Chapters 3-6 Summary

Chapter 3 begins with the protagonist thinking about his father reading a storybook to him when he was three, and how sitting on the bed with him, next to a lampshade pattern of robots and spaceships, felt like being in a spaceship. He explains that his job is to help people who have rented time machines to get out of wherever they have gone in time, hoping to change the past. What customers want, he says, is to repeatedly experience the worst moments of their lives repeatedly. He says his father built one of the first time machine prototypes, which preoccupied him for much of his life, and then he disappeared, years ago. The narrator has been looking for his father for some time. He advises that if a person ever sees himself emerging from a time machine, he should run from...