Jack looked at Hornby solemnly. “You invented a time machine, did you?”
   “Long ago.” Hornby smiled amiably and filled his glass again. “Better than the ones those amateurs at Stanford rigged up. I’ve destroyed it, though. Lost interest.” 

 Every man has more to live for than every other man. I don’t have a cute chick to sleep with, but I’d like to see the semi’s rolling along the Riverside Freeway at sunset a few more times. It’s not what you have to live for; it’s that you want to live to see it, to be there—that’s what is so damn sad. 

 Humphrey did mind, naturally, but there was nothing he could do about it. Here was the chance to go up to the Lodge, probably to go inside it, and he was being counted out. But he did what he had to do with fairly good grace and said that he would stay. 

 “D-dark?” he stammered. “I’ll switch on the light.” 

1. The Man Who Asked for Yesterday (31 Jan 1974) to the previous day
2. Yesterday’s Murder (27 Jun 1974) heroine redoes her life
3. Come Back with Me (2 Jul 1975) hero relives favorite times
4. Assassination in Time (26 Sep 1975) to Lincoln’s assasination
5. The Lap of the Gods (25 Nov 1975) sea captain in the 1820s
6. A Connecticut Yankee . . . (8 Jan 1976) to Camelot
7. There’s No Business Like (19 Jan 1976) to 2076
8. The Covered Bridge (23 Mar 1976) a feminist to the 1770s
9. Time Killer (5 Apr 1976) before Great Depression
10. Future Eye (19 Jul 1976) 2976 detective to 1976
11. Now You See Them, Now You Don’t (12 Mar 1977) back from World War V
12. A Point of Time (15 Nov 1977) overthrow dictator in 2200
13. The Time Fold (16 Mar 1978) from 1979 to far future
14. Time Out of Mind (18 May 1978) to World War II
15. The Winds of Time (16 Oct 1978) heroine secures closure
16. The Time Box (18 Feb 1980) to the 1880s
17. The Man of Two Centuries (29 Apr 1981) Huron travels centuries
18. The Old Country (24 Mar 1982) back to World War II

 This is our bicentennial year: a time to pause and count our blessings. And among the greatest of these are the men and women of letters who flourished in our native land, who created a literature that was both typically American and universally admired. 

—host E.G. Marshall in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

 All the coordinates are there, all the places and times I went to these past months. When you're lonely, when you need me, go to the Time Station and I’ll be waiting on the other side. 

1. The Old Die Rich (7 May 1974) sleuth forced into time machine
2. The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway (July 1976)    art critic from 25th century
3. An Imbalance of Species (July 1976) from “A Sound of Thunder’

 Stay tuned now for excitement and adventure in the world of the future! Entertainment for the entire family produced right here in Kalamazoo. 

 A time machine has fallen into a clump of birch just above the little pond back of the machine shops. 

 We knew we’d pull back someone from the Harvard Physics Department, because we’re here in the building right now. But it could have been just anyone. We might have found ourselve questioning a college freshman . . . Or a scrubwoman . . . Or even a tourist visiting the lab. 

 “No true Eloi should be able to read or write.” Mr. Wells puffed on his pipe, peering out of the window. 

 The one calling himself Cochrane is not of this era, but of a time far forward. 

 He lit a cigarette and leafed through the cards and minutiae that constituted his identity in the outside world. Well . . . knowing himself, his driver’s permit would be up-to-date and all credit cards unexpired. The year was 1970. Another look outside: autumn. So he was thirty-five, and the pans clattered at the hands of Judy. 

 If you’re talking about time-tours, why don’t you come with us? We’re going to see the Cruxifiction. 

 Columbus: But, say, what time is it?
Kermit: Oh, it’s about, ah, 1492. 

 Twenty-four hours after I left her, I knew I was wrong and knew what I should have said. 

 “Pleasta Meetcha, Bob. Likewise, Sarah. Call me, uh . . .“ The only twentieth-century language in which Three-phasing’s name makes sense is propositional calculus. “ George. George Boole.” 

 Mr. Shaw rallied. “No, no, thank you, frog in my throat. I’m all right. Really pleased to meet you, too. I’m ah – it’s just that – oh, look here, I’m having a hard time taking all this in. I mean, Susan’s told me an incredible story about herself and you –” 

 Nothing was for certain, anything could change (depending on your point of view), and almost anything could happen, especially to forgetful old men who often found themselves in the wrong century rather than on the wrong street. 

 She was strange, remote, and beautiful, and she called herself “Hare.” 

