The Foster Children of Time

Chapter Six: Gaudet

Chapter Six

Gaudet pushed his chair further in and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

“Time travel is regulated, you see.  Tightly regulated.  The folks at Temporal Affairs don’t want people messing around where they don’t belong, unless there’s someone to keep a close eye on them.  They kept me for “observation” for months, until they were sure that I wouldn’t go back to my time and expose their operations to the world.”

“But they let you return.” 

“Eventually they did just that, after keeping me on a tight leash and indoctrinating me with their “moral time travel” propaganda.  Ultimately I decided that this era had more to offer me, so I stayed.  Once you reach a place where trivial things like decades -- or even centuries –- are no longer an obstacle to where you want to go, what you want to see, what you want to do in life, it’s hard to go back.  You might wrestle with the same dilemma yourselves one day, if you stay here long enough.”

“I think I’ve seen enough,” said Caroline pensively.  “I just feel like I don’t belong here.  I shouldn’t even be seeing these things.”

“You, Tony?”

Tony shrugged diffidently. 

“So, exactly how much have you figured out about this place by yourselves now, by the way?”

“It’s Twenty Eighty…Eight,” began Caroline.

“This is a Time Station where you can go back in time to different periods in earth’s history,” continued Tony.  “And we’re in space right now.”

“And that?” 

Gaudet nodded at the window where people peered into the forbidding darkness.

“It’s a black hole.  This station somehow harnesses its power to hurtle people back in time.”

“Very good Tony, my man,” said Gaudet.  “I could tell you were a bright one.  But that’s a simplified explanation.  Once energy enters the event horizon of a black hole, it’s never coming back, at least not in any manner that can be controlled.  This station has a giant collector that intercepts energy pulled in by the black hole, which is then used to power travel through time.”

“What about the Time Bus, or whatever that was?” asked Caroline.  “It didn’t have a driver.”

“Care to hazard a guess, Tony?” asked Gaudet.

“Well, I would think that time travel would mess up the instrumentation, navigation somehow.  So it’s controlled remotely.  From this station?”

“Bingo!”

“Can you travel back in time and come back before you arrived?”

“Let me ask you this, Caroline:  can you be in two places at the same time?  Because if you arrived right before you left you’d be face to face with yourself, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess you couldn’t.”

“See, think of this table as the whole of time.  Right now, you’re here.”  He gestured to where Caroline’s orange soda sat.  “But if you jump back to say, 365 B.C., you’re here.”  He indicated a spot several inches to the right.  “Just as if you’d suddenly appeared a few feet down the corridor here.  You’re here and then you’re there.  And then you pop back to where you were originally.  But you can’t be two places at the same time.  It’s not just a violation of the rules of time travel; it’s a violation of all the rules of physics.”