Through Time With Mark Twain, HG Wells And Their Successors...

...mainly including Poul Anderson, of course.

The anonymous "Missing One's Coach" presents a visit to a historical period that might be a dream.

Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee experiences instantaneous "transposition of epochs" to Arthurian Britain and returns to the nineteenth century by Merlinian suspended animation.

In The Time Machine by HG Wells, the Time Traveler and his dinner guests discuss "time travelling" before the Time Traveler demonstrates his model Time Machine which does not move anywhere but, remaining stationary on the Earth's surface, undergoes extreme time dilation in either temporal direction while also unaccountably becoming both invisible and intangible.

In "The Dark Tower" by CS Lewis, five men discuss "time travelling" and agree that it is impossible before one of their number demonstrates his chronoscope which displays scenes not, as they initially think, from the past or future but from an alternative timeline.

In the Time Patrol series by Poul Anderson, timecycles, resembling modenized Time Machines, instantaneously change their spatiotemporal coordinates, thus neither moving nor dilating but disappearing and appearing.

In The Corridors Of Time by Poul Anderson, "time travelers" really do travel through time because they walk or drive down corridors whose lengths extend along the temporal axis.

In The Dancer From Atlantis by Anderson, a space-time vehicle does not remain stationary on the Earth's surface but moves across it "...while traveling through time." (London, 1977, p. 32)

In There Will Be Time by Anderson, some mutants can "time travel"/dilate invisibly and intangibly without needing a time machine and one of their number gives Wells the time travel idea.

In The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, mutant time travel is instantaneous but involuntary.

In Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson and two Time novels by Jack Finney, travel to the past and back to the present is a learned skill.

In "The Flight of the Horse" by Larry Niven, time travel is scientifically impossible so it takes explorers into a fantasy past where they find not extinct species but mythical beasts.

This is not and cannot be a complete list of time travel fictions but it does cover most of the possibilities and presents a conceptual sequence:

time travel is possible with machines - but there are different kinds of machines;
time travel is possible without machines - but in different circumstances;
time travel is impossible but time viewing is possible with a machine;
time travel is impossible so it is fantasy, not sf.

Over On The Poul Anderson Appreciation Blog

Recent discussion of time travel has been on the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog, e.g., here. Please look there for posts that would have been published here if they had not been mainly about works by Anderson.

See also here.

Check Out Poul Anderson

I have recently discussed time travel a lot on the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog. See here.

And here.

Temporal Vehicles

(i) A "time machine" (antiquated terminology from HG Wells) moves fictitious characters pastwards or futurewards along a single timeline. A variation is a space-time machine, like Poul Anderson's Time Patrol timecycles or Doctor Who's Tardis, which can also move the characters to a different place.

(ii) A different kind of vehicle, with no agreed terminology, would move characters sideways into a different timeline, assuming that other timelines exist.

So how can a character with a mere time machine get into a different timeline? He might travel pastwards and (a) initiate a divergent timeline or (b) return futurewards, passing through the moment at which another time traveler had initiated a divergent timeline.

It follows that a time traveler cannot enter another timeline merely by traveling pastwards.

Revisiting Successive Timelines

Rereading Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series reopens the issues of the two "Logic of Time Travel" articles at the beginning of this blog.

In the standard science fiction causality violation scenario, a time traveler originates in timeline 1 and travels to the past of that timeline but then "changes the past," thus generating timeline 2. One way to picture this is to represent timeline 1 by a horizontal line and timeline 2 by a second line emerging at an angle from the point representing the moment of the causality violation but this entails that, at that moment, the time traveler disappears from timeline 1 and creates around himself an entire new universe for timeline 2! I do not think that either the functioning of a time machine or the actions of a time traveler would be able to create all that organized matter and energy.

I think that it makes more sense to model temporal change on experienced change. Thus, in experienced change, a single temporal dimension connects states changed from to states changed to. Each of these states is a configuration of the entire three dimensional universe. Similarly, in temporal change, a second temporal dimension connects changing states. Each of these states is an entire four dimensional continuum with its own internal temporal dimension. It is these temporal dimensions that we call timelines 1, 2 etc. 

A time traveler originates in timeline 1 but either transforms timeline 1 into timeline 2 or causes timeline 2 to succeed timeline 1 along the second temporal dimension - these are alternative descriptions of a single process. In The Shield Of Time, Poul Anderson presents another scenario: a quantum change in space-time-energy transforms timeline 1 into timeline 2.

If a story were set in the timeline 2 of the quantum change scenario but without time travelers, then readers would recognize an alternative history or parallel universe story. However, "parallel" implies simultaneity or co-existence whereas I argue that timeline 1 does not coexist with timeline 2 but preexists and causes it along the second temporal dimension. In that dimension, timeline 1 is not contemporary with but earlier than timeline 2 and therefore is inaccessible to a time traveler who can either remain in timeline 2 or advance to timeline 3 but not return to timeline 1. That is how Anderson describes the relationship between the current and deleted timelines in the Time Patrol series.

The Little Monster III

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation:

Poul Anderson, "The Little Monster" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984).

The title of this story is ironic. A time traveling Boy Scout thinks of Pithecanthropus as "'...those little monsters...'" (p. 161) and they think of him as "...little monster..." (p. 152). And both opinions have to be reconsidered.

The previous post introduced the twelve year old (American) Jerry Parker and the (Spanish) physicist and engineer, Antonio Viana. Now it can be revealed that Jerry is Antonio's nephew, visiting his uncle's time projection lab while on holiday. But how is Jerry accidentally projected into the Pliocene Period, about one and a half million years ago?

The technicians working on the projector had closed the main circuits but disconnected the fail-safe devices and had not told Antonio this. Meanwhile, Antonio let Jerry enter the projector and Jerry, neglecting to ask permission before touching anything, closed the door...

Jerry must endure thirty hours in the Pliocene. However, although "...horrified..." (p. 146) to see the door close, Antonio and the technicians are not obliged to wait thirty hours for Jerry's return because every return is to almost the moment of departure. Looking in through the window of the cylindrical steel projector, immediately after the door has closed, they might have seen a dead body or even bare bones but they in fact see Jerry still alive. Meanwhile, we have read about his thirty hours.

He is in "...1,500,000 B.C., give or take enough millennia that there was no possibility of sending him help." (p. 149)

Uncle Antonio had explained that arrival dates are so uncertain that "'...no two expeditions have landed even within thousands of years of each other.'" (p. 145)

So Jerry is right to think that no help can be sent but seems to forget that there would in any case be no time even to think of sending help. His body, alive or dead, will return immediately after its departure.

