Questionable Practices

Thought Experiment

Ralph Drumm, Jr., as we all know, devised the first practicable method of time travel, in our timestream and in countless others. He was an engineer and a good one, or he would not have figured it out, but in one significant way, he simply had not thought things through.

It was mere happenstance that Ralph even had the time and inclination to consider the matter, that day in the dentist’s chair. It wasn’t as though he needed any dental work: Ralph had always had perfect teeth, thanks to fluoride, heredity, nutrition, and a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Most of the time, all he needed from the dentist was a quick cleaning, and he was done. But this time he opted for a little something extra: whitening. Ralph had always thought his perfect teeth would surely be more perfect if they were whiter.

The whitening process took an hour and a half, and it was not as much fun as the advertising brochure promised. But Ralph had a great fondness for thought experiments, so he set his mind to figuring out how to disassociate himself from the dentist’s chair. Being an engineer, he thought it through in a very logical and orderly way.

It was Ralph’s genius to intuit that time travel is accomplished entirely in your head: you just need some basic software development skills, plus powers of concentration that work in all four dimensions. It seemed simple enough, merely a matter of disassociating not only his mind, but also his body. A trick, a mere bagatelle, involving a sort of n-dimensional mental toolbar that controls the user’s timeshadow. The body stays behind, where it started, and the timeshadow travels freely until it alights in another time and place, where it generates a copy of the original worldline, body and all, in the timestream.

Ralph wondered why nobody had ever thought of it before. He was about to test it when the hygienist came back and started hosing out the inside of his mouth. Better leave this until I get home, Ralph thought. Even if it didn’t work, it was a wonderful theory, and it certainly whiled away ninety minutes that would otherwise have been entirely wasted, intellectually.

At home, Ralph got to work. He set up a few temporal links on the toolbar in his head: first, an easy bit of pre-industrial England. He should fit in there rather nicely, he thought, and they’d speak English. After that, he planned an iconic weekend in cultural history, and a couple of exciting historical events it would be fascinating to witness. Then, focusing the considerable power of his mind, he activated the first link.

Wessex, 144 °C.E.

The weekly market looked like a rural food co-op run by the Society for Creative Anachronism. People wearing homespun clothing in dull tones of brown and green and blue walked around with baskets, buying vegetables from similarly clad peasants who sat on the ground. In one area, a tinker was mending pots; in another, a shoemaker was stitching clunky but serviceable clogs.

The smell was a little strong — body odors, horse manure, wet hay, rotting vegetation, cooking cabbage — but Ralph felt right at home. He’d devised himself a costume that he thought would look nondescript in any time period, and carried a pocketful of Roosevelt dimes, figuring silver was silver, and Roosevelt did look a little like Julius Caesar.

He looked around nervously, but no one had noticed him materialize, even though he was right in the middle of the crowd. It was as if he’d been there all along, he thought. Ralph was unaware of the most basic tenet of time travel, as we understand it now: that the traveler’s arrival in a timestream changes both the future and the past, because his timeshadow extends for the length of his life. His present is his own, but his past in this timestream belongs to another self, with whom he is now entangled.

Ralph, our Ralph, was hungry, despite the unappetizing stink. There was a woman selling pasties from a pot, and another selling soup that was boiling on a fire. Neither of the women looked very clean, and each of them was coughing a lot and spitting out phlegm on the ground. Ralph decided that the soup was probably the safer choice, until he noticed how it was served: ladled into a bowl that each customer drank from in turn. Next time, he’d remember to bring his own cup.

He noticed a man grilling meat on wooden skewers. Just the thing. There was a small crowd around the charcoal-filled trough: a couple of rough-looking men, an old woman, some younger women with truculent expressions on their faces, and a handful of children. A quartet of buskers was singing a motet in mournful medieval harmony. A girl-child of about twelve watched him solemnly and with interest as he approached. Ralph hoped he hadn’t made some dreadfully obvious mistake in his clothing, so that he looked a foreigner, but no one else seemed to be paying any attention to him.

As he waited his turn, the child’s unblinking stare made him nervous. He was afraid to meet her eyes, and gazed earnestly at his feet, at the ash-dusted charcoal blocks, at the meat. He quickly made his way to the vendor and handed him a dime. The man gazed at it in disbelief, and then looked at Ralph with a canny mixture of greed and suspicion.

“Geunne me unmælice unmæta begas, hæenan hund!”

