Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  As Mr. Atkins put it, “It’s no different than reading a story and then having to relive the whole thing, anticipating each action and bit of dialogue. And that’s precisely what this is. Only it’s our lives, not fiction. We didn’t like it, Gerald. We didn’t like it at all! But we did something about the problem instead of merely complaining.”

  Let me say right now that I thought the solution they came up with was nonsensical and I kept searching, all the time we talked, for ways of politely turning down the offer. Escaping to to the past was a ridiculous answer. But it was just the kind of notion that would appeal to an old-fashioned character like Mr. Atkins.

  I didn’t tell him so, of course. I thanked him for his consideration and shook hands and felt relieved when he finally left.

  My mind was made up by then. I’d back out, quit if I had to, rather than take refuge in the past to evade the future.

  It wasn’t until I got out of the office that I realized there was no big decision to make; it was already made for me. Either I was going to die or I was going into the past—and I wasn’t going to die if I could help it. But neither did I intend going into the past if I could really help that!

  When Marge realized that I wasn’t merely trying to take her mind off the fatal day, she pounced on me and hugged me as though I myself had invented the time machine just to save her life!

  “It’s wonderful, darling!” she cried. “You were right all along! Oh, how can you forgive me for making things so unbearable for you?”

  “About this idea of going into the past—” I said.

  “What’s the difference when we go to,” she cut in, “as long as we don’t have to die?”

  “But I figured on telling Mr. Atkins at the last minute that all I want is a transfer—”

  “What’s the sense of guessing?” she asked excitedly. “All we have to do is borrow a couple of Projectors and see!”

  I began to feel myself being squeezed into a one-way trap. I put my foot down—but where it landed was in a Grundy Projector from the people next door—and where it figuratively emerged was eleven days later, when I couldn’t shut my non-physical eyes to the way the whole situation would turn out.

  Marge and I, with half a dozen others, were getting into a helicar. I followed them out to a house in the country. We handed in all the money we had saved and in return were given old-style clothes, ancient-looking money and a small amount of luggage. Then we all stepped into what looked like an oversized version of a Grundy Projector and vanished.

  Fight? Argue? Scheme?

  I didn’t have a chance.

  It was 1956 when we arrived in old New York. We were met by others who had pioneered the way before us and they looked after our group until we learned the ropes.

  There was nothing easy about getting used to the era. I wished often that I could get back to my own time, Grundy Projector or no Grundy Projector. Still, Marge didn’t complain; she was prepared to endure anything just because she thought her life had been saved. Occasionally, bothered by my blunders in adjusting to this past century, I’d start to reason with her, explain that her life hadn’t been in danger at all. But then, luckily, I would realize that convincing her would leave an angry, dissatisfied wife on my hands and I always managed to stop in time.

  I got a job working as a night janitor in a bank and studied accounting in the daytime until I was able to get a steady job. We’ve been here a few years now and I guess you could say we’re pretty well assimilated. We have a house and two small sons and I’m doing well at my job. We still see some of our friends from the 21st century and they’ve also managed to make the change successfully.

  We get together now and then, and talk over old times, and laugh at some things and get nostalgic over other things. Now that there aren’t any Grundy Projectors around, we’ve started feeling once more that our fates are in our own hands.

  Rog Owens has an interesting viewpoint. He said one night, “It wasn’t the future that was fixed; it was the Grundy Projectors that fixed the future! Whatever people saw would happen, they just let happen . . . or even worked to make it happen. No matter what it was, including their own deaths. Hell, how’s that any different than voodoo?”

  That was pretty much how each of us had felt, only we hadn’t figured it out so clearly. But Rog Owens has a special reason for thinking particularly hard about the problem. Mr. Atkins and his syndicate hadn’t send us back for purely altruistic reasons; they learned that Rog’s daughter Ann would marry a fellow (not one of us) named Jack Grundy and that they’d have a son named Bilbo, who would invent the Grundy Projector. Our assignment was to keep that from happening.

  Well, we couldn’t prevent the marriage, but we could—and did—make sure their son would have a good, plain American name. It’s William Grundy.

  But today my younger boy told me their kindergarten teacher calls William “Billy Boy.”

  And one little girl can’t pronounce it. She calls him Bilbo.

  IN THE CRACKS OF TIME

  David Grace

  They called him Mark for want of a better name, though a name was of only moderate usefulness as he rarely interacted with anyone. Most of the time it was just “me” or “I”. The half-spin disparity was responsible for some, but not all, of his isolation. Even after a jump it took a while for the field to equalize and pop him back into congruence with whatever reality he had landed in. Until then he floated through the worlds like a ghost, seeing but not being seen, until he pulled the pin.

  It didn’t hurt, really, not very much, the spin-up and the spin-down. Mostly it felt like pointy-legged spiders running up and down his body, their pads slowly becoming duller and blunter until their touch was barely more than a vague sensation like cobwebs brushing against bare skin.

