It would, of course, take a trio of Ivory Tower scientists to conceive of tracking down that statistical entity, the Common Man, and testing out an idea on him. And only the Ivory Tower type would predict that egregiously wrongly!
Was this ill-fated expedition the end of a proud, old race--or the beginning of a new one? There are strange gaps in our records of the past. We find traces of man-like things--but, suddenly, man appears, far too much developed to be the "next step" in a well-linked chain of evolutionary evidence. Perhaps something like the events of this story furnishes the answer to the riddle.
Millions of years in the distant future, a posthuman scientist is attempting to build a time machine and tests it by sending two boxes with a hastily gathered batch of educational toys into the past. When the boxes fails to return, he believes the entire experiment to be a failure, he discontinues his efforts. One box arrives in the middle of the 20th century and the second in the latter part of the 19th century. Both have had their time-travel circuitry irreparably damaged by the journey.
The operation was a very serious one and Bart Neely was willing to put himself into Dr. Morton's hands. But if things turned out badly, Bart was going to teach them a lesson. He was going to refuse to die.
To upset the stable, mighty stream of time would probably take an enormous concentration of energy. And it's not to be expected that a man would get a second chance at life. But an atomic might accomplish both--
The real trouble with communications satellites is the enormous difficulty of repairing even the simplest little trouble. You need such a loooong screwdriver.