Hard Time (With Short Story)

More about Hard Time (With Short Story)

HARD TIME
By P.V. Tims

Contrary to popular belief, time travel isn’t impossible. It’s just illegal. The preservation of causality is critical for ensuring the continued habitability of the continuum. Or so I’m told.
Luckily, you can always identify a time traveller by the smell. Every place and time has its own, peculiar aroma – totally imperceptible to those who live in it and have become inured to it, but as distinctive as a fingerprint to anyone from a different epoch. The Romans smelled of cold steel and tanned leather: the tools of the empire-builder’s trade. The aristocracy of the Regency era were perfumed with artificial scents. The denizens of the Victorian Age were impregnated with the distinctive odours of soot and smoke and brutal, degrading labour. The peasantry of the dark ages, of course, just reeked of good, old-fashioned excrement and the fermenting soil they used to wattle their roundhouses. Even our present century has its particular olfactory character. We live in the age of industrialised agriculture and ubiquitous contamination. We smell of meat and dairy and microplastics, all inadequately masked by the artificial fruitiness of our shampoos and soaps.
I mention this so that you understand I’m a professional. I can ALWAYS spot a time traveller and I’m never wrong. So when I saw the Woman in the Green Dress, I knew what she was at once. I just had to inhale and I recognised it: the smell of another millennium. Her skin wafted the traceries of chemicals that had not yet been invented; her breath carried the metallic hints of life-extending sorcery-drugs still undreamed of. I’ve got a nose for these things, as we say in the business, and I placed her as a traveller from at least two hundred years hence.
She was gorgeous. The kind of woman you only see in those sumptuous, soft-lit noir films from the ‘40s: a femme fatale with a cigarette held between her pursed red lips like a coffin-maker’s nail and hair as soft and black and shiny as a moonlit night. I’d didn’t believed in love at first sight. Not until I saw her.
But what’s love next to the integrity of the space-time continuum? Nothing at all really. I didn’t weep when I drew the gun and did my deadly, essential work. That came later.
Now here I am, explaining myself to you flatfoots. And obviously you don’t believe me. Just do me one favour and carbon-date the body. You’ll find it hasn’t yet come into being. You want me to do hard time, but you’re missing the point. All time is hard. Hard, and cruel and merciless.

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