Murray Leinster 19 min read

Jimmy Patterson knows his wife is dead, because he saw her buried, but that is only one possibility out of infinitely many, and in some other now, Jane may still be alive.

Murray Leinster's 1951 story is a poignant, ingenious alternate-history and social-SF tale. Sharp, tender golden-age SF. Read it for a moving story where a grieving husband glimpses a parallel present in which his wife never died, and love reaches, impossibly, across the branching of realities.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

19 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Philip Bard