Science Fiction

But as I am determined to give ſuch Readers and all Men, ſo full, and fair, and convincing an Account of my ſelf and that celeſtial Spirit I receiv’d theſe Papers from, and to anſwer all Objections ſo entirely, as to put Ignorance, and even Malice it ſelf to Silence: I am confident, the ingenuous and candid part of the World, will ſoon throw off ſuch mean narrow ſpirited Suſpicions, as unjuſt and ungenerous.

It is amusing to look at the descriptions of manners as they existed in those times.

He was comfortably seated on a machine of English Make, the smoke of which enveloped him in clouds of fantastic shape, and on the instrument panel there was a daguerreotype from the workshops of M. le Chevalier. Maurice, a little alarmed at first at this sudden apparition, was reassured by his mild appearance. He looked boldly at the little visitor and asked him who he was.

To the Editors of the Lady’s Book:—

I have the honor of sending you, for your magazine, an article which I hope you will be able to comprehend rather more distinctly than I do myself. It is a translation, by my friend, Martin Van Buren Mavis, (sometimes called the “Toughkeepsie Seer,”) of an odd-looking MS. which I found, about a year ago, tightly corked up in a jug floating in the Mare Tenebrarum—a sea well described by the Nubian geographer, but seldom visited now-a-days, except for the transcendentalists and divers for crotchets.

If only we were still in the time of fairies and genies, maybe I could find one good enough to tell me what the world, or only France, or Paris, or even just the Tuileries Gardens was like, ten or twelve thousand years ago, more or less.

Just whisper to him that when he has an infinite number of cars with an infinitesimal difference in their lengths, he will have obtained that infinite speed for which he seems to yearn.

By this truly wonderful invention (exquisitely simple in its machinery, yet of surpassing power) the obstacle of Time is as effectually conquered as that of Space has been for the last generation by the Electric Telegraph; and future years—even, it is anticipated, future centuries—will be made to respond to our call as promptly and completely as do now the uttermost parts of the earth wherewith the magic wire has placed us in communication.

In the year one thousand nine hundred and fifty my dearest friend, John Malcolm Weir, the greatest chemist of his day, had given me the sleeping draught: it should tie up the senses—life itself—for an indefinite period; and when the appointed years were over life might again be awakened.

The hands were whirling around the dial from right to left with inconceivable rapidity. In this whirl we ourselves seemed to be borne along. Eternities seemed to contract into minutes while lifetimes were thrown off at every tick.

According to the view of things above adverted to, the different stages in the history of our race are not successive only, but are also co-existent and co-extensive with each other. Just as in a block of marble, there is contained, not one only, but every possible statue, though, of the whole number, only one at a time can be made evident to our senses; so, in a given region of space, any number of worlds can co-exist, each with its own population conscious of only that world, or set of phenomena, to which their ego is attuned.

—Poco á poco—argumentaba un sensato.—Si el Anacronópete conduce á deshacer lo hecho, á mi me pasrece que debemos felicitarnos porque eso no permite reparar nuestras faltas.

—Tiene usted razón—clamaba empotrado en un testero del coche un marido cansado de su mujer.—En cuanto se abra la línea al público, tomo yo un billete para la vispera de mi boda.

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“One step at a time,” argued a sensible voice. “If el Anacronópete aims to undo history, it seems to me that we must be congratulated as it allows us to amend our failures.”

“Quite right,” called a married man jammed into the front of the bus, thinking of his tiresome wife. “As soon as the ticket office opens to the public, I’m booking passage to the eve of my wedding.”

It would have been reason enough, had there been no other, for abolishing money, that its possession was no indication of rightful title to it. In the hands of the man who had stolen it or murdered for it, it was as good as in those which had earned it by industry. People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence and disinterestedness which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization.

Those who were there say that they saw Dr. Nebogipfel, standing in the toneless electric glare, on a peculiar erection of brass and ebony and ivory; and that he seemed to be smiling at them, half pityingly and half scornfully, as it is said martyrs are wont to smile.

You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transportation of epochs—and bodies?

‘Possibly not,’ said the Philosophical Inventor. ‘But now you begin to see the object of my investigations into the geometry of four dimensions. I have a vague inkling of a machine—’

As once the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and straightaway coveted them, even so Bertram Ingledew looked on Freda Monteith and saw at the first glance she was a woman to be desired, a soul high throned, very calm and beautiful.

