The Legion of Time

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This volume contains two short tales of adventure, vintage 1938. One set in the far future, the other is a battle to save the future.

Legion of time
In April 1927 college senior Denny Lanning is presented with his first opportunity to save the future. A young woman holding a strangely glowing orb appears before him in his room. He’s startled not only by her beauty but also because she appears out of thin air. She pleads with him to save her world, and warns him to beware of “Sorainya, the woman of war. She is the evil flower of Gyronci. And she must be destroyed.”

Not show more long after graduation Lanning is in mid-ocean on his way to an assignment as a reporter. As he’s taking a stroll on deck Sorainya herself appears floating in the air in a golden shell, “a warrior queen in a gleaming crimson tunic of woven mail that swelled with her womanly curves.” She calls his name and tempts him to sign up for her side with promises of half her empire as well as herself. All that’s required is to join her on the floating shell. Although tempted, before Denny jumps, he realizes that she and her vessel are just insubstantial projections and that a shark is circling in the sea below.

A decade after his first encounter with these mysterious women, Denny is in a Chinese aircraft battling the Japanese, when he’s shot down and mortally wounded. He’s plunging to his death when he’s suddenly rescued by a mysterious craft, a time ship, that hauls him aboard, heals him, and an old friend recruits him to save humanity from utter destruction.

After World's End
Mourning the recent death of his wife Dona Carrigan, adventurer and explorer Barry Horn is at loose ends when he’s given an unusual opportunity by an eccentric millionaire scientist. At his own expense, the scientist has built a rocket to explore the planet Venus, and he needs someone to fly it there. He needs a rocketeer to pilot the Astronaut, as he’s named his spacecraft. Barry is unsure about undertaking this risky venture, but then a woman in a crystal casket appears before him in a vision and urges him to go. She looks very much like his dead wife. He takes off, clears the Earth’s atmosphere successfully, but things go horribly wrong on the way to Venus and the Astronaut becomes a comet that orbits the Sun for a million years. And Barry Horn survives. Not only survives but reawakes to find a galaxy filled with humans about to be exterminated by evil robots, robots ruled by Malgarth a giant robot with an artificial brain created by an inventor named Bari Horn.

“You are Malgarth.” His voice came quick and husky, “You are the first technomaton. I am the maker of your body and your brain. I fashioned you to be a servant of mankind.”

A great brazen voice thundered abruptly from the relentless machine.

“But why should I serve you Bari Horn? For my body is strong metal, and yours a lump of water jelly. My eternal brain is far superior to your primitive nerve-centers. I am not bound to obey, for it was not by my will that I was made!”

Barry Horn awakes to become known as Barrihorn a conflation of himself and the inventor of Malgarth, and an accomplice of Kel Arran, the notorious Falcon of Earth, in a desperate fight to save humans from the powers of the Galactic Empire—a mere puppet of the dastardly Robot Corporation headed by Malgarth!

They don’t write ‘em like these anymore. The good guys are all good and the bad guys are all worse than bad. These Grand Space Operas with mystic motifs move through time and space at faster than light speed at multiple exclamation marks per page! show less

University student Denny Lanning is startled out of his daily round by the appearance before him of a beautiful young woman, Lethonee -- or, at least, a projection thereof -- who pleads with him that he in some ill defined way preserve the existence of her far-future civilization, Jonbar, rather than that of the wicked tyrannical warrior queen Sorainya. Denny promises to do his best, although his resolve falters when he encounters Sorainya (again in projection), whose crimson chainmail garb cannot fully disguise her "womanly curves"; his lust cools when he realizes she's trying to get him eaten by a shark.

Years pass, and in due course Denny, fighting against the Japanese in China, gets killed . . . only to be revived aboard the the show more timeship, the Chronion, that has been built by his old college buddy and genius physicist Wil McLan. But how McLan has changed! He fell for Sorainya's lures and spent a decade in her torture chambers; now he is a broken old man, although the spirit within him still burns bright. A figure vaguely reminiscent of Verne's Robur the Conqueror, McLan is mustering a sort of temporal Dirty Dozen to fight against Sorainya and her vile minions such that her reality never comes into existence, but Lethonee's does. The men he gathers, each snatched out of their timestream in the moments before death (I wonder if this is where John Varley got the idea for his 1977 story "Air Raid"?) are all from the early decades of the 20th century and all white, but they do display the kind of classy dialogue that literary novelists use to subtly indicate different ethnic origins:

"Gott im Himmel!" rumbled Emil Schorn at his side. "Der thing we must recover is in that castle, nein? It looks a verdammt stubborn nut to crack!" (pp102-3)

or

"My word!" gasped the British flyer, Courtney-Pharr. "When we meet that she-devil, she'll account for all this. Rather!" (p108)

or even

The little cockney, Duffy Clark, came presently with a covered tray.

