Time Travel Omnibus, page 808
“Great idea. Vamanos!” Lucy said.
A few minutes into the ride Lucy noticed that Larry’s leg was invading her scarce space, his bushy arm hairs rubbing against her arm, so she slid slightly toward Jim. Better, Lucy thought.
Because they arrived at the concert as it was starting, a prime lawn location was not an option. Jim and Lucy offered a few words of complaint, but were resigned to suffer for their tardiness. They leaned back on the grass and enjoyed Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” which, Lucy commented, wasn’t being played half badly. A distant lightning storm gave the Capitol building a spectacular backdrop. During the breaks between pieces, Jim and Lucy made friends with the four people occupying the blanket next to them, and who were generous with their wine. The shared wine put the six in an even more pleasant mood. As the Marine band began their finale, Lucy poured another glass of Bordeaux, perhaps burgundy—it’s so hard to tell in the dark with screw tops, she thought—into a paper cup her new friends had provided. From time to time, thunder would add an accompanying drum sound to the orchestra. “Hope it doesn’t rain,” Jim whispered into Lucy’s ear.
“Have faith, Jimbo.”
“Wo! Did you see that lightning?!” At the same instant six thousand people exhaled. “That was close! I’d rather have the rain than another bolt of lightning so close by.” In the next instant six thousand people resumed their silence as the band played on.
In the dim light that spilled over the top of the U.S. Capitol building she saw Larry begin to fade.
“Jim,” Lucy said. She pushed Jim’s shoulder to penetrate his wine-induced fog. “Jim, look, Larry’s disappearing.” Jim sat up and looked in Larry’s direction.
“Jesus. You’re right. Parts of him are becoming transparent. I can see the grass beneath his legs. And do you see that!? There’s some kind of animal picture I can see through him. A painting in bleached pastels. There are some spears in the picture, too.”
“Yes, I see it. It’s like a buffalo. Now his arms and torso are going.”
Jim sat up straighter. “Not a buffalo—an elephant. It’s a drawing on a wall of some kind. And the cave. Do you see the cave? Jeez, he’s really vanishing. Look, the cave is glowing now—there’s a campfire inside.”
Lucy put both hands over her mouth. “Jim! Larry’s almost no longer here. We should do something. Quickly, think—how do we stop this? Oh my God, we have to do something!” She stared at the space that Larry was rapidly no longer occupying.
Jim watched the diffused light replace Larry’s shape. “Do what, Lucy?” Jim bowed his head to the weak impression in the grass that marked Larry’s spot. “He’s gone. But look, that’s odd.”
“What’s odd?” Lucy asked.
“Larry’s watch is still here.” He picked up Larry’s watch. “It says . . . 8:40pm.” Jim glanced at Larry’s watch, then Lucy’s. “Exactly on time. Larry’s watch is exactly correct. Never was before.”
One of their newly acquired friends on the adjacent blanket uttered a harsh, “Shh!”
“Oh, sorry,” Lucy said.
“Sorry,” Jim said, turning his head back to watch the band. “Could you pass the wine?” Jim whispered.
THE TRUTH ABOUT WEENA
David J. Lake
“The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.”
That was how I began my famous story of the Time Machine; the foundation of my success as an author—and of much else beside. That story figured largely, around 1900, in the movement of Household Socialism, and all that that led to. The tale was laughed at, praised, used in serious social and political argument—yet by most people was treated as nothing but a fiction. Well, in its hitherto published form it was partly fiction, because at the time—1895—I could not write the full truth. The full truth was even more fantastic than the fiction—too fantastic, surely, to be believed; or if believed, too disturbing to received notions of Time. And besides, there were living people to protect: in particular, one young person who was very dear to us.
It was agreed, therefore, among our small group that I must abbreviate the ending, and publish the story as a novel, an invention. I did, and the novel served its purpose. But now, in 1934, the time has come (the time! a nice phrase; well then, a time) in which I can tell the whole truth—of those famous dinner parties in Richmond in 1891, and what really resulted from the second party.
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.
