Time Travel Omnibus, page 1144
Being possessed of a way with words (according to my AI-instructor) and an acute memory, I elected to earn a crust—as I think you say—penning Science Fiction novels.
I very much regret that you do not possess the ability to recognize talent when you see it.
And for your information, antigrav-elevators are possible—and will be invented in 2075.
Yours in disappointment, T. Traveler.
29th July 1966
Dear T. Traveler,
Now there’s a story! It has everything—crime, punishment, devices gone wrong, unintended consequences. Hogwash, of course—but just what I’m looking for! Write it up as fiction in 40,000 words, with added spice—i.e., love interest and aliens—and you’ve got yourself a contract.
And as for you hailing from the fourth millennium. Look, buddy, I get all sorts writing for my outfit: nutty university professors and loons, hacks with delusions of grandeur and would-be messiahs. I don’t know where you fit on that list, but if you say you’re a time-traveler from the fourth millennium, that’s fine by me. Just so long as you produce the goods.
Yours, D. Woolover.
30th August, 1966
Dear Dan,
Please find enclosed the ms of my SF novel Stranded in Time, at 39,000 words, for your consideration. I’ve “spiced it up” for the market, and thus consider it far from my best work.
But, as they say, needs must . . .
And I must register my displeasure at being placed in the same category as “loons and hacks with delusions of grandeur.” One day, perhaps, I will be able to prove the veracity of my claim that I hail from the fourth millennium.
Yours, T. Traveler.
23rd September, 1966
Dear T. Traveler,
Hot-diggety! Stranded in Time has everything. I loved the scene where the hero was flung back in time with his broad sobbing buckets and the Tau Cetians in hot pursuit. Great stuff! This is just what we’re looking for.
Please find enclosed the contract for $750; sign both copies and return.
Publication is slated for March next year, and we’re putting you back-to-back with The Two Headed-Thing from Antares by John Racket. And how about this for a strap-line: “He paid for his crime by being stranded in time!”
And if you’re ever in the neighborhood, drop by—I’d love to meet you, Mr. Traveler.
PS—One thing . . . you said you were flung back in time for the error of embroiling yourself in an “escapade that was deemed by the authorities to be less than legal.” I hope you don’t mind me asking just what your crime was?
Yours, D. Woolover.
4th October, 1966
Dear Dan,
I’m delighted to have placed a novel with you at last, and I look forward to its publication with anticipation.
You made an assumption in your last letter that I must hasten to correct. You presumed I was “Mr.” Traveler. However, you were wrong. I am not a male of the species . . . and furthermore—and this might surprise you—nor am I technically speaking a female. We have come a long way, in the fourth millennium, in the science of genetic alteration, and several years ago I elected to undergo genetic-somatic-chromosomal modification. For your information I resemble a human being only from the head up (which makes passing for human in this age not too difficult); however, from the neck down . . .
Well, perhaps you would care to drop by my apartment one evening, Mr. Woolover, and see for yourself.
And my crime? I think that would be better discussed over a few drinks, don’t you? Or perhaps even a meal. My treat.
Yours with relish, T. Traveler.
The End
JOIN OUR TEAM OF TIME TRAVEL PROFESSIONALS
Sarah Pinkser
The sounds of half-tuned electric guitars blasted from the doorways of Manny’s and Sam Ash, dueling across the grimy patch of 48th St known as Music Row. Magda waited until the group of time tourists she was following had turned the corner, then plunged her arm into the nearest garbage can. Her hand encountered something slimy.
“Ugh,” she said, not for the first time that day. She wished she could wear gloves, but they weren’t part of her new uniform.
“Are you complaining, Magda?” asked her supervisor, Lwazi, through her jawbone implant. “In your first hour on the job?”
The nice thing about her cover identity was that Magda could respond freely. Manhattan in 1985 didn’t have jawbone communication, but it did have plenty of bag ladies who talked to themselves. Magda was temporarily one of them.
“No sir,” she responded. “Not complaining.”
“Good. There are plenty of people who would jump at this job if you don’t want it.”
Magda returned to her task. Her search of the garbage can yielded two Fauxcolate wrappers and an empty hydration pod. She wondered why they bothered bringing Fauxcolate to a time when they could buy the real thing; from what she had heard there was no comparison. She stuffed the trash into one of the bags in her shopping cart and shuffled after the tourists. A job is a job, she said to herself.
She turned left on 7th Avenue, as the tourists had. She checked each garbage can they had passed, and kept her eyes open for future-refuse that hadn’t quite made it to the cans, just as the training vids had instructed. Halfway down the next block she spotted a discarded box of MaryJane cigarettes. Had those been around in 1985? “When in doubt, take it out,” the training had said. She grabbed it just in case, realizing too late that it was lying in a pile of dog feces.
“Eeeeech!” she said, dropping it into one of her bags and examining her hand. She wished she was allowed to carry sanitizer.
