So many things can go wrong with just the push of a button.
He had been standing in the middle of the road, at around two-thirty in the morning, noting several coordinates. Naturally, the streets were deserted and the night sky was clear. His time transporter relied on the precise location of three specific stars to work. It was a sort of heavenly triangulation system that his spatial transposition formula used. He knew just how very close he was, using what he held comfortably in his hand, to be able to travel through time. Now, almost ninety, he had been working tirelessly for more than six decades to develop a simple, pocket-sized device that would change the world.
Of course, this is where the button pressing thing comes in. Having done just that, he was now standing in the road, in broad daylight, watching a large delivery van coming towards him at speed. The moment of impact resulted in three significant things. First, it had rendered him badly bruised and unconscious, secondly, the device had been crushed beneath one of the vehicle’s tyres, and the third was that he had been thrown back a week in time.
They were very nice to him in the hospital. The nurses were doing their best to stifle their giggles when he finally came to. They had been amused by his delusional ramblings, his frantic babblings about being lost in time and unable to get back.
In the hours and days that followed, he had considered so many things he could do to convince people that this had really happened. He could for example, being something of a soccer fan, tell them which team win’s the upcoming game, the resulting score, the injuries, the penalties, the player who was sent off, the threatening rain that held off… He could go on. He could do all of that. Was that what he wanted? No, not really. A sense of logical resignation took over. In a way, he was more than relieved when the week had finally passed.
At the end of the day, he knew that at the very worst he would only ever be regarded as some doddery old fool who’d watched too many episodes of Star Trek.