Near Future, AD 2300 and Beyond

Now my children! You wish to remake each other? Julie, you want your lover transformed into a more tender companion? And you Leander, you would rather that your Julie had a more aggressive bearing?

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

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.

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.

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!

“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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

Well, I close my eyes and I am shaking so that I hardly notice the vibrations of the horn begin, but when I reach the E in the third measure, I know I am feeling what I felt in Benny’s.

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.

Within this five-foot circle, time is speeded up to an almost unbelievable pace. But the world outside the circle remains unchanged.

We got the meal ready, and then someone said, “Where is Grandfather?”

If you went back to, I would guess, 1946, and worked to prevent your parents’ marriage in 1947, you would still have existed in that year; you would not go out of existence just because you had influenced events. The same would apply even if you had only been in 1946 one microsecond before shooting the man who would otherwise have become your father.

He had boarded the kettle in the 575th Century, the base of operations assigned to him two years earlier. At the time the 575th had been the farthest upwhen he had ever traveled. Now he was moving upwhen to the 2456th Century.

I’ll marry you, Everest! But first may I go on a short time-vacation?

It was Ned who fell under the hypnotic trance . . . and Ned who responded to the commands of Jiminez!

Yes sir! It’s a story about time travel . . . time travel and haunted houses!

That ship is an X-671, like mine!

At this stage in our campaign, we can take no risks. You’ll have to go. Prepare the temporal centrifuge, Mordecai.

Sleep, chick, sleep deep! You will like go into another world. A world without squares. A world where everyone is like real sweep people!

Maybe—maybe I could travel into the future by thinking myself there.

At the conclusion of that adventure, Doom’s castle was abandoned by him, but there is still a chance that the machine he used to send us into the past may still be operational!

Because the communists are realists. They never risk a war that would hurt them, even if they could win. So they won’t risk one they can’t win.

Spider-Man! Well, much obliged to you, fella! I never knew you were so . . . cooperative!

To the Reader: The “science” in this book is mostly scaffolding for the story, story-telling in the traditional sense. However, the discussions of the significance of time and the meaning of consciousness are intended to be quite serious, as also are the contents of chapter fourteen. —from Hoyle’s preface

We are trying to find a new sort of leader who can slow, even reverse, the break-up, Paul. We’ve selected a man from the Earth Past, Thomas More. We will present him to the people only as the Thomas, or perhaps, to be more fanciful, as the Past Master. You know of him?

The Dong button was just that, a big green button with the word Dong engraved on it. You pushed it, and it went dong. Well, that was alnost too simple. Should there not be a deeper reason for it? And the small instruction plate over it didn't add much. It read: “Wrong prong, bong gong.

Zresztą Bosch nie powstrzymał się od niedyskrecji. W „Ogrodzie uciech ziemskich,” w „piekle muzycznym” (prawe skrzydło tryptyku) stoi w samym środku dwunastoosobowy chronobus. I co miałem z tym robić?

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Even so, Bosch couldn’t refrain from certain indiscretions. In the “Garden of Earthly Delights,” in the very center of the “Musical Hell” (the right wing of the triptych), stands a twelve-seat chronobus. Not a thing I could do about it.

Given the power to alter the future, have we the right to use it?

Il veicolo aveva bisogno di una messa a punto! Comunque, siamo sulla “strada” giusta! Tenetevi forte!

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Keep your seat belts buckled at all times! In the unlikely event of a water landing, your seat cushion doubles as a flotation device.

Sharpie, you have just invented multiperson solipsism. I didn’t think that was mathematically possible.

And the interview was a great success. The old master used the hundred or so questions as takeoff points for truly masterful illuminations. It really was the archeological-historical coup of the century.

Steve, you know what this is, don’t cha? It’s a time-space warp.

Sharpie, you have just invented multiperson solipsism. I didn’t think that was mathematically possible.

Troi: Captain, sir, this is not an illusion of a dream.
Picard: But these courts belong in the past.
Troi:I don’t understand either, but this is real.

What if Cole came back to set off a chain of events that would eventually destroy the one man who stood in his way?

The Traveler to Picard about Wesley: In such musical geniuses I saw in one of your ship’s libraries—one called Mozart, who as a small child wrote astonishing symphonies, a genius who made music not only to be heard, but seen and felt beyond the understanding, the ability of others. Wesley is such a person, not with music, but with the equally lovely intricacies of time, energy, propulsion, and the instruments of this vessel, which allow all that to be played . . .

One city attempted to escape their onslaught by unraveling the secrets of time and travelling back in a desperate search for a safer age . . . they succeeded and time was their friend until the arrival yet again of their relentless enemy.

The stasis room creates a static field of time. Just as x-rays can’t pass through lead, time cannot penetrate a stasis field. So although you exist, you no longer exist in time, and for you, time itself does not exist.

Sensors show nothing, sir, But it appears a moment in time repeated itself exactly, for everyone.

We have run into an unusual situation, sir: There are people on board. Frozen.

Riker: A baby? This is a surprise.
Troi: More so for me.

Clancy: [to Geordi] Aye, sir. Where can I reach you?
Data: He can be reached at 221 Baker Street!

Most excellent!

For one thing, paradoxes can occur. Say you build a time machine, go backwards in time and murder your father when he was ten years old. That means you were never born. And if you were never born, how did you build the time machine? Paradox! It's the possibility of wiping out your own existence that makes most people rule out time-travel. Still, why not? If you were careful, you could do it.

We had almost given up hope. We were afraid maybe the whole Federation had been attacked.

Look, after we get away from this guy, we use the booth. We time travel back to before the concert and set up the things we need to get him now.

Kirk: [pacing in front of a lineup of the crew] Who started the fight?
O’Brien: I don’t know, sir.

Well, why didn’t ya just ask? The time machine is down the hall and to the left.

Or you, Pablo: you of all people ought to prefer to have all those paintings and sculptures sink unharmed into the ground rather than having them be blown sky-high.

The goal of this device is nothing less than complete knowledge, knowledge of everything that ever has been, that ever will be, that ever could be.

“Don’t you see?” says Terry. “We’ll just travel back in time and get a permit for the treehouse.”

Peering into the murky abyss, Spock saw something he had never seen before: a window, a portal to that other world, not a vision, not a light, but a feeling, a feeling he didn’t understand—wonderment.

“There’s nothing to return to.” Eliot’s knuckles bulged at the seams, but she didn’t yell. “When the Fade destroys a moment, it’s lost. Forever.”

Time? Of course, that’s how he did it. This is not another reality—this is our reality. He went back in time and changed the present.

I know me being here wasn’t . . . ideal . . . , and potentially reality-threatening, but meeting all of you has been one of the greatest experiences of my life.