An Interesting Way to Time Travel

 

cover art by E.K. Bergey

Sometime in the future (well, the future relative to 1941), an atomic war is destroying civilization. As New York City burns, Professor Tempus (who won the last Nobel Prize in 1948, before "the disappearance of Sweden as an independent state effectively put an end to further awards") leads the attractive Nancy Jordan through a tunnel to a chamber several hundred feet underground. It's here that they can wait out the war.

That's the basic premise of "The Eternal Moment," written by Robert Arthur and published in the March 1941 issue of Startling Stories. But there's more to it than that. Tempus has invented a gas that slows down metabolism. You don't go into suspended animation. Instead, Tempus and Nancy will live for waht will seem like a couple of months in the underground chamber. In real time, 500 years will have passed. Tempus is convinced a new civilization will have risen by then.

Tempus is also hot for Nancy. But she had no prior knowledge of his plan, gets understandably upset when Tempus tells her that her boyfriend Peter (Tempus' assistant) was killed, and doesn't appreciate Tempus' rather aggressive insistance that their perceived two months in the chamber be their honeymoon. To be fair to her, Tempus' timing is lousy. "Hey, honey, the man you loved just died a horrible, violent death. Wanna get hitched?"

Anyway, it turns out Peter was shot in the back by Tempus. But Peter didn't die and while a few minutes passed inside the chamber, Peter had a month to heal up outside the chamber (he's still far enough underground to avoid the nukes that are falling). Peter bursts into the room--moving at what seems to be super-speed until he also breaths the gas. The lever controlling the gas gets pushed, allowing more of it into the room. Now millions of years are passing outside the chamber as the two men struggle. The gas doesn't affect non-living objects, so everyone's clothes rot off their bodies while Peter tries to strangle Tempus, who in turn is trying to stab Peter. 

All of this leads to a great ending. You can read it for yourself HERE. 

It's a clever story. The author sets up the conditions of how the gas works, then logically follows through with the consequences of this and thus sets up the ironic climax. "The Eternal Moment" is a great example of just how fun and clever old-school science fiction could be.