… The worst thing is not to touch the incomprehensible, but to stay in it (with it) forever, for which in our case the most common trivial vehicle breakdown is enough. What awaits the unfortunate when they move to the "roadside" for urgent repairs during the time of feudal strife, when the nearest energy filling station will be 3 km and five centuries from them? Say what you like, but you won't get bored with such a technique. And neglect the next maintenance - the same!
“… His eyes were dimmed. The rotation pressed him even harder against the cushions of the chair. But the trip was not over yet! … When they finally stopped, the cabin tilted and swayed menacingly … Greenery! Dense greenery of such a dazzling color. He could not understand where he was and how he got here at that time … "We are lost" … "We have an emergency signal." True, the signal was short-range. The only unlikely possibility is if a patrolman accidentally turns up in some nearby parallel world and catches a distress signal … But contact is just the first step. If they do not give the coordinates of the time level, then they must give an accurate description so that the experts can determine their approximate location. All this takes time, more time than they can live here. " (Norton A. "Search at the crossroads of times" M., Joker, 1993, p. 193).
“… The time machine has disappeared! Like a blow to the face with a whip, the thought burned through me that I would never come back, forever remain helpless in this new, unknown world! The very thought of it was excruciating. I felt my throat tighten, my breathing stopped. Horror took possession of me …”(Wells G. Time Machine).
“… I entered a world that for thousands of years belongs to the past of humanity. Probably, a person has never experienced that feeling of loneliness that overcame me. The shipwrecked man, exhausted from hunger and thirst away from the sea route, still retains a grain of hope. I have nothing to hope for, there was not that blade of grass, clinging to which I could return to my whole past life … "(Lampo H." The Birth of God ") …
“… Know that there is a whole group of people who cannot return to their time. They are called temporary freaks … "(feature film" The sticky fingers of time ", USA, 1997) …
Fear of the danger of appearing at the "wrong" time
Yes exactly. Getting lost in Time is half the trouble. In full measure, fear will come to the unfortunate when he learns that the villainous fate was consistent and prepared for him the most terrible punishment. What could be more terrible for an honest person to find themselves in "troubled times", for a pacifist - during a civil and total war, and for an intellectual - in "gray, hopeless" years!.. You never know modern girls, due to the influence of beautiful films, dreamed of living in The "noble" XIX century? And in vain - fate can arrange a meeting with any century in the most unsightly place and in its most disgusting moment …
Promotional video:
“… From surprise, they froze in place for a second. Everything flashed before their eyes. They materialized a few inches from the surface of the earth - the scooter was designed so that it could not suddenly appear inside a solid object - so the car hit the pavement with such force that the patrolmen nearly dislocated their jaws. They found themselves in a place that resembled a square. Nearby was a fountain, its stone walls decorated with carved bunches of grapes. Streets lined up with square buildings made of brick or concrete from six to ten stories high departed from the square. These wildly colored houses were adorned with crude stucco ornamentation. Clumsy box-cars of a brand unknown to them passed by. The square was crowded with people.
- Guardian Gods of the Patrol! Where are we?
Everard stared at the instruments … Van Sarawak grabbed a sonic scanner. The crowd backed away from them, shouting in some incomprehensible language.
- What happened? the Venusian whispered. - Where are we?
Everard sat tense. His brain worked feverishly to the limit, causing pictures of all centuries, where he visited or which he read about … What does this have to do with these Scottish skirts, and they are not English! Nothing came together. Such an era simply did not exist!
- Hurry, let's go from here!
Everard's hands were already on the control panel when a tall man jumped on him. Together they collapsed on the sidewalk - their legs and fists were used. Van Sarawak fired, someone fell unconscious, but he himself was grabbed by the arms from behind. The crowd pounced on both of them, and everything mixed in Everard's mind. He vaguely remembered how several men with gleaming copper plates on their chests and in helmets forced their way through the crowd of people, lifted him to his feet and snapped the handcuffs on his wrists. He and Van Sarawak were then searched and pushed into a large, closed car. "Black Crows" are the same in all ages and eras … "(Paul Anderson" Time Patrol ") …
Fear of the danger of becoming different in a different time
How can this happen? No one knows. But they are afraid of this too. They are afraid that once we find ourselves in a time in which we are not supposed to be, we will turn into no one knows what!
