The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  “Gravitational energy?” said Welles at last. “My God, Sir, that – if you can touch that you are far beyond anything we now imagine . . . and the conversion factor?”

  The Traveller gave him some numbers.

  “That means, practically unlimited. You can reach the ends of Time, and only slightly reduce the earth’s orbital momentum. Ah, what a glorious device!”

  “For my next raid on the Future, however,” said the Traveller, “I’ll have to install some modifications. An extra saddle, wheels . . . But those can wait. Now, what little experiment do you want, Welles?”

  “Can you go forward in time just a quarter of an hour?”

  “Yes. I adjusted the fine control as I was returning. Go forward fifteen minutes, and then what?”

  “Stay there, Sir. We’ll just wait here, and see you reappear.”

  “Stand well back,” said the Traveller.

  He mounted his machine, pressed a lever – and vanished! A strong gust of wind blew in at the open window.

  We all gaped. “God, what a trick!” said the Editor. “Better than that ghost he showed us last Christmas. I suppose its done with mirrors . . . Well now, now what do we do?”

  “We could go back to the smoking room, and return,” said Welles. “But I intend to stay right here, watching that empty corner.”

  We all agreed to stay.

  “Don’t move from this corner,” said Welles. “There might be a nasty accident if he reappeared in one of us.”

  We waited. The Psychologist took up a topic he had raised the previous week. “Suppose – he went back to the Battle of Hastings – and then saved Harold, won the battle for the Saxons! What then?”

  I laughed. “We’d be speaking a different language now, Ellis – something more like German or Dutch, with almost no French roots. And our gracious Queen would probably be called Sieglinde – or something like that!”

  “Not at all,” said Welles, smiling. “You’re on the one-track theory again, Hillyer. No Traveller could affect the Battle of Hastings in our time-stream. It can’t be done, because we know it hasn’t been done. But our friend could go back to 1066 in another track – D, would it be? – and then in that stream there would be no Norman Conquest. I have a feeling that there may be very many time-streams, some very similar to our history, some very different. Perhaps these streams are diverging all the time, even without Time Machines . . . I don’t know. But my guess is, the ones that are very different are inaccessible to our present selves. If our friend were to go back in time and tamper with some version of history – then I’m afraid we would never see him again. He could return to 1891 – but it wouldn’t be our 1891. He would exist for our counterpart selves – the ones speaking Saxon perhaps; but no longer for us.”

  “Perish that thought!” exclaimed Doctor Browne. “I’d hate to lose him! Even now . . .” He gazed uneasily at the empty corner.

  “No, no: no danger. He has simply gone into our future; which any minute now will be our present.”

  A few seconds later, he was proved right. The Machine and the Traveller flashed into existence in the northwest corner. We felt a swirl of air.

  “Still there?” said the Traveller, looking cheerfully at us. “Has anything happened? I just pressed the lever a fraction . . .”

  “Fifteen minutes have passed,” I said. “We had an anxious wait.”

  “For me,” said the Traveller, “it was less than a second.”

  “Very good, Sir,” said Welles. “Now we have proved – for those who aren’t too sceptical – that forward time travel is feasible, and involves no paradoxes. But now – would you go forward again, another fifteen minutes – and then come back, on the machine, to a point just a few seconds ahead of now? Say, to avoid trouble, to half a minute ahead of the time you leave?”

  “This will take fine tuning,” said the Traveller, looking at his dials, “but – yes, I will do it. Here goes!”

  Again he vanished. This time we had only a few moments to wait. Suddenly I felt dizzy, and I saw the man and the Machine flash back into their place. But now the Traveller looked troubled. He dismounted, and came over towards us.

  Welles held up his hand. “Did anyone feel strange, just now?”

  “Yes,” said Browne, stroking his grizzled beard and looking meditative. “Now you mention it, just as our friend flashed back, I felt a little dizzy.”

  “So did I,” said Ellis.

  “And I,” I said.

  “The splitting of the tracks,” said Welles.

