Cited in Worlds Enough and Time, edited by Gary Westfahl

If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.

To the Editors of the Lady’s Book:—

I have the honor of sending you, for your magazine, an article which I hope you will be able to comprehend rather more distinctly than I do myself. It is a translation, by my friend, Martin Van Buren Mavis, (sometimes called the “Toughkeepsie Seer,”) of an odd-looking MS. which I found, about a year ago, tightly corked up in a jug floating in the Mare Tenebrarum—a sea well described by the Nubian geographer, but seldom visited now-a-days, except for the transcendentalists and divers for crotchets.

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.

It would have been reason enough, had there been no other, for abolishing money, that its possession was no indication of rightful title to it. In the hands of the man who had stolen it or murdered for it, it was as good as in those which had earned it by industry. People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence and disinterestedness which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization.

You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transportation of epochs—and bodies?

“It goes, of course, at the usual rate. Only the time has to go with it. Hence, if I move the hands, I change the time. To move them forwards, in advance of the true time, is impossible: but I can move them as much as a month backwards—that is the limit. And then you have the events all over again—with any alterations experience may suggest.”

“What a blessing such a watch would be,” I thought, “in real life! To be able to unsay some heedless word—to undo some reckless deed! Might I see the thing done?”

“With pleasure!” said the good natured Professor. “When I move this hand back to here,” pointing out the place, “History goes back fifteen minutes!”

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

I sat down. “Give me the potion,” I said. “If the worst comes to the worst it will save having my hair cut, and that I think is one of the most hateful duties of a civilized man. How do you take the mixture?”

Although your enemy is within a dozen feet of you, Lumley, he will soon be a whole century behind, and you will be safe.

Years appeared to pass, slowly. The earth had almost reached the center of the sun’s disk. The light from the Green Sun—as now it must be called—shone through the interstices, that gapped the mouldered walls of the old house, giving them the appearance of being wrapped in green flames. The Swine-creatures still crawled about the walls.

Lord, it is an Ambassador from Witchland and his train. He craveth present audience."

No vision this! Reality! Empty space, two moments ago. Then a phantom, a moment ago. But a real tower, now! Solid. As real, as existent—now—as these rocks, these trees!

This book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future. The brain that conceives and writes these sentences lives in the time of Einstein. Yet I, the true inspirer of this book, I who have begotten it upon that brain, I who influence that primitive being's conception, inhabit an age which, for Einstein, lies in the very remote future.

Well, her boss, Dr. X-10, is trying to bring a man to life who’s been dead fifty years!

Think! Think of hearing Lincoln’s own voice delivering the Gettysburg address!

No man or woman of Eos has the authority to direct, check, or in any way influence the free decision and impulses of another without that other’s full and intelligent consent. We demand the right to follow the natural inclinations of our characters. We demand the right to marry.

I believe that when I go back to my house at Berkeley Square at half past five tonight, I shall walk straight into the 18th century and meet the people living there.

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

They stand about, little misshapen men with huge heads. But their heads contain only brains. They had machines that could think—but somebody turned them off a long time ago, and no one knew how to start them again. That was the trouble with them. They had wonderful brains. Far better than yours or mine. But it must have been millions of years ago when they were turned off, too, and they just hadn’t thought since then. Kindly little people.

I showed her New York. She’d say, “But why do the people hurry so? Is it really necessary for all those automobiles to keep going and coming? Do the people like to live in layers? If the United States is as big as you say it is, why do you build such high buildings? What is your reason for having so few people rich, so many people poor?” It was like that. And endless.

Ah, yes, you have a mathematical means of expression, but no understanding of that time, so it is useless. But the last of humanity was allowed to end before the Sun changed from the original G-O stage—a very, very long time ago.

The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore, learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.

EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.

But Max Planck with the quantum theory, de Broglie and Schroedinger with the wave mechanics, Heisenberg with matrix mechanics, enormously complicated the structure of the universe—and with it the problem of Time.

With the substitution of waves of probability for concrete particles, the world lines of objects are no longer the fixed and simple paths they once were. Geodesics have an infinite proliferation of possible branches, at the whim of sub-atomic indeterminism.

Still, of course, in large masses the statistical results of the new physics are not much different from those given by the classical laws. But there is a fundamental difference. The apparent reality of the universe is the same—but it rests upon a quicksand of possible change.

Padway feared a mob of religious enthusiasts more than anything on earth, no doubt because their mental processes were so utterly alien to his own.

Most people think of time as a track that they run on from birth to death as inexorably as a train follows its rails—they feel instinctively that time follows a straight line, the past lying behind, the future lying in front. Now I have reason to believe—to know—that time is analogous to a surface rather than a line, and a rolling hilly surface at that. Think of this track we follow over the surface of time as a winding road cut through hills. Every little way the road branches and the branches follow side canyons. At these branches the crucial decisions of your life take place. You can turn right or left into entirely different futures. Occasionally there is a switchback where one can scramble up or down a bank and skip over a few thousand or million years—if you don’t have your eyes so fixed on the road that you miss the short cut.

