The Time Traveler, Chapter 2
How to meet your great-grandfather
Can we travel through time if we'd like to?
Professor West arrived at his London flat after the three-hour trip from Oxford University. His presentation to the top scientists, scholars, and alums went much better than expected.
At least this time, the skeptics allowed him to finish without bursting out the door after the first five minutes, like at Cambridge, or laughing their way out the way they did at MIT.
Professor West had been traveling the world for almost two years, presenting his “The Time Traveler” theory, looking for someone to fund his research. With his savings practically gone, he faced the tough decision to give up or continue by himself.
His theory was embedded in his brain since childhood, reading his great-grandfather’s books and listening to his grandfather’s (or grandpa, as he called him) stories on how being the out-of-wedlock son of the great H.G. Wells influenced him.
Grandpa lived with his mother all his childhood since his parents never married. Even so, he admired the famous novelist all his life, treasuring the brief moments they could spend together and listening to H.G.’s stories about the future.
Tales about flying machines, armored trucks carrying cannons, people traveling through space, and powerful weapons dropped from the air to end wars made his five-year-old grandpa dream about the future and sometimes have nightmares.
Professor West once asked his grandpa what it was like to see all of H.G.’s predictions come to life and if he ever asked him where he learned them or how he envisioned them.
Though H.G. never told him, Grandpa recalled once listening to his parents arguing about a lost watch and a young man who spent a couple of hours at his 141 Maybury Rd home, where he lived in 1895 with his second wife, Jane.
He also recalled that the watch appeared years after his father died, hidden in a box his mother kept in her closet. When he asked her why she kept the watch, though it was a gift from H.G.’s first wife, she said she wanted something for Grandpa.
Years later, the watch broke and stayed inside a desk drawer until Professor West found it, fixed it, and now used it all the time.
West looked at his great-grandfather’s watch and read the inscription “To my loving husband Herbert” once again. He always imagined traveling back to H.G.’s 141 Maybury Rd home, knocking at the door and saying, “Hello, Mr. Wells, I’m your great-grandson, and I want to speak with you for a while.”
The professor finished his dinner, put the plates in the sink, and opened the door to the basement towards his laboratory. The light flickered momentarily as the LED lights illuminated the dark room.
At the end of the basement resided the almost finished isolation tank he was building. With a few more hours, the device would be fully assembled and ready for a test.
On the other side laid a small bookcase with all his great-grandfather’s books, several NLP texts, quantum mechanics books, an old Mayan codex, and half a dozen psychology books. On the second shelve a copy of the “Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of The Existence of Such Substance,” by Duncan MacDougall. Also, all the “Back to the Future” DVDs and the 1960s version of “The Time Machine” movie starring Rod Taylor.
In front of the 1890s Victorian Oak Roll Top Desk, over a leather couch, hung an image of the limestone of the Yaxchilan lintels from the British Museum, depicting Lady K’ab’al Xook with a black and white drawing on the side.
West put his lab coat on and started working on the isolation tank. With a bit of luck, he would be finished before his assistant arrived the following day. After the work was done at four AM, he fell asleep on the couch.
Linda arrived at eight o’clock and made a fresh pot of coffee, washed the dirty dishes, poured two cups of the beverage, and walked down the stairs to the lab, where she found the professor lying on the couch.
This was not the first time she found West sleeping in the lab; it surely wouldn’t be the last. Linda was a Cambridge Psychology graduate studying NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming Master’s Degree. Though she didn’t make as much as she would like, the open hours, the access to the professor’s library card, and the laboratory compensated for the rest.
Besides, she was fascinated with West’s theory about time travel since she heard it in the first year of her Master’s Degree. Imagine the possibility of traveling back to help her patients cope with their traumas before they started.
They weren’t considering getting the lottery-winning numbers, traveling to the past, and giving them to their older version to collect the prize, even though the professor would have the money to continue his investigation this way.
West explained that doing this would change the timeline and create an alternate present where their other versions would have the money but not them. No matter how many times they’d tried, the result would be the same, a different timeline with cash.
This was how the professor explained to the skeptics why, if time travel was possible, there were no records of people doing it. Every time someone did it, an alternative timeline would be created where time travel is possible, but in their present reality, it had yet to be done.
The professor woke up and thanked Linda for the coffee. He asked her to fill the sensory deprivation tank with skin temperature (93.5 F) water. Once this temperature is set this way, it is virtually impossible for the body to distinguish what parts are in contact with the water and which aren’t. That’s why these chambers are sometimes called sensory deprivation tanks.
While Linda was filling the tank, West bathed and put on his swimsuit upstairs. A couple of minutes later, the professor returned and gave Linda a notebook with a checklist of all the activities she had to monitor while he was inside the tank.
She had to check the monitor showing the professor’s vital signs closely; any abrupt change in the heart rate, blood pressure, or oxygenation levels would abort the test, and she would have to open the device, but only if his life was in danger.
West explained that he knew a variation in his vitals was expected. Something lower than 40 or above 120 beats per minute would be the mark since most healthy adults present those ranges when sleeping. Otherwise, she had the authority to stop the test and open the chamber.
After checking the water’s saltiness and temperature, the professor stepped inside the chamber and lay floating on the warm water. A few moments later, when he felt leveled and calm, he instructed Linda to close the machine and start recording the session.
West closed his eyes and started the breathing techniques his Yoga taught him until he felt relaxed and aware of how every art of his body was floating in peace, almost like levitating.
He realized he didn’t have a plan for conducting this experiment. If he planned to travel in time, how would he set the date, place, and time he would go? Was he going to the future or the past as he’d always wanted?
To avoid feeling overwhelmed by these questions, he decided that, since this was his first test, the best option was to relax, enjoy the ride, and be aware of his surroundings.
With his eyes closed, he envisioned the black egg shape of the device and saw him floating inside. Then he tried to see what was happening outside the machine cover. To his surprise, he saw Linda sitting in front of the desk, watching the monitors and taking some notes. Everything was as expected.
Though inside the machine was completely silent, he heard a telephone ring and saw his assistant answering a call. Linda told the person on the other side of the line that she was busy and would call them back.
The professor took a deep breath and returned to feel his body again. Realizing how this experience made him in complete peace, he wondered how would time traveling, if possible, would feel. Would it be like on a rollercoaster, perhaps falling into an abyss, or if some force pulled you out of your body by force?
At that moment, he heard a big “Swoosh” sound and felt like he was being sucked into a dark tunnel with millions of lights passing outside, almost like the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland. But with millions of lights traveling, as in science fiction movies when the spaceship travels at light speed.
Suddenly, everything stopped, and all the lights went out. He was floating weightless, in complete bliss, feeling nothing but still being aware of everything around him.
Seconds later, he started falling to the ground, gaining speed every second as if dropped from an airplane with no parachute. He saw a bright light above him getting smaller as he descended to the ground, faster and faster every second. Just before hitting the ground, all the lights went out, and he was pulled out of the machine by his terrified assistant, who placed an oxygen mask on his face as she started CPR techniques.
Linda shouted, “Wake up, Professor, wake up.” He opened his eyes and took a deep breath.
© Copyright Jose Luis Ontanon Nunez 2023
