Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  What caught his eye now were the photos. In the shots taken before May 1939, the family resemblance that was always there was never so striking as it was in those images taken after that first trip to the World’s Fair.

  He stared at a fading color picture of himself as a boy. Beside him stood a thin, mostly bald man whose remaining hair and beard were a mix of white and gray and yellow—his grandfather, on one of their later trips to the World’s Fair, with the Trylon and Perisphere in the distance behind them.

  Mike knew his own visage well enough to see how close the resemblance was between the way the old man looked then and the way he himself looked now. It was almost as if the boy had grown up to become his own grandfather.

  Grabbing the trunk by both handles, he hauled it upstairs. Its weight forced him to pause and lean against the railings or wall of the stairwell every few feet. When he reached his office, he set the trunk down beside his eight-by-twenty-foot worktable.

  Clearing his Cord-related stuff from the workspace, he removed the trunk’s contents and spread them out over the table’s broad top. Up came the suit of clothes and other garments. The sharp leather shoes, too.

  Next came all the memorabilia, the flyers, the brochures, the programs. The oxymoronic prose of the captions describing GM’s Futurama, “a vast miniature cross section of America as it may conceivably appear two decades hence . . .”

  He sat down slowly in the chair at the worktable. Looking more carefully through the correspondence and the writings again after all these years, Mike thought that the notes now seemed less demented than eerily prescient. Here, paper-clipped to a page of typed notes in a binder, was a letter apparently sent from Einstein himself:

  Matter can be made to “degrade” into energy more readily than energy can be made to “upgrade” into matter. I do not, however, believe matter and energy are just types of information, as you have suggested, or that there is a spectrum linking them such that consciousness is just a more complex form of information than matter or energy. Nor do I believe that consciousness can be made to “degrade” more readily into matter and energy than matter and energy can be made to “upgrade” into consciousness. Although the distinction between past, present and future is an illusion, the distinction between energy, matter, and consciousness is not.

  Indeed the notes from that page on were most curious. “Planck energy for opening gap in spacetime fabric = 1019 billion electron volts,” read one, but then that was crossed out with a large X as the writer of the notes took a different tack.

  “At each bifurcation point,” read the next, “flux occurs in which many potential futures are present. Iteration and amplification mean one future is chosen and others disappear. In bifurcations the past is continually recycled, held timeless in eddies or closed timelike curves, stabilized through feedback. Time is turbulently recurrent, expressing self-similarity across different scales.”

  After a flurry of equations came an underlined conclusion: “Human nervous system both classical and quantum, exploits quantum scale processes to accomplish macroscale ends—solution lies in phase-locking feedback!”

  Mike picked up a page with a meticulously hand-plotted diagram, hauntingly beautiful in its elegant simplicity. When he looked at it more closely, he found the diagram was labeled with questions: “Closed Timelike Rossler Attractor? Temporal Mobius in Phase Space?” Below the question was the note, “Always incompleteness and missing information at the center. The shape of uncertainty shapes certainty.”

  What pushed Mike back in his chair, however, was how much the “Temporal Mobius in Phase Space” resembled an idealized, abstract image of Perisphere, Trylon, and Helicline. Looking away from the image, he realized that the sun was up, that his head hurt with hangover, and—something else. Bifurcations? Self-similarity? Phase-locking feedback? Phase space? That was the language of chaos theory!

  His hand trembled as he flipped through more and more pages of detailed notes, until he reached the inside back cover of the notebook-binder. Taped to it was an ancient envelope, with the words MICHAEL SAKLER written on it. With a shaky hand he pulled the envelope loose from the notebook and opened it.

  LETTER TO MYSELF:

  If Professor Einstein is right about what he calls a “Temporal Mobius” and I am right about the role consciousness plays on the information spectrum, then reading this letter is about to stop you from drinking yourself to slow suicide. Perhaps you have by now realized that these notes are memories of the future, not only mine in 1939, but also yours. In 1997 you have not written these notes yet, but you will—in 1939.