  “I say,” the Traveller began, “what happened to you people? When I dismounted, fifteen minutes ahead, there was nobody – not in here, not in the whole house! I questioned Mrs Watchett. She said you had all gone home. Then I came back in here, got on the Machine, returned – and here you are!”

  “Ah well,” said Browne, smiling, “I suppose it is late, and we will depart in the next few minutes.”

  “No,” said Welles, taking out his watch. “I am going to stay right here for twenty minutes. Why don’t you all stay? That way we will prove something important.”

  His meaning sank in to all of us. “Prove it’s all nonsense!” the Editor laughed.

  “I–I didn’t see you!” said the Traveller.

  “No – and you didn’t see yourself either, Sir, in this corner. If you’ll just wait . . .”

  We waited twenty minutes. And nothing whatever happened. The Traveller moved the Machine into the centre of the room. But the far corner remained empty. Everyone looked at their watches, the Traveller consulted the chronometer on his Machine. At last he looked round at us, dismayed. “It – it is five minutes past the moment I arrived and found you gone. Yet – you are not gone!”

  “And you have not reappeared in the far corner, or anywhere else,” I said. “If that had happened, five minutes ago you would have met yourself, too. Evidently, that journey has been wiped out.”

  “Not wiped out—” Welles began.

  “I’ll settle this!” cried the Traveller. “I’ll ask Mrs Watchett!” And he rushed out of the laboratory.

  “I’d like to see the housekeeper’s face,” said the Journalist, “when he does ask her. Why – there might be a story in this – in the silly column.” And he ran out too.

  We heard voices in the passage, and then they both re-entered – with Mrs Watchett, that motherly, elderly widow. “Oh, no Sir,” she was saying, “you never did ask me any such thing. And I never told you the gentlemen had left. How could I? They’ve been here with you all this ’alf hour and more, lookin’ at your experiments.”

  “All right, Mrs Watchett, you can go,” said the Traveller. “I – I just had a dream, that’s all. It’s over now.” He passed a hand wearily over his brow. He seemed quite crestfallen.

  “It’s high time to make our dream departure come true,” said the Editor crisply. “Well, thank you, mine host, for showing us some diverting illusions. Maskelyne is nothing to you. I look forward to something really startling this Christmas. Perhaps you can conjure up for us the ghost of a Morlock. That’d be something – the ghost of a being who doesn’t yet exist – and probably never will.”

  And he left, and the Journalist went with him.

  “Hopeless people,” said Welles savagely. “Two ancestors of the Eloi.”

  “But – perhaps they’re right,” said the Traveller. “Perhaps I did dream all this future travel. You have just shown, Welles, that one of my trips to the future was an illusion.”

  “No Sir – not at all,” said Welles. “It was real, all right. But by returning, by slipping back those fifteen minutes and telling us about your trip, you shifted us onto another time-line. We all felt the shift as a blurring, the moment you returned. We are now on Track C – before that, we were on Track B, the one you created by your return from the Morlocks. Track B still exists – in some metaphysical dimension you have just interviewed Mrs Watchett, she has told you the house is empty, and from that track you have vanished on your Machi
ne, I fear for ever, leaving that Mrs Watchett and your other servants aghast. But I don’t think abandoned tracks snuff out of existence.”

  “What is Existence?” said Ellis. “I think Berkeley had something. Where there are perceiving minds, there you have existence. I rather like your many-tracked world, Welles.”

  Welles laughed. “Consciousness is certainly a great mystery. Why do we feel confined to this track now? Why are we not also aware of our continuing lives in Tracks A and B? Perhaps our counterparts in Track B, who have long since gone home, are even now wondering the same thing . . . But it’s no more mysterious, I think, than the odd fact that our consciousness is confined to one body. Why do I always wake up in the morning and find myself confined to the body and brain of Herbert Welles, the not-very-brilliant student of physics – and not one day find myself in the body of George Hillyer, the excellent story writer? Anyway, Sir, the world is a very strange place – and backward Time Travel makes it stranger. You came back obliquely just now, thereby creating a new track and a new future. This evening you have created two new futures, by making two backward time journeys.”

