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  Time Travel Omnibus

  Volume 1: A thru M

  (custom book cover)

  Jerry eBooks

  Title Page

  How to Build a Time Machine (essay)

  Dr. Stephen Hawking

  3 RMS, GOOD VIEW

  Karen Haber

  12:01 P.M.

  Richard A. Lupoff

  “ALL YOU ZOMBIES—”

  Robert Heinlein

  A BETTER PLACE

  Linda P. Baker

  A BRIDGE IN TIME

  Joseph P. Martino

  A DREAM OF JOHN BALL

  William Morris

  A FEW GOOD MEN

  Richard A. Lovett

  A FRIEND TO ALEXANDER

  James Thurber

  A GUN FOR DINOSAUR

  L. Sprague de camp

  A HISTORY OF TEMPORAL EXPRESS

  Wayne Freeze

  A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR US TEMPUNAUTS

  Philip K. Dick

  A MATTER OF TIME

  Robert Reginald

  A NIGHT ON THE BARBARY COAST

  Kage Baker

  A NIGHT TO FORGET

  C.A. Verstraete

  A PASSION FOR TIME TRAVEL

  Donlad J. Bingle

  A PORTRAIT OF TIME

  Kelly Swalis

  A RELIC OF THE PLIOCENE

  Jack London

  A SHAPE IN TIME

  Anthony Boucher

  A SOUND OF THUNDER

  Ray Bradbury

  A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS

  Edgar Allen Poe

  A TOUCH OF PETULANCE

  Ray Bradbury

  A TRAVELER IN TIME

  August Derleth

  A VIEW FROM A HILL

  M.R. James

  A WITCH IN TIME

  Janet Fox

  ACCESSORY BEFORE THE FACT

  Algernon Blackwood

  AFTER-IMAGES

  Malcolm Edwards

  A VIEW FROM A HILL

  Gene Wolfe

  AIR RAID

  John Varley

  ALEXIA AND GRAHAM BELL

  Rosaleen Love

  ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD

  Arthur C. Clarke

  AMBITION

  William L. Blade

  AMPHISKIOS

  John D. MacDonald

  AN ANACHRONISM; OR MISSING ONE’S COACH

  Anonymous

  AN UNCOMMON SORT OF SPECTRE

  Edward Page Mitchell

  ANACHRON

  Damon Knight

  AND HAPPINESS EVERLASTING

  Gerlad Warfield

  AND COMES OUT HERE

  Lester del Rey

  ANNIVERSARY PROJECT

  Joe Haldeman

  ANOTHER STORY

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  ANYTHING WOULD BE WORTH IT

  Lesley L. Smith

  APOLOGY

  Sam Ferree

  ARISTOTLE AND THE GUN

  L. Sprague de camp

  ARMAGEDDON—2419 A.D.

  Philip F. Nowlan

  AS NEVER WAS

  P. Schuyler Miller

  AS TIME GOES BY

  Tanith Lee

  AT DORADO

  Geoffrey Landis

  AUGUST HEAT

  William Fryer Harvey

  AUGUSTA PRIMA

  Karen Tidbeck

  BACKTRACKED

  Burt Filer

  BACK

  Susan Forest

  BAD TIMING

  Molly Brown

  BALSAMO'S MIRROR

  L. Sprague de Camp

  BEEN A LONG TIME

  Matthew P. Mayo

  BETWEEN THE MINUTE AND THE HOUR

  A.M. Burrage

  BIRTH OF A NOTION

  Isaac Asimov

  BLANK!

  Isaac Asimov

  BLUE INK

  Yoon Ha Lee

  BROOKLYN PROJECT

  William Tenn

  BRUCK IN TIME

  Patrick McGilligan

  BUILT UPON THE SANDS OF TIME

  Michael Flynn

  BURNT NORTON (a poem)

