TIMESTOP
Copyright © 1984, 2004
by Richard S. Platz
I
My thoughts are so difficult to organize now
that the wings of madness have brushed them. I must shut out
all speculation on the fate of Laura and the children, forget
where I am and what is happening outside. I'll begin by writing
down as best I can a chronology of events leading up to the
advent of Synchronized Time. After that, I don't know. My account
is bound to ramble. Chronology seems to have lost all meaning
after that.
It started about mid-century. There wasn't much
talk of synchronization before then. I had just been hired on
as a national affairs reporter for the New York Times cable
information system. How I long for the bedrock certainty of those
simple days!
The U.S. Presidential election of 2052, as I
recall, first made "synchronicity" a political buzzword.
What smoke-filled rooms and short-sighted ambition underlay
that concept's ignoble emergence, I suppose it really doesn't
matter. Yet I should attempt to be as thorough as possible.
By 2050, the clocks of most scientific and business
computers of the industrialized world had been standardized
to operate on Atomic Time. The characteristic radiation associated
with the element cesium provided an amazingly uniform frequency
of just over nine billion cycles per second. The less advanced
computers were converted to utilize an integral fraction thereof.
By comparison, the movement of celestial bodies around the sun
afforded a primitive means of measuring the increasingly intricate
scheme of human concerns.
Solar calendars had always been awkward at best.
The Julian Calendar was adopted by Julius Caesar before the
birth of Christ and was a reasonably successful attempt, by
four-year cycles, to tailor the cumbersome solar year to fit
into whole days. Three years were composed of 365 days, followed
by a leap year of 366 days. Yet even the Julian Calendar was
approximately eleven minutes out of synchronization with the
mean tropical year.
By 1582 the discrepancy had grown to an egregious
ten days. Pope Gregory XIII, on the advice of the astronomer
Clavius, decreed that ten days be eliminated from the year 1582,
and the Gregorian Calendar was adopted in countries that were
then of the Catholic persuasion. The new calendar provided for
leap years, except for century years, unless they can be divided
by 400, and was accurate to within 26 seconds of the tropical
year. Until the twenty-first century, this was adequate enough.
Twentieth-century scientists had discovered that
the earth tended to speed up or slow down in its axial rotation
as it waltzed with the moon unsteadily around the sun. Scientists
were constantly adding "leap seconds" every year or
so in order to keep the world clocks, based upon the cesium
standard, in time with the wobbling rotation of the planet.
Moreover, the cesium standard was not integrally divisible by
the number of seconds that comprised a sidereal year, which
added a sort of astrophysical insult to the perceived injury
of irregularity.
Vigorous debate consumed the scientific community
when Amahl Khaptse, a professor of mathematics at the University
of California at Berkeley, published an elegant theoretical
solution to both problems. Professor Khaptse's equations provided
a hypothetical means of synchronizing the gravitational clock
of the heavens with the cesium-bound earth. Khaptse's First
Theorem contemplated a slight circularization and mean reduction
of the magnitude of the moon's orbit around the earth. Tidal
drag and orbital irregularity could be brought within calculated
limits to produce an even and precise axial rotation of the
earth with only two slight (by astrophysical standards) applications
of thrust to the lunar body.
What was most remarkable, however, was how neatly
Khaptse's Second Theorem derived from his First. The adjustment
he theorized would produce more than just an orbital effect.
It would also have relativistic consequences. The fabric of
time itself would be altered, if only slightly. As Einstein
had shown, time slows down in the vicinity of a massive object.
The lunar mass would be decreased a tiny bit, converted into
energy and propelled at relativistic speeds into the darkness
of intergalactic space. As the combined earth-moon mass was
decreased this infinitesimal fraction with respect to the gravitational
constant, G, time would be minutely reduced in the region of
the solar system, so that the sidereal day, month, and year
would each fall within the limits of octave projections of the
frequency of vibrations of the cesium atom. The decaying lunar
orbit would offset the theoretical decrease in the value of
G over time so that the whole system, once adjusted, would stay
synchronized for the next ten million years. Like monstrous
orchestral instruments, the earth and the heavens would at last
be brought into permanent temporal harmony.
