Damon Knight

The mathematicians are still working on that, Your Honor, and the best they can say now is that it was probably somewhere between the mid-Twentieth Century and the last Twenty-First. However there is a strong possibility that none of the material reached any enclosed space which would attract it, and that it may all have been dissipated harmlessly in the form of incongruent molecules.

“By God and all the saints,” he said. “Time travel.”

Harold snorted impatiently. “My dear Peter, ‘time’ is a meaningless word taken by itself, just as ‘space’ is.”

“But barring that, time travel.”

“If you like, yes.”

Cowardice again—that man did not want to argue about the boundaries with his neighbor’s muscular cousin. Another lucky accident, and there you are. Geometry.

There was a time slip in Southern California at about one in the afternoon. Mr. Gordon Fish thought it was an earthquake.

I’m a little tensed up, I guess, but I can do it. I wasn’t really scared; it was the way it happened, so sudden. They never gave me a chance to get ready.

He found a secondhand copy of J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time and lost sleep for a week. He copied off the charts from it, Scotch-taped them to his wall; he wrote down his startling dreams every morning as soon as he awoke. There was a time outside time, Dunne said, in which to measure time; and a time outside that, in which to measure the time that measured time, and a time outside that.. . . Why not?

Let us say there was a need to be inconspicuous. This is a dead period, for hundreds of years on either side. No one knows about this abandoned liner except us, and no one would think of looking here.

Therefore, he was not surprised to see himself emerge from the chamber, wearing this very suit, a moment after he had formed the decision.