The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  So, while one half of physics nowadays grapples with the problems of reverse-time, the other half, funded by most of the money from the space vote, pre-empting the whole previously extant space programme, is trying to work out ways to harness and modulate tachyons.

  These faster-than-light particles certainly seem to exist; we’re fairly certain of that now. The main problem is that the technology for harnessing them is needed beforehand, to prove that they do exist and so to work out exactly how to harness them.

  All these reorientations of science – because of him sitting in his enigmatic vehicle in deliberate alienation from us, reading Robinson Crusoe, a strained expression on his face as he slowly approaches his own personal crack-up.

  (1996)

  If you were locked up in a VSTM for X years, would you want a calendar on permanent display – or not? Would it be consoling or taunting? Obviously his instruments are calibrated – unless it was completely fortuitous that his journey ended on 1 December 1985 at precisely midday! But can he see the calibrations? Or would he prefer to be overtaken suddenly by the end of his journey, rather than have the slow grind of years unwind itself? You see, we are trying to explain why he did not communicate with us in 1995.

  Convicts in solitary confinement keep their sanity by scratching five-barred gates of days on the walls with their fingernails; the sense of time passing keeps their spirits up. But on the other hand, tests of time perception carried out on potholers who volunteered to stay below ground for several months on end show that the internal clock lags grossly – by as much as two weeks in a three month period. Our VSTM passenger might gain a reprieve of a year – or five years! – on his total subjective journey time, by ignoring the passing of time. The potholers had no clue to night and day; but then, neither does he! Ever since his arrival, lights have been burning constantly in the laboratory; he has been under constant observation . . .

  He isn’t a convict, or he would surely protest, beg to be let out, throw himself on our mercy, give us some clue to the nature of his predicament. Is he the carrier of some fatal disease – a disease so incredibly infectious that it must affect the whole human race unless he were isolated? Which can only be isolated by a time capsule? Which even isolation on the Moon or Mars would not keep from spreading to the human race? He hardly appears to be . . .

  Suppose that he had to be isolated for some very good reason, and suppose that he concurs in his own isolation (which he visibly does, sitting there reading Defoe for the nth time), what demands this unique dissection of one man from the whole continuum of human life and from his own time and space? Medicine, psychiatry, sociology, all the human sciences are being drawn into the problem in the wake of physics and space science. Sitting there doing nothing, he has become a kind of funnel for all the physical and social sciences: a human black hole into which vast energy pours, for a very slight increase in our radius of understanding. That single individual has accumulated as much disruptive potential as a single atom accelerated to the speed of light – which requires all the available energy in the universe to sustain it in its impermissible state.

  Meanwhile the orbiting tachyon laboratories report that they are just on the point of uniting quantum mechanics, gravitational theory and relativity; whereupon they will at last “jump” the first high-speed particle packages over the C-barrier into a faster-than-light mode, and back again into our space. But they reported that last year – only to have their particle packages “jump back” as antimatter, annihilating five billion dollars’ worth of equipment and taking thirty lives. They hadn’t jumped into a tachyon mode at all, but had “möbiused” themselves through wormholes in the space-time fabric.

  Nevertheless, prisoner of conscience (his own conscience, surely!) or whatever he is, our VSTM passenger seems nobler year by year. As we move away from his terminal madness, increasingly what strikes us is his dedication, his self-sacrifice (for a cause still beyond our comprehension), his Wittgensteinian spirituality. “Take him for all in all, he is a Man. We shall not look upon his like . . .” Again? We shall look upon his like. Upon the man himself, gaining stature every year! That’s the wonderful thing. It’s as though Christ, fully exonerated as the Son of God, is uncrucified and his whole life re-enacted before our eyes in full and certain knowledge of his true role. (Except . . . that this man’s role is silence.)

  (1997)

  Undoubtedly he is a holy man who will suffer mental crucifixion for the sake of some great human project. Now he re-reads Defoe’s Plague Year, that classic of collective incarceration and the resistance of the human spirit and human organizing ability. Surely the “plague” hint in the title is irrelevant. It’s the sheer force of spirit which beat the Great Plague of London – that is the real keynote of the book.

