The Last of the Time Machines and It’s Paradise, by God!

The Last of the Time Machines describes a machine that can pick up traces of the earth’s atmosphere ‘recorded’ on its surroundings – as in a tape-recorder – but to use it one must work in real time. Moreover, travel in it is limited by modern construction and to those places it can reach, so it must be provided with wheels and a scissor-lift to raise it to upper storeys. With miniaturization anyone can have one, and the police use it for solving crimes. But this creates such chaos on the roads that it is finally banned, except for its inventor, who is allowed to keep his own, using it for fulltime research into his two major questions about the past. 

In It’s Paradise, by God!, angels in Heaven – incarnations of historical figures – must repeatedly go down to Earth to play through past history, or God, The Old Man, will become upset. They try to revolt by ‘learning their parts’ wrongly, but God tricks them with a special entertainment he has devised.