I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud.

It was a case of the angels tumbling to the daughters of men. He saw at the first sight that she was a woman to be desired, a soul high-throned, very calm and dignified, yet scrumptious withal. Like the angels, he tumbled to her, and, falling from so great a height, was instantly mashed.

Space and Time are commensurable. To explore the universe by seeking knowledge of points in Space can be accomplished only through Time; and in order to measure Time quantitatively, we refer to Space intervals on the dial of a chronometer. Space and Time, being of the same nature, may be conceived of as different physical states of the same substance, or as differ ent modes of motion.

Know then that it is within my power to transfer you from the age in which we live, of which all the interest has for you been exhausted, to any other age that you may select, past or future.

Yes, I spent some little time in the islands. In fact, I am just on the point of going there now, and am very sorry I shall not see them again.

I sat down. “Give me the potion,” I said. “If the worst comes to the worst it will save having my hair cut, and that I think is one of the most hateful duties of a civilized man. How do you take the mixture?”

“He told me that the last time they experimented they put the pole on the roof of one of the big hotels here, and the batteries electrified all the water-supply, and”—he giggled—“the ladies got shocks when they took their baths.”

Although your enemy is within a dozen feet of you, Lumley, he will soon be a whole century behind, and you will be safe.

It does sound outlandish, when you think how big the world is. But what if ye go to the North Pole? Ain’t all the twenty-four meridians jammed up close together around that part of the globe? Ain’t it clear that if a feller’ll jest take a grip on the North Pole and go whirlin’ around it, he’ll be cutting meridians as fast as a hay-chopper? Won’t he see the sun getting left behind and whirlin’ the other way from what it does in nature? If the sun goes the other way round, ain’t it sure to unwind all the time that it’s been a-rollin’ up?

The doors and windows were opened, Sam and Mr. Jones walked out of the room, then to the depot purchased tickets and started for Chicago, but when the two men arrived at the depot, to Mr. Jones surprise, the ticket agent told him to get out of that waiting room or he would take a club to his head, and that pretty quick.

Wanted—A party of courageous men, experts in the various trades, to accompany a philanthropic gentleman on a mission of enlightenment to the Middle Ages. Single men only. References exchanged. An opportunity offers to construct anew the history of several benighted nations. If interested, call or write. Percival Tapscott, No. 198 Forty-Third Street.

I am not in the compass. I am a little unknown Wind, and I cross not Space but Time. If you will come with me I will take you not over countries but over centuries, not directly, but waywardly, and you may travel where you will.

The next of a series, interspersed of course with many “normal” stories, so to speak, was “My Time Annihilator,” something along the lines of H.G. Wells’ “Time-Machine,”—which, by the way, I had not at that time read. Wells is, of course, one of the most successful modern “science-fakers.” The skill wherewith he makes the impossible seem possible may well serve as a model for any aspirants in this line of endeavor.

Yes, Dejah Thoris, I too am a prisoner; my name is John Carter, and I claim Virginia, one of the United States of America, Earth, as my home; but why I am permitted to wear arms I do not know, nor was I aware that my regalia was that of a chieftain.

Dr. Alonzo Kelpie, author of “Time and Space and Their Limitations,” was a hunchback. Although a small man physically, intellectually he was a giant. To have him emerge thus unexpectedly through the dissolving mists of their environment was a seven-day wonder to Lumley, Kinch, McWilliams, Mortimer, and Ripley.

He had been an eavesdropper, and had come upon private information of a secret kind that he had no right to make use of, even that good might come—even to save life.

Far, far away, at the foot of a cliff, a Thunder Lizard—which must have been at least one hundred feet long—appeared out of the mists of forty million years.

Jules Verne, in his Tour Around the World in Eighty Days, had made the plot hinge on the fact that by circling the entire globe Mr. Fogg had gained one day. I also called to mind how, when European newspaper correspondents telegraphed to America, the message reached there five hours before it was sent. A childishly simple calculation showed that if a telegraph message was made to circle the whole globe, it would arrive twenty-four hours, or one calendar day, before it was sent. If then it were possible to telegraph twice around the globe, it would arrive two days before it was sent, and so on in proportion. If a message circled the globe 365 times, it would arrive one full year before it was despatched. 3650 times would anticipate 10 years, and 36,500 times would gain 100 years; and as to reach my wife of long ago I needed to go back 110 years, the problem would be solved if I could send a message around the globe 40,150 times without stopping. Of course, there would be a rectification to be made for the 27 leap years, so that the needed circlings would be 40,177.

