Urania

“You’re just not used to our kind of weather," a wheezy voice said. “Climactic conditions change quite a bit in a half million years.”

But Alveron and his kind had been lords of the Universe since the dawn of history, since that far distant age when the Time Barrier had been folded round the cosmos by the unknown powers that lay beyond the Beginning.

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.

When I opened you, I found a mess. I sent for the Chief of Surgery while I got the baby out, then we held a consultation with you on the table—and worked for hours to salvage what we could. You had two full sets of organs, both immature, but with the female set well enough developed for you to have a baby. They could never be any use to you again, so we took them out and rearranged things so that you can develop properly as a man.

In the case of a missing man, you were not required to search for him just because a record somewhere said you had done so. But how else would you stand a chance of finding him? You might possibly go back and thereby change events so that you did find him after all—in which case the report you filed would “always” have recorded your success, and you alone would know the “former” truth.

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.

“And watching the great Pythagorous at work.”
“And the three days that he spent on that little surveying problem. How one longed to hand him a slide-rule through the barrier and explain its working.”

I awoke this morning to some very puzzling incidents. It seemed that time itself had stopped, or that the whole world had gone into super-slow motion.

Snodgrass decided to make the Roman world healthy and to keep its people alive through 20th century medicine.

Apart from its stupendous novelty value, the commercial success of slow glass was founded on the fact that having a scenedow was the exact emotional equivalent of owning land.

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

He had been unwilling to admit his own fears that Man, perfector of a type of thinking which had given him mastery of the three spatial dimensions, had finally encountered a cooler, more judicious culture which had established its dominions in the long gray estuaries of time.

He had been unwilling to admit his own fears that Man, perfector of a type of thinking which had given him mastery of the three spatial dimensions, had finally encountered a cooler, more judicious culture which had established its dominions in the long gray estuaries of time.

“I said, have you got something going,” she repeated, still with the accent—the accent of my own time.

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.

He had made three training jumps, two hundred years, then four hundred, then six hundred, and he thought he knew what to expect, that sickening sense of breathlessness, of dizziness, of having crashed into the side of a mountain at full tilt; but everyone had warned him that even the impact of a six-C jump was nothing at all compared with the zap of a really big one, and everyone had been right.

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.