Security Plan: A Fortune From The Future

Ted Langer has spent twenty years and nearly everything he owns pursuing an idea respectable scientists dismiss as impossible. His wife Marilyn has stood beside him through pawn tickets, unpaid bills, and a restaurant that barely keeps them fed. She would like one simple thing from her brilliant husband: some assurance they won’t be broke when they’re old.

Then Ted’s machine works—but not quite the way he expected. A wildly dressed young amateur scientist named Solid Chuck Richards arrives from 1991 with strange slang, enormous money, and an appetite for something the future can barely afford: real food. Suddenly the steaks sitting in Ted’s refrigerator may be more valuable than his greatest invention. Unfortunately, money brought backward through time comes with one obvious problem. Fortunately, Ted knows someone who might not think the problem through.

Security Plan is a fast, funny time-travel story built around inflation, scientific ambition, and a wonderfully crooked opportunity. Joseph Farrell takes an ordinary worry about retirement and pushes it through a time machine, where a struggling restaurant, futuristic currency, and one very eager pawnbroker create an increasingly clever financial arrangement. The humor comes from watching Ted realize that inventing time travel may not be nearly as useful as figuring out how to make it pay.

Joseph Farrell published a small body of science fiction across nearly two decades. His known stories include Juke Box Asteroid, which appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories in Spring 1944, and The Ethical Way. Security Plan appeared in the April 1959 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.

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