“Sure! I told you they would. Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha?”

My uncle Otto took a slow drag at the cigar. He said, “The man at the Bureau of Documents came to me and said, ’Professor Schlemmelmayer,’ he said, ’you are the victim of a clever fraud.’ I said, ’So? And how can it a fraud be? The signature a forgery is?’ So he answered, ’It certainly doesn’t look like a forgery, but it must be!’ ’And why must it be?’ I asked.”

My uncle Otto put down his cigar, put down his drink, and leaned across the desk toward me. He had me so in suspense, I leaned forward toward him, so in a way I deserved everything I got.

“Exactly,” I babbled, “why must it be? They can’t prove a thing wrong with it, because it’s genuine. Why must it he a fraud, eh? Why”

My uncle Otto’s voice was terrifyingly saccharine. He said, “We got the parchment from the past?”

“Yes. Yes. You know we did.” “Over a hundred fifty years in the past. You said -”

“And a hundred fifty years ago the parchment on which the Declaration of Independence was written pretty new was. No?”

I was beginning to get it, but not fast enough.

My uncle Otto’s voice switched gears and became a dull, throbbing roar, “And if Button Gwinnett in 1777 died, you Godforsaken dunderlump, how can an authentic signature of his on a new piece of parchment be found?”

After that it was just a case of the whole world rushing backward and forward about me.

I expect to be on my feet soon. I still ache, but the doctors tell me no bones were broken.

Still, my uncle Otto didn’t have to make me swallow the damned parchment.

If I had hoped to be recognized as a master of humor as a result of these stories, I think I failed.

L. Sprague de Camp, one of the most successful writers of humorous science fiction and fantasy, had this to say about me in his science Fiction Handbook (Hermitage House, 1953), which, as you see, appeared not long after these (in my opinion) successful forays into humor: