Man Out of Time

the premonition

Pilot Jim Darcy (Dewey Martin) and his wife Linda (Mary Murphy) in the 1965 episode of “The Outer Limits” television show “The Premonition”

When the pilot and his wife ran from my shadowy, fluid form, leaving me standing in the NASA control center in the Mojave Desert, they placed a lit road flare just outside the door to keep me from following them.

They knew I was a being out of time, a man trapped in an endless limbo only they could see. Fire didn’t bother me just like anything else in normal time, but the pilot and his wife were out of synch with normal time, thrown ten seconds into the future and for them, time was passing thirty minutes for every one second of real time. The flare was also out of synch and was a real danger to me.

Of course, as a limbo being, I could have walked through any wall and followed them, even attacked them, but what’s the use?

I was greatly tempted to replace one of them when time resynchronized, leave one of them trapped in my place, in limbo, timeless, but I knew it wouldn’t work. Someone tried it on me before and it didn’t work. I’ll never know what happened to him.

Re-synchronization would only work with the living people who were thrown out of synch, those who still had a chance, those who hadn’t already been lost.

I knew I no longer had a chance. I was lost over five years ago. I’m not even still alive.

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