Minuteman

“ The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. "They were put into my pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time." He stared round the room. "I'm damned if it isn't all going. This room and you and the atmosphere of every day is too much for my memory. Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream? They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream at times—but I can't stand another that won't fit. It's madness. ”

“ Here spring up great mill towns, mining towns, and county seats; and here, too, our minute-man comes. What can he do? Nearly all the people are here to make money. He has neither church, parsonage, nor a membership to start with. Here he finds towns with twenty saloons in a block, opera house and electric plants, dog-fights, men-fights, no Sabbath but [26] an extra day for amusements and debauchery.
The minute-man is ready for any emergency; he takes chances that would appall a town minister. He finds a town without a single house that is a home; he has missed his train at a funeral. ”

“ Had it been possible to suggest any superstition about a man universally popular, people would have said that this henchman of time and minute-hand of diligence drew his power from doubtful sources. Further north, where there was less superstition than amongst these mingled unspiritualized populations, Minuit might have been burnt as a wizard. A little doctor in the Deutsch hills, who once prescribed for the clock-mender, reported that his pulse had a metallic beat, and, looking suddenly up, he saw, where Minuit's face had been, a round clock face looking down and ticking at him. ”

“ Hush, Louisa! Don't let me hear that odious excuse again. Suppose it was only for a minute. Have you any more right to do wrong for a minute than for a day? You are always saying—'only a minute,' 'just a minute,' but your minutes are very apt to lengthen into hours. It was your stopping 'just a minute' when you were sent on an important errand which almost cost the poor little baby its life, last summer. It is your stopping 'just a minute' to read or play or do something else to please yourself, which makes you late at breakfast, at school, and at church ”

“ You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children—asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a thunderstorm! It let loose the judgment I had suspended upon their clothes, their frail, light limbs, and fragile features. A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain. ”

“ The other men were Blank, the Editor afore-mentioned, a certain journalist, and another—a quiet, shy man with a beard—whom I didn't know, and who, as far as my observation went, never opened his mouth all the evening. There was some speculation at the dinner-table about the Time Traveller's absence, and I suggested time travelling, in a half jocular spirit. The Editor wanted that explained to him, and the Psychologist volunteered a wooden account of the "ingenious paradox and trick" we had witnessed that day week. ”

“ If it is travelling through time fifty times or a hundred times faster than we are, if it gets through a minute while we get through a second, the impression it creates will of course be only one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of what it would make if it were not travelling in time. That's plain enough.' He passed his hand through the space in which the machine had been. 'You see?' he said, laughing.
We sat and stared at the vacant table for a minute or so. Then the Time Traveller asked us what we thought of it all. ”

“ I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
“I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! ”

“ It wants just five minutes of the hour, if I judge the time right."
"No harm can happen from being a little too soon," replied Ralph.
"Sometimes, sir," answered Gaunt Stilling; "many a man has got his bones broken for being half an hour too soon; as, for instance, If a man appoints another to help him in a fray, and gets to his enemy half an hour before his friend, he will have time to take a mighty good drubbing for his lack of punctuality." ”

“ You read, I will suppose, attentively enough; but you cannot see the speaker's white, sincere face in the bright circle of the little lamp, nor hear the intonation of his voice. You cannot know how his expression followed the turns of his story! Most of us hearers were in shadow, for the candles in the smoking-room had not been lighted, and only the face of the Journalist and the legs of the Silent Man from the knees downward were illuminated. At first we glanced now and again at each other. After a time we ceased to do that, and looked only at the Time Traveller's face. ”

“ In Mr Wesley’s article on “Dialling,” there is the following beautiful sentence: “Time is the greatest treasure in this world that a mortal can be intrusted with. We are not only probationers for eternity by the help of time, but even the little interests of this world are managed by the means of it. To divide time by dials, clocks, and watches, is a faint imitation of God Almighty, who has divided the year into spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and even our life into days and nights.” ”

“ The Journalist tried to relieve the tension by telling anecdotes of Hettie Potter. The Time Traveler devoted his attention to his dinner, and displayed the appetite of a tramp. The Medical Man smoked a cigarette, and watched the Time Traveler through his eyelashes. The Silent Man seemed even more clumsy than usual, and drank champagne with regularity and determination out of sheer nervousness. At last the Time Traveler pushed his plate away, and looked round us. ”

“ And, on the other hand, if you set a clock forward even so little as ten minutes, you take away that much from the future, and you make the coming hour only fifty minutes long. Now, no human being has a right to take anything away from the future, or to make the hours shorter than they were intended to be. I desire, my dear niece, that you will earnestly think over what I have said, and I am sure that you will then see for yourself how unwise it would be to trifle with the length of the hours which make up our day. And now, Arla, let us talk of other things. ”

