Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  Space was black. There was nothing. Atkins said, “What happened? Where are the Earth and Sun?”

  The professor frowned. He said, “Going back in time must be different. The entire Universe must have moved.”

  “Where could it move?”

  “I don’t know. Other objects shift position within the Universe, but the Universe as a whole must move in an upper-dimensional direction. We are here in the absolute vacuum, in primeval Chaos.”

  “But we’re here. It’s not primeval Chaos anymore.”

  “Exactly. That means we’ve introduced an instability at this place where we exist, and that means—”

  Even as he said that, a Big Bang obliterated them. A new Universe came into being and began to expand.

  THE INVENTION OF TIME TRAVEL

  Jim Loy

  I very humbly thank the Swedish Academy for this award. Although my invention of time travel must be regarded as one of the truly great achievements of all human history, I do not feel worthy of the honor. My discovery was actually nothing more than the combination of two happy accidents, my accidental discovery of the Time Field Equations, and my subsequent invention of the time machine.

  Before I describe these happy accidents in more detail, let me digress by describing the truly meager work that had been done in time travel research before I began working on it. Time seemed rigid and unvarying until Einstein proposed his Special and General Theories of Relativity. Then it became clear that time could travel forward at various rates for different observers under certain circumstances, like extremely high speeds or in extremely strong gravitational fields. Then Quantum Mechanics showed that an antiparticle could be viewed as a particle travelling backward in time. A few scientists chose to believe that such particles actually were travelling backward in time. Most scientists were skeptical, to say the least.

  None of this even approached a coherent theory of time travel. Then I came along, and virtually stumbled upon my Time Field Theory and my Time Field Equations, almost ten years ago today. Here is my original notebook, in which I first wrote down these equations. I’m not sure how they came into my mind. But I was sure that they were the answer to the puzzles and paradoxes that I had been studying for so many years. I am sure that you have all seen these equations. They even appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, next to a ridiculous picture of myself.

  These Time Field Equations are a system of differential equations which are rather difficult to evaluate in detail, in most cases. Suffice it to say that solutions to the entire system of equations cannot normally be estimated using today’s fastest computers in less than a thousand or so years. While the equations do not point to solutions at this time, they do point to possible tests which can be performed in the laboratory.

  The fact that these equations must converge to a solution is obvious from the fact that we observe time to march at a constant rate, and by the predictability of Relativity.

  Under truly bizarre circumstances, the equations “blow up.” They predict that a time traveller, under these circumstances, would cease to exist in time. Although such an event sounds frightening, I do not actually know what it means. What happens when you do not exist in time? Do you merely cease to exist? I theorized that time travel, into the past or future, may happen somewhere between these two extremes, between constant time, and not existing.

  I needed time travellers, in order to test this theory, and find experimental values in order to calibrate my equations. My first time travellers were very accurate clocks. Later, I used rats, and even later, monkeys. Eventually, I myself travelled in time, from the age of dinosaurs to the far distant future. And I was able to create a portable device which creates a fairly intense time field. This device became known as a “time machine.” I hold such a device here. I will now activate it.

  And Professor Hansen disappeared from the stage. The audience stood and applauded wildly. His acceptance speech was described upon more front pages of more newspapers than had his initial discovery. I am sitting here, in a public library, in the year 2782, reading those front pages. There are nearly one-hundred books here on the subject of time travel. They all praise Dr. Hansen, profusely, as do encyclopedias and history books. None of them tells the real story, the story that I am about to tell here.

  I was a historian at a large university in the year 2905. That year, and my life in and around that year, seems so close to me here in 2782. But, of course, it is 123 years in the future. I was doing research, much as I am doing now, reading newspapers. And then, in an ancient issue of the New York Times, I spotted an interesting want ad:

  Wanted: Time traveller to please give me a ride in a time machine.

  Please meet me at 342 E. Snow Way, New York, NY, at noon, July 1, 2000.

