The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  All along Els had just needed help to return to the Field of Devils, help to move through space to where she could walk through time and rejoin her tribe in our future . . . or had she stayed because of affection for me? Whatever the case, she had only resorted to time-walking in sheer terror, when the journalists and camera crews had charged.

  My mind was racing as I drove. Glancing down, I could see Els by the gleam of the dashboard lights. In a strange sense, I longed to call Tormes on my cellphone, to tell him what had really happened in the Middle Pleistocene. The heidelbergensians had spawned two new species, not just the neanderthals. With the Saale Glacial’s ice sheets approaching, the neanderthals went down the tried and true path of increased intelligence, improved toolmaking skills, and a stockier build to cope with the growing cold. Homo rhunnis evolved mobility in the fourth dimension instead. This instantly removed the trait from the gene pool – at least in normal time. Humanity had evolved later, but continued down the same path as the neanderthals.

  In the distance I could see a helicopter’s searchlight. It was hovering where we were heading: the Field of Devils. I turned off the headlights, slowed, and drove on by moonlight, but the car had already been noticed. The light in the sky approached – then passed by. The pilot was heading for where he had last seen my lights. It gave us perhaps another two minutes. Els could easily escape through time and rejoin her tribe. I would be caught, but what could they do to me?

  We were only half a mile from the Field of Devils when the helicopter’s searchlight caught the car. I braked hard, opened the door and pulled Els out after me.

  “Els, tek var es bel!” I cried in Rhuun as we stood in the downwash of the rotor blades, imploring her to time walk two thousand midsummers away.

  “Carr, Els kek!” she pleaded, grasping my arm.

  Kek was new to me, but this was no time to be improving my grasp of Rhuun. The helicopter was descending, an amplified voice was telling me to drop my weapons and raise my hands.

  “Els, tek var es bel!” I shouted again.

  Els stepped out of the twenty-first century.

  To me it had all been so obvious. The Rhuun could travel forward in time but take nothing with them. Their skin cloaks and tents, their stone scrapers, axes and knives, and their wooden spears and pins, everything was left behind when the time-walked. Only the person time-walking could pass into the future. What I had forgotten were the babies visible on Marella’s video. If babies had could be carried through time, so could adults.

  The brightness of the helicopter’s spotlight vanished, replaced by the half-light of dawn. I was standing naked, in long grass, with Els still holding my hand. The air was chilly, but there was no wind. Els whistled, and awaited a reply. None came. The rolling hills were luridly green, and dotted with dusky sheep and cattle. It was an arcadia for Pleistocene hunters, but it was not the Pleistocene.

  In the distance, great snow-capped towers loomed. The air was clear and pure, and there was silence such as I had never experienced. There was a series of distant pops, like a string of fireworks exploding, and the rest of the Rhuun appeared a few hundred metres away. Els whistled, then waved. Another tribe materialized, then another. Some sort of temporal meeting place, I guessed. Even at a distance, the towers looked derelict, and there should not have been snow in southern Spain. Els was unconcerned. There was game to hunt and nobody to defend it, so nothing else mattered. Taking my hand again, she began to lead me toward the other Rhuun.

  In the years since our arrival I have concluded that humanity has ceased to exist, possibly wiped out by a genetically targeted plague, destroyed by a doomsday weapon . . . victims of their ingenuity. I have become a great shaman, inventing a primitive type of writing, the bow, the bone flute, the tallow lamp, and even cave painting, but when I die I shall end nature’s experiment with high intelligence – once known as humanity. Sheer intelligence has not proved to be a good survival trait in the long run, and through their fantastic mobility the Rhuun have inherited the Earth.

  THE TRUTH ABOUT WEENA

  David J. Lake

  The idea of having a machine transport you through time had first appeared in a short story, “The Clock That Went Backward” (1881) by Edward Page Mitchell, the editor of the New York Sun. The use of a clock is perhaps an obvious symbol and was used to considerable effect in the children’s novel, Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) by Philippa Pearce. The Spanish playwright Enrique Gaspar depicted a machine that was able to move backward in time in El Anacronópete (1887), a novella only recently made available in English as The Time Ship (2012), which is more a satire on human progress. The man who brought the time machine firmly into literature and who popularized the concept of time travel was, of course, H. G. Wells with The Time Machine, published in its final form in 1895. Wells’s purpose was to use the story to consider the effects of the changes in nineteenth-century society on the evolution of humans, which he achieved with considerable impact. “A book of remarkable power and imagination,” said the Saturday Review.

  The following is as much a treatise on the original Time Machine as it is a continuation of the story. It provides a valuable analysis of the nature of time travel and raises questions and paradoxes that we shall encounter throughout the rest of this book. David J. Lake is a British writer and academic, born in India, but long resident in Australia, though he was educated in England and studied alongside Wells’s grandson, Martin, at Cambridge University. Lake has written a separate novel based on The Time Machine, The Man Who Loved Morlocks (1981), but following a course in science fiction that Lake taught at Queensland University in 1990 he began to reconsider Wells’s work and produced a novel which he subsequently distilled into the following story, which also introduces us to the concept of alternate time tracks.

