At No Other Time

What else was there left to say?

We stood, both with heads bowed, foreheads touching as I clasped her hands in mine. Around us, people with places to go bustled around the station while an amplified voice burbled incomprehensibly from speakers all around us.

‘I’ll have to go,’ I said, not moving.

Emma nodded slowly, her hair brushing against mine.

‘I’ll be back,’ I said, wanting to believe it. I didn’t know though, whether I would be or not. That was the thing about time travel. Something we had discovered back at the Institute during the first live experiments. The past is as much a fluctuating possibility as the future. Just as we can’t travel forward in time – yet - because too many possibilities exist in an uncertain future, the past too is uncertain; always balanced on a knife-edge of competing possibilities. I knew that if I did manage to get back to this time, then it more than likely would not be to these possibilities. It could be a world where Emma did not exist, or one where we had never met, or even a world - as had happened to Freeman – without the human.

As my professor said, before he disappeared – possibly – somewhere in the middle of the Battle of Hastings, ‘every visit to the past is a throw of the dice.’ After all, it is always possible he did come back to a future, just not the one he left, because every future we come back to is different from the one we left. We do not even have to step on a butterfly to change the world we hope to return to.

So, eventually I got on the train and Emma disappeared from my life. I couldn’t help thinking about her, each moment of that journey back to my leap point. Each minute I resolved to turn back, stay there in that time – even though I knew what was coming as 1939 dragged on towards its inevitable climax – stay with Emma and see her through what was to come. Even so, I knew I had to try to get back, return to all I’d left behind in a lifetime yet to come.