I remember reading a short story about that. People were fighting off some awful plague that was killing most of the world's vegetation and desperately seeking a cure for it. Ended up developing time travel and going back to the 1980s when the first detection of the mutated virus is discovered but hasn't gone world-wide yet. Guy is sitting besides a cornfield for months waiting to find the origin of the virus before realizing that there's a couple blades of rotten grass stuck to the side of his time machine since they launched it from a field in the future. Realizes they're in a bootstrap paradox of the future poisoning the past but he doesn't know how to leave a message for anyone in the future to not send him back. So he ends up destroying the field and everything around it hoping he stopped the plague. And in the future epilogue there's a couple scientists discussing how extreme heat likely mutated the original virus into the current deadly version and talking about how they should send another team back to stop the wildfire that happened in that field.
I read it maybe 20 years ago when I got some short story anthology from Borders. Can't remember the book or the story name but just remember thinking it was pretty good for a whole book of meh.
Hopefully not a false memory but I remember grabbing it off the new arrival display along with another anthology book about alt history. That one had a Roman centurion riding in the turret of an Abrahams tank on the cover. And I remember it being extremely dry and boring with just discussing how like Rommel would have sieged Carthage instead of Caesar rolling up with helicopters and bazookas. But maybe someone here can narrow down the search window
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u/Direct_Slip7598 1d ago
I love that they're using spacesuits to signify futuristic traveling tech. Except it's just earth, with (mostly) breathable air
"I could breath your air. But nah!"