Tempus Itinerantur

Elspeth looked around the room at her group of twelve students. These were the brightest students, specially selected from the space academy and so far, they hadn’t let her down. But it was still early days.

To get into the Space Academy, you needed to be bright, adaptable, intelligent, very fit, endurance-tested and have a mind that was not constrained by conformity; no lingering biases that might influence the success or failure of a mission. Impartiality was paramount.

But to get into Elspeth’s fledgling course, you needed something else: the ability to suspend disbelief, because Elspeth taught Time-Travel.

Time-Travel had been anticipated ever since Einstein’s theory of space, time and gravity had proposed that time travelled at different speeds in the universe and that the atomic clock slowed down when away from the earth. But milliseconds of differences were never going to get anyone excited.

Until one day the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland produced a man from its portal. He just walked out of it. But he hadn’t walked in – yet! Pietre Anderssen was the first man to time-travel, and he had done it by accident, but no-one knew how because obviously, the portal wasn’t activated at the time.

Pietre had been carrying out routine maintenance and was totally unaware that anything was wrong until he met himself at his own desk. There had been a few moments of consternation, and security had been called. Pietre explained that he hadn’t been anywhere near the portal and wasn’t due to work on it until tomorrow’s scheduled service check and then Pietre explained that he had just finished doing the scheduled maintenance. Finally, in a room filled with geniuses whose IQ’s were all in the high 100’s – someone thought to ask Pietre the date.

‘June 4th.’

‘June 5th.’

‘Oh.’

And then suddenly there was a lot of talk. Loud voices. Loud excited voices! And then a Very Loud Voice that said ‘Ruhig Sein!’ and everybody shut up immediately.

The director, Otto Schweissman, had then summoned Pietre and Pietre and a few of the senior scientists into the board room where they spent the next hour questioning the future Pietre about what he had been doing to cause what appeared to be a rupture in time. Pietre didn’t know. As far as he was concerned, he had manipulated some of the loose particle transistor magnets to re-align them. Then he had picked up his tools and walked out.

‘What is going to happen to me?’ both Pietres wanted to know, not unreasonably. The decision was made to take future Pietre back to the portal, get him to reverse what he’d done, and see if he went back to his future. By now, he had been away for five hours and the discussion ensued as to whether or not he would re-appear instantly after his initial transportation, or if it would be five hours later in his time. Very quietly, some discussed the possibility that he might be transported somewhere else altogether but were careful that neither of the Pietres heard them. This time, everybody followed and Pietre had an audience filming him. Pietre manipulated the magnetics as he had before and promptly disappeared.

Everyone had been reminded that they had signed the Official Secrets Act and not a word was to be spoken about this.

*

Pietre had a bad night’s sleep and despite his wife and daughter repeatedly asking him what was wrong, he never said anything. The next morning at CERN, he flatly refused to service the portal until someone pointed out that if he didn’t, then he wouldn’t be able to come back, or if he did come back, then there could be two of him. Pietre gave up. After watching the film of what he had already done, he repeated the process and promptly disappeared. Five hours later he re-appeared and was immediately catapulted into a fame usually reserved for the likes of Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong. Unlike them, he was not allowed to tell anybody. CERN promoted him into the newly created position of Director of Particle Studies, (DOPS) wrote him an enviable job description and tripled his salary. Pietre agreed with everything on the condition that he never had to time-travel again.

*

Now, five years later, his daughter Elspeth was instructing the first ever recruits for the new program, ‘Tempus Itinerantur’. There had of course, been two major obstacles to overcome. The first was the physical problem of regulating how far in time the time-traveler could travel and second was, what could the traveler achieve in the past? Doing the smallest thing could significantly alter the future! The temptation to do something dramatic, such as assassinate Hitler and change the course of history, was terrifyingly real. The other parameter that sat quietly in the back of everyone’s minds, was that if time travel into the past was possible, was future travel ever going to be discovered?

Now, a mere five years later, the process had been refined, if not completely understood. Ethics was now the major dilemma. Elspeth had since majored in psychiatry and behavioral studies and it was her job to ensure that those who traveled would be mentally capable.

Elspeth looked over her class. They were excitedly chatting to one another as they discussed their first time-trip, scheduled for tomorrow morning. They already knew it was going to be a success because they had just met their future selves that had traveled back, and discussed the experience.

Elspeth coughed. Nobody took any notice. ‘Students, your attention, please.’ Silence dropped like a stone. ‘I am aware that all of you came into this facility to enter space and if that is your preference, you are free to leave now.’ Nobody moved. Space travel had not progressed further than the moon base and the space station. Setting up hydroponics and atmosphere creation was essential, but in reality it was just off-planetary eco-husbandry.

The students fidgeted and while some looked at her eagerly, others looked away. She noted which was which. ‘Time travel has problems,' she continued. 'You will no doubt encounter societies that are different than anything you can imagine. You need to be prepared for this. What would you take with you for a journey into the past? Anyone? Fillippa, what do you think?’

