The rickety home built time ship came to rest on a grass field of enormous size. There were scores of other time ships scattered across the grass. As I sat there looking at the expanse I heard a rap on the door and turned to open it and find myself faced with a grinning young woman.
"Welcome to Elysium," she said.
I was bewildered. I had set my time coordinates most carefully to carry me to the moment in time when Jesus was crucified and not to some athletic field of some time inhabited by busty maidens of time referee.
"Where is Gethsemane?" I demanded.
She smiled a smile like that painting by Leonardo in the Louvre and wasn't I just going to check out that next on my plan to survey the complete history of time using my new time machine.
"There is always a backup at the hill and so many time travelers have taken positions to view the past all the way up to 52,000,000 AD that there simply is no referent point that the scene can be witnessed from without imposition of time travel fields and that is simply unacceptable. We are here to keep the late comers from ruining the party. You will not be able to see the crucifiction. We're sorry about that."
I was stunned and determined. I would see it live if it was the last thing I did.
She was suddenly in my face. "I can see the little wheels going around in your head," she said. "You will simply go to an earlier frame of reference and bypass this little inconvenience."
She was right. I was going to do just that as soon as I kicked her out.
"You idiot," she exclaimed, "You think you'll just get there a few days early and set up a camp and wait until the moment and you don't understand, you poor benighted idiot, that people just like you showed up for millenia and decided to do the same thing. For over a thousand years that place has been crawling with idiot time travelers determined to see the moment even if it meant staying there forever. The place is not just crawling with time travelers and their descendants, it is populated by only time travelers and their descendants."
posted to the hazards of time travel.
5 comments:
And that sorta proves that time travel hasn't ever been invented.
A thought provoking post, well done and thank you.
difficult to get past the logic of the story line(no pun intended,but not a bad pun). long ago read a time travel story about a guy wanting to visit the scene at JFKs murder. ran into the same problem. the killing theory about traveling back in time is the desire to change things that must not be changed and the catastrophic results of actually making the change. for me, the real question is: can the past be changed. answering that one question answers so many other questions.
Hmmm..."crucifiction". Freudian slip or a signal of an interesting side plot?
Calvary truthers? Interesting possibilities there.
--Tennessee Budd
It twas nought but a bit of fun that slipped out of the pencil as I was writing. I wondered at crucifiction but thought people would like it so I left it as it lay, bleeding and sorta dead looking in the prose.
I rather like it, all in all. I think it did happen, but who today knows the truth of it?
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