Russell Moran: The Gray Ship

The squawk box squawked. “Captain Patterson this is Lt. Tomlinson, the Officer of the Deck on the bridge. Pick up please.”

“This is the Captain, go ahead Lieutenant.”

“Ma’am, the XO told me to report any suspicious sea traffic activity directly to you. There is a small fast paddle-wheel boat that’s been trailing us for a few minutes. He seems very curious.”

“Can you blame him Lieutenant?” said Ashley. “Keep me apprised if there’s any sign of hostile intent.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

Ashley turned back to Seaman Jack. “Just a sample of the strange things that have been happening.”

“Jack, (it’s frowned upon for officers to address enlisted sailors by their first names, but Ashley was beginning to feel very comfortable with this man) tell me about time travel. Tell me how the impossible is possible.”

“Actually, Captain, time travel is theoretically possible. It just seems impossible to our human senses. In physics there’s a theory called the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, also known as a wormhole. It’s derived from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Wormholes, or time portals as some call them, appear throughout the literature of time travel. I’m no scientist, but I’ve read a lot about this. I’ve also discussed it with at least five physicists who are listed in the credits to my book. To sum it up, if E=MC², then it’s possible for a portal or wormhole to exist in space and time. I can’t say that I understand all the math, but physicists love playing with this stuff.”

Although his book was 650 pages long, Jack summarized it, a talent acquired after many years of pitching manuscripts to literary agents. He told Ashley that the book had two main parts. The first part is a review of the fictional literature of time travel over the years. The second part of the book consists of interviews with people who claimed to have experienced time travel. He began with the classic, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells written in 1894, the first book to use the term time machine. He also talked about A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , Mark Twain’s time travel classic written in 1889. He synopsized dozens of other time travel novels, as well as movies such as the comedy Back to the Future . Almost all of the works have one subtext in common: Don’t change the past because the future may surprise you.

Jack then discussed his interviews with a dozen people who claimed to have traveled in time. “This was the hardest part of writing the book. I interviewed over a hundred ‘time travelers,’ but most of them were obviously imbalanced, the kind of people who think they were abducted by aliens. The dozen who made it into the book were normal people, except they all claimed to have done the impossible.” Jack explained that he brought a friend with him on these interviews, one of the book’s contributors, a psychiatrist with the New York City Police Department, Dr. Benjamin Weinberg, who went by the nickname Benny. Weinberg had a rare skill in spotting lies. He was a hit with every prosecutor he ever worked with. They swore that Weinberg’s testimony was better than a polygraph machine. As a joke he carried a business card that read, “Dr. Benjamin Weinberg - Bullshit Detector.”

Benny Weinberg told Jack that each of the time travel interviewees was telling the truth, and any one of them would be a star on the witness stand. “These fuckers (Benny also considered himself a hardened cop, and his language showed it) are either the straightest shooting people I’ve ever seen, or they’re a new breed of psychopath that I never encountered before.”

Ashley peppered Jack with questions, especially about the personal interviews. “Did their stories have anything in common?”

“Yes. None of them started their time journeys intentionally. It just happened. Also, the time portal, or wormhole, always had a specific location. That’s how they were able to get back to the present. It’s also interesting that not one of them tried to go back in time once they returned to the present. A couple of them have traveled more than once, but never intentionally, except for the return trip.”

Jack also told Ashley, as he had written in his book, that the times the people visited varied all over the place. One guy went back 1200 years to the Bronze Age. Another travelled back to World War I.

“One of the people,” said Jack, “travelled four times. He always went back to the same period of time, twenty years in the past. He experienced all of his journeys in the mid 1980s, so his travels took him back to the mid 60s. One time he found himself in New York in 1965 on the Number 7 train heading toward Flushing, Queens. The doors opened at the 109th Street Station in Corona, and he could hear the crowd at Shea Stadium, roaring for the Beatles concert. In 1969 he found himself at Altamont Speedway for the famous Rolling Stones concert. His two other journeys also involved rock & roll, but he couldn’t remember those other two bands. Doctor Benny thought he saw a clinical explanation for the phenomenon. Four time travels, four rock & roll concerts. Could it be the guy just vividly imagined things that were imbedded in his subconscious mind? On further questioning it turned out the guy was a classical music teacher who hated rock & roll, and couldn’t even name one individual Beatle or Rolling Stone. He claimed that he never heard the name Mick Jagger.”

