Time Travel Fiction

Busied in this, I walked on for several hours, during which the mist deepened around me to so great an extent that at length I was reduced to an absolute groping of the way. And now an indescribable uneasiness possessed me—

The hands were whirling around the dial from right to left with inconceivable rapidity. In this whirl we ourselves seemed to be borne along. Eternities seemed to contract into minutes while lifetimes were thrown off at every tick.

One step at a time,” argued a sensible voice. “If the Anacronópete aims to undo history, it seems to me that we must be congratuated as it allows us to amend our failures.”
   “Quite right,” called a married man jammed into the front of the bus, thinking of his tiresome wife. “As soon as the ticket office opens to the public, I’m booking passage to the eve of my wedding.

Those who were there say that they saw Dr. Nebogipfel, standing in the toneless electric glare, on a peculiar erection of brass and ebony and ivory; and that he seemed to be smiling at them, half pityingly and half scornfully, as it is said martyrs are wont to smile.

You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transportation of epochs—and bodies?

Just think how grateful you might be hereafter, if you could get back a single one of these half-hours which you find so tedious now.

I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud.

I pardon your ignorance concerning many matters of this Northland, for you are a young man and have travelled little; but, at the same time, I am inclined to agree with you on one thing. The mammoth no longer exists. How do I know? I killed the last one with my own right arm.

Unluckily the Hills are empty now, and all the People of the Hills are gone. I’m the only one left. I’m Puk, the oldest Old Thing in England, very much at your service—if you care to have anything to do with me. If you don’t, of course you’ve only to say so, and I’ll go.

He that taketh this crystal, so, in his hand, at night, and wishes, saying ‘At a certain hour let it be’; the hour comes and he will go back eight, ten, even twelve years if he will, into the past, and do a thing again, or act otherwise than he did. The day passes; the ten years are accomplished once again; he is here once more; but he is what he might have become had he done that one thing otherwise.

A cat can’t live nowadays—turn me back to a better age, just for a day.

P-p-peace! Ye half d-d-d-dressed dragon! Ye wot not w-w-what ye good Kynge Arthur will think of such an t-t-t-tantalizing reflection of c-c-cr-creation!

Dear Editor: Thus far the chief objection to time traveling has been this: if a person was sent back into the past or projected into the future, it would be possible for said person to interfere most disastrously with his own birth...—Arthur Berkowitz, 768 Beck Street, Bronx, N.Y. (Mar 1932)

    Dear Editor: I write this letter to comment, not on the stories, which satisfy me, but on a few letters in the “Corner” of the March issue; especially Mr. Berkowitz’ letter. ... Since he brought up the question of the time-traveler interfering disasterously with his own birth, I will discuss it. ... Back he goes into time and meets his grandfather, before his father’s birth. For some reason John kills his grandfather...—Robert Feeney, 5334 Euclid, Kansas City, Mo. (Jun 1932)

    Dear Editor: I read and enjoyed Mr. Feeney’s interesting letter in the June issue, but wish to ask: Why pick on grandfather? ... This incessant murdering of harmless ancestors must stop....—Donald Allgeier, Mountain Grove, Mo. (Jan 1933)

The twentieth century. It had a remote sound, an unreal significance. In this age, with the sun a brick red ball and the city of Denver a mass of ruins, the twentieth century was a forgotten second in the great march of time, it was as remote as the age when man emerged from the beast.

Time was a fourth dimension, he had said. An extension as real as the three of what we call space, and not completely distinguishable from them. A direction in which motion would carry one into the past, or into the future.

Into the past...into the future...read on for another exciting adventure in time with Brick Bradford 
—Brick Bradford and the Time Top #25, Australia

He ran a few steps forward in the dark, stumbling. The syncopated, thudding hoofbeats broke rhythm, paused ... And Bart Henderson found himself, in broad daylight, standing beside a fine carriage driven by a coachman in livery, drawn by two black horses with silver-trimmed harness.

Incidentally, I have forgotten the most important thing of all. Remember that Donovan’s dominating idea was to prove to me, and to the world, that he had been in the Cretaceous and hobnobbed with its flora and fauna. He was a physicist by inclination, and had the physicist’s flair for ingenious proofs. Before leaving, he loaded a lead cube with three quartz quills of pure radium chloride...

“Let me get out of these furs.” She walked away while fumbling with a zipper at her throat. The furs were all one garment which slipped off her shoulders and fell to the floor. Perry felt a shock like an icy shower and then a warm tingle.

EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.
— a sign at the ant colony (and also physicist Murray Gell-Mann’s description of particle physics)

Wah lenksh? Inksh lenksh, coss. Wah you speak? Said, sah-y, daw geh-ih. Daw, neitha. You fresh? Jumm?