Initial professional criticism of Khaptse's remarkable
insights was abruptly silenced when the eminent physicist Gustav
Immelmann and his colleagues at the National Planetary Institute
in Hamburg, Germany, not only confirmed Khaptse's equations,
but suggested that the endeavor was well within the resources
and technology of a world society with interplanetary thermonuclear
capabilities. In a series of published lectures Immelmann described
in minute detail how the adjustment might in fact be accomplished.
What astrophysics had to do with politics, I
was never really certain, but in 2051 the Neo-Republicans adopted
the Khaptse-Immelmann time synchronization program as a major
platform plank. The elegance of Khaptse's equations and the
beautiful simplicity of Immelmann's applications held a grip
on the human spirit far beyond their supposed utility. Why,
the Neo-Republicans asked, should we allow the cosmos to be
out of tune with man's finest technological achievements when
it would be so simple to do something about it? Why, indeed.
No one could have begun to imagine the frightful consequences
of that innocent political rhetoric.
Following his landslide election, the President
moved quickly to solicit the cooperation of the former members
of the Soviet Union under the new spirit of international detente
that then prevailed. The Russians agreed that the project could
be carried out as a part of the recently negotiated Nuclear Arms
Reduction Treaty of 2050. Both nations would contribute equally
from their stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons to provide the
explosive force necessary for the project. Many hoped that a synchronization
of the spheres might engender increased sympathetic harmony in
the affairs of mankind.
Yet no issue of the twenty-first century so divided
the peoples of the world. Sychronizationists saw universal harmony
as an expression of God's will and a mandate of man's holy mission.
Billions of people, however, mostly in the Third and Fourth
World countries, decried as blasphemous the proposed tampering
with the workings of the divine celestial clock. The peasant
riots which beset England when Parliament adopted the Gregorian
Calendar and dropped 11 days from the year 1752 were as nothing
compared to the religious conflagration that engulfed the planet,
culminating in the bombing of the United Nations General Assembly
in 2055 by the suicidal minions of the Ayatollah Abdulbonzoh.
But the industrialized world was not to be deterred.
Doomsayers were dismissed as ignorant fanatics, which, for the
most part, they were. Businessmen convinced themselves that
synchronization would facilitate a global interchange of information
and set the stage for true international marketing. Scientists
demanded to know if Khaptse's equations would prove correct.
Technocrats accepted Immelmann's plan as a challenge worthy
of their greatest skills, and the shareholders of technology
stocks urged them on. Once the gauntlet had been cast down,
the leaders of the world's superpowers feared that breaking
off the undertaking might be construed as an act against the
interests of world peace. In short, those who wielded the temporal
power were committed to the attempt at synchronization.
Curiously, no one suspected the real danger. It was an almost
universally accepted scientific postulate that time travel was
impossible. The concept reeked of logical inconsistency. Causality
was perceived to be embedded essentially in a one-way arrow of
time. What became of future effects if someone were to travel
back in time and altered their causes? What, for example, if a
man killed his own father before the man had met his mother? Besides,
if time travel were truly possible, where were the time travelers
from the future who should be haunting our lives? No one spoke
of timestops as pork-barrel politics shifted into high gear and
eroded the remaining islands of resistance to the project.