Another common thread, Jack noted, was that the elapsed time between the start of the journey and the return to the present was relatively short, and never matched the time they spent in the past. “The World War I guy said that he was on the battle fields of France for over eight months. An artilleryman, he spent what seemed like ages wading through mud and hooking up horses to caissons. He recalled one incident while he sat in a trench. It was raining heavily. He faced up toward the rain and cried his eyes out, thinking he would never see his wife again. At that point he had been on the battlefield for just over seven months. When he returned to 1987, he was standing on the edge of the rear patio of his house, dressed in the same blue jeans, sneakers and a sweat shirt that he wore when he began his journey. His wife said to him, ‘Where have you been? I’ve been looking all over the house for you for five minutes.’ ”

“Then there was the diner traveler,” Jack said.

“Diner Traveler?” asked Ashley.”

“Yeah,” Jack said as he laughed. “This story is really weird. It’s the only one where there were two time thresholds, hundreds of miles apart. This guy, named Phil, was sitting in a diner in Rochester, New York in July of 1993. It was 8:30 in the morning. He had just ordered his usual scrambled eggs and sausage. After he ordered, he realized he had left his wallet in his car. He excused himself and said he’d be right back. To get to his car, he took a short cut through a hedge opening, stepping on an old cement slab. Suddenly, he was standing on a street corner, in what he would soon learn was a suburb of Elkhart, Indiana. He looked down and saw that he stood on a storm grate. He had no idea where he was, only that he was in a nondescript suburban neighborhood. He looked up at the street signs to see if he recognized anything, a lucky move on his part, otherwise he would have never returned. The sign said Juniper Street and the cross sign read Elm Avenue. He began to walk. He estimated that he walked for three miles based on the elapsed time of 45 minutes, until he came to a business district. He was out of smokes, so he went to a convenience store. When he asked for a pack of Merits in a box, the proprietor said he never heard of Merits. They had Winstons, Marlboros, Luckies, Pall Malls, Chesterfields, and Camels. He asked for Marlboro Lights, and again the owner said he never heard of them. He bought a pack of regular Marlboros and grabbed a newspaper and a cup of coffee. He asked how much and the guy said that’ll be 85 cents. He thought the guy was being nice because he didn’t have his brand, so he just handed the guy a dollar and left, telling him to keep the change. He sat down on a park bench in a small memorial park to sip his coffee and read the newspaper. The paper was the Elkhart, Indiana Bulletin . Phil went back inside to ask the owner if he had anything from Rochester, New York. The owner, beginning to think Phil was a bit weird, just said, ‘Don’t get much call for Rochester news.’ So Phil sat down with his coffee, lit up a butt and began to read. That’s when the cigarette fell from his mouth into his coffee. The main headline was an update on the sinking of the Andrea Doria on July 26, 1956. He looked at the date on the newspaper. It was July 27, 1956. He couldn’t describe why, but, like all time travelers I’ve interviewed, he knew instinctively that he had to get back to the location he originally found himself. He began walking back to find the corner of Juniper and Elm. He became hopelessly lost, all of the houses appearing so similar. He finally came across a man who knew of the intersection and gave Phil instructions. After another thirty minutes of walking, he found Juniper and Elm, spotted the storm sewer grate, stepped on it, and was back in the hedge opening at the diner in Rochester, New York. He was back in 1993, after almost eight hours away. He noticed he held his wallet in his hand. He walked into the diner and sat down on the same stool he had vacated those long hours ago. The waitress put his plate in front of him and said, ‘Sorry it took so long. We’re training a new cook.’ He looked at the clock on the wall. He had been gone for six minutes.”