Well, then, have you ever read anything by Wells? The ‘Time Machine,’ for instance?

In pursuance of this theory he strove sedulously to teach the ape to distinguish colors, to recognize and fashion geometrical patterns, and to do many of the clever things with blocks and tinted paper that four and five year olds do in the kindergartens. Each new accomplishment he claimed as a triumph and a further vidication of his theory. I had my doubts, although I was willing to concede that Claybourne was a good animal-trainer.

All this nobility stuff is bunk.

But the main point I desire to make is that this neutralization was to be effected by a combination of the ordinary wave impluse with the Callieri Cool Wave. The combination, you understand. It had never been tried on a large scale—it was a virgin experiment.

So the professor was given a free hand, and went below. It was past nine o’clock.

I remained on the bridge enjoying a cigar with the officer of the deck, and chatting over a coming boar hunt we were to have south of the canal during the coming weekend. we had been talking for perhaps ten minutes in the darkness of the bridge, with the black satin of the Caribbean spreading out ahead and about the ship, and the diamond stars projecting just above our heads as though ready for any plucking hand, when suddenly we found ourselves half blinded by a dazzling light in the west.

“Perhaps I ought to explain,” he continued. “You see, I’m a clockwork man.”

After wading through years of fruitless research and encountering failures enough to make the heart sick, I accidentally got into communication with an intelligence whose home was no single sphere but the universe, one to whom human time was nought, as were also human fears, joys, sorrows and emotions. The fortunes of mankind meant no more to him that thosee of a tribe of insects, one year swarming over the earth, the next swept out of existence.

He would not let me address him in the language intercession. “I am like you,” he said, “but of a different sphere and a different power. I am not immortal; nothing is immortal. Neither the Earth, the Sun, nor the God who made them. Everything is passing away, or rather, dissolving, to be re-fashioned into other forms.”

Nie zapominajcie, że to Francuzi, najwaleczniejszy naród europejski, że to są ludzie, których brawura i dzielność oślepia.

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Do not forget that the French, bravest among all the European nationalities, are a people blinded by their very own braggadocio and past prowess.

“Time,” said George, “why I can give you a definition of time. It’s what keeps everything from happening at once.”

It’s true enough, what they’ve told you, as far as we can tell it. As to theories of time and space, I know no more than you do. I used to think they were obvious. I’ve heard the Professor talk two nights a week for three years, and I’ve realised that it isn’t all quite as simple as it seemed, though I don’t get much further. But the next room’s a fact. We lay things down on the central slab, and the room goes dark, and we go back in two minutes, and it gets light again, and they’re still there. And the Professor says he’s projected them 500,000 years ahead in the interval, and they don’t look any the worse for the journey.

Held in its shapeless form were men, who hung helpless in its grasp.

Don Feromeno nodded and smiled. “Then let us assume that your purely imaginary aircraft is capable of traveling at the rate of 24,000 miles per hour or that, in an hour's time, you can circumnavigate the earth. In that case, starting from Lima at noon on Monday, and rushing eastward, you would arrive in Barcelona at 6.30 P. M. on Monday, though your watch would show it to be 12.15 P. M. You would reach Calcutta at 1 A. M. Tuesday, although still only 12.20 on Monday by your watch. At Hawaii you would find time had leaped back to 7.30 A. M. Monday, despite the fact that your watch showed 12.45 of the same day, and at 1 P. M. on Monday by your watch you would be back in Lima where the clocks would prove to that it was 2 P. M. despite the fact that you had been absent only one hour.

I know from what you have shown me already, that you come of a race which has lived only on the earth’s surface, and any cave or tunnel by which you enter it implies the approach to a confined and narrow space, so that when you attempt to visualise the condition of a race which lives under the surface, your imagination is of a cave, and not of a country.

Cannes told of his life in that far future year, of his mystification at the circumstances surrounding the origin of that manuscript, which was used before it was made and could not hae been made if it hadn’t been previously used. He told us of the grandfather argument, and also of the time when he was actually and physically in two different places at one and the same time.

“Then you do not entirely despise science.”

“Of course not,” he affirmed. “I merely distrust the scientific positivism of the past fifty years, the positivism of Haeckel and Darwin and of Mr. Bertrand Russell. I believe that biology has failed pitifully to explain the mystery of man’s origin and destiny.

