Mixed Eras

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

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.

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

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.

Think how much power you’d need for all that!

And she was continually amazed at how easily everyone else accepted their situation, the blunt, apparently undeniable reality of the time slips, across a hundred and fifty years in her case, perhaps a million years or more for the wretched pithecine and her infant in their net cage.

Since she couldn’t recall having passed any cabins within the last several miles, she decided to plunge ahead into the strange, foreign landscape glittering in the cold. Because, when in doubt, go towards the creepy Twilight Zone landscape.

They would be playing God, and not only that but what if their tampering resulted in making the future worse? Their altering of history could set off a chain reaction, events woven together in an unforeseen way, that resulted in World War III or the zombie apocalypse for all she knew.

Soon after her arrival, light flashed like a dome over the town. When it had dissipated, they were in a new location—and a new time. Now, just like the other citizens, she was a woman out of place and out of time.

Flo’s tower of hair bobbled as she moved to a different cabinet. After not-so-gracefully shoving folders aside, she came out with a medium-sized binder with the year 1961 printed on the front. It threw Ella for a moment before she realized 1961 was the year she currently resided in, although Keystone had been cut off from the outside world for ten years, thereby making it a time capsule of the early 1950s.

She shook away the impending headache that hit anytime she tried to keep straight the time travel aspect of the town.

“I only intended to make a small inter-dimensional field, so to speak,” the professor continued. “Just large enough to encompass my house. At first, it worked. The field or bubble drew the enormous energy required to create the bridge from the fifth dimension itself and folded space-time.

“But then something went wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. The bubble expanded. It kept growing, drawing more and more power from the fifth dimension. I shut off the machine, but it was of no use. The field had become independent of the device.

“Eventually, the bubble stabilized. From what I can tell, we’re stuck in an inter-dimensional, space-time feedback loop.”

How many people could say they slept through a herd of dinosaurs?

[. . .] the bubble could transfer to a flux capacitor in a DeLorean, and we could use the car to travel back to the future.

“Because we don’t know how returning to our own timelines will affect things.”

She let out an exasperated noise. “For God’s sake, Will, that’s why you go back to a few seconds before you enter Keystone for the first time. It’s Time Travel 101.”

“Do you know, most nights when I’m trying to fall asleep, I can still see the faces of my friends who died in the war?”

“What? I had no idea . . . do you mean WWI?”

He nodded. “I enlisted as soon as I turned eighteen. Served from 1917 to 1918.”

Ella had seen the doctor’s exercise outfit on a previous occasion, but it still made her choke with stifled laughter. With the blinding neon leotard, tights, belt, and headband, she could have stepped straight out of an Olivia Newton-John music video.

Pauline caught Ella staring and sighed. “I told you, I was driving home from my Jazzercise class when I passed through Keystone just before it jumped.”

What has to happen to make you change?