Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  After that episode, the show intermittently tracked Titor’s proposed timeline, looking at current events like tea leaves, possible harbingers of a nuclear armageddon. But as the false predictions piled up—while many of Titor’s descriptions are vague enough to be considered “not yet disproved,” he did also claim there would be no Olympic Games after 2004—the search for Titor shifted from “Is this real?” to “Who deceived us?”

  In 2003, The John Titor Foundation, a for-profit Limited Liability Corporation, self-published John Titor: A Time Traveler’s Tale, which is essentially a bound copy of the message board posts. (Used copies of this are currently going for $130 a pop on Amazon.) The Italian investigative TV show Voyager took up the case in 2008, hiring a private eye to locate the folks behind the LLC, and a search led back to the aforementioned Lawrence Haber, who was listed as the company’s CEO. An investigation by amateur sleuth John Hughston, who also goes by the name “Razimus,” uncovered a mysterious P.O. Box in Celebration, Florida, belonging to the LLC. A group of friends with some downtime between gigs at their production company checked out the P.O. Box themselves but found nothing worthwhile. At some point, JohnTitorFoundation.com was created, offering some kind of nonsensical secret code to digital passersby. And just a week ago, Hughston released another video—this one 40 minutes long—in which he names Haber’s brother, Morey, as his prime suspect by using a side-by-side analysis of phrase-usage, which, to be kind, is not exactly a slam dunk.

  (Weirder side note: In 2004, a computer engineer named Marlin Pohlman filed a patent for a time travel machine that “back-engineered” concepts in the Titor posts. This started another round of speculation that Pohlman, himself, was the original Titor poster. Last March, he was arrested for drugging and sexually assaulting four women.)

  The search for Titor, then, has become more convoluted than Oliver Stone taking on the 9/11 conspiracy. A new piece of information comes out, a tech-savvy kid with some time to kill sees it, decides to give the puzzle a shot, and on and on it goes, the cycle never reaching an end. The trail burns hot, the trail goes cold, but the trail never disappears. There have been countless blog posts and armchair investigations—a Google search for “John Titor solution” bounces back with 325,000 results—but nothing’s come close to finding a worthwhile solution. An itch in the back of the throat remains, unscratched.

  But why?

  The Titor legend persists because no one ever claimed to be behind it. Now that we won’t be fooled, we need an answer. It’s the Zeigarnik effect; when something’s not wrapped up, it preoccupies our memory.

  Last month, Brian Dunning, a writer and producer specializing on the subject of skepticism, devoted an entire episode of his aptly-named podcast Skeptoid to the John Titor phenomenon, less focused on who it might have been and more about that question: why does something without any merit still have legs as an urban legend?

  “Now that the number of unsubstantiated claims on the Internet is somewhat larger than the factorial of the square of all the large numbers ever conceived separated by arrow notation,” said Dunning on his podcast, “it would be a lot harder to achieve John Titor’s celebrity.”

  Today, everything posted online gets a healthy dose of skepticism. Let’s call it the Post-Snopes Era. We’ve been conditioned—from everyone having access to Photoshop, to Punk’d and Jackass, to found footage films, to big budget viral marketing campaigns, to emails from faux Nigerian princes offering a portion of their riches if we simply send them our bank account number—to suspect everything. Every video of a cat performing a spectacular feat is met with at least one commenter decrying “FAKE!” The Titor story, from a time when we were all so innocent, a time that was less than 15 years ago, came right before things started to change.

  And the Titor legend persists, in part, because no one ever claimed to be behind it. Now that we won’t be fooled, we need an answer. It’s the Zeigarnik effect; when something’s not wrapped up, it preoccupies our memory. Our skepticism needs a party responsible, a grand designer that allows it to make sense. When we find out—think the wizard behind the curtain in Oz, or whoever Jacob was supposed to be in that final season of Lost—the mystery ends. No one has claimed Titor, so the story continues.

  There are some obvious connections for conspiracy theorists—the fracturing of governments, underground bunkers—but, for everyone else, there’s this: time travel stories are freaking cool. “This is a superpower that everyone would love to have,” said Dunning. “We all want John Titor to actually be from the future.” Who among us didn’t spend idle moments of our youth wondering about flying cars and hoverboards, or what life was like back in the Old West. In fact, when I asked Hughston, the sleuth blogger, why he was initially drawn to Titor, he said that he’d been “a big fan of time travel since about 1985,” the year Back to the Future was released.

  But there’s also a much easier explanation. “The John Titor story is popular,” Dunning said, “simply because that happens to be one of the stories that became popular.” If Titor wasn’t leading conspiracy-minded white dudes in their post-graduate years of boredom and confusion down a rabbit hole of mystery, something else would. It’s Urban Legend Darwinism. Among all of the hoaxes, Internet rumors, ghost stories, and Satanic voices you can hear if you play the vinyl backwards, some have to become popular. Might as well be Titor.

  There is one other (distant, remote, nearly scientifically impossible) possibility, though.

  “One of the keys to cracking the Titor question,” starts an email by someone who goes by the name Temporal Recon, “is to just allow for the possibility that time travel very well could be true.”

