"Divine Madness" , en kortfattad historia av Roger Zelazny , som också var svaret på frågan Bakåt i tiden ... Zelazny? . Några av dessa omslag ser bekanta ut?
En man upplever vändning av tiden de senaste dagarna
He blew smoke through the cigarette and it grew longer.
He glanced at the clock and realized that its hands were moving backwards.
Then came the thing like despair, for he knew there was not a thing he could do about it. He was trapped, moving in reverse through the sequence of actions past. Somehow, he had missed the warning.
Usually, there was a prism-effect, a flash of pink static, a drowsiness, then a moment of heightened perception . . .
där han återlämnar ett argument med sin fru som leder till hennes död
She was dead.
She was lying somewhere in the fragments of her car on Interstate 90 now.
As he paced, unsmoking, he knew she was lying there bleeding.
. . . Then dying, after that crash at eighty miles an hour.
. . . Then alive?
Then re-formed, along with the car, and alive again, arisen? Even now backing home at a terrible speed, to re-slam the door on their final argument? To unscream at him and be unscreamed at?
och han korrigerar det.
The door slammed open.
She stared in at him, her mascara smeared, tears upon her cheeks.
"!hell to go Then," he said.
"!going I'm," she said.
She stepped back inside, closed the door.
She hung her coat hurriedly in the hall closet.
".it about feel you way the that's If," he said shrugging.
"!yourself but anybody about care don't You," she said.
"!child a like behaving You're," he said.
"!sorry you're say least at could You"
Her eyes flashed like emeralds through the pink static, and she was lovely and alive again. In his mind he was dancing.
The change came.
"You could at least say you're sorry!"
"I am," he said, taking her hand in a grip that she could not break. "How much, you'll never know."
"Come here." And she did.