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"Brooklyn Project" is a short story by William Tenn, about altering the past through time travel. The story was first published in the Fall, 1948 issue of Planet Stories.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

A totalitarian government has built a time machine, which they are now prepared to demonstrate. This government has dismissed the fears of doomsayers that claim such a machine is dangerous, and now they will demonstrate the machine to a selection of reporters. The machine sends a camera into the past; but the way this machine works is that it sends the camera back 4 billion years, then 2 billion years, then 1 billion years, cutting the period in half with each reverberation, and allowing the camera to take pictures of each epoch. But because the machine is changing the past each time it enters the past, with each reverberation the species of the government official changes, without his knowledge of course, until at last, with the machine quiet and the camera returned to the present, the government official presenting the machine to the reporters is a purple blob, talking to an audience of purple blobs, but still insisting that nothing has changed.

Reprints

This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948).