Catherine L. MOORE collaborated with her husband and fellow writer Henry KUTTNER to an extent that will never be completely determined.
Most of their combined work appeared under his
name or under one of their numerous pseudonyms.
This novelette was credited as a collaboration between the two, but it is now considered likely that
Moore wrote all or at least the largest part of the
story.
Oliver Wilson is a landlord who grows increasingly unhappy with his newest batch of tenants.
They are foreigners, clearly, although their origins
are somewhat unclear, and they seem peculiar in
various ways inconsistent with their apparent
background. At times they fail to recognize objects
that should be commonplace, and they tend to be
secretive, making no effort to cultivate friendships
with anyone else, although neither are they unfriendly. They claim to be on vacation, but much
of their activity does not involve the normal
tourist attractions.
Wilson is drawn increasingly into their circle
by circumstance, and his list of questions grows
longer before he discovers the truth. The nearby
town is about to be devastated by a disaster, and
his guests are actually time travelers from some indeterminate future age who have come back to observe the catastrophe—and for amusement, rather
than as a scholarly pursuit. Wilson discovers the
truth too late, and his plan to tell the authorities
what happened so that they can watch for later
visits by voyeurs from the future is clearly doomed
to failure. The travelers themselves appear rather
careless in concealing their secrets, presumably because they understand that time is immutable and
that nothing they do can possibly affect the course
of events to follow. Many other authors have written stories of visitors from the future, but few have
ever approached the quality of this early, bittersweet tale of humanity’s ability to transform
tragedy into entertainment.
The novelette was filmed with some success as
Disaster in Time (1992). “In Another Country”
(1989) by Robert SILVERBERG is a sequel to the
original story in which a time traveler breaks one
of the rules by interfering with the past.