She caught up at Times Square. They were standing in the center island, gaping at the chaotic heart of the city, surrounded by peep shows and neon. Most of them blinked the shutters on their eye-cameras; only a couple seemed to remember the prop cameras around their necks. They were given cameras, costumes, and currency in lieu of training. The agency considered it more cost-effective to send guides and guards and cleanup crews than to try to teach their rich clients. New Yorkers ignored tour groups so there wasn’t much risk of interaction.
“Follow, Magda.” Lwazi’s voice moved from her jaw to her ear. She realized she had confused her group with another, and hurried to make up the distance.
“What happens if I don’t make it to the pickup with them?” she asked.
“Make it to the pickup,” Lwazi said.
“But if I didn’t?”
He sighed. “Magda, you did receive a copy of the contract, correct?”
“Yes.”
“But let me guess. You didn’t read the fine print before signing?”
“Not all of it,” she admitted. “It was my first job offer since I had my kid. I wasn’t in any position to turn it down, whatever it said.”
“You skipped some important stuff. If you fail to make it to your designated pickup, you must reach one of the other pickups. You have one week.”
Magda wanted to ask what would happen if she didn’t make it back in a week, but she thought she had shown enough ignorance already. She needed the job. Her daughter Sofia would be starting school soon, and there was so much to pay for.
One crosswalk separated Magda from her group. She fought the urge to attach herself to them. Close but not too close, as the training had said. She picked up another Fauxcolate wrapper and followed them back up Broadway.
The tourists had tickets to the Cats matinee, so Magda had a couple of hours to kill. There wasn’t much she could do in her cover identity besides sit and wait and try not to get arrested for loitering.
“Lwazi, mind if I take a bathroom break?”
“Where?”
She looked around. “Alley.”
“You’ve got five minutes,” he said. She felt the tiny click of the implant going inactive. The agency’s only concession to privacy.
Magda took the moment to sidle up to the group’s other support worker.
“Excuse me, Officer,” she said.
“You’re not supposed to talk to me.” He kept his eyes on the street, his spine straight. She didn’t doubt she was beneath his notice.
“It’s my first time. I’m just a little nervous. How many trips have you made?”
“Enough that I get to play cop instead of homeless.”
“Are you still monitored every minute?”
He puffed out his chest. “Nah. They trust me.”
Good. “So, um, what happens if we miss the pickup?” He gave her a look like a real policeman trying to decide if she was a suspect. She rushed an explanation. “I mean, I have a kid. I’m not trying to run out or anything. I just want to know.”
He removed his hat and ran his fingers through his hair, then tapped his head. “The nanobots injected at the same time as the HIV and hepatitis vaccines begin eating your memory to make sure you don’t profit off future knowledge. The temporary fertility suppressors become permanent. You’re left behind in your cover identity.”
“That’s barbaric!”
“No, that’s common sense. Otherwise they’d have employees disappearing into the past for better job opportunities, or betting on sure things and leaving themselves fortunes. There’d be branching timelines and paradoxes and all kinds of trouble. Speaking of trouble, you should probably get moving along.” He raised his voice at the end and pointed, for the benefit of a real policewoman who chose that moment to stroll by.
Magda walked in the direction he pointed, stopping at a bus shelter. Another click suggested Lwazi was back in her ear. A job is a job, she told herself again. Maybe if she was good at it, she’d get to play cop someday instead of bag lady.
“Goddamn time tourists,” she heard somebody mutter. Magda turned to see a homeless woman occupying one side of the shelter’s bench. “Goddamn time tourists. You can’t spit without hitting one.” The woman tore open a chocolate bar and tucked the wrapper into a bag beside her. She bit into it and closed her eyes, sighing. When she opened her eyes, she held the candy out toward Magda.
Magda shuddered and shook her head. Better not to know. She settled down on the other side of the bench and pulled her shopping cart close.
The End
HISTORICITY
Bob Newbell
“T-minus two minutes.”
That’s the mission control computer. That’s how long I have to back out. One second after that is one second too late. But I’m not going to back out. I don’t have any real ties to this era. My whole life I’ve felt I was born centuries later than I should have been. Temperamentally, I’m well-suited to time travel.
I’ve read some of the old time travel science fiction. Quaint ideas about time machines being compact little vehicles that magically drop you off to whatever calendar date you like. That’s a much nicer narrative device than having to find the right kind of black hole orbiting the right kind of star and then build a machine around both of them.
“T-minus one minute, forty-five seconds.”
And in the old stories, you could travel into the future, too. In reality, you can only travel to the past. The closer to the present you want to travel to, the more power it takes. In terms of energy, it’s far easier to travel 100 years into the past than it would be to travel ten seconds into the past. To travel even one nanosecond into the future would require infinite energy.
“T-minus one minute, thirty seconds.”
And once you’re in the past, forget about preventing your grandparents from ever meeting each other or killing Hitler or any other causality violation-type tampering. Laws of physics won’t allow it. Novikov self-consistency principle. Go back in time to kill your mom before she gives birth to you and on your way to commit matricide, you’ll trip and break a leg. Or get killed yourself in a car accident. Something will prevent you from violating causality. Nature abhors a paradox.
“T-minus one minute.”