We crossed over the centre of Lake Victoria and so northward, parallel to the well “trained” banks of the Nile. The Sudd region had been drained and embanked, thus saving the evaporation of millions of tons of water annually.

No vision this! Reality! Empty space, two moments ago. Then a phantom, a moment ago. But a real tower, now! Solid. As real, as existent—now—as these rocks, these trees!

As they watched, paralyzed, the building and air barge fell apart and hurtled toward the earth. The entire train had been split from end to end. The attacker now swung back and the then darted away.

The reader will have come to the conclusion the world of 6925 was inhabited by fools, or madmen.

This book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future. The brain that conceives and writes these sentences lives in the time of Einstein. Yet I, the true inspirer of this book, I who have begotten it upon that brain, I who influence that primitive being's conception, inhabit an age which, for Einstein, lies in the very remote future.

I have for years been working on the theory that there is another world, existing here in this same space with us. The Fourth Dimension!

Before Northwood’s horrified sight, he vanished; vanished as though he had turned suddenly to air and floated away.

“But someone must have taken it,” said the bewildered cashier. “Money doesn’t just walk off of its own accord or vanish into thin air—"

In this, I have even been compelled to manipulate in the matter of time! I must not only defeat and annihilate the minions of Moyen, but must work from a mathematical absurdity, so that at the moment of impact that moment itself must become part of the past, sufficiently remote to remove the monsters at such distance from the earth that not even the mighty genius of Moyen can return them!

The Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of a body cannot vary continuously, but only by a certain finite amount, or exact multiples of this amount, had been the key that unlocked the door.

This is accomplished by means of extremely complex vibrations penetrating earth, metals, buildings, space itself, and returning to our viewing and sound reproducing spheres to reveal the desired past or present occurrences at the point at which the rays of vibrations are directed.

True, he says, the Masters are far advanced, an’ able to do lots o’ thingsas a result. They’ve learnt everything there was to be learnt, they can live on the earth, in the air, in the water, or underground; they can travel to the other stars; they know how the world come about an’ when it’s ending, they think great thoughts an’things I couldn’t even understand, but, he says, what about the Robots?

Then the car rolled swiFTLy forward, bumping on the ground, and then ceased to bump. I looked down, then shuddered. The ground was already far beneath! I too, was flying in the air!

We have purposely allowed our time travellers to become known to the people of the eras that they visit, for in this way the great drama of the story becomes apparent.

Well, her boss, Dr. X-10, is trying to bring a man to life who’s been dead fifty years!

Because the article on dominant coordinates had appeared in the Journal of Physics and had dealt with a state of things in which the normal coordinates of everyday existence were assumed to have changed their functions; when the coordinates of time, the vertical, the horizontal and the lateral changed places and a man went east to go up and west to go “down” and ran his streat-numbers in a fourth dimension.

T =	t √ℓ - v²/c²

A terrestrial astronomer may reckon that the outburst on Nova Persei occurred a century before the great fire of London, but an astronomer on the Nova may reckon with equal accuracy that the great fire occurred a century before the outburst on the Nova.

And do you ever think that present-day New York will some time be as fragmentary and fabulous as Troy or Zimbabwe? That archaeologists may delve in its ruins, beneath the sevenfold increment of later cities, and find a few rusting mechanisms of disputed use, and potteries of doubtful date, and inscriptions which no one can decipher?

Let’s try and reduce it to rationality. The cage was—is, I should say, since of course it still exists—that cage is a Time-traveling vehicle. It is traveling back and forth through Time, operated by a Robot.

Think! Think of hearing Lincoln’s own voice delivering the Gettysburg address!

It is a difficult situation, but I hope I shall convince you. Very few men can have had the chance of convincing their great-great-great grandfathers of anything. I am now an anachronism. You see, I was born in the year A.D. 2108,—or should it be, I shall be born in 2108?—and I am—or will be—a refugee from the twenty-second century. I assure you that you will be married shortly, but I can’t remember when—I think I told you I was bad at dates.

I could not help wondering, as we settle swiFTLy over the city, whether our historians and geologists and other scientists were really right in saying that Denver had at one period been far from the Pacific.

“I wish I could remember how that time machine was built and operated,” said Dr. Bird reflectively, as he sat in his private laboratory in the Bureau of Standards some time later, “but Jumor did his work well. I can’t even remember what the thing looked like.”

