If time travel’s possible, where are all the time travellers? You hear that cliché over and over, offered as neat proof that time travel can never happen. It’s always annoyed me, that smug little riddle. I’ve always thought it sounded slick and incomplete, but I’ve never known how to answer it – until recently.

The nearest I could get to what I meant, in those days of my ignorance, was this: saying “If time travel’s possible, where are all the time travellers?” is the rough equivalent of time-travelling back to 1066, telling Bill the Conq. all about electricity, and him replying, with a pitying smile, “OK, pal, but explain something to me – if electricity’s possible, where are all the toasters?”

See? That make any sense at all? An absence of artefacts, or of practitioners, does not in and of itself defeat a theory.

 

So – just suppose. Suppose a man did indeed travel back in time. Never mind how he did it; the mechanics aren’t important. They’d change, in any case, depending on when he did it. If it was the 1950s, it’d be atomic power; if it was the 1990s, it’d probably be feng shui. That’s not important, but... suppose a man went back.

Suppose, the first time, he went back just three days, and caught a bus to a pub of which, in Home Time, he had recently become a regular customer. He walked up to the bar, smiled at the barman, and said: “Hi. Remember me?”

Bear in mind that his mission was to answer the conundrum: “Since we now know that time travel is most definitely possible, where indeed are all the time travellers?” Therefore, he was not being discreet. He didn’t go through a tough briefing session in which he was meticulously taught and tested on contemporary idioms, and things that mustn’t be revealed, and the ethics of time travel in regard to off-course betting or ancestor-nobbling. He was not subjected to a painstaking search of his person, to eliminate contamination via as-yet-unpatented designs of wristwatch or dental amalgam or communications equipment. He travelled, that is to say, as a time traveller; open and plain for all to see.

The barman gave him a funny look. “What do you mean, do I remember you?”

“Well, humour me, Ricky. I’ll have a pint, by the way. What I mean is, when did you last see me?”

Ricky poured a pint of Pride, and swapped it for my five pound note. As he made change, he said: “Two minutes ago? You went to the Gents. Then you came back. Now you’re drinking a fresh pint even though you haven’t finished the last one yet.” He pointed at a half-empty beer glass a few feet down the bar. “This isn’t one of your legendary amusing japes, is it, Eldridge? Because I might as well give you advance warning – I’m not in that sort of mood. I’m more in a telling-wazzocks-to-fart-off sort of mood.”

“Actually, I’m from the future,” I said, and winked at him over the rim of my glass. A sound from the rear of the pub caught my ear, and tickled my memory. Ah yes, now I knew it. It was the sound of the door to the Gents, sighing pneumatically as it opened and closed.

 

“You’re back then,” said Whitecoat, and I was.

“I’ve cracked it,” I said. “I was pulled back just as my old self came out of the lavatory, into the pub. Right?”

“So?”

“So, the only absolute proof you could ever offer a past-timer that you were from the fyooch would be to stand right next to your own self and gesture from your new self to your old self with your thumbs – like so – and say, like, Notice anything odd?”

Whitecoat paused in the act of lighting a small cigar. After a second or so, the match burned his fingers. “That’s how you’d do it, is it?”

“Got to be. Anything else – a fancy wrist-phone, say, or the results of next year’s election – could be too easily dismissed by the sceptical as, for instance, a Japanese prototype which you’d somehow got your sticky little paws on, in the first case, or as lucky guesswork in the second.”

“Or merely,” said Whitecoat, between sips from a tall beaker of clear liquid, “as astonishing proof of clairvoyance.”

“Right, exactly!” Encouraged, I went on. “However, as we have just demonstrated, it is impossible to stand next to your old self with your new self, and demonstrate things with your thumbs. Can’t be done. As soon as Old Me came out of the Gents – “

“Hope he washed his hands.”

“Always. As soon as he appeared, New Me vanished. Thus establishing that there exists a kind of law of nature, similar to those pertaining to gravity or thermo-dy-thingy, which automatically kicks in to prevent such meetings occurring, for reasons having to do with maintenance of the integrity of time-space.”

“And thus, nobody has ever reported meeting a time traveller because nobody has ever had absolute proof of having met one?” He put his overcoat on.

“Right, exactly! We could call it Eldridge’s First Law of Time Space Integrity!”

“You were pulled back, Eldridge, at that precise moment, because that was the precise moment at which I pulled the pull-back switch, due to Whitecoat’s Second Law of Overtime, which is ‘I don’t work late when I have a dinner date with my cousin who I haven’t seen for fifteen years’.”

“Oh. Yeah, but... oh. OK,” I said. “But what’s Whitecoat’s First Law of Overtime?”

“‘I don’t work late when I’m not getting paid for it, even on those rare nights when I do not have a pressing social engagement.’ Tell you what, you’re right about the impossibility of meeting yourself in the past, though.”

“Hey! Well, there you go – that’s something, right?”

“Yep. We’ve known about it for years. The maths is boringly simple. You sleeping here tonight?”

The time traveller nodded. He didn’t really have anywhere else to sleep.

“All right, well this time just make sure you turn off the lights before you crash out. Got that? Lights cost money.”

 

As far as broad theory went, this was about as far as we’d got: that since we now knew that time travel was not only possible, but actual, therefore the answer to the original question – where are all the time travellers? – was clearly, “They’re here.”

SOLD OUT