Space Barista

 

I’m doing something new! I am including the newly-public-domain book “The Time Machine” by HG Wells in each post, so you can read snippets with me! We started yesterday, and we are on Chapter 1. Here we go!

 

‘Scientific people,’ proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required
for the proper assimilation of this, ‘know very well that Time is only a kind of
Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace
with my finger shows the movement of the barometer. Yesterday it was so high,
yesterday night it fell, then this morning it rose again, and so gently upward
to here. Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of
Space generally recognized? But certainly it traced such a line, and that line,
therefore, we must conclude was along the Time-Dimension.’

‘But,’ said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, ‘if Time is
really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has it always been,

regarded as something different? And why cannot we move in Time as we move
about in the other dimensions of Space?’

The Time Traveller smiled. ‘Are you sure we can move freely in Space?
Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men always
have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how about up
and down? Gravitation limits us there.’

‘Not exactly,’ said the Medical Man. ‘There are balloons.’

‘But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the inequalities of
the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement.’

‘Still they could move a little up and down,’ said the Medical Man.
‘Easier, far easier down than up.’

‘And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present
moment.’

‘My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole
world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present movement.
Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing
along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the
grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above
the earth’s surface.’

‘But the great difficulty is this,’ interrupted the Psychologist. ‘You can move
about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time.’
‘That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we
cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very
vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as
you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying
back for any length of time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying
six feet above the ground. But a civilised man is better off than the savage in
this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he
not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along
the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?’

‘Oh, this,’ began Filby, ‘is all—’

‘Why not?’ said the Time Traveller.

‘It’s against reason,’ said Filby.

‘What reason?’ said the Time Traveller.

‘You can show black is white by argument,’ said Filby, ‘but you will never
convince me.’

‘Possibly not,’ said the Time Traveller. ‘But now you begin to see the object
of my investigations into the geometry of Four Dimensions. Long ago I had a
vague inkling of a machine—’

‘To travel through Time!’ exclaimed the Very Young Man.
‘That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as the
driver determines.’

Filby contented himself with laughter.

‘But I have experimental verification,’ said the Time Traveller.

‘It would be remarkably convenient for the historian,’ the Psychologist suggested.
‘One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the Battle of
Hastings, for instance!’

‘Don’t you think you would attract attention?’ said the Medical Man. ‘Our
ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms.’

‘One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato,’ the Very
Young Man thought.

‘In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German
scholars have improved Greek so much.’

‘Then there is the future,’ said the Very Young Man. ‘Just think! One might
invest all one’s money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on ahead!’

‘To discover a society,’ said I, ‘erected on a strictly communistic basis.’

‘Of all the wild extravagant theories!’ began the Psychologist.

‘Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it until—’

‘Experimental verification!’ cried I. ‘You are going to verify that?’

‘The experiment!’ cried Filby, who was getting brain-weary.

‘Let’s see your experiment anyhow,’ said the Psychologist, ‘though it’s all
humbug, you know.’

The Time Traveller smiled round at us. Then, still smiling faintly, and with
his hands deep in his trousers pockets, he walked slowly out of the room, and
we heard his slippers shuffling down the long passage to his laboratory.

The Psychologist looked at us. ‘I wonder what he’s got?’

 

To Be Continued…