  Intrigued, I dug out my time machine, and went to visit the man. It was Dr. Hansen. He was actually surprised that someone answered his ad. He had placed it with the newspaper just a few hours before. It had not yet appeared in print. He took some convincing that I was a real time traveller, and not some prankster from the newspaper. I showed him money from the future, and my ID cards from the future. He agreed that I could not have prepared these so soon after his phone call to the newspaper. Perhaps this was all genuine.

  We then took a time journey, using my time machine, the same portable device that he later claimed to have invented. We went to the end of the Jurassic era, shortly before dinosaurs became extinct. It was wild and beautiful there. I had an uneasy feeling that we were being watched by something really huge. We saw no animals larger than a small house, however.

  We took several time journeys, over the next few weeks. On one of these, I was shot. it was one of Napoleon’s battles; I don’t remember which one. And we were stranded in time, for a time. I had lost consciousness, and he did not know how to operate the time machine. He carried me to a farm house, where my wound was bandaged by the woman of the house. I eventually woke and took antibiotics which I had in my backpack. I was fed bread and a tasty soup with chunks of meat in it. In a few days, I was back on my feet. When I tentatively made my way down the stairs, I found Dr. Hansen, writing in his famous notebook. He had the time machine on the table, and he had pulled a tiny user’s manual out of a door in its side. I had never known that a user’s manual had even existed. He was copying “his” time field equations from the manual into his notebook. When he saw me, he guiltily put away his notebook. “Ah, you’re alive again,” he said, “I was just learning to operate your time machine.” One does not need the time field equations in order to operate a time machine.

  We had a few more time adventures together. And I began to consider him a good friend. Then he stole my time machine and left me stranded here in 2782. And he went back and won the Nobel Prize.

  I’m not really stranded here. Time travel is common in 2782. And I have nearly saved enough money to buy another time machine.

  Am I bent on revenge? No, not at all. Will I attempt to set the record straight? I doubt that that is even possible. Dr. Hansen is acclaimed as the inventor of time travel, not just in his own time, but perhaps in all subsequent times. I can only record my own story, as I am doing now.

  But I do want to visit with Dr. Hansen. I want to know why he stole my time machine, when we could have gotten one of them for a dollar, in the 37th century, inside a box of breakfast cereal.

  THE ILE OF DOGGES

  Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

  The light would last long enough.

  Sir Edmund Tylney, in pain and reeking from rotting teeth, stood before the sideboard and crumbled sugar into his sack, causing a sandy yellowish grit to settle at the bottom of the cup. He swirled the drink to sweeten it, then bore it back to his reading table where an unruly stack of quarto pages waited, slit along the folds with a pen-knife.

  He set the cup on the table in the sunlight and drew up his stool, its short legs rasping over the rush mats as he squared it and sat. He reached left-handed for the wine, right-handed for t
he playscript, drawing both to him over the pegged tabletop. And then he riffled the sheets of Speilman’s cheapest laid with his nail.

  Bending into the light, wincing as the sweetened wine ached across his teeth with every sip, he read.

  He turned over the last leaf, part-covered in secretary’s script, as he drank the last gritty swallow in his cup, the square of sun spilling over the table-edge to spot the floor. Tylney drew out his own pen knife, cut a new point on a quill, and—on a fresh quarter-sheet—began to write the necessary document. The Jonson fellow was inexperienced, it was true. But Tom Nashe should have known better.

  Tylney gulped another cup of sack before he set his seal to the denial, drinking fast, before his teeth began to hurt. He knew himself, without vanity, to be a clever man—intelligent, well-read. He had to be, to do his job as Master of Revels and censor for the queen, for the playmakers, too, were clever, and they cloaked their satires under layers of witty language and misdirection. The better the playmaker, the better the play, and the more careful Tylney had to be.

  The Ile of Dogges was a good play. Lively, witty. Very clever, as one would expect from Tom Nashe and the newcomer Jonson. And Tylney’s long-practiced and discerning eye saw the satire on every page, making mock of—among a host of other, lesser targets—Elizabeth, her Privy Council, and the Lord Chamberlain.