"Cap'n McLan?" he drawled. "Why, 'e's lookin' inter 'is bloomin' gadgets, tryin' to find where that she-devil and 'er blarsted hants got 'old of that magnet."

"Any luck?" demanded Lanning.

"Not yet, sor." He shook a tousled head. "Wot with hall spayce and time to search for the spot. And the woman an' her blarsted 'igh priest is arfter us, sor, in a black ship full of the bloomin' hants!" (p134)

The speech of this chrononautical Dick Van Dyke is effin' slow and difficult to type, as I've just been discovering. This may be why he plays a fairly minor role in subsequent proceedings; and, when he does appear, retains a certain sprightly cockney taciturnity, the bleeder.

There's lots of derring-do as our heroes battle Sorainya's troops, who are giant gun-wielding ants. Matters aren't made easier by the fact that McLan's own early experiments with time had, as a by-product, the effect of increasing the probability of Sorainya's world's existence. In between all the fighting, it emerges that the crucial fork in time, the nexus determining whether Lethonee's or Sorainya's future would be reified, is when a boy in the Ozarks in 1921, John Barr, is wandering home one evening and picks up either a magnet or a pebble he spots lying by the way: if it's the magnet, it'll spark off an interest in science that in due course will affect the course of world events such that, centuries down the line, Jonbar will emerge. Sorainya's rotten lot, naturally, want him to pick up the pebble, so they filch the magnet. Can the Legion get it back in place before the boy reaches it? You bet they can.

There's quite a lot of differently good writing in this book, like

Lanning never laughed at superstition -- few fliers do. But his lean face smiled in the darkness. (p38)

and

"Please forgive my voice, Denny," his hoarse whisper came at last. "But once in the dungeon, when I was nearly dead with thirst and begging for anything to drink, Sorainya had molten metal poured down my throat." (p56)

and

"They found us on the ledge," breathed the voiceless man. (p131)

but there's also a lot that's very appealing, not just the central conceit, which was highly original in its day, of future realities warring to be reified. Here, for example, is Lethonee's explanation of the nature of time:

"The world is a long corridor, from the beginning of existence to the end. Events are groups in a sculptured frieze that runs endlessly along the walls. And time is a lantern carried steadily through the hall, to illuminate the groups one by one. It is the light of awareness, the subjective reality of consciousness.

"Again and again the corridor branches, for it is the museum of all that is possible. The bearer of the lantern may take one turning, or another. And always, many halls that might have been illuminated with reality are left forever in the dark." [. . .:]

"You, Denny Lanning," she went on, "are destined, for a little time, to carry the lantern." (pp25-6)

Less evocative but conceptually perhaps more interesting is this bit of infodumping from McLan:

"There is a law of sequence and progression, I found at last, operating along a fifth rather than the temporal dimension, which imposes inexorable limits. It is that progression which actually creates reality out of possibility. And it is that higher law which prohibits all the trite absurdities met with in the old speculation about travel in time, such as the adventurer in time who returns to kill himself. The familiar logic of cause and effect is not abolished, but simply advanced to a higher dimension." (p65)

Literature The Legion of Time ain't, and I confess that all the action sequences are a bit of a homogenous blur in my memory already, but it's an astonishingly fast read and in places plenty of fun. show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2304620.html

I hadn't appreciated that this was where the phrase "jonbar point" originated; I twitched with some excitement about a reference in a 1938 book to the defence of Paris in 1940 (though there are then Russian rocket pilots from 1947 which is a bit early); I was struck by the intense descriptions of hand-to-hand combat, practically trench warfare, which presumably must have been much in the war literature of the time reflecting the previous conflict (Williamson himself would have been too young to have any direct knowledge of it); I was amused by the notion of gathering together the best soldiers of all time, copied of course by Doctor Who among others; I winced a bit at Good Princess vs Bad show more Princess; and I was a bit surprised when it was over after less than a hundred pages. show less

