Time Travel

by James Gleick

  Eternity is divided into sections, each associated with a particular century of human history. To go from one section to another, an Eternal rides the kettle: the arrangement feels like stacked floors in a tall skyscraper. Best not to look too closely at the workings. “The laws of the ordinary universe just don’t apply to the kettle shafts!” Between Time and Eternity is a boundary or barrier—an “immaterial” divider—likewise best not examined too closely: “He paused again at the infinitely thin curtain of non-Space and non-Time which separated him from Eternity in one way and from ordinary Time in another.” Eternity seems to adjoin the “real” universe anywhere and everywhere. Anyway, transportation from place to place never seems to be a problem. Is Eternity in the fourth dimension? Asimov doesn’t bother with the fourth dimension. That’s old news. He does tip his hat to the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics:

  The barrier that separated Eternity from Time was dark with the darkness of primeval chaos, and its velvety non-light was characteristically specked with the flitting points of light that mirrored sub-microscopic imperfections of the fabric that could not be eradicated while the Uncertainty Principle existed.

  Like Wells not-quite-describing his time machine, Asimov is using his literary wiles to help readers think they are visualizing something that can’t be visualized because, after all, it’s nonsensical. “Velvety non-light.” An artful dodge.*4 And nice touch, the uncertainty principle decorating the primeval darkness with specks of light.

  Now comes a problem of narrative. People live in Eternity, and they do things, one after another, in order to give the story a plot, and before long the fact of narrative makes it impossible to avoid noticing that they (the Eternals), too, operate in time. They remember the past and they worry about the future, just like everyone else. They don’t know what’s going to happen next. Whatever it would be like to be truly outside time, this magical state does not appear conducive to storytelling. Time passes here, too. “Men’s bodies grew older and that was the unavoidable measure of time.” They call the years “physioyears” and the hours “physiohours.” They tell one another, “See you tomorrow.” Even in Eternity, they wear wristwatches. It can’t be helped.

  Since this Eternity is created not by theologians but by technocrats, it does have a beginning and an end. It begins in the twenty-seventh century, after the development of the necessary machinery (“temporal fields” and whatnot), and ends in the “unplumbable entropy death ahead.” In the meantime, what fun they have, playing god! The Sociologists profile societies and suggest “reality changes” to fork their history. The Life Plotters diagram the affected lives. The Computers work out the “psycho-mathematics.” The Observers go into Time to get data, and the Technicians do the dirty work—e.g., jam the clutch on a vehicle and start a chain of events that prevents a war. When a Technician goes into action, a new branch of possibility becomes real. Then the old branch never happened. It becomes an alternative remembered only in the archives of Eternity.

  They believe they are do-gooders.

  We work to plot out all the details of everywhen [explains Technician Harlan] from the beginning of Eternity to where Earth is empty, and we try to plot out all the infinite possibilities of all the might-have-beens and pick out a might-have-been that is better than what is and decide where in Time we can make a tiny little change to twist the is to the might-be and we have a new is and look for a new might-be, forever, and forever.

  So, for example, Harlan gets out of his kettle, enters Time, and shifts a container from one shelf to another. (He has found the office supplies, apparently.) As a result, a man overlooks something he needs, gets angry, makes a bad decision, a meeting is canceled, a death is postponed—change ripples outward, and some years later what would have been a busy spaceport has vanished from existence. Mission accomplished. If some people must die so that others might live, so be it. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, the Eternals have learned. It isn’t easy, being responsible for “the happiness of all the human beings who were or ever would be.”

  What do they value, these masters of the universe? How do they weigh one possible reality against another? It’s not always clear. Nuclear war: bad. Drug addiction: bad. Happiness: good, but how to assess it? The Eternals seem to dislike extremes. One century has an excess of hedonism, and Harlan contemplates an improvement: “a different branch of possibility would become real, a branch in which millions of pleasure-seeking women would find themselves transformed into true, pure-hearted mothers.” (Lest we forget: these are men of 1950s America.) Mainly, they find themselves continually tinkering with reality in order to eliminate “nuclear technology”—an antiwar measure that has the side effect of keeping humanity from developing interstellar space travel. The reader might guess that the real master of this universe—Isaac Asimov—will vote for space travel.

  Without having read Borges, Asimov created a garden of forking paths operated by paper shufflers and bean counters. A branch erased may mean Shakespeare or Bach retroactively unborn, but the Technicians don’t care. They pull the plays or the music from Time and store them in the archives.

  Now Harlan stood at the shelves devoted to the novels of Eric Linkollew, usually described as the outstanding writer of the 575th [century], and wondered. He counted fifteen different “Complete Works” collections, each, undoubtedly, taken out of a different Reality. Each was somewhat different, he was sure.

  All so futile somehow. The apparatchiks have their own version of Borges’s Library of Babel, and it’s a storage closet.

  With the panorama of history spread out before them, these Eternals have little reason to think about the past. All is future—or is it present? What does it even mean to talk about “the present” in this place? We never really find out. The tinkering with reality just goes on. It is a work in progress.

