Joseph W. Skidmore

writer
Short Story

The Beetle in the Amber

Using hypnosis and a dark liquid, the mystic and scientist Oliver Kent sends the superconscious minds of his life-long friends Donald and Joane Cromwell back to the Pleistocene where they inhabit prehuman existences of themselves and discover the origin of Joane’s present-day unease. The Brontosaurus who makes an appearance is out of place in the Pleistocene, but never mind.

Joane Cromwell was the maiden name of Skidmore’s wife, and her name shows up as a character in several of Skidmore’s stories, although not as the same character. However, Oliver Kent does show up in a later story, “The First Flight,” where he once again sends a friend into a previous incarnation.
From the looks of the Brontosaurus . . . we are in the Pleistocene period.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The First Flight

Mystical Professor Oliver Kent, who first appeared in “The Beetle in the Amber,” is at it again. This time he gives pilot Donald Calvert a globule of concentrated liquid with the advice that drinking it may be a life-saver if he runs into inexplicable physiological changes during his high-speed round-the-world flight. Indeed, the changes happen, Donald swallows the globule, and he finds himself in the body of his prehistoric ancestor, Dowb, who undertakes a similarly difficult flight of his own on the back of a Pterodactyl.
It struck Dowb high in the thigh, hurling him skyward like a stone from a catapult. With an inherited instinct from ancestors who had clutched at tree-tops, Dowb sailed through the air, hands outstretched, claw-like, ready to grasp.

For a moment the slow brain of Dowb fancied he had been hurled into a tree, as his sinewy arms and legs grasped an obstruction that had brought him up abruptly in mid-flight. But the object moved and swooped crazily, and Dowb realized that he had grasped the neck of the beast directly below its repulsive head.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel