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eBook Category: Science Fiction/Humor
eBook Description: The world's greatest genius creates a time machine, saves the world from disease, overpopulation, economic collapse, and robotic catastrophe, yet still finds time to write helpful instruction manuals such as "Intrepid's Guide to Cheese Slicing" and "Intrepid's Guide to Brontosaur Teeth."

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Starshore, 1991
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2004

45 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [210 KB], eReader (PDB) [26 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [12 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [12 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [60 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [83 KB], hiebook (KML) [38 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [42 KB], iSilo (PDB) [10 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [13 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [41 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [21 KB]
Words: 3255
Reading time: 9-13 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

I

It was on his fourth attempt that Isaac Intrepid finally created a viable time machine. (The first three were good for very little except cutting up Munster cheese, a fact that caused Intrepid to add immeasurably to his wealth and fame by selling first North American rights to Intrepid's Guide to Cheese Slicing, available in hardcover for $17.95 from Seldom House.)

Intrepid ranged throughout human history in his time machine, observing the Crucifixion, correcting the spelling of the Ten Commandments, watching Babe Ruth call his shot against the Chicago Cubs, even offering Moyshe Dayan a bit of tactical advice in the Six Day War. It was illuminating for a while, but being a man of action and a man with a probing mind, he ultimately decided to come to grips with some of the more paradoxical elements in the nature of Time.

Ironically, the desire to warp the fabric of Time coincided with the news that Intrepid's Guide to Brontosaur Teeth would not be going into a fifth printing. Understandably depressed, the great man decided to end it all ... and he quickly realized that Time afforded him a unique way of so doing.

Armed with a .38-caliber Police Special (see Intrepid's Guide to the Handguns of Lower South Manhattan, 6th Edition), he took his machine back into the dim and distant past, to a point some eleven months before his birth. Disembarking, he moved to a place of concealment near his parents' house, waited for his father to return home from work, fired point-blank, and waited to vanish.

And, paradoxically, nothing happened.

The great man lowered his massive head in thought. He recomputed the Fitzwilliam-Goering equations, reintegrated the Steinholtz Theory of Space-Time Vectors, and even added the number of stolen bases accumulated by the 1943 St. Louis Browns. It still made no sense. If one killed one's father prior to one's own conception, then one simply ceased to exist. There was absolutely no other explanation, unless...

Suddenly he straightened up.

"Oh, Mother!" cried Isaac Intrepid, tears of shame running down his face. "How could you?"