My machine bends the staight track of time, curves it, curves it, so that the time track forms a perfect circle!

By golly, kid, I’d swear that thing wasn’t there a while ago! I’m gonna see what--
—Alley Oop watching a camera from the future dissolve away, 5 Apr 1939

Old Bidwell, not so, of Amalgamated Life Insurance? And he wanted his trained seals to expose me as a fraud, yes? For if I can tell a man the day of his own death, no one will buy is pretty policies.

The young dramalist expects to face his biggest casting problem in filling the roles of the two Neanderthal men which he has written into “And Adam Begot.” He wants a voice, he explains, which will instantly suggest a cave-man to the radio listener. With that in mind, he conducted a survey of what people expect in a Neanderthal voice. “A cross-section of the answers,” Oboler says, “suggests a bass voiced prizefighter, talking double talk with his mouth full of hot potatoes.”
—The Lima News, 9 Sep 1939

Padway feared a mob of religious enthusiasts more than eanything on earth, no doubt because their mental processes were so utterly alien to his own.

The following narrative is an excerpt from “Galactic Chronicles,” a monumental work on extraterrestrial history by the Earth-both Martian historiographer, Ilrai the Younger, who flourished about 2600 A.D. He regards the tale as of doubtful authenticity and is inclined to classify it as merely an interesting legend. It is hereby reproduced as no more than that.

He didn’t like to be called the Renegade.

History is built event by incident—and each is a brick in its structure. If one small piece should slip—
—John W. Campbell’s introductory blurb for the story

Dear Mr. Gates,
   ...Please write and tell me what you think of my theory.
Respectfully,
Jack Lewis

Think of the opportunities a time machine offers a newspaper. The other papers can tell them what has happened and what is happening, but, by Godrey, they’ll have to read the Globe to know what is going to happen.

I pinched the idea. What makes it madder is that I wasn’t quite sure of what I was stealing, and, crazier still, I don’t know from whence I stole it.

The problem of backward-jumping has not hitherto been solved. It involves an obvious paradox. If I go back and slay my own grandfather, what becomes of me?

“Now spill it. Just where did you come from?”
   “Geographically,” said Face, “not very far from here. Chronologically, a hell of a long way.”

Still, it was odd that the lighting system should have gone on the blink on this first ‘night’ of this first trip of the first spaceship powered by the new, stupendous atomic drive.

He could feel the supple firmness of her body even through the folds of her undistended pressure suit.

“‘Life is short—’”
“‘—but the years are long.’”
“‘Not,’” Mary responded, “‘while the evil days come not.’”

She’d be Hilda Pietjen, daughter of the prime minister, just another chip in the Nazi poker game. And he’d be dead in a bunker, a thousand years before he’d been born.

What did happen to McAllister from the instant that he found the door of the gunshop unlocked?

With the new tri-polar units I can deflect the projection field back through time. That’s where I’m going to attack Levin—in his vulnerable past.

OMIGOSH! Now I remember everything! I went to the past in order to prevent Captain Marvel from ever existing! But when I got to the past, all I did was re-live the same events as before! Curses!
—Dr. Sirvana from Captain Marvel Adventures #80

We are masters of time. We live at the farthest frontier of time itself, and all the ages belong to us. No words could begin to describe the vastness of our empire or the futility of opposing us.

‘Four-dimensional, Mr. Mac? But the fourth dimension is time.’ I had learned that the year before, in the third grade.

Are you not a Man, and do not Men know everything? But I am only a...

Years ago in one of those American magazines, there was a story of a man who saw himself. He came through a woods somewhere and stumbled on a machine, got in, and it took him three days back in time. Then, he lived forward again, saw himself get in the machine and go back.

The German professor had a nice idea for making archeology a branch of Blitzkrieg technique—with the aid of a little tinkering with Time.
—from John W. Campbell’s introduction to the story

Kenrube was at Gribe Schloss before two P.M., March 21st. This completely nullifies the six P.M. story. Place these scoundrels under arrest, and bring them before me at eight o’clock tonight.
—comment on a memo from Himmler

Well, didn’t you realize that this uncertainty hyolds for the past, too? I hadn’t until Quarrels pointed it out. All we have is a lot of incomplete data. Is it just because we’re stupid? Not at all. We can’t find a unique wave function.

Elliot Gallant went back into time thirty years. He liked the peaceful days of yesteryear. He married, had a son.

Well, sir, that little machine traveled so fast that before we could stop it we found ourselves in the last century. Somewhere in the 1890s. We were going to drop our oil drip there but I happened to remember that my grandfather was spending his honeymoon in Tokyo sometime during that decade—

Neither Paradine nor Jane guessed how much of an effect the contents of the time machine were having on the kids.