1. Getting Away (Jan 1976) Galaxy
2. Predators (Oct 1976) The Ideas of Tomorrow
3. To 1966 (Spring 1977) Chacal
4. Spectator Sport (Jul 1977) Amazing
5. The Maw (Jul 1977) F&SF
6. Time and Hagakure (Winter 1977) Asimov’s
7. Where or When (Jan 1991) Asimov’s
8. The Glowing Cloud (Jan 1992) Asimov’s
9. Now That We Have Each Other (Jul 1992)   Asimov’s
10. One Kansas Night (Jun 1994) Asimov’s
11. Living It (Aug 1994) Asimov’s
12. Staying in Storyville (Dec 2006) in When or Where
13. Life’s Work (Dec 2006) in When or Where
14. The Here and Now (Mar 1998) Asimov’s

 What do you want me to do? Go back and find out where Captain Kidd buried his loot? 

—“Getting Away”

 For your information, medical historians have been digging into that puzzle for years without any luck at all. So unless somehow—miraculously—you have discovered Dr. Henderson’s diaries in the last couple of hours . . . 

 That the first inventor of a workable time machine was a science fiction enthusiast is by no means a coincidence. 

 Thomas James Lloyd, straw hat raised in his left hand, his other hand reaching out. His right knee was slightly bent, as if he were about to kneel, and his face was full of happiness and expectation. A breeze seemed to be ruffling his hair, for three strands stood on end, but these had been dislodged when he removed his hat. A tiny winged insect, which had settled on his lapel, was frozen in its moment of flight, an instinct to escape too late. 

 I didn’t say that we could or should go back to pre-industrial technology. The changes since then were inevitable and irreversible. I only said . . . 

 He didn’t seem to fit in at all well with the modern decor of the place, but I got the key from him and went towards the lift. 

 Commonplace, if somewhat grim, unsocial event known as a necktie party. The guest of dishonor, a cowboy named Joe Caswell, just a moment away from a rope, a short dance several feet off the ground, and then the dark eternity of all evil men. Mr. Joe Caswell who, when the good Lord passed out a conscience, a heart, a feeling for fellow man, must have been out for a beer and missed out. Mr. Joe Caswelll, in the last quiet moment of a violent life. 

—Opening narration of the Twilight Zone episode

1. Child of the Sun (Mar 1977) Analog
2. The End of the World    (Jan 1984) Analog
3. Man of the Hour (Oct 1984) Analog
4. Mother of the Year (Apr 1985) Analog
5. Touch of the Match (Feb 1985) Analog
6. Will of the Wisp (May 1985) Analog
7. Crisis! (May 1986) fix-up novel

 But each time you intervene, no matter how subtly, you change the future from which you came. You exist in this time and outside of time and in the future, and so each change makes you forget. 

 Mister . . . I don’t know who you are, where you came from, or where you got them fancy guns . . . but I want t’thank God and San Houston f’r sendin’ ya! My name’s Crockett . . . and before you got here, I thought fro sure I’d wake up tomorrow shakin’ hands with th’ devil! 

 I had to choose between a panic if the fathead got them to thinking, and a possible panic from the flash of the gun. But when a 20th gets to talking about his “rights” and what he is “owed,&rdauo; things can get out of hand. 

 In the weeks since the whole business of the time changes started, I had not been this close to being caught since that first day in the cabin northwest of Duluth, when I had, in fact, been caught without knowing what hit me. 

 I find your lack of faith disturbing. 

 Dr. Isaac Asimov
Director: Thiotimoline Research Foundation
Trantor MA31416 

 Did nobody ever finish one of these, ah, time machines? 

 He swept out of the cell, through space and through time, at light-speed across unseen prairies, into the storms that raged down a great particle accelerator. 

 The tatoo was obviously her social security number, but it was preceded by an “A” and followed by a space and five additional digits. 

1. Title Publication
2. Floodtide (Nov 1977) in Weird Heroes 8
3. Orion (1984) incorporates “Floodtide”
4. Vengeance of Orion (1988)
5. Orion in the Dying Time (1990)
6. Orion and the Conqueror    (1984)
7. Orion among the Stars (1995)
8. Legendary Heroes (Dec 1996) Dragon Magazine
9. Orion and King Arthur (2012)

 But even from this distance I could see she was the gray-eyed woman I had known in other eras; the woman I had loved, thousands of years in the future of this world. The woman who had loved me. 

—“Floodtide”, reprinted in the March 1983 Analog

1. The Protector (10 Dec 1977) The All New Super Friends Hour
2. The Time Trap (30 Sep 1978) Challenge of the Super Friends
3. New Kids in Town (31 Oct 1998) Superman
4. The Savage Time (9 Nov 2002) Justice League
5. Day of the Dark Knight! (2 Jan 2009) Batman: The Brave and the Bold   
6. Staring at the Future (30 Oct 2013) Teen Titans Go!

