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Page 41.
Chapter 18. Time Travel with Wells and Tatnall
 Our first real journey was into the Year 1950. Wells stayed behind.
We had done all the fun little tinkering, like going an hour forward to try and look at ourselves, or a day backward to snap a photo of ourselves coming out of the pond. We had heated discussions about all this, and I convinced my friends to stay away from such frivolities. The Membrane is very sensitive to matters of time, for reasons that will be abundantly clear soon, and it picked up on our experiments. The realization floated through my understanding that, if we maneuvered ourselves into any sort of paradox, the Membrane—or the Temporale itself—would efficiently react by shutting us out, perhaps even letting us die in some entropic Cold Sack inch-seconds away from life and laughter and Little Tim's Christmas Goose. Our goose would be cooked, so to speak.
After much discussion, we picked 1950 as a nice round number. Tatnall had dressed the flying machine up with dark green paint and a bogus pair of axles with grubby farm tyres. The gadget, like our virtual body suits, had plenty of off-side support mechanisms to keep us from bumbling into things on our way uptime or downtime and mutually annihilating. All those practical problems (which, incidentally, Wells' Time Traveler anxiously ponders in Chapter III) had been solved by the Laars eons ago. It was simply up to us to pick safe places to visit.
In the backs of our minds, still, was the urgent cause of House Upholder and the dark Popess of the assassins. Timony had figured out somehow—perhaps he had already journeyed here or to other points in the Temporale—that this train system outside time and space was crucial to the survival of our society on Mars. The average End Times-obsessed muddle-brain took for granted that the universe would somehow mysteriously end all of a sudden, and those of us who'd been good would go to paradise, while the 'others' would perish. Timony had seen past all that and understood that, pragmatically, Mars was running down. Our ancestors had not been able to complete their huge terraplaning job. Even some of the god rocks on the middle slopes had started running down, so that people who could afford it and who traveled much had to carry a spare bottle or two. I conferred privately with Trini and Sindi, and we agreed to remain as long as Tatnall's hospitality was freely offered to us and as long as we felt we were learning something—anything at all to help us save Mars.
One other thing. Wells, being a bit neurotic, stayed away. He did not want to know when or how he would die, although there was no indication he would ever be famous and therefore no notion that the news of his demise would appear on billboards. Little did we know. Tatnall, being a more practical sort, vowed to ignore whatever personal matters he might learn. He was too busy being curious and excited to worry about becoming depressed.
We spent a strangely disturbing, cheerless day in the gray mist among unadorned gray factories, and living blocks outside London where unadorned lives were led, though those living them had decent clothing and round cheeks—there was something missing in their eyes, some discontentment that was hard to fathom. We three understood the English so little, but Tatnall guessed: "There has been some sort of huge war, ended by a terrible bomb, and they all live in morbid fear that their world will end any moment." He said this as we stood at Picadilly Circus watching masses of black and gray cars roaring in circles, and we Martians laughed. It sounded to much like our own world.
Our next trip was to the year 2000, which Tatnall picked as a good round number. Apparently in the paranoia of the popular imagination, this number, which was meaningless since it was just an arbitrary date on a calendar, and there were various other religiously based calendars with different information, even among these people who called themselves Christians, that it was hard to understand what they all got worked up about.
I must diverge (again) for a moment and offer some technical notes on my findings as, puzzled, I journeyed into their world and had to acquaint myself with morays and standards somewhat different from those with which I was accustomed, though they seemed hauntingly familiar at a some remove.
Their calendar, for example, was pegged to the birth of their monotheistic God, whose theologies seem hauntingly familiar to us of the Mars clergy of the Holy Fire. The Romans and later the Europeans of this religion conquered much of the world and imposed their Before Christus/Anno Domini and B.C./A.D. standard on the world. With globalization into the 21st Century, cognoscenti began driving a less sectarian and more universal standard, at first Before Common Era/Common Era or B.C.E./C.E. This somehow never really caught on, and Common Calendar or CC seemed much more catchy. Consequently most of the people we would encounter in our time travels used the -C/CC standard, still using the familiar Year 1 of Christ's birth as the peg but pretending it was also about other world events at the time—like the birth of the Roman Empire, which happened in practically the same generation. Satisfied with that, historians would refer to 100 B.C. or B.C.E. as simply 100 -C. By the same token, 100 A.D. or C.E. became 100 CC.
People in the late 20th Century had recently invented digitizers, which they called computers, and they thought somehow the world would end because of these primitive and laughable machines in conjunction with their superstitions about this charming but pointless Year 2000.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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