Preliminary feasibility studies were completed
by the spring of 2056. Design and construction contracts were
awarded in great haste to take advantage of the favorable positioning
of the earth and moon during late November and early December,
2059. The Russian Space Agency, NASA, ESA, and TWSA cooperated
to meet a complex time schedule on a global scale never before
undertaken. Nuclear devices were shuttled aloft and assembled
in earth orbit, then ferried into lunar orbit and carefully
lowered to the moon's surface in an intricate pattern along
its leading edge as it circled the earth. Lest the moon itself
be blown apart, the devices were programed to go off sequentially
over a period of ninety minutes during the apogee firing, and
for fifteen minutes in the second, more abrupt, perigee burn
scheduled for two weeks later. Calculations were checked and
rechecked, equipment tested and the results analyzed, a firing
sequencer with triple redundancy deployed, and all International
Lunar Outposts evacuated as an additional safety precaution
against major moonquakes. A massive information campaign bombarded
the earth's population with warnings against watching the blasts
without protective glasses. Winter solstice of the year 2059
was to mark the end of the Gregorian Calendar and the beginning
of Synchronized Time, or S.T., from which all future events
would be measured.
I covered much of the background preparation for
the Times and was on call during the first firing. I watched
it from the airport in Washington, D.C., as the moon hung low
in a clear and crisp eastern twilight. The nuclear explosions
themselves were hidden below the moon's lower lim, but I saw with
my own eyes the incredibly beautiful, brilliant spectral beams
of ionized fire flashing below the horizon like a cosmic beacon
in the interstellar night.
Two weeks later I was fighting a bout with the
flu, so I couldn't join the Times staff on its flight to
Fiji to watch the second firing, which would not be visible from
the continental United States. I was cold and achy and went to
bed early that night in the spare bedroom so Laura, my wife, wouldn't
be kept awake by my feverish tossing. I was so exhausted I intentionally
neglected to set the alarm to watch the early-morning television
coverage of the event.
II
I must have awakened in the first moments of
the new Synchronized Time, probably in the very first second.
I discovered that the scientific community was dead wrong about
time travel, although there is no way I could have understood
then what was happening.
In profound terror and confusion I awoke to a hell
more terrible than all the circles of Dante's Inferno,
to a landscape more bizarre than the paintings of Hieronymus Bosche
stroboscopically superimposed upon one another, to a chaos more
paralyzing than Jkeirt's Schizoid. The only thing I knew
was that I had surely gone raving mad, the fever had burned out
my brain. Sledgehammer vivacity decreed it was no dream, yet there
could be no reality to what I was experiencing.
No words can describe what was happening. Yet
I must try, if only to relate the flavor of the madness. Such
is my charge.
Reality pulsed and fluttered wildly, vividly,
horribly, nauseatingly. At first the whirl was so fast as to
be impenetrable, a mad roaring fulsomeness of sound and sight
and feeling. In time I began to distinguish individual split-seconds
flailing past as radically reconfigured versions of each other.
It was as if a drunken God had cut each single frame from the
motion picture of his Creation, had reassembled the severed
frames randomly, and was now projecting the results at twice
the proper speed. The experience sated every sense. To say I
sat up in bed or got to my feet is a gross oversimplification.
I sat up, stood up, lay back, rolled over, shook my head, fought
to regain my balance, screamed, and did and felt hundreds of
acts all as a part of the same fragmented instant. Each action
was interwoven with all the others, but in no comprehensible
order.
The time travelers were there from the first
instant, of course. When the flux had slowed enough for me to
perceive them, I thought at first they were my own twisted hallucinations.
As if the insane imagination of an illustrator of horror comic
books had been given free rein to reconstruct reality, in great
metamorphosing hordes his creatures overran everything, sampling,
tearing apart, inspecting, tasting, rearranging, coming and
going, wielding strange instruments, fighting among themselves,
appearing and disappearing with the rest of the chaos. Some
looked human, some did not. Faceless humanoids argued with furry
little apes, while tentacled anemones exchanged tools with a
white-shawled lizard. They might have come from other planets,
or been the future inheritors of this earth, or maybe they were
simply evolutionary alternatives to ourselves. I didn't know
who or what they were, why they were there, or what they wanted,
though I began to suspect that they, and not my fever, were
the cause of the madness.
