Flying Blind                                                                                                                                                   By Jeff Baker

            I hate time travel. And going on blind dates. And this was both, and it was all going wrong.

            When I arrived, I took off the glasses and pulled out my revulator  to check to see if I was in the right place and right era. Mine was one of the cheap ones. It said I was “somewhere in the western hemisphere” and it had an estimation of the date. Yeah, an “estimation.” Oh, and it said two-fifteen in the afternoon. Great. I’ve shown up late for things but being a century or so off for a date was overdoing it.

            “Steve!” a voice called from behind me. I turned and saw a tall, reddish-blond guy in jeans and a green sweater climbing the small hill I’d apparently appeared on.

            “You’re Steve, right?”

            “Yeah,” I said. “You’re Walter, right” I asked.

            “Yeah,” he said. He pulled out a revulator and stared at the display. “Any idea where we are?”

            “Nope,” I said. “According to this, it’s the twenty-seventh century. Probably.”

            “Mine says it’s 1926,” Walter said. “Any idea which of us is right?”

            “Nope,” I said, clicking on the display. “At least we homed in on each other. Well, there should be a place to sit down and eat somewhere near…”

            There was a huge roar. We turned and stared. Neither of us was sure if the giant dinosaur we saw ambling towards us belonged to the future or the prehistoric past. We didn’t try to figure it out, we just ran.

            “You got recall on yours?” Walter yelled, running.

            “Yeah!” I said. “Yours?”

            “Yeah!” Walter said. “Grab my hand!”

            I slowed down enough to grab his hand as we both keyed in the emergency recall option and pressed, just as the dinosaur-thing gave another loud roar. Very close.

            Everything faded into a greyish blur with black stripes and flashes. It reminded me of old images I’d seen of an old home video viewer from the mid-twentieth century.

            We wound up back at the TimeDate offices and had our first date in their employee cafeteria, while they were deciding whether to give us a refund or not. And I didn’t know whether it would all lead to a second date. All we knew was it wouldn’t be any place with dinosaurs.

                                                —end—