The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya Read Online Free PDF Page A

ability, but either way it was impressive for a transfer student to get in. I sure as hell didn’t have any interest in a class whose main dish would be extra helpings of math and science.
    In any case, I turned my attention away from the hell of college entrance exams into which I’d inevitably descend, purposefully avoiding the calendar in an effort to extend my few remaining days of life as a freshman, and once I got back from that fateful December eighteenth, carefully maintained my state of relaxation.
    After all, I sure can’t think of anything more dangerous than repairing space-time, and having successfully done so, surely I deserved some R&R. Nagato had returned to her usual self, Asahina’s smile was back, and while something was up with Haruhi, she’d start making noise about it soon enough.
    So there really shouldn’t have been any problems at all, or at least I didn’t want to think about them. But there was one person in the clubroom who selfishly insisted on making mountains out of molehills—the only one who, like Haruhi, had been left out ofthe loop, the esper whose powers were useless when it came to changing space-time—one Itsuki Koizumi, who said:
    “You’ve repeatedly visited two separate mornings of December eighteenth.”
    Koizumi had enjoyed hearing about the time-travel incidents I’d been through ever since the episode at the snowy mountain mansion, pestering me to relate them to him like a kid begging his grandfather for another story. As an aspiring time traveler, he seemed to envy me. Taking the train back from Tsuruya’s villa, he’d gone on and on about “Might you not find some way to take me back with you?” and “It should be fine so long as your past self doesn’t see me,” but it went without saying that I paid him no heed.
    I was still deeply embarrassed about the whole Nagato thing, and although it was all over and settled, I still tended to prevaricate about it, but in the face of Koizumi’s curiosity-borne persistence, and when just the two of us were in the clubroom, I finally told him the whole story.
    And as I’d expected, he happily began his commentary.
    “You see, it was the morning of December eighteenth when the malfunctioning Nagato changed the world into one where Suzumiya and I, and even Asahina, were all normal people. You spent three days in that world, then used Nagato’s escape program to travel three—no,
four
years into the past. There you met the still-functioning Nagato and returned to the morning of December eighteenth.”
    That was all true. And incidentally, I’ve now been back to that morning yet again, I told him.
    “I know. But think carefully now. Suppose we refer to the moment Nagato changed the world on the morning of December eighteenth as time
x
. When you returned to time
x
from Tanabata four years previous, it was no longer the same
x
.”
    What was he talking about? There was no way there could be more than one version of the same time, I told him.
    “There can—in fact, there must. The reasoning is simple. If thetime
x
where Nagato changed the world disappeared, then neither Suzumiya’s disappearance nor her and my transformation into regular people would have happened. And were that the case, you would never have needed to travel into the past.”
    He was talking about a time paradox. I had plenty of first-hand experiences with those, I said.
    “But a necessary precondition for returning this world to its previous state was you traveling into the past. If you hadn’t, the world would have stayed changed. But you did go, and you did repair it. Otherwise, this timeline would not exist.”
    I glanced over at the door, hoping desperately that someone would come and interrupt this conversation.
    “Let me use a diagram to explain. It might make it easier to understand.”
    Ever since the incident, Koizumi seemed to have gotten really into diagrams; he took an erasable pen and walked over to the whiteboard.
    “Say this