Time travel.

I feel like an idiot typing those two words. I’m afraid anyone who reads them will start looking at me the way I look at poor Fred.

Sure, by now everyone has probably read about the mission in the papers, or seen the preparations on TV. Yeah, it really works. Ching-Mei Huang has demonstrated it enough times. And, yes, it’s incredible, absolutely incredible, that she went from a first discovery of the underlying principle in 2005 to a working time machine by 2013. Don’t ask me how she did it so fast; I don’t have a clue. In fact, sometimes I don’t think Ching-Mei has a clue, either.

But it works.

Or, at least, the first Throwback worked; the automated probe returned with air samples (a little more oxygen than today, no pollution, and, fortunately, no harmful germs), plus about four hours’ worth of pictures, showing lots of foliage and, at one point, a turtle.

But now we’re going to try it with human beings; if this test works, a bigger mission, with everyone from meteorologists to entomologists, will be sent back next year.

But for this attempt, only two people were going back, and one of them was me: Brandon Thackeray, forty-four, a little paunchy, a lot gray, a goddamned civil servant, a museum curator. Yes, I’m also a scientist. Got a Ph.D. — from an American university, to boot — and I suppose it makes sense that it would be a scientist who’d go gallivanting across time. But I’m not an adventurer. I’m just a regular guy, with quite enough to deal with, thank you very much, without something like this. An ailing father, a divorce, a mortgage that I might be able to pay off by the beginning of the next geologic era, hay fever. Regular stuff.

But this was far from regular.

We were hanging by a thread.

Okay, it was really a steel cable, about three centimeters thick, but it didn’t give me any more reassurance.