It was a salad of vowels, fricatives, and glottal stops. But Ralph had realized it would be hard to get a handle on the local dialect, and figured he could get by on charm and sympathy until he worked it out. He smiled, and gestured in sign language that he was deaf.

The vendor stepped back suddenly and, with an expression of fear and revulsion pointed at Ralph and shouted “Swencan bealohydig hwittuxig hæenan, ellenrofe freondas! Fyllan æfunca sweordum!” The crowd turned toward him, and started in his direction. They did not look friendly. They were shouting words he could almost understand.

Ralph jabbed desperately at the next link on his mental toolbar.

Bethel, New York, 1969.

His heart pounding, Ralph found himself in a farmer’s field, in a sea of mud and rain and under-clothed young people. It’s okay here, he thought. The vibe was totally mellow, and so were all the people, who were slapping mud on one another and slipsliding around playfully.

The rain was soft and warm, and when it let up, someone handed him a joint. He took a toke and passed it on. How did he know, he wondered, to do that? And why was it called a toke? Time travel was really an amazing groove….

A beautiful longhaired boy gave him a brownie, and a beautiful longhaired girl gave him a drink of something sweet and cherry-flavored from a leather wineskin. “You have such a cosmic smile,” she said. “Have a great trip, man.” She kissed him, evading his hands gracefully and moving away, her thin white caftan clinging damply to her slim body.

Then the music started, and Ralph was pulled like taffy into the story of the song. He was the minstrel from Gaul, the soldier from Dien Bien Phu, the man from Sinai mountain. What did it all mean, he wondered briefly, but then he left meaning behind, and fell into the deep, sugar-rough voice of the singer. He was music itself, pouring out over the crowd, bringing together four hundred thousand people, all separate and all one, like the leaves of a huge tree stirred by a kind breeze, moving gently in the humid, muddy, blissful afternoon.

Time passed. Someone put a ceramic peace symbol on a rawhide thong around his neck. His clothes were muddy and he took them off. Set after set of music played. The sun went down, and it got dark.

The smell was rather strong here, too, he thought: body odors again, and the stink of the overflowing latrines. It was too humid, really, and something had bitten him on the butt. He put his clothes back on, rather grumpily. Ralph was starting to come down, and he was feeling just a little paranoid. Maybe Woodstock wasn’t such a good idea….

Then the music suddenly stopped, and the lights went out. On stage, people with cigarette lighters scurried about. Finally, a small emergency generator kicked in, and a few dim lights came back on. Arlo Guthrie grabbed the mike, and the crowd cheered him expectantly, though a bit mindlessly. “I dunno if you — ” he said. “I dunno, like, how many of you can dig — ” He shook his head. He seems a bit stoned, Ralph thought. “ — like how many of you can dig how many people there are here, man….” Arlo looked around. “But I was just talking to the fuzz, and, hey! — we’ve got a time traveler here with us.” The audience laughed, a huge sound that echoed in the natural amphitheater that sloped up from the stage. Arlo pumped his fist. “We’re historic, man! Far fucking out! We! Are! Historic!”

Then he shrugged apologetically. “But, can you dig this, the n-dimensional timefield effect has short-circuited the electrical system. We’re going to have call it off. Y’all’re gonna have to go home. Sorry about your weekend, people. Good luck getting outta here….”

It was dark, but Ralph could sense, somehow, that four hundred thousand people had all turned their heads toward him.

He panicked, and stabbed randomly at his mental toolbar.

Wessex, 1441.

Damn! He’d hit the Wessex button again. He was back at the market, a year later.

Ralph was an engineer: he was, he thought, the kind of man who thinks things through. So he had programmed his mental toolbox not to send him back to the same timespace twice, for fear he’d meet himself, so he knew he was exactly a year — to the second — from his previous appearance. As we know now, of course, that worry was irrelevant, but it adds a certain predictability to his visits to Wessex.

This time, Ralph thought, he would be more circumspect, and wouldn’t offer anyone money. It might be that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or maybe Julius Caesar) was not welcome on coins in this place. Or maybe the sight of a silver coin itself was terrifying. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. Maybe he could beg for some small local coins.

Or — that’s it! — he could sell his peace symbol. As long as he didn’t have to talk to anybody, and could get by on grunts and nods and smiles, he was sure he’d be okay. Thank God he’d put his clothes back on.

Ralph staked himself out a small space and sat down on the ground. He smoothed the dirt in front of him and put the ceramic medallion down in the center of the smooth space.

