Professor Arthur Frost has a small but willing class of students who explore elsewhere and
elsewhen.
Most people think of time as a track that they run on from birth to death as inexorably
as a train follows its rails—they feel instinctively that time follows a straight line,
the past lying behind, the future lying in front. Now I have reason to believe—to
know—that time is analogous to a surface rather than a line, and a rolling hilly
surface at that. Think of this track we follow over the surface of time as a winding road
cut through hills. Every little way the road branches and the branches follow side
canyons. At these branches the crucial decisions of your life take place. You can turn
right or left into entirely different futures. Occasionally there is a switchback where
one can scramble up or down a bank and skip over a few thousand or million years—if you
don’t have your eyes so fixed on the road that you miss the short cut.