The Very Slow Time Machine
In 1985, a small impenetrable living pod appears out of nothing at the National Physics
Laboratory. A window on one side shows the pod’s occupant: a delirious man who grows
younger and saner through the years, although generally doing little other than sitting
and reading, leading the observers to conclude that his quarters are in fact a VSTM
taking him back through time at the rate of one year for each year of his life.
As of
writing this, I am only partway through my reading and wondering so many things: When the
man in the world at large who will eventually enter the machine realize that he is the
traveler? From his perspective, what happened to the machine (and him!) when it
materialized in 1985? (Ah! That question is answered shortly after it occurs to me.) For
that matter, why doesn’t he himself, while in the pod, already know that he will reach
1985? To what extent does his very appearance cause the technology that permits his trip
to occur? VCIS! (Very Cool Idea-Story!), although it offers little in plot or character.
Our passenger is the object of popular cults by now—a focus for finer feelings. In this
way his mere presence has drawn the world’s peoples closer together, cultivating
respect and dignity, pulling us back from the brink of war, liberating tens of thousands
from their concentration camps. These cults extend from purely fashionable
manifestations—shirts printed with his face, now neatly shaven in a Vandyke style;
rings and worry-beads made from galena crystals—through the architectural (octahedron
and cube meditation modules) to life-styles themselves: a Zen-like “sitting quietly,
doing nothing.”