Characters:

Henry Hassel: Mad scientist; Inventer of Time travel
Greta Hassel: Cheating Wife; Red Head

Plot:
Henry finds his wife cheating on him with another man, so he decides to build a time machine to go to the past to kill not his wife’s past self but her grandparents.
He does this because he believes significantly changing the past will change his future, i.e killing Greta’s grandad should have made sure that Greta wasn’t born, but when Henry went to check if the deed had been done.
But to his dismay, she was still there on the couch.
Frustrated and confused about why his actions didn’t affect, he goes on a killing rampage throughout time, murdering celebrities, Politicians and Gods, but every time he went back to check whether his wife was gone or not he was met with defeat.

In “The men who killed Mohammed” by Alfred Bester, Alfred used increasingly extreme actions to keep the reader interested in what will happen next, actions Henry Hassel would go to get rid of his wife.

The books begins with dialogue discussing that the human races technological developments are not from smart people thinking in a room but from people who have gone insane due to researching to long or a major event in there lives causing them to develop a new technology to either fix a problem or to get rid of the people that have caused the problem that the scientist needed the solution for.

After the reader is introduced to Henry Hassel, Henry is met with betrayal, as he finds his wife naked with another man. With this rage, he develops a time machine. This is the first of many outrages outcomes of the short story that Alfred uses to keep the reader interested and it won’t be the last.
Once he has made the time machine it takes him a moment on what he wants to do with it, he is committed to getting rid of his wife.
He finally decides that his next actions should not be to stop himself from meeting his ex-wife or to stop his ex-wife’s parents from meeting, all reasonable actions to take in a situation like this, but instead decides to kill his wife’s grandparents.

After traveling to his ex-wife’s grandparents time before they had kids, he killed ex grandfather inlaw but realized that did nothing to get rid of his ex-wife and so goes on a massive killing spree of people in power during there prime time, people like Christopher Columbus, Napoleon Etc
But after this had no effect on the present he went to check at a library to see if his actions were having any effect at all.

How Alfred’s world works are that every moment is a bubble and that bubble is a fact it cannot be changed so if you go back in time to another bubble you can effect that moment but it will not affect anything else. Making it so life is already written out in the world, so everyone’s death is predetermined and Henry has dislodged himself from the time stream and is left as a phantom of time able to travel anywhere in time but will never be able to interact with anybody ever again.

Alfreds use of increasingly extreme actions is a great demonstration on the idea that as a human we keep ramping up or actions until we hit a brick wall.