 It is the fifth century, A.D., the place is Britain, and I am Merlin Ambrosius. 

—“The Day of the Dark Knight!”, Episode 4 of Batman: The Brave and the Bold

1. Backspace (Winter 1977) enter the backspace button
2. Balancing Act (16 Feb 1981) editing Pete’s bloopers and more
3. Backup System (26 Oct 1981) Sam’s death causes backspacing
4. Wrong Number (21 Dec 1981) aliens v. Russia

 My friend Sam is the only person I know who edits events. Which is to say, he does something in his head and the past changes; the alterations, of course also reflect into the present and the future. 

—“Backup System”

 To the Reader of this Work:
In submitting Captain Carter’s strange manuscript to you in book form, I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will be of interest.
My first recollection of Captain Carter is of the few months he spent at my father’s home in Virginia, just prior to the opening of the civil war. I was then a child of but five years, yet I well remember the tall, dark, smooth-faced, athletic man whom I called Uncle Jack. . . .
very sincerely yours,
Edgar Rice Burroughs 

—from the foreward to A Princess of Mars

 Here, at last, was the man in Grandma Bran’s wedding picture in the hall. 

 But never go back. Never tamper. Never alter the past. 

 Never again—never, never again—do I take travel hints from Ray Bradbury! Huh! Him and his short cuts! 

 “I built it,” said Kelly, not without pride.
“What for?” I asked. “Time Travel?” I sneered.
“Yes,” he said. 

 Maybe it takes gently crazy people and simpletons and dogs to do things we can’t do. Maybe they have abilities we don’t have. . . . 

 Swimming strongly on my way back to what the sage called the remote future, my form began to flow and change according to time pressure. Sometimes my essence was like steam, sometimes like a mountain. 

1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
2. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
3. Life, the Universe and Everything (1982)
4. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984)
5. “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe” (1986) in The Hitchhiker’s Quartet
6. Mostly Harmless (1992)
7. And Another Thing . . . (2009) by Eoin Colfer

 For instance, at the very moment that Arthur Dent said, “I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,” a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far, far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space, to a distance galaxy where strange and war-like beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle. 

—from the 4th radio episode

 He went through every moment, every step, every ragged breath, every slow, wading, stumbling yard through the cold water to the beach. And it all felt the same, as though he were just a spectator. The shell exploded. Staefler died a second time. 

 Before Jaxom could remind Ruth that they weren’t supposed to go between time, they had. 

 Anything you can do to expediate the publishing of Vahl’s story will be most appreciated, so that he will feel free to return to his own time. 

 Having learned early of the dangers attendant upon being unable to move the Time Machine, I had added to its structure a set of wheels and a driving chain attached to the pedals originally meant simply as foot rests. In short, I converted it into a Time Velocipede. 

 For what seemed like hour upon hour they arrived. Some by strange, grotesque vehicles. Some by spectacularly announced projection. Some by chronion gas, or drugs, or spiritual exercise, or by sheer mental power. Some involuntarily. Some unknowingly. At one point not far inland from the beach, across the first row of dim, ugly dunes, there suddenly appeared an entire city. 

 Faust and Mephistopheles entered the tavern and shed their heavy overcoats. 

  . . . but in all the lines I’m big, tough, and smart enough to know how to take good orders and not hear bad ones. 

 Our passenger is the object of popular cults by now—a focus for finer feelings. In this way his mere presence has drawn the world’s peoples closer together, cultivating respect and dignity, pulling us back from the brink of war, liberating tens of thousands from their concentration camps. These cults extend from purely fashionable manifestations—shirts printed with his face, now neatly shaven in a Vandyke style; rings and worry-beads made from galena crystals—through the architectural (octahedron and cube meditation modules) to life-styles themselves: a Zen-like “sitting quietly, doing nothing”. 

 Wait! I have one last request! I would like to die with dignity, with honor, . . . and with my penny-loafers on. 

 We can’t be sure how accurate our estimates of time and place are, but you seem to resonate with someone in London in 1871. 

 For us, approximately eight Terrestrial years have passed. It turns out that the T-machine is indeed a time machine of sorts, as well as a space transporter. The Betans—the beings whom we followed—calculated our course to bring us out near the date when we left. 

 We’ll arrive on Orel before they leave and stop them. 

