L. Sprague de Camp

Wah lenksh? Inksh lenksh, coss. Wah you speak? Said, sah-y, daw geh-ih. Daw, neitha. You fresh? Jumm?

Padway feared a mob of religious enthusiasts more than anything on earth, no doubt because their mental processes were so utterly alien to his own.

The problem of backward-jumping has not hitherto been solved. It involves an obvious paradox. If I go back and slay my own grandfather, what becomes of me?

A curious feature of time travel back from the present is that one gets younger and younger, becoming successively a youth, a child, an embryo and finally nothing at all.

Oh, I’m no four-dimensional thinker; but, as I understand it, if people could go back to a more recent time, their actions would affect our own history, which would be a paradox or contradiction of facts. Can’t have that in a well-run universe, you know.

Like his colleagues, Aristotle never appreciated the need for constant verification. Thus, though he was married twice, he said that men have more teeth than women. He never thought to ask either of his wives to open her mouth for a count.

I didn’t say that we could or should go back to pre-industrial technology. The changes since then were inevitable and irreversible. I only said. . .

The scientists had been arguing for half a century over the nature of the K-T Event. Some said a comet or a planetoid hit the Earth; others, that one or more of those big super-volcanoes, like the one that mad your Yellowstone Park, cut loose with an eruption that blanketed the Earth with ash and smoke.

One day this bloke Standish came in with his friend Hofmann, saying they wanted a time safari to cave-man days, to shoot dinosaurs the way our ancestors used to do.

Imagine a newt or salamander expanded to crocodile size, with a huge head for catching smaller fry, and you’ll have the idea. Might call it a crocamander, eh?

It will demonstrate that all these prehistoric beasts, whereof your clients bring home heads, hides, and photographs, did not live in succession, but all at the same time.

But the beasts my clients hunt on these time safaris are all long extinct anyway. Ending the safaris wouldn’t bring any dinosaurs or mastodons back to life.