The Time Traveller’s Almanac

The hands were whirling around the dial from right to left with inconceivable rapidity. In this whirl we ourselves seemed to be borne along. Eternities seemed to contract into minutes while lifetimes were thrown off at every tick.

I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud.

A hundred years hence! Think of it! If I could come back to life THEN—just for a few hours—and go to the reading-room and READ! Or, better still, if I could be projected now, at this moment, into that future, into that reading-room, just for this one afternoon! I'd sell myself body and soul to the Devil for that!

The weather makers put .006 of one percent too little moisture in the air on this set. There’s three-sevenths of an ounce too little gasoline in the storage tanks under here.

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.

They will not accept the fact that choice is an illusion caused by the fact that future time-loci are hidden from those who advance sequentially along the time-stream one moment after the other in blissful ignorance.

All the coordinates are there, all the places and times I went to these past months. When you're lonely, when you need me, go to the Time Station and I’ll be waiting on the other side.

Their only dreams are of winning prizes on television giveaway shows.

Although the secret of death has been imparted to the full membership of the Temple, not all have understood its import.

The people have this hint of the winning side, as they might from newspaper predictions or opinion polls—but the choice remains theirs, a decisions which we politicians humbly accept. 

Millions and millions of years ago this desert was sea bottom. Maybe even the birthplace of man. Who knows?

Let me prompt you. You’re dead, Curtis. Or you will be.

In the old days, when time was just a linear flow from then to now, did anyone get bored with all that stability? For better or for worse it was different now. You go to bed a Dartmouth man and wake up Columbia, never the wiser. You board a plane that blows up over Cyprus, but then your insurance agent goes back and gets you to miss the flight.

He began to babble about Sveaborg, about the importance of what we are doing here, about the urgent need to change something, somehow, to prevent the Soviet Union from ever coming into existence, and thus forestall the war that has laid the world to waste.

You’re Jean-Jacques Manoir, aren’t you? Right? You don’t know me, but I know all about you.

‘Honeymoon in time,’ indeed. Why? Is it that your woman is jealous of your time trips? Don’t be an idiot, Tasco. You know that ship’s not built for two.

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.

It was a shock to find that the expedition could go no further back than 429 BC; though for some of us, it was not an unwelcome one. Miriam was perhaps the only one amongst us who was annoyed that we couldn't get to Pericles. He had died earlier, in the part of the year we couldn’t reach. So near—but we had hit a barrier, as solid as a rockface on the path of linear time, in the year that the Peloponnesian War was gaining momentum.

Don’t change the past or the past will change you. The time laws. You lawyers understand this kind of thing. You, and you alone, are responsible for any dislocation of past events, persons or things, et cetera et cetera. Read the small print and sign.

You’re the only reason, Claudia. I did it for you. I read a story that you wrote and I knew it was about me and that it was about you. I searched in the Archives and I found your picture and then I knew that I loved you and that I had always loved you and that I always would.

So: once upon a time when I was twenty-one years old I left my home and came on the NAFAL ship Terraces of Darranda to study at the Ekumenical Schools on Hain.

I'm offering to send you back in time to attend the 1956 International Conference for Experimental Physics. I need a copy of Clarke’s last paper.

I was stupid. I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know how to take care of her.

Always, he would leave memories to cherish; months later, he would check up on his net-pals—his score so far was five institutionalisations and two suicides—just to see that the experience was still vivid. He was determined to crawl into IRENE D’s skull and stay there, replicating like a virus, wiping her hard drive.

This is a call from the past, my darling.

The wormholes were the port’s very reason for existing, the center of Cheena’s universe.

The genderbot still thinks Kit Marlowe was a girl. I reentered everything.

I have been hoping to speak privately with Amphiareaws about Time’s enmity. I know that I will not be born for many years. I know also that I have traveled the wrong way through those many years to join our crew. Was that in violation of Time’s ordinances? If so, it would explain his displeasure; but if not, I must look elsewhere.

A computer is like a beehive. Many bits and parts, none is by itself intelligent. Combine together and you have something that can think.

I'm from the Future, Says Bobble-Headed Boy.

A butterfly caused all this?

Everything ends eventually. But after all is said and done, it’s waht we do in the meantime that matters, isn’t it?

With a few measures of dancing, a charge of power crept into Madeline's bones, enough energy to take her anywhere: London 1590. New York 1950. There was power in dancing.

I haven’t just been to Mecca. I’ve been there in the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him.

The hands are moving now. Time is passing now.

Based on the linguistic evidence, I must conclude Madoc is truly a man out of time.

They’ll have no one to remember their lives but you; and all because you will believe the recruiters when they tell you that to join the organizaton you must kill your own grandfather, and that if you do not join the organization, you will die.

(It’s an antinepotism measure, they’ll tell you, nodding, not unkindly. And a test of your ruthlessness and determination. And besides, we all did it when it was our turn.)

In the future, I got a beer.

You know the arguments: If God had wanted us to travel through time, the devout claim, he would have given us the ability to do so. If God had wanted us to travel through time, the scientists say, he would have given us the ability to understand time travel—and oh! Look! He’s done that.

Whenever Hwang goes to sleep, he jumps forward in time. This is a problem. This is not a problem that is going to solve itself.

She would have been excited if she hadn’t been so horrified: The house was probably destroying the space-time continuum right now and forming a thousand glittering paradoxes all because she hadn’t really cleaned the kitchen. Once she’d forgotten to weed the window boxes and the house had dissolved her feet right up to the ankle.

But Ernie understands the long and the short of it well enough. The bottom line is the kid and his professor at school found a way to make these lumps spend some of their own future in the present.

Living space is tough to find, though—there just aren’t many places in any city of any time that will stay overlooked for the duration. The invisible spaces of Babylon in 1700BC would already be staked out and claimed by whoever was taking refuge there.