 So I told him.
From beginning to end (well not end, I didn’t tell him of his own funeral) and tried to leave nothing out that was pertinent to the plan. I didn’t know what else to do. The year 1939 may have been ready for Buck Rogers or Brick Bradford and his Time Top, but was it ready for the hard, cold reality of time travel? 

 In tonight’s Classics Illustrated presentation, a young scientist hurtles the barrier of time and finds himself locked in a struggle to prevent the destruction Earth in the world of the future—an exciting new version of H.G. Wells’s masterpiece, The Time Machine. 

 This may sound pompous, but . . . I wish to know whether or not there is a God. 

 In times of fear and confusion, the job of informing the public was the responsibility of the Daily Planet, a great metropolitan newspaper whose reputation for clarity and truth had become the symbol for hope in the city of Metropolis. 

 “You’re angry because I stayed in fifteenth-century Italy so long?”
“I’m not especially mad,” you answered, growling. “but the Time Travel Overseeing Community wasn’t much pleased. You shouldn’t have dropped in on Leonardo da Vinci with those tips on aerodynamics.’ 

 One of these traversed the Channel at an angle of exactly ninety degrees, and to walk across it was no different from crossing any bridge across any ordinary river.
One bridge was built slightly obtuse of the right-angle, and to cross it was to climb the temporal gradient of the flux-field; when one emerged on the other side of the Channel, twenty-four hours had elapsed.
The third bridge was built slightly acute of the right-angle, and to cross to the other side was to walk twenty-four hours into the past. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow existed on the far side of the Flux Channel, and one could walk at will among them. 

 In 1979, . . . both are faster. 

 Eat your heart out Harry Jones! 

 Their only dreams are of winning prizes on television giveaway shows. 

 “Oh, well—” He runs his pasty white hands through hispockets while Cole and the girl do the same. “I have a candy bar or two, I believe,” and he brings them out. “Cole, you have a bottle, don’t you?"
The guy with the black hat scowls at him, but brings a flask out of his hip pocket and lays it on the table. 

 I felt angry. I wanted to show that kid, but there wasn’t anything I could show him, with the possible exception of sentence structure. 

 She was behaving towards him, literally, as if he had been in two places at once . . . as if, this morning, he had met her and told her of the escape plans he had only half started to form a few minutes ago! 

 Fact then: Somehow, my travels crossed time as well as distance. Another fact: The boy was the focus of my travels—perhaps the cause of them. 

 In my storage case were volumes for his perusal—a concise history of the world through the year 2000, a selection of the greatest poets since the master, selected volumes of Shakespearean criticism, and the massive one-volume Armstead Shakespeare, the definitive Shakespeare, published in 1997. 

 It was embroidered with scenes from the ancient past of Castle Roogna and its environs, eight hundred years ago. 

 Ninety years ago I was a freak; today I am an amateur. 

—Jack the Ripper in the twentieth century

 The fabric of time is a delicate, almost whimsical thing. Our success rate runs at nearly eight-two percent, and within the industry that is an enviable rate. But we just can not guarantee success. 

 Now shall one king rise up against another. And there shall be bloodshed throughout the whole world, fighting between the devil, his kingdom, and the kingdom of light. 

1. Mandalay (Oct 1979) Asimov's
2. Out of Service (Jul 1980) Asimov's
3. Slowly By, Lorena (Nov 1980) Asimov's
4. Intersections (26 Oct 1981) Asimov's

 Clever people he worked for.
But not clever enough to preven the Fracture, when Augustan Romans had tumbled into the waters of the Spanish Main and bandannaed urban guerillas shot the hell out of the Sun King’s palace at Verasilles. Not clever enough to point the way to Homeline, except as a hundred-kilometer march from line to line through a hexagonal sewer in Space₄. 

—“Mandalay’

 It traverses Time—Time past, Time to come, Time that could have been and Time that might yet be. It goes on forever, so far as I know, and no one knows all of its turnings. 

 Although the secret of death has been imparted to the full membership of the Temple, not all have understood its import. 

 There exists but one node of time/future open within the range of our frames. You must go there and prepare the way for our exodus. Else, the supernova shall extinguish us all. 

 After my time machine warms up, we’ll be transported to the deck of the Silver Swan, the Spanish fleet’s most prized treasure ship. And after we pirate her valuable cargo, I’ll be the riches man in the world—ha ha ha ha ha! 

 Ah, agony in a tearing that made him feel, for the first time, every particle of his body as it screamed in pain. 

 Odd that the book-man should shrug off the value of books, but Pausanias had too much to do to ponder it, overseeing the copying, the shipping of the books up the Nile, the reorganization of his new estate, and of course there was taia, then a new—bride.