“Just grab his right shoulder with that glove, from behind,” SpockPrice was saying. “Press below the collarbone with the points of your fingers, press hard.”

He was, Vanning reflected, an odd duck. Galloway was essentially amoral, thoroughly out of place in this too-complicated world. He seemed to watch, with a certain wry amusement, from a vantage point of his own, rather disinterested for the most part. And he made things—

We can drop you anywhere in the continuum.

I knew grandfather. He would go as far as his machine could take him. I had duplicated that. He would look around him for a promising site, get out his tools, and pitch in. Well, I could do that, too.

We’re here! It’s over, the long night, the incredible journey. We’ll all be waking, seeing each other, as well as the civilization out there. Seeing, too, the great Centauri suns.

Ah! I’ve got it! On June 21st, 528, there was a total eclipse of the sun, but in 1879 there was none...now to wait...that will prove everything!

It works!! It works!!! I am a genius!! We are in 2046!!!

Not that he would necessarily have suspected anyway that he had come into possession of films that had been made more than fifty years in the future.

There is that element of wonder, too, you know. Every man in the place knows that someone is going to get clipped with that crane.

Looking backward later, Oliver thought that in that moment, for the first time clearly, he began to suspect the truth. But he had no time to ponder it, for after the brief instant of enmity the three people from—elsewhere—began to speak all at once, as if in a belated attempt to cover something they did not want noticed.

It is the same in all we do. Our houses grow new and we dismantle them and stow the materials inconspicuously away, in mine and quarry, forest and field. Our clothes grow new and we put them off. And we grow new and forget and blindly seek a mother.

Here; if you can remember the next thirty years, suppose you tell me when the War’s going to end. This one, I mean.

Sorry. Not Harry. Name is Ellen Abbot. Female. 26 years old. Year 2442. Five feet ten inches tall. Blonde hair, blue eyes—semantician and dimentional research expert. Sorry. Not Harry.

I hand him an empty can and say I want it filled with green paint—it should have orange polka dots.

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. If our lives are written in the Book of Acts, then no effort is worth the candle. For there will be those who will eternally strive to be good and yet shall fail. There will be others who care not nor strive not and yet will thrive. Why? Only because it is so written. And by whom? By the omnipotent God. Who, my friends, has then written into our lives both the good and the evil that we do ourselves! He moves us as pawns, directs us to strive against odds, yet knows that we must fail, because he planned it that way.

Maybe tomorrow you’ll be visiting your great, great grandmother.

Maybe tomorrow you’ll be visiting your great, great grandmother.

Mr. Asimov, tell us something about the thermodynamic properties of the compound thiotimoline.
— Professor Ralph S. Halford to Asimov at the conclusion of his Ph.D. oral exam on May 20, 1948.

...shifting a molecule of hydrogen that in our past really was never shifted.

Every man can have Temp and if you save your money you can have Permanent, which they say, is as close to heaven as man can get.

I am going to set up an interference in the time rhythm at this particular spot. Then the chimpanzies will enter it with my time capsules—since I know you won’t— and they will deposit the capules here a million years ago!

The sky, the sky is wrong, Sebastian! The constellations are all twisted up. Halley’s comet is back where it must have been a few thousand years ago! Sebastion, I’ve got it! That sky! That sky is the sky of about 5000 years ago!
—from “The Temple of the Pharaohs”

The inhabitants of the future resent you two hiding on a tripical isle, as it were, while they drop off the cliff into hell. Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them. It is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave. I am the guardian of their collective resentment against you
two.

We have Time Machines for sale—simple little machines of paper and ink, tubes and wires that, coupled with your own mind can soar down the years of
Eternity.
—from a Dimension X advertisement

Here within this brain of mine has been conceived a thing which will probably destroy a billion human lives in the coming years. D. triconus toxin in a suitable aerosol requires only a countable number of molecules in the lungs of a man to kill him. My brain and mine alone is responsible for that vicious, murderous discovery.

But it’s a longish story, and you might as well let me in. You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always have—or do—or will. I don’t know, verbs get all mixed up. We don’t have the right attitude toward tenses for a situation like this.

I just stepped off the path, that’s all. Got a little mud on my shoes! What do you want me to do, get down and pray?

You don’t understand. Look at the short, hairy, twisted body—the neck bent, the head thrust forward, those enormous brows, the short flat nose...
—from And Adam Begot

If there was such a thing as a 1990 almanac, and if it was in that package, wild horses couldn’t get it away from me.

How did it happen? Can you remember nothing at all?

Look, don’t you get it? I’m a time traveler. They picked me to send to the future. I’m important.”
   “Ummm. But you must realize that we have time travelers turning up continuously these days.

Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!