Clifford D. Simak

The twentieth century. It had a remote sound, an unreal significance. In this age, with the sun a brick red ball and the city of Denver a mass of ruins, the twentieth century was a forgotten second in the great march of time, it was as remote as the age when man emerged from the beast.

Think of the opportunities a time machine offers a newspaper. The other papers can tell them what has happened and what is happening, but, by Godrey, they’ll have to read the Globe to know what is going to happen.

It would reach back to win its battles. It would strike at points in time and space which would not even know that thre was a war. It could, logically, go back to the silver mines of Athens, to the horse and chariot of Thutmosis III, to the sailing of Columbus.

If you guys ever travel in time, you’ll run up against more than you bargain for. I don’t mean the climate or the terrain or the fauna, but the economics and the politics.

We were lucky, that was all. We could have sent that camera back another thousand times, perhaps, and never caught a mastodon—probably never caught a thing. Although we would have known it had moved in time, for the landscape had been different, although not a great deal different. But from the landscape we could not have told if it had gone back a hundred or a thousand years. When we saw the mastadon, however, we knew we’d sent the camera back 10,000 years at least.

I won’t bore you with how we worked out a lot of problems on our second model, or how Dennis managed to work out a time-meter that we could calibrate to send the machine a specific distance into time. Because all this is not important. What is important is what I found when I went into time.

I’ve already told you I’d read your book about Cretaceous dinosaurs and I liked the entire book, but that final chapter about the extinction of the dinosaurs is the one that really got me. Many a time I’d lie awake at night thinking about all the theories you wrote about and trying to figure out in my own mind how it really was.

So when it was time to get into that machine and go, I knew where I would be headed.

You mean there were two Pete Maxwells?

Humphrey did mind, naturally, but there was nothing he could do about it. Here was the chance to go up to the Lodge, probably to go inside it, and he was being counted out. But he did what he had to do with fairly good grace and said that he would stay.

A time machine has fallen into a clump of birch just above the little pond back of the machine shops.

Maybe it takes gently crazy people and simpletons and dogs to do things we can’t do. Maybe they have abilities we don’t have.. . .

Horace, the hardheaded, practical lout, the organizer, the schemer. Emma, the moaner, the keeper of our consciences. Timothy, the student. Enid, the thinker. And I, the loafer, the bad example, the one who makes the others feel virtuous.