Memoirs of a Space Traveler

“I’m behind in the rent…” he stammered. “But yes, you’re right. I’ll do it at once. I’ll climb in, like this. Now I’ll turn on the machine. When I reach the future, I’ll find out who financed the undertaking. I’ll get their names, and that will make it possible for you to…”

“Wait,” I said. “I don’t like this. How will you return if the machine stays here with me?”

He smiled.

“Ah, no. I’ll be traveling along with the machine. This is possible — it has two adjustments. Here, this variometer, see? If I send something through time and want the machine to stay, I focus the field into this little space under the hatch. But if I want to move through time myself, I expand the field so that it includes the whole machine. Except that the power consumption will be greater. How many amps are your fuses?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t think they’ll take the load. Even before, when you … sent that book, the lights dimmed.”

“No problem. I can replace the fuses with larger ones, if you don’t mind; that is…”

“Be my guest.”

He set to work. His pockets were a compact electronics workshop. In ten minutes he was done.

“I’m off,” he said, coming back into the room. “I’ll need to go at least thirty years forward.”

“Why so far?” I asked. We stood before the black machine.

“In a few years, specialists will know about the project, but in a quarter of a century every child will. It will be taught in school, and I will be able to get from any passer-by the names of the people who sponsored it.”

He smiled wanly, shook his head, and got into the machine with both his feet.

“The lights are flickering,” he said, “but that’s nothing. The fuses will hold. But… there may be a problem with the return trip.”

“How do you mean?”

He threw a quick glance at me.

“You never saw me here before?”

“What are you saying?” I did not follow.

“Well, yesterday, or a week or month ago — even a year ago — you never saw me? Here, in this corner, did a man ever suddenly appear, with both his feet in such a machine?”

“Ah!” I cried, “I understand. You’re afraid that when you return, you might overshoot the mark and come to rest some time in the past. But no, I never saw you before. True, I returned from a voyage nine months ago; before then my apartment was unoccupied.”

“One minute …” He frowned. “I’m not sure myself. If I was here before — for instance, when your apartment was unoccupied, as you say — then I should remember that, shouldn’t I?”

“Not at all,” I was quick to reply. “That’s the paradox of the time loop. You were somewhere else then and doing other things — the you of then, I mean. Of course, you could accidentally enter that then from this now, in which case —”

“Well,” he said, “it doesn’t really matter. If I go back too far, I’ll make a correction. At the worst, the project will be delayed a little. Anyway, it is my first experiment and I must ask for your patience.”