It was remarkably warm for November. There was a gray haze over the lake and the sun behind it was rich and orange. I waited in the heat of the porch, fanning thick hot air into my face and gazing down absently into the coolness of the lake.
Ten minutes.
Twenty.
I looked at my watch. He would have to come soon.
And then I chuckled slightly, feeling a shiver of cool excitement. He could come back anytime, Pell could. Anytime at all.
I waited.
And then he came.
All of a sudden he was there on the porch, come out of nowhere. His eyes were bright and glistening, laughing. He held a fresh newspaper in his hand. He stood for a long moment looking at me and smiling, and I looked back at him smiling too, filled with awe and suspense and relief all at once.
“Where did you go?”
“Nineteen thirty-eight,” he said.
Now that it was done, really and truly and irrevocably done, we sat wrapped in silence, unmindful of the heat. It was a great moment, of course, but now nothing made sense anymore and we were back at the Problem.
I had a bottle ready. I poured two stiff ones and we drank to ourselves. Then we drank to the future.
“How long was I gone?” he said.
“Thirty-four minutes.”
He nodded, checking his watch.
“Exactly. I just had time to go into town and buy a paper.” He pushed it across the table toward me. It read October 30, 1938.
I grinned.
“Not a very impressive relic.”
Pell shrugged.
“First attempt. Next time I’ll bring back something with a little more color. Like Cleopatra’s girdle, for instance.” He laughed, flushed, and then his eyes widened. “God, Tom, it’s unbelievable! I saw them all—all the children and the dead ones and the neighbors I used to know. I talked with them. And nobody recognized me. I could have stayed longer but I was weak, I was so excited…it’s…it’s…unbelievable.”
He stared out over the lake, shaking his head slowly. We were both silent for a long while.
And then we faced the Problem.
Or rather Pell did. For me it was too hot and the day was too full of wonder. But we had worked and thought for many, many days, never really believing that a man could travel in time, and now of course Pell had, and therefore there was the Problem.
“Well,” Pell said at last, “what about the future?”
I gestured weakly with my glass.
“To hell with it. Let it come.”
“But it already has.”
Pell lay back in his chair, smiling quietly, holding his glass to the light.
“The future exists,” he said. “It exists now, Tom, just as the past exists now. That’s proven. We’ve proved it ourselves.”
“All right,” I muttered, taking a long, deep cool one.
“But if we have time travel,” Pell went on slowly, “then obviously men in the future have time travel. They will be able—are able to come back.”
He paused, tinkling his glass absently.
“Tom,” he said after a while, “where are they?”
I tried to let the question pass, to feel the warm sun and the pride of achievement. But I couldn’t. There was something vaguely, weirdly wrong. For years Pell and I had worked with time travel, and all that discouraging time we had hunted for evidence—any evidence—that it could be done, that men had actually traveled in time. Because of course, if it could be done, then it would have been done already. But we never found a thing. Nowhere in history—and we searched for years—was there a single believable case of a visitor from another time. There were certain unexplainable incidents—like the famous two ladies of the Tuileries—but never anything at all that might have come from the future. And although it had been maddening then, it was worse now. Because now we actually had time travel, and if we had it, so did the future. But…where were they?
“Well, obviously,” I said, breaking the long silence, “they must be visiting us all the time and we don’t know about it.”
Pell shook his head strongly.
“No,” he said, “there is no evidence. And it’s much too big a thing. There are too many years ahead, too many billions of them. Somewhere, sometime, they would have to betray themselves.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. The whole thing was too complex, much to incredibly involved for a man to understand. And in the midst of it, caught like a fly in the tangled threads, was a vague bulbous fear I could not define.
But God! I thought, coming suddenly to myself. How could we sit here brooding on the world’s finest day? I jumped up from my chair.
“Oh, good Lord, man, let it pass!” I shouted, snatching at the lovely newspaper and waving it before Pell’s eyes. “We’ve done it, we’ve done it, after all those years. Man, man, we’ve conquered Time!”
I began to pace back and forth excitedly as the living reality of what we had accomplished began to come home now for the first time. I wanted to go myself. With a great warm yearning, more than anything else in the world, I wanted to go myself. They were all there waiting—great God! How many were waiting! My brother, who died in the war. My mother, young and in peace before her sickness came…
It was while I was thinking all these things, phrasing the words I would say and planning the places and the times of my visits, that Pell discovered the answer.
“Listen,” he said abruptly. At the sound of his voice I stopped pacing and looked at him. His face was white, stunned. He stared dazedly out toward the lake, toward where the Machine stood gleaming in the afternoon sun.
“We can’t use it,” he said.
I stared at him.
He rose and walked to the door, speaking slowly and numbly.
“We’ll have to destroy the Machine.”
I was too shocked to move. I think I began to stutter, but Pell cut me off.
“Tom. No one has ever come back from the future. Not even us, Tom. Not anybody at all. There’s only one reason, do you see?”
He paused.
“Nobody has come back because there’s nobody there. There is no future.”
After a long moment, a long exploding moment, I sat down. My fingers crumpled the newspaper. I did not even begin to argue, because I realized at last that this was the tangle in the web, the thing I had seen but had tried to ignore. It was true—I believed it. I sat in a daze.
“Somewhere up ahead,” Pell was saying, “man stops. It must be very soon. It must be—” He broke off and shook his head quickly, turned to me.
“All the while we were building this thing, all the while we were dreaming about it, did it ever once occur to you what a weapon it was? The Time Machine—a weapon! The Ultimate Weapon. You can’t detect it, you can’t anticipate it. You can’t screen it out. The man who owns it controls space and time and the world. If we pass this thing on, it goes into the future. Into a future nobody comes back from.”
He sat for a long while in silence.
Eventually I said, groping, “How do you know it’s the Machine that’s responsible? It might be a war that happens tomorrow. It might be”—I glanced involuntarily at the low red sun—“it might even be that the sun turns nova.”
Pell reached down and picked up his glass, from which the ice was long gone.
“We can’t know. All we know is that if the future has time travel perhaps it is there right now, alive, secure. What can we do? Man has ten billion years to live. We can’t pass on the Machine.”
“But all the work, all the years…”
“All useless,” Pell said. His voice was low and thick, but very steady.
“If we are wrong, there is only us to suffer. If we are right…other men will undoubtedly make the same discovery, will do—have already done—the same thing through the years. They have suppressed it—they will have suppressed it, every one of them down the ages to come. Because the moment that a man fails to suppress it…” Pell shook himself. “This is too fine an evening for the end of the world.”
He went quickly down the steps and over the hot grass toward the Machine.
Author’s note:
The original ending said simply that one man looked at the other, knowing that time travel was impossible, unable to understand why no one seemed ever to come back. And then, staring at the sunset, they suddenly know. The sun is growing. It has begun to blow, to nova. Pell says, to this effect:
“Of course. No one comes back from the future…”—he lifts his glass in a toast to the blooming sun—“because there isn’t any.”
My editor didn’t like that ending, so he printed this, with my grudging permission. Making it loving and human and blah. Too fine an evening for the end of the world—that was not my line.
First published in Fantasy & SciFi magazine, June 1954