As there have been countless reports and live broadcasts about time-bike racing, I suspect that quite a lot is known about it, so I won’t dwell on it. Sometimes I barely managed to stay in the time I wanted for a few seconds, because like a bungee jumping rope stretched really tight, time was pulling me back to where I belonged. When I took part in my first time-bike race, I placed a modest thirteenth. It wasn’t until the terms of the trip were explained to me that I realized that the Institute must have tried and failed, and now they were pinning all their hopes on me. In the end, it turned out that they were right, but it was a long time before I found that out and I wasn’t too worried about the future, because I had just discovered a new game. The second hypothesis was called panspermia and did nothing more than throw the dead cat in the neighbor’s yard, because it still didn’t explain how life arose from inorganic substances, but just moved the problem to other planets, where it would be brought from by meteors.
