Time Travel. A History

What do they value, these masters of the universe? How do they weigh one possible reality against another? It’s not always clear. Nuclear war: bad. Drug addiction: bad. Happiness: good, but how to assess it? The Eternals seem to dislike extremes. One century has an excess of hedonism, and Harlan contemplates an improvement: “a different branch of possibility would become real, a branch in which millions of pleasure-seeking women would find themselves transformed into true, pure-hearted mothers.” (Lest we forget: these are men of 1950s America.) Mainly, they find themselves continually tinkering with reality in order to eliminate “nuclear technology”—an antiwar measure that has the side effect of keeping humanity from developing interstellar space travel. The reader might guess that the real master of this universe—Isaac Asimov—will vote for space travel.

Without having read Borges, Asimov created a garden of forking paths operated by paper shufflers and bean counters. A branch erased may mean Shakespeare or Bach retroactively unborn, but the Technicians don’t care. They pull the plays or the music from Time and store them in the archives.

Now Harlan stood at the shelves devoted to the novels of Eric Linkollew, usually described as the outstanding writer of the 575th [century], and wondered. He counted fifteen different “Complete Works” collections, each, undoubtedly, taken out of a different Reality. Each was somewhat different, he was sure.

All so futile somehow. The apparatchiks have their own version of Borges’s Library of Babel, and it’s a storage closet.

With the panorama of history spread out before them, these Eternals have little reason to think about the past. All is future—or is it present? What does it even mean to talk about “the present” in this place? We never really find out. The tinkering with reality just goes on. It is a work in progress.

A few oddballs, though—and our hero, Harlan, is one of them—do take a hobbyist’s interest in the centuries before the invention of “temporal fields” and the establishment of Eternity. They call these ancient centuries the Primitive era. No century fascinates them more than the twentieth. Harlan collects Primitive books,

almost all in print-on-paper. There was a volume by a man called H. G. Wells, another by a man named W. Shakespeare, some tattered histories. Best of all there was a complete set of bound volumes of a Primitive news weekly that took up inordinate space but that he could not, out of sentiment, bear to reduce to micro-film.

Primitive history is locked in place: the Eternals cannot make changes there. “It’s like watching history standing still, frozen!” Harlan treasures a verse fragment about a “moving finger,” which writes once and then moves on. The Battle of Waterloo has only the one outcome, never to be changed. “That’s the beauty of it. No matter what any of us does, it exists precisely as it has always existed.” It’s so quaint. The technology, too: “In the Primitive era natural petroleum fractions were the source of power and natural rubber cushioned the wheels.” Most intriguing—most risible—were the ancients’ views of time itself. How could their philosophers be expected to understand? A senior Computer discusses philosophy with Harlan:

“Now we in Eternity are influenced in our consideration of such things by knowing the facts of Time-travel. Your creatures of the Primitive era, however, knew nothing of Time-travel.”

“The Primitives gave virtually no thought to Time-travel, Computer.”

“Did not consider it possible, eh?”

Just imagine—people with no concept of time travel! Primitives indeed. The rare exceptions came in the form of “speculations,” not by serious thinkers or artists, but only “in some types of escape literature,” Harlan explains. “I am not well acquainted with these, but I believe a recurrent theme was that of the man who returned in Time to kill his own grandfather as a child.” Yes, that again.

The Eternals know all about the paradoxes. They have a saying: “There are no paradoxes in Time, but only because Time deliberately avoids paradoxes.” That grandfather problem arises when you are naïve enough to assume “an indeviant reality” and try to add time travel as an afterthought. “Now your primitives,” says the Computer, “never assumed anything but an indeviant Reality. Am I right?”

Harlan is not so sure. The escapist literature again. “I don’t know enough to answer you with certainty, sir. I believe there may have been speculations as to alternate paths of time or planes of existence.”

Bah, says the Computer. That’s impossible. “No, without actual experience of Time-travel, the philosophic intricacies of Reality would be quite beyond the human mind.”

He has a point. But he underestimates us primitives. We have acquired a rich experience of time travel—a century’s worth. Time travel opens our eyes.

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