Philip Van Doren Stern (ed)

by Travelers In Time

  From these premonitory dreams, Dunne began to evolve his theory of a serial universe, a philosophical and scientific concept which, interesting as it is, need not concern us here.4 But as a first step he asked himself these questions:

  Was it possible that these phenomena were not abnormal, but normal? That dreams—dreams in general, all dreams, everybody's

  'SeeJ. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time, New York: Macmillan, 1927, fromwhich the quotations used here are taken. Also the same author's The Serial Universe, New York: Macmillan, 1938.

  dreams—were composed of images of past experience and images of future experience blended together in approximately equal proportions? That the universe was, after all, really stretched out in Time, and that the lop-sided view we had of it—a view with the "future" part unaccountably missing, cut off from the growing "past" part by a travelling "present moment"—was due to a purely mentally imposed barrier which existed only when we were awake? So that, in reality, the associational network stretched, not merely this and that way in Space, but also backwards and forwards in Time: and the dreamer's attention, following in natural, unhindered fashion the easiest pathway among the ramifications, would be continually crossing and re-crossing that properly non-existent equator which we, waking, ruled quite arbitrarily athwart the whole.

  Dunne then went on, with some success, to try to foretell the future while he was awake. He said of these attempts: "I employed this experiment mainly in order to seek for the barrier, if any, which divides our knowledge of the past from our knowledge of the future. And the odd thing was that there did not seem to be any such barrier at all. One had merely to arrest all obvious thinking of the past, and the future would become apparent in disconnected flashes."

  Dunne's experiments with future time are, of course, less spectacular than two Englishwomen being physically transported into the past. One may believe or disbelieve both accounts; there is no way of convincing the bitter skeptic. Dunne, who is a trained scientist, said in his book that he did not offer his experiments as scientific evidence; he urged his readers to try such experiments on themselves.

  We are so used to our bondage to time that if the fetters are loosened even momentarily, the experience is likely to be a shock. The present editor will never forget the one occasion on which he apparently foresaw a future event. He had a nightmare in which the salient and most memorable point was that he had identified his dream antagonist as Lucifer. The next morning he told his dream to two people, emphasizing the importance of the Lucifer character. He then went to his office, where he found awaiting him the galley proofs of an unpublished, unheralded book entitled Lucifer, Son of Morning.

  Coincidence? Perhaps. Your determined skeptic, who will bend the laws of probability until they crack, before he will admit that there might be an explanation not in his little bag of odds and ends of scientific learning, will naturally scoff. Yet he is willing to accept the astonishing theories of time and space that are part of the new physics. But he insists on thinking that such theories apply only to "out there" —"out there" meaning some vague faraway place where light from a distant star streams through the otherwise empty ether at the always constant rate of 186,000 miles per second—without ever realizing that the earth he so smugly inhabits is passing at high speed through a part of that same "out there," making a bit of it temporarily into the more comforting here and now.

  Our world is not the fixed place we like to think it is. It is, in fact, a giant ball of whirling electrons moving around an atomically exploding sun at the rate of eighteen miles per second, while the whole solar system is itself moving rapidly through space. Einstein has showed us that time and space are interconnected, and that time runs more slowly when a moving system speeds up. Once the idea of the immutability of time is discarded, anything can happen. Hiroshima and Nagasaki show that man can change the structure of the atom; perhaps the scientists working in our laboratories will someday be able to alter time.

  In an age like ours, when yesterday's axioms become today's fallacies, it behooves us not to cling too firmly even to the evidence of our own eyes; tomorrow may show us that we are not seeing truly— and there is always another tomorrow beyond that.

  Even the reader who refuses to have any part of the story of the two English schoolteachers' visit to the Versailles of 1789 or who dismisses Dunne's premonitory dreams as sheer coincidence may still enjoy the purely fictional tales printed here. The desire to master time is an exceedingly old one that antedates the invention of the clock itself. We all remember the ancient fairy tale of the princess who slept in a castle where time stood still for a hundred years until her predestined lover came to awaken her with a kiss. Two of the earliest short stories in American literature, Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" and William Austin's "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man," both deal with shifts in time. And Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which was first published in 1889, is a clear-cut example of time travel. But it is with H. G. Wells's The Time

  Machine, published in 1895, that the modem literature of the subject really begins.

  Wells was a young man when he wrote the story. In later years he professed to regard it as "a very undergraduate performance," but he wrought better than he knew, for the fantasy has become a minor classic which may outlast its author's more ambitious works. It is the most perfect of all tales of time travel, a parable of the far future of the human race written by a man who fought all his life for progress and then died—in the beginning of the second year of the atomic era—despairing of mankind's eventual fate. His people of the future, the Eloi, who represent the happy, indolent children of light, and the Morlocks, who are the underground dwellers in darkness, exemplify a division of humanity that has persisted since earliest times and that conceivably may grow more pronounced. And his nameless Time Traveler, the brilliant young scientist who rides off fearlessly on his strange contraption to explore unknown eons of time, is the prototype of a character that has already become standard in fiction of this kind. Just as Poe invented the eternal detective in C. Auguste Dupin, so did Wells create the eternal scientist in his Time Traveler.

