Short Story
Tenth Time Around
- by J. T. McIntosh
- Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1959
Gene Player seems destined to always lose his love Belinda to his friend Harry Scott, but maybe, just maybe, he’ll get it right on the tenth time around as he’s once again sent back to his 1975 body in this branching universe time travel story. But what if in the new 1975, he meets young Doreen for the first time, not to mention those other small things that go differently?
It was a big decision, the first time. If you were at all successful in life at forty, fifty, sixth, the glorious thought of being young again, strong, healthy and probably in love, was considerably tempered by the consideration that you’d be pushed around again, that you’d have to get up at seven and work hard all day for less than a tenth of what you made now, that you’d have to go through this or that operation again, that you’d have to see your father and mother die again . . .
