Yesterday's Revenge

In Short

Set in a future following decades of devastating global warfare, H. L. Nichols's science fiction story follows an unnamed dictator known as the Master, who rules a rebuilding planet through absolute technological terror and a vast army of robots. When a broken and grieving technician named Heidkamp presents him with a machine capable of viewing the past, the Master becomes consumed by a passionate desire for a young woman seen in 1940s America. The book has endured as a sharp exploration of tyranny, hubris, and the vulnerability of absolute power.

The Story

The story opens in the Serene Tower, where the Master sits in his floating Room of Power, confident in his total dominion over the Earth through robots, spies, and brutal executions. Despite his immense power, he harbors a deep, secret fear of the hate-soaked world beneath him. This routine is disrupted when Technician Heidkamp requests an audience to demonstrate the Time Visor, a device built from the recovered notes of a twentieth-century scientist named Dr. Louis Foster. After the Director of Precautions inspects the machine, Heidkamp presents it to the Master, who uses it to peer backward through a spiral of time into the year 1940. Looking down through the visor into the village of Nyack, the Master catches sight of a golden-haired girl with a fearless expression, standing on a lawn before a white house.

The initial viewing is interrupted by a massive, violent thunderstorm that tests the city's weather controls and triggers the Master's latent terror that nature and science might slip from his grasp. Enraged and captivated, the Master orders Heidkamp to construct a physical time trap capable of bringing the girl forward into the future from 1940 so she can be his. Heidkamp, driven by a hidden hatred because his brother died in the Master's wars and his daughter committed suicide due to the regime's cruelty, obeys on the surface. While the Master broods and monitors the girl's daily life through the visor alongside her tall, blonde companion, Heidkamp labors day and night in a vault beneath the tower to build the transport cage.

On the twenty-eighth day, Heidkamp announces that the machine is ready. The Master descends from his tower for the first time in months, accompanied by his robots carrying the telepathic controls. In the laboratory, the Master watches via a linked visor as the girl investigates a pile of museum-quality gems used as bait. When she steps inside the invisible force screen, Heidkamp triggers the switch, whisking her forward through time. As she materializes inside the glowing orange cylinder, the Master abandons all caution, hurls himself into the trap, and seizes her by the hair. Seizing his opportunity, the quiet Heidkamp steps forward, closes the cell door, and reverses the time trap's destination. Through the visor, Heidkamp watches the Master materialize on the 1940s lawn, where he is immediately confronted and seized by the girl's giant human lover. Methodically and deliberately, Heidkamp takes an iron bar and smashes the entire time machine, leaving the tyrant trapped forever in the past while the silent robots wait in vain for commands that will never come.

How It Unfolds

• The Peace of Fear — The narrative establishes a scarred Earth ruled by a tyrannical Master who relies on relentless terror, robots, and an impenetrable tower to maintain his global dictatorship.
• The Time Visor — Technician Heidkamp demonstrates a miraculous viewing instrument based on rediscovered twentieth-century physics, allowing the Master to peer back sixty-six years into 1940s America.
• The Vision on the Lawn — Through the visor, the Master becomes transfixed by a young woman with a fearless demeanor, sparking an obsessive and irrational passion that overrides his profound fear.
• The Impossible Demand — Driven mad by desire, the Master commands Heidkamp to build a functional time trap within thirty days to physically transport the woman into the future.
• The Trap Springs — Heidkamp completes the machine using glittering museum gems as bait, successfully luring the woman into a force field while concealing a lethal counter-plot.
• The Final Justice — When the Master lunges into the time cage after the girl, Heidkamp seals the door, reverses the coordinates to send him back to 1940, and smashes the machinery.

The People

• The Master is the supreme dictator of the world, driven by a lust for absolute control and a paralyzing, hidden fear of revolt. He wants total subjugation of humanity and, eventually, possession of the woman from the past; his arrogance and obsessive desires ultimately blind him to betrayal and lead directly to his downfall.
• Technician Heidkamp is a brilliant, middle-aged scientist with a gray, lined face and desolate eyes, motivated by a quiet, consuming hatred born from the tragic deaths of his brother and daughter under the regime. Nothing stands in the way of his determination to destroy the tyrant, and he ends up executing a precise, unhesitating revenge.
• The Girl is an anonymous young woman from 1940 living in Nyack, characterized by pure beauty, blue eyes, and fearless independence. She wants simple human connection with her companion, remains entirely oblivious to the future tyrant's gaze, and becomes an unwitting catalyst for his destruction.

In Its Own Voice

War! Years and decades of slaughter and hate and retrogression, of men against men, machines against machines, machines against men, in an ever quickening tempo of destruction.

The book begins with a sweeping, rhythmic catalog of humanity's continuous descent into planetary warfare.

The core of the visor is an ordinary electrically magnifying binocular, with stabilizers.

Technician Heidkamp dryly explains the practical mechanical foundation behind his seemingly impossible scientific miracle.

An inarticulate cry of joy burst from the lips of the Master.

The dictator completely loses his characteristic composure and caution the moment his obsession is brought within his physical reach.

What It's Really About

The story investigates the inherent instability of totalitarian power, suggesting that absolute tyrannies are ultimately vulnerable to the very human passions and griefs they attempt to crush. It examines the relationship between science and state control, questioning whether technological advancement serves liberation or enslavement. Furthermore, it plays with the concept of time as a cyclical barrier rather than a straight line, using the contrast between a sterile, over-engineered future and a vibrant, free past to critique how societies lose their humanity under the weight of mechanized warfare and authoritarian rule.

Why Read It Today

Readers who love classic mid-century science fiction featuring crisp plotting, grim dictatorships, and clever reversals of fortune will find this short story deeply rewarding. It reads like an intense psychological chess match between an arrogant autocrat and a deceptively compliant intellectual. The prose carries a stark, rhythmic cadence that captures the suffocating atmosphere of a high-tech police state, contrasting sharply with the pastoral innocence of 1940s America viewed through the visor. While the period attitudes reflect mid-century pulp conventions—such as the disposable treatment of background characters and straightforward gender dynamics typical of the era's magazines—the taut pacing prevents these elements from bogging down the narrative. What stays with you is the striking final image of an omnipotent dictator reduced to helplessness, trapped in a simpler time by his own uncontrolled hungers while his faithful, unthinking machines wait in an empty room.