They said we could hope to be received only as impostors and fakirs.

If I could go back into the past, there is one event which I should most certainly change: my rescue of Paul Arkwright!

“That is a space-port where the ships come in from the stars,” the girl said. (Of course, all conversations recorded in Smith’s notes have been translated into our English—if they were not, no one would be able to read them.)

“Ships from the stars!” Dick ejaculated.

No man or woman of Eos has the authority to direct, check, or in any way influence the free decision and impulses of another without that other’s full and intelligent consent. We demand the right to follow the natural inclinations of our characters. We demand the right to marry.

The twentieth century. It had a remote sound, an unreal significance. In this age, with the sun a brick red ball and the city of Denver a mass of ruins, the twentieth century was a forgotten second in the great march of time, it was as remote as the age when man emerged from the beast.

Time was a fourth dimension, he had said. An extension as real as the three of what we call space, and not completely distinguishable from them. A direction in which motion would carry one into the past, or into the future.

It means, I take it, that in only forty years from now the great game of sovereign states will be over. It looks also as if the parliamentary game will be over, and as if some quite new method of handling human affairs will have been adopted. Not a word of patriotism or nationalism; not a word of party, not an allusion. But in only forty years! While half the human beings already alive in the world will still be living! You cannot believe it for a moment. Nor could I, if it wasn't for two little torn scraps of paper.

A. MERRITT, WHO IS WELL KNOWN TO MANY OF THE READERS OF AMAZING STORIES, HAS CALLED OUR ATTENTION TO MANY SIMILARITIES IN DESCRIPTIONS, CHARACTERIZATIONS AND SITUATIONS IN THE STORY "BEYOND THE VEIL OF TIME" BY B.H. BARNEY, PUBLISHED IN THE FALL-WINTER ISSUE OF AMAZING STORIES QUARTERLY, AND DESCRIPTIONS, CHARACTERIZATIONS AND SITUATIONS IN HIS TWO BOOKS "THE MOON POOL" AND "THE FACE IN THE ABYSS". MR. MERRITT OBJECTS PARTICULARLY TO THE UTILIZATION OF THE CONCEPTION AND THE NAME OF "THE DREAM-MAKERS", WHICH FORMED AN ESSENTIAL PART OF HIS "FACE IN THE ABYSS".

For the last few seconds the light has been fading, now it is completely dark. There is a revolver shot, a woman’s scream, a moment’s silence, then the sound of a woman sobbing, exactly as at the beginning of Act I.

I, Doctor Michael Claybridge, living in the year 1926, have listened to a description of the end of the world from the lips of the man who witnessed it; the last man of the human race. That this is possible, or that I am not insane, I cannot ask you to believe: I can only offer you the facts.

Beyond the fourth there is a fifth dimension.. . . Eternity, I think you would call it. It is the line, the direction perpendicular to time.

You have always considered me a hopeless dreamer; and I am the last person who would endeavor or even wish to dispute your summary. It might be added that I am one of those dreamers who have not been able to content themselves with dreams. Such persons, as a rule, are unfortunate and unhappy, since few of them are capable of realizing, or even approximating, their visionary conceptions.

Down in my lead-walled room I shall drink my special drug and fall into a coma which would on the surface of the earth last (at most) a few hours. But down there, shielded from all change, I shall never wake until I am again subjected to radiation.

“We are here only as onlookers,” the Wanderer explained sadly, “and can have no material existence here. We can not enter this plane, for there is no gateway. Would that there were.”

You know some of the modern theories about the fourth dimension. How Einstein and others suppose that the fourth dimension of space is time. Well, I don’t want to claim any one else’s laurels, but that was my view even before the name of Einstein was heard of. I’ve been working at it for thirty-five years. It’s my belief too that the fourth side of space is time, and that, in a sense, all time exists simultaneously and eternally—although on some other plane than ours—just as all space exists simultaneously and eternally.

Certainly. . . . the Great Brain is infallible. Who would want to act contrary to reason?

Take our own single city, for the rest of the world is about the same, if not worse, how many people are alive . . . er . . . really alive and awake? Just four hundred and thirty by the last count. And these few people must feed themselves andprovide electrical energy and control the dream records for more than one million sleepers!

Furthermore, this young man can’t possibly be Adams Mayhew! Why Mayhew would be nearly eighty, if he were alive today, and this man is still in his twenties.

