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Time Quarry by Clifford D. Simak
In the 80th century, an astronaut, presumed lost for twenty years, returns to Earth. However, a time traveler comes back from the future and tries to have him killed before he can write a book and spread dangerously subversive beliefs.
Book Details
Book Details
Time Quarry (1950) – In the 80th century, an astronaut, presumed lost for twenty years, returns to Earth. However, a time traveler comes back from the future and tries to have him killed before he can write a book and spread dangerously subversive beliefs.
Time Quarry is a 50 chapter novel, first published in Galaxy Science Fiction as a three part serial in its inaugural three issues in 1950.
Time Quarry
One life should be enough to give for humanity . . . but humanity wanted Asher Sutton to keep making the sacrifice indefinitely! Ch. 1-15.
Part 2 of a 3 part serial
It was an attractive offer. All Sutton had to do was modify an idea to live in wealth. But he had died for the truth once before! Ch. 16-34.
Conclusion of a 3-part serial
The war in time needed bigger battalions to decide victory—but those battalions all had to be composed of one man! Ch. 35-50.
Clifford Donald Simak (1904-1988) was born in Millville, Wisconsin and died, aged 83 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. From 1929 to 1976 he worked as a newspaper reporter and from 1939 he worked for the Minneapolis Star until his retirement, when he became a full-time science fiction writer.
Simak’s mature writing has been described as constrained, lyrical, intensely emotional, and pastoral. Time travel, and robots, androids and other near-humans have featured as recurring themes. His settings often involve a pastoral setting somewhat like his rural Midwestern upbringing.
Time Quarry has 10 illustrations.

Files:
- Simak-TimeQuarry.epub
Read Excerpt
Excerpt: Time Quarry
I
THE man came out of the twilight when the greenish-yellow of the sun’s last glow still lingered in the west. He paused at the edge of the patio and called. “Mr. Adams, is that you?”
The chair creaked as Christopher Adams shifted his weight, startled by the voice. Then he remembered.
A new neighbor had moved in across the meadow a day or two ago. Jonathon had told him . . . and Jonathon knew all the gossip within a hundred miles. Human gossip as well as android and robot gossip.
“Come on in,” said Adams. “Glad you dropped around.”
He hoped his voice sounded as hearty and neighborly as he had tried to make it. For he wasn’t glad. He was a little nettled, upset by this sudden shadow that came out of the twilight and walked across the patio.
This is my hour, he thought angrily. The one hour I give myself. The hour that I forget . . . forget the thousand problems that have to do with other star systems. Forget them and turn back to the green-blackness and the hush and the subtle sunset shadow-show that belong to my own planet. For here, on this patio, there are no mento-phone reports, no robot files, no galactic co-ordination conferences . . . no psychological intrigue, no alien reaction charts. Nothing complicated or mysterious.
With half his mind, he knew the stranger had come across the patio and was reaching out a hand for a chair to sit in; and with the other half, once again, he wondered about the blackened bodies lying on the river bank on far-off Aldebaran XII, and the twisted machine that was wrapped around the tree.
Three humans had died there . . . three humans and two androids, and androids were almost human, different only in that they were manufactured instead of born. And humans must not die by violence unless it be by the violence of another human. Even then it must be on the field of honor, with all the formality and technicality of the code duello, or in the less polished affairs of revenge or execution.
For human life was sacrosanct. It had to be or there’d be no human life. Man was so pitifully outnumbered.
Violence or accident?
And accident was ridiculous.
There were few accidents, almost none at all. The near-perfection of mechanical performance, the almost human intelligence and reactions of machines to any known danger, long ago had cut accidents to an almost non-existent figure.
No modern machine would be crude enough to crash into a tree. A more subtle, less apparent danger, maybe. But never a tree.
So it must be violence.
And it could not be human violence, for human violence would have advertised the fact. Human violence had nothing to fear . . . there was no recourse to law, scarcely a moral code to which a human killer would be answerable.