Did I mention it’s a one-way trip? Like I said, you can’t travel to the future. And when you arrive in the “past,” that becomes the “present.” The time you traveled back from is forever inaccessible. Once you’re in the past, your job is to observe and document. And after you’ve recorded the history you were assigned to investigate, you take everything you’ve documented to the designated recovery location and let your recording machine dig itself into the ground. It’ll burrow deep enough into the Earth’s crust to remain undisturbed for centuries. They’ll locate it and dig it up the same day you were sent back in time, centuries after you’re dead.
“T-minus forty-five seconds.”
Speaking of death, you may not live very long after you’ve time traveled to the past. All matter that gets sent into the past including living tissue gets hit with ionizing radiation. You’ll have at least two or three forms of cancer shortly after you arrive. That may not sound like a serious problem, but cancer used to be a debilitating and even deadly disease. Depending how far back in time you go, the medical science may not be advanced enough to treat it. Your cell repair machines may be able to fix the damage but all that nanotech in your cells gets hit with radiation, too. It may not function properly. Statistically, you’ve got a less than fifty percent chance of making it five years after your arrival.
“T-minus thirty seconds.”
Still, for all the problems, time travel is worth it. Data mining history is a calling, almost like a religion. We can’t know who we are or what we can become if we don’t know how we arrived here. Dying 700 years before you were born is a small price to pay.
FIX
Michael A. Stackpole
The people best equipped to understand the reality of time travel are always those who most vociferously maintain it’s impossible. Granted, back in the days when sunset and seasons ruled mankind, the clues had been difficult to detect. With the rise of rationalism, however, and accuracy of timepieces, the reality of time travel could not have been more obvious. Still, the wise explained away anomalies with much complex math and overuse of the hobgoblin “subjectivity.”
Were subjectivity a carpet, all the evidence swept beneath it would tower over Everest.
It’s entertaining to watch learned men and women applying analogies to explain something they clearly don’t understand. Most believe time is a river. This theory allows them to postulate fast currents and slow, and eddies where time might actually travel backwards. There could even be stagnant pools, where time just stops altogether. They do the math, they write their books, and award each other prizes—all the while hoping no one noticed that they hadn’t a shred of proof for any of it.
My father, who yet is a legend among Fixers, explained time once to me simply: needing to objectively measure their mortality, men have made up rules for a game they call Time. A long life is scored as a blessing. A shorter life is not, unless the shorter life is lived hard and painfully, in which a premature death is scored a blessing. A child’s early death is tragic, unless they fought against some hideous disease, in which case it was heroic. You can also win through the simple expedient of living long enough for everyone else you knew to die.
Not the silliest amusement man has ever invented, and still the only one which everyone plays.
By the rules of the game, the five young women only earned a tragedy. Four were fixed, firmly and solidly. They truly belonged here, at the Chi Omega sorority at Florida State University. They were born in this when and lived here uninterrupted until their deaths. They weren’t the final victims to perish at Ted Bundy’s hands, but they would be his undoing. He’d be convicted of their murders and die for them—imbuing them with an aura of heroism.
I squatted next to the fifth girl’s body. She didn’t belong here. Unlike the others, she had defensive wounds on her forearms. Flesh under her fingernails could have provided a DNA match, but in 1978, Florida police weren’t even aware that was a possibility. No bite marks, which was an error, since her killer had all the time he needed to create dentures which would link her to Bundy. He didn’t take that much care because that clue would have only mattered to the Clockers.
He’d dropped this body for me.
I almost turned to one of the State cops to ask if they had identified the woman, but I knew the answer. Her killer hadn’t left any clues. He didn’t want her fixed in time; and my asking might do that. She’d been dumped. She’d just be some unfortunate, anonymous girl who happened to come to the sorority to study with a friend. Wrong place, wrong time. She’d be mentioned in a couple books about Bundy, but ignored in most. The writers simply wouldn’t have enough material to make her into a full-blown tragedy.
The Statie noticed me anyway. “Who are you?”
I pulled a worn badge and ID from inside my coat. “FBI, Special Crimes Division. I was visiting family when I got a call.”
“Hell of a thing.”
“Yeah.” I stood, putting my ID away. “I’m going to go out and get a cigarette.”
“Hope we get this bastard before you Feds do.”
“Me, too.” I gave him an encouraging nod. “Lot of things can get lost in the Glades.”
I never much cared for the 1970s. Ties too wide, colors too bright, people believing things much too hard. Things would have been better in Europe during that when, but going there, even escorted, would be breaking the rules. Bad things happened when rules got broken. Case in point being the 1960s and no one being able to remember much of anything which happened then.
Because I’m a Fixer—one who’s good and very well trained—I can pretty much go time-out wherever and whenever I want. In keeping with the game idea, I just step out of bounds and play stops. For me, anyway. There can be some residual effect lingering where Fixers go out. I try to minimize that kind of collateral damage. Freetimers tend to freak out if they get tagged. The periodic spates of witch burnings and belief in spiritualism is really just some Fixer’s sloppy time-out transit work.
