Asimov is Wrong
It came to me lying in my hospital bed.
If I were brutally honest, this story would have begun on a boat in the early 1960s when all my best ideas came. That said, I wasn’t particularly interested in time travel then. It really began on my wedding day in Reno, Nevada.
You would be forgiven if you thought I’d been reading books by Heinlein, Clarke, Niven, or Asimov. This is not the case. When Jenny and I arrived to get married by Elvis, not the real one, unless I’d already leaped back to 1997 and just happened to have taken Jenny with me. Which, while I’m a convincing author, isn’t what happened.
Anyway, Elvis insisted I look at the Bible while waiting to be married. On the front of the Bible, in gold lettering, were the words ‘The Old Testament’. It was a bit ‘dog-eared,’ but I opened it to read the first sentence.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
Not news, exactly. I went to Sunday School.
I remembered thinking then, ‘So where did He come from?’
Did he create Himself? And isn’t that a bit like the chicken and the egg?
So, if Asimov believes a ship will travel through space covering a light year in fifteen minutes, how long will it take to get into God’s back garden? Because if God did create the Universe, He did so from outside His creation, right? Nothing else makes sense, not the way my mind works, anyway.
Steve, a friend, flew in from California to check up on me. Bless his little cotton socks. I wouldn’t have walked down the street for him, but that’s an aside.
I talked to him briefly about this idea. His response was typically curt and unhelpful.
“I’m not a physics major. Do you want me to order a pizza?”
“The time travel theory is infinitely more complicated than ordering pizza, Steve. Let’s say there’s a working time machine in this room, and let’s, for argument’s sake, decide you want to travel back to the time of Christ, two thousand years, given a month of Sundays. None of the best science fiction writers ever explain the details of doing so. The Earth moves a million six hundred thousand miles in its orbit around the sun in twenty-four hours. Add to that this room is moving sixteen hundred feet per six hundred thousand miles…”
“Are you on drugs, Harry?”
“No, Camel milk. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“You get what I’m saying, right?”
“Absolutely, pepperoni?”
“Okay, so listen to this: if time travel is to seem instantaneous, we will have to travel sixty times faster than the speed of light. Since, as far as Google is concerned, we are bound by that ‘light speed measure,’ but if you remember something from fifty years ago, it immediately forms a picture in your mind, right? How fucking quick is that?”
“Anything to drink?”
“I told you, I can only have Camel milk. Are you listening to me, Steve? This is extraordinary. I think I’ve conquered the problem. If there is a God, we can meet Him in His backyard,” I said in a leftover anesthetic-tasting voice.
Steve has promised to continue this conversation tomorrow as I can only talk for half an hour every four hours.
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