Sci Fi Story about couple using time travel to hide?

January 15, 2009 11:11 PM

Can you help me remember/find a Sci Fi Story about a couple using time travel to hide? In Mexico? They were being tracked by a shadowy figure who would always order many beverages when he sat down in a restaurant...Bradbury?

any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated!

posted by flowerofhighrank to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

Oh yeah, that's a classic Bradbury story. They're escaping the future where the world has been threatened by the X-Bomb. What's the title...
posted by Kirklander at 11:16 PM on January 15, 2009

Was it, by any chance, Roger Zelazny's novel Roadmarks? I know it's a bit of a stretch...
posted by nasreddin at 11:17 PM on January 15, 2009

Oh wow, I've been trying for years to find that novel Roadmarks and didn't know what it was!
posted by Kirklander at 11:19 PM on January 15, 2009

"The Fox and the Forest" from Bradbury's The Illustrated Man?
posted by cadge at 11:31 PM on January 15, 2009

Yah, the guy chasing after them was spending as much time in the past as he could, soaking up the good things which just were not around in that possible future. Bradbury, for sure. Title? Um... Uh...
posted by dancestoblue at 1:22 AM on January 16, 2009

I'm with cadge on this one. The Fox and the Forest from The Illustrated Man.
posted by bjrn at 1:34 AM on January 16, 2009

Cadge and bjrn have it. From the wiki page for "The Illustrated Man": ""The Fox and the Forest" — A couple from the future tires of the war in their modern lives, so they go on a vacation to the more serene past in an attempt to escape with the help of a company called "Travel in Time, Inc." They go to Mexico in 1938, but are pursued by a government agent who forces them to come back to 2155."
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:37 AM on January 16, 2009

Oh yeah, I remember "The Fox and the Forest" from an old grade school reader. We never actually got to it in the course of the term, but I distracted myself in boring classes reading it over and over because it was the only real sci-fi story in the whole textbook.

"Sample" text from the story here and here (wink wink).

Until I read it I had been unaware that not pulling up one's pants legs to sit down were such a giveaway.
posted by brownpau at 7:16 AM on January 16, 2009

That's funny, Brownpau. I feel like I did the exact same thing in my school, but it was with Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains. It was the first Bradbury story I ever read, but the first of many.
posted by redsparkler at 2:06 PM on January 16, 2009