That figure of thousands of years between arrivals in the past is an estimate. The expeditions take astronomical instruments but the night sky changes considerably over time. The hero of Anderson's time travel novel, There Will Be Time, carries a small but elaborate instrument that scans star positions, even through an overcast, then tells him his exact date and time of arrival, thus sparing him wasted life-span casting about for his intended destination. But Jack Havig has complete freedom of movement in time, unlike Antonio's anthropologists.

The Little Monster

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation:

Poul Anderson, "The Little Monster" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 142-163.

This one-off story, originally published in Way Out, edited by Roger Elwood, 1974, describes a time traveling Boy Scout's encounter with Pithecanthropus. This puts it in the same category as the two Technic History stories in which teenage colonists of an extrasolar planet encounter winged Ythrians.

Jerry Parker is twelve in 1995. The future world of 1995 has:

aircars;
telecasts from Mars;
Mitsuhito's theory of temporal relativistics;
Antomio Viana's engineering application of Mitsuhito's theory;
thus, the new science of Temporalistics.

Every time travel story must clarify its premises, including any limitations on time travel, which help to avoid paradoxes. In this story:

"time projection" involves n-dimensional forces and the warping of world lines;
Viana's lab is a small part of an international project;
it is not yet possible "'...to enter the past at a later date than about one million B.C.'" (p. 144);
the temporal inertia effect prevents travel either to the recent past or to the future and "'...causes great uncertainty about arrival dates'" (p. 145);
time travelers are projected from, not in, a steel cylinder (whereas, in Anderson's "Flight to Forever", the cylindrical time projector carries the travelers in it while HG Wells' Time Machine carries his Time Traveler on it);
anything sent into the past automatically returns "'...after thirty hours [in the past], because of built-up stresses in the continuum'" (ibid.);
it returns to almost the moment of departure and also to the same place even if it moved elsewhere in the past (again unlike the vehicles in "Flight to Forever" and The Time Machine);
time travelers cannot bring anything back with them, except the matter that they have breathed, eaten or drunk because this is held by intermolecular forces.

There is far more in any Poul Anderson novel or collection than can be realized by anyone who merely reads it through once from cover to cover. This single story presents a time travel scenario to rival that of the Time Patrol series and will require more than one post to discuss it fully.

Threshold Of Eternity: Conclusion

This post, copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, is a sequel to Poul Anderson Update, also on Poul Anderson Appreciation:

OK. I have struggled to the end of John Brunner's Threshold Of Eternity (New York, 1959). I now think that this work is a text book example of how not to write about time travel. Both the narrative and the dialogue present a series of statements that are at at best incomprehensible and at worst incoherent with an apparent assumption that all such statements are clear and unproblematic for the reader.

For example:

"'Assume that the universe has a strong tendency to remain unified. Our original researches into four-dimensional existence suggested that probability. Then my going-double might have been firmly under the impression that he had remained in his own present and was giving information to the [another character] of his own present. However, if that information had been acted upon, it would have ironed out one of the distinctions between the two time-streams. Follow me?'

"'I do indeed...'" (p. 118)

Do you?

I was going to check how Brunner described his characters visiting a historical period. Not as well as Anderson. Brunner's characters dip in and out of the seventeenth century and quickly return to their preferred environment of spaceship interiors. Anderson often evokes the feel of an era by listing the sights, sounds and smells encountered by a time traveler on entering an ancient city. Brunner approaches this in just one paragraph about The Hague:

"Passing men laden with goods, men selling fresh water from barrels, itinerant vendors of needles, distinguished citizens with attendants, rough artisans, slatternly women, they were predominantly conscious of one thing - a stink which was almost nauseating...from upper story windows maidservants were casually tossing night slops into the streets, horses padded through the muddy pools leaving the inevitable signs of their passage..." (p. 85)

But we need far more than this to give us any sense of people, including visiting time travelers, living in that period.

Also, as I suspected, the men of different epochs fighting the space-time war on planets of different cultures exist only in the blurb and not in the text.

Space Time Wars

Although a war fought throughout space and time sounds like a straightforward idea, it is anything but. Doctor Who would have us believe that the Doctor is the last surviving Time Lord with no access to fellow Time Lords since they all died in a Time War. However, if they all died at a particular time, then surely he is able to travel to before they died? And, before dying, some of them would surely have traveled into their future? Therefore, some may exist now or, failing that, will in a while? And, if, as its name suggests, the Time War is fought at various times, then some of it is happening now or will in the future? Thus, even if all the Time Lords are to die in that war, they need not be all dead yet and, even if they were, a time traveler could still have access to them?

I am reading John Brunner's Threshold Of Eternity and expect some surprises before the end. The blurb informs us that:

"...there was a war going on throughout space and time. A war fought by men of different epochs, on planets of different cultures..." (Threshold Of Eternity, New York, 1959, p. 1)

So far in the text, however, the war, in our future, is only against an alien enemy in space. The time element consists of the fact that a battling spaceship can suffer a "...temporal surge..." that scatters its crew throughout history although they have a mechanism by which they can instantly return to their present (pp. 10-11). I expect that there is going to be more to it than that but I wonder if the "...men of different epochs, on planets of different cultures..." exist only in the blurb? (I will soon find out.)

As always, Poul Anderson comes to the rescue. His time travelers move through real history, not through abstract "space and time." In his The Corridors Of Time, rival human powers on a future Earth dispatch agents throughout history and prehistory. Unable to change events, they nevertheless recruit supporters and try to influence long term historical tendencies in order to determine an outcome in their future from which both sides are barred by their successors who, we learn, have transcended the conflict.

That really is a war fought throughout space and time.

Now

Places coexist. Thus, someone who has traveled from place 1 to place 2 can then ask, "What is happening now at place 1?" However, times, e. g., 4.00 am and 4.00 pm, do not coexist but precede and succeed each other. Thus, someone who has either lived or "time traveled" from 4.00 am to 4.00 pm cannot then meaningfully ask, "What is happening now at 4.00 am?"

However, HG Wells writes, of his Time Traveller:

"He may even now - if I may use the phrase - be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef..." (The Time Machine, London, 1973, p. 101)

- and John Brunner writes of men affected by an as yet unexplained "temporal surge":

"Now - if one could say such a thing - they were scattered across history..." (Threshold Of Eternity, New York, 1959, p. 11).

It would be interesting to know if Brunner realized as he wrote that he was echoing Wells on this precise point. However, Poul Anderson, who wrote three independent novels, one long series and several short stories about time travel, never made the mistake of referring to different times as if they were different places existing at the same time.

Addendum: In a film adaptation of The Time Machine, after the model time machine has disappeared, the Time Traveller says that by now it may be several years in the future.

