Charlie Gleister had invented a time machine, but he hadn't invented it right because it didn't work. His machine was about the size of a white plastic shoe box. Its surfaces were covered with dials and switches and levers and buttons. It made funny noises when Charlie turned it on, and its glow bulbs flashed purple and green, and it made his skin tingle. But nothing else. Charlie's machine was a very good tingler and flasher and noisemaker, but it was not a good time machine. It didn't become that until later, after Charlie had gained enough insight from the future so that he could adjust the machine to work properly in the present. (There is a paradox involved in that, of course. Time travel is full of paradoxes. The universe runs on paradox-power.)
So there was Charlie on a beautiful September afternoon in his basement laboratory on Apple Street in the unincorporated township of Harvest Falls, Indiana, tinkering with his machine and talking out loud to himself, saying things like, "Oscillation deployment factor...beat phase regeneration...infinite recycling amplitudes... second force reflection coefficient..." This is the veritable language in which genius communicates with itself, and Charlie was definitely a genius, even though Myra's father thought he was "a mite loco." Myra's father was the leading banker in Harvest Falls and a keen amateur psychometrician. Myra was Charlie's fiancée. Just now she was out for a drive with Carter Littlejohn, once the finest tailback in Hoosier history, now a locomotive salesman and the future father of Myra's illegitimate daughter, Hilda. Gleister's parents lived in a condominium in Jupiter, Florida, played Bingo every Friday night and wrote to Charlie on the first of every month. These people play no part in the story. Gleister also had an Uncle Max who lived in Key West and was known locally as the Pinochle King of the Conches. He also plays no part in the story. Nobody plays any real part in this story except Charlie Gleister, who plays entirely too large a part, or too many parts. But that's what happens when you begin to jump time tracks, as Charlie Gleister is about to do.
In the meantime, however, he was seated at his workbench putting tiny components together and taking them apart again and getting grease on his white shirt and cursing mildly and waiting for a gestalt to form or an insight to occur or something to happen.
And then something did happen. A voice behind him said, "Er, excuse me."
Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track One Plus Two:
The hairs on the back of Gleister's neck stood erect. He knew that he had bolted the lab door. His hand closed idiotically on the handle of a micrometer weighing perhaps thirty grams. He turned slowly.
"Didn't mean to startle you," the man behind him said, "but there was no other way. I've come about a very important matter."
Charlie relaxed his grip on the deadly micrometer. The man did not seem to be a dope-inflamed mugger. He was a tall lanky man of about Charlie's own age, with a long, homely, good-natured face. He was holding a white plastic box covered with dials and switches and levers and buttons. There was something familiar about him.
"Do I know you from somewhere?" Charlie asked.
The stranger grinned and didn't answer. Charlie looked at him, taking in the white shirt stained with grease, the khaki slacks, the Thom McCann ripple sole shoes...
"Oh my God," Charlie said, "you look just like me."
"I am you," the stranger said. "Or you are me. Or, more accurately, we're both Charlie Gleister occupying different time tracks."
"How can that be?" Gleister asked.
"That's a silly question for you to ask," the other Gleister said, "seeing as how you have just invented the world's first time machine and are therefore the world's leading expert on the nature of time."
"But I haven't invented it yet, not so that it works."
"Sure you have. Or you will very soon, which comes to the same thing."
"Are you certain about that? I seem to be doing something wrong. Could you give me a hint?"
"Of course," the other Gleister said. "Just remember that reality is positional and that nothing happens for the first time."
"Thanks," Gleister said doubtfully. "Let me see if I've got this straight. I'm going to get my time machine working soon, go into the future, then come back and meet myself just before I invent the time machine."
The other Gleister nodded.
"That's sort of weird, isn't it?" Charlie asked.
"Not at all," the other Gleister said. "You come back to now in order to urge yourself not to invent the time machine."
"Not to invent it?"
"That's right."
"Just a minute," Gleister said. "Let's start all over. I invent a time machine and go into the future and then come back to now and tell myself not to invent a time machine. Is that what I'm going to do?"
"That's it. But you don't have to keep on referring to us both as 'I.' We're both Charlie Gleister, of course, but we are also separate individuals, since we occupy different time tracks and are/were/will undergo different experiences at different moments in subjective time. So even though we're the same people, that makes us different, since reality is positional."
"I'll take your word for it," Gleister said. "Or my word for it...I think I'm getting a little hysterical...Why shouldn't I invent the time machine I invented?"
"Because it will be used for evil purposes."
"Could you be more specific?"
"Just take my word for it. I have to get out of here now: you and I talking together in the past constitutes a regressive temporal paradox, which can be maintained for only a few minutes and then is self-canceling. Progressive temporal paradoxes are another matter, of course; but you'll learn all of this yourself. Just believe me, do yourself a favor, don't invent that time machine."
The other Gleister began to shimmer faintly. Charlie called out, "Hey, wait! There's a couple of things---"
"Sorry, I'm smack out of duration," the other Gleister said. The shimmering intensified and his figure grew transparent. "How do you like this for an exit?" the other Gleister asked, grinning self-consciously. "See you around."
The other Gleister disappeared.
Gleister Main Line Sequence Time Track One:
After the other Gleister had gone, Charlie needed only a moment to decide not to not invent the time machine. He didn't like taking orders, not even from someone who called himself himself: which was arguable anyhow, since reality is positional. If it was so important not to invent a time machine, let the other Gleister not invent it.
Charlie went to work immediately, and, knowing that the thing was possible, needed only two hours to get his time machine working properly. Nothing happens for the first time, especially if what you're trying to do is to invent something absolutely novel and unprecedented. Of course, if nothing happens for the first time, that leaves the apparent problem of how anything happens at all. But the difficulty is entirely semantic: in the eternal recurrence of subatomic configurations of which our world is a simulacrum, there is no question of beginnings or endings. There are only middles, continuations, repetitions. Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.
So there was Charlie with his fully operational time machine neatly encased in a white plastic box, and now he is going on a journey into the future. But how? Consider---time and space are potentially equivalent quantities. They can be transformed into each other via the deus ex machina of a time machine. Take a simple analogy. You have five oranges and three apples. You want to add them together. To do so, you must first convert apples into oranges or oranges into apples or both into something else. The formula for converting apples into oranges is Taste divided by Flavor plus the square root of Color multiplied by seeds squared. You handle space-time transpositions in the same way, but using the appropriate formula. A time machine is no more than a realtime space-into-time converter operating on recycling interface energy residues. The practical application is a little more complicated than that, of course, and only Charlie Gleister was ever able to make it work. That may seem to be a violation of the law of Eternal Recurrence; but Exceptionality is also subject to repetition, as will be seen.