Рэй Брэдбери - Yestermorrow - Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

It follows that your uncommon tourist, wandering these territories will stumble upon not only uncommon times but uncommon foods, moving down through history or across continents.

At dinnertime, why not climb aboard the largest locomotive in the world to find that its interior is really a kitchen with stoves, ovens, and preparation tables. The steam from its kitchen would plume from the locomotive stack, of course, to be ventilated off. Behind the locomotive with its hidden bakery would be a procession of flatcars sporting, as it were, tables positioned in the open. An illusion of travel would run past them on surrounding film-projection walls as they felt themselves ride through an endless tunnel of images. As the dining flatcars rocked gently on their gimbals, and the silverware chimed sweetly, the diners would gaze out at Irish meadows, French vineyards, or the Indian buttes or mesas of Cheyenne or Taos. A different travel view every hour, a different journey, considered and ticketed in advance, every day. And the menu, prepared to fit the scenery: gazpacho nearing Catalonia, foie gras leaving Paris. Or, hell, why not an art history tour? The gourmet locomotive steaming through Provence and the multimillion sunflower fields to track-measure Van Gogh. Or an endless excursion sideswiping Monet’s oil or watercolored Giverny flower gardens and lily ponds? Or El Greco’s electric-fire-green-blue mountains, capable of birthing taffy-pull-elongated Christian saints? What a train, what far-travelings, what real and unreal remembrances!

Those who shun that special dining-seeing train (what a loss!), can board the Tea Trolley just beyond. It would resemble a San Francisco cable car or one of those smaller red bread-box-sized trolleys that used to sail the streets of Los Angeles. At four in the afternoon, how fine to see the Tea Trolley nested with three dozen ladies, or gents, sluicing the Indian brew over their teeth and devouring crumb cakes, yes?

Along the way, in the heavens above the Maze, a Zeppelin or Blimp shape, suspended, into which, if you wish, you can be hauled straight up by a harnessed-seat-rescue-device into a floating, soaring—or so it cinematically projected seems—restaurant where you can eat as you fly over New York, London, Paris, or Rio.

On through the maze, we have, finally, four to five dozen cafes, restaurants, soda founts, which we can add or subtract to infinity… including… yes?…

The Longest Soda Fountain in the World… a grand long parade of stools, one hundred in all, count ’em, all the way down the line, duplicating sweetly, succulently, the Longest Bar in the World in Tijuana. Faced with mirrors, of course, so you can fatten your eyes with the grand sight of yourself or your chum in the reflecting glass while you fatten your stomach. Then up and out and around, to the end of the Energy-Restoring-Restaurant Maze, to the entrance of: The Experiences!

Are you ready for this? Still with me?

The Second Time Maze is across an Abyss of Stars, separated from the First Maze, straight down, and, seemingly straight up, by a billion light years of stars in all directions. In order to cross over the abyss, there are a number of game stations where the head of any party of two, three, or four or more would play a laser beam game which, if won, totalling up to some particular sum, would cause a bridge to jut across from one side of the First Maze to the Second’s side.

The Second Maze, as seen from a distance, would be like a small City, seemingly suspended in space, turning slowly. An illusion, of course, the outer wall might circle about, with light patterns on the other walls giving a semblance of motion. The entire structure, perhaps like a double pyramid, one upright, one upside down, would have a series of doors in the various faces, and every few minutes, or every thirty seconds, a new door would be presented, with a different date on the facing, representing a different age, Past or Future, or, for that matter Far Away and Mysterious Present! What we are playing here, for the moment, is a variety of Time Roulette.

The facade of the Fantoccini Great Electric Time Maze Two gives one an immediate idea of the wonders that lie waiting, and humming inside.

Across the front, in giant metaphorical symbols, some electric robots, others in mural form, are representations of all the Times that wait within the portals. Here a great dinosaur lurks, there Jupiter rises as Saturn sets, up here an Egyptian pyramid looms, while below is a thermonuclear lab, an AC-DC electromagnetic Mechanical Hound spiders its eight legs until, like the wings of a hummingbird, they almost vanish!

Each Adventurer (customer) is given a computerized card or a small computer with which to give options for action within the Maze.

The Adventurers are led, 20 or 30 at a time, into a chemical-nuclear-electronic laboratory of immense size and incredible flexibility; it is all storms of electric power, and great screens on which Past, Present, Future thrive in images. At the center of the Lab is the Time Centrifuge. One of the Adventurers is asked to Volunteer to get into the Spinner to be Spun off into Time.

Someone volunteers… a boy or a girl preferably, though it could be an older person. The Volunteer (a real customer or an actor who is a permanent employee of the Maze) enters the Yestermorrow Centrifuge and the Physicist-in-Charge then asks the crowd to vote via magnetic card or computer device, on where the Volunteer Voyager shall be sent.

The vote is taken! It totals up on the screen—dinosaurs perhaps, hound Maze maybe, Alpha Centauri, could be! Lost in the pyramids, why not?!

Bang! A switch is thrown. The Yestermorrow Centrifuge whirls, groans, explodes with energy and breaks down! “My God!” cries the Physicist. “Our machine has miscalculated! Our Volunteer has vanished! See! But to what planet, what place, what time, where, how, why?”

And, indeed, the Machine has slowed and is empty. The Volunteers are now asked to vote, where to go, how to find, in what place and time to search for the lost Time Traveler!

They vote! They choose—perhaps—the Future! The Cosmic Reaches, the Star Deeps!

“Enter!” cries the Physicist. “Off you go to find our lost child!”

They enter the Centrifuge, which holds one person or 30, depending on need and use. Bang! The switch is thrown! As they vanish off in time they hear the Physicist cry: “I hope this time it works, and we don’t get lost somewhere else !” Whoommmmm! They lurch, spin, accelerate, travel! And… arriving by misadventure, or by computerized selection in a time roughly a billion years back of beyond, the Travelers are given kopi-helmets and electronic guns and sent out on paths through the jungle where, at one time or another, they will encounter varieties of prehistoric beasts and must be prepared to fire their electric rifles at the creatures to frighten them off. The beasts rise and attack from different positions in different ways and at different speeds every time a new mob of Hunters runs through. They must be hit in the eyes, of course, with the electric guns. Failing to score a hit will cause the monster beast to tilt forward and, with magnetic claws, seize the rifle away, thus “disarming” the Adventurer. The last Hunter to be disarmed, or who makes it through the Prehistoric Maze, having scored all hits, is the Winner, and gets to choose, for all the rest, where they will continue their Hunt for the Lost Child, Lost Man, or Lost Woman—who can be heard screaming, incidentally, from time to time, as they hunt through the Maze.

During all of the above adventures, of course, some of the Yestermorrow Travel Guides who accompany the Hunters, are snatched off into the sky and carried off by Pterodactyls, or grabbed and plunged down, sinking into quicksands by the Thunder Lizards… so that the Customers feel a true sense of danger as they blunder through the Jungle Maze toward Survival.