Time-Travel Fiction

Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways.

I’m a doctor, not a space cadet.

George was deliriously happy. Two years of red tape and now he was finally back in the past. Now he could complete his paper on the social life of the foot soldier of World War II with some authentic details.

Oh, I’m no four-dimensional thinker; but, as I understand it, if people could go back to a more recent time, their actions would affect our own history, which would be a paradox or contradiction of facts. Can’t have that in a well-run universe, you know.
—from “A Gun for Dinosaur”

You can’t drive into 1923 in a Jordan Playboy, along a four-lane superhighway; there are no superhighways in 1923.

Now, then. There is one point on which I must set you right. The end of the world is not coming in two years. This I know.

Even a cold, a common cold, would wipe out millions now. Resistance to disease has simply vanished over the past two centuries; it isn’t needed, with all diseases conquered. But you time-travelers show up loaded with potentialities for all the diseases the world used to have. And we can’t risk having you stay here with them.

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

Denver in 1970 was a very quaint place with a fine old-fashioned flavor; I became very fond of it. It was nothing like the slick New Plan maze it had been (or would be) when I had arrived (or would arrive) there from Yuma; it still had less than two million people, there were still buses and other vehicular traffic in the streets—there were still streets; I had no trouble finding Colfax Avenue.

Ten years of anything you want, within reason, and then you’re a demon. You’re one of us, with a new name of demonic potency, and many privileges beside. You’ll hardly know you’re damned.

Now! Now to make a halfway decent world! Max Alben pulled the little read switch toward him.

What a book title! Time—The Fourth Dimension! Going time travelling, Lester?
—from “The Last Laugh”

An elevator doesn’t involve paradoxes. You can’t move from the fifth floor to the fourth and kill your grandfather as a child.

It introduced law to the fourth dimension.

Bart: Do you think it’s possible for a person to go back in time?
George: Well, you know there is a theory that nothing is lost, nothing is destroyed.
Bart: Then you do believe it’s possible?
George: Anything is possible, Bart, to a degree. Science has proved that. It’s conceivable, with concentration and imagination, that a person might, for a moment, escape from the present into the past.
—from “Time Found Again”

I’m not kidding you at all,” Barney insisted. “I have produced a workable Time Machine, and I am going to use it to go back and kill my grandfather.

“The point being,” said the Secretary of State, “that most social values are conditioned by the time, place and prevailing political climate. Is that what you mean by perspective?

What the Natterjack would have said, no one could tell, for no one had asked him. The Natterjack did not mind. He bided his time. He could wait.

Town gardens are small, as a rule, and the Longs’ garden was no exception to the rule; there was a vegetable plot and a grass plot and one flower-bed and a rough patch by the back fence.

Milly: They’re like seven-league boots!
Billy: Even better! We’re covering a hundred miles at a step and we’re going back through history, too! These Ward shoes must have magical powers!

You’ve got a son to take care of you in your old age, Mr. Thompson.
—from “Flashback”

Like his colleagues, Aristotle never appreciated the need for constant verification. Thus, though he was married twice, he said that men have more teeth than women. He never thought to ask either of his wives to open her mouth for a count.

Change one event in the past and you get a brand new future? Erase the conquests of Alexander by nudging a Neolithic pebble? Extirpate America by pulling up a shoot of Sumerian grain? Brother, that isn’t the way it works at all! The space-time continuum’s build of stubborn stuff and change is anything but a chain-reaction.
—“Try and Change the Past”

“While I was backing up, I inadvertently trampled and killed a small Pleistocene insect.”
   “Aha!” said Hassel.
   “I was terrified by the indicent. I had visions of returning to my world to find it completely changed as a result of this single death. Imagine my surprise when I returned to my world to find that nothing had changed!”

When I opened you, I found a mess. I sent for the Chief of Surgery while I got the baby out, then we held a consultation with you on the table—and worked for hours to salvage what we could. You had two full sets of organs, both immature, but with the female set well enough developed for you to have a baby. They could never be any use to you again, so we took them out and rearranged things so that you can develop properly as a man.

Exactly. The Temporal Embassy. How can science live and breathe with such a modifier? It’s a thousand times worse than any of these ancient repressions like the Inquisition, military control, or university trusteeship. You can’t do this—it will be done first a century later; you can’t do that—the sociological impact of such an invention upon your period will be too great for its present capacity; you should do this—nothing may come of it now, but somebody in an allied field a flock of years from now will be able to integrate your errors into a useful theory.

My colleagues, clever as they are, would never dream of the angle I’ll use to get rid of the Fly! I’ll destroy him with beauty!
—the evil Dovi in Adventures of the Fly #22 while bringing

Be just vhat you is, not vhat you is not. Folks vhat do zis are ze happiest lot.

I should like to remind you that all of you who witnessed this demonstration are five minutes younger than you were when we started.

I’ll smash the first guy who says it’s all Greek to him.

And now I shall send you back...hundreds of years into the past! You will have forty-eight hours to bring me Blackbeard’s treasure chest! Do not fail!
—Dr. Doom in Fantastic Four #5

Two scientists are hurled helpless into the lost world of time!
—from the cover of The Time Tunnel 1.

I can visit nine different lives. Anywhere, any time, any country, any century.

The world from which he had come, or any other world for that matter, could dissipate into its component elements at any instant, or could have come into being at any previous instant, complete with everybody’s memories!

Hard to remember. Some time soon now, I think.
—The Doctor answering a police officer’s query as to his date of birth

Yes,” he said to Poul, “you do strike me as very, very faintly introve—no offense meant, sir, I mean, it’s legal to be introved.

Civil War...wonder how it’s going to turn out?

Q. How does it feel to go back a hundred—

The mightiest man battles reds from today, and monsters from yesterday!
—from Blue Beetle #2, Sep 1964

This evening’s tale begins with a nightmare-like experience, but that is only a prelude to the terrifying events which follow. And now, speaking of terrifying events...

Keep an eye out for them. Get as many rocks as you can.

This is all wrong! If I dare change their stone age way of life, it may affect the whole future of their race.

Dropping the letter, she held her head in her hands, closing her eyes as in the curved bone of her skull she heard all her possible courses of action jar together, future lifelines that annihilated each other.

Mike was a recent but ardent science-fiction fan. “I want to change it, Dr. Stuart,” he said earnestly. “I want to go back to four weeks ago and take away Tony’s Flexy.” He meant it, of course.

We’re at the marketplace, master. Oh, and there is Ali, the man who hit me.
—from “My Hero?”

As the first period of math class began, Mr. Komatsu—the fat math teacher—wrote down an equation on the board, and Kazuko began to frown. It was the very same problem they’d solved just the day before. But more than that, Mr. Komatsu had written the problem on the board at exactly the same time before, and Kazuko had been called to the front of the class, where she’d struggled for some time over the solution.