by Anthology
We ran toward the place and got there just as bobby and several citizens came up. On the boulevard, just off the kerb, lay a human body. At least, it had been that, but it looked as if every bone in it had been pulverized and every blood vessel burst, so it was hardly more than a slimy mass of pink protoplasm. The clothes it had been wearing were shredded, but I recognized an H. & H. .500 double-barreled express rifle. The wood was scorched and the metal pitted, but it was Courtney James’s gun. No doubt whatever.
Skipping the investigations and the milling about that ensued, what had happened was this: nobody had shot at us as we emerged on the twenty-fourth, and that couldn’t be changed. For that matter, the instant James started to do anything that would make a visible change in the world of eighty-five million B.C., such as making a footprint in the earth, the space-time forces snapped him forward to the present to prevent a paradox.
And the violence of the passage practically tore him to bits.
Now that this is better understood, the professor won’t send anybody to a period less than five thousand years prior to the time that some time traveler has already explored, because it would be too easy to do some act, like chopping down a tree or losing some durable artifact, that would affect the later world. Over longer periods, he tells me, such changes average out and are lost in the stream of time.
We had a rough time after that, with the bad publicity and all, though we did collect a fee from James’s estate. Luckily for us, a steel manufacturer turned up who wanted a mastodon’s head for his den.
I understand these things better now, too. The disaster hadn’t been wholly James’s fault. I shouldn’t have taken him when I knew what a spoiled, unstable sort of bloke he was. And if Holtzinger could have used a really heavy gun, he’d probably have knocked the tyrannosaur down, even if he didn’t kill it, and so have given the rest of us a chance to finish it.
So, Mr. Seligman, that’s why I won’t take you to that period to hunt. There are plenty of other eras, and if you look them over I’m sure you’ll find something to suit you. But not the Jurassic or the Cretaceous. You’re just not big enough to handle a gun for dinosaur.
A HISTORY OF TEMPORAL EXPRESS
Wayne Freeze
The History of Temporal Express
by Wayne S. Freeze
Miss Goemmer’s 12th Grade History Class
Senior Research Report, 2015
This year’s Senior Research Report was to research a modern business or government organization and write a paper that discussed the key events in its history. The report must be at least 2,000 words long and must include a minimum of four different sources of information. I selected Temporal Express for my report since many of its key events occurred during my lifetime.
It is all but impossible to discuss modern business without talking about Temporal Express. Its motto, “When it absolutely, positively must be there yesterday” has changed the face of today’s world. Although formed in the early twenty-first century, its origins actually date back to the late 1990s. Formed by a group of researchers at Maryland State University who were pushing the then known limits of high energy physics, TempEx (as it is more commonly known) has brought with it a whole new era of prosperity.
The Discovery
Temporal Express was founded in 2001 by Dr. Christopher Jameson, Dr. Samantha Ashburn, and Dr. Terry Katz. These same individuals are credited with building the first practical time transporter. The fundamental breakthrough that allowed them to build the time transporter occurred in 1998 while they were trying to build a device that would transport objects instantly from one location to another.
Their initial experiments were wholly unsuccessful. Objects placed on the transport platform disappeared as expected, but did not reappear on the receiving platform. This led to a vigorous debate as to where the objects actually went. On 1 April 1998, Dr. Jameson found one of the test objects on the receiving platform—a child’s wooden block with the letter T on the side. Thinking that either Dr. Ashburn or Dr. Katz was playing an April Fool’s joke on him, Jameson placed the block back on the shelf and forgot about it. He didn’t notice that there was an identical block sitting right next to it.
Later in the week, the researchers decided to try transporting an object from the receiving platform back to the original transporter pad. While this was supposed to work according to their theories, they hadn’t tried it before. When Dr. Katz went to get a test block, he found two blocks with the letter T on the shelf. Wondering why there were two blocks with the same letter, he grabbed the original one and placed it on the receiver pad.
When this block disappeared, Dr. Katz laughed and said that they were in luck and got the second block from the shelf. Dr. Jameson looked at it closely and instantly recognized the paint smudge that was identical to the block he had found on the receiver platform earlier in the week. Dr. Ashburn shook his head and said “Wouldn’t it be funny if the blocks were actually going backward in time?”
The more they thought about it, the more Dr. Ashburn’s explanation seemed to make sense. Further experiments proved that Dr. Ashburn was correct—the blocks actually did go back in time. They had actually built a time transporter!
The Evolution
To say that the researchers made a unique discovery was an understatement. However when Dr. Jameson, Dr. Ashburn, and Dr. Katz released their initial findings to their peers, no one believed them. They were treated as objects of ridicule. Eventually they took their case to the general public.
