Harry Turtledove - The Best Time Travel Stories of the Twentieth Century

THE BEST TIME TRAVEL STORIES

OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

_____________________________________________________

edited by Harry Turtledove and Martin H. Greenberg

Conventions. Owing to limitations of space, permission acknowledgments can be found at the back of this ebook, which constitute

an extension of this copyright page. Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing

Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc. First trade paperback edition:

December 2004.

INTRODUCTION

by Harry Turtledove

We’re all time travellers, whether we know it or not. We go into the future at a steady rate of one second per second, and we

leave the past behind. New things come along. Old things are forgotten. My own lifetime—neither especially long nor

especially short these days—has seen the rise of antibiotics, AIDS, space travel, television, CDs, videotape, DVDs, Richard

Nixon (twice), civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, cell phones, the computer, and the Internet. It’s seen the fall of

Communism, segregation, records, smallpox (we hope!), polio, Richard Nixon (twice), the Twin Towers, and the idea that

smoking is cool. It’s seen hula hoops, stuffing phone booths and Volkswagen Bugs, and streaking. Some things, of course,

remain constant. The Chicago Cubs haven’t been in a World Series since before I was born. They haven’t won one since

Teddy Roosevelt was president.

Toward the end of his long life, L. Sprague de Camp would give a presentation at science-fiction conventions called

“Memoirs of a Time Traveler.” Sprague, who was born in 1907, had seen much more come and go than I have (he was even

around the last time the Cubs won a Series). Making other people see how much that he took for granted as a child and a

young man had changed since was thought-provoking, to say the least.

But what if we weren’t limited to that steady one second per second progression? What if we could go against the normal

flow of time from past to future instead of being trapped in it? H. G. Wells, who was—among many other things—the first

great science-fiction writer to use English, published The Time Machine in 1895. He gave us the name for the device and the

bones of one kind of time-travel story: go to the future, take a look at what’s there, and come back and tell the present about

it. Other writers have been exploring and expanding the concept ever since.

Traveling into the future is relatively safe. Traveling into the past starts generating paradoxes. What if you killed your own

grandfather? Or, less bloodily, what if your journey into the past changed things so that your mother married somebody

else? Would you disappear? (Yes, that’s the one the Back to the Future movies look at, but you can also do it without a

DeLorean.) What if you changed some important past event? Would you change its future—your own present? That

particular line of time-travel stories forms one part of the spectrum of alternate history tales, some of which Del Rey recently

collected in The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century.

Dealing with the paradoxes—or not dealing with them—challenged the ingenuity of writers throughout the last century.

Writing as Anson MacDonald, Robert A. Heinlein wrapped up all the problems of one man’s existence in “By His

Bootstraps.” Close to twenty years later, Heinlein took another shot at it in “All You Zombies,” which tightens his

protagonist’s gene pool—and the inherent paradoxes—even more. His novel The Door into Summer also looks at time travel

in a situation where the traveler has an exactly even chance of going into the past or the future.

Isaac Asimov is better known for his Foundation stories and his tales of the Three Laws of Robotics, but he also wrote a

thought-provoking novel of time travel both into the past and across varying realities in The End of Eternity—which, in a

way, serves as the underpinning for all the other tales.

L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall is a time-travel novel not in the school of The Time Machine, but rather of Mark

Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: one that drops a modern man with all his modern knowledge into a

medieval setting and challenges him to make the best of it. Unlike Twain’s protagonist, de Camp’s Martin Padway really is in

sixth-century Rome, and establishes an alternate history by his success. De Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur” and the other tales

of Reggie Rivers collected in Rivers of Time exploit one of the time-travel story’s favorite themes: using a time machine to go

back into the past to look at and even to hunt animals extinct by the time humanity evolved. In Genus Homo, de Camp and P.

Schuyler Miller used suspended animation as a time-travel device by which modern men could visit the future.

Poul Anderson’s “The Man Who Came Early” is another variant on the theme of a modern man trying to make the best

of things in the past. Unlike the Twain and de Camp stories to which it is related, though, it is marked by Anderson’s strong

sense of the tragic. Anderson, always a writer with a strong sense of history, used time travel in his novels The Corridors of

Time (a sort of science-fiction companion to the fantasy Three Hearts and Three Lions) and The Dancer from Atlantis.