Summits Of Time Travel Fiction

Mark Twain: a novel about "transposition of epochs" to the Arthurian period.
HG Wells: the story of the Time Traveler's journey to the future.
Robert Heinlein: two stories and one novel about time travelers experiencing circular causality in the future.
Harry Harrison and Tim Powers: one novel each about time travelers experiencing circular causality in historical periods.
L Sprague de Camp and Ward Moore: one novel each about time travelers experiencing causality violation in historical periods.
Poul Anderson: a long story about a traveler around the circle of time.
Poul Anderson: a novel about time travelers experiencing circular causality in Atlantean prehistory.
Poul Anderson: two novels about time travelers experiencing circular causality in historical and future periods.
Poul Anderson: a series of stories and novels about an organization of time travelers experiencing both causality paradoxes in many historical periods.
Jack Finney: one collection and two long novels about time travelers to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States.
Richard Matheson and Audrey Niffenegger: one novel each about circular causality in romantic relationships.

I do not rate A Connecticut Yankee highly but Twain was there before Wells and before the Wellsian phrase "time traveling." I had thought of Anderson's Time Patrol series and Finney's two Time novels as the two peaks of time travel fiction but later had to add Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. Adhering to a single consistent timeline, Niffenegger avoids the incoherencies that Finney generates with his causality violation.

The Best Of Times

I envisage a single collection of the very few very best works of time travel fiction, which I suggest are:

The Time Machine by HG Wells;
"A Stitch In Time" by John Wyndham;
"By His Bootstraps" by Robert Heinlein;
"The Sorrow Of Odin The Goth" by Poul Anderson.

These happen to comprise two British literary works and two American genre stories.

Wells implies but otherwise avoids the issue of causality paradoxes. The other three works are circular causality stories although the last is set in a causality violation scenario. The four works present a good balance of past, present and future -

Wells: nineteenth century to 702,601 AD, then the furthest future of Earth, and return;
Wyndham: time travel within a character's life time;
Heinlein: twentieth century to far future;
Anderson: twentieth century to the Dark Ages.

The Time Traveler interacts with Morlocks and Eloi. Anderson's Time Patrolman interacts with Goths and Huns. The Time Patrol's mass produced, streamlined, futuristic timecycles are conceptual descendants of the Time Traveller's elaborate nineteenth century contraption. The time traveler sits on, instead of being enclosed by, each of these vehicles. Both Wyndham and Heinlein instead envisage a machine that sends people through time instead of moving past- or future-wards, taking them with it.

The Cleverest Kind Of Time Travel Story

The cleverest kind of time travel story is one in which the past seems to have been changed but then turns out not to have been. Poul Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis (London, 1977) is one such. Erissa remembers that, before the catastrophe, she and Duncan were together on Crete where he became the father of her first child.

However, the catastrophe occurs while Duncan is still en route to Crete. So why does Erissa remember events that cannot have occurred and who was the father? By the time Duncan arrives, Theseus has raped the teenage Erissa but the adult Erissa, accompanying Duncan, hypnotises her younger self with spurious memories. Thus, the causal circle is completed.

When the older Erissa and Duncan meet - the second time for her but the first for him - they resume a physical relationship that they had not in fact had when she was younger. Parting from the hypnotised younger Erissa, Duncan says, " 'Know that in the end I'll call you back to me.' " (p. 166)

We last see Theseus swaggering away - not a usual last scene for the villain of an action-adventure novel. However, by rescuing young Erissa, Duncan and the mature Erissa prevent Theseus from using her to consolidate his power through the Goddess religion. To that extent, they thwart his plans.

The high priestess called "the Ariadne," conspiring with the invader Theseus, had ordered that a thread of lamps be lit to guide his men through the main halls of the Minos' palace, called "the Labyrinth." Thus, very understatedly, Anderson presents a possible origin for the myth of Minos' daughter Ariadne helping Theseus to escape from the Labyrinth that had housed the Minotaur.

Duncan and Oleg, stranded in 1400 BC but knowing that futurian time travelers will probably observe the imminent Atlantean eruption, build anachronistic ships to sail nearby in the hope that the futurians, seeing the ships, will deduce the presence of stranded time travelers and rescue them. It works:

"A shining shape descended from the clouds."(p. 167)

- while the anachronisms burned in battle.

Erissa's Cretans celebrate the death and resurrection of the god, Asterion. While it is true that Paganism included such myths, I wonder if Anderson had to invent some of the details for novelistic purposes? Lastly, I would like to read a time travel story in which the hero is told of a happy summer that he spent in Crete and ends the story by beginning that summer exactly as it had been related to him!

Historical Dramas II

(Because this post is about time travel, I have copied it from the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog.)

The child who would have grown up to be Cyrus the Great was killed as an infant. Later, a Time Patrolman, Keith Denison, was forced to play the role of the adult Cyrus returned from hiding to claim his throne. After sixteen years in this role and thirteen years before he is due to fall in battle, Denison is found by a colleague, Everard, and they discuss how to get him out of there. They are in a scenario where history can be changed, hence the need for a Patrol.

If they simply proceed to the twentieth century, then they will arrive in a timeline where Cyrus, who is necessary for post-Exilic Judaism and thus also for Christianity, instead of dying in battle in the twenty ninth year of his reign, disappeared in the sixteenth or seventeenth year of his reign. That is acceptable neither to them nor to the Patrol.

Denison comments:

"Suppose I had not showed up? Mightn't Harpagus have found a different psuedo-Cyrus? The exact identity of the King doesn't matter. Another Cyrus would have acted differently from me in a million day-to-day details...But...if he was...reasonably able and decent...then his career would have been the same as mine in all the important ways, the ways that got into the history books." (1)

Here again is the idea of a historical role that could have been played by a different actor. Everard replies that it was Denison's mysterious appearance that gave Harpagus the idea of passing him off as a returned Cyrus.

The eventual solution is for the Patrolmen to prevent the murder of the infant Cyrus who then grows up to play his historical role. To check that history is still on track, they attend a winter solstice festival where they see Cyrus ride past with his courtiers, including Harpagus.

Denison comments:

"He's younger than I was...And a little smaller...different face entirely, isn't it?...but he'll do." (2)

Like seeing a remake of the film with a different actor but these guys are doing it with real history! He'll do? He's the right one!

Now something very strange happens to a legendary story. When Everard had arrived in 542 BC, Croesus had told him that Harpagus, ordered to kill the infant Cyrus, instead:

"...exchanged the prince for the stillborn child of a herdsman..." (3)

so that:

"...our lord Cyrus grew up as a herdsman." (3)

This story, the one told by Herodotus, is "...a typical hero myth...", told of Moses, Romulus, Sigurd etc, yet is sworn to by eyewitnesses. (4) Everard senses a mystery. Of course, he learns that the infant Cyrus was indeed killed and that the story of his growing up as a herdsman was devised in order to pass off the imposter, Denison, as the returned prince.

