Time Travel Agencies, Safaris, and Tourists

Normally, we drift with the current and travel downstream and into what we call the future. Now, if we equip our little boat with a motor, we can speed our passage downstream into the future or, breasting the current, travel upstream to view again those selfsame scenes that were passed by humanity ages ago.

Looking backward later, Oliver thought that in that moment, for the first time clearly, he began to suspect the truth. But he had no time to ponder it, for after the brief instant of enmity the three people from—elsewhere—began to speak all at once, as if in a belated attempt to cover something they did not want noticed.

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

Oh . . . The Crucifixion. You want to witness it, of course—

W kilku słowach: w naszym społeczeñstwie decyduje o losie człowieka ranga intelektualna. Ludzie wartoœciowi, o zdolnoœciach wybitnych, mają prawo do całego, własnego ciała. Ja właœnie byłem takim, byłem samodzielnym, suwerennym meżczyznę!

translate

Briefly, in our society the fate of a person depends on his intellectual level. Valuable people with outstanding abilities have the right to their entire body. I was just that, I was an independent, sovereign man!

On the fourth page Alice finds a clause warning the prospective renter that the company cannot be held liable for any consequences of actions by the renter which wantonly or wilfully interfere with the already determined course of history. She translates that for herself: If you kill your husband’s grandfather, don’t blame us if you get in trouble.

He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew. He knew that his name was Charles Phillips and that before he had come to live among these people he had lived in the year 1984, when there had been such things as computers and television sets and baseball and jet planes, and the world was full of cities, not merely five but thousands of them, New York and London and Johannesburg and Parks and Liverpool and Bangkok and San Francisco and Buenos Ares and a multitude of others, all at the same time.

Travis: We might destroy a roach—or a flower, even—and destroy an important link in the species.

Eckles: So?

“It didn’t seem a good show,” Anna said to Mrs. Streichman. “A comedy and not very funny.”

Mrs. Streichman twisted into the space next to her. “That was just a rehearsal. The reviews are incredible. And you wouldn’t believe the waiting list. Years. Centuries! I’ll never have tickets again.” She took a deep, calming breath. “At least you’re here, dear. That’s something I couldn’t have expected. That makes it very real. [. . .]”

Think of History as a living organism, with its own defence mechanisms. History will not permit anything to change events that have already taken place. If History thinks, even for one moment, that that is about to occur, then it will, without hesitation, eliminate the threatening virus. Or historian, as we like to call them.

Well, she wasn’t a contemporary, that much was clear.

Like all those stories where the world goes to hell because of some tiny stupid thing I might do back then.