In science fiction stories, for example, they wrote that, having fallen into the distant Past, in those times when there were no people on Earth yet, the chronotraveller would fall into the body of the most intelligent creature of those Times. For example, D. Pyson described how "the pilot felt himself in the body of a dinosaur" …
But even in the rather close past, according to some fantastic works, there is a chance to “stop being yourself”. To become just a different person:
“… One morning I woke up from the feeling that I had become the granddaughter of my soul… Besides, I woke up in a bed unfamiliar to me and in a foreign language similar to Russian. In this language I am now writing these words. I live in a Parisian 18th Arondisman … my language is French … I fell asleep in one of the Parisian hotels with my lover and saw in a dream some kind of water standing over me, and woke up in the 15th century, not knowing a word of French … My zodiac is now not Cancer, but Scorpio, and the lover is not the one born under the sign of Leo, from Paris, but completely different - I am head over heels in love with an Aquarius guy … with him I lost my innocence for the second time … "(Pavich Milorad" Star mantle "/ S-Pb.," Azbuka ", 2001, p.9) …
Punishment by time
If a person lost in Time (as it seems to modern science fiction writers!) Must necessarily suffer in the most cruel way, then someone must have come to mind to use this to their advantage. For instance:
“-… Can you imagine a more terrible retribution than the expulsion of the criminal into the past?
- And it would not even have occurred to me that they still have a concept of retribution, or even more so the need to keep some in fear, subjecting others to terrible punishment. Even we, in our century, are aware that it does nothing.
- Are you sure about that? he asked calmly. - And isn't crime itself increasing alongside with the development and improvement of the modern science of punishment? By the way, you were somehow surprised that I dare to wander alone through the night streets. I'll tell you more: punishment cleanses society as a whole. In the future, you would be told that public hanging reduced the crime rate, which would otherwise be even higher. And, more importantly, in the 18th century, these performances created the conditions for the birth of true humanism. In any case, so they say in the future. Whether they are right or just trying to justify an element of degradation in their own civilization does not matter. All you have to admit is that they do send their dangerous criminals back in time.
“Pretty careless about the past,” I remarked.
- No, in fact it is not. If only because everything that happens because of them has already happened … Damnation! English is not designed for such paradoxes. You just have to understand the main thing: that they do not spend all these efforts on ordinary villains. To deserve exile in the past requires a special crime. And the severity of the crime depends on in what year of world history it is committed. Murder, robbery, treason, heresy, drug trafficking, slavery - all this was punishable by death in some epochs, easily descended in others and was positively assessed in others. Look back in your mind and see if I'm right or not … "(Paul Anderson" We should probably go ") …
Curiosity and Romance of Time Travel
Everything terrible and incomprehensible has its property not only to frighten and repel, but also … to lure and attract. Adrenaline is a poetic drug that drives the progress of civilization. The construction of factories on Mars is a prose that they will be proud of, but about which they will hardly write poetry, the construction of a time machine (MV) (just think … Time Machines!..), a meeting with your own great-great-grandmother and great-granddaughter (!!), interviews with Homer, Shakespeare and Pushkin on live television (!!!), philosophical disputes with Confucius, Plato, Socrates and Lenin at the same time (!!!!) - this is poetry or, if you like, a fairy tale for adults.
“… For the first time, Everand really felt the reality of time travel. He understood them intellectually, admired them, but felt them as a kind of exotic. Now, rocking around London in a two-wheeled cab (not in an old-fashioned carriage for tourists, but in a real dusty and loose carriage), breathing in the morning air, which felt more smoke than in the city of the twentieth century, but there were no gasoline fumes; seeing … gentlemen in bowlers and top hats, laborers, women in long dresses - not actors, but living people, real people - he really realized where he was. His mother had not yet been born, his grandparents were still a young couple about to get married. Grover Cleveland was the President of the United States, Victoria was the Queen of England, Kipling composed his works,and the last Indian uprising in America was yet to take place … Everand experienced a real shock. (Anderson P. Time Patrol. St. Petersburg, North-West, 1993).
“… Twenty thousand years ago there was great hunting in Europe, and winter sports are good there in any era. That is why the Time Patrol, always caring for its highly qualified staff, has set up several hunting lodges in the Pleistocene Pyrenees … (Paul Anderson, Time Patrol) …
Time machine and falsification: the unreal in the incredible
"The awareness of one's own ignorance is the beginning of true wisdom." - Socrates.
Over the years of collecting tales of mysterious incidents involving tricks in Time, I have certainly come across dubious stories on more than one occasion. When he was obviously doubtful, he threw them away immediately, and sometimes after a long or quick (as it turned out) check for "lice". To be honest, some seemingly "truest stories", as it turned out, were invented in part or in full.
