Flight from Tomorrow

A dictator falls from power and flees into the past, but the past is our present, and he arrives not as a conqueror but as a plague carrier. Hradzka, ruler of a far-future empire, escapes his revolution by launching himself backward through time, only to crash in the First Century of the Atomic Era, our twentieth century. Stripped of his armies and technology, hiding among people he considers savages, he poses as a deaf-mute while plotting his return to dominance. But he carries something far more dangerous than ambitions of conquest: the microbiome of his own era, pathogens to which these "primitive" people have no immunity. As plague spreads and the locals begin to connecting the strange deaf-mute to their suffering, Hradzka discovers that history has a cruel sense of irony. The tyrant who fled a revolution finds himself once again surrounded by people rising against him. Piper's 1950 novelette is a brutal little machine: part time-travel paradox, part allegory about empire and its consequences, and all the cold satisfaction of watching a monster discover he's not as clever as he thinks.