  “But then,” said the Traveller, “Weena still exists, in what you call Future A.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “But I can’t get back there.”

  “Not exactly there. But if you go forward again to 802,701, on this Track C, you may find it not very different.”

  “Then that is just what I shall do.”

  He agreed with us that his next journey would be in five or six days’ time – the time needed to modify the Machine, and make other preparations. And we agreed with him – Browne, Ellis, Welles and myself – that in the interval we would do nothing to disturb the far future. No political activities, no socialist meetings. Doctor Browne even promised to limit his charitable work among the poor to a minimum. And of course, we all promised to keep the projected future journey a complete secret from all outsiders. We thought alike on most matters – Browne was a Liberal, Ellis a Radical: now we had become a conspiracy.

  As we were leaving the house, Welles said to us: “It’s just occurred to me that not doing something is also a modification. To be fair to our friend – to ensure that he meets something like Eloi – I suggest we just carry on as usual, doing neither more nor less. I shall visit William Morris as usual – but won’t say a word to him about the future triumph of capitalism.”

  “How do you rate our friend’s chances,” I said, “of finding Weena?”

  “Not high. We can’t suppress our own knowledge of Future A. Even those newspaper idiots . . . Trivial little actions now, smoking one cigar more or less – they must have increasing effects over 800,000 years. Unpredictable effects. I hope I’m wrong, but – I’ll visit William Morris, and try to be unaffected by what I know.”

  3

  In the event, only I had time to visit William Morris; Welles, unavoidably, became involved in one unusual activity; for the Traveller pressed him into service as a collaborator in modifying the Time Machine. Welles hardly resisted the Traveller’s request; soon he became eager to help. For the Machine fascinated him.

  By Saturday evening they had installed the four wheels which could be lowered when needed below the level of the runners. They were bicycle wheels, small size, with solid tyres. The Traveller was determined now to wheel his machine into an Eloi building, and there chain it to a pillar, safe from the prying eyes and fingers of the Morlocks.

  On Monday, there was a new development. The second saddle, installed behind the Traveller’s seat, was first intended for the rescued Weena. Then Welles said:

  “Why don’t I go too, Sir? With two of us, you’d be more than twice as secure. We could stand alternate watches, at night. And I could always cover your back.”

  The Traveller was half elated, half dubious. “It’s very good of you. But you know the dangers?”

  “Of course. But after your pioneer journey, they should be small. Much smaller with two of us. And a much greater chance of a successful rescue.”

  “Yes, yes. But it would alter things. And I want them, as far as possible, unaltered . . .”

  “Sir, I would stay in the background – especially as regards Weena.”

  That settled it. It was agreed that they would return with Welles carrying Weena before him on a slightly lengthened saddle.

  I also was given a little job. As a writer of fiction, I should have the necessary talent and the Traveller called on me to invent a story for Mrs Watchett. Silently I invoked the spirit of Dickens, to account for the sudden arrival of a young foreign female, alone, oddly clad, and unchaperoned, in the Richmond house. I think in the end my tale would have gladdened the great Charles’s heart. On the Monday evening I took the housekeeper aside, in the little office-cum-sitting-room, and broke it to her.

  The Traveller, I said, had an uncle – recently deceased – who had worked most of his life in Transylvania, and married there. Wife half Transylvanian, half French – also dead now. They had left an only daughter. The poor girl was utterly without resources – a wicked business partner had ruined that family, and indirectly caused the father’s death . . .

  When I got this far, Mrs Watchett could barely restrain her tears. “Oh, Sir, the poor little thing! How old is she?”

  “We are not very sure. In her teens, I believe. She is now in France, with a relative on her mother’s side – an old woman who is herself poor, and unable to travel. It is not yet at all certain, but we think the girl may manage to come over to England this week. She will then be utterly dependant on her cousin, your master. We hope you, Mrs Watchett, can take care of the girl – you being the only woman in this house, apart from the maid.”