Wait a minute now—he was under no compulsion. He was sure of that. Everything he did and said was the result of his own free will. Even if he didn’t remember the script, there were some things that he knew “Joe” hadn’t said. “Mary had a little lamb,” for example. He would recite a nursery rhyme and get off this damned repetitive treadmill. He opened his mouth—

Neither Paradine nor Jane guessed how much of an effect the contents of the time machine were having on the kids.

I knew grandfather. He would go as far as his machine could take him. I had duplicated that. He would look around him for a promising site, get out his tools, and pitch in. Well, I could do that, too.

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.

The traitorous Shayson and his illegal federation extended this hypothesis to include much more detailed and minor acts such as shifting a molecule of hydrogen that in our past really was never shifted.

Docent: Kindly notice the round hole in the breastplate, undoubtedly caused by an iron-tipped arrow of the period.
Hank Martin: [shakes head and grunts] . . . I mean, well, that happens to be a bullet hole.

Tomorrow, my tomorrow, is the day of the President’s death.

The discovery of negative entropy introduces quite new and revolutionary conceptions into our picture of the physical world.

The inhabitants of the future resent you two hiding on a tropical isle, as it were, while they drop off the cliff into hell. Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them. It is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave. I am the guardian of their collective resentment against you two.

Switch is right. It was about time travel. What we call travel through time. So I took the tube numbers he gave me and I put them into the circuit-builder; I set it for ‘series’ and there it is-my time-traveling machine. It travels things through time real good.

It would reach back to win its battles. It would strike at points in time and space which would not even know that thre was a war. It could, logically, go back to the silver mines of Athens, to the horse and chariot of Thutmosis III, to the sailing of Columbus.

But it’s a longish story, and you might as well let me in. You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always have—or do—or will. I don’t know, verbs get all mixed up. We don’t have the right attitude toward tenses for a situation like this.

If there was such a thing as a 1990 almanac, and if it was in that package, wild horses couldn’t get it away from me.

Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!

Your time scale has been altered. A minute in the outer world would be a year in this room.

I could say that time is an illusion and that all events occur simultaneously.

Dear Mr. Lewis,

We think you should consult a psychiatrist.

Sincerely,

Doyle P. Gates
Science Fiction Editor
Deep Space Magazine

Esperanto isn’t anywhere. It’s an artificial language. I played around with it a little once. It was supposed to end war and all sorts of things. Some people called it the language of the future.

Figuring backward brought him quickly to the equivalence he wanted: one second in ship time was two hours in Garrard time.

And then the terminator’s claws began to manufacture their own varieties and attack Soviets and Westerners alike. The only humans that survived were those at the UN base on Luna.

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.

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.

Oh, I’m no four-dimensional thinker; but, as I understand it, if people could go back to a more recent time, their actions would affect our own history, which would be a paradox or contradiction of facts. Can’t have that in a well-run universe, you know.

You are the struback.

Even a cold, a common cold, would wipe out millions now. Resistance to disease has simply vanished over the past two centuries; it isn’t needed, with all diseases conquered. But you time-travelers show up loaded with potentialities for all the diseases the world used to have. And we can’t risk having you stay here with them.

In one hundred years, at ten per cent compounded annually, your gold would be worth better than 700,000 zecchini.

Denver in 1970 was a very quaint place with a fine old-fashioned flavor; I became very fond of it. It was nothing like the slick New Plan maze it had been (or would be) when I had arrived (or would arrive) there from Yuma; it still had less than two million people, there were still buses and other vehicular traffic in the streets—there were still streets; I had no trouble finding Colfax Avenue.

Full of fire and energy and force; it was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was justice, equity, truth and right, the good set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened by the wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarled, edged and heated, backed with wrath.

So they have not briefed you? Well, a run is a little jaunt back into history—not nice comfortable history such as you learned out of a book when you were a little kid. No, you are dropped back into some savage time before history—

He was a very ugly little boy and Edith Fellowes loved him dearly.

“While I was backing up, I inadvertently trampled and killed a small Pleistocene insect.”

“Aha!” said Hassel.

“I was terrified by the indicent. I had visions of returning to my world to find it completely changed as a result of this single death. Imagine my surprise when I returned to my world to find that nothing had changed!”

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.

I know you’ve come from a long way from here . . . a long way and a long time.

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.

Caswell: I wanna see if there are things out there like you described to me. Carriages without horses and the buildings that rise to—

Professor Manion: They’re out there, Caswell. . . . Things you can’t imagine.

