Detectives -- Fiction; Inventors -- Fiction; Private investigators -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction
What's that? His name's Haney, just like Angus Haney? That figures,
I guess. George Haney. Well, truck him in for crying out loud. He'll
confirm everything I say--
Here he is now. "Well, Jack am I glad to see you! They think I'm crazy.
They're trying to tell me there's no such thing as time travel, but I
ought to know. I come from the past. And you ought to know, because you
went back there to destroy Angus Haney's prototype of a time machine so
you wouldn't build one yourself, based on it, and be trapped back in my
century. Right? Incidentally, Jack, you can forget all about the ten
grand, just as long as you get me out of here and convince them I'm not
crazy."
He stares at me. He's Great-great, all right. He frowns and says, "I
could not possibly be interested. I never saw you before in my life.
And obviously, there is no such thing as time travel." He shakes his
head sadly and starts to leave.
"Wait!" I cry. "You don't understand. I understand now. Of course you
wouldn't know. You wouldn't remember. Because if you destroyed Angus
Haney's time machine there wouldn't be any such thing as time travel
and you wouldn't have built your own machine. So you forgot. The
episode sort of never existed for you."
"I'm terribly sorry I can't help you, fellow." A genuine look of
sympathy in his eyes.
"There's no such thing as time travel. For everybody but me. I'm the
one guy who proved time travel was possible--before the first and only
time machine was destroyed."
He leaves. The head medics confer. I know what they're saying. I'm
nuts. Time travel is impossible so I must be nuts.
But we know better, don't we?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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