  T.S. Elliot

  BUS

  William Grewe-Mullins

  BUSINESS OF KILLING

  Fritz Lieber

  BUT I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE

  Chris Pierson

  BUTTON, BUTTON

  Isaac Asimov

  BULL MOOSE OF BABYLON

  Don Wilcox

  BY HIS BOOTSTRAPS

  Robert Heinlein

  BY HIS SACRIFICE

  Daliso Chaponda

  BY OUR ACTIONS

  Michael A. Stackpole

  CASTAWAY

  A. Bertram Chandler

  CAVEAT TIME TRAVELER

  Gregory Benford

  CAVERNS OF TIME

  Carlos McCune

  CENTURY TO STARBOARD

  Liz Williams

  CHAOS THEORY

  Stephen Leigh

  CLOSING THE TIMELID

  Orson Scott Card

  COME-FROM-AWAYS

  Tony Pi

  COMING BACK

  Damien Broderick

  COMPOUND INTEREST

  Mack Reynolds

  CONDITIONAL PERFECT

  Jason Palmer

  CONVOLUTION

  James P. Hogan

  BESPOKE

  Genevieve Valentine

  CORRESPONDENCE

  Ruthanna Emrys

  DARWIN’S SUITCASE

  Elisabeth Malartre

  DAY OF THE HUNTERS

  Isaac Asimov

  DEAR TOMORROW

  Simon Clark

  DEATHBED

  Caroline M. Yoachim

  DEATH SHIP

  Richard Matheson

  DECISIONS

  Michael A. Burstein

  DELHI

  Vandana Singh

  DOMINE

  Rjurik Davidson

  DOMINOES

  C.M. Kornbluth

  DOUBLE INDEMNITY

  Robert Sheckley

  DOWNTOWN KNIGHT

  James M. Ward

  DOXIES

  Brandon Alspaugh

  DRAFT DODGER’S RAG

  Jeff Hecht

  DRINK IN A SMALL TOWN

  Peter Wood

  ENDOWMENT POLICY

  Henry Kuttner

  ENOCH SOAMES: A MEMORY OF THE EIGHTEEN-NINETIES

  Max Beerbohn

  ENTER A SOLDIER. LATER: ENTER ANOTHER

  Robert Silverberg

  ETCHED IN MOONLIGHT

  James Stephens

  EVERYWHERE ELSE AND OTHERWISE

  Algernon Blackwood

  EXPERIMENT

  Fredric Brown

  EXTEMPORE

  Damon Knight

  FISH NIGHT

  Joe R. Lansdale

  FIRE WATCH

  Connie Willis

  FIRST FIGHT

  Mary Robinette Kowal

  FLAME FOR THE FUTURE

  William P. McGivern

  FLIGHT FROM TOMORROW

  H. Beam Piper

  FLUX

  Michael Moorcock

  FORTY, COUNTING DOWN

  Harry Turtledove

  FULL CHICKEN RICHNESS

  Avram Davidson

  FUTURES MARKET

  Mitchell Edgeworth

  GET ME TO THE JOB ON TIME

  Ian Randal Strock

  GRANDFATHER PARADOX

  Ian Stewart

  GREENWICH NASTY TIME

  C
arl Frederick

  HALL OF MIRRORS

  Fredic Brown

  HE COULD BE AMBROSE BIERCE

  Shaenon Kelty Garrity

  HE WALKED AROUND THE HORSES

  H. Beam Piper

  HEREDITY

  Isaac Asimov

  HERITAGE

  Robert Abernathy

  HEY, LOOK AT ME

  Jack Finney

  HIMSELF IN ANACHRON

  Cordwainer Smith

  HOLE-IN-THE-WALL

  Bridget McKenna

  HOME ALONE

  Jack Finney

  HOT TIP

  Billy Bruce Winkles

  HOUSE OF BONES

  Robert Silverberg

  HOW I LOST THE SECOND WORLD WAR . . .

  Gene Wolfe

  HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION

  Pat Murphy

  HOW THE FUTURE GOT BETTER

  Eric Schaller

  HWANG’S BILLION BRILLIANT DAUGHTERS

  Alice Sola Kim

  I HEAR YOU CALLING

  Eric F. Russell

  I LOVE GALESBURG IN THE SPRINGTIME

  Jack Finney

  IAN'S IONS AND EONS

  Paul Levinson

  IF THIS IS WINNETKA, YOU MUST BE JUDY

  F.M. Busby

  I’M SCARED

  Jack Finney

  “IN THE BEGINNING, NOTHING LASTS . . .”

  Michael A. Stackpole

  IN THE CARDS

  Alan Cogan

  IN THE CRACKS OF TIME

  David Grace

  IN THE TUBE

  E.F. Benson

  INSIDE TIME

  Tim Sullivan

  INSIDE THE BOX

  Edward M. Lerner

  IF I EVER SHOULD LEAVE YOU

  Pamela Sargent

  IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?

  Kim Newman

  IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME

  James M. Ward

  JOHN BARTINE’S WATCH

  Ambrose Bierce

  JOIN OUR TEAM OF TIME TRAVEL PROFESSIONALS

  Sarah Pinkser

  JUST ENOUGH TIME

  Douglas K. Beagley

  KIDNAPED INTO THE FUTURE

  William P. McGivern

  KNOT YOUR GRANDFATHER’S KNOT

  Howard V. Hendrix

  LAST BORN

  Isaac Asimov

  LEGIONS IN TIME

  Michael Swanwick

  LETTING GO

  Alex Shvartsman

  LEVIATHAN!

  Larry Niven

  LIFE TRAP

  Barrington J. Bayley

  LIMITED TIME OFFER

  Dean Leggett

  LOOB

  Bob Leman

  LOST CONTINENT

  Greg Egan

  LOST IN TIME

  Arthur Leo Zagat

  LOST IN THE FUTURE

  John Victor Peterson

  LOVE AND GLASS

  Michael Scott Bicker

  LOVE AT THE CORNER OF TIME AND SPACE

  Annie Bellet

  LUNCH-HOUR MAGIC

  Jack Finney

  MAN FROM THE FUTURE

  Don Wilcox

  MAN IN HIS TIME

  Brian W. Aldiss

  MARATHON PHOTOGRAPH

  Clifford D. Simak

  MATING HABITS OF THE LATE CRETACEOUS

  Don Bailey

  MEMORIES OF LIGHT AND SOUND

  Steven Saus

  MEMORIES OF MY MOTHER

  Ken Liu

  MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

  Nalo Hopkinson

  MIDNIGHT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

  Eric Ian Steele

  MR. PAUL REVERE AND THE TIME MACHINE

  J.B. Priestley

  MR. STENBERRY’S TALE

  A.W. Bernal

  MUNDANE LANE

  Kevin J. Anderson

  MY NAME IS LEGION

  Lester del Rey

  HOW TO BUILD A TIME MACHINE

  Dr. Stephen Hawking

  All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast . . .

