Feb. 16, 2631—
Dear Diary: Do I dare do it? It's so frustrating to have to be dependent upon the whims of a physicist like Croton Myers. I'm sure the man is a sadist—to say nothing of being a pompous ass with his scientific double-talk, and selfish to boot. Otherwise, why won't he let me use the time-grapple? All that folderol about disrupting the fabric of time.
He actually patted me on the shoulder today when I swallowed my righteous indignation to the extent of pleading once more with him. "Don't take it so hard, Bugsy," he said—imagine—'Bugsy'—to me, Philton J. Bugsomer, B.A., M.A., L.L.D., Ph.D., "in about twenty years it'll be out of the experimental stage. Then we'll see if something can't be done for you."
It's intolerable. As if a little handful of people would be missed out of the whole Roman Empire. Well, if I can't do it with his permission, I will do it without. See if I don't. My reputation as a scholar of sociomatics is at stake.

Thanks to Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders for providing the text for this work of public domain literature - and many, many others.
I don’t know if anyone uses TheStoryGraph to track reading, but I couldn’t find any entry on there for this story so I’ve made one!