"I thought you might," I said. "That's one reason I pushed them to let me come back."
"Back from where?" he asked, some tension creeping into his face as he leaned forward. "Russia? China?"
I shook my head. "I'm from the future, Weldon. To be precise, from November 7, 2153."
He took it better than I'd expected him to. A couple of owlish blinks of the eyes, and he was back on track again. "Two hundred years exactly," he said thoughtfully. "Coincidence?"
"No, that's just how it works," I told him. "You can only do jumps in one-hundred-year multiples. No one knows why."
"I've read stories about that sort of thing," he said. "Science fiction, they call it. I never thought it could really happen. So Amanda was a time-traveler too?"
"A very unwilling one," I said. "She was a kidnap victim."
That one got me no less than three blinks. "She was _kidnapped? _" he asked. "Why?"
"The usual reason," I told him. "Her father has a lot of money. A gang of sewage-eaters wanted some of it."
He mulled at that a moment. "And they decided to hide her in the past while they waited for the ransom to be paid?"
"Basically," I said, rather impressed he'd made the connection so quickly. "It's a little trickier than that -- they wanted some complicated power transfers instead of straight cash. But never mind that. The point is that it was going to take time, and the way everything's interconnected they knew they could never hide her that long."
I waved a hand around me. "So they commandeered a pastportal and brought her here."
"Sounds like a pretty good plan."
"It was a terrific plan," I admitted. "Not only did we not have our usual resources to draw on in 1953, but we also had to make sure we