  Our passenger is the object of popular cults by now – a focus for finer feelings. In this way his mere presence has drawn the world’s peoples closer together, cultivating respect and dignity, pulling us back from the brink of war, liberating tens of thousands from their concentration camps. These cults extend from purely fashionable manifestations – shirts printed with his face, now neatly shaven in a Vandyke style; rings and worry-beads made from galena crystals – through the architectural (octahedron-and-cube meditation modules) to life-styles themselves: a Zen-like “sitting quietly, doing nothing”.

  He’s Rodin’s Thinker, the Belvedere Apollo, and Michelangelo’s David rolled into one for our world as the millennium draws to its close. Never have so many copies of Defoe’s two books and the Jules Verne been in print before. People memorize them as meditation exercises and recite them as the supremely lucid, rational Western mantras.

  The National Physical Laboratory has become a place of pilgrimage, our lawns and grounds a vast camping site – Woodstock and Avalon, Rome and Arlington all in one. About the sheer tattered degradation of his final days less is said; though that has its cultists too, its late twentieth-century anchorites, its Saint Anthonies pole-squatting or cave-immuring themselves in the midst of the urban desert, bringing austere spirituality back to a world which appeared to have lost its soul – though this latter is a fringe phenomenon; the general keynote is nobility, restraint, quiet consideration for others.

  And now he holds up a notice.

  I IMPLY NOTHING. PAY NO ATTENTION TO MY PRESENCE. KINDLY GET ON DOING YOUR OWN THINGS. I CANNOT EXPLAIN TILL 2000.

  He holds it up for a whole day, looking not exactly angry, but slightly pained. The whole world, hearing of it, sighs with joy at his modesty, his self-containment, his reticence, his humility. This must be the promised 1995 message, two years late (or two years early; obviously he still has a long way to come). Now he is Oracle; he is the Millennium. This place is Delphi.

  The orbiting laboratories run into more difficulties with their tachyon research; but still funds pour into them, private donations too on an unprecedented scale. The world strips itself of excess wealth to strip matter and propel it over the interface between sub-light and trans-light.

  The development of closed-cycle living pods for the carriers of those tachyon receivers to the stars is coming along well; a fact which naturally raises the paradoxical question of whether his presence has in fact stimulated the development of the technology by which he himself survives. We at the National Physical Laboratory and at all other such laboratories around the world are convinced that we shall soon make a breakthrough in our understanding of time-reversal – which, intuitively, should connect with that other universal interface in the realm of matter, between our world and the tachyon world – and we feel too, paradoxically, that our current research must surely lead to the development of the VSTM which will then become so opportunely necessary to us, for reasons yet unknown. No one feels they are wasting their time. He is the Future. His presence here vindicates our every effort – even the blindest of blind alleys.

  What kind of Messiah must he be, by the time he enters the VSTM? How much charisma, respect, adoration and wonder must he h
ave accrued by his starting point? Why, the whole world will send him off! He will be the focus of so much collective hope and worship that we even start to investigate Psi phenomena seriously: the concept of group mental thrust as a hypothesis for his mode of travel – as though he is vectored not through time or 4-D space at all but down the waveguide of human will-power and desire.

  (2001)

  The millennium comes and goes without any revelation. Of course that is predictable; he is lagging by a year or eighteen months. (Obviously he can’t see the calibrations on his instruments; it was his choice – that was his way to keep sane on the long haul.)

  But finally, now in the autumn of 2001, he holds up a sign, with a certain quiet jubilation:

  WILL I LEAVE I985 SOUND IN WIND & LIMB?

  Quiet jubilation, because we have already (from his point of view) held up the sign in answer:

  YES! YES!

  We’re all rooting for him passionately. It isn’t really a lie that we tell him. He did leave relatively sound in wind and limb. It was just his mind that was in tatters . . . Maybe that is inessential, irrelevant, or he wouldn’t have phrased his question to refer merely to his physical body.

  He must be approaching his take-off point. He’s having a mild fit of tenth-year blues, first decade anxiety, self-doubt, which we clear up for him . . .

