The First Time
Written autumn 1994
The First Time
 The first time Anton alone made a travel in time
everything went wrong. His teacher in tempology (latin:
tempus = time, logos = science) was ill and the
substitute, a small, thin man who looked almost as
exciting as a toothbrush, knew nothing about time
travels. He was as lost as a gerbil in the Antarctic. Anton, on the other hand, knew everything about the
structure of the time atoms, from which time molecules
you easiest extracted them and how you in practice used
them in a Time Atom Disruptor. Anton usually found tempology to be the Science
School's most interesting subject. But today, when he
for the first time would travel in time, helped only by
a bald, spectacle-clad, baking- powder-dry, substituting
tempology professor, nothing worked properly. The Science School was a comparatively new invention,
a boarding school whose object was to produce an elite
among geniuses. Anton was one of the school's most
accomplished students. That may have been due to his
great example:Arnold Jones. Arnold was the German-American who thirty-two years
ago, in the middle of the year 2026, discovered the time
atom. This occurred by pure accident when he exercised
the dog in a shut down sulphur mine. For some obscure
reason he brought one kilo nitroglycerine (a common
explosive by that time) with him that he happened to
drop. The entire mine blew up and so did he. The nuclear physicist Adolf Jones, the brother of
Arnold, discovered a rare time molecule deposit where
the mine had been, when he was going to bury Arnold.
Adolf immediately understood the prospects a such would
involve. He proved to be right. Anton woke up the usual time in the morning by the
piercing, brisk voice of the alarm clock. "It's time to raise now", it bellowed dashingly in
his ear. "Shut up", he mumbled and walloped a tuft decorated
slipper on it. "Oh, what WONDERFUL weather", smiled the clock and
began to hum a jolly little tune. Those who once have
heard an alarm clock humming jolly tunes, know that
you very soon leave its presence, screaming wildly. Anton sought shelter in the bathroom and realized
with a sight, deep as the Marian Grave (11035 metres),
that the rest of the day was ruined. Little did he
know, that the problems, like the day, had only just
begun... With a tired sigh he met his harebell-blue eyes in
the mirror. He splashed some water in his honey-blonde
hair and combed it to one side. That made him look
intelligent and somewhat absent-minded as usual. After
cleaning his small, plastic-rimmed (a common material
by that time) glasses he left the room and began to
walk towards the dining room. The first class was nuclear physics, one of his
worst subjects. He slept through the lesson. When he
once in a while woke up, he got annoyed at his
deskmate August - as alert and keen as ever. The
fluorescent tube always dawned on him and he absorbed
every syllable of the monotonous, persistent voice of
the professor. It was a lecture on the principles of
nuclear fission, but Anton had tempology as optional
subject and already knew all about it. Next class was - fortunately - just tempology and
now the fatal, memorable time travel would take
place. His first big mistake was that he never programmed
the Time Atom Disruptor in advance. Its object was
partly to split the correct number of time atoms
depending on how far you wanted to travel, and partly
to, through the addition of electricity, put them
together again when you wanted to get back. "Oh, never mind, I'll program it manually when I'm
going home", thought Anton. Preoccupied as he was, it
didn't occur to him that he couldn't possibly reach the
time atom disruptor once he had left. So he continued
the preparations and made his second big mistake: He
forgot to make a safety copy on a time disc. The safety copy was made to let those still in the
classroom bring the time traveller back if something
went wrong. Had Anton's ordinary teacher been there,
such details would of course have been carefully
controlled. Instead was there an absent-minded
substitute who hardly knew the difference between
East and West. Thus Anton dissolved into atoms on their way to a
Swedish city in the end of the twentieth century. One
tenth of a second later he was put together again and
brushed away some time dust from his cloudberry-yellow,
fashionable jacket. The dust made him feel a hot
scent of fresh coffee served in a Turkish coffeeshop
in 1974, the stale stench of a Siberian camel's
unwashed right foot, the inviting, salt-tasting breeze
from a windswept English coast in 2008, before the
oceans became so polluted that you couldn't stay
within a radium of ten kilometres from them, and many
other smells and feelings he couldn't quite
identify. He looked around. He found himself be in a small, hopelessly primitive
town. "This must be Ottval, the city I tuned in",
thought Anton. Vehicles (after extensive research, the
conclusion has been reached that the vehicles must have
been so called "cars") in different colours
snailed their way along the street and amazed he
discovered that the mopeds hadn't even jet engines! "Dull place", he thought and prepared himself for
returning home. As you know, this was impossible as he
couldn't reach the Time Atom Disruptor. There he was now, in another century and his only
contact with his own time was cut off. He didn't even
know if he could communicate with the natives here. Of
what he could see on all signs their language was
very archaic. Certainly he had studied ancient Swedish
in school, but he was never especially good at it. "Uddevalla", he read on a sign. Hum, he thought. The
name sounded familiar somehow... A girl, about eighteen years old, passed by him. "What date is it today?", he asked her. Surprised
she looked at him. Interested he studied her. She kept
her long, black hair in a, in his eyes, very un-modern
style. Her clothes were old-fashioned (the girl was
probably very trendy dressed, but Anton wasn't from
the twentieth century and thus ignorant of the fashion
of that time), but the face was nice with coconut-brown,
half-moon shaped eyes. Her accent when he replied was
dreadful: "August 25th", she said and continued walking. "What year?", Anton wanted to know. "What?" She looked at him as if he wasn't quite
sane. "It's 1994 of course, are you making fun
of me?" "Oh no", answered Anton kindly. "Do you know what
day of the week it is?", he asked then. "It's Thursday", she replied. "Anything else you
want to know?", she continued sarcastically. "Yes, what is this city called? That could be good
to know", said Anton curiously. His new acquaintance
didn't answer. She only tapped her head with her
knuckles and left. Anton wondered if the gesture was
the name of the city expressed in domestic sign
language or if it was a local greeting gesture. He passed the evening planlessly wandering through
the city. In the evening he decided to try to get work
somewhere the next morning so he could afford food. The
night Anton spent on a very uncomfortable bench in a
park. Next morning he washed himself in the fountain and
went to the employment office. Unfortunately you needed
education to get work, so Anton decided to start
school. He was accepted by one of the high schools of
the city, Östrabo, where they studied much
mathematics. Math was one of his favourite subjects, next
to tempology. Anton knew all that the school could teach, and quite
a lot more in addition, so he graduated (to graduate
meant that you finished school. The graduation was often
celebrated in very animated forms with flowers,
festivities and liquor. Liquor was a kind of intoxicant)
soon afterwards. He had applied for study support and
housing allowance (money that time's youth got if studying)
and could now afford an apartment in
Ottval (by that time the city was called Uddevalla).
When he had become a professor at the university within
a week or so, he was employed as atom specialist in a
research laboratory in Stockholm (a city in Uppland,
nowadays a village called Sthlm. Since Svanesund became
capital its importance has decreased). Left in the classroom were the other nine students,
wondering what had happened to Anton. The substitute
feverishly tried to find Anton's safety copy, which he,
as you might remember, never made. When the real teacher
gradually recovered a fruitless search for Anton
began. Yet he was rather satisfied with the existence in
the twentieth century Sweden. At the turn of the century
he was a happy father of six children in Ottval.
Although he now had invented the tempology in advance
(and received the Nobel Prize for the discovery), he had
no plans of using it for a time travel home. He was
happily ignorant of his former classmates' eager
searching, and if they haven't found him yet, he's
probably in Ottval still. |
1998 Jemima & Carl-Henrik Hammarlund. All rights reserved.