as a time rogue. She shook her head in horror at that thought and clamped her fingers over the bridge of her nose. She had developed the habit to help herself stay silent when she needed to. Just what the hell happened in the future to bring about this series of events? As tempting as it was to contact him and ask, she knew that the results of talking with him alone could create a huge paradox and piggybacking even a class two onto a class six could have devastating results on the stability of the time stream. Contact was not a viable option and she summarily dismissed it. Puzzling out the situation from secondhand and observational facts would to have to do.
    Could procedure have changed so much in the ten years separating them that he would be allowed to come back here? That was an easy answer: no. James was on an unauthorized leap, trying to alter the time stream without field command’s knowledge. She didn’t even really need logic for that one. He would have sent a message via the HUD if he were here on a legitimate mission. So, logic followed that her husband’s motivation was either born of desperation or that he was hell-bent on destroying the world. Wanda thought it through. No matter how bad things were for James upstream from her relative time, she knew her husband well enough to know he would never act on a course he felt would be destructive to the world around him. He was too good of a man.
    This meant that he was desperate. So it followed that one of two things caused him to be here. Either she failed or she died on this mission in his relative time. The third possibility floated into her mind that it could also be a combination of the two. She might fail and die. One was as bad as the other so far as she was concerned, without adding to the weight by combining them.
    But from James’s viewpoint she couldn’t see a simple failed mission inspiring this kind of action in him. Even if it