  Why doesn’t he know what shape he arrived in? Surely that must be a matter of record before he sets off . . . No! Time can not be invariable, determined. Not even the Past. Time is probabilistic. He has refrained from comment for all these years so as not to unpluck the strands of time past and reweave them in another, undesirable way. A tower of strength he has been. Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Zeitgänger! Well, back to the drawing board, and to probabilistic equations for (a) tachyon-scatter out normal space (b) time-reversal.

  A few weeks later he holds up another sign, which must be his promised Delphic revelation:

  I AM THE MATRIX OF MAN.

  Of course! Of course! He has made himself that over the years. What else?

  A matrix is a mould for shaping a cast. And indeed, out of him have been moulded increasingly since the late 1990s, such has been his influence.

  Was he sent hindwards to save the world from self-slaughter by presenting such a perfect paradigm – which only frayed and tattered in the eighties when it did not matter any more; when he had already succeeded?

  But a matrix is also an array of components for translating from one code into another. So Yang’s demodulation of information hypothesis is revived, coupled now with the idea that the VSTM is perhaps a matrix for transmitting the “information” contained in a man across space and time (and the man-transmitter experiments in orbit redouble their efforts); with the corollary (though this could hardly be voiced to the enraptured world at large) that perhaps the passenger was not there at all in any real sense; and he had never been; that we merely were witnessing an experiment in the possibility of transmitting a man across the galaxy, performed on a future Earth by future science to test out the degradation factor: the decay of information – mapped from space on to time so that it could be observed by us, their predecessors! Thus the onset of madness (i.e. information decay) in our passenger, timed in years from his starting point, might set a physical limit in light-years to the distance to which a man could be beamed (tachyonically?). And this was at once a terrible kick in the teeth to space science – and a great boost. A kick in the teeth, as this suggested that physical travel through interstellar space must be impossible, perhaps because of Man’s frailty in face of cosmic ray bombardment; and thus the whole development of intensive closed-cycle life-pods for single astronaut couriers must be deemed irrelevant. Yet a great boost too, since the possibility of a receiverless transmitter loomed. The now elderly Yang suggested that 1 December 1985 was actually a moment of lift-off to the stars. Where our passenger went then, in all his madness, was to a point in space thirty or forty light-years distant. The VSTM was thus the testing to destruction of a future man-beaming system and practical future models would only deal in distances (in times) of the order of seven or eight years. (Hence no other VSTMs had imploded into existence, hitherto.)

  (2010)

  I am tired with a lifetime’s fruitless work; however, the human race at large is at once calmly loving and frenetic with hope. For we must be nearing our goal. Our passenger is in his thirties now (whether a live individual, or only an epiphenomenon of a system for transmitting the information present in a human being: literally a “ghost in the machine”). This sets a limit. It sets a limit. He couldn’t have set off with such strength of mind much earlier than his twenties or (I sincerely hope not) his late teens. Although the teens are a prime time for taking vows of chastity, for entering monasteries, for pledging one’s life to a cause . . .

  (2015)

  Boosted out of my weariness by the general euphoria, I have successfully put off my retirement for another four years. Our passenger is now in his middle twenties and a curious inversion in his “worship” is taking place, representing (I think) a subconscious groundswell of anxiety as well as joy. Joy, obviously, that the moment is coming when he makes his choice and steps into the VSTM, as Christ gave up carpentry and stepped out from Nazareth. Anxiety, though, at the possibility that he may pass beyond this critical point, towards infancy; ridiculous as this seems! He knows how to read books; he couldn’t have taught himself to read. Nor could he have taught himself how to speak in vitro – and he has certainly delivered lucid, if mysterious, messages to us from time to time. The hit song of the whole world, nevertheless, this year is William Blake’s “The Mental Traveller” set to sitar and gongs and glockenspiel . . .

  For as he eats and drinks he grows

  Younger and younger every day;

  And on the desert wild they both

  Wander in terror and dismay . . .

