Lorne Lovell stood silently in the airtight glass cubicle at the Department of Science and Social Engineering.   As an experienced time traveller, Lorne knew by rote the spiel about not even killing an ant when time travelling, for fear of irreversibly altering the time stream.   Nonetheless, he did his best not to look bored to tears as the grey speaker in the sterile white polyvinyl chlorate wall in front of his cubicle pumped out the pre-recorded warning in a shrill, strangely sexless voice:

“Be most careful not to alter a single thing on your journey into the past.   Even the slightest change to the past time stream could have dire consequences, irreparably altering the fabric of the past, present and future.   Even killing a tyrant, an Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Ronald Reagan could have catastrophic consequences to the entire fabric of space-time as we all know it.   If Hitler were killed, possibly someone who was going to die in World War Two would then go on to become an even

greater despot than Hitler.   Or possibly the death of Hitler may only postpone the start of World War Two, turning Hitler into a martyr and sending the Nazi party underground for half a decade or so until the mid to late 1940s when the superpowers are starting to acquire nuclear capabilities.   Thus, instead of twenty-five million casualties, World War Two may result in the extermination of billions of people in a nuclear holocaust.   Possibly even causing the extinction of the entire human race….”

“Blah!   Blah!   Blah!” thought Lorne, unable to resist the temptation to yawn from boredom.   Seeing George Thomsett smiling at him, he did an exaggerated stretch for her benefit and heard her tittering through the glass cubicle.

Reaching out a hand, Lorne felt the cold clear surface of the time travel cubicle.   “Cold!” he said aloud, thinking how pleasant the sensation was compared to the warm, dry feel of the sterile white or grey domes, pyramids and Picasso-envisioned monstrosities that the twenty-third century had the gall to call buildings.

“Yes,” he muttered, recalling the wonders of real brick, stone, concrete and wooden buildings, which he had seen on his many travels back through time.