Free Memories of the Future by Robert F. Young Page A

refusing ever since, about the grand time the three of them had had on the camping trip they’d gone on last summer.
    When he had finished, she said, “What a wonderful family life you have. Nineteen-sixty-one must be a marvelous year in which to live!”
    “With a time machine at your disposal, you can move here any time you like.”
    “It’s not quite that easy. Even aside from the fact that I wouldn’t dream of deserting my father, there’s the time police to take into consideration. You see, time travel is limited to the members of Government-sponsored historical expeditions and is out of bounds to the general public.”
    “You seem to have managed all right.”
    “That’s because my father invented his own machine, and the time police don’t know about it.”
    “But you’re still breaking the law.”
    She nodded. “But only in their eyes, only in the light of their concept of time. My father has his own concept.”
    It was so pleasant hearing her talk that it did not matter really what she talked about, and he wanted her to ramble on, no matter how farfetched her subject. “Tell me about it,” he said.
    “First I’ll tell you about the official concept. Those who endorse it say that no one from the future should participate physically in anything that occurred in the past, because his very presence would constitute a paradox, and future events would have to be altered in order for the paradox to be assimilated. Consequently the Department of Time Travel makes sure that only authorized personnel have access to its time machines, and maintains a police force to apprehend the would-be generation-jumpers who yearn for a simpler way of life and who keep disguising themselves as historians so they can return permanently to a different era.
    “But according to my father’s concept, the book of time has already been written. From a macrocosmic viewpoint, my father says, everything that is going to happen has already happened. Therefore, if a person from the future participates in a past event, he becomes a part of that event—for the simple reason that he was a part of it in the first place—and a paradox cannot possibly arise.”
    Mark took a deep drag on his pipe. He needed it. “Your father sounds like quite a remarkable person,” he said.
    “Oh, he is!” Enthusiasm deepened the pinkness of her cheeks, brightened the blueness of her eyes. “You wouldn’t believe all the books he’s read, Mr. Randolph. Why, our apartment is bursting with them! Hegel and Kant and Hume; Einstein and Newton and Weizsäcker. I’ve—I’ve even read some of them myself.”
    “I gathered as much. As a matter of fact, so have I.”
    She gazed raptly up into his face. “How wonderful, Mr. Randolph,” she said. “I’ll bet we’ve got just scads of mutual interests!”
    The conversation that ensued proved conclusively that they did have—though the transcendental aesthetic, Berkeleianism and relativity were rather incongruous subjects for a man and a girl to be discussing on a September hilltop, he reflected presently, even when the man was forty-four and the girl was twenty-one. But happily there were compensations. Their animated discussion of the transcendental aesthetic did more than elicit a priori and a posteriori conclusions—it also elicited microcosmic stars in her eyes; their breakdown of Berkeley did more than point up the inherent weaknesses in the good bishop’s theory—it also pointed up the pinkness of her cheeks; and their review of relativity did more than demonstrate that E invariably equals mc2—it also demonstrated that, far from being an impediment, knowledge is an asset to feminine charm.
    The mood of the moment lingered far longer than it had any right to, and it was still with him when he went to bed. This time he didn’t even try to think of Anne; he knew it would do no good. Instead he lay there in the darkness and played host to whatever random thoughts came along—and all of them