  In the beginning he tried to blend in, settle down, sometimes staying years, decades, in one place, in one reality, until the pain became too great and he cursed fate for giving him a heart to go with his brain. Then he would again push the button and drift off through the five dimensional universe and everyone and everything he had come to love became as insubstantial as a soap bubble and slipped away. He still remembered them, one of the detriments of his perfect memory. Especially Linda, his first wife, who had aged and withered and grown old in what seemed like only a heartbeat of his own time.

  Now during his pop-ins he avoided people as much as possible and he usually limited his grounded time to no more than a year and a day, the minimum his systems needed to repair and recharge before he could resume his tangled journey. Subjectively, three-hundred and six years had passed. Six-hundred ninety four to go. Insubstantial and isolated, he could live in the cracks of time as long as he wanted but none of that counted toward his thousand year mission. Only time spent on the ground, among the living, advanced his internal clock and until that clock had counted off a thousand cold and lonely years, he could not go home.

  Like everything else, with perfect clarity he remembered the day they had sent him away.

  The lab was far underground, almost perfectly shielded against the Ants’ probes. Almost.

  “Do you have any questions, Mark?” Maria Salazar asked with a forced smile. She knew he didn’t but it was the polite thing to do. Behind her were the optical control cables and the rings of the hyper-magnets, all focused on the meter and a half thick aluminum sphere in the center of the apparatus.

  Mark gave his head a tiny shake. His brain felt as empty as an old bucket.

  “You understand that you’ll have to wait the entire thousand years? We can’t count on the Ants being completely gone sooner than that.” She was babbling, she knew. They had gone over this a hundred times, but nervously flicking her gaze between Mark and the silver sphere, she couldn’t restrain herself from one last lecture.

  “They’ll overrun us in five years at the most, probably only three. The genetic drift we’ve programmed into them will take a minimum of a hundred years to fully take hold in the crucial genes. We don’t dar
e program it to work any faster. If they discover what we’ve done before it fully infects them a million years won’t be long enough.”

  “I understand,” Mark said in a flat voice, his eyes never leaving the Sphere.

  “Then they’ll have to carry it back to their hives. Who knows how many generations that will take.” Glassy-eyed, Maria was rambling as if standing in front of her mirror, rehearsing her original briefing to the Joint Chiefs. “We’ve allotted five hundred years for the genetic drift to be fully encoded in all the Ants, in all their breeding chambers. Then we added another hundred years, just to be sure. Then we figured another hundred years for half of them to die. Then another hundred years for their scientists to discover the cause of the problem and slow the effects. Then another hundred years for the last of them to die. Then another hundred years, just to be sure. So, a thousand years from now is the soonest you can come back.

  “I know.”

  Maria fidgeted and took a step back. By that unspoken signal Mark stood and approached the Sphere.

  “Your battery’s only good for an initial three seconds,” Maria warned him unnecessarily.

  “I know. I can do it.”

  Maria gave him a weak smile and extended her hand.

  “We’ll detonate an hour after you leave. None of us who know . . .” Maria waved her hand describing not just the lab but the entire research complex that extended for half a mile in every direction, “can be allowed to be captured by the Ants.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s a hundred megaton H-bomb. We won’t feel a thing,” she said and trembled.

  Mark stared blankly then gave her a little nod and reached for the GO button.

  “We’re counting on you!” Maria shouted just before he disappeared and slid through the aluminum-alloy shell as if it were no more than a gust of warn air. Once inside the Sphere he pulled the pin and solidified in the hunched control chair. The center of the small panel in front of him held only a red light and a single button. Mark took a last, long breath and pressed the button to the stop.

  Outside the magnets charged-up and went through their calibration cycle. At odd moments the Sphere vibrated to random harmonics then settled into an almost indiscernible hum. The light flashed orange. Forty-six seconds later it turned a steady green. The button began to pulse a vivid red. Mark took one deep breath, then slammed the control with the heel of his palm.

  The air seemed to coalesce into a thick, sub-sonic scream and then the Sphere and the lab and the entire outside world all faded into cellophane-colored smoke and Mark drifted down into the cracks in time.

  “Time isn’t what people think it is,” Maria had told him the first time they met. “Events don’t happen, one after the other. All of our temporal history is there, all at once, in five dimensional space.”

  The confusion on Mark’s face was obvious and she took a breath and started again.

  “Time itself is a series of energy ripples like waves down a long trough filled with glass plates. Each plate contains the entire three dimensional universe one incredibly tiny fraction of a second thick. One after another each time wave crosses a plate, activates that three-d universe as now, then moves on. Our wave, our time, washes down the trough activating each of our nows one after another. Our time wave is the fourth dimension that sequentially activates all that is us and now one fragment of existence at a time.”

  “And the fifth dimension?”

  “That’s the length of the trough, the depth of existence from the beginning of time to the end. Actually, it’s not a trough but a mobius strip, it continues without any end and the waves of time go round and round forever.”

