Time Enough for Love Read Online Free PDF

right?”
    She nodded again, her gaze never leaving him as she tried to follow where he was leading. He liked having her full attention. It had been a long time. The Maggie from his time had been distracted and unhappy for the past few years as she struggled to make her failing marriage work. But this was before all that. This was before she married that fool. This was before she discovered that the sizzling attraction that sparked every time she looked in Chuck’s eyes wasn’t what she wanted.
    “Now, suppose I were to go into the men’s room and sneak out the window to the alley where I supposedly keep my Runabout. And suppose I were to travel back in time just an hour or so,” Chuck told her, “where I would intercept you on your way into Tia’s and take you somewhere else—like up to the Pointe—for dinner. Suppose I order a couple ofsteaks and baked potatoes and we eat that. I changed history, right? Steaks and potatoes replaced enchiladas and black-bean soup.
But.
Here’s the strange part.
    “I’ve found that when time has been tampered with—and my going back in time and changing these things, as inconsequential as they seem,
is
time tampering—people are left with residual memories. These residual memories—or memories of how it actually happened the first time around—provide time travelers and those people affected by the time travel with
double memories
.
    “Your most vivid memory would be of your steak and potato, but you would
also
remember the black-bean soup. It’d be foggy almost as if it were a dream, but it’d be back there. Double memories. Of course, since I’m the person who did the actual time traveling, both of my memories will be clear and vivid, because both events actually
happened
to me.”
    She nodded. “That makes sense.”
    “If you concentrate, you may be able to find a residual memory of what you did immediately after you heard about the earthquake the first time around.”
    Maggie closed her eyes for a moment, frowning slightly. When she opened her eyes, they were widewith surprise. “I stayed home and watched the news all night,” she said. “Oh, that’s so
weird
.”
    “That’s right.” Chuck gestured around them at the restaurant. “This isn’t the way it originally happened, so you have double memories both of being home alone, and of spending the night with me.”
    Her eyes flashed as she met his gaze, but she looked away immediately, and he realized the implications of what he’d said. He’d meant evening, not night. Spending the evening with him. Still, she didn’t seem overly averse to his inadvertent suggestion that they spend the night together, and he felt a familiar hot flare of desire at the thought. God, he’d wanted her for so long.
    He had to clear his throat before he spoke again. “A double memory can be so distant and dreamlike, I might not have noticed it if I hadn’t been researching the phenomenon. But I knew something was wrong the morning that I woke up and turned on the TV and heard the first of the news reports about the White House bombing. I had a residual memory of that same morning that was very different. I could remember that I got up, turned on the TV while my coffee machine did its thing, and I felt disgusted by the lack of hard news. The biggest story even on CNN was the birth of some pop singer’s baby. I still had that memory, and that’s how I knewthat time tampering was responsible for the assassination. And I knew it was the work of Wizard-9. They were the only ones besides me who had access to the Wells Project.”
    She was still watching him intently, her chin tucked into the palm of one hand. “So, okay,” she said. “You’ve come back in time to change events that are going to occur in my future. But since you’re
from
the future, all of the changes that you’re going to make have already happened in your past. Shouldn’t you already remember them?”
    Chuck shook his head. “I understand what you’re