Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 46 — page 96: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

OUTSIDE—LOOKING IN time travel lark first starts, which makes me a what-d’ye- call-it? An anachronism. I’ve seen quite a few scien- tists and chronologists from up ahead, and not one of them has heard of the Doc’s experiments. One, the Ein- stein of his time, no doubt, put it down to the Final War, which, being due in the not too distant future, probably wiped out all records. They’ve never studied the Doc’s lab, because they’ve had no reason to. There was... eh? Oh, this Final War. No, I’m not telling you the date. You'll find out soon enough, when it comes. ~As I was saying, there was another reason why Einstein II came to see me, and it’s this. Until I bobbed up, every channeller had been carried back some hundred years or more from their starting point before they were dumped off the Field. As natural laws work the same this side as they do your side, they always die before they re-reach the time when they came in. So nobody knew what would happen to a living person who caught up with himself from inside. If you see what J mean. I, therefore, having but a ' few months to go, seem to be 95 the answer to the research worker’s prayer, and on The Night there will be a couple of “‘observers’”’ in the Doc’s lab with me, as the favourite theory seems to be that when I get level with my “wave- length” radiations again [| shall get pulled back inside. There was nobody—no other “me’’—in this place, before I came, but that’s quite in order apparently, as, accor- ding to this Einstein bloke— **,.. the past is generally more fluid than was once supposed. Small incidents can and do vary from time to time, but the general pattern of events © remains constant.” The idea being, as far as I can see, that as long as there is a “‘me’’ outside to carry on with the good work, it doesn’t matter which one it is. So if I get taken back in the place of the “‘me’’? which makes the trip, it may set up a sequence of events to be followed by all future ‘“‘me’s”’—at four monthly intervals. ‘““There’s a flaw there,” said I, in another of my lucid moments, “‘for there was no- body to take my place when I came through.” I thought that was unanswerable, but Tosh had one all ready for me. “Did you,” he asked me, “always wait at your Doctor’s comiclooks.corn