“Yes. You called them cities,” she explained, “and that is essentially what this is. You had many thousands of people in each city, it is true—I suppose you could not afford many cities?—while we have a city for every inhabitant. But otherwise they are, I should imagine, much the same.”

We must make him young again—what a chance to try out the full cell-cycle!

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.

From the looks of the Brontosaurus . . . we are in the Pleistocene period.

So it was with such thoughts that Pencill turned to the first page. “The End of Time by Hamil Edmondton,” he read aloud, as was his habit when alone. With but a causual interest he began the story; but as the clock ticked and he read on, this interest became more than a casual one, and soon he was reading carefully, keenly, and with much enjoyment. On and on he read, and inexorable Fate slowly marshalled her forces in favor of the heroes case into time, and Pencill became aware that soon the story must end. End it did, in a very logical and pleasing way, and Pencill reluctantly placed the manuscript on his desk.

The year of grace 1935! A dull year, a comfortable year! Nothing much happened. The depression was over; people worked steadily at their jobs and forgot that they had every starved; Roosevelt was still President of the United States; Hitler was firmly ensconced in Germany; France talked of security; Japan continued to defend itself against China by swallowing a few more provinces; Russia was about to commence on the third Five Year Plan, to be completed in two years; and, oh, yes—Cuba was still in revolution.

I am the daughter of Ellayn, who was the daughter of Ellayn, until far back there was the first Ellayn. She and Worin were the first two.

My people now go into the long sleep. We do that out of terror of Taa, for when he roams the land in wrath no thing that can feel, see or hear can survive.Only in these catacombs is it possible to bear his thunders and live. We call it the Sleep of Ten Thousand Years, though no one knows how long the time really is.

I must have a subject. And there is a certain—risk. Not great, now, I’m sure. My apparatus is improved. But, in my first trial, my subject was—injured. I’ve been wondering, Mr. Webb, if you—

To return to my dream, this person thought that either you or I should go among these subhumans, and yoiu, though willing to go, were a shade less willing than I. So it was decided that I was to go, and when I asked this person, who had been thinking to us about these creatures, how I should come to them, seeing that they were either on another planet or in another time, the way thither was made clear to me, for all I had to do was to wish to be there with them, and there, wherever or whenever it was, I should be.

I am much inclined to think it was not on another planet, but on the same planet in another time.

He looked at the fantastic, beauteous sleeper, and his haggard face was terrible again with longing and despair and dread.

In addition to his various tricks of magic, this young Chinaman had another typically Oriental trait, namely that of being able to commune with his ancestors.

He’s found the fourth dimension and it is the realm of invisibility.

Our first experience with the time-car was harrowing.

“[. . .] This is an experiment in mental monism, you know, along the time-space continuum that forms material totality.”
I looked at Nicholas and, despite all my conversatons with him, I did not comprehend.

You twentieth-century folks don’t know how lucky you are.

You know as well as I that in 1932 the Earth was groaning under a tyranny more brutal, morehorrible, thanany in all recorded history.

Professor Stringer threw open the laboratory door and turned on the lights. We saw it then, an odd machine, shiny and rounded, occupying the center of the workshop floor. I had been drinking, you will recollect, and my powers of observation were not at their best. It was the same with the others. When I questioned them later, they could give no adequate description of it. “So this,” said Olson Smith rather flatly, “is a time machine.” The doctor walked about—a little unsteadily I noticed—and viewed it from all angles. “The passenger,” said the Professor, “sits here. Notice this lever on the graduated face of the dial; it controls the machine. Turn it this way from Zero and one travels into the past; throw it ahead and one travels into the future. The return of the lever to Zero will return the machine to the point of departure in time. The electronic flow.. . .” he went into obscure details. “Will it work?” demanded the Doctor.

That evening, as he and Lois Lane stepped into the waiting room, Garney came out of his office and looked in.

Past, present, future—all one. And we, moving along the dimension called time, intersect them. I can’t grasp it. But I can’t deny it. If only there were proof—

It’s a paradox.

To come to my point, Richard, I have for many years been very disgusted with the fact that all the human race—indeed every living organism—must waste a third of its life in sleep. Think what a race we’d be if we never slept!

There are an indefinite nubmer of possible futures, any one of which we would encounter if we took the proper ‘forks” in time.

Why should father want tounlock the doors of the unknown—probe backward through time? Beyond the beyond!

