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"...science fiction is sort of like a sociological genome. It's a huge range of possible futures, most of them useless; some vital. You never really know in advance."
- Peter Watts
 |
| Time Travel Back Pack | ||
| A handy time machine you can conveniently wear. |
| “Dow, you’ve got to fix it up for me ! This is what I’ve been hunting !”
"Are you crazy, boy? This is nothing that can ever he proved safe except by the actual experiment, and the experiment could never return. You know that, don't you? From what blind groping I’ve done, it seems to me that time is not a constant flow, but an ebb and flux that can't be measured. It would be hard to explain to you. But you couldn't return — couldn’t guide yourself. You wouldn’t dare try it!” “I’m fed up with certainty and safety! And as for returning, what have I here to return to? No, you can’t scare me. I’ve got to try it !” “Absolutely no,” said Dow firmly.
 (Back Pack Time Machine from "Tryst in Time" by C.L. Moore) BUT three months later he was standing under the great skylight of his laboratory, watching Eric buckle a flat metal pack on his heavy young shoulders. Though reluctance still lined the scientist’s face, under its shock of white hair he was alight almost as hotly as the younger man, with the tremendous adventure of what was about to happen. It had taken weeks of persuasion and argument, and he was not wholly at ease even yet about the experiment, but the fever that burned in Eric Rosner was not to be denied... “I don’t understand anything about the works, and I don’t much care,” said Eric. “All I know is I’m to snap these switches here” — he laid big sunburned hands on the two rods at his belt — “when I want to move along. That will throw out the anchor. Right?” “As far as it goes, yes. That will increase your inertia sufficiently to make you immune to time and space and matter. You will be inert mentally and physically. You'll sink down, so to speak, to the bedrock, while time flows past you. I have in this pack on your back, connecting with the switches in the belt, the means to increase your inertia until no outside force can interrupt it. And a mechanism there will permit the switches to remain thrown until one small part, insulated from the inertia in a tiny time space of its own, trips the switches again and up-anchors. And if my calculations are correct — and I think they are — there you’ll be in some other age than ours. You can escape from it by throwing the switches again and returning to inertia, to be released after an interval by the automatic insulated mechanism in your pack. Got it?” ...Envy clouded Dow’s eyes for a moment, as the switches closed. PAST ERIC’S EYES eternity ebbed blindingly. Rushing blankness closed over him, but he was conscious of infinite motion, infinite change passing over him, by him, through him, as events beyond imagination streamed past that anchorage in inertia’s eternal bedrock. For a timeless eternity it lasted. And then — and then -
 (Back Pack Time Machine from "Tryst in Time" by C.L. Moore) A confusion of noises from very far away began to sound in his ears. That rushing blurriness abated and slowed and by degrees took on a nebulous shape. He was looking down from a height of about thirty feet upon a street scene which he identified roughly as Elizabethan by the costumes of those who moved through the crowd below him. |
| Technovelgy from Tryst in Time,
by C.L. Moore. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1936 Additional resources -
|
The following discussion of time travel precedes the use of the device:
Dow smiled.
“The eternal question,” he said. “The inevitably objection to the very idea of time travel. Well, you never did, did you? You know it never happened! I think there must be some inflexible law which forbids the same arrangement of matter, the pattern which is one’s self, from occupying the same space time more than once. As if any given section of space time were a design in which any arrangement of atoms is possible, except that no pattern may appear exactly twice.
“You see, we know of time only enough to be sure that it’s far beyond any human understanding. Though I think the past and the future may be visited, which on the face of it seems to predicate an absolutely preordained future, a fixed and unchangeable past — yet I do not believe that time is arbitrary. There must be many possible futures. The one we enter upon is not the only way. Have you ever heard that theory explained? It’s not a new one — the idea that at every point of our progress we confront crossroads, with a free choice as to which we take. And a different future lies down each.
"I can transport you into the past, and you can create events there which never took place in the past we know — but the events are not new. They were ordained from the beginning, if you took that particular path. You are simply embarking upon a different path into a different future, a fixed and preordained future, yet one which will be strange to you because it lies outside your own layer of experience. So you have infinite freedom in ail your actions, yet everything you can possibly do is already fixed in time.”
“Why, then — then there’s no limit to the excitement a man could find in navigating time,” said Eric almost reverently...
Compare to the Anacronopete from El Anacronopete (1887) by Enrique Gaspar, the time machine from The Time Machine (1895) by HG Wells, the Dutch clock from The Clock That Went Backward (1881) by Edward Page Mitchell, precogs from The Minority Report (1956) by Philip K. Dick, the chronoscope from Legion of Time (1938) by Jack Williamson, and the time-telespectroscope from The Exile of Time (1931) by Ray Cummings.
“Suppose you landed in your own past ?” queried Eric.
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