  “So we travel through time . . .” Mark began hesitantly.

  “We can’t travel through time, at least not our time. Our time is our wave and we can’t make it move faster or slower and we certainly can’t make it go backward.”

  “But, I thought—”

  “You thought that we were going to send you through time?” Maria frowned then gave him a patronizing smile. “Pretend you’re in a rowboat balanced on the crest of a wave. Okay, you take a flat stone and you skip it across the waves toward the shore or out to sea. Each wave it touches is somebody else’s time. You’re going to be that stone. You’re going to skip yourself from wave to wave, back and forth through other people’s time until your wave, our wave, has moved a thousand years into our future. Then, wherever you are, you’re going to skip forward and rejoin your own time, our universe.”

  “And I can’t kill my own grandfather and never be born because . . .”

  “Because whoever you kill won’t be your grandfather. He’ll will be someone else’s grandfather.”

  “But that someone will be a person who looks like me and thinks like me. Who is me.”

  Maria exhaled loudly as if unsuccessfully trying to explain the square root of 7 to a backward third grader.

  “Your time is always fixed in your own little wave. Your time is your own wave going down the trough. For you there isn’t any past or future to go to. All you’ve got is your own wave as it moves forward through the universe. Your time is where you are on your wave in the trough, past to future, your past, your future. There’s no time travel in your own wave because it’s always only where it is. But we can send you back to someone else’s wave.”

  “What’s the difference?” Mark asked. “If all the waves are the same . . .?”

  “They’re not all the same. The passage of the each wave across each plate, their passage down through the fifth dimension changes things, maybe just a little change for someone in the wave right behind ours. But that one difference changes things a little more for the people in the wave behind it. And then the next and the next. If you jump to a wave very far behind yours and ride it back to the ‘present’, to its present, everything may be different from what it was in your present at the same stage. Ripples, eddies, harmonics, all of them affect each succeeding wave’s events so the farther down the line you go, the more things are changed by the time that the early wave reaches where you were in the trough before you jumped back.”

  “And if I jump ahead of my wave?”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can’t. I could prove it if you had the math but you don’t.”

  Mark frowned like a child who thinks an adult is lying in order to hide an unpleasant truth.

  “Look, all you have to know is that the universe is built in a certain way and we can’t change it. We can jump you back to old waves but we can’t send you forward to where our wave will be a thousand years from now because it’s not there yet. You can only get to our future a thousand years from now by waiting until a thousand years pass and then jumping back to your own wave from wherever you were.”

  “I thought this time travel thing was going to save humanity. If I can’t change our past and I can’t go to our future, what’s the point of all this?” Mark waved at the massive equipment in the lab below the conference room.

  “The point isn’t where you’re going to, it’s where you’re not going to be.”

  Mark stared her with frank confusion.

  “We have to hide you someplace where the Ants can’t find you. We have to hide you until our wave is a thousand years in the future and the Ants will all be dead. Then you can come home.”

  “If all you need to do is hide me, there must be—”

  “There isn’t. Who knows how far the Ants’ empire will have reached five centuries from now? They have some kind of interstellar transportation. Is it only sub-light? We don’t know. Suppose we put you on some ship and send it out at one-percent of the speed of light, which is about the best we can do. How far will you get by the time the Ants overrun the earth? Where on the earth or the moon or even on Mars could we hide you for a thousand years where we could be sure they wouldn’t find you?”

  “So, you’re going to hide me someplace in the past?”

  “
Somewhere in the cracks of time before the Ants ever found us. You’ll skip back twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred years, wait ten, then skip back another twenty, wait twenty, skipping, waiting, skipping, waiting, until the thousand years are up. Then you’ll skip all the way forward to our own time and, God willing, by then the Ants will be dead and gone.”

  “And then?” Mark asked.

  “And then, you’ll save us all,” Maria told him, more a prayer than a promise.

  Mark drifted through diaphanous buildings of pale brick and ethereal stone and watched pallid shadows pour down sidewalks as night alternated with day. Once fully energized by the first skip into the past he had left the Sphere behind, tethered in his own time in a laboratory that no longer existed, now just a hole in the ground, probably still swarming with Ants. The time waves themselves now energized his internal systems and he could speed up or slow down his skims across the crests with only a thought.

  Day, night, day, night, day, night, faster and faster he flickered back down the years. Finally he hovered in a moderate-sized city in what he knew as Upstate New York. He waited a few subjective seconds until dawn then he pulled the pin and the spiders danced on his skin as the buildings grew substantial, thickening like sheets of water crystallizing into dirty ice.

  The breeze was cool and beneath the residue of burned diesel he detected spring grasses and new leaves. A fragment of newsprint tumbled past. Mark grabbed it. May, 1953 according to the smudged date. One of his favorite eras although little changes were starting to creep in from the history he had known from his own time. He found the rest of the paper protruding from a trash can and sat on a bus bench to read it in the growing light.