  It could never be performed.

  RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:

  Why is’t named Ile of Dogges?

  WITWORTH:

  Because here are men like wild dogges. Haue they numbers, they will savage

  a lyon: but if the lyon come upon one by himselfe, he will grovel and showe his belye.

  And if the lyon but ask it, he will sauage his friends.

  RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:

  But is that not right? For surely a dogge should honour a lyon.

  WITWORTH:

  But on this island, even the lyon is a dogge.

  It could never be performed, but it was. A few days later, despite the denial, Jonson and the Earl of Pembroke’s Men staged The Ile of Dogges at the Swan. Within the day, Jonson and the principal actors were in chains at the Marshalsea, under gentle questioning by the Queen’s own torturer, Topcliffe himself. The other playwright, Thomas Nashe, fled the city to elude arrest. And The Theatre, The Curtain, The Swan—all of London’s great playhouses languished, performances forbidden.

  The Ile of Dogges languished, likewise, in a pile on the corner of Tylney’s desk, weighted by his pen-knife (between sharpenings). It lay face down, cup-ringed pages adorned with the scratch of more than one pen. The dull black oakgall ink had not yet begun to fade, nor the summer’s heat to wane, when Tylney, predictably, was graced by a visit from Master Jonson.

  Flea bites and shackle gall still reddened the playwright’s thick wrists, counterpoint to the whitework of older scars across massive hands. Unfashionably short hair curled above his plain, pitted face. He topped six feet, Ben Jonson. He had been a soldier in the Low Countries.

  He ducked to come through the doorway, but stood straight within, stepping to one side after he closed the door so that the wall was at his back. “You burned Tom’s papers.”

  “He fled London. We must be sure of the play, all its copies.”

  “All of them?” For all his rough bravado, Jonson’s youth showed in how easily he revealed surprise. “‘Tis but a play.”

  “Master Jonson,” Tylney said, steepling his hands before him, “it mocks the Queen. More than that, it might encourage others to mock the Queen. ‘Tis sedition.”

  Recovering himself, Jonson snorted. He paced, short quick steps, and turned, and paced back again. “And the spies Parrot and Poley as were jailed in with me? Thought you I’d aught to tell them?”

  “No spies of mine,” Tylney said. “Perhaps Topcliffe’s. Mayhap he thought you had somewhat of interest to him to impart. No Popist sympathies, Master Jonson? No Scottish loyalties?”

  Jonson stopped at the furthest swing of his line and stared at the coffered paneling. That wandering puddle of sun warmed his boots this time. He reached out, laid four blunt fingertips and a thumb on the wall—his hand bridged between them—and dropped his head so his arm hid the most of his face. His other hand, Tylney noticed, brushed the surface of the sideboard and left something behind, half-concealed beside the inkpot. “No point in pleading for the return of the manuscript, I take it?”

  “Destroyed,” Tylney said, without letting his eyes drop to the pages on his desk. And, as if that were all the restraint he could ask of himself, the question burst out of him: “Why do it, Master Jonson? Why write it?”

  Jonson shrugged one massive shoulder. “Because it is a good play.”

  Useless to ask for sense from a poet. One might as well converse with a tabby cat. Tylney lifted the bell, on the other corner of his desk from the play that ought already to be destroyed, and rang it, a summons to his clerk. “Go home, Master Jonson.”

  “You’ve not seen the last of me, Sir Edmund,” Jonson said, as the door swung open—not a threat, just a fact.

  It wasn’t the usual clerk, but a tall soft-bellied fellow with wavy black hair, sweet-breathed, with fine white teeth.

  “No,” Tylney said. He waited until the click of the latch before he added, “I don’t imagine I have.”

  ANGELL:

  Hast sheared the sheep, Groat?

