The Project Gutenberg EBook of A World Apart, by Samuel Kimball Merwin

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Title: A World Apart

Author: Samuel Kimball Merwin

Release Date: February 8, 2010 [EBook #31215]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_For obvious reasons, since time-travel has yet to be invented as
far as we know, science fiction authors usually attribute it to the
future. Yet there is always the possibility that somewhere, somehow,
somewhen, it has already been put to use. A possibility which Sammy
Merwin here considers in highly intriguing and human terms. Let's go
back with Coulter...._

a
world
apart

_by ... Sam Merwin, Jr._

Most men of middle age would welcome
a chance to live their lives a second
time. But Coulter did not.

It wasn't much of a bump. The shock absorbers of the liquid-smooth
convertible neutralized all but a tiny percent of the jarring impact
before it could reach the imported English flannel seat of Coulter's
expensively-tailored pants. But it was sufficient to jolt him out of his
reverie, trebly induced by a four-course luncheon with cocktails and
liqueur, the nostalgia of returning to a hometown unvisited in twenty
years and the fact that he was driving westward into an afternoon sun.

Coulter grunted mild resentment at being thus disturbed. Then, as he
quickly, incredulously scanned the road ahead and the car whose wheel
was gripped by his gloved hands, he narrowed his eyes and muttered to
himself, "Wake up! For God's sake snap out of it!"

The road itself had changed. From a twin-laned ten-car highway,
carefully graded and landscaped and clover-leafed, it had become a
single-laned three-car thoroughfare, paved with tar instead of concrete
and high-crowned along its center. He swung the wheel quickly to avoid
running onto a dirt shoulder hardened with ice.

Its curves were no longer graded for high-speed cars but were scarcely
tilted at all, when they didn't slant the wrong way. Its crossings were
blind, l