Scrambled World

Redskins! Boston tealeggers! Jeep men! Time traveler Devin Orth clutched his temples, battling insanity. Some genius had waved a wand over Terran history and produced a—
The sun was dying. About its sullen shadow-streaked red globe thousands of miniature artificial worlds clustered like a swarm of night-chilled midges. So thickly did they hug the great globe of dulling flame that it seemed Sol had acquired an outer husk of interlocked asteroids and moonlets.
Of all the planets and their satellites only Earth remained—a shrunken and changed planet. And Earth too had shifted its orbit until it now swung but a few million miles from its molten primary.
In the huge ovoid of metal that was the Time Bubble the three men making up its crew had by now grown accustomed to the changes that three million years had brought to the solar system. They had expected great changes—and found them. This was to be their first stop in their time quest for an efficient shield against the deadly radiations of atomic disintegration's side effects.
Devin Orth, the lean, dark-haired young scientist sharing the control blister with his employer and friend, Norris Horn, studied the expanding green wilderness of what had once been northern Ohio. He turned to the big bald man in whose brain the plans for the time spanner had been born.
The continents are there, he said unbelieving, almost exactly as we left them. And yet Earth is smaller. Its diameter has dwindled more than a thousand miles!
Horn's broad thick body quivered as he loosed a volcanic chuckle.
I know, he said. And the oceans, big though they are, are probably very shallow. A thousand feet at the most. Water will be growing precious.
But, puzzled Orth, why are there no cities and why have the continents changed so little? Surely three million years....
I'd say the inhabitants of those small globes near the sun, suggested Horn, are descendants of Earthmen. They have used their superb command of science to make of Earth a beautiful park or preserve as it was in our own primitive age.