Rolf sat at his desk reading the reports that the computers had generated as a result of Emily’s birth. He had no way of knowing exactly what was happening within the jump, it wasn’t like he had a window into their activities. But Rolf was quite the brilliant man, and he was able to deduce that the monumental changes to their timeline could only amount to a couple things. Someone was born or someone died. He guessed it was the former, but it could have easily been the latter. All the indications of major changes had shown up in the numbers and the graph lines, but this one was obvious to the naked eye without any number crunching. This was the addition or the loss of at least one person, and it was a serious problem. The impact these big changes were having were not on their future but on the stability of slipstream. It meant that they were jumping all kinds of places they shouldn’t be going, namely unshared time. It was hard enough to control shared time, but to go somewhere they had no frame of reference for meant they were carving out whole new journeys that time didn’t know what to do with, which caused formulas to error out, and that meant more instability in each subsequent jump. Whatever these two did in Cleveland was bad enough, but then they just kept on making changes, and the instability of the framework supporting their timeline increased exponentially. And now this latest one really did a number on the timeline: It was no longer in any way predictable. This current jump’s end point had moved more than once, which meant that Rolf had to re-plot his own planned jump to try to warn them every time that happened. He hoped this latest end point shift would stay static long enough for him to finalize his formula so he could get himself there and pull himself back before he’d have to do this all over again, again. Because if this went on much longer, he was never going to be able to pull them back to their own time.