When I first started having these chronopathic flashbacks, I dismissed them as nightmares and waking dreams. Then came the doubts about my own sanity, the sessions with a psychiatrist, the numbing terror of madness. It wasn't until Dr. D. M. Mayes, of the University of Texas right here in Austin, issued his report that the nature of my affliction became obvious. Temporal dislodgement. Chronopathy. How much better I felt once I knew the name of my disease. How nice to hear that there were dozens like me.

The last I heard, they still didn't understand just how the human mind could travel through time. If physicists were baffled by the mechanics of telepathy, clairvoyance and telekinesis, they were absolutely infuriated by chronopathy, which brazenly refuted much that they held dear about the nature of Time and Space. But I have my own theory to explain why.

I think it was triggered by despair. Maybe chronopathy has always been latent in people, manifesting itself on occasion and giving rise to conjecture about ghosts and reincarnation. But the manifestations have become more widespread during the last quarter of this century. And I think it's due to an overwhelming sense of hopeless oppression in a worsening environment. People lost all faith in the future. Unhappy in the present, they longed for the past, ached for it, because it always looked rosier, simpler, easier.

Thus were the shackles within the human psyche struck off. So, anyway, at age thirty-eight, I turned out to be chronopathic. Learning to live with it wasn't easy, but I've managed. I guess.

Once, I even sought out Mayes and offered my services. But he had already assembled a team of chronopaths, men and women whose abilities were finely honed, who had all of the necessary paleonto-, archeo- and anthropological schooling to complement their talents.

I was untrained. I had no control over my power. I was, in short, a semi-gifted amateur, a layman, a hack writer and minimally successful poet to boot.

We appreciate your thinking of us in this regard, Mr. Holt, but...

Not suitable for present needs. Terrific. The story of my life.

Last night, I watched from the crowd as Louis XVI went under the blade. You should have seen the expression on his face, dear diary. He really did not believe that we'd go through with it. Right up to the moment that the executioner dropped the blade, he refused to accept the reality of the situation, and then, just as the blade began to fall, I saw him crane his head up as far as it would go. I would have sworn that I saw his lips form the words, Mon Dieu.

Ah well. Where did I leave off in the continuing saga of Bruce and Carol?

The other day, while I was waiting for her to get over her mad, I put my ancient Olympia portable on the table and got to work on the latest installment of my TV soap opera. I was halfway down the page when Carol bumped into something and made a lot of unnecessary noise on her way to the John. She was, I'm certain, deliberately trying to provoke me. But I settled back in my chair, closed my eyes and felt myself leaving again.

When I got there, the sky was overcast, and warm rain was falling. The low clouds had a faint greenish tinge. I crouched in a snug hole on the face of a cliff that dropped straight down into the sea. My niche stank of rotting fish and excrement, but the stench did not cut too sharply. My host's sense of smell seemed atrophied. However, even in this murk, its vision was exceptional--the only other time I had ever experienced such incredible clarity of vision was the time I rode alone with what must have been one of the very last eagles.

The rain ceased by and by. My host--no, I--stirred and stretched pathetic little hindlegs to restore circulation, unfurled wings that were membranous and covered with a fine down. The wings were braced by an enormously elongated digit. I now knew what, when and probably where I was.

Pterosaur, Cretaceous Period. By the inland sea of Kansas, perhaps.

I waited until the updraft from the sea felt right, and then I gently kicked away from the face of the cliff, dipped, rose and was airborne. I had the sky all to myself.

Eventually, my host brought us lower and skimmed along above the waves, watchful of silver shadows just below the surface. My long, toothless beak dipped in suddenly and scooped up a thrashing fish which went down my gullet whole.

Then my host climbed, still the only creature in the sky. The sun was starting to slide below the horizon. I could not escape the feeling that this might indeed be the last evening of all, that I had happened upon the very last of the dragons. I had come to the Mesozoic Era many times before, I had been Gorgosaurus and Plateosaurus, I knew my way around in the Age of Dinosaurs. But something was different now. The land, sea and sky looked as they had always looked on my previous visits to Late Cretaceous times, my host flew on as though nothing were strange, but I knew, I knew, that aerial reconnaissance of the land to the east would reveal it to be empty of giants. There was only my host, gliding silently toward what I had, in a poem, termed "the moment of extinction." It seemed an invasion of privacy to remain and witness this final pterodactyl's fall, so I pulled away and got on with my typing.