  As a boy, we first traveled with Grandfather Sakler to the Fair on May 28, 1939, to witness the opening of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion. Albert Einstein speaks there, and that day you—I—meet him for the first time. The old man whom the boy returns home with is not his grandfather. It is himself from sixty years into that boy’s future.

  Why must “we” go through such temporal acrobatics? I’m glad I asked. If we don’t, our grandfather will be brutally murdered after running out of gas in Yorkville on the night of May 28. The very fact that this temporal Mobius exists proves that possibility.

  On one timeline, embittered by our grandfather’s death, one of the many possible “us” devotes his life to inventing a time-travel device and uses it to return to 1939 to save our already severely injured Grandfather by sending him into the future. He—we—I—remain in 1939, taking over the role of that grandfather. The boy is spared the suffering and grief of seeing his grandfather die from his injuries.

  In creating the device and using it to alter his own timeline, however, our other self on that line creates a temporal paradox. On that timeline, Grandfather Sakler is killed and as a result one of us grows up to create the device that will allow him to travel back to 1939 to prevent Grandfather Sakler’s murder. Preventing Grandpa’s murder, however, means none of us ever grows up to become the man who invents the device to prevent Grandpa’s murder. Therefore Grandfather Sakler is killed and one of us grows up to create the device that will allow him to . . . et cetera, et cetera.

  Professor Einstein tells me the structure of the universe will not tolerate such an endless conundrum. Instead it conserves its own integrity by melding the two timelines together into “the temporal equivalent of a Mobius strip”—something both and neither loop and intersection. On such a dimension-collapsing Mobius, “either/or” (either Grandpa is saved or the device is created) becomes “not only/but also” (not only is Grandpa saved but the device is also created).

  We have, in some sense, been “grandfathered into” this temporal loophole, but at a cost. The price of this shift to “not only/but also” is the energy of our eternal vigilance. If we want his murder to never again recur, we must ever again prevent its recurrence.

  I know this is difficult for you to understand at first, but if you choose to perpetuate this recurrence, you will learn that time travel is less like running a particle accelerator and more like experiencing a lucid dream or particularly vivid memory.

  Utilizing the chaotic effects always present in consciousness, we can exploit time’s turbulent and strange-attractive properties to burst the surface tension of spacetime at far, far less than Planck energy. I know we can, because we already have.

  For us, it’s not only the dream of the doing that’s grandfather to the memory of the accomplishment, but also the reverse: The memory of the accomplishment is grandfather to the dream of the doing.

  The device in the steamer trunk is only partially complete. I have done as much as I can with technology available before mid-century. The system can only be completed with technology from your era. I have enclosed a list of what you’ll need. You’ll have to search it out and make it all work together, if you choose to perpetuate our responsibility in this and knot your grandfather’s knot—our grandfather’s knot, and Einstein’s knot—in that old Cord.

  I hope you will do so, and will find it both a loophole that binds and a kn
ot that frees, as I have. At all events, good luck!

  —Michael Sakler

  P.S.: That Cord’s no hot rod, but it’s crucial to the set and setting of the mental state required for this time travel experience. It also works well enough for hauling batteries and getting around New York in 1939, so treat it kindly!

  Mike slowly folded the letter. Lost in thought, he stroked his beard absently for a while. Well, it’s better than the other option for a loophole that binds and a knot that frees, he told himself, remembering his hungover dream of a hangman’s noose.

  He got up from the table and the chair and stretched. Then he went downstairs, down to the garage/workshop where the Cord sat with its hood up. The sun was shining brightly just beyond the shadows. He got to work.

  Focused on that work, Mike’s days flew by. A certain balance had returned to his life, too: his obsession was no longer a mad one. He returned, at least sporadically, to his ai-ki-do, tae-kwon-do, do-si-do classes. He sent a card of apology to the widow, who unfortunately was not interested in reestablishing contact. During 1998 and early 1999 he even went to temple a few times—something he hadn’t done in years.

