The scene: A laboratory. Harvey stands atop a platform attempting to get a time machine’s monitor to come into focus while the window of opportunity remains open. Paul, the traveler, stands upon the projection platform. As they wait for a clear opportunity to travel, a discussion ensues:

Paul: Harvey… what’s the monitor picture now?

Harvey: Still distorted. And we’ve got six or seven minutes left.

H: What guarantee do you have that you’ll reach the point that you want?

P: No, guarantee at all. But if I fail, you simply mark off one man, one insignificant human, one frail, protesting member of the race. Let’s put it this way. If I do fail… if I end up in hell, limbo, or the cemetery… the responsibility is exclusively mine. You can rest easy on this fact.

H: Feeling pretty secure now, eh, Paul?

P: You sound… funereal, Harvey.

H: And I sound the way I feel. I’m helping you because you asked me to as a friend, Paul. I can give you efficency and dedication, but… enthusiasm I can’t dredge up even to the minutest degree.

P: No sense of adventure? No wonder at the unknown?

H: Some wonder. Some inquistiveness as to how a human being can place himself in such jeopardy…not only with willingness, but … with anticipation.

P: Jeopardy! Harvey, old friend, the jeopardy I face comes in shadow. Yours happens to be much more real. But of the two, there isn’t much choice. Did you… happen to drink milk this morning, Harvey? What was the strontium 90 content of the glass? And has it occurred to you that the things you’ve been eating over the last couple of years might have been turning your bones into sawdust? Oh, Harvey. Speak to me of jeopardy if you will, but don’t sound as if I have an exclusive franchise on the calculated risk… you and I both share this dubious distinction with several million of our peers who inhabit the 20th century.

H: And you don’t care for the 20th century.

P: I do not. I will now tell you as succinctly as possible how I classify the times. We live in a cesspool, a septic tank; a gigantic sewage complex in which runs the dregs, the filth, the misery-laden slop of the race of men. His hatreds, his prejudices, his passions and his violence. And the keeper of this sewer? Man. He is a scientifically advanced monkey who walks upright and with eyes wide open into an abyss of his own making. His bombs, his fallout, his poisons, his radioactivity. Everything he designs as an art for dying is his excuse for living.”

— an anonymous informant ( aka Richard Matheson writing for The Twilight Zone, 1963: There’s No Time Like the Past )