The cold war had been going on for years, of course, and gave promise of going on for many more. The last thirty years had seen crisis after crisis, rumor after rumor, near-war always threatening and big war never breaking out, until a cold-war-weary world yawned in the face of the new peace rumors and the crises that were a dime a dozen.

Someone at an obscure college down in Georgia had set a new record at raw egg-gulping and a glamorous movie star was on the verge of changing husbands once again and the steel workers were threatening to strike.

There was a lengthy feature article about missing persons and he read about half of it, all that he wanted to. It seemed that more and more people were dropping out of sight all the time, whole families at a time, and the police throughout the land were getting rather frantic. There always had been people who had disappeared, the article said, but they had been individuals. Now two or three families would disappear from the same community and two or three from another community and there was no trace of them at all. Usually they were from the poorer brackets. In the past, when individuals had dropped from sight there had usually been some reason for it, but in these cases of mass disappearances there seemed to be no reason beyond poverty and why one would or could disappear because of poverty was something the article writer and the people he had interviewed could not figure out.

There was a headline that read: More Worlds Than One, Says Savant.

He read part of the story:

BOSTON, MASS. (AP) — There may be another earth just a second ahead of us and another world a second behind us and another world a second behind that one and another world a second behind… well, you get the idea.

A sort of continuous chain of words, one behind the other.

That is the theory of Dr. Vincent Aldridge.

Vickers let the paper drop to the floor and sat looking out across the garden, rich with flowers and ripe with sunshine.