We can drop you anywhere in the continuum.
But a time machine is impossible. It is a paradox. Your professors will explain that a
time machine cannot be, because it would mean that two things could occupy the same space
at the same time. And a man could go back and kill himself when he was younger, and—oh,
all sorts of stuff like that. It’s completely impossible. Only a crazy man could—
In ten years, traveling forward in space and backward in time, the fleet would have
traversed just that distance—186,334186,334 miles.
They didn’t use that style of furniture in Los Angeles—or anywhere else that you know
of—in 1954. That thing over there in the corner—you can’t even guess what it is. So
might your grandfather, at your age, have looked at a television.
I haven’t found anything earlier that brings up this question, but although the resolution was clever, it didn’t satisfy me, and (though I could be wrong) I think Brown misses the fact that at one point there should be two copies of the object in existence at the same time. In any case, this was the first part of a pair of short-short stories in the Feb ’54 Galaxy, which together were called Two-Timer (the second of which had no time travel).
What if, now that it has already appeared five minutes before you place it there, you
should change your mind about doing so and not place it there at three o’clock?
Wouldn’t there be a paradox of some sort involved?
I, a member of the dominant race, was once what you called. . .
The story was reprinted in the 1958 collection, Honeymoon in Hell, which features a cover by Hieronymus Bosch (indexer Grzegorz’s favorite painter) with an owl in the background (Grzegorz’s favorite bird)!
What would have happened if you’d rushed to the door and kicked yourself in the seat of
the pants?
. . . run backward run. . .
When the story was reprinted in Nightmares and Geezenstacks it was presented as three separate vignettes (“The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver,” Parts I to III), but the original EQMM publication had just one entry (Of Time and Eustace Weaver) in its table of contents.
He could become the richest man in the world, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. All
he had to do was to take short trips into the future to learn what stocks had gone up and
which horses had won races, then come back to the present and buy those stocks or bet on
those horses.