The Future II

...and the same can probably be said of time travelers.

Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207- 288.

In 1973, Martin Saunders and Sam Hull plan a brief exploratory journey to 2073. Sam says:

"'Come on...Let's go, Mart. Sooner we set out, the sooner we can get back.'" (p. 210)

No, Sam. If you can travel through time, then you can return to the moment of your departure or even earlier.

Their time projector is a metal cylinder, ten feet high, thirty long, containing a large dimensional projector, battery banks and a small forward space for the time travelers. Their automatic time projectors are simply much smaller cylinders and thus are reminiscent of the Time Traveler's model Time Machine, except that the time projectors are programmed to return - except that they don't. Saunders thinks that their vacuum tubes must have blown or some such problem. Saunders the physicist and Hull the mechanic, carrying with them many spare parts and tools, should be able to cope with any technical difficulties. They set off:

"A hundred years ahead - less the number of days since they'd sent the first automatic, just so that no dunderhead in the future would find it and walk off with it...." (p. 211)

But, on arrival, they find no automatics. Hull remarks:

"'That's odd...But maybe the ground-level adjustments -...'" (p. 212)

He does not complete his sentence. What was he going to suggest? The projector, better equipped than the Time Machine, contains a ground-level machine that automatically materializes the vehicle on the surface and mass-sensitive circuits that prevent materialization inside any other solid object. (Liquids and gasses move aside.) In any case, the projector departs from an underground workshop and arrives in a pit which is clearly the former basement of the house. Thus, its "surface" does not seem to have moved much in a hundred years.

They think that they have arrived a few minutes after the automatics started back and that the latter blew out on the way. But, in that case, why does the pit not contain blown-out, weather-worn automatics? Well, there could have been any number of "dunderheads" between whenever the automatics blew out and the arrival of Saunders and Hull - especially if the automatics blew out before the house burned down and while it was still occupied.

In 2013, they find the two automatics, "...tarnished with some years of weathering." (p. 215)

So maybe the automatics made it back as far as 2000? Saunders examines them with instruments, presumably inside the big time projector, thus explaining why there was no trace of the automatics at any later time. Saunders is the "dunderhead."