Books Dissecting The Dark Descent Everything Eventually Ends: “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” by Philip K. Dick A slippery story about time loops, endings, and perpetual mourning. By Sam Reader | Published on August 26, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post. When this column started two years ago, it was with an article about how things should begin. It’s only fitting that here, at the end of our thousand-page journey through Hartwell’s anthology, we end with a story about how things should end. “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” is all about endings, from its perpetually exhausted time travelers to its gut punch of a final paragraph (that unfortunately we will have to discuss). It’s about a horror familiar to anyone trapped in a situation they can’t leave or mired in the whorls of depression, stuck in their own slough of profound loneliness. “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” brings that question to a head—when given the choice, do you choose between the familiar cycle of pain and trauma, even if it’s damaging, or begin anew, knowing you’ll be facing the strange and unfamiliar? Addison Doug and his fellow tempunauts are dead. They died upon reentry when their time capsule exploded after only traveling a week into a journey that was meant to shoot them a century forward in time. Time travel being notoriously unreliable, they’re also alive; yanked from the timeline and forced to exist in a loop alongside their own deaths until everything catches up with them. Forced through funeral parades where they accompany their own coffins and confusing military meetings where they’re told they might die but no one’s sure when, they try to figure out how to make the best of their situation with the aid of two Russian chrononauts and Doug’s girlfriend Merry Lou. As they struggle with their new reality, an unnerving sense of déjà vu arises, and with it some disturbing questions: Have they all done this before? And if so, how will it all end? Things have to end eventually. “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” knows this. It’s not sad about this fact. In fact, the story finds its own moments of deadpan humor, like arguments over whether or not the tempunauts should be allowed to smile and wave at the public during their own funeral procession, or the weirdly informal conversations the three time travelers have with their superiors and minders. It’s wistful about things finally coming to a close for the three men, but Doug and his fellow tempunauts Benz and Crayne are mostly just tired, trying to play out the time they have left and not be consumed by dread. There’s a mystery to solve, but as Crayne says, “It’s not what you have to live for, it’s that you want to live to see it, to be there—that’s what’s so damn sad.” It’s sad because that ending will close a door, because it will change things forever and you’ll have to say goodbye to the old for good. Of the three of them, Addison Doug is the most clearly suffering, mentally and emotionally, from the effects of their situation. In contrast to more overwrought or dramatic depictions of mental illness, Doug is subdued. He’s described as looking like “God’s kneeling on his neck,” a perpetually tired man who simply wants to die. As it becomes clearer that he’s stuck in a time loop, that weariness only grows while those around him try to solve the mystery and come up with a solution. He very clearly wants it all to stop, but he also knows if it does, then he will have absolutely no way to deal with it. Doug is one of the most down-to-earth depictions of someone with chronic depression out there—presented bluntly, the grim resolution to keep going through the misery one knows while at the same time wanting “it all” to just stop is spot-on. Depression isn’t always sadness. Very often, it’s weariness, the feeling of being worn down and yet wanting to burrow deeper into that all-encompassing misery, even choosing it over the possibility of momentary joy or a more uncertain future. The more Doug learns about his situation, the more he meets it with indifference—not just because he’s lived through this multiple times before and can’t see any point to continuing, but because he’s so habituated to his perpetual tiredness that it feels inseparable from his sense of self. Which is exactly why he does what he does. In an effort to trigger the capsule’s explosion upon reentry and (supposedly) break the time loop keeping everyone in a weird pocket timeline of attending their own funerals and receiving perpetual, confused examinations, he lugs fifty pounds of Volkswagen parts into the capsule, blowing them up upon reentry. His hope is that the timeline will restart with them dead, and things will progress as normal. Doug convinces the much more emotionally stable Benz and Crayne that they can all leave the loop that way, and they drive off to the blast site to initiate the procedure… only for Doug to get a call from one of the eggheads explaining that a successful reentry will break the loop and restart the timeline. The added bonus, of course, being that none of the tempunauts will explode and die. Doug’s given an out, a way not to be perpetually exhausted. Finally, an escape! All he has to do is accept some kind of ending. And he doesn’t. He lies to Benz and Crayne so they’ll all blow up the capsule and restart the loop, and heads off for another week of perpetual mourning, grief, and exhaustion rather than exiting the timeline. The story closes on the image of Doug with his eyes closed, knowing that he’s chosen a perpetual hell over a possible escape, choosing the misery he knows rather than a chance of happiness. He feels comfort at reliving the one moment he was most content, watching his own body in a flag-draped coffin, telling himself that he’s given the world “the dreadful and weary miracle of eternal life.” The story’s single moment of pure horror after its earlier scenes of pathos and deadpan humor centers on one depressed man deciding he’d rather condemn the people he knows to hell rather than escaping and moving on into an uncertain future. By offering someone that power to progress and move on, then showing them choosing not to use it, Dick’s depiction of depression strikes me as one of the most horrifying and authentic I’ve ever read. It’s also to the point—the definitive ending is better than the awful living death of perpetual weariness. Which is where we part ways. The book was always going to close on Dissecting The Dark Descent (pun very much intended). After all, The Dark Descent is long, but it’s not infinite. It’s only fitting that the last column, this last missive from this unusual two-year close-reading spree, ends on the note it began—where “The Mist” was an ending Hartwell inexplicably used as a beginning, “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” is a plea for a definitive ending, telling us that we must bring things to a close so that everyone can move on, rather than lingering on in an endless twilight. As hard as this is to type, it’s time to say goodbye. With that in mind, I’d like to thank you all for taking this trip with me. I’d especially like to thank all the authors and critics who supported this project even at its strangest and most nascent form, Bridget and Sabine, my intrepid (and long-suffering) editors, everyone who commented or read or shared this weird expedition through a definitive work of horror fiction, and of course the late, lamented David G. Hartwell for crafting and curating what was for a time the definitive collection of horror stories. Unlike Addison Doug, I know all things must come to an end—the door has to close, the lights have to go out, and the book’s got to go back on the shelf. I’ll see you in the next one, hopefully. And now to turn it over to you. What are your thoughts on “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts”? And since this is our final column, please feel free to share your favorite articles, and stories from The Dark Descent—this comments section is your space.[end-mark] The post Everything Eventually Ends: “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” by Philip K. Dick appeared first on Reactor.