Timeline

When a whiz kid CEO (Doniger) starts taking people’s lives for granted in the pursuit of business profits using a brand new technology his company is developing, he has to be taught a lesson and given a dose of his own medicine. This is one aspect of this story. The brand new technology is the ability to teletransport people using quantum mechanics principles and quantum computing, not just from one place to another, but from the present to any time period in the past and back. The idea is that time is not like a destination that you travel to, but all periods of time exist together in parallel universes, and all that is required is a way to cross from one to another.

This technology of moving between times has been in secret development by the firm for years, with animals and employees as guinea pigs. And when accidents happen with the test subjects, they get hushed up in the firm while improvements are devised: Accidents like not being reconstructed properly on the return phase, or the brain or nervous system being altered. When a curious professor and his assistants working indirectly for the firm are assured that the technology is absolutely safe, they are transported to a region of France 600 years back, into the Middle Ages of Europe, only right into a war. While they are battling for their own lives so as to get back to the present, the CEO is contemplating turning his back on them so they don’t return, as an explosive accident in the lab has caused loss of equipment and raised other issues.

But luckily, the Professor and two of his three assistants manage to get transported back, only for them to hear the whiz kid giving a presentation to business executives whose companies he wants to get further funding from, selling them the idea of cultural tourism into the past as a billion dollar new business frontier. One of his colleagues takes it upon himself to banish the whiz kid into the past to teach him a lesson. He is drugged and transported alone back to France of the 14th Century, during a period of The Black Plague.

April 4, 2015. Novel first published in 1999, this Ballantine Books edition being published in 2000, ISBN 0-345-41762-3.