The Futile Flight of John Arthur Benn

By putting himself into reverse, the doom-intended man left thetwentieth century far ahead. Nineteen fifty-six was a good year toget out of. John Arthur Benn watched the roaring twenties go by, andthe gay nineties, backwards, and wondered how it would be to pilot ariverboat on the Mississippi, or to fight under John Paul Jones.

Before he was really aware of it, he was for a speeding second acontemporary of another John—Smith—and thought about the life of theRedman before the colonists began changing things around. By that timethe scenery had begun to get monotonous—just shrinking trees—and JohnArthur Benn swung over into lateral. Ah, England.

There went another namesake—Ben Jonson—and in a very little while heconsidered slowing down to meet still another. But King Arthur flashedpast and into a womb in West Wales just as John was convulsed by asneeze (it was quite drafty and he should have dressed more warmly),and as he stuffed his handkerchief back in his pocket he caught just atantalizing glimpse of an interesting Druid ceremony.

John Arthur Benn blacked out somewhere in the limbo of thepre-Christian era, as he'd been warned he might, and when he came tohe found himself lying in a rather uncomfortable heap with his headin a mushroom patch. The mushrooms and the trees around him weren'tshrinking any more, so John knew he'd stopped—or at least was goingvery slowly. After a while he decided he wasn't going at all, and gotto his feet.

It seemed very pleasant here, in the woods, so he found a fallen treeto sit on and took a wrapped sandwich and a small vacuum bottle ofcoffee out of his pocket. When he'd finished his meal he walked to astream nearby, rinsed the bottle, tossed the waxed paper onto the waterto be carried away and pocketed the vacuum bottle.

Now, he thought, what? This was scarcely dinosaur country. At thispoint a wild boar chased him up a tree. To be killed by a boar wouldbe ignominious, after all this, although the animal was well enoughtusked to have done the job, and so John Arthur Benn climbed to a highbranch, where the boar's persistence forced him to spend the night.He slept, somehow, and, with the closing of his conscious mind—theone that wanted to meet a dinosaur in fatal combat—the conventionalsubconscious, which also sought suicide, but in a more familiar way,shifted him out of reverse.

When he awoke, he was back in 1956, in Philadelphia. Irrevocably, JohnArthur Benn knew.

He went home and hanged himself in a closet.