A Little Something For Us Tempunauts is a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick. It was first published in Final Stage, 1975. Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... Philip K. Dick Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 — March 2, 1982), often known by his initials PKD, and sometimes by the pen name Richard Phillips, was an American science fiction writer and novelist who changed the genre profoundly. ... 1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1975 calendar). ...

US time travellers, called tempunauts, find that instead of travelling 100 years into the future, they have gone merely a few days. And in doing so, there are only too cogniscent of the fact that their return has been/will prove to be fatal, for there is a state procession being planned for them.

Addison Doug is one of the 'nauts, and he begins to believe that they are trapped (as is the rest of the Earth) in a closed time loop, doomed to forever repeat the period between their starting their trip and their (fatal) return. Having found out the cause of their fatal return journey, they have to decide whether to change or not to change their return journey in order to get out of the loop. Or does the loop exist merely in Addison's head?

Further trademark paranoia in terms of the media manipulation, and the Russian threat another dimension to the story. In popular culture, the term paranoia is usually used to describe excessive concern about ones own well-being, sometimes suggesting a person holds persecutory beliefs concerning a threat to themselves or their property and is often linked to a belief in conspiracy theories. ... The process of media manipulation is the way in which individuals or groups use various tricks -such as doing a big pile of poo- in dealing with the media in order to create an image of their side of an argument that is most favorable to the receiver. ...

Dick said:

"In this story I felt a vast weariness over the space program, which had thrilled us so at the start -- especially the first lunar landing -- and then had been forgotten and virtually shut down, a relic of history. I wondered, if time-travel became a 'program', would it suffer the same fate? Or was there an even worse possibility latent in it, within the very nature of the paradoxes of time-travel?" Human spaceflight is space exploration with a human crew, and possibly passengers (in contrast to unmanned space missions, which are remotely-controlled or robotic space probes). ...