“There but for the grace of God go I”, I thought as I watched Gina’s diapers being changed by Pauline. The idea occurred to me this afternoon that matter transmitters could really be considered a form of dimensional travel. What if instead of traveling to another position in the same universe, the transmission was being made to another parallel universe that was so similar, so congruent, that they had matter transmitters and were making the same journey. Maybe we weren’t spanning our space-time continuum at all! Maybe we were taking a shortcut into another universe just like our own. If so, how could we tell? What if the data corruption didn’t occur on our side at all? What if the corruption occurred on the other side? I hadn’t been able to explain why the unit had self-destructed. What if the two units had locked onto each other and gotten into a feedback loop? If that was true, were we really building up matter from elementary particles? If we were, were we limited to merely transmitting matter rather than transmuting it into other forms? Gina’s condition suggested we could make any changes in a body that we wanted. We could make someone tall or short as we pleased. If someone was ill all we had to do what transport them to a receiver and edit the illness out at the other end. We could even defeat that most relentless of predators, time. We could make someone as old or young as we liked. If I accepted the theory that there was an infinity of universes, then anything could happen. From that viewpoint, I decided that everything must happen at least once. How big a role did chance play? What if something had broken down and there had been a delay? Would Gina have been okay? What if I had started testing on another day, would that have made a difference? Would there have been a victim? Or would my machine have claimed someone else’s maturity? Had I been rejuvenated in some far off universe instead of Gina? Or was that universe here and now, closer to me than an electron’s diameter, just waiting for me to pass through and become one with that universe’s reality. I looked at Gina again and thought about what it would be like to be Pauline’s baby. Would she love me? I was sure she would. I asked myself whether I would like to be Pauline’s baby and found myself shivering in anticipation. The thought produced a sensation of longing, of an unfulfilled need in me. That was silly I decided. I was a man and real men don’t want to be babies. “No”, I chuckled to myself, “it could never happen. Not even in an infinity of universes. The grace of God has nothing to do with it. I’m simply too much of a man for it to happen to me.”

I glanced at Gina sucking on her nipple contentedly and felt a silly urge to suck my thumb. Suddenly I felt an urgent need to go to the bathroom. As I hastily got up and went into our bedroom to go to the master bathroom, I saw my reflection in the dressing mirror on the wall. I saw to my horror that there was a large dark damp spot on the front of my trousers. I had peed in my pants! I ran to the bathroom in a race against time as I felt my bowels rumble threateningly in my gut. I flew through the door and was unbuckling my trousers as they let go and filled my underwear with a soft sticky substance. I moaned as my bladder released and added to the mess, “Noooo. The doctor cured me. This can’t be happening. I don’t want to be a baby again!”

My pants slipped from my hands as I sank to my knees in defeat. The puddle of urine seeped into the knees of my trousers coldly as I whimpered in failure. Memories that had been buried for a year by hypnotic drugs and shock treatments came flooding into my consciousness. There was an eighty percent chance that the treatment would have been permanent. Evidently I was part of the minority in which the effects were only temporary. I wanted to curl up in shame and hide from the world. My life was over, I’d never be a man again. My head jerked back in fear as I heard a voice say to me, “It’s happened again. Hasn’t it, Honey? After all we’ve been through. I’m not going to coddle you and try to potty train you again. If that’s the way you want to live your life, then I’ll treat you the way you deserve. Let me get Gina tucked into her crib and then I‘ll come back and clean you up. Don’t move, I’ll be back in a minute.”