Time Travel. A History

Speculative philosophers and pulp readers had predicted this. In time travel, you can meet yourself. It’s finally happening, and it’s happening every which way. Before we are done we will have five protagonists, and they are all Bob. The author was Bob, too: Robert Anson Heinlein, writing under one of his several pen names, Anson MacDonald. His original title was “Bob’s Busy Day”; the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction published it in October 1941 as “By His Bootstraps.” It was the most intricate, complex, carefully plotted exercise in time travel to date.

No grandfathers die, no future mothers are impregnated, but wisecracks are exchanged and punches thrown. Scenes are narrated by one Bob and then reprised from the point of view of an older, more knowing Bob. You might expect “Joe” to remember his first encounter with Bob, but he finds the changed perspective confusing. Recognition only dawns slowly. The Bobs have to climb a ladder of growing self-awareness. To unravel the timeline we need a Minkowskiish diagram. Heinlein drew one for himself while drafting the story.

Credit 5.1

Really, of course, there are multiple timelines in play. Besides the Bobs’, there is the reader’s: the arc of the narrative. Our point of view is the one that matters. The author coaxes us gently along. He says of his poor hero, “He knew that he had about as much chance of understanding such problems as a collie has of understanding how dog food gets into cans.”

Robert Heinlein came from Butler, Missouri, in the heart of the Bible Belt, and made his way to Southern California by way of the U.S. Navy, in which he served between the wars as a midshipman and sometime radio officer aboard the Lexington, one of the first aircraft carriers. He considered himself well skilled in ordnance and fire control, but after a collapse from pneumonia he was discharged as disabled. He wrote his first story in 1939 for a contest. Astounding Science Fiction paid him seventy dollars for it, and he began pounding the typewriter; he quickly became one of the pulps’ most prolific and original writers. “By His Bootstraps” was one of more than twenty stories and short novels he published under various names in the next two years alone.

That first prizewinning story, “Life-Line,” began in a familiar way: a mysterious man of science explains to a group of skeptical listeners that time is, still and always, the fourth dimension. “Maybe you believe it, perhaps not,” he says. “It has been said so many times that it has ceased to have any meaning. It is simply a cliché that windbags use to impress fools.” He asks them now to take it literally and to visualize the shape of a human being in four-dimensional spacetime. What is a human being? A spacetime entity measurable on four axes.

In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event, reaching to, perhaps, 1905, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man some place in the 1980s. Imagine this space-time event…as a long pink worm, continuous through the years.

A long pink worm. Slowly and gingerly, the culture was digesting the space-time continuum. The easy bits no longer needed quite so much explaining, so some nuances could be revealed.

The fun of “By His Bootstraps” lies in the comic encounters of the Bobs; it’s a one-man farce times five, with misplaced hats, a confused and irate girlfriend (the word two-timing has never been so apt), and, with the Time Gate, the sci-fi equivalent of comically timed slamming doors. The hat is tossed and found and lost again until it seems to be multiplying like rabbits. Bob gets drunk with Bob. Bob recoils at the sight of drunken Bob, and Bob calls Bob some choice names. But Heinlein also takes some pains with the science. Or the philosophy. The eldest and wisest of the Bobs, living thirty thousand years in the future, tells one of his past selves, “Causation in a plenum need not be and is not limited by a man’s perception of duration.” Young Bob thinks about this and offers a comeback: “Just a second. How about entropy? You can’t get around entropy.” And so on. Examined closely, this gab is as hollow as the painted storefronts on the set of a Western.