I had a sneaking suspicion that the vampires were just using me as bait.   What did they have against NASA anyway?  Admittedly, children might not always tend to plan things very well, but at least now I was able to remember the other timelines, and that was a tremendous advantage.  I had to make a move sooner or later.  But I couldn't fight for either side of the war, they were both monsters in one way or another.

    There were four and a half billion people in the world in 1982, and if I didn't do the right thing, whatever that may be, then we were all going to die.  I had no idea how many people there were in the breakaway civilization up in space, but I was convinced that number was growing by the day.  And if the vampires were desperate enough then there was no telling what they could do when push came to shove.

    I had a feeling that the vampire’s time travel technology was capable of doing a lot of things that I hadn't even imagined yet.  But then again, there was no telling what the breakaways had learned in space.  If they truly had found aliens from other worlds then they may have acquired unimaginably powerful alliances and technologies, things that could make time travel look like child’s play.  But the vampires could presumably take all the time they needed to accomplish or undo practically anything.

    What I didn't understand however was why hadn't the vampires simply invested some time to develop their own space travel?  And if the breakaways were so smart then why weren't they the ones who developed time travel?  And then it hit me, something I hadn't understood before that point, the consequences of time travel can come at you from both the past and the future.  The vampires and the breakaway civilization were the exact same group, just different sides of the same coin.

    Eventually, long after destroying life on Earth, the breakaways would fulfill the scientific prophecy of time travel, then they would go back to a time to long before the destruction of life on Earth and enslave all of humanity, thus eventually causing the need to escape from the Earth with the breakaway movement.  The clash was coming from a disconnect of about ten thousand years between the modern breakaway civilization and the ancient order which they will have established long ago.  Apparently it was causality itself which wouldn't allow either side to dominate or destroy the other.  They had become locked in an endless paradox that they could never finish, like a snake trying to eat its own tail.  The vampires and the breakaway civilization must have reached a standoff in the war over time and space.

    I wondered how it all began.  What came first, the chicken or the egg?  I tried to not even think about how it would end.  Instead I tried to figure out my place in this mess.  And then I realized, that's how it would end, I was like the breakaway civilization's version of Typhoid Marry.  Somehow the breakaways had wound me up like a little toy robot and set me loose upon the world.  Every time I traveled through time the germs in my body went with me, over and over again, until eventually the plague evolving inside of me would be strong enough to wipe out all life on Earth. 

    But how exactly could I stop time traveling when every time I had died before I always ended up reliving my past again?  It seemed like an impossible situation.  But then I thought, what's going to happen when I do eventually die this time?  Will I go back just to die again from the plague?  And then what?  How does an infinite loop actually come to an end?  I was beginning to wonder if I had been a member of the breakaway civilization in another timeline, and actually volunteered for this mission.  But why would I do that?  It didn't make any sense.  It seemed more likely that someone else had volunteered me for the job.

    This time the realization hit me like a brick, I needed to find another time traveler and send a weak sample the germs back with them to a time before I was born, so that they could develop an immunity to the plague, just like how I had become immune to the vampire contagion from a weakened blood sample in that other timeline.  But where on Earth was I ever going to find another time traveler in the 1980's?

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