  Maybe the prayers paid off. In June of 1998, he was able to start and run the Cord’s engine for the first time—and the completed restoration cost him less than he’d expected. Such was not the case with completing the “Temporal Mobius Generator,” however.

  The interface synching his mind up to the machine and capable of inducing the mind-chaos needed for his time trip required state-of-the-art neuro-hookups so expensive he had to take out a second mortgage on his property. They were on the 1939 list, however, so he purchased top-of-the-line units from a “mindware” dealer operating out of a software storefront in a Marin County strip mall.

  Using the system he put together, Mike experimented with low voltages to create a map of his own mind’s functioning. Taking as his guide the 1939 notes—with their jargon of “ekstasis points,” “temporal dissipation vortices,” and “eschaton particles”—he located regions of his brain that, when stimulated, produced both “out of body experience” and vivid strange-attractor memories of the World’s Fair. These, the notes indicated, were vital to the temporal voyage he was to undertake.

  By May of 1999 all was in final readiness. A couple of days before his planned time jaunt, he took the now operational and fully equipped Cord on one lengthy test drive—but only one.

  That test drive in itself narrowly missed becoming a disaster. Driving the Cord down to the Valley to see his doctor for his routine physical, he felt fine and the car was running fine, but he still almost didn’t make it. Pulling off of Herndon Avenue and into the rat’s maze of private medical offices surrounding St. Agnes Hospital, he blanked out at the wheel. Only in the last second did he catch himself—and catch the hard left turn he very nearly missed.

  When he finally pulled into a parking spot, he was both shaken and relieved. He had narrowly escaped smashing into the cinder-block wall separating the parking lot of his doctor’s building from the hospital’s parking lot.

  Well, he reminded himself as he walked to his appointment, if I’d smashed through the wall, at least I would have practically landed in the emergency room!

  The only sign of Mike’s brush with Fate was a slightly elevated pulse rate. No trace of a mini-stroke or any other brain glitch that might explain his blanking out just moments earlier. His doctor declared him to be in fine shape, outside of the pulse spike—especially considering his cholesterol and his plaqued arteries and everything else the doctor deigned to lecture him on.

  Given Mike’s failure to change his diet to save his ticker, the doctor warned him that he would have to remain absolutely faithful in taking his heart pills and would likely still need to have surgery within the year to remove his blood mud. Mike agreed politely but planned on changing nothing because, two days later, he was ready to go.

  Into his winged chariot’s trunk Mike loaded the big Exide storage batteries that had, until then, provided electrical storage for the solar panels atop the roof of his off-the-grid party house. Despite the fact that his house would soon be going dark, he was in a celebratory mood.

  He decided to dress appropriately for the occasion. From the closet in his office Mike removed the full suit of clothes and shoes he’d taken from the trunk so long before and tried them on. All the clothes fit perfectly, as he somehow knew they would.

  He looked at himself in the mirror, a man of not inconsiderable years, dressed in a dark suit and tie of a rather conservative cut, topped by a snap-brim hat. Yes, just what the well-dressed time traveler would be wearing in 1939.

  He locked up his home. Walking toward the Cord in the driveway, he twice glanced back wistfully toward his huge handmade house. Starting up the Cord, he drove it through evening light along a deserted forest service gravel road until it passed directly beneath the hydroelectric powerlines, where he stopped.

  Rigging up a coupling and converter, he linked power from an overhead line to the battery array in the trunk. From the system of dams and turbines on the upper San Joaquin River, he swiped enough of that “clean, safe Democracity energy” to bring the device and the storage batteries up to maximum.

  As he decoupled his power tap, he doubted the power company would much notice. A little free juice was the least they owed him, after he’d put up with this power line eyesore all these years.

  The fully restored Cord spun gravel on the last stretch of switchbacks before fishtailing up onto the blacktop of Alder Springs Road. Einstein had once contended that imagination was more important than knowledge. At this moment, Mike felt like a living embodiment of that premise.

