A Race through Time
- by Donald Wandrei
- Novelette
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Time Phenomena
- English
- “A Race through Time” by Donald Wandrei, Astounding Stories, October 1933.
Evil Daniel kidnaps Ellen and takes her to the year 1,000,000 A.D. via metabolic speed-up! Not to worry. Good and compassionate Webster follows via relativistic time dilation!
—Michael Main
What I’ve done is to build a time-space traveler, working by atomic energy. Even as long ago as 1913, you know, Rutherford succeeded in partly breaking down the hydrogen atom. By 1933, others succeeded in partially breaking down atoms with high voltages of electricity. But they used up far more energy than they got back, or released. I’ve simply perfected the method to a point where, with an initial bombardment of fifty volts, I can break down one atom and get back thousands of times the energy I put in. There’s nothing strange or wonderful or miraculous about it. I don’t create energy of power from nothing. I simply liberate energy that already exists. Part of the power I use to break down another atom, and so on, while the rest is diverted to propel the torpedo by discharging through tubes—like a rocket. I’ve made one short experimental trip.
Tags
(9)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1950 to 1959: Web notes that he is in the year AD 1,001,950, exactly one million years after his starting point.
- Far Future: In the year AD one million: “They emerged, finally, upon the site where New York had risen in its vastness, and halted in dismay. A smooth plain rolled before them; a plain on which no building or habitation remained.”
- Time Travel Methods
- Time Ships: “a long torpedolike object of silvery and symmetric beauty”
- Themes
- Altered Metabolic Rates: Similar to Web, Daniel also has one-way travel to the future, but his travel is based on a drug that greatly slows his metobolic rate.
- Relativistic Time Dilation: The crux of Web’s time travel seems to be in special relativity: He’ll travel fast and return centuries later without much aging himself. But he seems to think this also involves going faster than light—though only as an extension of relativity and not in the usual returned-on-the-previous-night manner.
- Fictional Tags
- Mad Scientists: “Daniels, the evil genius, ruled by personal ambition and the desire for power.”
- Groupings
Variants
(1)
- “A Race through Time” by Donald Wandrei, Astounding Stories, October 1933.