  1

  “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.”

  That was how I began my famous story of the Time Machine; the foundation of my success as an author – and of much else beside. That story figured largely, around 1900, in the movement of Household Socialism, and all that that led to. The tale was laughed at, praised, used in serious social and political argument – yet by most people was treated as nothing but a fiction. Well, in its hitherto published form it was partly fiction, because at the time – 1895 – I could not write the full truth. The full truth was even more fantastic than the fiction – too fantastic, surely, to be believed; or if believed, too disturbing to received notions of Time. And besides, there were living people to protect: in particular, one young person who was very dear to us.

  It was agreed, therefore, among our small group that I must abbreviate the ending, and publish the story as a novel, an invention. I did, and the novel served its purpose. But now, in 1934, the time has come (the time! a nice phrase; well then, a time) in which I can tell the whole truth – of those famous dinner parties in Richmond in 1891, and what really resulted from the second party.

  You have met us, the guests, before. My name is George Hillyer, at that time barely known to the world as a minor writer of short stories. Doctor Browne and Ellis the Psychologist had been with us the previous Thursday, October 1. Today, October 8, we had also present the Editor, the Journalist, and the person I formerly called the Shy Man. I practised a little deception there, deliberately putting him well in the background. He was not really shy at all, simply a good listener, slow to speak unless he had something worth saying. He was young, with fair-brown hair and blue eyes; to make himself seem older, at that time he sported a trim little brown beard. He was a mathematical physicist, and he had once been a student under our friend the Time Traveller, when the latter was still a professor at London University.

  The party went much as described in my novel. The Traveller was late, and we began dinner without him. We talked of what three of us had seen last week – the big Time Machine nearly finished, and the little model which disappeared. I suggested the Traveller was late
now because he was travelling in time. “He left that note, so he must have anticipated—”

  “Oh, stuff!” said the Editor. “If he can travel backward in time, why should he expect to be late? He need only stay on his machine a little longer, coming home – and he could be early.”

  “Very early!” The Journalist laughed. “Why, he could get back the previous week – and meet you fellows last Thursday.”

  “Including himself!” said the Editor. “Don’t forget, he could meet himself too! Then there’d be two of him, one a week or so older than his brother. And, I presume, then there’d be two Time Machines! And if he took money with him, he could multiply that as well – a bad look-out for the Bank of England! So you see, it’s all nonsense – a gaudy lie, a conjuring trick. There can’t be any time travel.”

  “Excuse me,” said the young Physicist. “Your argument holds only against travel backwards in a single time line. I see no objection to forward time travel. We do it all the time – at sixty seconds to the minute. And skipping forward in a machine is no more, logically, than hiding yourself for a while, and then coming on the scene again. It’s the logical equivalent of the Rip Van Winkle coma. With clever technology, perhaps he could go forward.”

  “But what’s the use of that,” said the Editor, “if he couldn’t come back?”

  Just at that moment the door slowly opened, and the Time Traveller appeared – limping, bloodstained, ghastly. He was a man of middle age, and now he looked older, grey and worn.

  He drank his wine, went out, changed, ate dinner, and told us his story. He had spent eight days in the year 802,701, and he had returned.

  I need not repeat his story in detail: you have heard it before. In the far future, the human race had split into two species: above ground, the rich had turned into little mindless Eloi, living in a half-ruined fools’ paradise; below ground, in caverns and tunnels, the enslaved workers had turned into foul, lemur-like Morlocks – and turned upon their former masters, turned cannibal – if that was the right word – coming out at night, especially in the dark of the moon, to eat the Eloi. He told us of his life among the Eloi: of Weena, the little Eloi girl-woman, blonde and helpless, whom he rescued from drowning when none of her companions would raise a decadent finger to save her; and how at last he had lost her, in a night of fire and torment, with Morlocks all around – lost her to death by fire – or worse. And then he added an episode still more terrifying, the episode of the sun flickering out some thirty millions of years hence.

  At that point, the young Physicist objected. “Are you sure about that date, Sir? That sounds like Kelvin, and his theory of the sun’s energy – or rather, lack of it. But we don’t really know what makes the sun shine. I am working on the structure of the atom; at the sun’s enormous temperatures, who knows what strange energies may lurk there . . . Anyway, I’ve read the geologists. The earth, and so the sun, must have existed for hundreds of millions of years already; and if so, why not hundreds of millions more?”

  The Traveller hesitated. “I think it was thirty million . . . I must admit, I was rather hysterical after I left the Morlocks. All that Further Vision was like a bad dream.”

  “Then perhaps,” said Ellis, the Psychologist, “that episode of the Eloi and Morlocks was also nothing more than a dream, though a fascinating one. The symbolism—”

  “No, no! That was absolutely real. As real as this room! And – I’ve shown you Weena’s two flowers.”

  The two sad little flowers lay withered upon the table. And we looked at the Traveller’s scars.