As the pace of the pulses slackened, the degree
of alteration grew ever more drastic and bizarre. I remember one
early impression more vividly than the rest. For an instant I
saw Laura standing in the doorway of my room, and I cried out
to her. She came and went, leaning against the door frame one
instant, kneeling the next, then writhing in the grip of a slimy
green horror, she fluttered into and out of existence.
I reached out to her. A huge alligator-like beast appeared next
to me and ripped off my right arm. I could feel its teeth puncture
my flesh and the horrible pain as my shoulder socket gave way.
An instant later my arm was restored and healthy, the pain had
vanished, and Laura was gone.
I stared at my arm, and before my eyes hundreds
of jolts of change darkened it, covered it with sores, healed
it, made it swell, grew hair as thick as a gorilla's, slashed
it off painfully just below the elbow, restored it, and created
and revised nuances I can't begin to remember or describe. At
the same time I felt the incompatible sensations from inside,
the pressure, the pain, the numbness, the itch, the warmth and
cold, the stiffness and tone of each alteration. And it wasn't
just my arm. Everything was changing, pulsing into and out of
being, lengthening, shortening, changing color and shape, my body,
the house, the bushes, trees, hills and sky outside the window,
when the window was there at all. I can remember only a tiny fraction
of the visions and revisions, the pains, the elations, the horrors,
and I can describe them only inadequately. For that I am grateful.
I was terrified. It seemed as though strange creatures
were surrounding me and wanted to slice me open. I tried to run,
but had no coordination. I grew dizzy and vomited, and at the
same time I did not vomit. I tried closing my eyes and covering
my ears. But still I felt and smelled and tasted the raw chaos
all about me. And there was always accompanying me a flickering
counterpoint of myself who did shut my eyes or cover my
ears as I sat, stood, ran, recoiled, and tumbled through space
in kaleidoscopic confusion.
I tried to look for Laura and the children, but
the task was impossible. The terrain through which I had to
search was alien to me and in constant flux. I stumbled over
everything. My own body was unreliable. I reached for a doorknob
and the door disappeared, stepped onto the front porch, and
I was kneeling in a desert. I was as helpless as a newborn baby.
Terror is an exhausting emotion. It can only
last so long before it burns itself out. Deep inside I grew
aware of a kernel of myself which alone seemed to be untouched
by the whirling chaos, a center which perceived, remembered
imperfectly, and tried to compare one facet with another. I
recognized it as the same place of calmness I had found practicing
the bio-feedback techniques my doctor had prescribed to lower
my blood pressure. I fled there for refuge. One version of myself
after another sought that tranquility, which spread outward
from the center into all my fragmented versions like ripples
across a pond. I sat down and listened to my breathing as it
slowed. A thousand fragmented times I sat down. A thousand times
I began to follow my breathing. Gradually my mind stopped paying
so much attention to the mad sensations assaulting me, and the
pond within grew still. I fell into a waking torpor.
I don't know how much time passed. It could have
been minutes, days, or even weeks, if those quaint concepts
have relevant meaning any longer. I ate, I slept, I passed my
bodily wastes as a part of the splintered pattern of doing and
not doing, but whether on a thousand different occasions, or
only once with a thousand revisions, I have no way of judging.
Memory itself had become shattered and unreliable. I felt as
if I had died and been reborn ten thousand times. Now I know
it was truly so.
Gradually curiosity overcame my fear of the time
travelers. With a few I held brief conversations, until they
would vanish before my eyes. I learned that they had come from
the distant future. I asked what it was like there, but their
answers were as confusing and inconsistent as the chaos in which
we held our chat.
I don't know when I first saw the Ringmaster. I
call him that because he looked exactly like the drawing of the
Ringmaster in an antique Ringling Brothers Circus poster Laura
had hung in the family room. I grasped immediately that there
was something different about him. His appearance was bizarre,
more like an animated wax manikin with artificial skin and unsighted
eyes, than like a real human being. But it wasn't his curiously
familiar appearance, nor the absurd swallow-tailed tuxedo and
top hat he wore that distinguished him. Far too many creatures
more incredible than he were coming and going for his looks to
have mattered much. But he didn't change. The chaotic flux
did not touch his constant presence. My gaze lay upon him as the
eyes of a seasick sailor might languish on the unmoving shore.
