Soon, the time traveler would face the necessity of his own death.

He had not taken that decision, however, or even begun to contemplate its necessity, on the cool spring morning when Billy Gargullo burst through the kitchen door into the back yard, heavily armed and golden in his armor.

The time traveler—whose name was Ben Collier—had begun the slow, pleasant labor of laying out a garden at the back of the lawn. He had hammered down stakes and marked the borders with binding twine. Next to this patch of grass and weed he had placed a shovel, a rake, and a tilling device called a “garden weasel,” which he had found in a Home Hardware store in the Harbor Mall. Ben was looking forward to the adventure of the garden. He had never gardened before. He understood the fundamentals but wasn’t certain what might thrive in this sunny, damp patch of soil. Therefore he had purchased a random selection of seeds from the hardware store rotary rack, including corn, radishes, sunflowers, and night-blooming aloe. In his right hand he held a packet of morning glories, reserved for a space by the fence, where they’d have something to climb on.

He had lived alone on this property—two acres of uncultivated woodland and a three-bedroom frame house—for fifteen years now. A tiny chunk of time by any reasonable scale, but substantial when you lived it in sequence. He had arrived at this outpost in August of the year 1964 and since then he had not held a conversation more prolonged than the necessary hellos and thank yous directed at store clerks and delivery people.