Perhaps the bawdiest time-travel novel ever written is Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line. Silverberg notes that, as time travel

becomes feasible for a longer and longer period, more and more travelers from the future will crowd back in time to visit

such events as the Crucifixion, the opening of Hagia Sophia, or the Black Plague. Why, then, don’t these historical events

grow ever more crowded with observers from their futures? His answer is that they do, though just what the locals do about

this is not always quite so clear.

One time-travel theme that has perhaps never quite been successfully brought off is a reversal of the time stream, so that

it begins to flow from future to past rather than the other way around. Fritz Leiber’s “The Man Who Never Grew Young”

perhaps comes closest; several others have tried at novel length, also with results less than they might have hoped. The

challenge there remains for writers yet to come.

Time travel as a vast, secret government project intended not just for exploration but also to change the past for the

benefit of the government doing the sponsoring is a common theme of these stories, and has perhaps grown more

common as governments have grown larger and less easily controlled by the people they rule. One of the best of these tales is

Jack Finney’s Time and Again, which seems only to have grown more relevant in the generation and a half since it appeared. It

is beautifully written, beautifully researched, beautifully illustrated, and very well thought through. Its sequel, From Time to

Time, unfortunately does not quite measure up to the high standard it set.

Another novel with a related theme, though much grittier and more cynical, is Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered.

Because of his indoctrination and training, the protagonist has a great many sins indeed to remember. The book, which dates

from near the time of the Watergate scandal, is a devastating indictment of those who do things allegedly for other people’s

good.

Another theme often used in time-travel tales is that of the time traveler from the future who comes back to the present

for his or her own nefarious purposes and has to be thwarted by moderns with technological resources small compared to

those of the villain. A good recent example is S. M. Stirling’s Drakon, which springs from his series of Draka alternate-history

novels. His heroine finds herself in the late twentieth century of our timeline because of an experiment gone awry, and

proceeds to do her best to remake it to her—nasty—heart’s desire. If the poor hapless moderns didn’t also have assistance

from the future, things would turn out even worse. And, as there is room for a sequel to the novel, they may yet.

Clifford D. Simak’s The Goblin Reservation takes time travel out of the sphere of big politics and puts it in a far less

consequential arena: that of academia. He has a great deal of gentle fun with the theme. Simak’s cast of characters includes a

moonshining Neanderthal brought up to his future present and rechristened Alley Oop; a saber-toothed tiger; as well as

elves, dwarves, a banshee, and the ghost of a prominent seventeenth-century English playwright—the only problem being,

the ghost isn’t sure whose ghost he is at first, so when the authentic Will Shakespeare (who turns out, in this book, not to be

the playwright in question) is brought forward, alarming, and very funny, consequences ensue.

Simak’s book is unquestionably science fiction, despite the trappings of both fantasy and popular culture that hang on its

coattails. Larry Niven takes a different course in his series of time-travel stories collected in The Flight of the Horse. To Niven, a

hard-headed rationalist, time travel is impossible. This does not keep him from writing time-travel stories, but does turn the

stories he writes about it from science fiction to fantasy. His time traveler, a certain (often, much too certain for his own

good) Svetz, is a bit of a bungler, and never realizes that when he travels back into the past, he’s not exactly traveling back into

the past with which his world is familiar. Problems with a roc, a leviathan, and too many werewolves immediately spring to

mind.

Time travel through magic or other fantasy device is less commonly written of than time travel through time machine or

other science-fictional device. Just why this should be so is puzzling, as time travel by either means seems equally impossible

and equally implausible, but it does appear to be so.

One time-travel novel that leans more toward fantasy than sf is Household Gods, by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove,

from an idea that the late Fletcher Pratt had but did not write up before his death. Despite the fantasy trappings, the novel

springs from the school of A Connecticut Yankee and Lest Darkness Fall. It drops a modern American woman dissatisfied

with her life and with bumping her head against the glass ceiling into an ancestor’s body in a town on the Danube frontier of

the Roman Empire in the late second century a.d., just in time for a series of Germanic invasions and devastating plagues.