“ At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for the Time Traveller: waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.
Epilogue
One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? ”

“ For if we suppose the time marked to be an hour, the space passed over by the minute hand, that is, the circumference of the dial, has no relation with the hour except what the artificer gave it by so constructing the watch that the minute hand would make one revolution every hour. ”

“ The problem of hours, minutes, seconds, and fractions of them was something they scarcely dreamed of. Nor did they need to cut their time up into such small parts. Life, as I before remarked, was not very rushing. Nobody expected to meet anybody else at a particular instant in those far-away, lazy, easy-going times, or to go anywhere on the minute. [60] If you arrived at where you were going before the darkness fell that was all even the most ambitious asked. The splitting up of time with our present-day nicety is of comparatively modern working out. ”

“ The Very Young Man stood behind the Psychologist. We were all on the alert. It appears incredible to me that any kind of trick, however subtly conceived and however adroitly done, could have been played upon us under these conditions.
The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism. "Well?" said the Psychologist.
"This little affair," said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows upon the table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus, "is only a model. It is my plan for a machine to travel through time. ”

“ I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the dark, and it was only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my store of matches had run low. It had never occurred to me until that moment that there was any need to economize them, and I had wasted almost half the box in astonishing the Overworlders, to whom fire was a novelty. ”

“ To measure time by the state of our feelings would be as futile as an attempt to measure space by the slowness or impetuosity of our movements. Hours dwindle into minutes, and minutes are exaggerated into hours, according to the circumstances under which the mind moves on. ”

“ For by the time the minute-hand gets to eleven, the hour-hand has passed on to twelve, and by the time the minute-hand has reached twelve, the hour-hand has passed beyond it. Every time the minute-hand comes to where the hour-hand now is, the hour-hand has passed beyond. The distance becomes less and less, but theoretically, or in conceivability, the one can never overtake the other. ”

“ The Clockwork man spun round like a teetotum, his bat flashing in the sun, whilst the flannelled figures flying from all parts of the field approached him, only to be sent reeling and staggering to earth. Some dodged for a moment only to be caught on the rebound. Dust flew up, and to add to the whirl and confusion the unearthly noise that had so startled Arthur Withers broke out again, with terrific force, like the engine of a powerful motor suddenly started.
"I told you he was mad!" shouted Allingham, as he and Gregg leapt through the aperture of the pavilion and dashed to the rescue. ”

“ Myers took me by the arm.
"Listen," he said, "and listen good, because I don't have time to say it twice. I've got the sixteen Romans waiting in a trigger area. There's a trip mechanism that will throw them back to their own time the minute there's an opening for them to fit into. I'm going to stay here and operate the machine. I want you to ride the time-grapple back to the Arena and see that the others—you said they were Roundheads?—and nobody but they get into the time-grapple for transference back to their own time." ”

“ The professor stared into Mark's eyes.
"How much do you know about time?" he demanded.
"Time?"
"Yes. And time travel."
The younger man shrugged.
"Practically nothing," he admitted. "Oh, I've read a few stories, of course. But that's all. I don't know what the theory of it all is, if that's what you mean."
"I thought so." Professor Duchard sighed. "That being the case, there is little use in my wasting energy trying to give you any real understanding of it.
"However, I can tell you this: time is not the immutable thing most people presume it to be. Actually, it is only another dimension. ”

“ I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?'
'Oh, this,' began Filby, 'is all—'
'Why not?' said the Time Traveller. ”

“ Thus, to take the simplest case, a period of time may seem long because the kinæsthetic strain of waiting becomes intense, or because a great number of perceptions and ideas occur during its course; the strain and the number of ideas have come to mean length of time, and the primary experience of duration, so to say, drops out of sight. If, therefore, we wish our observers in the laboratory to compare periods of time; if we wish to find out accurately what durations can be grasped by the attention and held in the memory ”

“ The units of duration, on the other hand, which the time-sense is able to take in at a single stroke, are groups of a few seconds, and within these units very few subdivisions—perhaps forty at most, as we shall presently see—can be clearly discerned. The durations we have practically most to deal with—minutes, hours, and days—have to be symbolically conceived, and constructed by mental addition, after the fashion of those extents of hundreds of miles and upward, which in the field of space are beyond the range of most men's practical interests altogether. ”

“ Arthur's recent reflections returned to him, and produced a little glow in his mind. "Is there a world," he questioned, "where the problems of Time and Space are different?"
"Of course," replied the Clockwork man, clicking slightly, "quite different. The clock, you see, made man independent of Time and Space. It solved everything." ”