The Pimpernel Plot

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An End to War…

On April 1, 2425, Dr. Wolfgang Amadeus Mensinger, professor emeritus at Heinlein University on Dyson One, discovered time travel. Already hailed as the greatest scientist of his time for his formulation of the Unified Field Theory at the age of eighty-five, Mensinger had been in disfavor with the scientific community for thirty years as a result of steadfastly maintaining that time travel or, as he preferred to call it, temporal translocation, was theoretically possible. When he made the announcement on his one hundred and fifteenth birthday, he promptly became the darling of the media. Had anyone else come forth with such a theory, he would have been just another mild and amusing curiosity, but when the man who had relegated Einstein to the league of the also-rans made such a pronouncement, people listened.

Access to the media had never been a problem for Dr. Mensinger. He was a garrulous, highly articulate, and charming man with an empathy for the nonscientific mind, which resulted in his being able to explain complex ideas in a manner that the layman could easily understand. He also understood what, traditionally, most scientists did not, that scientific research was to a large degree a game of politics.

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