The Search
- by A. E. van Vogt
- Novelette
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “The Search” by A. E. van Vogt, Astounding, January 1943.
When salesman Ralph Carson Drake tries to recover his missing memory of the past two weeks, he discovers he had interactions with three people: a woman named Selanie Johns who sold remarkable futuristic devices for one dollar, her father, and an old gray-eyed man who is feared by Selanie and her father.
Van Vogt combined this with two other stories and a little fix-up material for his 1970 publication of Quest for the Future.
Van Vogt combined this with two other stories and a little fix-up material for his 1970 publication of Quest for the Future.
—Michael Main
The Palace of Immortality was built in an eddy of time, the only known Reverse, or Immortality, Drift in the Earth Time Stream
Tags
(11)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1600 to 1699: early western America, in 1650
- Circa AD 1940 to 1949: starting time, in the USA during World War II
- Timeline Models
- Outside of Time: The Palace of Immortality, in “an eddy of time.”
- Time Travel Methods
- Innate Time Travelers: “They can go through time at will. [. . .] There are [. . .] about three thousand of them. They were all born over a period of five hundred years beginning in the twentieth century; the strangest thing of all is that every one of them originated in a single, small district of the United States, around the towns of Kissling, Inchney and particularly in an infinitesmal farming community called Piffer’s Road.”
- Themes
- Cannot Return to Where You Already Exist: “If instead of entering the trailer, you walked off down the road to resume your life, in one week you would reach the time where your earlier self was in the hospital. You would vanish, disintegrate.”
- Fix History!: “[The Possessors] are trying to do something about the terrible mistakes of Man and Nature. They’ve made a marvelous science of their great gift, and they use it like beneficial gods.”
- Long Life: The backward aging in the Palace of Immortality makes the Possessors effectively immortal.
- Time Corps: the Possessors
- Unusual Aging: “You’ll have to stay more at the palace, reversing your age, while I go to Earth and add a few years to mine.”
- Fictional Tags
- Parallel Universes or Dimensions: We have no idea how to classify the “probability worlds” much less the “personal probability worlds” and the “almost perfect 290A,” so let’s just call them parallel universes for now.
- Groupings
Variants
(1)
- “The Search” by A. E. van Vogt, Astounding, January 1943.
Translations
(7)
- Dutch.
“Sporen in de tijdstroom” [Travels in the stream of time] by A. E. van Vogt, in De volmaakte wens by A. E. van Vogt (Bruna, 1976). - French.
“La quête” [The quest] by A. E. van Vogt, in Au-delà du néant / Destination univers by A. E. van Vogt (OPTA, June 1969). - German.
“Die Suche nach dem Gedächtnis” [The search for memory] by A. E. van Vogt, in Bis in die Unendlichkeit by A. E. van Vogt (Moewig, December 1964). - Italian.
“La ricerca” [The search] by A. E. van Vogt, in Destinazione Universo by A. E. van Vogt (Editrice Nord, November 1979). - Italian.
““Otto giorni prima”” [“Eight days before”] by A. E. van Vogt, in Cosmo 95, 15 March 1962. - Japanese.
“消されし時を求めて” [In search of time to be erased], as by A・E・ヴァン・ヴォクト, in 1940 年代―星ねずみ, edited by 中村融 [Nakamura Tohru] and 山岸真 [Yamagishi Makoto] (河出書房新社, November 2000). - Romanian.
“Căutarea” [The quest] by A. E. van Vogt, in Destinația Univers by A. E. van Vogt (Editura RAO, 1994).
Derived Works
(1)
- Quest for the Future by A. E. van Vogt (July 1970).