"Are you sure this's a good idea, Edgar?" asked the neon-haired woman uncertainly.

"Sure I'm sure, Terra!" The pale-blond pony-tailed man replied. "If all my calculations are correct, this should cause a complete temporal lapse."

"The last time you tried something like this, O Smart One, all that you lapsed into was a coma," Terra reminded him. "Now jog my memory; how exactly do you figure this will work, and why do you want me along?"

Edgar rolled his eyes and gestured toward a blueprint of a jumble of shapes representing a two-axle vehicle colliding head-on with a disk-shaped wall. "Simple! We merely accelerate to some unheard-of speed and time will freeze on us!"

"You mean we'll both freeze in cold storage at the morgue," Terra scoffed.

Edgar let that slide. "You, unbeliever, are coming because, firstly, your beauty has captivated me…"

Terra yawned, suppressing a groan. He'd inflicted the same line on her four years ago, when they'd first met.

"…and second, I also want to know if I'm your type…"

Same old, same old. Terra bowed her head and began to snore.

"I guess, um…I guess your abilities would be a distant th—"

"All right, all right, let's get going already." Anything to make him shut up.

Terra surveyed the test area with mounting disbelief. "We're doing it here? In that?"

She was staring at a shabby old Toyota Camry sitting at one end of the narrowest road in the history of public transportation. She turned to Edgar. "Couldn't you find anyplace wider?"

"And get wasted by oncoming traffic? Forget it."  He opened the door and stepped into the driver's seat. "What are you waiting for?" He handed her a stopwatch. "Hop in."

Terra reluctantly complied, but asked, "Why the stopwatch?"

"When it stops moving, that means we've done it!"

He inserted the key and twisted. The car choked noisily as it started.

Terra winced. "What speed do you expect we'll have to do to break the space-time continuum?"

"Sixty, maybe seventy," Edgar replied as he undid the parking brake. "Why?"

"Because, by the sound of this junk pile, it'd take a miracle for it to do any more than twenty."

"It's a long road." Edgar shifted the lever into the D position. "We've got plenty of time. Press start on that, will you?"

As she pressed start, his foot pressed down on the gas pedal. Terra was flung back, forward, and back again as the car jolted into movement.

When the odometer read 30 MPH, Edgar asked, "How long?"

"Thirty seconds. Not there yet."

The odometer climbed to 40. "How about now?"

"A minute and ten. Nope."

Another half minute later they were doing 60. "We're going pretty fast!" Edgar exclaimed. "What time now?"

"1:40! Time still hasn't stopped!"

Suddenly the road ahead of them dropped into a cliff. Edgar gulped and leaned on the brakes, screaming, "Has time stopped NOW?"

The car sped over the cliff anyway.

"No, just my heart…"

"Right…MAYDAY! BAIL OUT!!!"

Terra climbed out of the Terra-shaped hole in the ground. "Well," she muttered brokenly, "told you Einstein was a fraud, didn't I?"

But Edgar was ecstatic as he looked at the ruined stopwatch. "No, he's right! Look; the stopwatch isn't moving at all anymore!" he exulted.