  “Oh yes, Sir, of course, it’d be a pleasure. I had a little daughter meself once . . .”

  “You must be prepared for some surprises, Mrs Watchett. Miss Driver will be very foreign, I’m told – not a word of English. You’ll have to use sign language. And – they have rather simple manners in Transylvania. I don’t think they use knives or forks. Oh yes – and they’re vegetarians.”

  “Bless my soul! Sir – how will we feed her? Vegetarian . . .”

  “Oh, Doctor Browne is preparing a diet sheet. Perhaps gradually we could tempt her to cheese and eggs. If you’ll have the things by Wednesday . . .”

  Wednesday, indeed, was fixed for the great journey. The Traveller had cancelled all his usual Thursday parties: if we got Weena, we would have to keep her very secret for a while. Luckily, the Editor and Journalist had lost interest in us – not even a paragraph had appeared in their paper.

  Ellis was unavoidably detained for most of that day, but on Wednesday morning, four of us assembled in the laboratory. It was nearly 10 a.m., a grey dismal October day, but the electric lights in that big room burned brightly. The Traveller and Welles prepared to mount the newly polished Machine in its old spot in the southeast corner; Doctor Browne and I stood well back. We two were the farewelling and, we hoped, the welcoming committee. Browne had his medical bag. “Pray it won’t be needed,” he muttered. I felt pangs of fear for Welles, my close friend . . .

  The Traveller and Welles had large haversacks – this time they would be well equipped with revolvers, a camera, a patent lamp, extra clothing. Clothing! Welles had visited a theatrical costumier’s, and now they both wore Roman tunics over trousers and boots. Welles had also shaved off his beard – and his hairless chin made him look very young, if anything less than his actual twenty-five years.

  “We want to be inconspicuous this time,” said the Traveller. “As much like Eloi as possible. I’m too tall, of course – but my friend might just pass as a very tall one of that people. We are going to arrive, of course, in full view of that Sphinx, and the Morlocks who live in its base may have spy-holes.”

  “They may also have dark goggles,” said Welles.

  “My Morlocks didn’t,” said the Traveller.

  “Perhaps not, Sir, but perhaps these Morlocks will have. You kn
ow, we have been forced to do some unusual things. It can’t be exactly the same future . . .”

  “No, you proved that last Thursday night,” said the Traveller, somewhat bitterly. “But we must try to repeat events as nearly as possible. We’ll arrive just one day earlier, secure the Machine, check the next day that no other Traveller arrives in the middle of that thunderstorm – then wait to meet Weena at the river, so I can rescue her—”

  “And then come directly back?” said Browne.

  “No.” The Traveller looked stubborn. “I mean to repeat things – as far as it’s safe. We’ll spend five more days there, so she can get to know me again – so she is willing for the ultimate rescue, from the Morlocks. She has to love and trust – so that she will not be afraid to get on our Machine.”

  I saw what he left half unspoken: he wanted the same experience as before, but with a happy ending. He would have to win, all over again, the affections of a girl in the far future – a girl who might not now even exist.

  I said: “Do you all realize that today is October 14?”

  “What of it?” said the Traveller.

  “It’s the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. Which we talked once of changing. Well, with your return voyage today, you ought to change at least our future history.”

  “How?”

  “Weena must change things a little,” I said.

  Later, I remembered that as the understatement of the century. Or two centuries.

  4

  When the Machine and its two occupants vanished, there was the usual cold blast of wind from the open window, as air rushed in to occupy the little vacuum.

  “Well,” said Browne, “if all goes smoothly, we shouldn’t have long to wait. That’s one crazy thing about this Time Travel: they can spend eight days away, but for us it should be only a few seconds. Or if they overshot . . .”

  “They’d arrive in our past – on a different time track,” I said. “And I think, we would never see them again. Because we haven’t so seen them. Other selves of ours would meet them, greet them – but not us.”

  Browne shuddered. “I can’t bear to think of that.”