Circa AD 1930 to 1939

Yes. They had only been married a couple of months.

A dazzling streak of lightning, a mighty clap of thunder, and Paul Feron, suddenly awakened, sprang to his feet with white face and staring eyes. What had happened? God, what had happened?

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—"

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Think a minute. If the watch seems running double speed that would indicate that your perception of its movements had slowed down fifty per cent.

“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.”

I believe that when I go back to my house at Berkeley Square at half past five tonight, I shall walk straight into the 18th century and meet the people living there.

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 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—

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

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

“[. . .] 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.

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

By intense radio-active action on the ductless glands, the drug I have just mixed should prove a powerful stimulant to our dormant sub-conscious impressions, and whirl us back through time when we swallow it—

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

♫ Then let me dream and never awake until I make you mine ♫ . . . Ah, Rowena [falls asleep]

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.

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.

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.

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

Never before had it occurred to me to ask myself why the sun should rise each morning on a new day instead of upon the old day over again; or to wonder how much of what I did was really my own to do. It may be that here on this earth we are not grateful enough for our ignorance, and our innocence. We think that there is only one road, one direction—forward; and we accept it, and press on. We think of God, we think of the mystery of the universe, but we do not think about it very much, and we do not really believe that it is a mystery, or that we could not understand it if it were explained to us.

Tally, if you hear me, come in and build the rest.

There’s something different about that child. I wondered if my pencil could catch it.

But what if those pills really work? I’d be out of prison . . . free, back twenty years!

I know you’ve come from a long way from here . . . a long way and a long time.

The mine did cave later . . . but mining is a dangerous business and some always die! The important thing is, I got production!

In what time period will you find yourselves when you land at your particular destinatoin!

Nervously fingering his narrow lapel, he broke the silence, saying, “I’d like to tell you some things . . . Totally outrageous things. You have to promise me just one thing first.”

I tossed the few bits of gravel and did the thing that had never been done, ever in my life.

He thinks of me now as the one person who’ll be able to say who’s the original and who’s the plagiarist when “the other guy” does eventually turn up!

He thought she wouldn’t answer but finally she said, “What if I can’t go back? What if I have to live out Brandy’s life? She lives an awfully long time, Corbin.”

This was the message received by a dozen or so experts in the "time attempters" field:

"I have succeeded in establishing a creeping time-satellite or time-shuttle at my estate of Moonwick near Lunel in the Herault Department of the Peoples Republic of France. If you are really experts in your field, you will appreciate the importance of this. From this time-shuttle, which is just beyond the ‘shoal’ of all of you to whom I am sending this message, it will be possible for you to launch genuine time probes. I am sending this to a dozen or so and I hope for acceptance from at least five. I must have a matched set of at least five. Some soon. A very little bit after ‘soon’ will be too late for me to transmit the shuttle to you. Bring ideas only. Everything else for frugal and break-through living is provided. You will receive various transportation chits and enabling papers. Peter Luna.”

The World Courier Service (“No questions asked. Messages carried anywhere or anywhen in the world”) delivered these messages to the dozen or so persons who were experts in the time field. And some of the people gave assent and some didn’t. So, the next day, the Courier Service delivered airline tickets, train tickets, and International Taxi Coupons to five of the experts who had agreed to go to Moonwick.

1. Travel is possible only into the past.
2. The object transported will return to exactly the time and place of departure.
3. It is not possible to bring objects from the past to the present.
4. Actions in the past cannot change the present.

If you think about it too long, you’re going to go crazy, and then I’ll never get to your time.

Annie: Are you ready to leave?
Stephen: Yes.
Annie: How long will it take?
Stephen: I don’t know: seconds, decades, an eternity.
Annie: An eternity? For a few moments together?
Stephen: Yes.

So much hot air rising above the tables in the Café Heck or the Osteria Bavaria, like smoke from the ovens. It was difficult to believe from this perspective that Hitler was going to lay waste to the world in a few years’ time.

“Time isn’t circular,” she said to Dr. Kellet. “It’s like a palimpsest.”
“Oh, dear,” he said. “That sounds very vexing.”
“And memories are sometimes in the future.”

We came by the raft dishonestly. We’d only meant to do a little fishing. It was cool and nice under the big willow with its whips trailing over the water. Christ, it was a scorcher of a day. The whole town must have fallen asleep, along with Jim and me. When we finally did wake, if we ever did, the raft was too far along in space and time to return it. We could no longer reverse ourselves, our motions in all five dimensions, than fly to the moon.

Tell me something I can hold onto forever and never let go.

If I kill you now, you will never go back in time, there is no formica bomb, and Adolf Hilter takes over the world . . . with me as his heir.

“Do you have a time machine,” he’d asked his father. It was hard to fathom, unbelievable even as he’d said it, but the idea fascinated him with little-boy wonder.

Nisreen: I want to know how it is different and why he wanted to change it. Don’t you see? That’s how the world was supposed to be.

Ramazan: Assuming no one else had gone back and changed things before he did.

“What? You live almost a hundred years in the future and you’ve never seen microfilm before?” asked Grant, who shook his head. “Women.”

“We have computer code which can store a warehouse of microfilm in a space the size of a pinhead.”

“How the hell do you do that?”

“With a series of zeros and ones.”

“That makes no sense whatsoever.”

“Yeah, I don’t really understand it myself.”

This is your moment, Billie. Coming up right now. Save the worlds, Billie. Change everything. You can do it.