People walked by him, and he tried to attract their attention. He coughed, he waved, he gestured at the peace medallion. People ignored him. He would have to work harder, he thought, since he wasn’t willing to say anything. But he was an engineer: sales had never been his strong point.

So Ralph stood up. He held the medallion out to passersby. They turned their heads away.

Ralph was getting hungry. He thought about the salespeople he knew. They didn’t give up: rather, they ingratiated themselves with their potential customers. He looked around nervously.

He noticed a buxom young woman in the crowd, staring at him intently. She was quite a bit older than the girl who had watched him so carefully last time he was here. She was very pretty — maybe he could include her in his sales pitch, and then, after he sold the medallion, he could buy her something safe to eat.

Ralph smiled at her with what he hoped was his most engaging smile and dangled the medallion, swinging it in her direction and then holding it up as though she might like to try it on.

Almost instantly, a crowd formed. Aha! he thought with a grin: the language of commerce is universal. But then he noticed that they were muttering in a very unpleasant tone, picking up stones and glancing in his direction. Whatever they were saying, it sounded like he was in a mess of trouble.

Ralph was getting a little queasy from this rapid temporal disassociation. He didn’t know what is now common knowledge: that the reverse-Schrödinger effect, which creates the dual timeshadow, causes info-seepage from the newly generated parallel self, adding data at a subconscious level.

Superimposition of the time-traveling Ralph over the newly generated stationary Ralph, fixed in the timestream both forward and back, generated a disorienting interference pattern. The traveling Ralph (TR) influenced the stationary Ralph (SR), and vice-versa, though neither was quite aware of the other. Each of them thought he was acting of his own free will — and indeed each one was, for certain values of free.

At any rate, the crowd was ugly, and Ralph didn’t feel so good. So, of his own free will, Ralph bailed, whacking the toolbar without saying good-bye to the young woman or, really, paying much mind to where he was headed.

Washington, DC, 1865.

Ralph looked around groggily. He was in a theater filled with well-dressed, jolly-looking people, sitting in an uncomfortable seat that was covered in a scratchy red wool. It was anything but soft: horsehair stuffing, probably. The stage in front of him was set as a drawing room. It was lit by lights in the floor that illuminated the actor and actresses rather starkly: a funny-looking, coarsely dressed man and two women in elaborate crinoline dresses.

“Augusta, dear, to your room!” commanded the older of the two actresses, pointing imperiously into the wings, stage right.

“Yes, Ma,” the young woman said, giving the man a withering glance. “Nasty beast!” she said to him, and flounced off the stage.

The dialog sounded a bit stilted to Ralph’s ears, but the audience was genially awaiting the older woman’s comeuppance. Our American Cousin, he thought abruptly, that’s the play — it’s been a hit throughout the war.

He glanced up at what was obviously the presidential box: it was twice the size of the other boxes, and the velvet-covered balustrade at its front, overhanging the stage, had been decorated with red-white-and-blue bunting. Just then, President Lincoln leaned forward through the drapery at the front of the box and rested his elbow on the balustrade to catch the next bit of dialog.

Ralph was dumbstruck, and who would not have been? Medieval England, Woodstock, these had been interesting enough places to visit — but seeing Abraham Lincoln — an iconic figure in American history, an instantly recognizable profile, in the flesh, alive, moving, a real human being, on the very day that the long war had come to a close, with a startlingly cheerful smile on his face as he anticipated a famous comic rejoinder — was to Ralph an intensely moving experience.

He held his breath, frozen, as, at the back of the box, unknown to its occupants, he saw a stunningly handsome man — John Wilkes Booth, he was sure — move in against the wall. Booth pulled out a handgun and drew a bead on the president’s head. Without thinking, Ralph leaped to his feet. “Mr. President! Duck!” he shouted.

The gun went off. There were screams and shrieks from the box. A large young man in the presidential party wrestled with Booth, as Lincoln pulled his wife to one side, shielding her. A woman’s voice rang out, “They have shot the president! They have shot the president!” Lincoln clutched his shoulder, puzzled but not seriously hurt. Booth leaped for the stage, but strong men grabbed him as he landed, and brought him down.

Oh, cripes, Ralph thought. I’ve really done it now. This would change the future irrevocably! He would never find his way back to his own time, or anything resembling it. And, panicking, he hit the mental button a third time.

Wessex, 1442.

Ralph looked around at the damned medieval street market. This time, before he could say anything, an attractive dark-haired woman grabbed his upper arm firmly, pulled him close to her, and spoke into his ear. “Keep your mouth shut, if you know what’s good for you,” she whispered urgently. She looked remarkably like the young woman he had seen before, but a bit older and a lot more intense.

