Button, Button (Asimov short story)
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Button, Button is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. The story first appeared in a January 1953 issue of Startling Stories. It is one of several stories by Asimov in which he deliberately set out to be funny.
An eccentric professor develops a method of linking brain power to creating physical effects, but when his effect is modified to create weapons of war, he turns in disgust to the real love of his life - creating a flute that can be played by mental power alone.
To raise the capital required for this project, he colludes with his nephew - a less-than-ethical lawyer and the story's narrator - to use a new invention of his that can reach back into time and retrieve objects. (as also occurs in The Ugly Little Boy and A Statue for Father)
They plan to retrieve a signature of one of the signers of the United States Declaration of Independence, Button Gwinnett, which is rare and therefore potentially valuable. The experiment works and they present a piece of genuine parchment with a genuine signature to the government for authentication. The scheme fails when the government investigators decide that the parchment is too new to be genuine. (Since it skipped forward hundreds of years in time, the parchment scrap only appears to be a year or two old).
