Men Who Come Late?

We are still with our Three Time Travel Texts:

The Time Machine

Time Patrol

There Will Be Time

 

I advise everyone to read or reread these works - but I always say that. When we discuss Poul Anderson's several future histories, we also refer to Robert Heinlein. When we discuss Anderson's several works on time travel, we also refer to HG Wells. These are the best in these fields.

Time Patrol

A Time Patrol timecycle disappears at/departs from one set of spatiotemporal coordinates and appears/arrives at another set of coordinates with zero transit time from the point of view of the cycle rider. That rider presets a destination place and time, presses a go button and is there-then instantly without any physical aging or experience of duration. Such a vehicle cannot travel too slowly and therefore arrive at the right place but at a later time. In ordinary travel, the destination time is a future time by which a journey through three-dimensional space is to be completed but, with a timecycle, there is neither travel time nor velocity and its destination time may be future, past or even present. (If the destination time is present, then the timecycle changes its spatial coordinates but not its temporal coordinate.)

 

The Time Machine

The Time Machine, the complete opposite of a timecycle:

 

does not change its spatial coordinates, thus remains stationary on the Earth's surface;

 

undergoes future-ward or past-ward time dilation, thus does endure transit time;

 

indeed, accelerates if the future-ward or past-ward lever is held down firmly;

unaccountably becomes invisible and intangible to everyone else.

 

The Time Traveler's outward journey has no preset destination time. He stops to explore different periods. His return journey stops when he recognizes his laboratory and has passed through the moment when Mrs Watchett walked across the room. At the end, he has vanished three years ago and the outer narrator wonders whether he will ever return. No, If he had been able to return, then he would have done so, as promised, before lunch on the day of his second departure. Nothing could have "delayed" him for three years or more.

There Will Be Time

Jack Havig time travels like the Time Traveler but without a machine. Let's consider him shortly.