Did you ever see a man suddenly materilize out of thin air directly in front of you, directly on the spot where you had been looking at nothing the instant before? If not, you must try it some time. It must be a very astonishing spectacle. That’s what happened to B. Lue Pencill . . .

Of course! It has always been known that you would ‘appear’ sooner or later.

In my time it was June 5, 1942. The only thing that’s certain is that it is summer; the year depends on—well, it depends on what year you were living in when all this happened.

I’m over the Caroline Islands, longitude 158° 23´ west, latitude 8° 30´ north. There’re millions of people drowning all around me. What shall I do?

Physically, I am thirty-three years of age. But, counting years of terrestrial chronology, I am three hundred and eighteen years old.

It struck Dowb high in the thigh, hurling him skyward like a stone from a catapult. With an inherited instinct from ancestors who had clutched at tree-tops, Dowb sailed through the air, hands outstretched, claw-like, ready to grasp.

For a moment the slow brain of Dowb fancied he had been hurled into a tree, as his sinewy arms and legs grasped an obstruction that had brought him up abruptly in mid-flight. But the object moved and swooped crazily, and Dowb realized that he had grasped the neck of the beast directly below its repulsive head.

They stand about, little misshapen men with huge heads. But their heads contain only brains. They had machines that could think—but somebody turned them off a long time ago, and no one knew how to start them again. That was the trouble with them. They had wonderful brains. Far better than yours or mine. But it must have been millions of years ago when they were turned off, too, and they just hadn’t thought since then. Kindly little people.

Into the future she had gone, William said, and I had no reason to doubt him. The cat took the matter in a calm way and seemed in no wise injured by its uncanny transit.

In 1942, the brilliant Colm MacColgan has perfected his Tempevision, allowing us all to view the past ten years via time wave-lengths.

“The first stroke of the elaborate electric-gong arrangement which Barton had had built into tthe clock, sounded out”

Into the past . . . into the future . . . read on for another exciting adventure in time with Brick Bradford

For a space of roughly ten ages we have been asleep, in a state of suspended animation, in that mighty mausoleum known as your Moon.

I showed her New York. She’d say, “But why do the people hurry so? Is it really necessary for all those automobiles to keep going and coming? Do the people like to live in layers? If the United States is as big as you say it is, why do you build such high buildings? What is your reason for having so few people rich, so many people poor?” It was like that. And endless.

“It cannot be,” the Abbot asserted suavely. “The years from 1925 to 1935 happen only once in the whole course of eternity. You are not now living through a repetition of those ten years. Rather it is those same ten years. The events which you remember as having happened back in Boston, and the events which are happening here today, are happening simultaneously. Your ten years in Boston from 1925 to 1935, are one and the same ten years. It is only an illusion of your mind that they seem to be successive, rather than concurrent. And this illusion is not so different from the illusion of all mankind with respect to the flow of time, for Brahm, the Creator, sees all time and all space as one complete instantaneous event.”

Ah, yes, you have a mathematical means of expression, but no understanding of that time, so it is useless. But the last of humanity was allowed to end before the Sun changed from the original G-O stage—a very, very long time ago.

“They are not dead,” he averred; “within half an hour of your time they will be returned, unaware of what has taken place. They must wait for Time to catch up with them!”

“These,” said Pete calmly, “are my fiancée.”

There are no living men and women in the world today. But what of the trillions of men and women who have existed on Earth in the past? Those trillions are separated from me by the abyss of time. Yet. . .

The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore, learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.

Time’s all mixed up. It’s as if the universe were the rim of a great wheel, whirling through Time. As if, somehow, we have left that rim, shot inward along different spokes whose outer ends are different years, far apart, and reached the wheel’s axis where all the year-spokes join. The center point of the hub, that doesn’t move at all through Time, because it is the center. Where there is no Time. Where the past and the present and the future are all one. A land, in some weird other dimension, where Time stands still.

Harry! A mouse is in the trap and I haven’t the nerve to—OH!—you’ve knocked over the magic hour glass. . .!

Time traveling! And here, in this same space that now held Dora’s little bungalow and garden, Sah Groat’s home existed in the year 2536.

I can transport you into the past, and you can create events there which never took place in the past we know—but the events are not new. They were ordained from the beginning, if you took that particular path. You are simply embarking upon a different path into a different future, a fixed and preordained future, yet one which will be strange to you because it lies outside your own layer of experience. So you have infinite freedom in all your actions, yet everything you can possibly do is already fixed in time.

