My name is Ishmael.  No, really, it is Ishmael and the last name is Jones!  With a start in life like that, how could I ever achieve anything?I had been working as laboratory assistant for Dr. Robert Norris for ten years and had become quite certain that he would NOT achieve his life’s desire, the abiilty to ‘go back in time’.  To me, with my doctoral in physics, it was a simple impossibility, the IDEA of travel in time, since TIME did not really exist but was a simple way for humans to divide up lives, work, play, etc.

  “JONES, COME HERE!”  That on the intercom from old Norris’ laboratory!  I put out my clandestine cigarette, and washing away the tobacco taste at the water cooler, went down the corridor to the lab and walked in upon a highly perturbed Dr. Norris.

  He was in shirtsleeves, sweating like the Niagara, and holding his spectacles in his hand, was furiously writing formulae on the blackboard.

  “I suppose I should say, ‘Eureka!”" he tiredly attempted humor,”But  I HAVE finally overcome the anomaly.  Let me explain it all to you, so sit down and watch as I sketch the basics…I hope your Penn State doctorate in physics will put you up to understanding this!”  I sat down and put a stick of chewing gum in the corner of my jaw, and awaited another triumph of failure!

  But it was not!  I’ll explain the hieroglyphics to you in plain language…when the great telescope  is focused on a distant star, lets say Proxima Centaurus, you are SEEING the LIGHT from Proxima Centaurus as it was when it LEFT the reflection to the telescope ……in the case of a much further away star, say the SUN, you have the time factor of 93,000,000 miles which converted to time at 286,000 miles per secomd means that the PICTURE you see is already ‘old” when you see it!

  Pictures of further away galaxies than the Sun would of course, be ‘older’;  we may very well be watching the birth or death of a star millions or billions of years from our ‘time’.

  But Professor Norris had worked it out…he had to find a way, preferably an intellectual way, to increase the speed of transmission of sending a telescope to ,say, ten million times the speed of light, thus avoiding the anomaly..  His curlicues and notes on the board now proved that feasible.  For you non-scientists out there, what Norris and I would now do at extraordinary expense was to send a radiotelescope, focused BACKWARD onto earth,  as it sped to the far limits of the Universe, but always looking back upon earth alone and at a billion times the speed of light…it would proceed under his new formula at one billion times 286,000 miles per second, and thus when it arrived would be at the utmost creation of earth itself at the time of the Big Bang.