OK here goes.
A young man in his 20s crashes in a flying machine in the Arizona desert. He’s found and rescued immediately but can’t remember anything about who he is or where he comes from. He’s taken to hospital for observation and treatment and makes a full recovery, except for the amnesia. The staff call him ‘Mark’. Knowing no better, he adopts the name. While in hospital, he becomes very fond of a young nurse, Mary. She reciprocates his feelings and, after his release, they marry and go to New York. In due course they have a child, Matthew.
In due course, young Matthew grows up to be a highly intelligent young man. Curious about the mysterious family story about his father’s ‘appearance,’ he specialises in physics and eventually gets extremely interested in the fast developing race to become the first to build a successful time-travel machine. Matthew finally builds a machine but he doesn’t want to make a public announcement just yet. Concerned that it might not work, he decides to take it for a trial spin first. He can’t resist telling his dad though; some things you just can’t keep to yourself. Mark is wildly excited and pleads to be allowed to accompany his son. Matthew is concerned tht things might be a bit hard for one to handle in the past so he gratefully accepts. Not wanting to frighten Mary, they decide not to mention the trip until their return.
Matthew and Mark take off and, to their great delight, everything goes to plan. They arrive in upstate New York, just as planned, in a quiet out of the way place in 1872. How fortunate. Dressed for the occasion and with period money they brought with them, it wasn’t hard to pass for 19th century New Yorkers. They did all the things New Yorkers would do; they took day trips to Jersey and Yonkers and lived very well thanks to some less than fortuitous winnings on horse races. But after a while it was time to return. Matthew wanted to take pride of place as the first time traveller and Mark was missing Mary greatly.
Take off went fine, and so did the travel for a while. Then Matthew made an alarming discovery. He’d dramatically underestimated how long the return trip would take and they were clean out of food with quite a long journey still ahead of them. It didn’t take Matthew long to do the sums. No food and quite a long way to go. If neither of us eat, both will die. Crucially, I won’t take my rightful place as the inventor of the first time-travel machine. Being rational, he did the only thing he could do. He quietly killed Mark and dined out on him for the rest of the journey. Just as he was finishing the last morsel, it was time to prepare the ship for landing. But again things weren’t quite right. He wasn’t in New York, he was in Arizona. And he was going to have to crash land.
A young man in his 20s crashes in a flying machine in the Arizona desert. He’s found and rescued immediately but can’t remember anything about who he is or where he comes from. He’s taken to hospital for observation and treatment and makes a full recovery, except for the amnesia. The staff call him ‘Mark’. Knowing no better, he adopts the name. While in hospital, he becomes very fond of a young nurse, Mary. She reciprocates his feelings and, after his release, they marry and go to New York. In due course they have a child, Matthew …