Later, he suggests to Denison:

"...all the scientific historians in the future are convinced that the story of Cyrus' childhood as told by Herodotus and the Persians is pure fable. Well, maybe they were right all along. Maybe you experiences here have been only one of those little quirks in space-time which the Patrol tries to eliminate." (5)

So a story that was a lie in the deleted timeline becomes a legend in the revised timeline. The scientific historians do not know what underlies the events that they study.

(1) Anderson, Poul, The Guardians Of Time, New York, 1981, p. 102.
(2) ibid., p. 123.
(3) ibid., p. 83.
(4) ibid., p. 84.

The Time Travel Archives

a publishing idea

Defining statement: the Time Travel Archives would be uniform editions of good time travel stories and novels covering the basic concept, the causality paradoxes and divergent timelines but excluding stories or novels whose internal logic of time travel was regarded by the Editor as unacceptably inconsistent.

However, works by Wells, Anderson and Finney that compensate for questionable logic in other ways would be included. A rigorous application of the defining statement would rule out The Time Machine, The Time Patrol and Time and Again.

The Basic Concept, Causality Violation and Divergent Timelines

"Missing One's Coach" Anonymous
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
The Time Machine by HG Wells
Lest Darkness Fall by L Sprague de Camp
Bring The Jubilee by Ward Moore
Past Times (a revised edition) by Poul Anderson
The Time Patrol by Poul Anderson
The Shield of Time by Poul Anderson
Jack Finney's time travel short stories collected
Time And Again by Jack Finney
From Time To Time by Jack Finney

Circular Causality

"The Chronic Argonauts" by HG Wells
"A Stitch in Time" and "Chronoclasm" by John Wyndham
"By His Bootstraps" and "'- All You Zombies-'" by Robert Heinlein
The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein
The Technicolor Time Machine by Harry Harrison
Beyond The Barrier by Damon Knight
The Corridors Of Time by Poul Anderson
The Dancer From Atlantis by Poul Anderson
There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson
Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Curious Sub-Sub-Genre of Juvenile Historical Fantasy Time Travel Novels by English Women Writers
 
A Traveller In Time by Alison Uttley
The Moon Dial by Helen Cresswell
Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
The Story Of The Amulet by E Nesbit
etc

Not to be included 

The End Of Eternity by Isaac Asimov
The Legion Of Time by Jack Williamson
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber
Up The Line by Robert Silverberg
The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold
11/22/63 by Stephen King

For discussion of some of these works, see here and here. An extra volume of the Archives would be an Editorial explanation of inclusions and exclusions. Apart from the circular causality paradox and the curious sub-sub-genre, I found it impossible to list the categories separately. Causality violation is possibly attempted in A Connecticut Yankee and subtly implied in The Time Machine before it occurs in Lest Darkness Fall, thus initiating a divergent timeline.

"Missing One's Coach" and the first five items in the "Circular Causality" list could form a collection.

Time and Eternity

Introduction

Indian "sutras," telegrammic statements recited or written in lists, conveniently summarize philosophical propositions and arguments. "Time and Eternity" is a suitable subject for sutras because Indian philosophy addresses eternity although less can be said about it than about time. Time, a consequence of motion, is commonly but mistakenly regarded as also a direction of motion. HG Wells' Time Traveler propagates this error before introducing the machine that supposedly accelerates along time. Thus, discussion of time includes discussion of alleged motion along time and thus also discussion of fictitious time travel.

The sutras are grouped in fours for convenience but the beginning of a line of thought does not always correspond to the beginning of a new quatrain. This experimental format has limits. 
 

Time

Space is relationships between material objects.
Motion is change of spatial relationships.
Time is the relationship between relationships changed from and relationships changed to.
A static reality would be atemporal.

Three dimensions of space and one of time account for experience.
We perceive space but presuppose time.
Perceiving one three dimensional state, we remember others.
To remember a material state is to recognize it as previously perceived.

Recognition presupposes temporal endurance.
The temporal presupposition transforms immediate sensations into coherent experiences.
Objects extend and move through space but endure through time.
Extension is spatial, endurance is temporal and motion is spatiotemporal.

Motion involves both distance covered and time taken.
Endurance resembles extension, not motion.
A human body extends but does not move from its feet to its head.
It endures but does not move from its birth to its death.

To occupy adjacent points in space simultaneously is to extend between them.
To occupy adjacent points successively is to move between them.
To occupy successive moments is to endure between them.
To occupy adjacent moments successively would be to move between them.

Motion Through Time?

But we do not move through time.
However, our experience of motion and time makes us speak of motion through time.
I have heard it said that we move into the future at the rate of sixty minutes per hour.
This proposition reflects our experience but is conceptually confused.

Comparing endurance to extension entails imagining successive moments as cross-sections of the body.
Instead, we imagine succession as motion, like an insect crawling up the body.
To move is to occupy different places successively.
To endure is to occupy different moments successively.

We think that successive occupation is motion.
However, we successively occupy places because we move from place to place.
But we successively occupy moments because they succeed each other.
We exist in each successive moment without moving between them.

We do not move from one o'clock to two o'clock but exist at and between them.
There is no two o'clock before we reach it or one o'clock after we have left it.
But there is a Paris before we reach it and a London after we have left it.
"When I reach 65..." and "When I reach Paris..." have different meanings.

The age of 65 is not now waiting somewhere else until I move to it.
I can reach it by existing for another five years.
To exist is also to move but through space, not time.
We do not experience the Earth's motion through space.

Thus, we can reach 65 without apparently moving even through space.
Places co-exist in space while we move between them.
Moments succeed each other in time while we exist in them.
We experience moment 1 when it occurs, then 2 when it occurs.

We do not experience 1 while it co-exists with 2, then 2 while it co-exists with 1.
Moments do not co-exist in one spatial dimension while we successively experience them in a separate temporal dimension.
Physicists postulate extra dimensions but not to explain motion along time.
At 60 mph, 60 miles is distance covered and one hour is time taken.

At 60 minutes per hour, 60 minutes is not distance covered.
60 minutes and one hour are both time taken.
If there is no distinction between distance covered and time taken, then there is no motion.
60 miles alone are distance.

60 minutes or one hour alone is duration.
Only 60 miles in 60 minutes is motion.
Thus, 60 minutes in one hour is a period of duration, not a rate of motion.
We can reduce speed to 50 mph but not time to 50 minutes per hour.

We feel that we move through time but not around the Sun or the galactic center.
Therefore, feeling is an inadequate criterion of motion.
Four co-ordinates describe our occupation of a place at a time.
Changing the temporal co-ordinate changes the time at which we are in that place.