On the now famous episode of “Sixty Minutes,” they were able to convince Dan Rather that their machine actually worked. They were able to send Dan’s watch back in time sixty minutes while he and five different cameras recorded the event. Dan Rather actually picked up his future watch and compared it to the one on his wrist. It was identical. He then held on to the future watch and placed the one on his wrist on the time transporter’s pad, and exactly sixty minutes after the first watch was sent, he pressed the button to send his watch back into the past.
The subsequent publicity overwhelmed the researchers with requests for time travel projects. The most common requests were for pictures and artifacts from ancient history. An original copy of King Lear by Shakespeare, a scroll from Moses, and a piece of the cross from the Crucifixion of Christ were among the most popular.
Unfortunately these requests were impossible to fulfill. Early in their time transporter research, the doctors quickly identified three main limitations to their new device. The first limitation is that the time transporter can transport objects only to another version of itself. The second is the more massive the object, the more power it requires to transport it. Thus sending one two pound object requires significantly more power than sending two one pound objects. The third limitation is that sending an object back in time two days requires more than twice the power required to send an object back one day.
In addition to these three limitations, the researchers found another problem. It appeared to be possible to change the future. Dr. Ashburn received a message from herself in the future that suggested that she buy a lottery ticket with a particular set of numbers which would win a large sum of money. But on that evening’s drawing, Dr. Ashburn didn’t win anything. Subsequent experiments showed that sending the winning number back into the past worked only when someone didn’t act on that information. The Theory of Useless Information was coined by Dr. Katz to describe this phenomenon.
Once the three limitations plus the Theory of Useless Information became known to the general public, interest in the time transport device waned. It looked like the time transporter was destined to become a research oddity that would never become practical.
The Idea
The researchers continued working on the time transporter, but with little hope of success. Then one day Dr. Ashburn wanted to join her fellow scientists for lunch, but didn’t have enough money. Payday was only a day away, and as with most absent minded professors, Dr. Ashburn was always forgetti
ng her money. Just before she was going to tell the others to go without her, she noticed an envelope on the time transporter. In the envelope was a twenty dollar bill and a note in her own handwriting that said “pay me back later.”
While at lunch, the three professors discussed a minor technical problem with the machine. Dr. Jameson said that one of the displays on his computer had stopped working. If he had the parts, he could fix it in five minutes, but it would take two days to get the parts from the vendor.
Dr. Katz said that what he needed was a time machine that could send the part back to when the display died, and then he uttered the now famous line, “When it absolutely, positively must be there yesterday.” Everyone laughed for a moment and then Dr. Ashburn thought about it for a minute and shared her tale from earlier in the day. From this lunch sprouted the seeds of the most famous company in the world today.
The Beginning
Today, Temporal Express is a world-wide organization with its home offices in the City of Time also known as Columbia, Maryland. Columbia is located halfway between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland. This location was close to Maryland State University where the trio worked as professors. The location also proved important in later years since it provided easy access to the legislators who created the laws that made it possible for TempEx to be very profitable.
But Temporal Express did not start out as an immediate success. Its early years were extremely rough. While Dr. Katz and Dr. Ashburn remained with the University, Dr. Jameson tried to raise money to build a second machine. Failing to do that, Dr. Jameson was at least able to raise sufficient money to buy the rights to the existing time transporter from the University. The University had begun to find the entire project an embarrassment and wished to distance itself from all the negative publicity. After getting sole possession of the temporal transporter and its related technology, the threesome then relocated the machine to Dr. Ashburn’s garage. From there they began to offer their services . . .
At first most potential customers were skeptical of the service. The service was both expensive, (costing over ten thousand dollars for a one pound package delivered the previous day) and extremely restrictive due to the time transporter limitations and the Theory of Useless Information. However when a multi-million dollar machine was destroyed at a local manufacturing plant because a small, relatively inexpensive part failed, TempEx was able to save the day. They delivered the part just before the machine broke down, and the manufacturer’s staff was able to replace the part before disaster struck.
Their second customer was a major airline who managed to avoid a huge aircraft disaster by replacing a small circuit board in the control system of their new Boeing 787 aircraft. If the board hadn’t been replaced before the aircraft took off, it was almost certain that all twelve hundred passengers would have died.
These stories are simply the first in a series of disasters prevented by the timely delivery of a package by TempEx. Over the next twelve months, TempEx was able to move out of the garage into a large office complex. Two years later, TempEx completed a hostile takeover of Federal Express, followed shortly by DHL and Airborne Express. Thus the corporate motto, “Any time, any place.” Other companies acquired over the years that followed include: Chrysler Corporation, General Electric, and Hewlett Packard. Temporal Express had reached the big time!
After all of the skepticism surrounding the initial announcement, Dr. Jameson, Dr. Ashburn, and Dr. Katz deliberately suppressed their theories about time travel which left their competitors without sufficient information to build their own time transporters. As TempEx grew, there were many attempts by their competitors to build their own temporal transporters. The most aggressive of their competitors was the United Parcel Service (UPS). In the early twenty-first century, UPS had achieved a near monopoly on the package delivery service in the United States. Having bought the U.S. Postal Service from the federal government in 2003, it had very little competition left and it had sufficient funds to try to duplicate the temporal transporter.
