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"The Seesaw" is a 7500-word short story by A. E. Van Vogt, about a man from the present who enters a gun shop from the future. The story was first published in the July, 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

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 streetcorner magician is performing a trick, and the crowd is amazed to see a strange building materialize behind him. A sign on the building reads

A policeman tries to enter, but finds the door locked. A reporter, Chris McAllister enters the building, and then exits a short time later, “in a dazed condition.”

When McAllister entered the shop, a woman inside, Lystra, at first thought he was a customer wanting to buy a gun. But then she realized that things were very wrong. She and her father explained to McAllister that in fact this shop existed on an Earth of the future—about 5000 years into the future. They are at first afraid that McAllister might have been sent by “her”—a woman “who lusted for unlimited power; and who, to attain tyranny, must necessarily seek first to destroy us.” She has sent an army of invisible soldiers to destroy the gun shop, powered by a vast building located nearby, and only now have Lystra and her father realized the enemy soldiers were there (the appearance of McAllister showed them that something was wrong.) Soon, Lystra’s father and his cohorts devise what even they consider a desperate scheme to stave off defeat.

By travelling through time, McAllister’s body is now bathed in a dangerous amount of energy. If he stepped out the door of the gun shop, he could conceivably blow up the city, or even the entire Earth. They will put McAllister inside an insulated, invisible suit, and send him back to his own time, 1941. His body, and the temporal energy it contains, will act like one end of a pendulum, propelling the invisible army’s energy source forward in time a few weeks, which will give the gunmakers, hopefully, enough time to find a defense against the invisible army. McAllister realizes how dangerous this plan is, and so Lystra’s father and his men force the insulation suit on him and then push him out the door, and back into the year 1941.

Returning to his own time, it seems to others that McAllister simply entered and exited the strange building. But now McAllister must find some scientists who will understand his predicament, since if he just takes off the invisible suit, the temporal energy will cause an explosion. He goes off to find someone to help, but soon finds himself being thrust forward in time to a distant future, and then backward in time to the distant past, then forward and back, like on a seesaw. He realizes that the enemy soldiers' power source must be on the other end of the seesaw.

There remained the mechanical law that forces must balance.

Somewhere, sometime, a balance would be struck….

On, on, on the seesaw flashed; the world on the one hand grew bright with youth, and on the other dark with fantastic age.

Infinity yawned blackly ahead.

Quite suddenly it came to him that he knew where the seesaw would stop. It would end in the very remote past, with the release of the stupendous temporal energy he had been accumulating with each of those monstrous swings.

He would not witness, but he would cause, the formation of the planets.

Additional Notes

This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 3 (1941). A. E. Van Vogt wrote two sequals to this story: "The Weapon Makers", and "The Weapon Shops of Isher".