  The great thing about time travel: the story cannot be refuted. If events don’t happen as the traveler says, that’s because the traveler changed the timeline. “Many never even get off the ground in their research due to this very limiting view,” T.R. said. “They simply don’t believe that the human race will ever conquer time. ‘Ever’ is a very long time, Rick.”

  There’s a particular point-of-view that seems to evolve within every amateur Titor investigator I encountered. As the puzzle fails to be solved, when no serious candidates present themselves, the goal of locating the hoaxster morphs ever so slightly, allowing in the possibility that maybe, just maybe, time travel could be real. “Look, of course John Titor didn’t travel through time,” they’ll say, only to dramatically shift with the addendum, “but let’s say he did.”

  If you squint hard enough—and forget about the last four Olympics—things will always begin to resemble what you want to see, especially when reality’s only a minor quibble.

  I mean, couldn’t the political differences that continue to separate America into red states and blue states be precursors to the Second Civil War? U.S.—Russian relations have been kind of strange lately, haven’t they? The history of 2015, when Russia and the U.S. nuke each other into oblivion, is still yet to be written!

  Then T.R. writes a sentence that haunts me, one that will no doubt tip me over the edge on a course to try to solve the mystery, to locate the poster, or maybe a precocious kid now armed with a learner’s permit who once met his future self. Graphs and charts will mass, blanketing my small studio apartment, where I’ll only need a bare mattress in the corner, a pizza on the way, and a computer with browser tabs parked on obscure pages of note, set to auto-refresh. Friendships and relationships and family will drift into the ether; there are only so many hours in the day. Hands will blister, fingers will ink-stain, eyes will learn to scan for men in black suits, or white coats, or some combination thereof.

  He writes: “And there are others.”

  And down I’ll go, into the abyss.

  THE OLD MAN

  Holloway Horn

  Martin Thompson was not a desirable character, he possessed a clever, plausible tongue, and for years past had lived, with no little success, on his wits. He had promoted doubtful boxing competitions and still more doubtful sweepstakes. He had been
a professional backer, in which capacity he had defrauded the bookies; again, a bookmaker who had swindled his “clients.” There was more cunning than imagination in his outlook, but, within his limits, he possessed a certain distorted ability.

  He was known to his intimates as Knocker Thompson, and as such had a surprisingly wide reputation. In outward appearance he was a gentleman, for long experience had taught him to avoid the flashy and distinctive in dress. Indeed, his quiet taste had often proved a valuable business asset.

  Naturally, his fortunes varied, but he was usually more or less in funds. As Knocker sometimes said in his more genial moments: “For every mug that dies there’s ten others born.”

  Funds were rather low, however, on the evening when he met the old man. Knocker had spent the early part of the evening with two acquaintances in a hotel near Leicester Square. It was a business meeting, and relations had been a little strained; opinions had been freely expressed which indicated a complete lack of confidence in Knocker, and an unmistakable atmosphere had resulted. Not that he resented the opinions in the least, but at that juncture he needed the unquestioned trust of the two men.

  He was not in the best of humours, therefore, as he turned into Whitcomb Street on his way to Charing Cross. The normal plainness of his features was deepened by a scowl, and the general result startled the few people who glanced at him.

  But at eight o’clock in the evening, Whitcomb Street is not a crowded thoroughfare, and there was no one near them when the old man spoke to him. He was standing in a passage near the Pall Mall end, and Knocker could not see him clearly.

  “Hullo, Knocker!” he said.

  Thompson swung round.

  In the darkness he made out the dim figure, the most conspicuous feature of which was a long, white beard.

  “Hullo!” returned Thompson, suspiciously, for as far as he knew he did not number among his acquaintances an old man with a white beard.

  “It’s cold . . .” said the old man.

  “What d’you want?” asked Thompson curtly. “Who are you?”

  “I am an old man, Knocker.”

  “Look here, what’s the game? I don’t know you . . .”

  “No. But I know you.”

  “If that’s all you’ve got to say . . .” said Knocker uneasily.

  “It is nearly all. Will you buy a paper? It is not an ordinary paper, I assure you.”

  “How do you mean . . . not an ordinary paper?”

  “It is to-morrow night’s Echo,” said the old man calmly.

  “You’re loopy, old chap, that’s what’s wrong with you. Look here, things aren’t too brisk, but here’s half a dollar . . . and better luck!” For all his lack of principle, Knocker had the crude generosity of those who live precariously.

  “Luck!” The old man laughed with a quietness that jarred on Knocker’s nerves. In some queer way it seemed to run up and down his spine.

  “Look here!” he said again, conscious of some strange, unreal quality in the old, dimly-seen figure in the passage. “What’s the blinking game?”

  “It is the oldest game in the world, Knocker.”

  “Not so free with my name . . . if you don’t mind.”

  “Are you ashamed of it?”

  “No,” said Knocker stoutly. “What do you want? I’ve got no time to waste with the likes of you.”

  “Then go . . . Knocker.”

  “What do you want?” Knocker insisted, strangely uneasy.

  “Nothing. Won’t you take the paper? There is no other like it in the world. Nor will there be—for twenty-four hours.”

