Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  You have met us, the guests, before. My name is George Hillyer, at that time barely known to the world as a minor writer of short stories. Doctor Browne and Ellis the Psychologist had been with us the previous Thursday, October 1. Today, October 8, we had also present the Editor, the Journalist, and the person I formerly called the Shy Man. I practised a little deception there, deliberately putting him well in the background. He was not really shy at all, simply a good listener, slow to speak unless he had something worth saying. He was young, with fair-brown hair and blue eyes; to make himself seem older, at that time he sported a trim little brown beard. He was a mathematical physicist, and he had once been a student under our friend the Time Traveller, when the latter was still a professor at London University.

  The party went much as described in my novel. The Traveller was late, and we began dinner without him. We talked of what three of us had seen last week—the big Time Machine nearly finished, and the little model which disappeared. I suggested the Traveller was late now because he was travelling in time. “He left that note, so he must have anticipated—”

  “Oh, stuff!” said the Editor. “If he can travel backward in time, why should he expect to be late? He need only stay on his machine a little longer, coming home—and he could be early.”

  “Very early!” The Journalist laughed. “Why, he could get back the previous week—and meet you fellows last Thursday.”

  “Including himself!” said the Editor. “Don’t forget, he could meet himself too! Then there’d be two of him, one a week or so older than his brother. And, I presume, then there’d be two Time Machines! And if he took money with him, he could multiply that as well—a bad look-out for the Bank of England! So you see, it’s all nonsense—a gaudy lie, a conjuring trick. There can’t be any time travel.”

  “Excuse me,” said the young Physicist. “Your argument holds only against travel backwards in a single time line. I see no objection to forward time travel. We do it all the time—at sixty seconds to the minute. And skipping forward in a machine is no more, logically, than hiding yourself for a while, and then coming on the scene again. It’s the logical equivalent of the Rip Van Winkle coma. With clever technology, perhaps he could go forward.”

  “But what’s the use of that,” said the Editor, “if he couldn’t come back?”

  Just at that moment the door slowly opened, and the Time Traveller appeared—limping, bloodstained, ghastly. He was a man of middle age, and now he looked older, grey and worn.

  He drank his wine, went out, changed, ate dinner, and told us his story. He had spent eight days in the year 802,701, and he had returned.

  I need not repeat his story in detail: you have heard it before. In the far future, the human race had split into two species: above ground, the rich had turned into little mindless Eloi, living in a half-ruined fools’ paradise; below ground, in caverns and tunnels, the enslaved workers had turned into foul, lemur-like Morlocks—and turned upon their former masters, turned cannibal—if that was the right word—coming out at night, especially in the dark of the moon, to eat the Eloi. He told us of his life among the Eloi: of Weena, the little Eloi girl-woman, blonde and helpless, whom he rescued from drowning when none of her companions would raise a decadent finger to save her; and how at last he had lost her, in a night of fire and torment, with Morlocks all around—lost her to death by fire—or worse. And then he added an episode still more terrifying, the episode of the sun flickering out some thirty millions of years hence.

  At that point, the young Physicist objected. “Are you sure about that date, Sir? That sounds like Kelvin, and his theory of the sun’s energy—or rather, lack of it. But we don’t really know what makes the sun shine. I am working on the structure of the atom; at the sun’s enormous temperatures, who knows what strange energies may lurk there . . . Anyway, I’ve read the geologists. The earth, and so the sun, must have existed for hundreds of millions of years already; and if so, why not hundreds of millions more?”

  The Traveller hesitated. “I think it was thirty million . . . I must admit, I was rather hysterical after I left the Morlocks. All that Further Vision was like a bad dream.”

  “Then perhaps,” said Ellis, the Psychologist, “that episode of the Eloi and Morlocks was also nothing more than a dream, though a fascinating one. The symbolism—”

  “No, no! That was absolutely real. As real as this room! And—I’ve shown you Weena’s two flowers.”

  The two sad little flowers lay withered upon the table. And we looked at the Traveller’s scars.

  “I believe you about the Morlocks,” said the young Physicist suddenly. “It’s exactly in line with present trends. We are really two nations, so why not later two species? And we treat our workers abominably.”

  “Hear, hear!” I said.

  The Traveller smiled wanly. “Thank you, Welles. I know your socialist leanings—yours too, Hillyer—but thank you. As for me, I wish we could simply abolish the workers—be served by intelligent machines. Then certainly no Morlocks could evolve.”

  “But now,” said Welles, the Physicist, “what do you intend to do, Sir? You’ve still got a working Time Machine, haven’t you?”

  “Go back,” said the Traveller.

  “Go back in time? To the past?”

  “No, go back to the future. I must—I will try again to rescue Weena . . .”

  “I’m afraid,” said Welles, “there may be a problem about that, Sir.”

  “You would meet yourself,” I said. “Will you wrestle with your former self over who has the honour to save Weena?”

  The Traveller looked shaken. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I don’t think that would happen,” said Welles. “The real trouble, I think, is that you wouldn’t get back to the same future.”

  “There is only one future!”

