Dr. Salva Gordy survives the Three-Hour War, but his family and his city do not. Staring at a boiling anthill beside the radioactive smear that was Detroit, he decides to use his time machine to give another species the chance humanity wasted, with results he could not have predicted. It first appeared under the name James MacCreigh.
A sharp early Pohl story about atomic despair and evolution, from Planet Stories in 1949. Download the free EPUB.