  After Wells had shown the way, tales about time, which had hitherto been written rather infrequently, became fairly common. The turn of the century marks the beginning of writers' interest in them. It is not difficult to understand why. The famous Michelson-Morley efforts in the 1880s to measure the speed of light experimentally, Roentgen's discovery of X rays in 1895, Becquerel's discovery of the radioactive nature of uranium in 1896 and the Curies' discovery of radium in 1898, the announcement of Planck's Quantum Theory in 1901, and Einstein's first statement of the theory of relativity in 1905 were bringing about radically new and different conceptions of matter, space, and time. After 1905, when Einstein pointed out that man's previously held ideas of space and time were purely metaphysical and were not supported by the observations and experiments of physics, the comforting notion that time flows on forever and everywhere at a fixed and unvarying rate could no longer be maintained by any thinking person.

  The implications of the new physics were so overwhelming that they struck writers' imaginations forcefully. Time stories began to be written, and they have been written ever since. Most of them, however, have little to do with the scientific aspects of relativity, for few writers possess either the training or the patience to master so abstruse a theory. They usually just take it for granted that a shift in time might occur and go on from that to show the effect it would have on the lives of their characters.

  More English writers than American have been impressed with the possibilities of the time theme. J. B. Priestley admits that J. W. Dunne has had a profound influence upon his work. Several of Priestley's plays are concerned with time, notably Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before. Barrie's Dear Brutus and Dunsany's If both deal with what might have happened if a man had had the chance to go back and live his life over again. In the American theater such plays as Maxwell Ande
rson's The Star-Wagon, John Balderston's Berkeley Square (inspired by Henry James's unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past), and Paul Osbom's dramatization of Lawrence Watkin's novel, On Borrowed Time, are based on shifts in time.

  The time theme has been less popular in novels than in plays or short stories. Nevertheless, there are quite a few full-length novels dealing with time. Robert Nathan's Portrait of Jennie is one of them; John Buchan's The Gap in the Curtain and Warwick Deeping's The Man Who Went Back are others; and Dorothy Macardle has made use of precognition in her recent The Unforeseen.

  The literature of seriously written time fiction is not large, but it is large enough to enable the editor, in his search for stories for this collection, to choose only those which he thought had genuine literary merit. Good writing is essential to fantasy, for fantasy, at its best, approaches poetry, and, like poetry, requires the mind of a disciplined artist to cope with it. When the imagination is allowed to soar unchecked, it may fall, like Icarus, ignominiously to earth, where it will meet with inevitable ridicule.

  Writers of the lurid tales printed in pulp magazines have, of course, done the time theme to death. Their stories are ingenious enough-some of them are, in fact, miracles of inventiveness—but mere ingenuity is not enough. Too much complication or too much novelty can be as ruinous to fantasy as too little. And the art of fiction still holds for fantasy as well as for realism. Depart too far from the norm of human experience and you bore the adult reader, who will no longer care what happens to your characters once they have stepped through a dozen dimensions of time and are consorting with twelve-sided green monsters somewhere in interstellar space. The true artist, who knows how to deal with elusive material, is more likely to work his tricks right in your own living room, where the reality of familiar things lends strangeness to whatever he may conjure up.

  Here, then, are twenty-four tales of time, an appropriate number, one for each hour of the day. As you read them, you may, if you listen carefully enough, hear the beating of man's restless wings as he tries desperately to move about in a medium that has always held him fast. And from your reading of them you may even obtain the one thing we can hope to seize from time's all-devouring grasp—a little pleasure, that ingenious human device which enables man to find delight rather than terror in the awe-inspiring spectacle of the night sky, where time itself undergoes strange alterations as it whirls madly through the vastness of space.

  December 5, 1946 Brooklyn, N.Y.

  Through the Clock

  Reprinted by permission of Mrs. G. P. Wells.

  The Time Machine

  By H. G. WELLS

  THE TIME TRAVELLER (FOR SO IT WILL BE CONVENIENT TO SPEAK OF him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way—marking the points with a lean forefinger—as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.

  "You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception."

  "Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?" said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.

  "I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions."

  "That is all right," said the Psychologist.

  "Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence."

  "There I object," said Filby. "Of course a solid body may exist. All

  real things---- "

  "So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?" "Don't follow you," said Filby.

  "Can a cube that does not last for any time at all have a real existence?"

  Filby became pensive. "Clearly," the Time Traveller proceeded, "any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives."

  "That," said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over the lamp; "that . . . very clear indeed."

  "Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked," continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accession of cheerfulness. "Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it. But some foolish people have got hold of the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say about this Fourth Dimension?"

  "I have not," said the Provincial Mayor.

  "It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly—why not another direction at right angles to the other three?—and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon

  Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four—if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?"

  "I think so," murmured the Provincial Mayor; and, knitting his brows, he lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats mystic words. "Yes, I think I see it now," he said after some time, brightening in a quite transitory manner.

  "Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.

  "Scientific people," proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, "know very well that Time is only a kind of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally recognised? But certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must conclude was along the Time-Dimension."

  "But," said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, "if Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has it always been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?"

  The Time Traveller smiled. "Are you so sure we can move freely in Space? Right and
left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there."

  "Not exactly," said the Medical Man. "There are balloons." "But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the in-

  equalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement." "Still they could move a little up and down," said the Medical Man. "Easier, far easier down than up."

  "And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment."

  "My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth's surface."

  "But the great difficulty is this," interrupted the Psychologist. "You can move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time."

  "That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilised man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?"