The Phantom of the Moon was one of the unluckiest men I ever met. Like me, he was a time traveller, but unlike me, he wasn’t a temporal physicist. This is never a good combination.
I first met him on his arrival in my then-present, in 1941. My instruments had detected an incoming anomaly, and he certainly was that. The Phantom of the Moon – I never did learn his real name – was from several thousand years uptime. He’d come back to my time in a stolen time machine, intending to prevent his immediate past from becoming everyone’s future. Given that he’d stolen the time machine in fleeing the destruction of the Moon, and the deaths of millions who’d lived there, and billions more on Earth when the formerly-lunar debris landed on them, it was hard not to sympathise. Even his chosen name as a science hero was a reminder of what he was trying to prevent, although not many people knew that, and he did like to use his tech to play up the whole ghost angle.
But he was such a clumsy manipulator of history. His first mission was to prevent certain advances in rocketry being made to early by Americans, and he dealt with this by turning the lead engineer on the project into an alcoholic with some technology he’d brought with him. But it was messy – I had to get involved to help him out, and from there it all just spiralled out of control. Harvey – that was his name – committed the cardinal sin: he allowed himself to be detected by a present-timer. I helped him to straighten it out, but it took work – efforts on my part that could have been better spent elsewhere.
I also discovered that he couldn’t be trusted with my technology, although that turned out to be a self-correcting problem: Harvey inadvertantly discovered the date of his own death, twenty years up the line, but still way too close to know about, and spent most of his last two decades either wrestling with his mortality or throwing himself into the worst dangers he could find to defy it – I remember him fighting in Korea, and attempting to rescue fishermen who sailed too close to the nuclear tests at Enewetak – but mostly he stayed at home and drank himself into oblivion.
It’s too bad. He could have been one of the greats if he’d been better balanced, but he was always going to extremes. Poor bastard.
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