  No machine alone could do what he was going to do. The chaos of brain, the individuality of mind, the singularity of memory: all were indispensable to the reality of travel in time.

  Over the blacktop he drove to the summit of the ridge, then stopped the Cord. Its engine thrummed along placidly, idling, as he watched the sun go down. Slowly, the rim of the turning world obscured the light of day. Soon the first stars began to come out.

  Mike took off his hat and put on his temples the circlets containing the neuro-hookups. Checking everything one last time, he threw the switches to activate the timers and all the memory systems of all the computers on board, revved the engine as high as it would go, put the Cord in gear, then took his foot off the brake.

  He was overcome by a euphoric sensation of floating upward, not unlike what he had sometimes experienced just as he drifted off to sleep and the bed beneath him seemed to fall away. This time, however, there was no hard jerk of ordinary consciousness striking to reassert control.

  This time he just kept drifting, a full-blown out-of-body experience bringing his body and the car with it. Faintly he heard the engine sounds breaking up, digitizing, becoming discrete, then wildly dilated, then sounding almost as if they were being played backward.

  Through the windshield and windows he saw a fog rising—a type of Bose condensate. Mike seemed to have seen it before: thick yet low, the Tule fog of memory.

  He looked up through the windshield and saw a star perched atop a great curving skybridge, like a diamond ring effect seen during a total eclipse of the sun. The bridge was a vast, slightly rainbow-shimmering catenary Mobius curve. From this angle, it looked rather like the St. Louis Gateway Arch, only countless miles high—and it wasn’t so much “in” the sky as it somehow was the sky.

  The Cord was moving in and through the skybridge, in the ultimate daredevil stunt loop. His own memories ran like cords of fog through the suspended and suspending bridge and tunnel. Particular events in his life possessed their own unique gravity, curving and warping his memoryspace in ways he could not have foretold—

  —until the fogbridge did its Mobius fillip and he sat outside the 1939 World’s Fair, in sunshine, in the Cord, in the parking lot that would one day become Shea Stadium. Through the windshield he saw the Trylon and Perisphere surrounded by the whole
of the Fair, a candied confection of the Future to be consumed by the present.

  Too often, for him, black and white was the past, while the future was color. Yet here he was, in the past—and in color. Putting on his hat as he stepped out of the car, Mike was a man inside his own dream.

  Might as well enjoy myself, he thought. He grabbed a frankfurter with everything at Swift & Company’s streamlined super-airliner building, then some ice cream over by Sealtest’s triple shark-finned edifice. He paid for them with the antique liberty coins the notes had suggested he bring.

  Strolling about the fairgrounds, he saw again how wind-shaped so many of the structures appeared. Buildings that looked as if they’d been designed in wind tunnels. Frank R. Paul mélanges of fins and keels and flanges. Spirals, helices, and domes, their towers topped with zeppelin-mast spires. An airstream wonderland, waiting for the inevitable arrival of Northrop flying wings and Bel Geddes teardrop cars.

  Stopping at the base of the Trylon and examining it closely, Mike rediscovered the Fair’s secret. Like everything else, the Trylon was intended to look smoothly mass produced, machine precise, and slipstream slick. Up close, however, he saw that its surface was rough, stuccoed with all the “smoothness” of jesso over burlap. Beneath its assembly-line dreams of aerodynamic cowls and zero-drag farings, the great exhibition felt handcrafted—a prototype of the shape of things to come, not a production model.

  The future is best viewed from a distance, Mike thought as he approached the Chrysler Motors Building in the Transportation Zone. Remembering its “Rocketport” display, he went inside.

  Where he literally bumped into Albert Einstein.

  “Pardon me, Professor,” Mike said quickly.

  “Not a problem, not a problem,” the Nobel laureate said with a distracted smile, turning back to lean on a railing. Together they watched the Rocketgun simulate another blastoff into tomorrow, with full noise and light special effects.