The accidental time machine by Joe Haldeman

Author:Joe Haldeman [Haldeman, Joe W.]
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction - Science Fiction, Science fiction., American Science Fiction And Fantasy, gsafd, Haldeman; Joe - Prose & Criticism, General, Science fiction, Science Fiction - General, Science Fiction - Short Stories, Fiction, Short Stories, Time travel
ISBN: 9780441014996
Publisher: New York : Ace Books, 2007.
Published: 2007-08-06T23:00:00+00:00

“To teach here, though, you can learn Theosophy. It’s not as if you weren’t a Christian—a Methodist, I

believe?—so you’re halfway there.”

“That’s right,” he said slowly. They’d talked to Moses. “I can learn quickly. My graduate assistant, Martha, said I wouldn’t be teaching until next year.” He nodded, a faraway look in his eyes. “What was it like, traveling through time? Did you see the future going by?”

“I wish I had. It was all just a gray blur, which seemed to last only a minute or so.” “You were in a car?”

“That seemed sensible. We didn’t know where I might end up.” “We sent a team out to Arlington, to tow it in.” It took a moment for the meaning of “team” to sink in. Horses. “Do you think you could get it to work?” “I don’t know. Can you generate electricity and store it in a fuel cell?” “You’ll have to ask the people in mechanical studies. I’ve seen them make sparks with electricity that they carried in a box.”

“That would be a start.” He choked down some more coffee to be polite. “If it’s something like a chemical battery,in theory it could work.” Though it might take months to get enough charge to go a few miles, he wouldn’t mind having a getaway vehicle that was also a Faraday cage. “Can you travel back? Go back to the . . . earlier MIT?” “Some say yes, and some say no. If I were back in my own time, maybe I could build a machine that went the other direction. People were working on it when I left. But you can see the logical problem in going backward.”

The dean’s brow furrowed. “You would meet yourself? Be in two places at the same time?” “That’s one manifestation of it. But the larger philosophical problem is that it blows apart cause and effect. You could use the time machine to go back and murder the person who invented the time machine.”

“But . . . that would be a sin.”

“I don’t mean you would actually do it.” “No, of course. Theoretical possibility.” He laughed. “Sorry. I used to be a Father. So you would be using the machine to make the machine not exist in the first place.” “Exactly.”

“But then . . .” He rubbed his chin and concentrated. “There doesn’t have to be a paradox. Time just starts over, and goes on as if the machine had never existed. Assuming the time traveler would have to disappear once his time machine stopped existing.” Pretty damned good. “That’s right, sir. And the ‘loop,’ as we call it, of time and space when and where the machine existed—that loop itself ceases to exist.” “So where does it go?”

Matt shrugged. “Limbo? Nobody can say.”

“Interesting.” He poured himself some more coffee, and Matt declined a refill. “How could one tell . . . how can you tell that you aren’t in one of those closed-off loops? Suppose you do invent a reverse time machine, and you go back and smash the machine that sent you here.

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