Nicole Gunther-Perrin has the chance to see whether the glass at the end of the twentieth century is half full or half empty.

Roger Zelazny’s Roadmarks straddles the line between fantasy and science fiction. Its protagonist is traveling down the

Road of Time with a pickup truck full of automatic weapons to help the Greeks beat the Persians at Marathon. The Road,

and the various characters, nasty and less so, he meets along the way are shown with Zelazny’s characteristic wit and splendid

writing. The Road is a concept a little reminiscent of that in Anderson’s The Corridors of Time, but far more mutable.

These are some of the more interesting time-travel novels the field has produced over the years—not a complete list,

certainly (you will want to get on to the stories themselves, after all!), but a few of the highlights. The short fiction collected

here looks at similar ideas and some wildly different ones. The pieces speak for themselves; anything I say about them, I fear,

would only get in the way. The only thing I can be fairly sure of is that you’ll like most of them. Enjoy!

THEODORE STURGEON

Theodore Sturgeon’s (1918–1985) fiction abounds with ordinary characters undone by their all-too-human shortcomings or struggling in

unsympathetic environments to find others who share their desires and feelings of loneliness. Sturgeon began publishing science fiction in 1939,

and made his mark early in both fantasy and science fiction with stories that have since become classics. “Microcosmic God” concerns a scientist

who plays God with unexpectedly amusing results when he repeatedly challenges a microscopic race he has created with threats to their survival.

“It” focuses on the reactions of characters in a rural setting trying to contend with a rampaging inhuman monster. “Killdozer” is a variation

on the theme of Frankenstein in which a construction crew is trapped on an island where a bulldozer has become imbued with the electrical

energy of an alien life form.

Fiction Sturgeon wrote after World War II showed the gentle humor of his earlier work shading into pathos. “Memorial” and “Thunder

and Roses” were cautionary tales about the abuses of use of nuclear weapons. “A Saucer of Loneliness” and “Maturity” both used traditional

science-fiction scenarios to explore feelings of alienation and inadequacy. Sturgeon’s work at novel length is memorable for its portrayals of

characters who rise above the isolation their failure to fit into normal society imposes. More Than Human tells of a group of psychologically

dysfunctional individuals who pool their individual strengths to create a superhuman gestalt consciousness. In The Dreaming Jewels, a

young boy discovers that his behavioral abnormalities are actually the symptoms of super-human powers. Sturgeon is also renowned for his

explorations of taboo sexuality and restrictive moralities in such stories as Some of Your Blood, “The World Well Lost,” and “If All

Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” His short fiction has been collected in Without Sorcery, E Pluribus

Unicorn, Caviar, and A Touch of Strange. The compilations The Ultimate Egoist, Thunder and Roses, A Saucer of Loneliness,

The Perfect Host, Baby Is Three, The Microcosmic God, and Killdozer, edited by Paul Williams, are the first seven volumes in a series

that will eventually reprint all of Sturgeon’s short fiction.

Traveling into the past only to discover that the past isn’t there any more is a popular conceit of the genre. “Yesterday Was Monday,” one

of his most-often reprinted tales, is one of the early time-travel stories that were published after the pulp era, where the emphasis wasn’t on

science yet so much as strangeness, evoking a surreal feeling that this story embodies perfectly. Making the protagonist of the story an everyday

person waking up in his own past instead of a scientist or an inventor only adds to the unusual blend of time travel and fantasy.

YESTERDAY WAS MONDAY

by Theodore Sturgeon

Harry Wright rolled over and said something spelled “Bzzzzhha-a-aw!” He chewed a bit on a mouthful of dry air and spat it

out, opened one eye to see if it really would open, opened the other and closed the first, closed the second, swung his feet

onto the floor, opened them again and stretched. This was a daily occurrence, and the only thing that made it remarkable at all

was that he did it on a Wednesday morning, and—

Yesterday was Monday.

Oh, he knew it was Wednesday all right. It was partly that, even though he knew yesterday was Monday, there was a gap

between Monday and now; and that must have been Tuesday. When you fall asleep and lie there all night without dreaming,

you know, when you wake up, that time has passed. You’ve done nothing that you can remember; you’ve had no particular

thoughts, no way to gauge time, and yet you know that some hours have passed. So it was with Harry Wright. Tuesday had

gone wherever your eight hours went last night.

