time track n.

We know that matter moves along this time-dimension from the past toward the future at an unchangeable speed, like a locomotive following its track. We can not speed up our movement on that track, or reverse it, or stop or even slow it, but move forward always at the same rate. But suppose that this time-track we follow doubled back upon itself so that a point really far ahead of us on it would be close beside us in reality, just as a railway track or road sometimes doubles back upon itself so that a point which you will not reach on it for hours is right beside you? Then we could short-cut across to that point and reach a time actually millions of years ahead in the future!

They said that the prognosis following a Confederate victory was not good and that we have to assume the moral responsibility for the sort of futures we set up in these branch time-tracks we generate, even if they have no effect on us.

But you can’t go back to the beginning. You can’t even go back along your timetrack. Because the train is moving on, it isn’t where it was twenty, fifty, eighty years before, and if you try to retrace your steps, you’re walking along a strange road. It isn’t quite spatial or temporal, really.

It’s branching time tracks… That’s the idea! There can be more than one past, and more than one present, and more than one future. An old speculation. You do something, and it sets you on one time track rather than another. If you could go back, you could do something else and get on another time track.

The bones are real, I’ve held them in my hands, and they’re still in place in the museums. No amount of twaddle about alternate time-tracks and congruent universes is going to change that.

‘What about something really good?… Anti-gravity, or the interstellar drive?’ ‘And shunt the world on to a different Time Track?’

But I knew you did, as soon as I thought about it, because they weren’t in that other—time-track or whatever it is.

Whatever the symptom, it always meant the same thing: your time-track has been meddled with, your life has been retroactively transformed.

The matter transmitters lead to alternate time tracks, opening up even more territory for our lost adventurers to keep track of (as it were).

The old girl seems to want to take us somewhere in a bit of a hurry and she’s jumping a few time tracks in order to do it. Just like a needle skipping in the grooves of an old record.