  A few oddballs, though—and our hero, Harlan, is one of them—do take a hobbyist’s interest in the centuries before the invention of “temporal fields” and the establishment of Eternity. They call these ancient centuries the Primitive era. No century fascinates them more than the twentieth. Harlan collects Primitive books,

  almost all in print-on-paper. There was a volume by a man called H. G. Wells, another by a man named W. Shakespeare, some tattered histories. Best of all there was a complete set of bound volumes of a Primitive news weekly that took up inordinate space but that he could not, out of sentiment, bear to reduce to micro-film.

  Primitive history is locked in place: the Eternals cannot make changes there. “It’s like watching history standing still, frozen!” Harlan treasures a verse fragment about a “moving finger,” which writes once and then moves on. The Battle of Waterloo has only the one outcome, never to be changed. “That’s the beauty of it. No matter what any of us does, it exists precisely as it has always existed.” It’s so quaint. The technology, too: “In the Primitive era natural petroleum fractions were the source of power and natural rubber cushioned the wheels.” Most intriguing—most risible—were the ancients’ views of time itself. How could their philosophers be expected to understand? A senior Computer discusses philosophy with Harlan:

  “Now we in Eternity are influenced in our consideration of such things by knowing the facts of Time-travel. Your creatures of the Primitive era, however, knew nothing of Time-travel.”

  “The Primitives gave virtually no thought to Time-travel, Computer.”

  “Did not consider it possible, eh?”

  Just imagine—people with no concept of time travel! Primitives indeed. The rare exceptions came in the form of “speculations,” not by serious thinkers or artists, but only “in some types of escape literature,” Harlan explains. “I am not well acquainted with these, but I believe a recurrent theme was that of the man who returned in Time to kill his own grandfather as a child.” Yes, that again.

  The Eternals know all about the paradoxes. They have a saying: “There are no paradoxes in Time, but only because Time deliberately av
oids paradoxes.” That grandfather problem arises when you are naïve enough to assume “an indeviant reality” and try to add time travel as an afterthought. “Now your primitives,” says the Computer, “never assumed anything but an indeviant Reality. Am I right?”

  Harlan is not so sure. The escapist literature again. “I don’t know enough to answer you with certainty, sir. I believe there may have been speculations as to alternate paths of time or planes of existence.”

  Bah, says the Computer. That’s impossible. “No, without actual experience of Time-travel, the philosophic intricacies of Reality would be quite beyond the human mind.”

  He has a point. But he underestimates us primitives. We have acquired a rich experience of time travel—a century’s worth. Time travel opens our eyes.

  —

  MAYBE ASIMOV BEGAN writing this tale optimistically, imagining that a fraternity of wise overseers could nudge humanity onto a better path here and there and steer us away from the nuclear peril that was on everyone’s mind in the 1950s. Like Wells, he was a rationalist, a reader of history and believer in social progress. He seems to share the satisfaction his hero, the Technician Harlan, feels in “a universe where Reality was something flexible and evanescent, something men such as himself could hold in the palms of their hands and shake into better shape.” If so, Asimov couldn’t sustain his optimism. The story takes a dark turn. We begin to see these Eternals not just as philistines but as monsters.

  There is a woman after all. Much as Wells’s Time Traveller had his girl-of-the-future Weena, Harlan finds Noÿs, “the girl of the 482nd.” (“It was not that Harlan had never seen a girl in Eternity before. Never was too strong a word. Rarely, yes…But a girl such as this!”) She has glossy hair, “gluteal curves,” milky white skin, and some tinkling jewels that draw attention to her “graceful breasts.” She has been assigned to Eternity as a sort of temp for secretarial work. Apparently she is not too bright. Harlan finds he has to explain to her some of the simplest concepts of time. She, in turn, manages to educate him about sex, about which he is naïve, being a stereotype himself.

  For a while Noÿs serves as a minor plot device, the motive for some jostling and maneuvering among the Eternals. Harlan, besotted, goes rogue and hustles her into the kettle. They zoom off together. “We’re going upwhen, Noÿs.” “That means the future, doesn’t it?” He stashes her in one of the literature’s odder love nests, a spare room in an empty corridor of the year 111,394, where he passes the time with a great deal more explaining. He has to explain Reality Changes, he has to explain Computers, he has to explain “physiotime” as opposed to real time. She listens eagerly. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand it all,” sighs Noÿs, her eyes sparkling with “frank admiration.”

  Eventually he explains his intention to take her with him back in time to before the creation of Eternity—to the Primitive era, where they will find themselves in a sparsely populated southwestern territory of the United States of America. “A craggy, lonely world brightened by the splendor of an afternoon sun. There was a soft wind with a chilly edge to it and, most of all, silence…bare rocks…colored into dull rainbows…manless and all but lifeless surroundings.”

  Harlan thinks he is on a mission to protect Eternity: to close a circle, to ensure its creation. He has a surprise coming: Noÿs is on a mission of her own. She is no Weena. She is an operative sent from a future beyond the imagining even of the Eternals—from a time they have not managed to penetrate, the so-called Hidden Centuries.

