Engineers -- Fiction; Kidnapping -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Spouses -- Fiction; Time travel -- Fiction
The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and
got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.
The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. "Come out, what are you
advertising?" they kept asking. "Who got you up to this?"
The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his
wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a "Work License," which
Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave
doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.
In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night.
Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned
and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down
in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he
hesitated.
In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately
he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the
big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow
brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.
IV
He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a
little man with a briefcase at his cell door.
"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott," the man said coolly. "I am one of Mr. Bullen's
barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release,
if you are ready to be reasonable."
Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. "I doubt if I'm
ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?"
"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man
claiming to be a time traveler, we knew."
"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen
isn't getting me out of here."
The lawyer smiled and sat down. "Mr. Kersey told you yesterday--you've
gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to
understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie
film. A film never changes. Space does--and time does. For example, if
a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to
find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?"
"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil
War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?"
"If you go back to the time you call 1865--which is most easily
done--you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or
that war."
Jeff looked blank. "What are they doing then?"
The little man spread his hands. "What are the people doing now at
Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day
of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you
grasp the difference between the two?"
"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you
speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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