One co-ordinate describes a moment.
Changing the temporal co-ordinate merely changes the moment.
There is no sense in which it can change the time at which we are in the moment.
Every moment in which there is consciousness is seen as the present moment in that moment but only in that moment.

However, no single moment has any unique status.
Subjectively, the present divides time into past and future.
Objectively, there are only temporal relations of before and after.
Objective time is divisible into natural or artificial periods.

A day in 3000 CE is unchangeably later than us and earlier than our successors in 4000 CE.
Accumulating memory generates the illusion that the present moves along time so that the past grows while the future shrinks.
However, perception of a subjective present occurs in every moment of consciousness.
Therefore, it does not move from each moment to its successor.

A conscious subject and present objects are interdependent.
"Present", whether contrasted with "past and future" or with "absent," means "presented to consciousness."
Therefore, there is no moment of consciousness that the present has vacated or not yet reached.
That past moments are not now conscious might suggest that consciousness has moved from them to the present.

However, past moments were conscious.
And they do not now exist unconsciously elsewhere.
The present tense refers to the subjective present, to current periods or to several times if a single proposition is equally applicable.
Multiple applications of the present tense neither negate succession nor entail simultaneity.

Real simultaneity between apparently successive events would eliminate succession.
But alleged motion of consciousness between simultaneous events re-introduces succession.
Experience is successive.
Therefore, accounts of experience need not eliminate succession, especially not to re-introduce it.


That consciousness is present in only one moment at a time is tautologous or false.
That it is present in each moment only in that moment is tautologous.
That all moments co-exist with consciousness occupying them one at a time is false.
The latter implies that past events are still occurring now but without consciousness.

HG Wells' Time Traveler identifies endurance with extension in a fourth dimension.
He adds that immaterial subjects of consciousness successively observe three dimensional cross-sections.
However, consciousness is an organism-environment interaction.
It is not an immaterial entity intersecting otherwise unconscious four dimensional objects.

The Time Traveler identifies the fourth dimension with time.
In fact, it would be a fourth dimension of space.
Motion along it would take time.
JW Dunne argued for an infinite regress of temporal dimensions which would surely be static at infinity.

The Time Traveler also inconsistently identifies endurance with motion of objects along the fourth dimension.
The totality of objects has no external spatial relationship.
Therefore, it cannot move.
Even if it could, its motion would take time.

Therefore, the dimension moved through would not be time.
Also, such motion would not explain changes occurring within the universe.
But it is these changes that generate time.
Therefore, time is an internal feature of the universe.

Time Travel

It is not an external dimension.
A time traveler who did somehow move faster than a moving universe would leave it behind.
Therefore, he would not find it waiting for him on arrival.
He would have to wait for it to catch up.

But the Time Machine moves only through space like everything else.
It remains stationary on the Earth's surface.
It endures indefinitely with decelerated internal processes.
Returning, it reverses the direction of its endurance or duration.

Its increased speed is supposed to explain its invisibility and intangibility in transit.
But it has no speed.
Also, a bullet or propeller accelerated to invisibility remains lethally tangible.
The Time Traveller's physical and mental processes are decelerated in relation to his environment.

He sees the sun moving so fast that it becomes an arch across the sky.

A new drug does accelerate another Wells character's physical and mental processes.
Consequently, he sees his environment as immobile.
The Time Traveler in transit should be visible and tangible but apparently static.

This condition is "stasis" or time dilation, not time travel.

His sensation of speed is unaccounted for.
Dr Who's TARDIS disappears at one place and time and appears at another.
Its occupants experience reduced duration in another realm.

Poul Anderson's Time Patrolmen and Audrey Niffenegger's time travelers merely disappear and re-appear.

Twain's Connecticut Yankee finds himself in the Arthurian period and returns to the nineteenth century by suspended animation.
Preceding Wells, he uses the phrase "transposition of epochs."
Anderson's mutant time travelers sense motion but merely endure in an attenuated form.

None of these "time travelers" moves through time.

However, language has incorporated Wellsian "time traveling" terminology.
Anderson's Wardens and Rangers walk or drive along corridors that have been rotated onto the temporal axis.
Thus, they do move along time.

The height, width and length of a "time corridor" are spatial.

However, its length has been made to extend in the direction along which Earth endures.
People arriving in a corridor from different times should be separated on arrival only by spatial distances.
Therefore, they should arrive simultaneously in the corridor's temporal dimension.

But for story purposes, travelers along corridors rarely meet.

So Anderson explains merely that duration occurs in the corridors but on a different plane.
Rangers entering a corridor from a time several seconds after the central character also arrive inside it several seconds later.
This contradicts the premise that temporal intervals outside the corridor correspond only to spatial intervals within it.

The direction of endurance within a time corridor may be a fifth dimension.
Or it may correspond to an external spatial dimension.
In the latter case, a spatial corridor could give access to different periods of the corridor's internal history.
Like Twain and Wells, Anderson presents a story, not a treatise.

The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.
Accordingly, the relativistic space time equivalence is 186,000 miles to one second.
However, the corridor equivalence is about a foot to a month.
Thus, a 6000 year time corridor need not extend for 6000 light years before it is rotated onto the temporal axis.

Paradoxes

The time travel paradoxes are circular causality and causality violation.
An effect causes or prevents its cause.
A timeline is a single sequence of events occurring along one temporal dimension, T1.
A single timeline can incorporate circular causality.

At least four alternative scenarios incorporate causality violation.
One scenario is branching timelines.
However, this involves creating universes ex nihilo.
A time traveller "changing the past" disappears into a new universe branching away from the original universe.

This is logically possible but physically questionable.
Parenthetically, timelines might diverge without time travel.
Divergence would occur at every moment of indeterminacy, not at arbitrary moments of extratemporal interference.
If divergence does occur, there is no contact between divergent universes.

Such contact does occur in fiction.
But parallel universe travel is not time travel.
Men Like Gods is not The Time Machine. 
Piper's Paratime Police regulates traffic between parallel Earths with alternative histories.

Anderson's Time Patrol regulates traffic and prevents causality violations along a single timeline.
Asimov's Eternals violate causality to increase human happiness.
Heinlein's temporal bureau closes causal circles.
One temporal agent is her own parents.

Some fictitious organizations fight wars by changing history.
But most such narratives are logically inconsistent.
Premises are ambiguous or events contradict them.
Asimov's Eternals need to complete a causal circle in a no longer existent timeline (see below).

Wardens and Rangers fight a war by manipulating the history of a single timeline.
They hope to influence their future from which they are barred by their successors.
Anderson's mutant time travelers divide into warring factions in a single timeline.
One group, the Eyrie, recruits Jack Havig, Boris and others on the original Good Friday.