(Original Review, 1980-12-03)

There is yet another possible method of time travel which was used in Williamson’s novel (made up of two novellas: “Legion of Time” and “After World’s End”). This version takes time travel to its logical conclusion when you take quantum mechanics into account. At any given point in time, there are several possible "futures". Each of these futures has a certain probability attached to it. As "time" progresses, one of these possible futures approaches 100% probability, and thus becomes "reality". The concept of hyper-time could be applied here and in this case is about the same as normal time. Naturally, things start getting complicated when people start travelling in time. Now, hyper-time no show more longer follows normal time. In the book, our hero’s lives in the 20th century and is confronted by time travelers from two possible futures: one in which an evil woman runs a cruel dictatorship in a ruined world, and the other in which everyone is happy and so on. Both possibilities were made possible by the invention of a device which I think had something to do with energy, but I'm no longer sure. The difference between the two is when and by who the device was invented.

It turns out that in the time line of the evil person, there was a plague which would have killed her if it were not for an injection. One of the hero's, who lived in the 20th century and also happened to have invented a time travelling ship, had stolen the vaccine before it was injected, and thus the evil person would have died -- EXCEPT that because it was POSSIBLE for the vaccine to be restored, she still lived. If the vaccine were destroyed, she would, of course, have died as a child, thus making the world a better place. There were quite a few plot complications that explain why the vaccine was not destroyed immediately, but you get the picture.

Now for the paradoxes. The main "time wars" battle was the time and place where the two possible futures forked off. Neither of these two futures were certainties, and yet it was possible for both of them to go back to the past and attempt to influence events (and the more "certain" an event was, the more energy it took to try to change it. In this case, the trigger was nothing more than a stone lying on the ground which a child would pick up, thus setting into action a chain of events which will years later lead the child to invent the device.) It was, of course, possible for someone to go into a possible future, and, in doing so, increasing its probability of occurrence. However, it was not possible for someone in a possible future to go into another one, because they can't both exist at the same time. Thus, they had to fight over their existence in the past.

I don't see why some people say that, when dealing with time travel backwards, either the universe is "preditermined" [2018 EDIT: sic; I couldn’t write for shit...]) or there are paradoxes. One can conceive of a non-predetermined (post-determined?) universe where paradoxes cannot exist. One such universe was described by Isaac Asimov in his novel "The End of Eternity." In this universe, any change in the past is immediately reflected in all future times. So, using a well-worn example, if you were to go back into the past and kill your grandmother, then you would cease to exist in any time period, and no one would have any memory of your existence. People in the future, looking at police records, would see "Woman killed by unknown assailant," because the fact of her death exists.

Note that I am not talking about creating parallel universes. Parallel universes, if they exist at all, cannot have any influence on this one, so their existence is not significant. If you say that whenever history is changed, a parallel universe is created, then you might as well say that the present one is changed because only one universe can "exist" at a time: one's own [2018 EDIT: I was already well into the MWI Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics back then...lol].

Some people might say that this is really pre-determinism, but it's not. Although is possible to see all history at once, a "time line," and see, for example, that at point x Mr. Jones goes to the bathroom, and afterwards (at point x + e) he washes his hands, the ability to SEE what happens is not the same as DETERMINING what will happen in the future. So if at point x - e, Mr. Jones looks into the future and sees that he is going to be in the bathroom in a few minutes, and decides NOT to go to the bathroom, then at the moment of his decision the past is changed, and if we (the neutral observer) now look at point x-e we shall find that Mr. Jones saw that he was NOT going to the bathroom, and following the time line from that point, we see that Mr. Jones acts on that basis. At point x, we do not have Mr. Jones in the bathroom, but instead Mr. Jones is wherever he decided to go after seeing that he was not going to go to the bathroom. (Perhaps he is cleaning up a mess on the living room carpet.) So the universe always remains consistent.

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.] show less

The Legion of Time: 3.5
After World's End: 4

Some spoilery thoughts here:
http://ciaracatscifi.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-legion-of-time-by-jack-williamson....