Tally, if you hear me, come in and build the rest.
Sorry. Not Harry. Name is Ellen Abbot. Female. 26 years old. Year 2442. Five feet ten
inches tall. Blonde hair, blue eyes—semantician and dimensional research expert. Sorry.
Not Harry.
I’ve called you because I feel Tom Wolfe’s the man, the necessary man, to write of
space, of time, huge things like nebulae and galactic war, meteors and planets, all the
dark things he loved and put on paper were like this. He was born out of his time. He
needed really big things to play with and never found them on
Earth. He should have been born this afternoon instead of one hundred thousand mornings
ago.
How can you prove who is from the Past, who from the Future?
The inhabitants of the future resent you two hiding on a tropical isle, as it were, while
they drop off the cliff into hell. Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know
that others die with them. It is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the
grave. I am the guardian of their collective resentment against you two.
And those older people seated with the children. Mothers, fathers, they called them. Oh,
that was strange.
He heard the voice and turned to see who had called him. There on top of a metal slide, a
boy of some nine years was waving. “Hello, Charlie . .
. !”
This was not the first speculation on small changes in the past causing big changes now (for example, Tenn’s “Me, Myself, and I”), but I wonder whether this was the first time that sensitive dependence on initial conditions was expressed in terms of a single butterfly.
Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!
Consider an attic. Its very atmosphere is Time. It deals in other years, the cocoons and
chrysalises of another age. All the bureau drawers are little coffins where a thousand
yesterdays lie in state. Oh, the attic’s a dark, friendly place, full of Time, and if
you stand in the very center of it, straight and tall, squinting your eyes, and thinking
and thinking, and smelling the Past, and putting out your hands to feel of Long ago, why,
it. . .
It was a fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness, and this place was no man’s place
and there was no year or hour at all, but only these men in a faceless emptiness of
sudden frost, storm, and white thunder which moved behind the great falling pane of green
glass that was the lightning.
War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose al the time, and the one who loses
last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but
the end of it.
Step by step, frame by frame of film, stop motion by stop motion, he, Terwilliger, had
run his beasts through their postures, moved each a fraction of an inch, photographed
them, moved them another hair, photographed them, for hours and days and months.
On the way there, with not one sound, the dog passed away. Died on the front seat—as if
he knew. . . and knowing, picked the better way.
I tossed the few bits of gravel and did the thing that had never been done, ever in my
life.
Me, thought the young man. Why, that old man is . .
. me.
What can I do to save us from ourselves? How to save my friends, my city, my state, my
country, the entire world from this obsession with doom? Well, it
was in my library late one night that my hand, searching along shelves, touched at last
on an old and beloved book by H. G. Wells. His time device called, ghostlike, down
the years. I heard! I understood. I truly listened. Then I blueprinted. I built. I
traveled [. . .]
Perhaps Ralph was meant to be a ghost bully, perhaps the curly haired boy is young Charlie, perhaps Charlie switches bodies with his own son, or perhaps there’s time travel invovled. We doubt that even Captain Kirk could sort out all those perhapses in this TV version of Ray Bradbury’s story starring William Shatner. But clarity can be had if you read the original story, which takes about the same amount of time as watching the TV episode but shows the rich inner life of Charles Underwood and leaves no ambiguity about what’s up with “Ralph.”
Ralph? The bully. When I was a kid, he used to wait for me on the corner every day.
My beauties. Not alive, but alive. Dead, but not dead. Clay and then liquid rubber. Yes,
oh yes. I moved you and then frame by frame photographed you.
If I finish it, will you come?
Travis: We might destroy a roach—or a flower, even—and
destroy an important link in the species.
Eckles: So?
We are one, the same person: Jonathan Hughes.
Stiles: For years I brooded on it. I was in complete despair,
and then one night, I was rereading H. G. Wells and his wonderful time machine, and
then it struck me. “Eureka!” I cried, “I’ve found it. This [pounds book in hand]
is my blueprint.”
Old Doug: Doug, Doug. . .
. Come on out and play.
You do not build a time machine unless you know where you are going.
A butterfly caused all this?