When Havig organizes against the Eyrie, he sends Boris to infiltrate the Eyrie on Good Friday.
Thus, Boris must have recognized his fellow Eyrie recruit as his future anti-Eyrie organizer.
The Eyrie has evidence of its future success.
Therefore, Havig's group fakes the evidence.

Thus, not events but their significance is changed.
In the second causality violation scenario, timelines succeed each other along a second temporal dimension, T2.
Like spatial dimensions, temporal dimensions are at right angles to each other.
To travel backwards or forwards in T1 is always to travel forwards in T2.

Thus, a time traveler never returns to his original timeline.
He enters the past or future of a subsequent timeline.
He cannot complete a causal circle in his original timeline.
Timelines are identical except for changes made by a time traveler.

The first such change is his arrival.
Asimov's "Realities" are timelines and his "physiotime" is T2.
His Eternals have altered many successive timelines.
Their original timeline is far in the past of T2.

In the present of T2, it no longer exists.
Thus, return to it is impossible.
Yet such a return is necessary for the existence of the Eternals.
Of course, a text may bear other interpretations.

Attempted clarification of The End of Eternity suggests internal inconsistencies.
This problem applies to several works about frequent causality violations.
In one unproblematic text, a single time traveler deliberately prevents the Dark Ages.
Thus, a timeline of uninterrupted civilization succeeds the Dark Ages timeline.

In another novel, a fictitious time traveler accidentally prevents Confederate victory at Gettysburg.
Thus, the American Civil War timeline succeeds a "War of Southron Independence" timeline.
In the third causality violation scenario, a single timeline contains discontinuous events.
Thus, a time traveler with counterfactual memories appears ex nihilo at Gettysburg.

Such macroscopic quantum events are possible because time travel is.
Confederates should have occupied a position ensuring victory at Gettysburg.
But their advance was halted by the arrival of a time traveller from the independent Confederate States.
Thus, a potential future generates a time traveller who prevents that future.

In this scenario, if we perceive or remember an event, then we know that it has not been prevented from occurring.
But, if a time traveler arriving in his past remembers an event, then he does not know that it has not been prevented from occurring.
Thus, the meaning of "memory" is widened.
This scenario is counterintuitive though not logically contradictory.

Scenarios without time travel preclude any potential futures from which time travelers could arrive.
Thus, without time travel, the Confederates would have won at Gettysburg.
In the first causality violation scenario, Southron Independence occurred in the original timeline.
In the second, it occurred in the past of T2.

In the third, it never occurred.
The fourth causality violation scenario is specific to the Time Patrol series.
This scenario may not be distinct or coherent.
Patrolmen speak of one mutable timeline, not of many branching timelines.

They do not believe that a temporal round trip takes them between timelines.
They speak as if their current timeline can be prevented from existing.
Therefore, none of the first three scenarios applies.
T1/T2 terminology is not used but is implicit.

T1 is a single timeline.
T2 is the relationship between successive timelines.
Or T2 is the relationship between successive states of a single mutable timeline.
The difference is terminological.

We can say either that one timeline succeeds another or that the single timeline changes its content.
In either case, there is a relationship between a state changed from and a state changed to.
This summary uses the term "timeline", not the phrase "state of a timeline".
In the Time Patrol scenario, most time travel is along a single timeline.

Thus, it occurs within a single moment of T2.
The timeline incorporates circular causality.
Most time travelers are already a part of the past that they visit.
However, they can change past events.

 

Usually, other events change to counteract a change made by a time traveler.
However, at nexus points, a small change can alter the entire future.
Occasionally in T2, there is a quantum change to another timeline.
Quantum changes result either from time travelers or from random fluctuations in space-time-energy.

Small changes in the life of one medieval knight affect the outcome of the European church-state conflict.
Therefore, the knight is a personal causal nexus to be eliminated by the Patrol.
Unpredictable fluctuations remain when organizations of time criminals have been apprehended.
By guarding the timeline, the Patrol preserves cosmic order.

Cyrus the Great is killed in infancy.
Later, a captured Time Patrolmen is forced to play the role of the adult Cyrus.
Sixteen years into his reign, he is rescued by a fellow Patrolman.
They travel further back in time to prevent the murder of the infant Cyrus.

Thus, despite changing events, they preserve Cyrus's pivotal role in the Patrol-protected timeline.
But they leave behind in T2 a timeline in which Cyrus disappeared sixteen years into his reign.
Patrolmen claim that that timeline simply does not exist.
Therefore, they claim to inhabit the third scenario.

This entails that some passages in the story describe events that did not occur.
Even while experiencing an event, Patrolmen claim that the event may be prevented from occurring.
However, if the event is being experienced, then it is occurring.
If it is occurring, then it has not been prevented from occurring.

A timeline can be prevented from currently existing in T2.
Then that the events of that timeline never occurred is true in T1.
In Finney's second Time novel, characters who have not time traveled partially remember prevented events.
Former timelines are remembered sporadically and indistinctly, like dreams.

Finney's fifth scenario seems to be that events unwind and rewind in an altered sequence but with indistinct memories of the original sequence.
But preventing events should prevent any memory of them.
Usually in fiction, former timelines are remembered only by time travelers from them.
Causality violation entails unintended self-duplication of time travelers.

Thus, at time t1, a time traveler experiences event A.
Disliking A, he travels from t2 to t1 in order to change A to A~.
Thus, at t1, his younger self experiences A~.
The time traveler who changed A to A~ returns to t2.

At t2, the time traveler who had experienced A~ has no reason to travel back to t1.
Thus, at t2 the traveler who experienced A~ coexists with the traveler who changed A to A~.
The problems of self-duplication are probably greater than the problem of leaving A unchanged.
In the timeline guarded by the Patrol, Roger II of Sicily died in 1154 (Timeline 1).

Volstrup was a Patrolman based in Palermo during Roger's reign.
In an aberrant timeline, Roger died in battle in 1137 (Timeline 2).
The appalled Volstrup informed an earlier Patrol base.
He visited that base for consultation.

After consultation, Patrol intervention saved Roger's life at the battle in 1137 (Timeline 3).
Ostensibly, the preferred timeline was restored.
However, Timelines 1 and 3 differ in detail.
Unlike Timeline 1, Timeline 3 has Volstrup visiting an earlier base and Patrolmen intervening at the battle in 1137.

Like Timeline 1, Timeline 3 has Volstrup in Palermo not hearing about Roger's death.
That Volstrup neither informs nor visits an earlier base.
But the Volstrup who did visit an earlier base and who does remember Roger's death returns to Palermo in the 1137 of Timeline 4.
At that point, Volstrup is duplicated.

