A Little Something for Us Tempunauts

"A Little Something for Us Tempunauts" is a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick. It was first published in Final Stage in 1975.

Plot summary

Time travellers from the United States, called "tempunauts", are sent only a few days into the future rather than a century as was intended. In this near-future, they learn their return from the future was fatal to them.

Addison Doug, one of the tempunauts, believes that they are trapped with the rest of the Earth in a closed time loop, doomed to forever repeat the period between their starting their trip and their fatal return. Having found out the cause of their fatal return journey, they have to decide whether to change or not to change their return journey in order to get out of the loop. Or does the loop exist merely in Addison's head?

Further trademark paranoia in terms of the media manipulation, and the Russian threat another dimension to the story.

Dick said:

"In this story I felt a vast weariness over the space program, which had thrilled us so at the start -- especially the first lunar landing -- and then had been forgotten and virtually shut down, a relic of history. I wondered, if time-travel became a 'program', would it suffer the same fate? Or was there an even worse possibility latent in it, within the very nature of the paradoxes of time-travel?"