Very Soon and Yet Still Very Far Away

By Stephen Saperstein Frug

The secret time travel research group finally receives a message from a once-unreachable future. They scramble to save their work before the impending disaster whose nature they have just begun to glimpse. But is the messenger all that he seems to be?

This is the fifth story in the Retcon story mosaic, a series about a secret research program into time travel at Cornell University. This story, like all the rest, can be read independently of the others, although it is enriched by the larger context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Saperstein Frug
• Release date: Jul 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781960745040

Stephen Saperstein Frug

Stephen Saperstein Frug is the author and illustrator of Happenstance: A Photographic Novel, and the author of the essay series Attempts, and of Retcon: A Mosaic Story in Three Movements. He lives with his family in Ithaca, New York, where he commits occasional acts of illeism.

Book preview

Very Soon and Yet Still Very Far Away

movement 1, installment 5 of

Retcon

A Mosaic Story in Three Movements

by

Stephen Saperstein Frug

Copyright © 2023 by Stephen Saperstein Frug

All rights reserved.

Published by Snark & Boojum Press

Ithaca, New York

https://stephenfrug.com/snark-and-boojum-press/

First edition

July, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-960745-04-0

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, incidents, footnotes, minerals, and mysterious physics are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Except for the lights clicking on all at once. That bit was real.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. But he's an easygoing fellow, so feel free to email him and ask.

Table of Contents

Start Reading

Cover

Title Page

Table of Contents

Very Soon and Yet Still Very Far Away

Epigraph

It Was A—And Yes, Yes, I Know, But Still, It Really Was, You Want Me To Lie?—Dark and Stormy Night

It Was Still Dark But the Rain Had Let Up Considerably

Zero Plus Four

It Was a Bright and Brainstormy Morning

Conversing With the Dead

All Due Caution

Expletive Not Deleted, Just Delayed

Not Really A—

Time Travel, the One-Volume Abridgment

The Pathetic Fallacy Is Not Confined to Descriptions of Weather

Humor is Strange and Mysterious When You Stop and Think About It

The Secret Origin of Keith Longley

Three Months and Three Minutes Later

The Hard Rain Obscured What Light There Would Otherwise Have Been, Reducing Even the Habitual Low Visibility of the Evening Hours to Greater (Which is To Say Lesser) Depths

A Brief Time Later, Six Floors Down

It Was Only Twilight But the Rain Was Already Falling Quite Heavily

It Was Still Dark and Still Stormy

The Repairman's Delight

By Design, This Time

An Introduction to a One-Volume Edition

You Will Not See Its Success But That Doesn't Mean It Failed

The Turn of a Busted Flush

An Excerpt from a Letter Labeled Do Not Open Until March 12, 2028

It Was a Bright and Clement Afternoon

It Was A—

About Retcon

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Previous Stories in Retcon

Also From Snark & Boojum Press

Attempts a series of essays by the author of Retcon

Very Soon and Yet Still Very Far Away

We have no hope yet we live in longing.

— Dante, Inferno, IV:42 (trans. Allen Mandelbaum)

It Was A—And Yes, Yes, I Know, But Still, It Really Was, You Want Me To Lie?—Dark and Stormy Night

When someone shows up claiming to be a time traveler, you don't just take their word for it; there are procedures to follow. After all, if you listen to the mutterings of mad homeless men, tossed out of their families for their difficulty and of institutions for cost savings, you would think that time travelers were not rare — but also that Napoleon still walked the earth. Yet they are rare, because time travel is difficult, inconvenient, dangerous, uncomfortable — and, above all, expensive. Think of how much energy it takes to hurl a tube of metal graced with wings up into the sky and across oceans; you think it will take less to hurl one back through time? You think the required safety checks will be more lenient? So when such an assertion is made, to those in the know, it is neither dismissed nor accepted without question: it is investigated .

So when Mona — probably having heard a noise, although not registering one, her awareness simply dropping from her work in a rush, like a daydream shattered by a stumble — looked up to see, standing in the lab doorway, a man she didn't recognize, with clothes as wet as if he had swum in with an ocean storm, in need of a shave, and panting as if he had run all the way up from the future, and heard him say, without preliminaries, I'm from elsewhen, the (to her mind) risible but long-since-agreed-upon and now-unchangeable code phrase to use in such circumstances, she automatically rose and had walked halfway to the cabinet to fetch the requisite materials with which to begin the necessary formalities when she paused, turned, and asked if he might perhaps be in need of a towel.

If you have one, he said. Raining like the deluge out there.

And then Mona had to go find a towel, of course, because physics labs don't have linen closets. Luckily she remembered that Jill had mentioned just that day that one of the guys up on the fifth floor had been sleeping in the lab for the past several nights, working round the clock nursing an experiment— and he'd packed a suitcase. She brought the borrowed towel down and handed it to the man.

He thanked her as he took the towel, then buried his face in it, dried