David Mason 7 min read

A big, complicated, wheelless object simply appears in the middle of Main Way, fifty feet from the statue of Vachel Lindsay, and Corrigan, sighing, recognizes another doomed attempt at time travel.

David Mason's 1955 story spins a wry, gentle social-SF and time-travel tale. Clever, warm golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where a stranded time-traveler's arrival is met not with alarm but with a sympathetic cluck of the tongue.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

7 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).