  “I don’t suppose there are many of to-morrow’s papers on sale . . . yet,” said Knocker with a grin.

  “It contains to-morrow’s winners,” said the old man, in the same casual manner.

  “I don’t think!” retorted Knocker.

  “There it is; you may read for yourself.”

  From the darkness a paper was thrust at Knocker, whose unwilling fingers closed on it. A laugh came from somewhere in the recesses in the passage, and Knocker was alone.

  He was suddenly and uncomfortably aware of his beating heart, but gripped himself and walked on until he came to a lighted shop front where he glanced at the paper.

  “Thursday, July 29, 1926 . . .” he read.

  He thought a moment.

  It was Wednesday . . . he was positive it was Wednesday. He took out his diary. It was Wednesday, the twenty-eighth day of July—the last day of the Kempton Park meeting. He had no doubt on the point, none whatever.

  With a strange feeling he glanced at the paper again. July 29, 1926. He turned to the back page almost instinctively—the page with the racing results.

  Gatwick . . .

  That day’s meeting was at Kempton Park. To-morrow was the first day of the Gatwick meeting, and there, staring at him, were the five winners. He passed his hand across his forehead; it was damp with cold perspiration.

  “There’s a trick somewhere,” he muttered to himself, and carefully re-examined the date of the paper. It was printed on each page . . . clear and unaltered. He scrutinized the unit figure of the year, but the “six” had not been tampered with.

  He glanced hurriedly at the front page. There was a flaring headline about the Coal Strike . . . that wasn’t twenty-five. With professional care he examined the racing results. Inkerman had won the first race . . . Inkerman—and Knocker had made up his mind to back Paper Clip with more money than he could afford to lose. Paper Clip was merely an also-ran. He noticed that people who passed were glancing at him curiously. Hurriedly he pushed the paper into an inner pocket and walked on.

  Never had Knocker so needed a drink. He entered a snug little “pub” near Charing Cross and was thankful to find the saloon bar nearly deserted. Fortified with his drink he turned again to the paper. Inkerman had come home at 6 to 1. He made certain hurried but satisfactory calculations. Salmon House had won the second; he had expected that, but not at such a price . . . 7 to 4 on. Shallot—Shallot of all horses!—had romped away with the third, the big race. Seven lengths . . . at 100 to 8! Knocker licked his dry lips. There was no fake about the paper in his hand. He knew the horses that were running at Gatwick the following day and the results were there before him. The fourth and fifth winners were at short prices; but Inkerman and Shallot were enough . . .

  It was too late to get into touch with any of the bookmakers that evening, and in any case it would not be advisable to put money on before the day of the race. The better way would be to go to Gatwick in the morning and wire the bets from the course.

  He had another drink . . . and another.

  Gradually, in the genial atmosphere of the saloon bar, his uneasiness left him. The affair ceased to appear uncanny and grotesque, and became a part of the casual happenings of the day. Into Knocker’s slightly fuddled brain came the memory of a film he had once seen which had made a big impression on him at the time. There was an Eastern magician in the film, with a white beard, a long, white beard just like the one belonging to the old man. The magician had done the most extraordinary things . . . on the screen.

  But whatever the explanation, Knocker was satisfied it was not a fake. The old chap had not asked for any money; indeed, he had not even taken the half-crown that Knocker had offered him. And as

  Knocker knew, you always collected the dibs—or attempted to—if you were running a fake.

  He thought pleasantly of what he would do in the ring at Gatwick the following day. He was in rather low water, but he could put his hands on just about enough to make the bookies sit up. And with a second winner at a 100 to 8!

  He had still another drink and stood the barman one too.

  “D’you know anything for to-morrow?” The man behind the bar knew Thompson quite well by sight and reputation.

  Knocker hesitated.

  “Yes,” he said. “Sure thing. Salmon House in the second race. Price’ll be a bit short, but it’s a snip.”

  “Thanks very m
uch; I’ll have a bit on meself.”

  Ultimately he left the saloon bar. He was a little shaky; his doctor had warned him not to drink, but surely on such a night . . .

  The following morning he went to Gatwick. It was a meeting he liked, and usually he was very lucky there. But that day it was not merely a question of luck. There was a streak of caution in his bets on the first race, but he flung caution to the wind after Inkerman had come in a comfortable winner—and at 6 to 1. The horse and the price! He had no doubts left. Salmon House won the second, a hot favourite at 7 to 4 on.

  In the big race most of the punters left Shallot alone. The horse had little form, and there was no racing reason why anyone should back him. He was among what the bookies call “the Rags.” But Knocker cared nothing for “form” that day. He spread his money judiciously. Twenty here, twenty there. Not until ten minutes before the race did he wire any money to the West End offices, but some of the biggest men in the game opened their eyes when his wires came through. He was out to win a fortune. And he won.

  As the horses entered the straight one of them was lengths ahead of the field. It carried the flashing yellow and blue of Shallot’s owner. The groan that went up from the punters around him was satisfactory, but there was no thrill in the race for him; he had been certain that Shallot would win. There was no objection . . . and he proceeded to collect.