Yet Anderson writes as if there is only one Volstrup in Palermo after the battle in 1137, the one who remembers Roger's death.
Volstrup thinks that at any moment he and his environment can cease ever having been.
But that is not a consequence of causality violation.
There are potential timelines in which Volstrup was not born and therefore does not exist in adulthood.

But there is no timeline in which he was not born and therefore ceases to exist in adulthood.
Nothing can exist until a particular moment, then, at that moment, cease having existed until that moment.
An entire timeline can cease to exist in T2.
But that affects no one's experience in T1.

A time traveler departing on a successful mission to end our timeline will think that we have ceased to exist.
But he will think this in a temporal dimension at right angles to ours.
There is no cessation of existence at any moment in our T1.
It is difficult to make the Time Patrol series fully coherent.

The Literature

The time travel writers whose works are worthiest of analysis are Wells and Anderson.
The Time Machine addresses the nature of time and the future of mankind.
Anderson's six volumes address time travel paradoxes, history and the future.
The Time Patrol is the only sustained high quality time travel series.

Thus, Anderson supersedes his immediate predecessor, Robert Heinlein.
Heinlein perfected the circular causality paradox in three works with futuristic American settings.
Wells' "The Chronic Argonauts" and two short stories by John Wyndham developed this paradox in contemporary British settings.
Harry Harrison linked circular causality to history and humor.

Richard Matheson and Audrey Niffenegger each wrote one novel integrating a love story into circular causality.
Jack Finney perfected nostalgic time travel fiction focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
L Sprague de Camp and Ward Moore each wrote one definitive historical causality violation novel.
There have been two or three good time travel films but several atrocious ones.

Eternity

By attending fully to the objects of immediate awareness, we enter "the eternal present".
Approaching death, we may also approach "the light of eternity", the perception of life as complete.
Hypothetical beings perceiving all human life as eternal would necessarily endure in a second temporal dimension.
Duration-less perception, beginning and ending simultaneously, would be unconsciousness.

"Eternal" means endless, changeless, timeless/atemporal or transtemporal.
Thus, energy is endless, the past is changeless, mathematics is timeless and the eternal present transcends time.
Thus also, several meanings of "eternal" would remain applicable even if the future were known to be finite.
We live in time and eternity.

A temporal process is a sequence of incomplete syntheses between change and resistance to it.
Thus, masses are more resistant then gasses, organisms more dynamic then inanimate objects etc.
A complete synthesis would be changeless but ever-new.
This might correspond to some mystical accounts of eternity.

Mundaka Upanishad: "Even as a spider sends forth and draws in its thread, even as plants arise from the earth and hairs from the body of a man, even so the whole creation arises from the Eternal."
The Dhammapada: "All things indeed pass away, but the Buddhas are for ever in Eternity."
Blake: "To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour."
Engels: "Nothing is eternal but eternally moving, eternally changing matter and the laws by which it eternally moves and changes."

Yossi, the Time Traveller

After the High Ones left, some of us searched their Palace for humanly usable (or even just comprehensible) technologies. I was looking after my two-year old granddaughter, Yossi, on the lawn outside the Palace while members of our group searched different Chambers inside. Yossi kept running behind bushes, then went up the ramp into the Building.

Knowing that her father, Rick, was checking computers in the first Chamber, I took my time about following her. When I got inside, however, Rick was alone, absorbed in machinery. Yossi must have gone further in. Passing Rick, I found myself in a corridor with openings to several Chambers. Becoming alarmed, I hurried forward and suddenly noticed a young woman who momentarily reminded me of my daughter, Aileen. Smiling, she pointed to a particular opening. Thanking her, I dashed inside and immediately saw Yossi on a dangerously high platform without a railing: typical High Ones architecture, not designed for human use. Someone had erected a humanly usable ladder to the platform but Yossi could not possibly have climbed it, especially not in the time she had been out of my sight.

More startling was another Yossi, sitting on the floor at the foot of the platform. Standing back, I could see two Yossis simultaneously. This was not quite as surprising as you might think. I knew that, theoretically at least, time travel was possible inside the Palace. After all, it was believed that the High Ones had gone away into Time, not into Space, and there was evidence to support this belief. First, there was the “Hall of the Time Gate” which no one knew how to operate and some thought was merely ceremonial. Secondly, there was the peculiar architecture of the Palace: not just unprotected platforms but openings into thin air high in the impossibly curving walls of uninhabitable, floorless Chambers, as if the Builders could fly or as if we perceived only a cross-section of a multi-dimensional structure. Extra dimensions could be used for space warps or time warps. If Yossi had travelled even a minute into the past, then she would obviously coexist with her younger self until the younger self disappeared at the end of that minute. And, if she had stumbled onto time travel, then she had definitely made the breakthrough that we were all looking for. Was the platform a time machine?

My first thought was that the Yossis had better be prevented from seeing each other in case they became alarmed but, before I could move, the Yossi on the platform stood, pointed and addressed me with:

“Oh, look, there’s Yossi!”

She spoke! She spoke in a sentence! She pronounced her name correctly: “Yossi”, not “Sossi”! She was older than the one I had been looking after who, I hoped, was the one on the floor. I didn’t want three of them. I needed to get to the older Yossi. She was in greater danger because she was on the platform and (I reasoned) the younger Yossi could be presumed to be safe because it was known that she would survive to become the older Yossi. I raced up the ladder and, addressing Yossi from the top of it while pointing to the figure on the floor, asked:

“Is she your…”

(Could I say “your younger self”?)

“…your little Yossi?”

“Yes. I played with her.”

When? There had not been time.

I continued: “When there are two of you, you must tell me which is older because that is the one I must look after.”

“I know.”

She knew! She already knew something about the intricacies of time travel. I climbed up and picked her up. Then, as we looked down at the younger Yossi, that one disappeared while the one I was holding said:

“Bye bye, Yossi.”

The disappearance was more like the fading of a memory than the departure of an object. Had I really seen her there a moment ago or had it been ages ago?

I asked:

“Do you remember being her?”

“Yes.”

“Where did she…you go?”

“To a lady.”

She was not going to say any more and I was already starting to realise that I should not enquire too closely. The events were already safely past for Yossi. 

My first hypothesis had been that this older Yossi had come back to us from our future. Now it seemed that the younger Yossi had travelled perhaps a month into the past and had grown into the Yossi I was now holding. During that month, she had been looked after by someone, a “lady,” had improved her speech, learned something about time travel and possibly played with her younger self without our knowledge. I was learning to reinterpret chronokinetic events continually. Yossi could have travelled backwards or forwards in time in a more complicated sequence than the one I had just hypothesised but it was at least the simplest explanation for what I had seen so far. 

