"The whole doppelganger thing," Jim acknowledges: it's clearly not a guess. He takes a long drink from the bottle and sighs in satisfaction at the burn. It cuts nicely through the haze of exhaustion that had settled over him, and helps him think a bit better for a moment. Clocking Alan's age was child's play, but figuring the rest out was more a shot in the dark, drawing inferences from what he had already heard and read.

"If most of the memories are his, you must not have been ... yourself for very long at all, giving yourself those kind of odds. Man in his late thirties, early forties ... and you only you for ... what, a year at best? Maybe two?"