"Well, look! Look at that!"

She thrust the paper into his hands, still folded, the big, black
headline where he could see it.

KHALID IB'N HUSSEIN ASSASSINATED

He glanced over the leading paragraphs. Leader of Islamic Caliphate
shot to death in Basra ... leaving Parliament Building for his palace
outside the city ... fanatic, identified as an Egyptian named Mohammed
Noureed ... old American submachine-gun ... two guards killed and a
third seriously wounded ... seized by infuriated mob and stoned to
death on the spot....

For a moment, he felt guilt, until he realized that nothing he could
have done could have altered the event. The death of Khalid ib'n
Hussein, and all the millions of other deaths that would follow it,
were fixed in the matrix of the space-time continuum. Including,
maybe, the death of an obscure professor of Modern History named
Edward Chalmers.

"At least, this'll be the end of that silly flap about what happened a
month ago in Modern Four. This is modern history, now; I can talk
about it without a lot of fools yelling their heads off."

She was staring at him wide-eyed. No doubt horrified at his
cold-blooded attitude toward what was really a shocking and senseless
crime.

"Yes, of course; the man's dead. So's Julius Caesar, but we've gotten