He stood on a flat plain that undulated gently. That much was understandable. The surface of the earth, if it really was changing rapidly, had become a mere blur to his senses. The solid ring of substance across the sky was the sun, traveling at a prodigious rate that kept pase with his transit through Time. The retina of the eye caught its image as a solid ring, so swift was the earth’s rotation. As the seasons altered the ring shifted lower or higher across the horizon, that was all.

Incidentally, I have forgotten the most important thing of all. Remember that Donovan’s dominating idea was to prove to me, and to the world, that he had been in the Cretaceous and hobnobbed with its flora and fauna. He was a physicist by inclination, and had the physicist’s flair for ingenious proofs. Before leaving, he loaded a lead cube with three quartz quills of pure radium chloride that he had been using in a previous experiment, and locked the whole thing up in a steel box.

In the first revolution it made, the first day it was built, it circled to the ultimate end of time and the universe, and back to the day it was built.

You just trust your Uncle Jim! Everything’s going to be all right, sure as God made little apples. Just sit down over here, and powder your nose, or whatever they do in your time. Then you can tell me all about it.

There are times, I reflected, when nothing else in the English language is so expressive as the single word, “Nuts.” But I said nothing, hoping that he would work off his enthusiasm by writing a letter to the magazine. I should have known better.

I had set up my laboratory in the wilds of the Peak District in Derbyshire, in England, where work could be carried on with the minimum of interference. From this laboratory I had dispatched into the unknown, presumably the future, a multitude of objects, including several live creatures such as rats, mice, pigeons and domestic fowl. In no case could I bring back anything I had made to vanish. Once gone, the subject was gone forever. There was no way of discovering exactly where it had gone. There was nothing but to take a risk and go myself.

In it, I viewed time as a helix (this is, as something like a bedspring). Someone could cut across from one turn directly to the next, thus moving into the future by some exact interval, but being incapable of traveling one day less into the future. (I didn’t know the term at the time, but what I had done was to “quantize” time travel.)

“Let me get out of these furs.” She walked away while fumbling with a zipper at her throat. The furs were all one garment which slipped off her shoulders and fell to the floor. Perry felt a shock like an icy shower and then a warm tingle.

Not ants of your time, however, but the rulers of the year ninety-sixteen, seven thousand of so years ahead of you—time enough for the busy creatures of your present day to have evolved into the significant might you see we have.

But Max Planck with the quantum theory, de Broglie and Schroedinger with the wave mechanics, Heisenberg with matrix mechanics, enormously complicated the structure of the universe—and with it the problem of Time.

With the substitution of waves of probability for concrete particles, the world lines of objects are no longer the fixed and simple paths they once were. Geodesics have an infinite proliferation of possible branches, at the whim of sub-atomic indeterminism.

Still, of course, in large masses the statistical results of the new physics are not much different from those given by the classical laws. But there is a fundamental difference. The apparent reality of the universe is the same—but it rests upon a quicksand of possible change.

We human beings live in a three dimensional space, or which time has sometimes been called the fourth dimension. But did it ever occur to you, Mr. President, that we do not extend in time. We never experience any other time than the present. Our so-called space-time existence is thus seen to be a mere three-dimensional layer, or lamina, infinitely thin in the time direction. There could exist another three-dimensional space just a second or two away from ours, and we would never know it.

History runs wild when Columbus, Napoléon, and Cleopatra journey through time from the past to the present!

It’s another form of the space-time field that I use in the Egg to bridge the gap between the coils of time.

But this is the seventeenth time one of these birds has turned up. What’s the secret?

I’ll project the City of Zoom into the past where it will be safe for the time being!

“Yes, my boy. I understand your aversion to making any more trips into the historical Past. You have been a—um—lodestone for violent trouble . . .”

“Something always happens to me!” exclaimed Pete. “What if I she’d get bumped off in the Past? Nix. No more o’ that stuff for me.”

“Quite right, my son. And yet—” Mayhem’s benign tone and dreamy stare at the ceiling were pure ham. “I would never have invited you here again, Pete, knowing it to be a place of strange memories, except that occasionally in our lives there arise demands that transcend all selfish personal considerations. Do you follow me?”

If you stepped off this platform you’d be cut in two just as if you stepped off a fast moving train! You can’t be in two different “times” any more than you can be in two difference places at the same moment!