“The Man From Yesterday” is a John Wyndham mystery. The story appeared in the v105, #2752, March 28, 1959 issue of John Bull. (Thanks for the scan, Bill.) I can find no mention of the story under another title in ISFDB or The Fiction Mags Index (my go-tos). I have scoured his story collections for any tale that begins with “On a day in late December of ….” (the date could be changed, of course). Nothing.
The plot of the story has the narrator, Reginald Aster, approached by an overly curious lawyer, Mr. Fratton of Cropthorne, Daggit & Howe, about a bequeathing of a large fortune. Aster admits that he only every met the man who left him a fortune once!
The recipient of the money reveals what happened later at the club. He met Sir Andrew Vincell on the street back in December. The old man seemed confused so Aster took him into a hotel bar for a few brandies. While there the old man seemed fascinated by his elderly appearance.
Vincell mentioned being hit by a trolley but the trolley tracks were pulled up thirty years ago. He mentioned living in Hart Street but that avenue has been renamed. Looking through his wallet, they see a photo of him with his children. They find a business card that says he is Sir Andrew Vincell of VinVinyll Plastics. The old man inquires “What is plastic?”
The narrator kindly explains everything he knows about the plastics industry, its history, types of plastic, chemical composition, etc. There is a home address, so Aster takes Sir Andrew to his residence. A phone call the next day says he has fully recovered. The narrator never much thought about the encounter since. He was surprised to hear from the lawyer.
It is the Fratton’s turn to reveal a few interesting details. The will that Sir Andrew wrote was seven years old but the one before that also had the same bequeath as did older wills. Looking at the newspaper, Vincell’s obituary spoke of how he had quit his job in an accounting firm to pursue the chemical formulas that made him rich. The old man promised he would not forget the kindness that Aster had done for him…
Wyndham wrote several stories around this time about time travel. “Chronoclasm” feels quite similar but in that story it is a woman of the future who visits the protagonist in the past. “Time Stops Today” or “Time Out” traps two couples in a dome of time. We don’t usually associate Wyndham with time travel, more often Wellsian alien invasion or space travel, but he did write some stories with that SF device.
The mystery here is why this particular story, which is not as developed as many of Wyndham’s better ones, has been forgotten? Why should the catalogues of his tales, the collections of his work, ignore this small but tasty piece? And why John Bull?
The weekly was the British version of The Saturday Evening Post, read on Sundays and containing fiction as well as news. Other famous authors (Wyndham had been famous as the author of The Day of the Triffids for eight years earlier) like Agatha Christie, H. E. Bates and Gerald Kersh published in John Bull. Wyndham would not have been out of place among these popular writers.
But why didn’t any US Science Fiction magazines grab the story? Having Wyndham’s name on the cover was worth a lesser entry from his catalogue. I suppose they simply did not know about it since it was published in a mainstream magazine in the UK.
A small mystery for the SF completist to solve…
