Time Travelers
 When
I saw the movie Back to the Future in 1987, I was enchanted by Dr. Emmit
Brown, the crazed scientist who builds a time machine in a DeLorean
automobile. On the wall of his parlor were pictures of the men he
admired -- Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison and Albert
Einstein. Franklin and Edison are two of my heros, and so I felt a
certain kinship with this loon, as he used his flux capacitor and 1.21
gigawatts of electricity to propel himself into the past.
When I was a kid I saw another such movie called The Time Machine, and
later on I read the H. G. Wells book the movie was based on. In this
story The Time Traveler, who is called George in the movie, invents a
machine that transports him to the far distant future. There he has an
interesting and dangerous time among the Eloi and the Morlocks. The book
was written about 1895 and may have been the first about time travel. In
the movie, you can see the marvelous contraption that is the time
machine in operation. As a kid, I longed to have a time machine of my
own so I could zip backward and forward through the years.
I cannot build a time machine like Dr. Brown and George did, and I have
never met or heard of the man who can, so that way is out. In other
stories, I have read of strange houses where, if you leave by a
different door than the one you enter by, you will step out into another
time. I have also read of an obscure forest where the different paths
lead to different times and places. I have never yet found such a house
nor walked through such a forest. Both Superman, and the equally heroic
Captain Kirk, in his USS Enterprise, did the time travel trick by flying
at great speed round and round the sun. I am not likely to be doing that
very soon, and so it seemed for a long time that I would never be able
to travel back in time. Then my sister Ellen gave me a book by Jack
Finney called Time and Again which tells how it can be done.
Time and Again is one of the finest mysteries I have ever read, and I
strongly recommend it to you. The story involves a method of time travel
which I find very appealing. Suppose that you want to travel back to
1952. To do this, find an abandoned town and have it restored to looked
as it did in the 1950's. Next, populate this town with actors playing
the roles of the various townspeople. Now go live in that town and
forget about the present. Work hard to establish a symmetry in your
day-to-day life that matches, as well as possible, that of a resident of
this small town back in 1952. As the weeks go by you will forget the
present, and your mind, believing that it is in 1952, will transport
your body there. Once you have arrived, you can go anywhere and do
anything you wish. Travel to New York and take the subway up to Harlem
to witness the birth of Rock and Roll, or go downtown to Greenwich
Village and have a drink with the bohemians, or go further on down to
Wall Street and buy some Motorola stock! When you are ready to return,
get yourself out to the Statue of Liberty some foggy night and imagine
yourself returned to the world of today. If you do it right, your mind
will take you back to the future!
Each night at about 1 A.M., I leave my office and walk through town to
my home and my bed. In truth my house is only a block away from my
office, but I never take the direct route at the end of the day.
Computer programming requires close concentration, and a walk about town
seems to bring my head down out of the clouds. One memorable night
between Christmas and New Years in 1987, after hunting for a programming
bug until 2 A.M., I called it quits for the day, wearily left the Hahne
Building, and stepped out into a raging blizzard. The snow lay four
inches deep on the ground and a fierce wind from the northwest was
quickly adding to that total. I shuffled along with my back to the wind
and my front toward the old part of town, reveling in the foul weather
and leaving my problems behind me. As I clumped down back alleys which
have hardly changed in a hundred years, I noticed that the street lights
were out. I came by chance to the house where my grandfather once lived
and fell to thinking about him and the house and the old Victorian
neighborhood thereabouts. Looking down, I imagined the brick street that
lay beneath the carpet of snow. As I looked up again and gazed into the
teeth of the storm, I glimpsed a carriage just turning the corner and
going out of sight. Stranger still, a second later, I saw the window of
a nearby house flung open, and a flaming Christmas tree, covered with
burning candles, emerge to be extinguished by the wind and snow. This
certainly caught my attention, and as I bucked the wind on the homeward
leg of my walk, I for some time wondered just when I was.
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