She took him by the arm, and led him through the fair. Toothless old women in their forties offered her root vegetables, but she shook her head. Children tried to sell her sweetmeats, but the young woman pushed on. Without seeming to hurry, without drawing attention to herself or him, she quickly led Ralph to the edge of the fair. People who noticed them smiled knowingly, and some of the men gave him a wink. The woman led him behind a hayrick, a seductive look on her face.

Behind the huge mound of hay, the noise of the fair was diminished, and, for the moment at least, they were visible to no one. The woman’s flirtatious manner had vanished. She pushed Ralph away from her and glared at him. Ralph was a little afraid: didn’t people in medieval times hit one another a lot? This woman was mad.

“Ralph, you idiot!” she said in a low but exasperated voice. She’s not speaking Middle English, Ralph thought. Momentarily he wondered: was she a medieval scholar of modern English? Uh….

She looked at him sternly. “People here are smarter than you think! You have to take some precautions! You can’t just show up and expect everyone to ignore you.”

“What?” said Ralph, brilliantly.

“You dunderhead,” she said. “You’re lucky you weren’t burned at the stake. They were waiting for you, or someone like you. Any old time traveler would do.”

“What’s your name?” Ralph asked.

“I’m Sylvie, but that’s not important.”

“It’s important to me,” said Ralph.

She shook off his attention. “Come with me. Don’t say a word, don’t even open your mouth.”

“But how did you know?” said Ralph. “How do you know I’m a time traveler? Why do you speak a language I can understand?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Sylvie. “You were the first, but you’re not the only. Historians of time travel come here all the time, to see where you landed on that very first trip. The locals are getting restless. They flayed those travelers they identified, or they burned them, or they pressed them to death with stones. We couldn’t let that happen to you, especially before you told us how it worked.”

“How on earth would these yokels have ever noticed me?” he asked.

“Your damn teeth,” she said. “Your flawless, glow-in-the-dark, impossibly white teeth.” She handed him a rather ugly set of yellowish fake teeth. “Put these on now.” Ralph did.

Sylvie then gestured toward a nearby hovel. “Over there,” she said. “Inside. It’s time for you to explain to me how time travel works.” He went where she told him to, and did what she said. How could he not? He was smitten. Fortunately for Ralph, Sylvie was likewise smitten. Many a woman would be, as he was a handsome man with good teeth, and he gave up his secrets readily.

Sylvie then traveled forward, to a time before she was born, and told her parents the secret of time travel. Her parents, who became the most famous temporal anthropologists in history, educated a few others and, when baby Sylvie came along, brought her up to leap gracefully from one century to the next. More gracefully, in fact, than her parents themselves, who vanished in medieval England when Sylvie was twelve. She was, in fact, looking for them when she came upon Ralph that very first time.

Ralph and Sylvie were married in Wessex in 1442, Ralph’s dental glory concealed by his fake teeth. Sylvie, inveterate time-traveler that she was, convinced him they should live in the timestream, giving them a sort of temporal immortality. And this is where Ralph, who was, after all, an engineer, not a physicist, failed to anticipate the effect of his actions.

Time does not fly like an arrow, it turns out. It just lies there, waiting for something new to happen. So when Ralph Drumm showed up — completely inappropriately — in the past, that past changed — the past healed itself — so that he had always been there. He acquired ancestors, was born, grew to adulthood — to Ralph’s exact age in fact — and his body just happened to be in the exact place where Ralph’s timeshadow showed up.

Time travel changes the past as well as the future: time is, in fact, an eternal present when viewed from outside the timestream.

So, as Ralph and Sylvie moved from time to time, they created more and more shadows of themselves in the timestream. As they had children — one, two, three, many — and took them about, the timeshadows of the Drumm children were generated and multiplied. Each shadow was as real as the original. Each shadow lived and breathed… and bred.

Although they were innocent of any ill intent, Ralph and Sylvie Drumm changed the flow of the stream of time in a way more profound than could be accomplished by any single action, no matter how momentous its apparent effect. Their genetic material came to dominate all of human history, an endless army of dark-haired, blue-eyed Caucasians with perfect teeth. They looked the same. They thought the same. They stuck together.

And this is why we, the last remnants of a differentiated humanity, are waiting here today in Wessex, in 1440 — to defend our future from the great surge of the Drummstream. This time, they will not escape us.