One thing you can be certain of when you meet a nostalgic physicist in a science fiction story: There’s gonna be some time travelin’. In this case, the nostalgic narrator travels from 1978 back to pastoral American days at the end of the Great Depression with the goal of helping his father stand up to a domineering wife.

Gaughan was better knowm as a prolific sf artist, but he also produced this story and one other for Asimov’s Science Fiction.
So I told him.

From beginning to end (well not end, I didn’t tell him of his own funeral) and tried to leave nothing out that was pertinent to the plan. I didn’t know what else to do. The year 1939 may have been ready for Buck Rogers or Brick Bradford and his Time Top, but was it ready for the hard, cold reality of time travel?

Variants

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  1. “One More Time” by Jack Gaughan, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, November/December 1978.
    2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Jack Gaughan