Little Adventures
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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 1950s. 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 your day-to-day life so that it 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. And, 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.