Weekly Short Story: Experiment by Fredric Brown

Previously on this blog I have discussed a couple of short stories by the twentieth-century science fiction/mystery writer Fredric Brown, The Weapon and Preposterous, and now it's "time" to bring up a third, Experiment.  But before I do, since this very brief story is in public domain and on the internet, why not first read it for yourself...just click on the following link: [link]...

Written in 1954 amid a rash of popular stories about time travel, Experiment focuses on the main problem of the paradox of travel into the past.  A professor has invented a prototype time machine that can project a small object up to twelve minutes into the future or past.  He has two colleagues present to demonstrate how it works, using a small square cube, placing it on the machine's platform, and setting it to travel into the future five minutes.  Presto, the cube vanishes and then reappears five minutes later...everyone is duly impressed.  Then Professor Johnson shows how the machine works transporting objects back in time.  Holding the cube, he tells his associates that in five minutes he will place it on the machine and send it back...the object promptly disappears from his hand and reappears on the machine...exactly five minutes before he was to place it there.  One of his friends, however, raises the "paradox" question...suppose the good professor decides instead not to place the cube on the machine five minutes later?  Tantalized by this, he refrains from doing so...and the story ends abruptly with one of the best final lines I've ever read (and I first read this one when I was a little kid)...

With time travel into the past (not the future), there is always the inherent paradox of the same object or person being there twice, with the "current" one in a position to affect its past...thereby affecting the "past" one's future to the point where the "current" one wouldn't be going back in time to affect its own past...that third Harry Potter book/movie The Prisoner of Azkaban examines this as well when Harry and Hermione use the latter's time-travel necklace to try to redress a past wrong. Experiment resolves the paradox in a different way that makes any attempt at time travel to the past not only unfeasible, but very, very dangerous.  A hint in case you haven't read it yet: that cube has a tendency to vanish...