But he hadn’t slept through Tuesday. Oh no. He never slept, as a matter of fact, more than six hours at a stretch, and

there was no particular reason for him doing so now. Monday was the day before yesterday; he had turned in and slept his

usual stretch, he had awakened, and it was Wednesday.

It felt like Wednesday. There was a Wednesdayish feel to the air.

Harry put on his socks and stood up. He wasn’t fooled. He knew what day it was. “What happened to yesterday?” he

muttered. “Oh—yesterday was Monday.” That sufficed until he got his pajamas off. “Monday,” he mused, reaching for his

underwear, “was quite a while back, seems as though.” If he had been the worrying type, he would have started then and

there. But he wasn’t. He was an easygoing sort, the kind of man that gets himself into a rut and stays there until he is pushed

out. That was why he was an automobile mechanic at twenty-three dollars a week; that’s why he had been one for eight years

now, and would be from now on, if he could only find Tuesday and get back to work.

Guided by his reflexes, as usual, and with no mental effort at all, which was also usual, he finished washing, dressing, and

making his bed. His alarm clock, which never alarmed because he was of such regular habits, said, as usual, six twenty-two

when he paused on the way out, and gave his room the once-over. And there was a certain something about the place that

made even this phlegmatic character stop and think.

It wasn’t finished.

The bed was there, and the picture of Joe Louis. There were the two chairs sharing their usual seven legs, the split table,

the pipe-organ bedstead, the beige wallpaper with the two swans over and over and over, the tiny corner sink, the tilted

bureau. But none of them were finished. Not that there were any holes in anything. What paint there had been in the first

place was still there. But there was an odor of old cut lumber, a subtle, insistent air of building, about the room and

everything in it. It was indefinable, inescapable, and Harry Wright stood there caught up in it, wondering. He glanced

suspiciously around but saw nothing he could really be suspicious of. He shook his head, locked the door and went out into

the hall.

On the steps a little fellow, just over three feet tall, was gently stroking the third step from the top with a razor-sharp

chisel, shaping up a new scar in the dirty wood. He looked up as Harry approached, and stood up quickly.

“Hi,” said Harry, taking in the man’s leather coat, his peaked cap, his wizened, bright-eyed little face. “Whatcha doing?”

“Touch-up,” piped the little man. “The actor in the third floor front has a nail in his right heel. He came in late Tuesday

night and cut the wood here. I have to get it ready for Wednesday.”

“This is Wednesday,” Harry pointed out.

“Of course. Always has been. Always will be.”

Harry let that pass, started on down the stairs. He had achieved his amazing bovinity by making a practice of ignoring

things he could not understand. But one thing bothered him—

“Did you say that feller in the third floor front was an actor?”

“Yes. They’re all actors, you know.”

“You’re nuts, friend,” said Harry bluntly. “That guy works on the docks.”

“Oh yes—that’s his part. That’s what he acts.”

“No kiddin’. An’ what does he do when he isn’t acting?”

“But he—Well, that’s all he does do! That’s all any of the actors do!”

“Gee— I thought he looked like a reg’lar guy, too,” said Harry. “An actor? ’Magine!”

“Excuse me,” said the little man, “but I’ve got to get back to work. We mustn’t let anything get by us, you know. They’ll

be through Tuesday before long, and everything must be ready for them.”

Harry thought: this guy’s crazy nuts. He smiled uncertainly and went down to the landing below. When he looked back

the man was cutting skillfully into the stair, making a neat little nail scratch. Harry shook his head. This was a screwy morning.

He’d be glad to get back to the shop. There was a ’39 sedan down there with a busted rear spring. Once he got his mind on

that he could forget this nonsense. That’s all that matters to a man in a rut. Work, eat, sleep, pay day. Why even try to think

anything else out?

The street was a riot of activity, but then it always was. But not quite this way. There were automobiles and trucks and

buses around, aplenty, but none of them were moving. And none of them were quite complete. This was Harry’s own field;

if there was anything he didn’t know about motor vehicles, it wasn’t very important. And through that medium he began to

get the general idea of what was going on.