  “No, Sir, there must be at least two. According to your hopes, one future in which Weena dies, another in which you save her. And I think something like that might happen. But not exactly that. You see, by coming back and telling us about the future, you have already altered the future. You have reinforced my socialist fears, and I think Hillyer’s also. We will now make extra efforts—talk urgently to William Morris, to the Fabians—so the Eloi—Morlock situation may never arise, in this stream of time. Time is not really a single stream, a single fixed railway-track from fixed past to fixed future. There are many tracks of possibility, some close together, some far apart. And you have just proved that—by apparently coming back from our future.”

  “Apparently coming back. I have come back!”

  “Not from our future Sir, no. From a future which was ours until—a moment perhaps two hours ago. When your machine stopped in the laboratory and you dismounted, while we were eating dinner—I think I know the exact moment—that was when you split time, and pushed us onto a slightly different line. Like a railwayman shifting points. We have all been running on a different line since then.”

  “This is preposterous!” said Doctor Browne. “We didn’t feel a thing!”

  “I felt dizzy at one moment,” said Welles. “A slight blurring feeling, about 7.45. It only lasted a fraction of a second. One could easily disregard it.”

  It struck me then that I had felt it too—I thought at the time I might be going to faint. Nobody else would admit to it.

  “Is there a piece of paper handy?” asked Welles. “I need to draw a diagram or two to explain my Theory of Time. It’s my belief that backward time journeys are never straight back—always oblique. Otherwise you have circular causation.”

  Pencil and paper were found, and Welles drew the following sketch:

  “This is the happening I deny,” said Welles. “A single time-track—which I had to draw rather thick—and you, Sir, going forward to 802,701 and returning to 1891. You see that you have circular causation? For instance, we are not all socialists here. Your tale of purely underground workers may strike one or two of us as a good idea. They might push it . . .
Then the Morlocks in the future become the cause of the Morlocks in the future—practically, they are uncaused. Or if you go less far into the future, to the advanced time, you could bring back the secret of some wonderful invention—say, anti-gravity flying machines—and publish it now. Then that invention will never have to be invented—the future flying machines would be their own cause. And so on . . . That is why I deny any straight returns. This is how I see the true situation.”

  And he drew:

  “You see,” he said, “there is no longer any circular causation—there are only zigzags. And 802,701B awaits your next journey, Sir—that would be the dotted line. There is no fear of meeting yourself: because you have never been in 802,701B, only in 802,701A.”

  “It’s still crazy,” I said. “What if our learned friend went back a week now, as our newspaper friends suggested—to our last dinner party. Would he meet himself, and us, in that case?”

  Welles smiled. “I think he could. The situation would be as follows:

  “That gets us a third time track,” said Welles, “Track C. On our present track, which is Track B—also on Track A—our learned friend did not turn up last week because we know he didn’t. Several of you lived through that party, and you know there was only one Traveller, and only one Machine. But on Track C, there is no circular causation to prevent doubling of men or machines. Maybe the conservation laws would have to be modified—one track loses matter, another gains . . . Of course, there would also be a corresponding future on Track C, a year 802,701C. I don’t know what it would be like, but it might be exposed to a raid by two Time Machines.”

  “My head is splitting,” said Doctor Browne. “All this airy, crazy theory!”

  “It need not be only theory,” said Welles. “I know it’s late, but if we’re not too tired to spare, say, another hour, we could experiment.”

  “Experiment!” said the Traveller, rousing himself. “Why not? But I’m not ready yet for another long time journey . . .”

  “No, Sir, I meant short hops, fifteen minutes or so, forth and back. Could you stand that?”

  “Certainly, young man!”

  “Then let’s go, Sir. You know, I’ve never even seen the Time Machine as yet . . .”

  2

  We all trooped into the laboratory—and there was the Machine, just as the Traveller had described, in the northwest corner: a little battered, a little stained, but wonderfully impressive. The Editor and Journalist stared and tittered, but Welles was immediately touching it here, touching it there, almost stroking it, and asking technical questions which I for one could not follow. The Traveller answered him.

  “Gravitational energy?” said Welles at last. “My God, Sir, that—if you can touch that you are far beyond anything we now imagine . . . and the conversion factor?”

  The Traveller gave him some numbers.

  “That means, practically unlimited. You can reach the ends of Time, and only slightly reduce the earth’s orbital momentum. Ah, what a glorious device!”

  “For my next raid on the Future, however,” said the Traveller, “I’ll have to install some modifications. An extra saddle, wheels . . . But those can wait. Now, what little experiment do you want, Welles?”

  “Can you go forward in time just a quarter of an hour?”

  “Yes. I adjusted the fine control as I was returning. Go forward fifteen minutes, and then what?”

  “Stay there, Sir. We’ll just wait here, and see you reappear.”

  “Stand well back,” said the Traveller.

  He mounted his machine, pressed a lever—and vanished! A strong gust of wind blew in at the open window.

  We all gaped. “God, what a trick!” said the Editor. “Better than that ghost he showed us last Christmas. I suppose its done with mirrors . . . Well now, now what do we do?”

  “We could go back to the smoking room, and return,” said Welles. “But I intend to stay right here, watching that empty corner.”

  We all agreed to stay.

