Home. I lighted the living room from the door, looked around for intruders for the first time I could remember, and went inside.

I threw myself on the couch and rubbed my stomach. I wasn't hurt badly. My middle was going to be sorer in the morning than it was now.

Lighting up a cigarette, I watched the shapes of smoke and tried to think.

I looked at it objectively, forward and back.

The solution was obvious.

First of all, I positively could not have been an aviator in World War One. I was in my mid-twenties; anybody could tell that by looking at me. The time was the late 'Fifties; anybody could tell that from the blank-faced Motorola in the corner, the new Edsels on the street. Memories of air combat in Spads and Nieuports stirred in me by old magazines, Quentin Reynolds, and re-runs of Dawn Patrol on television were mere hallucinations.

Neither could I remember drinking bootleg hooch in speak-easies, hearing Floyd Gibbons announce the Dempsey-Tunney fight, or paying $3.80 to get into the first run of Gone with the Wind.

Only ... I probably had seen GWTW. Hadn't I gone with my mother to a matinee? Didn't she pay 90￠ for me? So how could I remember taking a girl, brunette, red sweater, Cathy, and paying $3.80 each? I couldn't. Different runs. That was it. The thing had been around half a dozen times. But would it have been $3.80 no more than ten y............