  It’s Noÿs’s turn to explain. Her people, the people of the Hidden Centuries, see human history whole, and more than that, as a tapestry of combined possibilities. They see alternative realities as if they were real: “A kind of ghostly never-never land where the might-have-beens play with the ifs.” As for Harlan’s revered Eternals, she points out that these meddlers are nothing more than a bunch of psychopaths.

  “Psychopaths!” exploded Harlan.

  “Aren’t they? You know them. Think!”

  Their incessant petty tinkering has ruined everything, according to the wise future people of the Hidden Centuries. They have “bred out the unusual.” In forestalling disasters, they have left no room for triumphs that come only from danger and insecurity. In particular, the Eternals have adamantly prevented the development of nuclear weaponry, at the cost of forestalling any possibility of interstellar travel.

  So Noÿs is the time traveler on a mission to change history and Harlan her unwitting pawn. She has brought them on a one-way trip to Primitive times in order to effect the reality change to end all reality changes. She will allow humanity to create its first nuclear explosion at the “19.45th” century, and she will forestall the establishment of Eternity.

  Happy ending for Technician Harlan, though: although Noÿs is not the ingenue she has pretended to be, she truly loves him. They will live happily ever after, and “have children and grandchildren, and mankind will remain to reach the stars.” We are left with just the one puzzle, then: why the superwoman from the Hidden Centuries, having accomplished her mission of placing humanity on a path to interstellar greatness, wants to settle down with the hapless Andrew Harlan.

  So much for eternity. It was a sacred concept: a state of grace, outside of time. For a few hundred pages Asimov turns it into a mere place—outside of “Time,” but equipped with elevator shafts and storerooms, a uniformed support staff, new men arriving by invitation only. That is quite a comedown. For the godless, though, what else is there? Who has this power over time? The devil.

  With us acts are exempt from time, and we

  Can crowd eternity into an hour,

  Or stretch an hour into eternity.

  That’s Lucifer, per Lord Byron, on good authority. Luke 4:5: “And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, showed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.” Kurt Vonnegut must have remembered this when he created his Tralfamadorians, adorable green aliens who experience reality in four dimensions: “All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance.” Eternity is not for us. We may aspire to it, we may imagine it, but we cannot have it.

  If we’re going to speak literally, nothing is outside of time. Asimov ends his story by nullifying it. Who has the privilege of changing history? Not the Technicians, only the author. On the last page the entire previous narrative—the people we have met, the stories we have watched unfold—is erased with the stroke of a pen. The rewriters of history are written out.

  * * *

  *1 “Harlan had seen many women in his passages through Time, but in Time they were only objects to him, like walls and balls, barrows and harrows, kittens and mittens.”

  *2 The OED cites Asimov as the coiner of several words, including robotics, but endochronic is not one of them. It has not yet caught on.

  *3 Silly? Yet in the distant future—2015—Panasonic marketed a camera that it said recorded images “one second prior to and one second after pressing the shutter button.”

  *4 This passage appeared in the first published version of The End of Eternity and disappeared from the book version.

  NINE

  * * *

  Buried Time

  So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

  —James Joyce (1922)

  IN ITS ISSUE of November 1936, Scientific American transported readers into the future:

  The time is A.D. 8113. The air channels of the radio-newspaper and world television broadcasting systems have been cleared for an important announcement…a story of international importance and significance.

  (Evidently it seemed plausible that the world’s communications channels could be “cleared” on command.)

  The television sight-and-sound receivers in every home throughout the world carry the thre
ad of the story. In the Appalachian Mountains near the eastern coast of the North American continent is a crypt that has been sealed since the year A.D. 1936. Carefully its contents have been guarded since that date, and today is the day of the opening. Prominent men from all over the world assemble at the site to witness the breaking of the seal that will disclose to the waiting world the civilization of an ancient and almost forgotten people.

  The ancient and almost forgotten people of 1936 America, that is. This puff was headlined “Today—Tomorrow” and written by Thornwell Jacobs, a former minister and advertising man, now president of Oglethorpe University, a Presbyterian college in Atlanta, Georgia. Oglethorpe had been shuttered since the Civil War. Jacobs re-created it in partnership with a suburban land developer. Now he was promoting his idea, “heartily endorsed” by Scientific American, for a Crypt of Civilization, to be waterproofed and sealed in the basement of the administration building on his campus. Jacobs was also a teacher: his course in cosmic history was mandatory for Oglethorpe seniors. Not presuming that Oglethorpe University itself would last forever, he proposed that the crypt should be “deeded in trust to the Federal government, its heirs, assigns, and successors.” Its contents? A thorough record of the era’s “science and civilization.” Certain books, especially encyclopedias, and newspapers preserved in a vacuum or inert gas or on microfilm (“preserved in miniature on motion picture film”). Everyday items such as foods and “even our chewing gum.” Miniature models of automobiles. And: “There should also be included a complete model of the capitol of the United States, which, within a half-dozen centuries, will probably have disappeared completely.”