By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
Thinkwilder’s theory was that, when dinosaurs went to mate and bear young on your earth, they would be inadvertently harvesting organic material as well. Any food they ate—plants or animals—would become a part of their bodies, and when they left your world, that organic material which would have become the basis of parts of other animals and plants in the future then disappeared from your universe. Also, any children born to those dinosaurs would also carry their organic material over to the other side, to our frozen kingdom, and some dinosaurs have large litters—lots of young, which grow to be huge animals, and then all those tons of flesh and bone ripped from your reality into ours then they grow into adults and walk through the portal. If, in the future on your side, that stolen organic material happened to be part of someone’s heart or other vital organs, well… that person would die.
Of course I had a lot of questions. Perhaps the most important question was that none of this really makes any sense. If some organic material was harvested from the past, then since it was taken away from the past, it would never have the chance to become a part of creatures in the future. It should never have a chance to disappear from the bodies of animals or humans or dinosaurs because it should never have existed so as to become a part of those animals.
Yet time travel always presents numerous logical difficulties. It doesn’t really make sense that anyone should ever be able to travel through time. If, for example, a human being were to travel back thirty years with his time-traveling car, then there would be the same matter replicated twice in one time period—the exact same matter from his body already exists in the past, but just in another form, in the trees, in the food he has not eaten yet, in the world around him. It goes against logic that the same matter should be able to exist in two places at the same time.
Nevertheless, as proved by the mysterious portal, time travel exists and is possible. There seems to be some kind of underlying system in reality, though, that prevents paradoxes from occurring. For example, for whatever reason, though attempts have been made, a dinosaur has never been able to travel to a time period in which he already exists, thus exempting two copies of the same dinosaur. Something prevents such paradoxes from happening.
And there also seems to be another mechanism in the systems of reality that governs how matter can appear or disappear from a universe. If, for example, I travel to your world in 2018 one day and spend several days in 2018, then the same amount of time is experienced in the frozen kingdom simultaneously. I mean, if I return to the frozen kingdom from your side again after several days, then several days will have passed in the frozen world, too. It’s impossible so far as we know to go back in time in the frozen world, regardless of what time we jump into and out of when we travel to and from your world. There seems to be some kind of a synchronization that happens between your world’s time and ours when we travel hither and thither for our honeymoons.
These synchronization systems have some possibly deadly consequences.