When UPS was unable to develop the temporal transporter on their own, they decided to sue TempEx for the information on the grounds that the time transporter technology was developed with public funds and thus should be open to everyone. TempEx was successful in proving that their device was built using grant money from several different corporations such as Hewlett Packard, Chrysler Corporation, and General Electric.
Following this decision, TempEx turned their attention to Washington and Congress. They were able to convince Congress that transporting objects though time was a risky business and should only be attempted by organizations with sufficient experience. Since TempEx was the only organization with an operational time transporter, they were immediately granted a license by Congress. A review board was established to determine if an organization has sufficient expertise to experiment with time transportation. Since the members of the review board were required by law to have temporal experience, no other organizations were permitted to develop that technology. For all practical purposes, TempEx now had a monopoly on time transportation.
The Service
Temporal Express has positioned itself for growth well into the twenty-second century. Currently it is the second largest corporation in America, only ten trillion dollars behind Microsoft. It is larger than the rest of the Fortune 100 combined. Its research and development budget is larger then the gross national product of many countries.
Today, Temporal Express is an international organization that can deliver and pick up packages anywhere on Earth as well as the moon and Mars. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, TempEx is planning to expand their services into the asteroid belt in the next 12 to 18 months.
Originally TempEx was organized as a star network, with a central hub in which all of the packages flowed through and where the temporal transporters were located. This is the same organization that proved successful for Federal Express. However, demand for TempEx’s services overloaded the central facility. Now TempEx has several smaller hubs located at key points around the globe and one on the moon.
For normal previous day delivery in the United States, TempEx will pickup and deliver a one pound package for only $10,000. Two day delivery costs $35,000, and one week delivery is available by special quote. While not very popular, one week delivery is believed to have been used several times in the past at a cost of over $1 million dollars per delivery.
The largest package ever handled by TempEx was a twenty-six pound oxygen recycling module that was needed by the Lunar Authority to replace a similar unit that was damaged by a meteorite. With the primary unit already offline for major repairs, over half the colony’s population would have died due to lack of oxygen before a replacement unit could make the 12 hour flight from Earth.
The Future
While the original founders of Temporal Express do not participate in the day to day operations of the company, they are active professors at Future University (the new name for Maryland State University after it was purchased by TempEx). They teach doctoral seminars in temporal theory at Future University and advise the University president, Dr. Therese Jillion, on policy and direction.
Through Future University, TempEx is actively pursuing technologies that will improve the range and efficiency of their current time transporter. Also TempEx is investing a large part of their research budget in an attempt to combine their time transporter technology with conventional spaceship technology to build the first practical starship. It is expected that this starship will be ready to launch within the next five years.
It is clear that from the beginning, Dr. Christopher Jameson,
Dr. Samantha Ashburn, and Dr. Terry Katz, believed that Temporal Express would be successful. Even though the early years were rough, all three professors stuck with their idea and nursed it into the corporation it is today.
Sources
“Future University: A Status Report to the Shareholders.” Jaybird, J. B., Tempor
al Express Press, 2013.
“Temporal Express Annual Report.” Temporal Express Press, 2013.
“The Official History of Temporal Express.” Ashburn, S., Adler & Robin Books, 2012.
“The Rise and Fall of UPS.” Brigham ton, L., Chrissam Press, 2010.
“The Unauthorized Life of Christopher Jameson.” Jillion, T., Chrissam Press, 2011.
Grade: A—
Your facts were very good and so was the presentation. While you used five references, you should have included references for the Wall Street Journal article and the “60 Minutes” television episode since you referred to them in your report.
Overall a very good job.
—Miss Bonnie J. Goemmer
A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR US TEMPUNAUTS
Philip K. Dick
Wearily, Addison Doug plodded up the long path of synthetic redwood rounds, step by step, his head down a little, moving as if he were in actual physical pain. The girl watched him, wanting to help him, hurt within her to see how worn and unhappy he was, but at the same time she rejoiced that he was there at all. On and on, toward her, without glancing up, going by feel . . . like he’s done this many times, she thought suddenly. Knows the way too well. Why?
“Addi,” she called, and ran toward him. “They said on the TV you were dead. All of you were killed!”
He paused, wiping back his dark hair, which was no longer long; just before the launch they had cropped it. But he had evidently forgotten. “You believe everything you see on TV?” he said, and came on again, haltingly, but smiling now. And reaching up for her.
God, it felt good to hold him, and to have him clutch at her again, with more strength than she had expected. “I was going to find somebody else,” she gasped. “To replace you.”
“I’ll knock your head off if you do,” he said. “Anyhow, that isn’t possible; nobody could replace me.”