When he knew he had my attention, he beckoned
me to follow him. He brought me to this cavern. How we got here,
through what territory we traveled, I haven't any clue. I don't
know whether we're still on the planet earth. But my very own
bed sits miraculously in a little stony alcove, and nearby fresh
groceries are neatly arranged on the familiar blue gingham surface
of our kitchen table. Here the walls of rock don't change, the
light that emanates from nowhere glows constant, and sleep is
possible. Only the sporadic pulsing, the flickering of being
itself distinguishes this from more pleasant times gone by.
III
I fell into a deep sleep, woke up, and found
myself alone. I ate, explored the small chamber, and slept again.
When I awoke the second time, the Ringmaster
was seated upon a three-legged stool beside my bed. He looked
more like a parody of a circus ringmaster than the real thing.
His jacket was threadbare, his shirt yellowing from age, his
taxidermic eyes glazed and staring, and his tiny mustachio was
penciled onto his upper lip. When he spoke, his words were out
of sync with his mouth movements like a poorly manipulated ventriloquist's
dummy. He was obviously a robot or a puppet, but what was animating
him I couldn't determine.
We held a conversation of sorts. Actually, I'm
not really sure he spoke at all. It seemed as if his words simply
appeared in my mind in response to my spoken inquiries while
his jaw flapped an inept percussion accompaniment. Much of what
he said to me I never did comprehend, but he assured me that
it was of no great importance. What follows is not literally
accurate, but an approximation of what he said, or what I understood
of what he said.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"We are a colony," was his reply.
"You mean you represent a colony?"
"No, we are a colony of all the surviving
humans. Souls,' is the word that might apply, approximately.
This appearance was created just for you alone to help you feel
more at ease."
"Are you the only ones who survive?"
"We are one alternative of those who survive."
I wasn't sure what that meant. "Where
is this place?"
"Deep inside a mountain, in a cave."
"Do you know my wife Laura?"
"We know who she is, yes."
"Can you bring her here?"
"We are sorry, but that is not to be."
"My children?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"There is no way you can be made to comprehend
that. There are no sufficient words to explain."
I was frustrated, and the presumption of his
reply angered me. "What do you want from me?"
"We want you to write an account of what
has happened."
"But I don't know what's happened."
"What you do not know, we will explain."
I thought about the offer for a moment. At least
it was a beginning. I settled myself more comfortably on the
bed. "What went wrong? Did Professor Khaptse make a miscalculation
somewhere?"
"No, Professor Khaptse's equations were
impeccable. The earth and the heavens were brought into precise
harmony, just as he had predicted. However, the relativistic
consequences of twisting the fabric of time, if we may use that
metaphor, had implications he never dreamed of."
"Like what?"
"It created a timestop."
"A timestop?"
"By altering time just slightly, your civilization
created a kink in the flow of time that could not be crossed
by the time travelers. If you would permit us an analogy that
might be helpful, it is as if time were a growing tree, and
the trunk was severed through by your synchronization project.
Above the cut, the trunk has been twisted, only slightly, but
enough so that the phloem and xylem tubes no longer line up.
Nothing can pass through."
"But I passed through."
"Yes, you and your entire world grew through
once, at the time the cut was made, but only once, and never
again."
"But . . . I still don't understand. That
doesn't explain anything. Why is everything so chaotic now?"
"Because you are now beyond the timestop
and thus live in a universe that contains time travel. The time
travelers have caused all the confusion."
"How are they to blame?"
"They have gone back and reshaped events
by altering their causes. Each one has attempted to remake the
world the way he wishes it to be." He paused to let the
words sink in. "And whenever a cause is changed, time is
bifurcated. Both the original and altered versions subsist completely.
