Weekly Short Story: Elsewhen by Robert Heinlein

Twentieth century science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, best known for his novels Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers, was also responsible for many good short stories.  Early in his career he liked to dabble in the area of time travel as a theme...the 1941 story Elsewhen, which appears in the 1953 collection titled Assignment in Eternity (Baen Books), is one such tale...

Professor Arthur Frost is being arrested, suspected of murdering five of his students at his home and hiding their bodies.  But as the arresting officer momentarily averts his eyes, Frost vanishes into thin air.  What happened? Well, the story then flashbacks to the crucial meeting between the professor and the five students attending his speculative metaphysics class.  The subject? Why, time travel, of course...

Professor Frost claims that he has learned how to travel through time, which he claims is not the one, straight line commonly thought, but rather more like a plane. In his scenario we are still traveling down a line or path, but sometimes there are forks, representing important choices we make...and then there are the crossroads, leading to other realities.  A trained mind, says Frost, can escape the time pattern we are all encased in, and he challenges each of his students to follow him in this quest.  As it turns out, they each have their own unique experiences, tailored to their particular personalities and outlooks.  The rest of the story has a lot of traveling back and forth from one time and place to another...I'll leave all that for you to discover should you want to read it sometime...

What I liked the most about Elsewhen, which struck me as being a bit silly in places, was how Heinlein added to the notion that what we call "now" or "present" is a highly subjective experience to cover the entire fabric...or should I say "plane"...of time.  Once choices are made, time itself moves to accommodate those changes, according to the individual making the choices.  That may sound a little hard to grasp, but I have a gut feeling that there is something significant to it...what do you think?