"The re-reversal!" His blue eyes were a little self conscious as they looked at me now. "Don, I was born Mark Storm. This explosion today reversed my time direction and I became Summer Storm, to give birth to myself nine years ago. And in a terrific burst of natural energy that you yourself saw, a crucible so fiery that it could wrench the very inner fabric and physical form of the body, the time flow for me was twisted back to its proper direction that night in the park and I became myself—to father myself six years later!
"I was my mother. I am my own father and my own son!"
There it is. Wyn believes he sprang from nothingness, from himself. Amid the wreckage of the laws of cause and effect that this whole thing involves, it's possible, I suppose. But a couple of details still bother me, details I haven't mentioned to Wyn.
Oh, it isn't the coincidences. If the future is fixed as is the past, they wouldn't necessarily be coincidences: things like Summer—in the reversed time in which she lived—stripping off her clothes, donning Gus Adams' raincoat over her nakedness and going with us out to the park, to that rendezvous with the lightning and Wyn.
One of the details I can't take is that it's hard to believe that, even in such strange twistings and turnings of time, any creature can initiate itself and, in effect, spring from nothing—though Wyn says it's done at the sub-atomic level in simple terms of conversion of energy to matter. But how about the fact that such a complicated creature as man is built by the action of the genes and chromosomes?
The other is that year that I was Summer's lover. If she was living backward biologically, wouldn't that apply, too, to the growth of an unborn child while it was still part of her. And Wyn left Allertown right after Mark's birth.
I've heard of virgin mothers. I'd rather believe in a "virgin father" than human creation from nothingness.
I once had hair, and it was blond. My eyes are blue. I look in the mirror, and then I look at Wyn lounging at ease behind his newspaper.
My son? My motherless son?