When I speak of time, I’m speaking of the fourth dimension.

I may be able to prevent it: Is that what you mean?

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.

Laura! The freshest, most radiant creature God ever created. Eighteen when I married her, Marty, . . . twenty-five when she died.

Yeah, it takes dopey pictures—dopey pictures like things that haven’t happened yet, but they do happen.

. . . run backward run. . .

Tel était le but des expériences : projeter dans le Temps des émissaires, appeler le passé et l’avenit au secours du présent.

translate

Such was the purpose of the experiments: to project emissaries into Time, to summon the Past and the Future to the aid of the Present.

Now, this computer seems to be able to fake up just about any scene you want to take a look at. You name it, it sets it up. Chester, we’ve got the greatest side-show attraction in circus history! We book the public in at so much a head, and show ’em Daily Life in Ancient Rome, or Michelangelo sculpting the Pietà, or Napoleon leading the charge at Marengo.

Hard to remember. Some time soon now, I think.

Isn’t it obvious? The war did happen. You never did go back with your warning.

Dropping the letter, she held her head in her hands, closing her eyes as in the curved bone of her skull she heard all her possible courses of action jar together, future lifelines that annihilated each other.

A series of parallel black lines, several inches apart, extended from it, some distance across the corridor floor. At the head of each was a brief inscription, in no alphabet he could recognize. But every ten feet or so a number was added. He saw 4950, 4951, 4952. . .

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

The door slammed open.

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.

The Time Machine was a sphere full of milky fluid in which the traveller floated, enclosed in a rubber suit, breathing through a hose leading into the wall of the machine.

Power: [serious voice] One of the rules of time travel, Kitty, is to never kill anyone in the past, ’cause it might start a chain reaction that could indirectly affect your own life.

Spock: Fifty years to go. Forty. Thirty.
Kirk: Never mind, Mr. Spock.
Spock: [silence]

We set out basic texts, and we take careful note of the world as it is. If the world changes, then the texts should change here before our eyes.

Suppose, he thought fretfully, some bureaucrat in Class Seven or Nine or thereabouts had gone ahead on his own authority, trying to win a quick uptwitch by dynamic action, and had rounded up a few known hoppers in advance of their departure. Thereby completely snarling the fabric of the time-line and irrevocably altering the past.

One of his biggest problems here was keeping people from cracking up because there was too little privacy. Propinquity could be intolerable in a place like this.

On his last mind into the Devonian, when this tragic illness was brewing, he had intercourse with a young woman called Ann.

Fifi could not understand what on earth he was talking about. Every since leaving Plymouth, she had been adrift, and that not entirely metaphorically. It was bad enough playing Pilgrim Mother to one of the Pilgrim Fathers, but she did not dig this New World at all. It was now beyond her comprehension to understand that the vast resources of modern technology were fouling up the whole time schedule of a planet.

Well, isn’t it obvious, Manning? The war did happen. We didn’t get back with our warning.

So Hawksbill’s machine did work, and the rumors were true, and this was where they sent the troublesome ones. Was Janet here too? He asked. No, Pleyel said. There were only men here. Twenty or thirty prisoners, managing somehow to survive.

Humans of the 20th century do not go beaming around the Galaxy, Mr. Seven.

History has been changed in the fact that Billy Claiborne didn’t die, but Chekov is lying there dead.

They cannot hear you, Captain. To their ears, you sound like an insect.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on.

Spock! You’re reverting into your ancestors, five thousand years before you were born!

There’s a project. A U.S. government project I guess you’d have to call it. Secret, naturally; as what isn’t in government these days? In my opinion, and that of a handful of others, it’s more important than all the nuclear, space-exploration, satellite, and rocket programs put together, though a hell of a lot smaller. I tell you right off that I can’t even hint what the project is about. And believe me, you’d never guess.

She said: “It’s a matter of weight, Mr. Chaney. The machine must propel itself and you into the future, which is an operation requiring a tremendous amount of electrical energy. The engineers have advised us that total weight is a critical matter, that nothing but the passenger must be put forward or returned. They insist upon minimum weight.”

“Naked? All the way naked?”

My thoughts were of myself: I’m coming to save you. I’m coming, Gus. You won’t hurt any more. . . you’ll never hurt.

Given the power to alter the future, have we the right to use it?

The Timesweep program was a close parallel to the space sweep. The Old Era temporal experimenters had littered the timeways with everything from early one-way timecans to observation stations, dead bodies, abandoned instruments, weapons and equipment of all sorts, including an automatic mining setup established under the Antarctic icecap which caused headaches at the time of the Big Melt.

I have come unstuck in time.

No, no, no. I suppose it’s simply a logical impossibility to change the past, same as it’s logically impossible for a uniformly colored spot to be both red and green.