  ‘Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He’s now dead. So who fired the shot?’

  Hello. My name is Stephen Hawking. Physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. Free to explore the universe and ask the big questions, such as: is time travel possible? Can we open a portal to the past or find a shortcut to the future? Can we ultimately use the laws of nature to become masters of time itself?

  Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I’m not so cautious. In fact, I’m more like the people who built Stonehenge. I’m obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I’d even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.

  To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do—at the fourth dimension. It’s not as hard as it sounds. Every attentive schoolchild knows that all physical objects, even me in my chair, exist in three dimensions. Everything has a width and a height and a length.

  But there is another kind of length, a length in time. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years. And the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension.

  To see what that means, let’s imagine we’re doing a bit of normal, everyday car travel. Drive in a straight line and you’re travelling in one dimension. Turn right or left and you add the second dimension. Drive up or down a twisty mountain road and that adds height, so that’s travelling in all three dimensions. But how on Earth do we travel in time? How do we find a path through the fourth dimension?

  Let’s indulge in a little science fiction for a moment. Time travel movies often feature a vast, energy-hungry machine. The machine creates a path through the fourth dimension, a tunnel through time. A time traveller, a brave, perhaps foolhardy individual, prepared for who knows what, steps into the time tunnel and emerges who knows when. The concept may be far-fetched, and the reality may be very different from this, but the idea itself is not so crazy.

  Physicists have been thinking about tunnels in time too, but we come at it from a different angle. We wonder if portals to the past or the future could ever be possible within the laws of nature. As it turns out, we think they are. What’s more, we’ve even given them a name: wormholes. The truth is that wormholes are all around us, only they’re too small to see. Wormholes are very tiny. They occur in nooks and crannies in space and time. You might find it a tough concept, but stay with me.

  A ‘wormhole-tunnel’

  A wormhole is a theoretical ‘tunnel’ or shortcut, predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity, that links two places in space-time—visualised above as the contours of a 3-D map, where negative energy pulls space and time into the mouth of a tunnel, emerging in another universe. They remain only hypothetical, as obviously nobody has ever seen one, but have been used in films as conduits for time travel—in Stargate (1994), for example, involving gated tunnels between universes, and in Time Bandits (1981), where their locations are shown on a celestial map

  Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you’ll find holes and wrinkles in it. It’s a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. Now it’s easy to show that this is true in the first three dimensions. But trust me, it’s also true of the fourth dimension. There are tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids in time. Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a plac
e called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times.

  Unfortunately, these real-life time tunnels are just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimetre across. Way too small for a human to pass through—but here’s where the notion of wormhole time machines is leading. Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.

  Given enough power and advanced technology, perhaps a giant wormhole could even be constructed in space. I’m not saying it can be done, but if it could be, it would be a truly remarkable device. One end could be here near Earth, and the other far, far away, near some distant planet.

  Theoretically, a time tunnel or wormhole could do even more than take us to other planets. If both ends were in the same place, and separated by time instead of distance, a ship could fly in and come out still near Earth, but in the distant past. Maybe dinosaurs would witness the ship coming in for a landing.

  The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we’ll have to go more than 2,000 times faster

  Now, I realise that thinking in four dimensions is not easy, and that wormholes are a tricky concept to wrap your head around, but hang in there. I’ve thought up a simple experiment that could reveal if human time travel through a wormhole is possible now, or even in the future. I like simple experiments, and champagne.

  So I’ve combined two of my favourite things to see if time travel from the future to the past is possible.

  Let’s imagine I’m throwing a party, a welcome reception for future time travellers. But there’s a twist. I’m not letting anyone know about it until after the party has happened. I’ve drawn up an invitation giving the exact coordinates in time and space. I am hoping copies of it, in one form or another, will be around for many thousands of years. Maybe one day someone living in the future will find the information on the invitation and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving that time travel will, one day, be possible.

  In the meantime, my time traveller guests should be arriving any moment now. Five, four, three, two, one. But as I say this, no one has arrived. What a shame. I was hoping at least a future Miss Universe was going to step through the door. So why didn’t the experiment work? One of the reasons might be because of a well-known problem with time travel to the past, the problem of what we call paradoxes.

  Paradoxes are fun to think about. The most famous one is usually called the Grandfather paradox. I have a new, simpler version I call the Mad Scientist paradox.

  I don’t like the way scientists in movies are often described as mad, but in this case, it’s true. This chap is determined to create a paradox, even if it costs him his life. Imagine, somehow, he’s built a wormhole, a time tunnel that stretches just one minute into the past.