  GROAT:

  Aye, though their fleece be but siluer.

  he handeth Angell a purse

  ANGELL:

  Then thou must be Iason and find the golden fleece: or mayhap needs merely shear a little closer to the skin.

  GROAT:

  Will not the sheep grow cold, without their wool?

  ANGELL:

  They can grow more. And, loyal Groat, wouldst prefer thy sheep grow cold, or thy master grow hot?

  GROAT:

  The sheep may shiuer for all I care.

  Tylney waited until Jonson’s footsteps retreated into silence, then waited a little more. When he was certain neither the clerk nor the playmaker were returning, he came around his table on the balls of his feet and scooped up the clinking pouch that Jonson had left behind. He bounced it on his hand, a professional gesture, and frowned at its weight. Heavy.

  He replaced it where Jonson had laid it, and went to chip sugar from the loaf and mix himself another cup of sack, to drink while he re-read the play. He read faster this time, standing up where the light was better, the cup resting on the sideboard by the inkpot and Jonson’s bribe. He shuffled each leaf to the back as he finished. When he was done, so was the sack.

  He weighed the playscript in his hand, frowning at it, sucking his aching teeth.

  It was August. There was no fire on the grate.

  He dropped the playscript on the sideboard, weighted it with the bribe, locked the door behind him, and went to tell the clerk—the cousin, he said, of the usual boy, who was abed with an ague—that he could go.

  WITWORTH:

  That’s Moll Tuppence. They call her Queene of Dogges.

  RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:

  For why?

  WITWORTH:

  For that if a man says aught about her which he ought not, she sets her curres to make him say naught in sooth.

  Sir Edmund Tylney lay awake in the night. His teeth pained him, and if he’d any sense, he’d have had them pulled that winter. No sense, he thought. No more sense than a tabby cat. Or a poet. And he lay abed and couldn’t sleep, haunted by the image of the papers on the sideboard, weighted under Jonson’s pouch. He should have burned them that afternoon.

  He would go and burn them now. Perhaps read them one more time, just to be certain there was no salvaging this play. Sometimes he would make suggestions, corrections, find ways—through cuts or additions—that a play could be made safe for performance. Sometimes the playmakers acquiesced, and the play was saved.

  Though Jonson was a newcomer, Tylney knew already that he did not take kindly to ed
iting. But it was a good play.

  Perhaps there was a chance.

  Tylney roused himself and paced in the night, in his slippers and shirt, and found himself with candle in hand at the door of his office again. He unlocked it—the tumblers moving silently in the well-oiled catch—and pushed it before him without bothering to lift the candle or, in fact, look up from freeing key from lock.

  He knew where everything should be.

  The brilliant flash that blinded him came like lightning, like the spark of powder in the pan, and he shouted and threw a warding hand before his eyes, remembering even in his panic not to tip the candle. Someone cursed in a foreign tongue; a heavy hand closed on Tylney’s wrist and dragged him into his office, shouldering the door shut behind before he could cry out again.

  Whoever clutched him had a powerful grip. Was a big man, young, with soft uncallused hands. “Jonson,” he gasped, still half-blinded by the silent lightning, pink spots swimming before his eyes. “You’ll hang for this!”

  “Sir Edmund,” a gentle voice said over the rattle of metal, “I am sorry.”

  Too gentle to be Jonson, just as those hands, big as they were, were too soft for a soldier’s. Not Jonson. The replacement clerk. Tylney shook his head side to side, trying to rattle the dots out of his vision. He blinked, and could almost see, his candle casting a dim glow around the office. If he looked through the edges of his sight, he could make out the lay of the room—and what was disarrayed. The Ile of Dogges had been taken from the sideboard, the drapes drawn close across the windows and weighted at the bottom with Jonson’s bribe. Perhaps a quarter of the pages were turned.

  “I’ll shout and raise the house,” Tylney said.

  “You have already,” the clerk said. He released Tylney’s wrist once Tylney had steadied himself on the edge of the table, and turned back to the playscript.