Things I Will Do With A Time Machine
I’m beginning to think the possibilities are endless. Just think of the misery that could be stopped, the accidents prevented, if I had the courage to travel back in time and do what was required.
I entertain myself with these scenarios.
- I could kill Hitler. I can’t believe no one’s thought of this (come to think of it they probably have). I could go back to Austria, April 20th, 1889, to the Pommer Guesthouse in a village called Braunau am Inn and kill the baby Adolf Hitler, who was born there that day. (I know: anyone would think I’d been researching this or something.) Wouldn’t that be awesome, although I’m not sure how I would feel about killing a baby, even one that I knew was Adolf Hitler and would grow up to murder millions of people. How could I do it? I’d suddenly materialise in the dining room, say, then go up to the receptionist and ask, “Wo ist das Hitler Baby?” then – assuming I understand the answer and I haven’t been pounced on by the terrified locals – what am I supposed to do? Run into the room, shouting, “Die, you murderous dictator-to-be,” and stab the baby with a steak knife I found downstairs? No. I couldn’t do it. And what would the baby’s mum say? I’d never get away, I’d be captured and hanged, leaving a time machine zinc tub in the middle of a 19th century Austrian dining room.
- Stop the First World War. OK, this one is a bit easier. Everyone says the First World War was started by a lone gunman, Gavrilo Princip, who shot the Austrian Duke, Franz Ferdinand and then everyone else piled in, basically. So I go back to where it happened, outside Schiller’s Delicatessen in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914. I stand next to Princip in the shop doorway and wait for him to draw his gun, and then nudge his arm so he misses. But what if he hit someone else? Or turned the gun on me?
- Everyone says that the First World War led to the Second World War, so that would mean no Second World War, without me having to kill Hitler. But then Dad used to say that the biggest advances in computer technology came about when we devised ways of firing rockets at Germany (or maybe it was Germany firing rockets at us, I can’t remember) and decoding their secret messages. Anyhow, without the Second World War, maybe there’d be no computers, and without computers, Dad wouldn’t have built his time machine. So that’s all a bit tricky.
- OK here’s one. I could go back to last week and buy a ticket for the lottery, knowing what the winning numbers are. I could then convert it all to cash and bring it back to now, and be super-rich. You know, that one’s quite good. The only difficulty is that I’m not old enough to buy a lottery ticket, and I run up against the doppelganger thing. But it’s worth bearing in mind.
Meanwhile, though, I have a task – and to do it, I need to fix up the time machine in my bedroom.