From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) re: PEACE EZ Timeline
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 14:04:09 

Michael Andre-Driussi wrote:
> 
> To show my enthusiasm for Roy's timeline: we had long suspected that the
> Dr. V astral visit was a mix of at least two realtime visits (which seemed
> the case when the nurse comes in and tells Den he ought to be
> undressed--this seems like a "bad splice"); if this is true, then I found a
> nearly invisible seam of splicing when Den first goes in, before he sees
> the doctor.
> 
> 1) Fat new president Den (rich man at 50) enters waiting room, sees
> Margaret Lorn (uh, that's Mrs. Price to you, bub <g>), Sherry Gold, Ted
> Singer (odd, but we have some stuff on him), and Abel Green (huh?).
> 
> 2) Margaret is reading "Life" magazine, but then she puts it down and goes
> in to see the doctor, never seen in a later timeframe. (This putting down
> of "Life" and exiting, added to the damp impressions left by her hands,
> make me suspect that she is terminally ill and will die before Den's next
> yearly physical.  IF that is true, then Den will retreat from the scene to
> avoid the pain . . . )
> 
> 3) Nurse calls for Mrs. Price, and "Sherry, who is sixteen now" tells her
> that Margaret already went in.  SPLICE!  (See, the discontinuity of the
> nurse's behavior is the first hint, but Sherry is sixteen =now=, [she was
> in her twenties, say, a sentence before] that's the smoking gun.)
> 
> 4) Doctor examines underweight (i.e., poor man at 40) Den.
> 
> This, then, is a way Den can go into the doctor's office in the 60s but
> actually only see the doctor in the 50s!

I think we'd need at least one more splice, maybe two.  On the page
after Weer is underweight, we have this dialogue:

   "There's not a man in my plant I'd talk to the way you talk to every
patient you've got."
   "But I can't fire my patients, Mr. Weer."

The clear implication is that Weer is president at this point; at any
rate, he's not the poor 40-year-old.  Then a couple pages later we have
the dialogue putting Weer's age as in the early 40s.  I don't know if we
can push Weer's presidency back that far; if not, another splice.

While looking this up, I noticed another sentence: "There is (as a
matter of fact) a whole pile of _Lifes_ before me, and I play the old
game of trying to arrange them chronologically without looking at the
dates, and lose." (3)  If that isn't Wolfe going nyah-nyah-nyah to his
readers, I don't know what is.  (And I won't even go into the
implications of reincarnation in the first half of the sentence!)

--Adam

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