The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century

The weather makers put .006 of one percent too little moisture in the air on this set. There’s three-sevenths of an ounce too little gasoline in the storage tanks under here.

He was, Vanning reflected, an odd duck. Galloway was essentially amoral, thoroughly out of place in this too-complicated world. He seemed to watch, with a certain wry amusement, from a vantage point of his own, rather disinterested for the most part. And he made things—

The discovery of negative entropy introduces quite new and revolutionary conceptions into our picture of the physical world.

Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!

Got himself killed is right. Eleven-fifteen at night in Times Square—the theaters letting out, busiest time and place in the world—and this guy shows up in the middle of the street, gawking and looking around at the cars and up at the signs like he'd never seen them before.

Oh, I’m no four-dimensional thinker; but, as I understand it, if people could go back to a more recent time, their actions would affect our own history, which would be a paradox or contradiction of facts. Can’t have that in a well-run universe, you know.

Now, then. There is one point on which I must set you right. The end of the world is not coming in two years. This I know.

Yes, I’ve missed so much. I wasted a lot of time. If only I could have avoided the blind alleys, I could have done many times as much.

“Pleasta Meetcha, Bob. Likewise, Sarah. Call me, uh. . .“ The only twentieth-century language in which Three-phasing’s name makes sense is propositional calculus. “ George. George Boole.”

Nothing was for certain, anything could change (depending on your point of view), and almost anything could happen, especially to forgetful old men who often found themselves in the wrong century rather than on the wrong street.

He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew. He knew that his name was Charles Phillips and that before he had come to live among these people he had lived in the year 1984, when there had been such things as computers and television sets and baseball and jet planes, and the world was full of cities, not merely five but thousands of them, New York and London and Johannesburg and Parks and Liverpool and Bangkok and San Francisco and Buenos Ares and a multitude of others, all at the same time.

“I said, have you got something going,” she repeated, still with the accent—the accent of my own time.

Harry bought a pair of socks, thick gray wool, for 89 cents. When the man took his dollar, Harry held his breath: each first time made a little pip in his stomach. But on one ever looked at the dates of old bills. He bought two oranges for five cents each, and then, thinking of Manny, bought a third. At a candystore he bought G-8 and His Battle Aces for fifteen cents. At The Collector’s Cozy in the other time they would gladly give him thirty dollars for it. Finally, he bought a cherry Coke for a nickel and headed towards the park.

So: once upon a time when I was twenty-one years old I left my home and came on the NAFAL ship Terraces of Darranda to study at the Ekumenical Schools on Hain.