Swarms of little men who might have been twins of the one he had spoken to were crowding around the cars, the

sidewalks, the stores and buildings. All were working like mad with every tool imaginable. Some were touching up the finish

of the cars with fine wire brushes, laying on networks of microscopic cracks and scratches. Some, with ball peens and mallets,

were denting fenders skillfully, bending bumpers in an artful crash pattern, spider-webbing safety-glass windshields. Others

were aging top dressing with high-pressure, needlepoint sandblasters. Still others were pumping dust into upholstery,

sandpapering the dashboard finish around light switches, throttles, chokes, to give a finger-worn appearance. Harry stood

aside as a half dozen of the workers scampered down the street bearing a fender which they riveted to a 1930 coupé. It was

freshly bloodstained.

Once awakened to this highly unusual activity, Harry stopped, slightly open-mouthed, to watch what else was going on.

He saw the same process being industriously accomplished with the houses and stores. Dirt was being laid on plate-glass

windows over a coat of clear sizing. Woodwork was being cleverly scored and the paint peeled to make it look correctly

weather-beaten, and dozens of leather-clad laborers were on their hands and knees, poking dust and dirt into the cracks

between the paving blocks. A line of them went down the sidewalk, busily chewing gum and spitting it out; they were

followed by another crew who carefully placed the wads according to diagrams they carried, and stamped them flat.

Harry set his teeth and muscled his rocking brain into something like its normal position. “I ain’t never seen a day like

this or crazy people like this,” he said, “but I ain’t gonna let it be any of my affair. I got my job to go to.” And trying vainly

to ignore the hundreds of little, hard-working figures, he went grimly on down the street.

When he got to the garage he found no one there but more swarms of stereotyped little people climbing over the place,

dulling the paint work, cracking the cement flooring, doing their hurried, efficient little tasks of aging. He noticed, only

because he was so familiar with the garage, that they were actually making the marks that had been there as long as he had

known the place. “Hell with it,” he gritted, anxious to submerge himself into his own world of wrenches and grease guns. “I

got my job; this is none o’ my affair.”

He looked about him, wondering if he should clean these interlopers out of the garage. Naw—not his affair, He was

hired to repair cars, not to police the joint. Long as they kept away from him—and, of course, animal caution told him that

he was far, far outnumbered. The absence of the boss and the other mechanics was no surprise to Harry; he always opened

the place.

He climbed out of his street clothes and into coveralls, picked up a tool case and walked over to the sedan, which he had

left up on the hydraulic rack yester—that is, Monday night. And that is when Harry Wright lost his temper. After all, the car

was his job, and he didn’t like having anyone else mess with a job he had started. So when he saw his job—his ’39

sedan—resting steadily on its wheels over the rack, which was down under the floor, and when he saw that the rear spring

was repaired, he began to burn. He dived under the car and ran deft fingers over the rear wheel suspensions. In spite of his

anger at this unprecedented occurrence, he had to admit to himself that the job had been done well. “Might have done it

myself,” he muttered.

A soft clank and a gentle movement caught his attention. With a roar he reached out and grabbed the leg of one of the

ubiquitous little men, wriggled out from under the car, caught his culprit by his leather collar, and dangled him at arm’s

length.

“What are you doing to my job?” Harry bellowed.

The little man tucked his chin into the front of his shirt to give his windpipe a chance, and said, “Why, I was just

finishing up that spring job.”

“Oh. So you were just finishing up on that spring job,” Harry whispered, choked with rage. Then, at the top of his voice,

“Who told you to touch that car?”

“Who told me? What do you— Well, it just had to be done, that’s all. You’ll have to let me go. I must tighten up those

two bolts and lay some dust on the whole thing.”

“You must what? You get within six feet o’ that car and I’ll twist your head offn your neck with a Stillson!”

“But— It has to be done!”

“You won’t do it! Why, I oughta—”

“Please let me go! If I don’t leave that car the way it was Tuesday night—”

“When was Tuesday night?”

“The last act, of course. Let me go, or I’ll call the district supervisor!”

