time track n.

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.

Originally, in pattern a, there was no place for the eighty-year-old dead body of Gallegher. It was introduced and changed the future. We automatically switched into another time track.

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.

A parallel time track most likely, where they got started up the ladder say fifty thousand years before us.

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.

This whole time track idea has always had a great fascination for me, and nowhere have I seen it so well presented as in ‘Police Operation’.

He was certain now that his rescuer had been an earlier Ewing, one who had preceded him through the time-track, reached this point in time, and doubled back to become his rescuer, precisely as he was about to do. His head swam. He refused to let himself dwell on the confusing, paradoxical aspects of the situation.

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?’

We are searching now, trying to pick him up, but outside the Earth’s time-track all is chaotic to our instruments—some defect in out understanding of time.

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.

But it seems pertinent to close on the work of Philip José Farmer. His novel The Gate of Time (1966) sets his pivotal point for the divergence of history in pre history, and in this timetrack the continent of the Americas does not rise above the surface of the oceans.

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