Consider it this way: the first time traveler went back and
made the first tiny change, and suddenly there were two equally
valid alternative realities, and two time travelers existed
where there had only been one. Ten changes produced ten alternatives
and ten time travelers, each with the power to change causes
and create alternative realities."
"My God! I had no idea! How many realities
are there on this side of the timestop?"
"They are without limit. Time has exploded
into infinity, not lineally, but laterally. The number of alternatives
expands sideways in a geometrical progression."
"Who invented time travel? When was it devised?"
"That's impossible to determine now, so
many alternatives have been overlaid. Nor is it important. The
dynamics are rather simple. Someone was bound to discover it
some day, and as soon as he began to alter causes, the proliferation
of alternatives was inevitable."
"Couldn't it be controlled?"
"Oh, it has been controlled quite effectively
in some alternative universes. But someone from one reality or
another always goes back and undermines the controls by altering
their causes."
"Are there no timestops in the future?"
"Yes, plenty of them. But their causes are
always accessible, so they are inevitably undone. Yours was
the last timestop before the discovery of time travel and consequently
the earliest limit whose causes cannot be undone."
"Who are the time travelers? Are they our
descendants?"
"Yes, most of them are."
"That means some of those alive on earth
at the time of the Synchronization survive, doesn't it? And
their children survive."
"The time travelers are quite fond of manipulating
genetic causes. Every possible combination of human DNA which
existed at the time of the timestop has undoubtedly been tried
in one world or another, its product brought to term, given
birth, and nurtured to maturity. The descendants of those experimental
unions now people the uncountable alternative realities."
"What about Laura? What about the boys?
Christ! What's happened to the six billion people on earth?"
His response was slow in coming, as if he would
have preferred not to discuss such things. "In infinite
time," he finally replied, "everything is not only
possible or likely, but inevitable."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"As a rough approximation, it is probably
fair to say that everything has happened to them."
The response so upset me I was unable to continue
for quite a while. I tried to press the Ringmaster for what
he meant by "everything." Admittedly it was an absurd
request. I asked him for examples, but he refused to give me
any, and certainly that was for the best. I believe I'm in more
danger of losing my mind trying to comprehend what's happened
to Laura and the children than in recalling the brief madness
I experienced for myself.
We adjourned our conversation until the next
"day", as I like to think of my periods between sleep.
By that time I was again relatively composed and had innumerable
questions for him.
"So that's what I've been experiencing?
The flurry of alternative realities rushing past?"
"Yes."
"Why is it so confusing to me? Why am I
unable to cope?"
"You were designed by a half-billion years
of evolution to live in one particular sort of world. There
was nothing to prepare you for this."
"Could I learn? Could I . . . adjust?"
"For the most part, no, not by yourself."
"And the six billion others?"
"No. You that were conceived and born before
the timestop experience each change as it occurs. But like the
timestop itself, your parentage is immune from alteration. You
cannot be erased. In a sense, you are the canvass upon which
the changes are painted. You hold the fragmented universe together."
"For how long?"
"That question has no meaning, unless you
specify which alternative you are talking about."
"But some manage to survive and produce
offspring. You said that yourself. How are they able to cope?"
"In some alternative universes their descendants
come back to help them."
"Who are the others, the non-human time
travelers?"
"Some alternatives go very far into the
future and link up with other civilizations which may or may
not be associated with yours, and they also participate."
"From other stars?"
"Yes, some."
"Can't you get behind the timestop by going
back at some other place, some other star, and traveling here?"
"No. Space and time are not fundamentally
different. Some places, like some times, are inaccessible to
the time travelers."
"Why do I experience none of the changes
here in this cave?"
"Because we have painstakingly collected
all of your alternatives and brought them here."
"How do you remain constant? How do
you keep from fluctuating like everything else?"
"There is no way that you can be made to
comprehend that. There are no words to suffice."
