Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
Given enough time, some things are inevitable. You are going to have lots of time at your disposal, enough to make this not inevitable but at least possible. Of the people you meet traveling across time, there’s a real chance one will be another time-traveler.
With a whole planet and thousands of years as ground for your exploration, this might seem a long shot, but the scale is deceptive. There will be very popular times and places to visit: I’ve been guiding you by using three such examples1. The population density, so to speak, of time-travelers will be concentrated there and then, and an encounter between two or even more becomes highly plausible.
How can you recognize another time-traveler? If you manage it, it’s probably going to be something subliminal, not a specific trait you’d be looking to spot. It could be a subtlety in appearing out of place, although in many cosmopolitan settings there will be a lot of people not from there, looking out of place.
It could be a modern turn of phrase, a quirk of grammar more current-day than contemporary. This isn’t as likely as you might think. Other time-travelers may well not be from your general time or culture, and thus wouldn’t sound like you if they let something from their own home slip in. A turn of phrase foreign to both the place you’re visiting and your own home is a clue, but it could also be just a foreigner from the current time.
It could be something in the stranger’s bearing, a sharpened attentiveness to the surroundings, a sense that unknowable risks might lurk around any corner or through any doorway. Or that could be a sign of mere normal paranoia. A good time-traveler might avoid giving off these vibrations, but not every time-traveler will be a natural.
What should you do if you encounter another time-traveler? Ideally, nothing. That person is trying to keep incognito, just like you. Drawing attention to the other time-traveler is as undesirable as, for instance, that time-traveler drawing attention to you.
Still, your paths may keep crossing. Your separate endeavors may keep running counter to each other. You may find you have, not an unacknowledged companion, but a rival.
A rival in what, though? Not in changing the past. This won’t be some time war, you vying against a fanatical SS officer to prevent a resurrection of the Third Reich2. The stakes will be lower, perhaps by a lot, perhaps by a little.
Your rival may want to carry knowledge -- uncovered history or lost literature or similar things -- back to his present first, before you. In this context, though, “first” is a slippery concept. Leaving the past time period ahead of somebody else doesn’t count for much. Getting to our present era with that knowledge does, but if you’re looking for priority in presenting the discovery, that depends on returning to an earlier period than your rival in what we’re calling “the present.”
If you travel from the year 2029 to ancient Athens, and your rival goes back from 2035, you’ve got the advantage. If you both return to your home times with the complete works of Sophocles, your discovery will have priority by six years. Your rival could try undercutting you by going to 2025 with the plays instead, but this would alter the last decade of his own past, maybe enough to create a paradox loop. His undercutting move would also imperil four years of your past, but he’d be bearing much the greater risk. Whether this suffices to deter him depends mostly on his own character.
On the other hand, his perspective is that nobody’s uncovered the complete works of Sophocles yet in 2035. (Maybe he was dumb enough to have missed such a discovery in the news, but let’s assume not.) The natural conclusion would be that you failed to bring back the works ahead of him. In his eyes, you can’t succeed. Indeed, you mustn’t succeed, or you’ll undo his timeline. Thus, you have to be prevented from acquiring the works of Sophocles and bringing them forward.
This means you have to die. So be it.
There are gaps in this argument, such as your rival not necessarily knowing that you come from a time before him and can thus undercut him without imperiling your timeline. It’s not much comfort to know that you’re dying due to an unsound argument. To solve this problem, I recommend simple evasion. In layman’s terms, run away, and arrange it so your rival knows you’re running away. This can mean returning to your own time, or slipping back two more weeks into the past to make your big literary purchase.
Your rival might instead be seeking fame, the glory of being the first to accomplish X, Y, or Z. This is related to the previous primacy motivation, a way to gain prestige. This would be a much more obvious motivation if not for the current underground nature of time travel.
“Secret fame” is close to being an oxymoron, but the contradiction isn’t as plain it may seem. In an isolated and tight-knit group, performing acts they must keep out of general notice, there is still the urge to set up a hierarchy, and to be as close to the top of that hierarchy as possible. Great feats are a natural way to assert “top dog” status, even if only a select few know about them.
If you don’t want to play this game, you can tell the members of your time-travel clique how futile it is. The very nature of time travel makes appeals to priority in accomplishing some time-shifted task a mockery, an application of linearity to something that defies set progressions simply by being done.
This is way too smart to work. I include it mainly so I can look smart myself.
Once this appeal to common sense and humility fails, you’ll need a new plan. How you respond to your rival playing glory-hog at your expense hinges upon how much you care about that hierarchy -- or how much personal pride you have.
If you don’t care about such pecking orders, you have two options. The first is not to bother about it. This may be good for the soul, even if it’s bad for the reputation you don’t care about. The second, more advantageous option is to feign caring, so you can negotiate away the glory to your rival in exchange for something that matters more to you.
It is vital in this scenario to act like you care. Your rival won’t pay much in exchange for something you plainly don’t value. If you’re confident enough in your negotiating skills, you can start the bargaining by flipping your real priorities and trying to secure the glory for yourself. Only after your rival rebuffs you3 will you fall back to giving it up for a sufficient consideration, and bear your rival gloating over having beaten you.
What you take in exchange is naturally up to you. Cash is always good; trade items certainly work. Ideally, figure out what your adversary values less compared to you, so you can get more of it.
Another possible point of contention with your rival could be something ideological or doctrinal. Your opponent may know you, or know of you, and disapprove of what you stand for. He may know, or think, or fear, that you’re buttressing or undermining some theory or narrative with your investigation of the past. Imagine that you’re looking into the life of Adam Smith, or Karl Marx, and you get a quick taste of how that could work. Spread it to all forms of politics, or anthropology, or especially theology, and the ramifications exponentiate.
This is not so easily dismissed as someone beating you to the complete Sophocles or the first photograph of the Parthenon under construction. Your rival has a deeper goal, and isn’t going to be dissuaded. Neither, presumably, are you.
If it’s simply a matter of hunting facts bearing on some big controversy, it’s less of a problem. Those chips will fall where they may. Indeed, they’ve already fallen. The years during which Buddha was alive4, or whether Thomas Jefferson had a copy of The Wealth of Nations by his side when he was writing property rights into his first draft of the Declaration of Independence5, won’t vanish because you weren’t the one to make the discovery.
More weighty matters, like buttressing or demolishing a historical figure’s reputation, need stronger answers. Sadly, they aren’t readily available. If I knew how to parry such thrusts, I’d be dominating every argument I ever had about politics, religion, and whether the 1927 Yankees would beat the 1975 Reds.
For a quick and dirty solution, you can drop vague hints about some other figure connected to the dispute you’re having, what you’ve uncovered, and how your present day will react to the startling revelations. This could get your adversary haring off on that false scent. For actual relief, though, he’d need to be so distracted by that side issue that he never returns to the original one. Chances of that are not great, but it’s worth a shot.
For surer aid, knowing your subject well will help. Presumably you brushed up before making the journey, though, and studying the matter obsessively beforehand on the odd chance of meeting an ideological rival for in the past is a dubious use of your time. You can, of course, break off to go home and do those studies, once you know you need them. Your adversary can do the same, so you’re probably stuck in that intellectual arms race.
Of course, the rivalry could always be something more tangible. Your opponent might very well be out for money, and glad to get it at your expense. He might be selling things in the time and place you’re visiting and undercutting you; he might be buying things you were hoping to purchase for yourself; he might be bringing back artifacts to the future and putting them on the market before you can.
This is a much more straightforward contest than the others. I do not call it simpler, because there is great room here for complex maneuvers. Ideally you want to maintain your own profits, and don’t really care about ruining your rival -- unless that’s the best way to keep him from ruining you.
In that spirit, you can again try negotiating with your rival. There’s surely a modus vivendi that would give both of you spheres in which to operate for maximum personal advantage, avoiding dragging each other down. Your rival isn’t necessarily a personal antagonist, even if previous examples have made that seem unavoidable, and a show of good will could straighten things right out. To borrow from a 20th-century philosopher, be nice -- until it’s time to not be nice.
If and when that latter time comes, you need to keep certain principles in mind for your economic competition. The primary one is that profit derives from inefficiency. Having too much of one thing and not enough of another is an inefficiency. Having a center of production and a center of consumption separated by a hundred miles, or a thousand, or ten thousand, is inefficient. Lack of information makes it hard to trade frictionlessly, and that’s inefficient for those lacking the information.
Gains can be realized by smoothing over the inefficiencies6. You hold a market where people can trade; you transport goods in a less costly and arduous manner; you give people the information they need to trade wisely. Your position as a time-traveler gives you immense advantages in creating these conditions -- or in leveraging areas where you have an advantage to produce gain for yourself.
Is this exploitative? Is this unjust? Those are tangled questions. If you buy a mundane item from somebody that will be worth lots to a collector in two hundred or five hundred or two thousand years, have you cheated the seller? You’ve paid him the price he asked today, and he won’t live long enough to realize the greater profit he might have by holding onto the item.
Do this with a kid in 1952, trading for his new Topps baseball card of Mickey Mantle, and you’re on shakier ethical ground. That’s a big profit he could realize in forty years, when the card explodes in value. Yes, maybe his mom will throw away the card before then, or maybe he’ll throw it away himself, or maybe he’ll stick it in the spokes of his bicycle wheel7. Or maybe he’ll save it and have a nest egg for his retirement. Your trade would not only take this away, it would start messing with the recent timeline at a scale that might not get cleaned up.
This tangent comes back around to my primary point: your knowledge is your best tool for economic success as a time-traveler. This matters as much for outmaneuvering a pesky trading rival as for dealing with a humble shopkeeper. Know the market you’re visiting as well as possible, and you’ll be well armed to defeat another time-traveler on that battlefield.
If it turns out you aren’t as well prepared as your opponent, don’t despair. Also, don’t continue the battle on those terms. Disengage and go home -- to reload. Add to your studies back in your home time, then return and re-engage, perhaps with next to no time elapsed in the past. You have a time machine. Use it strategically. Think four-dimensionally.
Remember, too, that your rival can do the same thing. Don’t be satisfied getting a step ahead of him with your refresher course. Try to get two steps ahead. Maybe three.
If your rival’s sabotages are less about past trades than present or future ones, your best response may be to slip out of his way. You don’t need to sell your bounties from the past in your own time. You can select the recent past, or even the near future, whichever avoids the effects of a rival-glutted market better.
For past dealings, remember that inflation will cost you some of your value if you take payment in cash. You may be better off making a swap for a different trade good that will appreciate faster than the inflation rate for the intervening span. If going to the future, a cash transaction has the problem of currency dated after your home time, which you won’t be able to pass at least until the year on the bill comes along. Goods-for-goods swapping is an even better idea in this case.
Also remember the timeline risks involved with doing anything in the near past. You may want to pick the very near past, on the order of weeks or months, and find a different market location than the one your rival is using (if you can find out which that is). Buyers looking to keep their purchases quiet will be very useful in not disturbing the timeline.
You may be tempted to use your knowledge a different way. Exposing your rival, either directly as a time-traveler or indirectly as somebody undesirable simply by not being from around these parts, could drive him away and leave the field to you. It is at least as likely, maybe more, to draw suspicion upon you. Making the general accusation focuses attention on the accuser, and you’re trying to move through this society as anonymously as you can. (You don’t exactly fit either, remember?) Worse, what if the locals believe your accusation, then find your rival’s machine and prove it? Bye-bye, timeline. This massive escalation does far more harm than good.
If you’re going to attack your rival’s business practices, you need to be specific, not to mention credible. Hit him on particular practices, not a generalized smear, and you’ll have a better chance of avoiding blowback onto yourself. If possible, point out things that would be hard for your rival to deny without risking exposure as a time-traveler. Paint him into a corner. His only escape might be via the fourth dimension.
Be aware, of course, that your rival can use the same tactics. Keep your business dealings clean, so there’s no material for fair accusation. Unfair accusations can’t be headed off, as anybody who has observed politics knows. It’s the risk you run.
Even if you make yourself a formidable opponent against one time-traveling rival, that doesn’t deter the operation of others, perhaps many others. It’s a law of economics that, if one entity is making big profits in a market, others will be highly motivated to move in and get their piece of the action. You can’t even depend on exploiting a lag time while word gets out about the opportunity. Time travel doesn’t work that way: they can come for the rich pickings at the same time you do, or even before. If enough competitors arrive to exploit the obvious bargains, you may need to get creative and crafty in finding some that they haven’t thought to exploit.
If you look at it from a viewpoint other than your own benefit, it is a marvelously complex situation. Adam Smith would have a field day just thinking about it. Too bad you can’t discuss it with him8.
Footnotes:
This means I’ve probably raised the chances of such meetings. Sorry about that.
All right, it probably won’t be a time war. The SS guy might be under a misapprehension about the effects he can have on the established timeline. Maybe he doesn’t know any of the rules. Maybe he’s heard of the rules, but considers them “Jewish science” and doesn’t believe them. Nobody said Nazis were smart -- except other Nazis, and they would say that, wouldn’t they?
And hopefully doesn’t walk off in a huff -- or worse, accept your deal. This needle-threading is the dangerous part of the negotiation.
Some scholars have Buddha dying before others have him being born. As Buddhist calendars are based on the years since a specific event in Buddha’s life, you see how this could seriously upset assumptions, and people.
Smith’s book was published in March 1776, barely in time for it to cross the Atlantic before Jefferson got his writing assignment. If anyone in America was going to get it that fast, though, it was the bibliophile Jefferson.
The gain doesn’t necessarily have to be in money, but money is a highly useful if imperfect way of keeping track of value.
Kids did this to make their bikes sound a little like motorcycles. They probably have something plastic to do the same thing now, if anyone even bothers.
Well, perhaps you could at the very end of his life, when he wouldn’t have a chance to blab to others. And don’t bother with Karl: he’d be a crashing bore about it.
Back to Top
Back to "Looks Can Be Deceiving"
Back to Home Page
|