The Futile Flight of John Arthur Benn
By EDWARD HALIBUT
He forgot the most important rule
of time-travel: don't fall asleep!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity Science Fiction, February 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
By putting himself into reverse, the doom-intended man left the twentieth century far ahead. Nineteen fifty-six was a good year to get out of. John Arthur Benn watched the roaring twenties go by, and the gay nineties, backwards, and wondered how it would be to pilot a riverboat on the Mississippi, or to fight under John Paul Jones.
Before he was really aware of it, he was for a speeding second a contemporary of another John—Smith—and thought about the life of the Redman before the colonists began changing things around. By that time the scenery had begun to get monotonous—just shrinking trees—and John Arthur Benn swung over into lateral. Ah, England.
There went another namesake—Ben Jonson—and in a very little while he considered slowing down to meet still another. But King Arthur flashed past and into a womb in West Wales just as John was convulsed by a sneeze (it was quite drafty and he should have dressed more warmly), and as he stuffed his handkerchief back in his pocket he caught just a tantalizing glimpse of an interesting Druid ceremony.