BUSY DOING NOTHING

I came to. I wasn't unconscious. My rescuer tells me I was actually quite dead. I'd been strangled with cheese wire, and apparently it had been quick, humane and I hadn't felt a thing.

"Who did this to me? I asked"

"I did", he replied apologetically.

He helped me up from the floor, bid me take to the sofa and poured me a glass of my own whiskey. He seemed terribly nice, and not at all the sort of chap you'd expect to have break into your house while you are watching daytime TV, sneak up behind you and murder you on the spot. Nor did he seem insane enough to think he could resurrect the dead. To be on the safe side though I chose to hear him out, and hope he would leave quietly before I set about summoning the local constabulary.

As he told me his preposterous story I took in his tin foil asbestos like fire-proofing suit, and the visor that looked half-motorcycle helmet, half old fashioned diving mask. It was almost a fancy dress astronaut outfit. He told me he was from eighty years into the future. His own age of scientific breakthrough was degenerating into barbarism, and he had come back to the past, i.e., my present, to make changes. Initial experiments had involved attempts to kill great dictators, i.e., Hitler, Thatcher, George W. Bush, but the effect on the time-space continuum had been so drastic that the time travelers had cancelled out their own births, and the dictators had therefore been rendered safe by the fact that no attack had been made on them. After this, the travelers had become more patient and cautious. Time in their era was running out, but the joys of time travel meant that they also had time to be patient. They started by killing off nothing more than a few blades of grass or a couple of butterflies and then working out the extent of the changes effected; which meant huge sweeping changes in agriculture as plants unaffected by weeds that the travelers took out were able to grow and so more people got fed. Then they moved on to deal with animals, and finally started work on minor people and those who might not make too much impact on history, This effected some modest changes, for example, a Bible salesman was killed just before he knocked on the door of Hank Theakston, the American Poet who was thus able to finish and complete a poem that had previously gone out as incomplete. The Bible-pusher was not a significant being but he had affected someone else's destiny and the world was better off without him.

I got another whiskey, myself this time, and the man who had murdered me carried on eulogizing me to death. They worked up, killing people who had tweaked history and leaving alive those who adjusted it too far, and they thought they had it off cold until they met me. My death had apparently changed absolutely nothing. I had done nothing of significance with my own life and had so little contact with others that I had made no changes in their lifestyles that could alter the course of their histories either. At first the time traveler had assumed that leaving me for dead might be for the best, but apparently, it lead to a major manhunt for a psychotic killer for which an innocent man would be arrested, thus ending his career as a Chronometric Technician at a research laboratory nearby. My life meant literally nothing, but my untimely death would mean someone important to the future science of time travel itself would have problems. Thus I had been given a second chance to go on being a couch potato, a state which the time traveler insisted I maintain, for the good of all future history... He left, with no apparent machine, he just faded out of my field of vision and was gone for good, I hope.

I grabbed some crisps and settled back on the settee, knowing that my much-criticized life of apathy and sloth might save the world one-day, as it had certainly saved me from certain death. That's also why I haven't bothered washing the dishes or getting the vacuum cleaner out, love.

Arthur Chappell