Daily Scifi Shorts, Sketches, & Starts

Sunday, October 12, 2014 [1117]

The sun rose in the Pennsylvanian epoch over a high plateau, a rolling landscape that would eventually become part of the state of Montana. Grass waved in the breeze, and reptiles and amphibians inhabited the shores of a stream that wound its way across the field and around the outcroppings of rock at its bottom. It was late in the spring; the precise date could--and would be--calculated as May 15, 314,407,741 BC, but of course, that number was devoid of context and therefore nonsense, merely a notch in the electronic brain of the pocket-sized device that Bill Radner would be carrying in his pocket, as a matter of fact, when he materialized onto the grass in a matter of hours.

It was a simple matter, really, time travel was--surprisingly simple. The trouble had been that there had never been any hint in the natural world concerning how to go about it. Bill remembered his professor in college lecturing on the matter. "For every other invention, Nature has, in its wisdom, provided an example or at least a hint--a model to follow. Consider heavier-than-air flight, for instance. Heavier-than-air flight existed in the natural world long before Man arrived on the scene in the form of birds, bats, even insects. These formed a model to follow, and provided hints about how heavier-than-air flight might be achieved mechanically," he continued. "At the very least, they demonstrated that such a thing was, at least in principle, possible. Very little of mankind's developments and achievements can be said to be original to Man."

One of the undergraduates in that course--stupidly--asked if the internal combustion engine might be an idea original to Man. The professor considered it. "The gasoline engine sprung from the steam engine in which water was turned to steam and allowed to expand in a closed cylinder, pushing a piston and doing work upon it as it did so. This was based on the observation of a phenomenon that Nature provided--that water expands when it is heated to boiling, and that this expansion can be made do to work. We can easily imagine some early human staring at geysers as the water within them is heated by the earth's magma and shooting out of the ground, wondering how this effect might be put to work."

The undergraduate continued: "Then, what about fire itself? Perhaps that is an idea original to Man."

"No," the professor answered back. "I can't see it that way. Natural fires would have been created by lightening storms, and then once the phenomenon is seen to exist, it is merely an extension and refinement that brings it under Man's control." The undergraduate was quieted by this, and the professor continued. "But in the case of time travel, we have no such example in Nature, as far as we can see. No animal has evolved it; no natural object engages in it--again, to the degree that we know of. Perhaps an animal has evolved time travel, and uses that ability to avoid us." This brought snickers from the stands in which nearly two hundred student sat in semi-darkness. Not all of them were there for credit--this professor's  lectures were often attended by students who were merely interested in the material and eager to be exposed to this particular professor's clear, straightforward, and entertaining style. "But to the degree we can know of as of this moment, there is no example of time travel in Nature, no hint, no example, no model for us to base our approach on, to give us the hint we need to get started."

As it happened, the professor was more right than he knew. There were animals in the natural world which did evolve time travel and did use it to avoid their enemies, the human animal almost certainly being counted among them. The professor had no way of knowing about them, though--they were native to a planet more than 700 light years away from his podium, and that distance was as good an insulator from the potential human threat as any amount of time would have been. Still, though, it was interesting to see them use their natural ability to slide forward and backward in time--as much as a full solar day, if conditions were perfect. As the jaws of its predator slid closed, the animal, called Perkins' Beastie after its discoverer, would pop out of existence, to the predator's unending surprise and frustration.

It turned out that time travel was surprisingly simple, just as the airfoil shape that permits heavier-than-air flight is simple. Like playing the violin, Bill mused, time travel is easy if you know how. It turned out that mass and electrical charge was critical--and, surprisingly, color. Blue items required less energy to break the time barrier and slide forward or back than red items did. Black items were very difficult--the theory said that a perfect blackbody could not be made to travel through time at all. It had something to do with the relationship between the item traveling and the black hole which was necessary to power the effect; Bill didn't really understand it, but then, he wasn't a theoretician, and one didn't have to be to be an effective time traveler. Meticulous planning and careful execution counted for much more on the practical ends of things, as it generally does in other pursuits.

And so, on the morning of May 15, 314,407,741 BC, Bill Radner shimmered into existence on a grassy plain on what would eventually become part of the state of Montana in about three hundred million years. His ship, which was invisible and, as a result of the trip, would be invisible for a couple of hours, crushed the grass under it and depressed the soft ground. Small insects were trapped and crushed, but there was no Bradbury-inspired butterfly effect to worry about. In fact, it was difficult to do anything in the past that would affect the future--there was a strong tendency for history to adjust itself back towards what would happen and had happened. One could kill Hitler in 1920, sure--but someone else would step in and take his place: Gobbels, perhaps, or Steinmetz. In one Hitler-less iteration, Edwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, led German into the mess that was World War II. What did it matter if a short man with a combover and a toothbrush moustache or a tall one with a full head of hair and a clean-shaven face appeared on the newscasts. They ended up doing largely the same things, and thus history was largely preserved. The Conservation of Events, this phenomenon was called.