The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold Page A

to, it won’t happen.”
    â€œSo it’s really me who’s doing the seducing, isn’t it?”
    Don grinned. He rolled over on his back and spread his arms in invitation. “I’m ready.”
    So was I. I moved into them and kissed him.
    And wondered why previous versions of myself had been so afraid.
    I wanted to do it. Wasn’t that reason enough?

    Evolution, of course.
    I had provided a hostile environment for those of me with doubts about their sexuality. They had excised themselves out of existence.
    Leaving only me. With no doubts at all.
    Survival of the fittest?
    More likely, survival of the horniest.
    I know who I am. I know what I want.
    And I’m very happy.
    If I’m not, I know what I can do about it.

    As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d go away!
    â€”HUGHES MEARNS
The Psychoed

    â€”only, the little man was me.
    I keep running into versions of myself who have come back from the future to tell me to be sure to do something or not to do something. Like, do not fly American Airlines Flight 191 from O’Hare to LAX on such and such a date. (It’s a DC-10 and the engine falls off.) Or, do not go faster than seventy miles per hour on the freeway today. (The highway patrol is having radar checks.) Things like that.
    I used to wonder about all those other Dans and Dons—even though I knew they weren’t, it still seemed like they were eliminating themselves. They’re not, but it seems that way.
    What it is, of course, is that I am the cumulative effect of all their changes. I—that is, my consciousness—have never gone back to excise anything. At least I have no memory of ever having done so.
    If they didn’t exist to warn me, then I wouldn’t have been warned and I would have made the mistake they would have warned me against, realized it was a mistake and gone back to warn myself. Hence, I am the result of an inevitable sequence of variables and choices.
    But that precludes the concept of free will. And everything I do proves again that I have the ultimate free will—I don’t have to be responsible for any of my actions because I can erase them any time. But does the erasure of certain choices always lead to a particular one, or is it just that that particular one is the one most suitable for this version of me? Is it my destiny to be homosexual and some other Danny’s destiny to not be . . . ?
    The real test of it, I guess, would be to try and excise some little incident and see what happens—see what happens to me. If it turns out I can remember excising it, then that would prove that I have free will.
    If not—if I find I’ve talked myself out of something else—then I’m running along a rut, like a clockwork mechanism, doomed to play out my programmed actions for some unseen cosmic audience, all the time believing that I have some control over those actions.
    The test—

    â€”was simple. And I passed it.
    I simply went back to May 21, 2005, and talked myself out of going to the races. (“Here’s today’s paper,” I said. “Go to the races yesterday.” Danny was startled, of course, and he must have thought me a little crazy, but he agreed not to go to the races on May 21.)
    So. I had excised my first trip to the track. In this world I hadn’t made it at all.
    Just to double-check, I drove out to the race track. Right. I wasn’t there. (An interesting thing happened though. In the fourth race, Harass didn’t bump Tumbleweed and wasn’t disqualified. If I had been there to bet, I would have lost everything—or would I? The Don I might have been might have foreseen that too. But why had that part of the past been changed? What had happened? Something I must have done on one of my other trips must have affected the race.)
    But I’d proved it to my own satisfaction. I had