_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.

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

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

Now, he thought, what? This was scarcely dinosaur country. At this
point a wild boar chased him up a tree. To be killed by a boar would
be ignominious, after all this, although the animal was well enough
tusked to have done the job, and so John Arthur Benn climbed to a high
branch, where the boar's persistence forced him to spend the night.
He slept, somehow, and, with the closing of his conscious mind--the
one that wanted to meet a dinosaur in fatal combat--the conventional
subconscious, 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, John
Arthur Benn knew.

He went home and hanged himself in a closet.