“Call the devil himself. I’m going to spread you on the sidewalk outside; and heaven help you if I catch you near here

again!”

The little man’s jaw set, his eyes narrowed, and he whipped his feet upward. They crashed into Wright’s jaw; Harry

dropped him and staggered back. The little man began squealing, “Supervisor! Supervisor! Emergency!”

Harry growled and started after him; but suddenly, in the air between him and the midget workman, a long white hand

appeared. The empty air was swept back, showing an aperture from the garage to blank, blind nothingness. Out of it stepped

a tall man in a single loose-fitting garment literally studded with pockets. The opening closed behind the man.

Harry cowered before him. Never in his life had he seen such noble, powerful features, such strength of purpose, such

broad shoulders, such a deep chest. The man stood with the backs of his hands on his hips, staring at Harry as if he were

something somebody forgot to sweep up.

“That’s him,” said the little man shrilly. “He is trying to stop me from doing the work!”

“Who are you?” asked the beautiful man, down his nose.

“I’m the m-mechanic on this j-j— Who wants to know?”

“Iridel, supervisor of the district of Futura, wants to know.”

“Where in hell did you come from?”

“I did not come from hell. I came from Thursday.”

Harry held his head. “What is all this?” he wailed. “Why is today Wednesday? Who are all these crazy little guys? What

happened to Tuesday?”

Iridel made a slight motion with his finger, and the little man scurried back under the car. Harry was frenzied to hear the

wrench busily tightening bolts. He half started to dive under after the little fellow, but Iridel said, “Stop!” and when Iridel

said, “Stop!” Harry stopped.

“This,” said Iridel calmly, “is an amazing occurrence.” He regarded Harry with unemotional curiosity. “An actor on stage

before the sets are finished. Extraordinary.”

“What stage?” asked Harry. “What are you doing here anyhow, and what’s the idea of all these little guys working around

here?”

“You ask a great many questions, actor,” said Iridel. “I shall answer them, and then I shall have a few to ask you. These

little men are stage hands— I am surprised that you didn’t realize that. They are setting the stage for Wednesday. Tuesday?

That’s going on now.”

“Arrgh!” Harry snorted. “How can Tuesday be going on when today’s Wednesday?”

“Today isn’t Wednesday, actor.”

“Huh?”

“Today is Tuesday.”

Harry scratched his head. “Met a feller on the steps this mornin’—one of these here stage hands of yours. He said this

was Wednesday.”

“It is Wednesday. Today is Tuesday. Tuesday is today. ‘Today’ is simply the name for the stage set which happens to be

in use. ‘Yesterday’ means the set that has just been used; ‘Tomorrow’ is the set that will be used after the actors have finished

with ‘today.’ This is Wednesday. Yesterday was Monday; today is Tuesday. See?”

Harry said, “No.”

Iridel threw up his long hands. “My, you actors are stupid. Now listen carefully. This is Act Wednesday, Scene 6:22. That

means that everything you see around you here is being readied for 6:22 a.m. on Wednesday. Wednesday isn’t a time; it’s a

place. The actors are moving along toward it now. I see you still don’t get the idea. Let’s see... ah. Look at that clock. What

does it say?”

Harry Wright looked at the big electric clock on the wall over the compressor. It was corrected hourly and highly accurate,

and it said 6:22. Harry looked at it amazed. “Six tw— but my gosh, man, that’s what time I left the house. I walked here, an’

I been here ten minutes already!”

Iridel shook his head. “You’ve been here no time at all, because there is no time until the actors make their entrances.”

Harry sat down on a grease drum and wrinkled up his brains with the effort he was making. “You mean that this time

proposition ain’t something that moves along all the time? Sorta—well, like a road. A road don’t go no place— You just go

places along it. Is that it?”

“That’s the general idea. In fact, that’s a pretty good example. Suppose we say that it’s a road; a highway built of paving

blocks. Each block is a day; the actors move along it, and go through day after day. And our job here—mine and the little

men—is to... well, pave that road. This is the clean-up gang here. They are fixing up the last little details, so that everything

will be ready for the actors.”