“Yes,” said Jherek. “I have already met the time-traveller. Last night. At the Duke of Queens’. I was so impressed by the costume that I made one up for myself.”

Now is the time. Look straight ahead and don’t be afraid.

You know, Joe, you are my first reader! A pity you don’t remember my book a little better!

The instructions were on the back of the clasp—when I touched it lightly, the words TIMEBELT, TEMPORAL TRANSPORT DEVICE, winked out and the first “page” of directions appeared in their place.

This sad little lizard told me he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh, people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.

Look, you gotta be kidding. I wanna go back to sleep! If I don't get at least 600 years, I'm grouchy all day.

Every man has more to live for than every other man. I don’t have a cute chick to sleep with, but I’d like to see the semi’s rolling along the Riverside Freeway at sunset a few more times. It’s not what you have to live for; it’s that you want to live to see it, to be there—that’s what is so damn sad.

“No true Eloi should be able to read or write.” Mr. Wells puffed on his pipe, peering out of the window.

The Mediterranean floor lay ten thousand feet below sea level. The inflow took most of that drop within a fifty-mile strait. Its volume amounted to ten thousand cubic miles a year, a hundred Victoria Falls or a thousand Niagaras.

I had to choose between a panic if the fathead got them to thinking, and a possible panic from the flash of the gun. But when a 20th gets to talking about his “rights” and what he is “owed,&rdauo; things can get out of hand.

In the weeks since the whole business of the time changes started, I had not been this close to being caught since that first day in the cabin northwest of Duluth, when I had, in fact, been caught without knowing what hit me.

Our passenger is the object of popular cults by now—a focus for finer feelings. In this way his mere presence has drawn the world’s peoples closer together, cultivating respect and dignity, pulling us back from the brink of war, liberating tens of thousands from their concentration camps. These cults extend from purely fashionable manifestations—shirts printed with his face, now neatly shaven in a Vandyke style; rings and worry-beads made from galena crystals—through the architectural (octahedron and cube meditation modules) to life-styles themselves: a Zen-like “sitting quietly, doing nothing.”

Maybe it takes gently crazy people and simpletons and dogs to do things we can’t do. Maybe they have abilities we don’t have.. . .

Well, in principle, it utilizes a electromagnetic force field to molecularly reconstruct the space-time continuum.

Fact then: Somehow, my travels crossed time as well as distance. Another fact: The boy was the focus of my travels—perhaps the cause of them.

Ninety years ago I was a freak; today I am an amateur.

Sharpie, you have just invented multiperson solipsism. I didn’t think that was mathematically possible.

Suppose your grandfather’s right. What happens to free will? If you can send information backward through time, you can tell me what I did even before I get around to doing it. So suppose I choose not to?

Today is December 7, 1941. I’m sure we are all aware of the significance of this date in this place in history. We are going to fight a battle that was lost before most of you were born. This time, with God’s help, it’s going to be different. . . . Good Luck.

Come back to me.

Is it all ready? Right. Come on then. Back to creation. We mustn’t waste any more time. They’ll think I’ve lost control again and put it all down to evolution.

Until the moment of my departure, you see, my life had been a slide show of dreams divided one from another by many small darknesses of wakeful dread and anticipation.

Physicians listened to heartbeats that dragged on, lonely and deep, for over a minute per. They worried over eyes that refused to blink, yet remained somehow moist. They despaired over encephalograms whose spikes could be counted in single neuron flashes, adding up to a complex pattern that was . . . normal!

You shot it. What a bunch of dumb sons of bitches. You shot it—a machine, you butt-heads!

Ray, help! Larry! It’s me!

Navy owes me 40 years back pay.

Kyle: [to Sarah at the Tech-Noir Club] Come with me if you want to live.

Greetings to the council. As you may have gathered, I have survived the pathetic trap set by Trooper Deth on Mecon 7. For twelve long years, you have hunted my disciples like dogs. Now, my day of vengeance is at hand. I’ve synthesized a time drug, and in a moment shall retreat down the dark corridors of history. Know that it is I who is solely responsible for your demise. One by one, your ancestors shall be murdered, and you, their progeny, shall cease to exist. Then shall I return, join my legion, and claim the seat of power for my own. Adieu . . . adieu . . . 

Next Saturday night, we’re sending you . . . back to the future!

Now that sounds like we’re dealing with a time-space warp.

Horace, the hardheaded, practical lout, the organizer, the schemer. Emma, the moaner, the keeper of our consciences. Timothy, the student. Enid, the thinker. And I, the loafer, the bad example, the one who makes the others feel virtuous.

This is totally rad. You’re like my big little brother.

Well, Mr Snelgrove, I happen to know that in the future I will not have the slightest use for algebra, and I speak from experience.

McCoy: You realize that by giving him the formula you’re altering the future.
Scotty: Why? How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?