"But you have mastered the flux, the change.
Are you in control of it all?"
"No. No one is in control. We are but one
of an infinite number of solutions, no better or worse than
any other."
"What do you really look like?"
"That concept has no meaning. We do not
radiate or reflect electromagnetic impulses of a frequency which
your retina or your science could perceive."
"You're invisible."
"Yes."
"How large are you?"
"That concept has no meaning. We are infinite
and nonexistent. There is no way that you can be made to comprehend
that. There are no words to suffice."
"You travel through time?"
"Yes."
"How long is time?"
"Infinitely long and infinitely short. There
is no way that you can be made to comprehend that. There are
no words to suffice."
"Try me."
"That is impossible."
"How many . . . souls' are you?"
"An infinite number, and none."
"You answer my questions the same way, with
no answer at all."
"Yes, many of your questions require the
same response. It is very difficult for us to try to reduce
such complex matters into thoughts, let alone to mere words.
We are very sorry."
IV
Our conversations went on for days, and the Ringmaster
took great pains to answer every question I could think of.
Many of his responses were so strange I find them difficult
to believe. But I have no alternative explanation for what has
befallen me, so I just have to trust him. What difference does
it make anyway?
He offered an explanation for why reality is
always flickering, even here in this cave. In the infinite onslaught
of possibilities, of personalities, countless suicidal desperadoes
with unimaginable destructive capabilities return to annihilate
the universe itself. They are frequently successful. There are
also, however, an unlimited number of do-gooders who do not
want the universe ended and who inevitably return to thwart
the schemes of the nihilists. Null universes are thus intermixed
throughout the deck of possibilities.
The Ringmaster tells me that my account will
be sent back through the timestop somehow, as a warning. I couldn't
understand how, and he didn't try very hard to explain it to
me. I suspect it has something to do with what we used to call
"telepathy." Physical matter cannot pass through the
timestop, but something else can. Something else will influence
the "imagination," as the Ringmaster calls it, of
a person living before the timestop.
It sounds to me like he's trying to change the
causes on the other side of the timestop. Either it won't work,
or it will lead to the same insane chaos there that has damned
the world on this side of the timestop.
The Ringmaster says, no, I don't understand.
He has insisted that I compose this account for the world just
prior to the Great Synchronization.
I asked him why he doesn't do it himself. He
says that only someone who has come from the past can make himself
comprehensible to those still living then. He has trouble limiting
his thinking to mere concepts, his concepts to words. Besides,
he assures me I will do an excellent job, since he has already
seen my message and has selected it from among hundreds of other
candidates to be the one he will actually send.
How can I argue with that?
I have no advice to give those who come before,
for I can see no solution to the dilemma. If the timestop is never
created, then the time travelers will always be there,
and the world I knew will never have existed. Perhaps they can
postpone its creation for a little while, but heaven help them
if they wait too long.
I've though about it quite a bit, and I really
have nothing to add. I hope the Ringmaster knows what he's doing.
And if this account somehow manages to get through . . . good
luck.
Author's Note
Man, this's nutty. I was on m'way t'work at the
Carwash, mindin' m'own business, don'cha know, when this jive
riff starts t'runnin' through m'head so bad I can' think straight.
I make it straight t'Eddie's, cause he's usually hip to
this kinda weird shit.
Well, when I gets there, Eddie ain't home, see,
but he's got this hot typewriter he's been figurin'ta unload
forever, man, an' I axes his ol' lady if I can see it, an' she
says, sure, an' I don' even know how t'type fer Chrissake!
Well she drags the motha' out, sticks some paper
in't, an' I sits down an' starts typin' out this jive shit I
don' ev'n unnerstan' like I was her friggin' welfare worker.
This keeps up fer a coupla hours an' Eddie's ol' lady's really
freakin', don'cha know, an' then I'm done, an' that's wha' this
here is.
Wha'da'ya make of it, man?
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