“Breakfast at Twilight” January 1953

Tim McLean and his family sit around the breakfast table on what seems to be a typical morning. When Earl returns from his attempt to go to school, though, he tells the family soldiers prevented him. It turns out the foggy weather was actually radioactive dust. The city has been destroyed. Soldiers come to the house and are shocked to find a woman, children, and food. A political commission comes to question them. It’s 1980. Some type of bomb pulled the McLean’s house several years into the future, when the so-called Cold War has heated up. Actually, it was always going on somewhere, starting with Korea, until finally bombs were falling in the US. The family has to decide whether to be separated––the husband to the army, the wife to a labor camp, the children to re-education centers––and remain in a paranoid society where books are burned and war is constant, or stay in the house and hope another blast sends them back to their own time. They decide to stay. The bombs fall again and gradually they come to under rubble in their basement, back in the old city before the war. Police and neighbors cannot understand what could have happened. One neighbor suggests it was the water heater. After considering that war will come regardless in several years, and there is no way he can explain or alter this, Tim McLean says it was the water heater. In the context of the future war and the prevalent fear of war with the Soviets at the time, his final words, ostensibly about the water heater, are rather poignant: “I should have had it looked at. Before it was too late.”