Divorced, workaholic professor Harvey DeLeo’s time machine is finally ready to test on a human, and against everyone’s advice he himself takes that first journey back to a time when he was still married to his beautiful wife and their son was but a toddler.
This day, the next hour, were the reasons he had built the device. Not so that graduate students in religion could travel back to Christ’s cruxifixion to see if it really happened as the Bible said. Not so that historians could add to their dissertations by actually speaking to Thomas Jefferson. Not so that techs could fruitlessly try to modify the device so that someone could finally shoot Hitler.

Variants

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  1. “The First Step” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2015.
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch