Monday, December 14, 2020

Something About the Holes of Time (and Space?)

Go when you want to go.

I was again thinking about The Trolley to Yesterday recently because I had a hole in my thyme container. It cracked during Thanksgiving and, well, here we are. The spice rack is more fragrant than usual.

When Childermass discusses his time traveling trolley, he explains how the contraption can idle outside the holes of time. We get a sense of some of these holes:
One of them is in the upper story of a three-hundred-year-old house in Topsfield, Massachusetts. [...] There's another hole in a cave at the bottom of the Atlantic, about two miles deep. But you'd need a lot of fancy equipment to visit that hole, so I suppose we can pass it up. A-a-and there's another hole at the temple of Abu Simbel in Upper Egypt, and still another in the crypt of a medieval church in London.
But are these just temporal holes, or can they be spatial holes, as well? That is, what if Rod and the boys wanted to hurry down to south-central Essex County but save gas doing so. Could they take the time trolley from "early 1950s" Duston Heights to "early 1950s" Topsfield? If the trolley ran into problems, I suppose they could hitch a ride back ... and find the trolley there in the basement waiting. Or could they easily visit London any time they want by way of this mysterious medieval crypt? Would they need to take a passport just in case?

I suppose the question is, do they have to use the trolley to travel in time?

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