  The unvoiced fear represented by this song’s sweeping of the world being that he may yet evade us; that he may slide down towards infancy, and at the moment of his birth (whatever lifesupport mechanisms extrude to keep him alive till then!) the VSTM will implode back whence it came: sick joke of some alien superconsciousness, intervening in human affairs with a scientific “miracle” to make all human striving meaningless and pointless. Not many people feel this way openly. It isn’t a popular view. A man could be torn limb from limb for espousing it in public. The human mind will never accept it; and purges this fear in a long song of joy which at once mocks and copies and adores the mystery of the VSTM.

  Men put this supreme man into the machine. Even so, Madonna and Child does haunt the world’s mind . . . and a soft femininity prevails – men’s skirts are the new soft gracious mode of dress in the West. Yet he is now so noble, so handsome in his youth, so glowing and strong; such a Zarathustra, locked up in there.

  (2018)

  He can only be twenty-one or twenty-two. The world adores him, mothers him, across the unbridgeable gulf of reversed time. No progress in the Solar System, let alone on the interstellar front. Why should we travel out and away, even as far as Mars, let alone Pluto, when a revelation is at hand; when all the secrets will be unlocked here on Earth? No progress on the tachyon or negative-time fronts, either. Nor any further messages from him. But he is his own message. His presence alone is sufficient to express Mankind: hopes, courage, holiness, determination.

  (2019)

  I am called back from retirement, for he is holding up signs again: the athlete holding up the Olympic Flame.

  He holds them up for half an hour at a stretch – as though we are not all eyes agog, filming every moment in case we miss something, anything.

  When I arrive, the signs that he has already held up have announced:

  (Sign One) THIS IS A VERY SLOW TIME MACHINE. (And I amend accordingly, crossing out all the other titles we had bestowed on it successively, over the years. For a few seconds I wonder whether he was really naming the machine – defining it – or complaining about it!
As though he’d been fooled into being its passenger on the assumption that a time machine should proceed to its destination instanter instead of at a snail’s pace. But no. He was naming it.) TO TRAVEL INTO THE FUTURE, YOU MUST FIRST TRAVEL INTO THE PAST, ACCUMULATING HINDWARD POTENTIAL. (THIS IS CRAWLING DOWNHILL.)

  (Sign Two) AS SOON AS YOU ACCUMULATE ONE LARGE QUANTUM OF TIME, YOU LEAP FORWARD BY THE SAME TIMESPAN AHEAD OF YOUR STARTING POINT. (THIS IS SLIDING UPHILL.)

  (Sign Three) YOUR JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE TAKES THE SAME TIME AS IT WOULD TAKE TO LIVE THROUGH THE YEARS IN REAL-TIME; YET YOU ALSO OMIT THE INTERVENING YEARS, ARRIVING AHEAD INSTANTLY. (PRINCIPLE OF CONSERVATION OF TIME.)

  (Sign Four) SO, TO LEAP THE GAP, YOU MUST CRAWL THE OTHER WAY.

  (Sign Five) TIME DIVIDES INTO ELEMENTARY QUANTA. NO MEASURING ROD CAN BE SMALLER THAN THE INDIVISIBLE ELEMENTARY ELECTRON; THIS IS ONE “ELEMENTARY LENGTH” (EL). THE TIME TAKEN FOR LIGHT TO TRAVEL ONE EL IS “ELEMENTARY TIME” (ET): I.E. 10-23 SECONDS, THIS IS ONE ELEMENTARY QUANTUM OF TIME. TIME CONSTANTLY LEAPS AHEAD BY THESE TINY QUANTA FOR EVERY PARTICLE; BUT, NOT BEING SYNCHRONIZED, THESE FORM A CONTINUOUS TIME-OCEAN RATHER THAN SUCCESSIVE DISCRETE “MOMENTS”, OR WE WOULD HAVE NO CONNECTED UNIVERSE.

  (Sign Six) TIME REVERSAL OCCURS NORMALLY IN STRONG NUCLEAR INTERACTIONS I.E. IN EVENTS OF ORDER 10-23 SECS. THIS REPRESENTS THE “FROZEN GHOST” OF THE FIRST MOMENT OF UNIVERSE WHEN AN “ARROW OF TIME” WAS FIRST STOCHASTICALLY DETERMINED.