Outside Reading

Crichton, Michael. Timeline. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 1999.

For this Outside reading, I read Timeline, by Michael Crichton. This novel starts out in the desert in Arizona, between an Indian reservation and a small town called Gallup. A man and his wife are driving towards Gallup, and they see an old man on the side of the road. As they drive past, the hit a pothole. The wife thinks they have hit the man, and so they drive back to see. The old man is lying down, but has not been hit by the car, and they see the pothole they hit. The old man is obviously very distressed, and he is speaking in riddles. He is saying things like "Left it, heft it, Go back now, get it how (6)" and, to the tune of a John Denver song, "Quondam phone, makes me roam, to the place i belong, old Black Rocky, country byway, Quondam phone, its on roam (9)" Obviously, the couple has no idea what the man is trying to say. Then the wife notices the old mans fingers are very red and swollen, but they werent when they first picked the man up. This goes on for the rest of the car ride, and when they get to the hospital, the old man dies of massive cardiac arrest. An autopsey shows that the veins in his fingers and heart were split, as if they had ben taken apart and then rearranged slightly lower than their normal places. At first they think its a problem with the machine, but later in the story we realize that isnt the case at all. The story then shifts to a company, supposably where this old man worked. They are a company that has developed the secret of time travel. They have been sending people back to find out what an archeologic sight looked like in the past. We discover that this man was sent back, but upon return the equiptment malfunctioned, messing him up. I wont tell you the rest, because it would ruin the suspence should you decide to read this book. A character in this book, Bob Doniger, the CEO of the time travel company, reminded me of the theme of friendship in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? He is a very cruel man. Upon hearing of the death of his employee, he says:

Big f**king deal. The autopsy won't show a thing. Traub (the old man) had transcriptual errors. They'll never figure it out. Why are you wasteing my time with this s**t?
'One of your employees just died, Bob,' Gordon said.
'That's true,' Doniger said coldly. 'And you know what? There's all the f**k I can do about it. I feel sorry. Oh me oh my. Send some flowers. Just handle it, OK? (23).

The transcriptual errors are errors that happen in your body if you time travel too much. Traub (the old man) had these errors. The company knew it, but Traub threatend to reveal the secret of time travel if they didnt let him go back again. He went, and then died on return. Bob Doniger is not being a good friend here. In Oh Brother Where Art Thou, the men were willing to take on extreme danger to help Tommy get out of trouble, but Doniger wasnt willing to take a little bad publicity to keep one of his employees alive. Also, you can tell that he is an unstable person, because of the nochalant way he takes the news about his employees death. It's almost as if he knew it was going to happen. And the language he uses right off the bat is atrocious too. It's too bad that there really are greedy, cruel people like that in the world.