  “I believe you about the Morlocks,” said the young Physicist suddenly. “It’s exactly in line with present trends. We are really two nations, so why not later two species? And we treat our workers abominably.”

  “Hear, hear!” I said.

  The Traveller smiled wanly. “Thank you, Welles. I know your socialist leanings – yours too, Hillyer – but thank you. As for me, I wish we could simply abolish the workers – be served by intelligent machines. Then certainly no Morlocks could evolve.”

  “But now,” said Welles, the Physicist, “what do you intend to do, Sir? You’ve still got a working Time Machine, haven’t you?”

  “Go back,” said the Traveller.

  “Go back in time? To the past?”

  “No, go back to the future. I must – I will try again to rescue Weena . . .”

  “I’m afraid,” said Welles, “there may be a problem about that, Sir.”

  “You would meet yourself,” I said. “Will you wrestle with your former self over who has the honour to save Weena?”

  The Traveller looked shaken. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I don’t think that would happen,” said Welles. “The real trouble, I think, is that you wouldn’t get back to the same future.”

  “There is only one future!”

  “No, Sir, there must be at least two. According to your hopes, one future in which Weena dies, another in which you save her. And I think something like that might happen. But not exactly that. You see, by coming back and telling us about the future, you have already altered the future. You have reinforced my socialist fears, and I think Hillyer’s also. We will now make extra efforts – talk urgently to William Morris, to the Fabians – so the Eloi–Morlock situation may never arise, in this stream of time. Time is not really a single stream, a single fixed railway-track from fixed past to fixed future. There are many tracks of possibility, some close together, some far apart. And you have just proved that – by apparently coming back from our future.”

  “Apparently coming back. I have come back!”

  “Not from our future Sir, no. From a future which was ours until – a moment perhaps two hours ago. When your machine stopped in the laboratory and you dismounted, while we were eating dinner – I think I know the exact moment – that was when you split time, and pushed us onto a slightly different line. Like a railwayman shifting points. We have all been running on a different line since then.”

  “This is preposterous!” said Doctor Browne. “We didn’t feel a thing!”

  “I felt dizzy at one moment,” said Welles. “A slight blurring feeling, about 7.45. It only lasted a fraction of a second. One could easily disregard it.”

  It struck me then that I had felt it too – I thought at the time I might be going to faint. Nobody else would admit to it.

  “Is there a piece of paper handy?” asked Welles. “I need to draw a diagram or two to explain my Theory of Time. It’s my belief that backward time journeys are never straight back – always oblique. Otherwise you have circular causation.”

  Pencil and paper were found, and Welles drew the following sketch:

  “This is the happening I deny,” said Welles. “A single time-track – which I had to draw rather thick – and you, Sir, going forward to 802,701 and returning to 1891. You see that you have circular causation? For instance, we are not all socialists here. Your tale of purely underground workers may strike one or two of us as a good idea. They might push it . . . Then the Morlocks in the future become the cause of the Morlocks in the future – practically, they are uncaused. Or if you go less far into the future, to the advanced time, you could bring back the secret of some wonderful invention – say, anti-gravity flying machines – and publish it now. Then that invention will never have to be invented – the future flying machines would be their own cause. And so on . . . That is why I deny any straight returns. This is how I see the true situation.”

  And he drew:

  “You see,” he said, “there is no longer any circular causation – there are only zigzags. And 802,701B awaits your next journey, Sir – that would be the dotted line. There is no fear of meeting yourself: because you have never been in 802,701B, only in 802,701A.”

  “It’s still crazy,” I said. “What if our learned friend went back a week now, as our newspaper friends suggested – to our last dinner party. Would he meet himself, and us, in that case?”

  Welles smil
ed. “I think he could. The situation would be as follows:

  “That gets us a third time track,” said Welles, “Track C. On our present track, which is Track B – also on Track A – our learned friend did not turn up last week because we know he didn’t. Several of you lived through that party, and you know there was only one Traveller, and only one Machine. But on Track C, there is no circular causation to prevent doubling of men or machines. Maybe the conservation laws would have to be modified – one track loses matter, another gains . . . Of course, there would also be a corresponding future on Track C, a year 802,701C. I don’t know what it would be like, but it might be exposed to a raid by two Time Machines.”

  “My head is splitting,” said Doctor Browne. “All this airy, crazy theory!”

  “It need not be only theory,” said Welles. “I know it’s late, but if we’re not too tired to spare, say, another hour, we could experiment.”

  “Experiment!” said the Traveller, rousing himself. “Why not? But I’m not ready yet for another long time journey . . .”

  “No, Sir, I meant short hops, fifteen minutes or so, forth and back. Could you stand that?”

  “Certainly, young man!”

  “Then let’s go, Sir. You know, I’ve never even seen the Time Machine as yet . . .”

  2

  We all trooped into the laboratory – and there was the Machine, just as the Traveller had described, in the northwest corner: a little battered, a little stained, but wonderfully impressive. The Editor and Journalist stared and tittered, but Welles was immediately touching it here, touching it there, almost stroking it, and asking technical questions which I for one could not follow. The Traveller answered him.