Harry sat still, his mind creaking with the effects of this information. He felt as if he had been hit with a lead pipe, and the

shock of it was being drawn out infinitely. This was the craziest-sounding thing he had ever run into. For no reason at all he

remembered a talk he had had once with a drunken aviation mechanic who had tried to explain to him how the air flowing

over an airplane’s wings makes the machine go up in the air. He hadn’t understood a word of the man’s discourse, which

was all about eddies and chords and cambers and foils, dihedrals and the Bernoulli effect. That didn’t make any difference;

the things flew whether he understood how or not; he knew that because he had seen them. This guy Iridel’s lecture was the

same sort of thing. If there was nothing in all he said, how come all these little guys were working around here? Why wasn’t

the clock telling time? Where was Tuesday?

He thought he’d get that straight for good and all. “Just where is Tuesday?” he asked.

“Over there,” said Iridel, and pointed. Harry recoiled and fell off the drum; for when the man extended his hand, it

disappeared!

Harry got up off the floor and said tautly, “Do that again.”

“What? Oh— Point toward Tuesday? Certainly.” And he pointed. His hand appeared again when he withdrew it.

Harry said, “My gosh!” and sat down again on the drum, sweating and staring at the supervisor of the district of Futura.

“You point, an’ your hand—ain’t,” he breathed. “What direction is that?”

“It is a direction like any other direction,” said Iridel. “You know yourself there are four directions—forward, sideward,

upward, and”—he pointed again, and again his hand vanished—“that way!”

“They never tole me that in school,” said Harry. “Course, I was just a kid then, but—”

Iridel laughed. “It is the fourth dimension—it is duration. The actors move through length, breadth, and height,

anywhere they choose to within the set. But there is another movement—one they can’t control—and that is duration.”

“How soon will they come... eh... here?” asked Harry, waving an arm. Iridel dipped into one of his numberless pockets

and pulled out a watch. “lt is now eight thirty-seven Tuesday morning,” he said. “They’ll be here as soon as they finish the

act, and the scenes in Wednesday that have already been prepared.”

Harry thought again for a moment, while Iridel waited patiently, smiling a little. Then he looked up at the supervisor and

asked, “Hey—this ‘actor’ business—what’s that all about?”

“Oh—that. Well, it’s a play, that’s all. Just like any play—put on for the amusement of an audience.”

“I was to a play once,” said Harry. “Who’s the audience?”

Iridel stopped smiling. “Certain— Ones who may be amused,” he said. “And now I’m going to ask you some

questions. How did you get here?”

“Walked.”

“You walked from Monday night to Wednesday morning?”

“Naw— From the house to here.”

“Ah— But how did you get to Wednesday, six twenty-two?”

“Well I— Damfino. I just woke up an’ came to work as usual.”

“This is an extraordinary occurrence,” said Iridel, shaking his head in puzzlement. “You’ll have to see the producer.”

“Producer? Who’s he?”

“You’ll find out. In the meantime, come along with me. I can’t leave you here; you’re too close to the play. I have to

make my rounds anyway.”

Iridel walked toward the door. Harry was tempted to stay and find himself some more work to do, but when Iridel

glanced back at him and motioned him out, Harry followed. It was suddenly impossible to do anything else.

Just as he caught up with the supervisor, a little worker ran up, whipping off his cap.

“Iridel, sir,” he piped, “the weather makers put .006 of one percent too little moisture in the air on this set. There’s three

sevenths of an ounce too little gasoline in the storage tanks under here.”

“How much is in the tanks?”

“Four thousand two hundred and seventy-three gallons, three pints, seven and twenty-one thirty-fourths ounces.”

Iridel grunted. “Let it go this time. That was very sloppy work. Someone’s going to get transferred to Limbo for this.”

“Very good, sir,” said the little man. “Long as you know we’re not responsible.” He put on his cap, spun around three

times and rushed off.

“Lucky for the weather makers that the amount of gas in that tank doesn’t come into Wednesday’s script,” said Iridel. “If

anything interferes with the continuity of the play, there’s the devil to pay. Actors haven’t sense enough to cover up, either.

They are liable to start whole series of miscues because of a little thing like that. The play might flop and then we’d all be out

of work.”