As I carried her through the Palace to rejoin Aileen and her friends, I wondered if Yossi and I could just cover up what had happened but this was impossible. I began to notice that she was bigger and was dressed differently and, as soon as she saw her mother, she ran towards her, speaking in a way that showed she had changed.

That was how it began. Since then, we have had to become used to Yossi’s time travelling. Sometimes she just disappears. When that happens, we know that she has gone forward for a day or two. Then, we just have to wait for her to reappear, unaged, unchanged, sometimes even in mid-sentence. Sometimes, she is seen in the distance, talking to her older or younger selves. When that happens, we do not interact with them unless one of them invites us to. 

Events which the oldest Yossi present regards as past must be allowed to unfold as she remembers them. If she remembers that she did not tell us something that we wanted to know, then so be it. We can probably be told it later but obviously did not need to know it at the time.

Once, Aileen glimpsed a taller figure that could have been the “lady” who interacts with Yossis. Sometimes, events are chaotic. Once, Sheila answered the door late at night to be confronted with a twelve year old Yossi who handed over her younger, sleeping self and immediately disappeared. We wanted to tell her that this was unacceptable but had to wait until we saw a Yossi who was old enough to say it to. We had a day of looking after a very small baby again and now suspect that she had been taken from her pram at a very early age and returned to it before our younger selves were able to notice that she had gone.

On another occasion, several Yossis walked past my half open door, saying, “Hello, Granda” in descending order of height. The smallest could only manage, “Lo, Wawa.” I was astounded that they had managed to involve one so young but I knew that she was perfectly safe so I resisted the temptation to run down the corridor after them. I expect that we will be seeing younger Yossis as guests at the older ones’ birthday parties for years to come but I will have to live through each twelve month period consecutively in order to find out.

As you know, Anderson and others have significantly advanced time travel theory by studying Yossi’s reported comings and goings: having disappeared, she either reappears (travels into the future) or turns out to have appeared earlier (travelled into the past). In the latter case, an effect (appearance/arrival) precedes its cause (disappearance/departure) and sometimes causes it (which is the paradox of circular causality) but apparently never prevents it (which would be the paradox of causality violation). When Yossi knows that her older self has been seen to appear or to act in a particular way at an earlier time, she simply accepts that, at some point in her personal future, she will have reason to appear or to act as her older self is already known to have done. She usually forgets about her reported actions until she finds herself performing them although, occasionally, she sets out to do what she is known to have done in order to complete a particular series of events. Thus, there is both circular causality and deliberate avoidance of causality violation.

She seems to have learned at an early age that, if she attempts the opposite, deliberate causality violation, even just by appearing at a time and a place at which she did not appear, then events outside her control, possibly including a fatal accident, will prevent her, so she doesn’t try.

We do not know whether she subjectively experiences anything between objectively disappearing and (re)appearing or how she controls her time of arrival. In fact, I think she is still learning how to control it. Certainly her earliest temporal journeys were controlled by her older selves or by hypothetical time travelling colleagues, not by the travelling self. The theoreticians’ first mistake was to think that the Yossi whom I followed into the Palace had accidentally discovered time travel. Rather, one of her older selves had carefully arranged for that Yossi to travel back a month or so in order to get the process started. Even an early trip to the past that seems to us completely pointless is, to her, a remembered part of her learning experience and therefore must be allowed or even caused to have occurred. The platform is not a time machine but she was put on it in order to get me away from the younger Yossi who was scheduled to disappear soon after I entered the Chamber.

Yossi is obviously protecting and instructing her younger selves while preparing her present self for longer journeys and a greater purpose. She has visited periods before and during High Ones rule which is a bit nervous-making but:

she only embarks on such a journey after she has seen herself return from it so she knows it is safe to go;
the periods visited are the safest in human or superhuman history;
she assures us that, while she is in such periods, she automatically disappears at the first sign of potential danger.

(I think that a time traveller can develop a sixth sense for danger and disappear before consciously realising what the threat was, especially if all that she is trying to avoid is detection. This would explain some reported apparitions in and around the Palace.)

A Yossi from several years in our future mentioned that, after she had extended her range, she provisionally decided to visit a particular pre-High Ones period called “the twentieth century” but took the usual precaution of waiting to see herself return before setting off. Since she did not return, she did not go and now avoids that period like the plague. I have subsequently confirmed that it was a lethal period of social conflicts that have since been resolved and transcended. As for our future, Yossi’s knowledge is, of course, limited and she is understandably reluctant to share it except to say that we have some surprises ahead of us.

She could, if she wanted, spend several consecutive years in a chosen historical period and return to us at the moment from which she left but then we would miss those years of her development so she will not let this happen yet. If she does eventually settle down in an earlier period, then she could already be one of her own ancestors (bequeathing a gene for time travel?). Scientists and historians want information on the High Ones, who concealed themselves during the latter years of their “reign” when they did not rule human beings directly but did alter our environment and influence our culture, fundamentally for the better, but Yossi has a different agenda which I have only recently begun to understand.

I had been confident from the start that the younger Yossi was safe because I knew that she would survive to become the older one. I now have reason to believe that the older Yossi was safe for a similar reason. The clue was the identity of the woman who pointed to the Chamber of the Platform. None of the other exploratory groups in the Palace had a young female member who remotely resembled Aileen and, when I thought about it, the woman had literally appeared in front of me. The corridor had been empty when I entered it but I had been too concerned about Yossi, then grateful for the woman’s help, to think about where she had come from. So who was she? Not a disguised High One, I hope. The one man who thought he saw a High One, by ingeniously but only temporarily adopting the Time Gate as a chronoscope, has since been too overawed to talk about it. Besides, I now know that we have an advantage even over the High Ones. I have listened carefully to Yossi’s remarks about her temporal journeys and have even overheard some of her conversations with her teenage selves.

Thus, I have pieced together an understanding of what my mysterious woman, Yossi’s “lady,” will do after she has made her last remembered visit to her younger selves. She, the adult Yossi, will travel into the far past and lead the human beings who became the High Ones and built the Palace. 

Acknowledgements

This story:

was inspired by a dream about my granddaughter, Yossi Clark;
incorporates her parents and grandparents as supporting characters;
derives its terminology and crucial aspects of its setting from Robert Heinlein’s classic science fiction story, “By His Bootstraps”;
pays tribute to another master of time travel literature, Poul Anderson,
and incorporates part of a phrase from Action Comics, no. 591, cover-dated August 1987, where, in an episode entitled “Past Imperfect,” scripted and drawn by John Byrne, Superman describes the return of a time machine into the time stream as “…more like the fading of a memory than the movement of a vessel!” (This memorable phrase stayed in my mind until February 1996, when I wrote about Yossi.)