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| | “Of Time and Eustace Weaver”
aka “The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver” by Fredric Brown First publication: Ellery Queen’ Mystery Magazine, Jun 1961
When the eponymous hero invents a time machine, he’s quite happy to embark on a career of larceny, gambling, and playing the market to make his riches, knowing that if things go awry, he can always return to the start.
When the story was reprinted in Nightmares and Geezenstacks it was presented as three separate vignettes (’The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver, Parts I, II and III), but the original EQMM publication had just one entry (Of Time and Eustace Weaver) in its table of contents. He could become the richest man in the world, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. All he had to do was to take short trips into the future to learn what stocks had gone up and which horses had won races, then come back to the present and buy those stocks or bet on those horses. | |
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| | | | | | “The Zookeeper”
by Otis Kidwell Burger First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jul 1961
Some 18,000 centuries in the future, one remaining being from the past looks after the animals and artifacts in the zoo where They keep Their collectables including Ruth, a reflective and naive woman of the long-lost past. Having conquered Time and Space, They have now returned to them, as children do to long-forgotten toys. The collectors of string, match-boxes, old bottle-caps, have finally inherited the earth, and the City, built in the first star-reaching flush of power, has now become a dusty antique shop stuffed with every period Man ever knew. People in queer costumes parade the streets; the Old Vehicles Club has outings along SP@ Ave. (and only They, who can control time and motion, could keep Anglo-Saxon carts and Hexabiles from the 4th archy going at the same pace.) | |
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No Time Travel. Move along. | “Random Quest” by John Wyndham, Consider Her Ways and Others, 1961 [parallel universes ]
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