Mr. Durkell wrote the scientists to tell how he glimpsed a village, through a small copse, on his daily commute, where he knew there shouldn’t be a village. There it was, complete with half-timbered houses and smoking chimneys, only to wink out of existence a few seconds later. Leaving behind nothing but empty fields! The village reappeared a week later, on the same day, which was seen by two witnesses and a road map showed the place, Mons, actually exists. But not for very long! The whole village disappeared a second time and another look at the road map showed nothing remotely close to a place named Mons!
This puzzling phenomena of a village that doesn’t exist, except on Tuesdays, coincided with the disappearance of a farmer’s wife in the same vicinity. So what’s going on?
Another short story I may be conflating because so many of them have this premise.
A nurse in a hospital sees a man with weird clothing emerge from nothing, run into the maternity ward and throw a random baby out the 3rd story window before disappearing in thin air again. The nurse finds the baby on the floor now dead, and fearing she’s to be blamed since she was the only one on-duty goes to a local insane asylum and bribes a guard to get a similar looking baby from a severe alcoholic and crazy woman who had just given birth in there. So she wraps the baby up and goes back to the hospital and finds the baby’s parents wondering where their kid is, and the final line is the nurse handing the baby over and saying “Here you go Mr. And Mrs Hitler”.
Collins finally manages to fulfill her plan by stealing the child and jumping into a river with it. However, Kristina, another housemaid, having followed Andrea and witnessed her jump, buys a homeless woman’s baby – the homeless woman ironically a Gypsy – and passes it off as Adolf, presumably the one known to history in the first place. Effectively Collins murdered an innocent child while creating Adolf Hitler.
This is vaguely similar to the story “Heresies of the Huge God” by Brian Aldiss, but there are enough differences to make me think it must be a completely different story. It’s interesting that two authors must have come up with the same general idea. Here’s the ISFDb entry for the Aldiss story:
How odd, I have been wondering for weeks about a SF story I read perhaps in the 1970s. I think it was by an important author. It was quite long.
A dystopian world ruled by huge companies. The main character works for some sort of advertising agency. Among other things, they develop advertisements that can be projected onto the eyes of drivers on the highway. Advertising is everywhere. A fake coffee product, “Cafest” is mentioned.
Things go wrong in corporate politics. The guy wakes up with super-long (and so super lower-caste) social security number tattooed on his arm. He ends up on an off-world colony. He works cutting hunks off of an endlessly-growing lump of chicken meat called “chicken little.”
And then other stuff happens. Any idea what story this might be?
There was a short story about a scientist who discovered an equation or something, and the mere knowledge of it gave him the ability to transport himself anywhere by merely thinking about the destination. Unfortunately the ability was rather uncontrollable, and most of the story had him popping around the globe to different places because of a stray thought. At one point he thought of the planet Mars and ended up there briefly, but was able to return to Earth before suffocating. He was working feverishly throughout the story to come up with another equation that would let him control his power, because he was afraid of having a particular thought that was never made clear through the story. Finally at the end, he achieves control of his power, and reveals that the thought he was unconsciously afraid of having, which was of the Sun. I have a vague idea that the author might be L. Ron Hubbard, but that may be wrong.
