Billy recovers from the plane crash in a hospital in Vermont. As Valencia drives to meet him, her anxieties lead to a car accident. The accident breaks the muffler on her car, but she ignores the issue and keeps driving to Canada. Valencia arrives at the hospital, switches off the ignition to the car, and is then knocked unconscious by carbon monoxide poisoning. She dies an hour later in her car. Billy is unaware of her death because he is also unconscious.

A retired military man named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord shares the hospital room with Billy. Rumfoord is now a military historian at Harvard University. He is 70-years-old and married to his fifth wife, Lily, who is 23. Rumfoord is working on a book about World War II, and Lily brings him research which includes a book about Dresden. The forewords in the book concede that the bombing was a tragic event but refuse to state that the people who ordered the bombing were evil. The writers suggest that the Dresden firebombing was just a natural, terrible part of war.

Billy jumps through time. First, he goes to his office in 1958 and examines a patient. Then he travels to a day when he was 16 and waiting to see a doctor for an infection in his thumb.