Synopsis: When Professor Egen embarks on the creation of a time machine, he's scoffed by the scientific community. The government comes down hard on him, as well, sending in the police to stop him from continuing his work. He moves his work to a hidden location, but the army is sent to discover his hidden base.
A squad arrives at his base just in time to see him depart in his time machine.
He goes first to the year 2009 (which, incidentally, looks unrealistically futuristic from the vantage point of 2007), but finds it unsatisfactorily close to his own time period. He thus presses his machine further into the future by a hundred years, finding little difference on 2009. He goes still further, and sees more change.
Then he goes 50 more years in the future and discovers that most of Earth's human population is no longer present, but that those who remain are more akin to cave men than modern men.
He wonders fervantly what happened, and thinks the answer must lie in moving still further forward in time. He continues jumping and sees the world resembling early civilizations, then something approximating his own time period.
He is forced to stop jumping when he develops a massive headache and his time machine literally begins to melt. He's left with the single though that fate itself is intervening on his travels. "Man was never meant to know the future!" he surmises. "If he ever learns it, then fate itself takes the memory from him!"
With that one thought still dominating all others, he finds himself returned to the point in time when he first proposed creating a time machine.
Notes: This story is signed with one name: Ditko. It almost certainly is Steve Ditko, but it's unknown whether the credit was solely for the art or for the writing as well. He's thus entered below as an unconfirmed artist.