THREE humans dead, fifty light years distant, and it became a thing of great importance to a man sitting on his patio on Earth. A thing of prime importance, for no human must die by other hands than human without a terrible vengeance. Human life must not be taken without a monstrous price anywhere in the galaxy, or the human race would end forever, and the great galactic brotherhood of intelligence would plummet down into the darkness and the distance that had scattered it before.
Adams slumped lower in his chair, forcing himself to relax, furious at himself for thinking . . . for it was his rule that in this time of twilight he thought of nothing . . . or as close to nothing as his restless mind could manage.
The stranger’s voice seemed to come from far away and yet Adams knew he was sitting at his side.
“Nice evening,” the stranger said.
Adams chuckled. “The evenings are always nice. The Weather boys don’t let it rain until later on, when everyone’s asleep.”
In a thicket down the hill, a thrush struck up its evensong and the liquid notes ran like a quieting hand across a drowsing world. Along the creek a frog or two were trying out their throats. Far away, in some dim other-world, a whip-poor-will began his chugging question. Across the meadow and up the climbing hills, the lights came on in houses here and there.
“This is the best part of the day,” said Adams.
HE DROPPED his hand into his pocket, brought out tobacco pouch and pipe. “Smoke?”
The stranger shook his head. “As a matter of fact, I am here on business.”
Adams’ voice turned crisp. “See me in the morning, then. I don’t do business after hours.”
The stranger said softly: “It’s about Asher Sutton.”
Adams’ body tensed and his fingers shook as he filled his pipe. He was glad that it was dark so the stranger could not see.
“Sutton will be coming back,” the stranger said.
Adams shook his head. “No chance. He went out twenty years ago.”
“You haven’t crossed him off?”
“No,” said Adams slowly. “He still is on the payroll, if that is what you mean.”
“Why?” asked the man. “Why do you keep him on?”
Adams tamped the tobacco in the bowl, considering. “Sentiment, I guess. Faith in Asher Sutton. Although the faith is running out.”
“Just five days from now,” the stranger said, “Sutton will come back.” He paused a moment, then added: “Early in the morning.”
“There’s no way you could know a thing like that.”
“But I do. It’s recorded fact.”
Adams snorted. “It hasn’t happened yet.”
“In my time it has.”
Adams jerked upright in his chair. “In your time?”
“Yes,” said the stranger quietly. “You see, Mr. Adams, I am your successor.”
“Look here, young man. . . .”
“Not young man. I am half again your age. I am getting old.”
“I have no successor,” said Adams coldly. “There’s been no talk of one. I’m good for another hundred years. Maybe more than that.”
“Yes,” the stranger said, “for more than a hundred years. For much more than that.”
Adams leaned back quietly in his chair. He put his pipe in his mouth and lit it with a hand that was suddenly steady.
“Let’s take this easy,” he said. “You say you are my successor . . . that you took over my job after I quit or died. That means you came out of the future. Not that I believe you for a moment, of course. But just for argument. . . .”
“There was a news item the other day,” the stranger said. “About a man named Michaelson who claimed he went into the future.”
“I read that. One second! How could a man know he went one second into time? How could he measure it and know? What difference would it make?”
“None,” the stranger agreed. “Not the first time. But the next time he will go into the future five seconds. Five seconds, Mr. Adams. Five tickings of the clock. The space of one short breath. There must be a starting point for all things.”
“Time travel?”
The stranger nodded.
“I don’t believe it,” Adams said. “In the last five thousand years we have conquered the galaxy. . . .”
“Conquer is not the right word, Mr. Adams.”
“Well, taken over, then. Moved in. However you wish it. And we have found strange things. Stranger things than we ever dreamed. But never time travel.” He waved his hand at the stars. “In all that space out there, no one had time travel. No one.”
“You have it now,” the stranger’ said. “Since two weeks ago. Michaelson went into time, one second into time. A start. That is all that’s needed.”
“All right,” said Adams. “Let us say you are the man who in a hundred years or so will take my place. Let’s pretend you traveled back in time. Then why come here?”
“To tell you that Asher Sutton will return.”
“I would know it when he came,” said Adams. “Why must I know now?”
“When he returns,” the stranger said, “Sutton must be killed.”
Excerpt From: Clifford D. Simak. “Time Quarry.”
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