Time Travel. A History

So much for eternity. It was a sacred concept: a state of grace, outside of time. For a few hundred pages Asimov turns it into a mere place—outside of “Time,” but equipped with elevator shafts and storerooms, a uniformed support staff, new men arriving by invitation only. That is quite a comedown. For the godless, though, what else is there? Who has this power over time? The devil.

With us acts are exempt from time, and we

Can crowd eternity into an hour,

Or stretch an hour into eternity.

That’s Lucifer, per Lord Byron, on good authority. Luke 4:5: “And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, showed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.” Kurt Vonnegut must have remembered this when he created his Tralfamadorians, adorable green aliens who experience reality in four dimensions: “All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance.” Eternity is not for us. We may aspire to it, we may imagine it, but we cannot have it.

If we’re going to speak literally, nothing is outside of time. Asimov ends his story by nullifying it. Who has the privilege of changing history? Not the Technicians, only the author. On the last page the entire previous narrative—the people we have met, the stories we have watched unfold—is erased with the stroke of a pen. The rewriters of history are written out.

*1 “Harlan had seen many women in his passages through Time, but in Time they were only objects to him, like walls and balls, barrows and harrows, kittens and mittens.”

*2 The OED cites Asimov as the coiner of several words, including robotics, but endochronic is not one of them. It has not yet caught on.

*3 Silly? Yet in the distant future—2015—Panasonic marketed a camera that it said recorded images “one second prior to and one second after pressing the shutter button.”

*4 This passage appeared in the first published version of The End of Eternity and disappeared from the book version.

NINE

Buried Time

So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

—James Joyce (1922)

IN ITS ISSUE of November 1936, Scientific American transported readers into the future:

The time is A.D. 8113. The air channels of the radio-newspaper and world television broadcasting systems have been cleared for an important announcement…a story of international importance and significance.

(Evidently it seemed plausible that the world’s communications channels could be “cleared” on command.)

The television sight-and-sound receivers in every home throughout the world carry the thread of the story. In the Appalachian Mountains near the eastern coast of the North American continent is a crypt that has been sealed since the year A.D. 1936. Carefully its contents have been guarded since that date, and today is the day of the opening. Prominent men from all over the world assemble at the site to witness the breaking of the seal that will disclose to the waiting world the civilization of an ancient and almost forgotten people.

The ancient and almost forgotten people of 1936 America, that is. This puff was headlined “Today—Tomorrow” and written by Thornwell Jacobs, a former minister and advertising man, now president of Oglethorpe University, a Presbyterian college in Atlanta, Georgia. Oglethorpe had been shuttered since the Civil War. Jacobs re-created it in partnership with a suburban land developer. Now he was promoting his idea, “heartily endorsed” by Scientific American, for a Crypt of Civilization, to be waterproofed and sealed in the basement of the administration building on his campus. Jacobs was also a teacher: his course in cosmic history was mandatory for Oglethorpe seniors. Not presuming that Oglethorpe University itself would last forever, he proposed that the crypt should be “deeded in trust to the Federal government, its heirs, assigns, and successors.” Its contents? A thorough record of the era’s “science and civilization.” Certain books, especially encyclopedias, and newspapers preserved in a vacuum or inert gas or on microfilm (“preserved in miniature on motion picture film”). Everyday items such as foods and “even our chewing gum.” Miniature models of automobiles. And: “There should also be included a complete model of the capitol of the United States, which, within a half-dozen centuries, will probably have disappeared completely.”