> There was also a very intriguing time travel story in one of those books by Frederick Pohl. (Or it may have been Poul Anderson). The inventor created a time machine that could only travel *forward* in time, [...] In the end, he found out that time is cyclical as he went beyond the death of the universe and then witnessed the birth of a "new" one, only to keep going and discover that he had started over and the "new" universe was identical to his old one. So he made it home after all, in a roundabout fashion.
>
> Gri"It doesn't actually work that way, but it's an interesting idea"shny

(-: I think you're right on both counts. That sounds similar to an Anderson novella called "Tau Zero", and Pohl wrote a series about some aliens called the Heechee, who stepped outside of Time briefly in order to re-explode the monoblock (i.e., redo the Big Bang event), and recreate for themselves the Universe in physics constants more hospitable to life... However, the process unexpectedly evolved humans along the way.

Oh well. Heh. When writing epic science fiction of inconceivable proportions, you might as well Think BIG like that I say :-)

Wolf "or you can just tour the universe while inside a giant space bug" spirit