“The Skull” September 1952

Conger is a hunter serving a prison term for some sort of illegal trading. The authorities need his special skills. They want him to go into the past and kill the “founder” of a non-violent sect of quasi-Christians. They show him the skull for identification. He takes the skull and a gun into the past. First he goes to just after when the founder died and researches the papers. Then he travels further back to kill him before he can deliver his message. Ultimately, he holds the skull next to his own face and realizes that he is the founder. He gives the assembled crowd a brief paradox, then waits to die, knowing he will be seen to have risen from the dead in “the near future.” By a neat accident, the authorities of his own time have brought about the very thing they had hoped to prevent.