“Take one of these, squeeze it and suck the juice. You’ll probably need three of them.”
“Three?”
“Yes, Two can leave you with considerable discomfort.”
“What are they?”
“Limes, of course, green fruits, full of vitamin C and it’s that we need. Much like those sailors of the high seas. Then, it helped with scurvy but now they help with time sickness.”
“Time sickness?”
“Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve told you, you really must keep up. There is quite literally, no time to waste!”
“Sorry.”
“The process of time travel is very draining on the human body. Time sucks nutrients as we shoot down the time tubes. The first time travellers learn this quickly.”
“How did they know? And how did they get the message back? I thought the first travellers were on a strictly one-way ticket.”
“And they were my boy and they were. They went back in time, arrived drained, with scurvy like symptoms and almost dead, had no means of return and were treated like madmen if they tried to talk to anyone about their trip. Understandably when you think about it. No one had ever done it before. It was only years later that our scientists began thinking about this problem and considered that as madmen they would probably have ended up in asylums. Then they studied the archives of these asylums and looked for any notes which might have been left by travellers. Now, most of the notes were from actual nutters, some of them sounded plausible, conspiracies and the like, so it took a while to sort the wheat from the chaff. But eventually, they found just a couple that seemed to talk some sense. Not in their time of course. In their time they were nutters. But in our time it made some sense. A couple mentioned Oranges and Grapefruits for their journeys. Now if you know anything you’ll know that Oranges and Grapefruits are quite large and don’t have as much vitamin C as a lime. You can carry a pocket full of limes no problem. A pocket full of grapefruits would be rather obvious. Do you see? So now we use limes, much more useful, more portable. Well, limes and a packet of pork scratchings, although we’re not sure if the pork scratchings are technically necessary or if the first travellers just really had a penchant for the snack. Either way today we don’t take any chances and worst-case scenario we arrive at our chosen time with a tasty snack. Nothing puts a bigger smile on your face than watching the Battle of Waterloo, for example, while munching on a packet of pork scratchings.”
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