‘Would we know in advance where we are going?’

‘Hypothetically, yes.’

There was a burst of nervous giggles from across the room.

‘Then I would want to make sure I was dressed like everyone else.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Probably, but …’

‘A gun!’ Tully called out from the back of the room. ‘You never know when you are going to need to protect yourself.’

‘Not a good idea, Tully. You might end up shooting your own grandfather. Worse still, you might shoot mine!’ Elspeth put a X against Tully’s name while the room filled with catcalls.

‘I was only joking!’ protested Tully. But Elspeth had noted that it had come quickly to his mind, so he was out.

‘Jenna, what about you? What would you take?’

‘A recording device. Because then history could be properly recorded and we’d know the truth!’

‘Uh-huh. And you would explain this to people … how? There you are, using a camera in medieval times. You’d get burned as a witch!’ Elspeth put an X against her name, too. ‘Anybody else got any reasons why it’s not a good idea to take a recording device back in time? Anybody? Grae, you have something?’

Grae tentatively raised his hand. ‘Look, I don’t know, but I’ve got a bit of a feeling that time sorts everything out eventually. Ummm… look at Japan. That got nuked at the end of World War two. It was terrible! It was a true crime against humanity that wiped out millions of non-combatants. And it didn’t happen once; they saw what happened and then they did it again! The perpetrators should have been hounded and tried, because that was large scale murder, much worse than anything Hitler did. But the wash-up years later is that the Japanese rebuilt their whole society. And now they are a power-house nation. If someone had changed that, yes, millions of Japanese lives would have been saved, but nobody would have learned anything. So, I guess I’m saying that in the end, I trust people to try and get things right eventually.’

Elspeth didn’t react. She knew that she mustn’t let her students know that she was continually monitoring and reselecting them. She quietly put a tick against Grae’s name. This was by no means a final grading, but it was a good start for when she transcribed her notes later.

‘Can I ask a question?’ This was Ishrael. He was constantly teased as people pretended his name was an accident, because his dad had a lisp. He thought it was funny enough to retell the joke himself and was good humored enough never to tire of it. Elspeth nodded at him. ‘What’s the point?’ he asked. ‘I mean, if we aren’t going back to change the past or to see what really happened, then why bother? I can’t see any advantage.’

‘That, Ishrael, is precisely the reason for this course. You are right, we don’t know. That being the case, what would you take with you into the past? I mean, we have perfectly good records of what has already happened, so why bother?’

Ishrael shrugged. It was almost lunchtime, and everyone was exhausted after the thrill of meeting themselves earlier. The adrenolin levels had since dropped considerably.

‘Elspeth…?’ That was Tanika. Elspeth had studied her CV when she was allocated a place in the class and wondered who had pulled strings to get her admitted. Tanika had very little to recommend her.

‘Tanika. You have a question?’

‘Ummm. No, not really. I was thinking about what you’d take with you into the past. I think I’d take a good open mind. Non-judgmental. Not interfering, but maybe looking out for opportunities. I mean, like when your dad went through the portal…’

Elspeth was shocked! That was still a Closed File. How could she know?

‘… if they hadn’t taken the action they did and investigated it, we’d never be here. Perhaps it was a push from the future that molded the past to create the future?’

Elspeth’s mind reeled! Is that what had happened? Had someone from the future actually configured the Portal to send her father back to the past and then made sure that the process was repeated to send him forward again? And they knew it would be safe, because they had already read about it in their history books. And so, they had to make sure that it happened. Elspeth sat heavily in her seat and leaned on her desk while the lunch bell clanged along with the tumult of noise in her mind. The students didn’t wait, they erupted from the room and made their way down to the canteen. Tanika walked over and pulled a book from her shoulder bag.

‘Before I go, I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind signing this for me?’ she murmured.

Elspeth looked at the book. On the front cover was a picture of herself, sitting at the very desk she was sitting at now. The book was entitled ‘Adventures in Time’, by Elspeth Mackilroy. As she looked up, Tanika snapped her picture. Elspeth realized with a jolt, that she was wearing these same clothes on the cover of the book that she was holding. Tanika handed her a pen and opened the book to the flyleaf.

‘Tanika – T-a-n-i-k-a, if you don’t mind?’

Elspeth obediently wrote ‘To Tanika, thank you. Elspeth Anderssen’.

‘Mackilroy? I take it I get married at some time in the future? Can I look inside?’

Tanika smiled. ‘Better than that, I brought you your own copy. You’d better not let anybody else see – but I trust you to keep it a secret.’

‘Errr…. Thank you. Will I see you this afternoon?’

‘You know you won’t.’ Tanika held out her hand and Elspeth shook it. ‘Goodbye, Elspeth. It was a great honour to meet you. I’m going back now.’

Tanika left and a few moments later, Elspeth noticed that her name had disappeared from the student roll. ‘Gone back to the future,’ she mused, and then wondered where she had heard that phrase before.