You don't have to go far for examples of dead newspaper ducks:
“… In 1992, archaeologists José Sabittini and Augut Benavides told the world about their discovery in the Guatemalan jungle. According to them, recently at night the Indians living near the ancient Mayan temple lost in the jungle, 100 km from San Mateo, were awakened by a strange noise. The sky above the jungle has taken on a bright purple color. In the morning again there was a noise similar to the roar of an airplane, then everything calmed down, and the Indians risked approaching the temple. Not far from it, the trees turned out to be crushed and scorched as if by a round press with a diameter of 186 meters, inside this circle there were three squeezed traces with a diameter of 90 cm. Allegedly in the same place the Indians found a coin issued in … 2164, and the inscription “Tom Salivan, July 2172"
Comments: It is difficult to talk about the minimum degree of reliability of this information, especially since no official confirmation from other scientists has come, and meanwhile the message is printed all over the world in dubious publications (for example, in the Polish newspaper Skandala). Meanwhile, our search for the indicated names of the archaeologists did not lead to anything …
In 1998, reprints or links to a super-sensational report about the tests of the MV (time machine) in Nizhny Novgorod, in which the famous popularizer of science Albert Abramovich Valentinov participated, were widely circulated in the press and on the Internet. He allegedly managed to ask for trials, went to the MV in the 19th century, was attacked there by a certain master and barely had time to return to the 20th century with a bloody trace on his back from a master's whip. Rumors about "MV from Nizhny" were multiplying by themselves …
Comments: I am well acquainted with A. Valentinov, a journalist for Rossiyskaya Gazeta, who has been writing about the problems of Time for two decades, interviewing N. Kozyrev and writing good reviews of the work of other researchers, so when rumors appeared, I just called him. Everything turned out to be simpler - the journalist just joked, once again proving how easy it is to “buy” media …
In 1999, another, apparently invented story, began to be rewritten in the most varied variations. It was something like this … “a 130-seat plane flying to Buenos Aires caught fire. The passengers looked out of the windows in panic. There was nothing to hope for … Suddenly, everyone felt that the airplane leveled off, and soon landed safely in the field. People began to jump out of the burning cabin and run away. The plane, it turns out, landed twenty miles from the city … When the rescuers arrived, they began looking for the pilot who had landed the plane, but he was nowhere to be found. The strangest thing is that none of the passengers remembers whether the pilot himself was. "There was something that looked like a silhouette in the cockpit," said one of the businessmen on the ill-fated flight, Luca Desmerias, "but I couldn't really see it." It is also surprisingthat this plane was not on the list of departures at all. And among the terrible pilots' stories there was a story about a pilot and passengers who crashed on the same flight three years ago. ("NGN" 1999, No. 15, p. 7).
Comments: Needless to say, there were no answers to all our inquiries regarding this "sensational case" …
At the end of 2000, it became "reliably" known about the tragedy that allegedly happened during the tests of CF in the United States. As follows from numerous articles in newspapers (Secret Power of 2000, No. 23; Gazeta.com, 2001, No. 1, p. 11) and on the Internet, back in early 1995, specialists from the top-secret "Research Project Time Travel USA”sent a laboratory rat for one month in the Past and brought it back. In 1999, it was decided to send a person to the past 1918, Dr. Richard Mason Perel was supposed to stay in the Past only twenty-five minutes, however, soon after the start, "something went wrong." The project's specialists “pored over the newspapers of that year, hoping to find a message about the appearance of a man from the future” (!?). Finally, in the newspaper "New York Policy Courier" (dated 26.02.1918) allegedly found a message titled "Mysterious Man Found Dead in a Capsule." Experts in 2000 (unlike the police in 1918) identified the cylinder in the photo as an MV capsule and found that the capsule, the original size of which was 12 meters, was incomprehensibly compressed as a result of chrono flight. "As a result, Perel was crushed," - this is how the sensational article ends …
Comments: Alas, the search by phone and through the American representation of the traces of R. M. Perel did not lead to anything. I couldn’t get the mentioned American newspaper in Russia, I asked my American friends to do it, however … But thanks to the help of journalist V. Potapov, we managed to find out the primary source of the rumors - the American world news magazine Weekly World News. There, judging by indirect signs, this "news" was born. Later she got into the newspaper "New York Policy Courier" and other publications …
Thanks, of course, to the journalists. They don't let us sleep calmly, stir up the imagination and encourage us to act … Like those forgers from the American classic science fiction story "The Noise Level", who edited a film-duck supposedly about the tests of anti-gravity and thus provoked work in this direction with the subsequent actual birth of the anti-gravity apparatus …
Vadim Chernobrov