Terry Donovan realizes that it’s possible to travel through time in 60,000,000-year increments, so naturally he travels back to the Cretaceous where he meets dinosaurs and aliens.

This story was under Tremaine’s Astounding editorship, but the sequel, “Coils of Time,” (May 1939) appeared after Campbell became editor.
—Michael Main
Incidentally, I have forgotten the most important thing of all. Remember that Donovan’s dominating idea was to prove to me, and to the world, that he had been in the Cretaceous and hobnobbed with its flora and fauna. He was a physicist by inclination, and had the physicist’s flair for ingenious proofs. Before leaving, he loaded a lead cube with three quartz quills of pure radium chloride that he had been using in a previous experiment, and locked the whole thing up in a steel box.

Tags

(9)

Variants

(2)
  1. “Sands of Time” by P. Schuyler Miller, in Astounding Stories, April 1937.
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by P. Schuyler Miller
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . translated by Eduardo Saló
  2. alternative title.
    “The Sands of Time” by P. Schuyler Miller, in Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas (Random House, 1946).
    3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by P. Schuyler Miller
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . translated by Alfred Joseph

Translations

(2)
  1. German.
    “Spuren im Sand der Zeit” by P. Schuyler Miller, in Die Mörder Mohammeds, edited by Robert Silverberg (Marion von Schröder, 1970).
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by P. Schuyler Miller
  2. Portuguese.
    “As Areias do Tempo” by P. Schuyler Miller, in Viajantes no Tempo, edited by Robert Silverberg (Galeria Panorama, 1967).
    3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by P. Schuyler Miller