“Oh,” Harry oh-ed. “Hey, Iridel—what’s the idea of that patchy-looking place over there?”

Iridel followed his eyes. Harry was looking at a corner lot. It was tree-lined and overgrown with weeds and small saplings.

The vegetation was true to form around the edges of the lot, and around the path that ran diagonally through it; but the

spaces in between were a plain surface. Not a leaf nor a blade of grass grew there; it was naked-looking, blank, and absolutely

without any color whatever.

“Oh, that,” answered Iridel. “There are only two characters in Act Wednesday who will use that path. Therefore it is as

grown-over as it should be. The rest of the lot doesn’t enter into the play, so we don’t have to do anything with it.”

“But— Suppose someone wandered off the path on Wednesday,” Harry offered.

“He’d be due for a surprise, I guess. But it could hardly happen. Special prompters are always detailed to spots like that,

to keep the actors from going astray or missing any cues.”

“Who are they—the prompters, I mean?”

“Prompters? G.A.’s—Guardian Angels. That’s what the script writers call them.”

“I heard o’ them,” said Harry.

“Yes, they have their work cut out for them,” said the supervisor. “Actors are always forgetting their lines when they

shouldn’t, or remembering them when the script calls for a lapse. Well, it looks pretty good here. Let’s have a look at Friday.”

“Friday? You mean to tell me you’re working on Friday already?”

“Of course! Why, we work years in advance! How on earth do you think we could get our trees grown otherwise?

Here—step in!” Iridel put out his hand, seized empty air, drew it aside to show the kind of absolute nothingness he had first

appeared from, and waved Harry on.

“Y-you want me to go in there?” asked Harry diffidently.

“Certainly. Hurry, now!”

Harry looked at the section of void with a rather weak-kneed look, but could not withstand the supervisor’s strange

compulsion. He stepped through.

And it wasn’t so bad. There were no whirling lights, no sensations of falling, no falling unconscious. It was just like

stepping into another room—which is what had happened. He found himself in a great round chamber, whose roundness

was touched a bit with the indistinct. That is, it had curved walls and a domed roof, but there was something else about it. It

seemed to stretch off in that direction toward which Iridel had so astonishingly pointed. The walls were lined with an

amazing array of control machinery—switches and ground-glass screens, indicators and dials, knurled knobs, and levers.

Moving deftly before them was a crew of men, each looking exactly like Iridel except that their garments had no pockets.

Harry stood wide-eyed, hypnotized by the enormous complexity of the controls and the ease with which the men worked

among them. Iridel touched his shoulder. “Come with me,” he said. “The producer is in now; we’ll find out what is to be

done with you.”

They started across the floor. Harry had not quite time to wonder how long it would take them to cross that enormous

room, for when they had taken perhaps a dozen steps they found themselves at the opposite wall. The ordinary laws of space

and time simply did not apply in the place.

They stopped at a door of burnished bronze, so very highly polished that they could see through it. It opened and Iridel

pushed Harry through. The door swung shut. Harry, panic-stricken lest he be separated from the only thing in this weird

world he could begin to get used to, flung himself against the great bronze portal. It bounced him back, head over heels, into

the middle of the floor. He rolled over and got up to his hands and knees.

He was in a tiny room, one end of which was filled by a colossal teakwood desk. The man sitting there regarded him with

amusement. “Where’d you blow in from?” he asked; and his voice was like the angry bee sound of an approaching hurricane.

“Are you the producer?”

“Well, I’ll be darned,” said the man, and smiled. It seemed to fill the whole room with light. He was a big man, Harry

noticed; but in this deceptive place, there was no way of telling how big. “I’ll be most verily darned. An actor. You’re a

persistent lot, aren’t you? Building houses for me that I almost never go into. Getting together and sending requests for

better parts. Listening carefully to what I have to say and then ignoring or misinterpreting my advice. Always asking for just

one more chance, and when you get it, messing that up too. And now one of you crashes the gate. What’s your trouble,

anyway?”

There was something about the producer that bothered Harry, but he could not place what it was, unless it was the fact

Harry Turtledove - The Best Time Travel Stories of the Twentieth Century

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