"Perhaps the craziest of these time travel paradoxesof the second type was cooked up by Robert Heinlein in his classic short story "All You Zombies"----
A baby girl is mysteriously dropped off at an orphanage in 1945. "Jane" grows up lonely and dejected, not knowing who her parents are, until one day in 1963 she is strangely attracted to a drifter. She falls in love with him. But just when things are finally looking up for Jane, a series of disasters strike. First, she becomes pregnant by the drifter, who then disappears. Second, during the complicated delivery, doctors find that Jane has both sets of sex organs, and to save her life they are forced to surgically convert "her" to a "him". Finally, a mysterious stranger kidnaps the baby from the delivery room.
Reeling from these disasters, rejected by society, scorned by fate, "he" becomes a drunkard and a drifter. Not only has Jane lost her parents and her lover, but he has lost his only child as well. YEars later, in 1970, he stumbles into a lonely bar, called Pop's Place, and spills out his pathetic story to an elderly bartender. The sympathetic bartender offers the drifter the chance to avenge the stranger who left her pregnant and abandoned, on the condition that he join the "Time Traveler Corps". Both of them enter a time machine, and the bartenderdrops off the drifter in 1963. The drifter is strangely attracted to a young orphan woman, who subsequently becomes pregnant.
The bartender then goes forward nine months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops the baby off at an orphanage in 1945. Then the bartender drops off the thouroughly confused drifter in 1985, to enlist in the Time Traveler Corps. The drifter eventually gets his life together, becomes a respected and elderly member of the time traveler corps, and then disguises himself as abartender and has his most difficult mission: a date with destiny, meeting a certain drifter at Pop's Place in 1970."
Who is Jane's mother, father, grandfather, grandmother, son, daughter, granddaughter, grandson?
--From "Hyperspace" byMichio Kaku
