The Northern night sky slowly rotated above us inside the great astronomical dome of the Magellan Planetarium as the audience sat listening to the Astronomer in residence as he talked about all things Universal and our place in it.

The auditorium was packed for his monthly lecture and I had been lucky enough to get a seat to the rear and I sat there listening intently as he turned to the particular themes and subject which had come to interest me the most.

The Astronomer came to the front of the platform with his microphone. “We all know the three dimensions in which everything exists but, for me, things get really interesting when we consider the fourth dimension and add that to the mix. And the fourth dimension is?” he asked the audience who responded with various people shouting back at him.

“That’s right. Time. Time is the fourth dimension. If you want to turn your brain to mush, there are other theories that suggest more dimensions beyond even these four but that discussion is for another day when we’ve all had a few too many!” he laughed. 

“We can observe the first three by simply moving forward or back, left or right, and up and down. Time you can’t see but we know it’s there because we’ve created a system to measure it.”

He took a swig from his bottle of water and continued on the same theme. “Through seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, epochs, periods, era, and eons, we know that time is passing for us. Just look at a watch or a clock. Now wouldn’t it be the most amazing thing to be able to move in the fourth dimension in the same way we can move in the first three. This is where theory comes in. In physics, it is theoretically possible to be able to do that. The trick is to invent something that allows us to do it. A machine. A machine that can move in time.”

I sat forward in my chair and listened intently.

“Now, if I asked you who you thought my heroes were, you’d probably say it would be some famous Astronomer or Physicist like a Copernicus, Kepler, Herschel, or Newton, someone like that. Though those men have influenced the course of my life and the career I’ve decided to pursue you’d be wrong. My hero is someone you may or may not have heard of. My hero is Doctor Who.”

There was a light murmur of amusement from the audience and the Astronomer laughed and gave a thumbs up.

“Aha, I see we have a few old school PBS fans in here tonight. People with good taste,” He grabbed a stool and sat on it, “Yes, my hero is Doctor Who. Now for those of you who don’t know who I’m talking about, Doctor Who is a British science-fiction tv show that first aired way back in 1963 and is still on the air here today in 1990.

That’s nearly twenty-seven years it’s been going. Amazing, huh? Doctor Who is an alien time traveler who comes from the planet Gallifrey. He looks just like us but he has two hearts and the ability to become someone else when his old body wears out even though he remains, essentially, the Doctor. Now on that planet are a special group of people called Time Lords who have the ability to travel anywhere in time and space using a machine called a TARDIS. Anyone know what that stands for?” he asked looking around.

A woman near the front put up her hand and answered.

“That’s right,” he nodded, “Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. A TARDIS is a special kind of time machine because it can not only move forward and back in time, it can also move in space as well. Unlike, say, the time machine in H.G Wells famous book which could also move back and forth in time but not in space. That machine would have to be physically moved from its fixed point. Which is what happened when the Morlocks discovered it and dragged it into the Great Sphinx. 

But the interesting thing about Doctor Who is the way it handles the nature of time itself. Its premise is simple. That the past, present, and future are already there for the Doctor to visit and explore. Think of time being like a great big book with billions upon billions of pages with each page describing a moment in time and you can go there in the blink of an eye no matter where or when it is. Past or future.

Think how far the human race has progressed since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. The great technological strides we’ve taken as a species. Now extrapolate that relatively short period of time a thousandfold into the far future. Imagine what the world will be like a hundred, two hundred, five hundred or even a thousand years from now. 

Now consider that sometime in that future, someone or something could have invented a machine which a person or persons could sit in and go explore time and space. A future where science-fiction becomes science-reality. 

But that raises another interesting question. If it is possible and has been theoretically done, then that means there could be people from the future traveling throughout time and space right now. For all I know, there may be a time traveler sitting in this auditorium listening to me right now. Which is kind of scary because to them we’ve just crawled out of the swamp intellectually wise,” he laughed.

I glanced around at the people sitting near me as they sat listening to the Astronomer continue on his lecture. I eased back in my chair and looked up at the projected heavens above me. From magic comes wonder that leads to an understanding that gives life to reality. I closed my eyes and let my mind wander wherever it wanted to go.

It had been seven years since the last encounter.

Seven long years since I had seen her. 

Back when I was eighteen.

Maybe I would never see her again.

That possibility was something I didn’t even want to think about.

At least I still had the photo.

***

“Sweetie Pie!!”

The woman grabbed me in a bear hug as she tried to squeeze the pips out of me. I stood there on the doorstep as Mom got her Mother’s suitcase and bags from the boot of the car.

“Hey, Gran,” I winced as she grabbed my face and gave me a big juicy smacker on my right cheek, “How goes it?”

She held me at arm’s length and looked me up and down.