Language Difficulties

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

“My subject,” he began, “is the science of astronomy. I am going to be frank. In my land and time . . . uh . . . that is—” Guy frowned. He had warned him against any mention of that insane delusion of his about having been catapulted back from a future age. But Cambray recovered himself. “What I meant is that there are far greater masters of this science where I come from. I am familiar only with the skirts of this knowledge. Yet what I have to say will be novel to you, and will doubtless upset many of your present concepts.”

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.

The mathematicians are still working on that, Your Honor, and the best they can say now is that it was probably somewhere between the mid-Twentieth Century and the last Twenty-First. However there is a strong possibility that none of the material reached any enclosed space which would attract it, and that it may all have been dissipated harmlessly in the form of incongruent molecules.

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.

Events are the result of a complex. There are no single causes. That’s why it’s so hard to change history. If I went back to, say, the Middle Ages, and shot one of FDR’s Dutch forebears, he’ll still be born in the late nineteenth century—because he and his genes resulted fom the entire world of his ancestors, and there’d have been compensation. But evey so often, a really key event does occur. Some one happening is a nexus of so many world lines that its outcome is decisive for the whole future.

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

Thin lightnings winked from above. The cloven air boomed behind them. He felt a chill, deeper than the night cold. But he eased his pace. There was no more reason for hurry.

Thin lightnings winked from above. The cloven air boomed behind them. He felt a chill, deeper than the night cold. But he eased his pace. There was no more reason for hurry.

If Tyre explodes, why, here we’ll be, but our ancestors, your kids, everything we knew, they won’t. It’ll be a whole different history. Whether whatever is left of the Patrol can restore it—somehow head off the disaster—that’s problematical. I’d call it unlikely.

But I did not, repeat not establish a new god; I merely fitted an image they’d long worshipped, and in the course of time, a generation or so, they came to assume I must be him.

You know what he said when I told him he should run at least one unmanned? He said, “If something unfortunate does happen, we can go back in time and pull Miss Engle out before it happens, can’t we?” The man has no notion of how the net works, no notion of the paradoxes, no notion that Kivrin is there, and what happens to her is real and irrevocable.

“I’m going to the future and you can’t stop me,” said Peter.

Peter: “I'm going to the future. I want to see it for myself!”

Time had gone wrong—this is what the Hystorians believed. And if things were beyond fixing now, there was only one hope left . . . to go back in time and fix the past instead.

It was the tightening of time and space around her as she moved from one era to another. And it should have brought her, Dak, and Riq to 885.

Dad was right. It is just a pile of stones with a gift shop.

I’m not cut out to be a time traveling bandit.

We don’t know if we can change time or effect it at all.”

Kevin: Then after that day, no one ever saw him again.
Gangsters: Oh! You had him disappeared? 
Kevin: Moved to Preston.
Gangsters: Ahem. Moved to Preston? That’s cold.

His hajj to Mecca comprised 60,005 people . . . The number of people is different. We changed something! There’s five more people—us!