The Time Traveler's Almanac

In the future, researchers tried and failed, tried again and failed, to raise the money to build an enormous cable, billions upon billions of miles long. They wanted a space probe sent to an asteroid, to mine and refine and spool out huge stretches of cable through space, cable that earth people could hook up to the phone line and use to call back further in time. To call back in time before the 2004 blockage. But the expense was too much, and the project had not brought about any useful improvement in the quality of life. A person could place a bet in 2010, and call up an internet page from the following day to guide him; with the result that, under such circumstances, betting shrank to long-term wagers only. People could find out tomorrow’s news today, but almost always tomorrow’s news is merely an extrapolation of today’s news.

As the network grew, people called their friends and family in the past, warned loved ones of imminent death and told them which stock to buy, but the past is fixed in curious, physics-consistent ways. You are not fixed, as you read this sentence, I’m not suggesting that! But, then again, as you read this sentence you are at the now, between the past and the future. That is where you always are. I, writing it, am in the past. That’s just the truth. And even if you could call me up, so that my telephone here on my desktop, this blueblack-plastic Buddha-shaped machine here would ring and you could talk to me, it would make no difference, almost certainly no difference, in almost every case. You can’t really reach me, not easily, hardly at all. I’m sorry to tell you this, but it is the truth, it’s better you know the truth. Information does flow backwards, but sluggishly, treacly. It rushes much more forcefully the other way. So although people warned loved ones of imminent death and told them which stock to buy, the loved ones still died, and nobody found themselves suddenly rich because their earlier selves had invested more wisely. None of that happened. It might still happen, of course. There is nothing in the theory that suggests it could never happen.

And so 2019 turned into 2020, and 2020 into 2021, and people could talk to one another from any time from 2004 to 2038, but nobody built the superlong cabling that would have enabled the technicians to get clear neutroelectron signals that reached further back in time than 2004, to get internet access from the past and into the future. There seemed little point.

3.

A phone rings.

The phone is shaped something like a tapered loaf, cast from blood-brown plastic, with a broad steel ring like a buckle on the front that is rimmed with little circular holes. The receiver, bone-shaped, shivers in its cradle in time to the rings. The bell is a mechanical bell, located inside the hollow body of the thing, so that, ringing, it vibrates the whole device a little bit. The receiver is connected to the body of the phone with a brown flex, a flex which had come from the manufacturer curled as precisely as DNA, but which now is gnarled and knotted, unwound in places, scrunched up in others.

The phone sits by the wall on a shelf in a small kitchen area. You might, perhaps, describe the area as a kitchenette. Against the west wall there is a unit containing a small sink, and next to it a dwarf-fridge on a shelf, with a kettle on top of it, and next to that a two-ring hob. On the south wall at tummy-height is a shelf upon which storage jars of coffee and of tea and of sugar, and three mugs, stand next to the phone. A door in the east wall, the north wall decorated with a poster for the film Gladiator. Somebody has pasted a photocopy of the face of an individual called Vernon St Lucia over the face of the star of the film, the humour of this gesture deriving from the ironic contrast between the muscular good looks of the film star and the weedy, querulous nature of St Lucia, who has authority over the three laboratory technicians who work here.

Only one of these technicians is in the building. It is shortly after seven o’clock in the evening, and everybody else has gone home for the night. The single technician remaining is called Roger. He comes through to the kitchenette.

The penetrating chirrup of the phone-bell stops.

‘Extension three-five-one-one?’

A rainy, white-noise sound, overlaid with a rhythmic distant thudding, and behind it, as if very far away, a tinny vocalisation, or singsong, or whistling. But no words.

‘Hello?’ says Roger. ‘Hello?’

The hissing swells and subsides like surf, the crackles pop more frequently. The oo-aa-ooing in the background might be words.… couldn’t get through earlier …

‘Hello? The connection,’ Roger says, ‘is not good.’

Crunching and flushing noises, and then sudden clarity: ‘… imperative that we get a message through…’ but then, with a swinging, horn-like miaow the line dissipates into static.

‘Hello? This is a very bad line.’

Nothing but noise.