OK, it’s time for me to try one of these. I was in a weird “where are all the time travelers” conversation and was trying to remember the details of a story I read once and now I’m trying to track it down again from vague memories.
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I think it was a story in a collection, not a novel. Possibly in a magazine. I probably read it in the 1970s (though possibly as late as the mid-1980s but certainly no later than that).
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The basic story was that a few people (maybe just two) had invented a time machine and gone forward in time. They found themselves in a dystopian future with the requisite evil government and police state.
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At least one of them falls in with a woman who is part of a resistance movement. Something happened to the other traveler(s); they are captured or killed or something.
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The government has specific laws against time travel and tries to find and capture travelers.
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As part of this they can somehow erect time “barricades” or “barriers” that prevent time machines from passing through the time they are erected. At one point in the story they set off one of these barriers and dozens of time machines appear; any time machine starting in the future and trying to go further into the past gets stopped by the barrier and appears at that time.
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The barrier is erected during some rally or demonstration or something; some big crowded event.
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At the end they somehow realize that all of the newly trapped time travelers come from a limited time in the future and that this implies that there is another barrier further in the future.
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I seem to remember the last line is something like “To the moment after the next barricade!”
This came up in answer to the question “Where are all the time travelers?” The “time barricades” in the story would answer that but I can’t remember if they ever actually used that explanation in the story. Of course I couldn’t remember any other details like the name of the story or who wrote it, so here I am. Ring any bells for anyone?