by Henry Clark
The artist Pablo Picasso once removed the seat from a bicycle, welded a set of bicycle handlebars to the seat, hung it on a wall, and everybody who saw it said, “Ah! the head of a bull!” The handlebars became the horns, the seat became the bull’s long face. The pattern was there; Picasso saw it first, and once he pointed it out, everybody could enjoy it, except possibly the guy who owned the bicycle. What Picasso did is called a visual pun. (People who hate puns call it found art.) It is very similar to seeing the dots and dashes of Morse code in the hexagrams of the I-Ching. (Am I comparing myself to Picasso? No, but I am saying my bull is every bit as good as Picasso’s bull.)
Patterns are everywhere. In clouds, in junkyards, in human behavior. We read to find patterns. If you’ve read this book, you’re a pattern-seeker, and that’s a very good thing to be. Some of the patterns in the book were deliberate—puns form a type of pattern; stories of prejudice through the ages form another—but I’m sure there are patterns within this book that the author was unaware of. Different readers will see different things. This is how books work.
Dear reader, new patterns are out there, waiting to be found, and waiting for their finders to show them to the rest of us.
Who will find them?
I’m betting it’s you.
Acknowledgments
I would, first and foremost, like to thank history. History tells us that
• the pencil with attached eraser was first patented in 1858;
• Moby-Dick, a book with a narrator who wished to be called Ishmael, about the final voyage of a ship known as the Pequod, was published in 1851 to poor reviews that pretty much sank its author’s career;
• the Fugitive Slave Act (referred to herein by Archie Killbreath and Frankie Camlo as the Fugitive Slave Law) was enacted as a result of the Compromise of 1850 and required that all apprehended runaway slaves be returned to their original captors;
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852 as a response to the Fugitive Slave Act and helped rally supporters to the antislavery cause;
• the steamboat Buckeye Belle exploded on the Muskingum River in November of 1852 with great loss of life;
• King Di Xin of China’s Shang dynasty didn’t—as far as we know—persecute people for wearing their clothes inside out, but he did persecute them for things just as trivial;
• in 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, eighty-one-year-old Giles Corey was crushed to death because he refused to plead either guilty or not guilty to the charge of witchcraft;
• the writers Ambrose Bierce and Zane Grey were both born in Ohio;
• no one knows the actual date chopsticks premiered in America.
Without history, The Book That Proves Time Travel Happens would have been a very different book.
The book would have been even differenter (and included more words like differenter) without the patient, possibly bemused, editorial guidance of Andrea Spooner and Deirdre Jones. Copy editor Regina Castillo caught major goofs (Major Goofs will be a minor character in my next novel), and Ben Davidson offered helpful suggestions concerning nineteenth-century dialect and word usage.
My agent, Kate Epstein, would have been at the top of this list if I hadn’t lowered myself to make the different/differenter joke, but then she understands I sometimes can’t help myself.
Emma Joy Jampole made me start thinking along lines yin and yang, and Paul Feldman and Terry Hunt, along with the rest of the cast of the Melvin Snodgrass Show (improvised into a reel-to-reel tape recorder in my basement, circa 1964–1969) contributed to the genesis of the Time Trombone.
In my younger days, a number of teachers encouraged me to write, and they deserve special, reverent mention here, starting with Evadne Lovett in fourth grade, Leo Reardon in fifth, Egon Teichert in sixth, and, in high school, Eugene Murphy and especially Michael Stoller. (Mike also tried teaching me logic, and we can all see how well that turned out.) Judith Claire Mitchell was a fellow student in Mike’s class, and she hints I’m in the acknowledgments of her A Reunion of Ghosts, so I’d better say hi here. She always said she’d publish her second novel three weeks before I published my second novel. (She also predicted the Internet.)
Last but not least, I am forever grateful to my wife, Kathy, and my daughter, Elyse, for giving me the time and space I needed to complete the book. (Love you guys!)
A major portion of this novel—all right, the limerick in chapter 15—first appeared in the October 1979 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I mention this only as a ploy to garner a possible review of Time Travel Happens from the current Asimov’s, which was my long-range plan when I wrote the limerick and planted it in Asimov’s to begin with.
I love it when a plan comes together.
About the Author
Henry Clark is the author of What We Found in the Sofa and How It Saved the World. He has contributed articles to MAD magazine and published fiction in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, in addition to acting as the head phrenologist at Old Bethpage Village Restoration, a living-history museum in New York. He lives on Long Island, and he invites you to visit his website at indorsia.com.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
CHAPTER 1: The E=Mc Squad
CHAPTER 2: An Ancient Roman English Teacher
CHAPTER 3: If You Have an I-Ching—Scratch!
CHAPTER 4: The Camlo Shagbolt
CHAPTER 5: A Field Trip Every Day of Your Life
CHAPTER 6: Caught in the Banned Room
CHAPTER 7: Bold as Brass
CHAPTER 8: The Ghost Candle and the Real Smart Pencil
CHAPTER 9: First Folio, Now This
CHAPTER 10: Runners
CHAPTER 11: Pier Pressure
CHAPTER 12: Some Sort of Bizarre Cutting Implement
CHAPTER 13: The Emperor’s New Matching Handbag
CHAPTER 14: Not the Middle School
CHAPTER 15: T for Torture
CHAPTER 16: Erase Trouble
CHAPTER 17: Thunk! Clangity-Clank! Thzzzt! and Klonk!
CHAPTER 18: I Am a Yo-yo
CHAPTER 19: Coffins and Hogsheads
CHAPTER 20: Something Going Ka-Boom
CHAPTER 21: That Which Does Not Kill Me Will Probably Try Harder Next Time
CHAPTER 22: Night of the Floating Dead
CHAPTER 23: Yin Anyang
CHAPTER 24: Hello Goodbye
CHAPTER 25: Transformations
CHAPTER 26: Not Yet Completed
CHAPTER 27: Completed
A Few More Lines from the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Text copyright © 2015 by Henry Clark
Interior illustrations copyright © 2015 by Terry Fan and Eric Fan
Cover art © 2015 by Iacopo Bruno
Cover design by Marcie Lawrence
Cover © 2015 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: April 2015
ISBN 978-0-316-40615-4
E3
