The Man Who Floated in Time

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There was something shady and sly about him. For one thing he was small and slightly built, and I have an instinctive mistrust of men who stand less than five feet five: they seem too agile and unpredictable, shifty little Napoleons who are apt to come at you from three directions at once. Then, too, his narrow glittery gray eyes, though they did actually make contact with mine, never seemed to be aimed directly at me but rather, somehow, sent a beam of vision hooking around a sharply banked curve even when his face looked at me right square on. I didn’t like that. He was about sixty, sixty-five, lean and trim, not well dressed, his gray hair cropped very short and gone at the crown.

“What I do,” he said, “is travel in time. I float freely back to other eras.”

“Really,” I said. “Never forward?”

“Oh, no, never. That’s quite impossible. The future doesn’t exist. The past is there, solid and real, a place, you know, like Des Moines or Wichita. One can go to Wichita if one makes the proper connection. But one can’t go to a city that’s never been built. It isn’t conceivable. Well, perhaps it’s conceivable, but it isn’t doable, do you follow me? I go to the past, though. I’ve seen Attila the Hun. I’ve seen Julius Caesar. I wish I could say I went to bed with Catherine the Great, but I didn’t, although I had a few vodkas with someone who did. She smelled of garlic, he said, and she took forever to come. You don’t believe any of what I’m saying, do you?”

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