  “Don’t move from this corner,” said Welles. “There might be a nasty accident if he reappeared in one of us.”

  We waited. The Psychologist took up a topic he had raised the previous week. “Suppose—he went back to the Battle of Hastings—and then saved Harold, won the battle for the Saxons! What then?”

  I laughed. “We’d be speaking a different language now, Ellis—something more like German or Dutch, with almost no French roots. And our gracious Queen would probably be called Sieglinde—or something like that!”

  “Not at all,” said Welles, smiling. “You’re on the one-track theory again, Hillyer. No Traveller could affect the Battle of Hastings in our time-stream. It can’t be done, because we know it hasn’t been done. But our friend could go back to 1066 in another track—D, would it be?—and then in that stream there would be no Norman Conquest. I have a feeling that there may be very many time-streams, some very similar to our history, some very different. Perhaps these streams are diverging all the time, even without Time Machines . . . I don’t know. But my guess is, the ones that are very different are inaccessible to our present selves. If our friend were to go back in time and tamper with some version of history—then I’m afraid we would never see him again. He could return to 1891—but it wouldn’t be our 1891. He would exist for our counterpart selves—the ones speaking Saxon perhaps; but no longer for us.”

  “Perish that thought!” exclaimed Doctor Browne. “I’d hate to lose him! Even now . . .” He gazed uneasily at the empty corner.

  “No, no: no danger. He has simply gone into our future; which any minute now will be our present.”

  A few seconds later, he was proved right. The Machine and the Traveller flashed into existence in the northwest corner. We felt a swirl of air.

  “Still there?” said the Traveller, looking cheerfully at us. “Has anything happened? I just pressed the lever a fraction . . .”

  “Fifteen minutes have passed,” I said. “We had an anxious wait.”

  “For me,” said the Traveller, “it was less than a second.”

  “Very good, Sir,” said Welles. “Now we have proved—for those who aren’t too sceptical—that forward time travel is feasible, and involves no paradoxes. But now—would you go forward again, another fifteen minutes—and then come back, on the machine, to a point just a few seconds ahead of now? Say, to avoid trouble, to half a minute ahead of the time you leave?”

  “This will take fine tuning,” said the Traveller, looking at his dials, “but—yes, I will do it. Here goes!”

  Again he vanished. This time we had only a few moments to wait. Suddenly I felt dizzy, and I saw the man and the Machine flash back into their place. But now the Traveller looked troubled. He dismounted, and came over towards us.

  Welles held up his hand. “Did anyone feel strange, just now?”

  “Yes,” said Browne, stroking his grizzled beard and looking meditative. “Now you mention it, just as our friend flashed back, I felt a little dizzy.”

  “So did I,” said Ellis.

  “And I,” I said.

  “The splitting of the tracks,” said Welles.

  “I say,” the Traveller began, “what happened to you people? When I dismounted, fifteen minutes ahead, there was nobody—not in here, not in the whole house! I questioned Mrs Watchett. She said you had all gone home. Then I came back in here, got on the Machine, returned—and here you are!”

  “Ah well,” said Browne, smiling, “I suppose it is late, and we will depart in the next few minutes.”

  “No,” said Welles, taking out his watch. “I am going to stay right here for twenty minutes. Why don’t you all stay? That way we will prove something important.”

  His meaning sank in to all of us. “Prove it’s all nonsense!” the Editor laughed.

  “I—I didn’t see you!” said the Traveller.

  “No—and you didn’t see yourself either, Sir, in this corner. If you’ll just wait . . .”

  We waited twenty minutes. An
d nothing whatever happened. The Traveller moved the Machine into the centre of the room. But the far corner remained empty. Everyone looked at their watches, the Traveller consulted the chronometer on his Machine. At last he looked round at us, dismayed. “It—it is five minutes past the moment I arrived and found you gone. Yet—you are not gone!”

  “And you have not reappeared in the far corner, or anywhere else,” I said. “If that had happened, five minutes ago you would have met yourself, too. Evidently, that journey has been wiped out.”

  “Not wiped out—” Welles began.

  “I’ll settle this!” cried the Traveller. “I’ll ask Mrs Watchett!” And he rushed out of the laboratory.

  “I’d like to see the housekeeper’s face,” said the Journalist, “when he does ask her. Why—there might be a story in this—in the silly column.” And he ran out too.

  We heard voices in the passage, and then they both re-entered—with Mrs Watchett, that motherly, elderly widow. “Oh, no Sir,” she was saying, “you never did ask me any such thing. And I never told you the gentlemen had left. How could I? They’ve been here with you all this ’alf hour and more, lookin’ at your experiments.”

  “All right, Mrs Watchett, you can go,” said the Traveller. “I—I just had a dream, that’s all. It’s over now.” He passed a hand wearily over his brow. He seemed quite crestfallen.

  “It’s high time to make our dream departure come true,” said the Editor crisply. “Well, thank you, mine host, for showing us some diverting illusions. Maskelyne is nothing to you. I look forward to something really startling this Christmas. Perhaps you can conjure up for us the ghost of a Morlock. That’d be something—the ghost of a being who doesn’t yet exist—and probably never will.”