Time to Button Down

in the Ekcolir Reality
original cover by Gerard Quinn

Along with stories about telepathy and teleportation, I find it difficult to resist a science fiction story that includes time travel in its plot. I've long been a fan of Isaac Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity (1955), but I recently read several of his short stories that were published shortly before the novel, including "Button, Button" (1953) and "The Immortal Bard" (1954).

"The Immortal Bard" is very short and I probably first read it in Earth Is Room Enough back in the 1970s. Now I finally read it as it first appeared in Universe Science Fiction with an illustration by Lawrence Stevens (see the image below).

Dr. Welch has a time travel machine.
internal art by Lawrence Stevens

I like to imagine that in an alternate Reality, the science fiction genre developed slightly differently. In the Ekcolir Reality, many of the early science fiction story writers were women and even Asimov included more female characters in his stories. 

The alternate New England in the Ekcolir Reality

 Joke Story. "The Immortal Bard" is a kind of joke story. In our Reality, Asimov imagined poor William Shakespeare being brought into the future and failing an English course that was all about his own writing. 

In the Ekcolir Reality, Anne Hathaway was also a time traveler and her brief presence in the 20th century along with her husband led to an unexpected alteration to the course of history in England and the New World.

Ham the Astrochimp

In that same issue of Universe Science Fiction was "Testing, Testing" by Otto Binder. Yes, it was the 1950s, when UFOs were falling from the skies with regularity. A spaceship from Mars falls into the backyard of Major Mack at Space Medicine Labs where the poor suffering Major has girl problems: Dr. Alice. 

Dr. Alice is studying the effects of cosmic rays on experimental animals who have been sent up into outer space... and also studying the behavior of the Major. Major Mack is in love with Dr. Alice and her cute freckles, but she won't even explain why she has not fallen for the Major and resists his persistent amorous advances. Through shrewd psychological analysis, Alice discovers that the crew members of the Martian spaceship are chimp-like experimental test subjects, sent on the first dangerous spaceship ride from Mars to Earth.

in the Ekcolir Reality
original cover by Alex Schomburg

 Another Otto. In "Button, Button", Asimov again imagines a university professor who invents a time travel machine. Dr. Otto Schlemmelmayer works alone in his lab and he is only interested in time travel if it will provide a source of ca$h to fund construction of the flute factory that he longs to build. However, his time machine has serious limitations.

In some sense, Asimov's first love was history. In "The Immortal Bard", Dr. Welch uses his time machine to bring famous people from the past into the present, including Archimedes, Newton and Galileo. However, poor Otto's time machine can only bring about one gram of material into the present from the past. As part of his money-making $cheme, Otto decides to bring out of the past the prized signature of the provisional president of Georgia, Button Gwinnett.

Otto Schlemmelmayer's Viewer

Sadly, Otto's dream of the flute factory is dashed when his irreplaceable time machine is turned into melted circuitry after it is used to bring a fragment of the Declaration of Independence out of the past and into the present. The fragment of paper really has Button Gwinnett's original $ignature on it, but the shrewd experts of the $ignature marketplace think it is fake because the paper is not 200 years old.

Contrived. As shown in the image to the left, Otto's time machine can view documents in the past and then he can select a specific one gram piece of the document to bring into the future. It is rather amazing how hard Asimov worked to assemble this silly and contrived plot.

interior art for Three-Legged Joe by Peter Poulton

In the same issue of Startling Stories that held "Button, Button" was a story by Jack Vance. Three-Legged Joe is an alien who makes it difficult to mine valuable mineral resources from the planet Odfars.

Recent graduates of Highland Technical Institute, Milke and Paskell set off for Odfars. They are able to stun the meddlesome Three-Legged Joe with a jolt of electricity. Similarly, in "Hard Luck Diggings" (1948), Magnus Ridolph was able to use an electric shock to protect himself from other Evil™ aliens. After a series of silly short stories about mines on exoplanets, eventually Vance was able to write an amusing novel about mining on a planet; see The Face.

interior art for "Time's Arrow"

 Dinosaur Time. I also read "Time's Arrow" (1950) by Arthur C. Clarke which was published several months before Asimov's "Day of the Hunters". For "Day of the Hunters", Asimov imagined a professor who used his time machine to investigate the demise of the dinosaurs. He finds that there was an intelligent species of lizard that developed advanced technology and exterminated all the dinosaurs. "Time's Arrow"  is tedious and involves the use of time travel to investigate the dinosaurs, but the investigation goes bad when a dinosaur eats the investigators. 

Harry catches a scene-shifter (source)

I've previously blogged about "A Statue for Father", another time travel story in which some dinosaur eggs were brought from the far past to modern times. I wonder how many silly time travel stories have been written about dinosaurs? Speaking of silly time travel stories, "Time's Arrow" was collected in "The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century" along with "Yesterday Was Monday" (1941) a goofy story by Theodore Sturgeon in which Harry, an automobile mechanic, wakes up on the wrong day and gets to observe an army of "scene-shifters" who are at work preparing for Wednesday. Each and every day is a "scene" that has to be built in preparation for the arrival of its "actors". Sturgeon's silly story of a slip in time was taken to the next level in "A Matter of Minutes" which imagines that a whole new world has to be built for each minute of time.

1950 in the Ekcolir Reality (original)

 All the World's a Stage. What if the "scene-shifters" from Sturgeon's imagination could slip into "our" world? In some sense, Asimov's Eternals are like "stage-setters" in that they exist outside of Time and are responsible for "working behind the scenes" to prepare the world as we know it for the people who live in Time.

Viewers. One of my favorite parts of Asimov's The End of Eternity is how the Eternals use devices that allow them to view any particular time and place in Reality. Asimov's depiction of a "viewer" in the short story "Button, Button" was published in the same year that Asimov began writing The End of Eternity. Maybe in an alternate Reality, Asimov wrote some additional short stories that involved characters like Noÿs who suddenly arrive in Time.

in the Ekcolir Reality
Dell Davison travels to the past.
original cover by Alex Schomburg

 Time Travel Institute. Isaac Asimov had the Robotics Institute, but for his time travel story "Stitch in Time" (1952), James Murdoch MacGregor depicted Olive Ettingham as having to direct the Time Travel Institute in order to have a chance to inherit her father's money. Olive invents a Viewer that can allow anyone to view past events, but for some reason it only works back to the invention of the "olivet" Viewer in the year 2002. Not only that, there is also a way to send yourself back through time, but only as far as the "downwhen terminus" in 2005. Asimov included the idea of a "downwhen terminus" in The End of Eternity.

Like The End of Eternity, "Stitch in Time" is also told in a non-liner way, starting with Dell Davison and her brother Fred in the year 2132. Fred is puzzled by the fact that during the past 127 years, there is no record of anyone ever having traveled back in time. 

An excerpt from "Stitch in Time" explains what must be happening... but why?

 

interior art for "Stitch in Time"

 Switcho-Chango. In the 22nd century, everyone casually uses the olivet Viewer to observe past events, but why hasn't actual time travel to the past even been attempted? Or has it? Fred goes into the past and he becomes Olive's time travel research assistant. And in the future, Dell's entire life instantly warps; she never had a brother. Then she decides to travel back in time and then she is suddenly Fred's sister again, in a newly created timeline where she knows Olive. I suppose the idea is that time travel paradoxes are not possible because whenever someone travels in time, the timeline is "automatically" re-arranged so as to accommodate the change, and nobody can ever remember that time travel even took place.

It would be interesting to know if Asimov read "Stitch in Time" before writing The End of Eternity.

Next: more old time travel stories

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