I really liked this scene, and it was hard to part with it. I left it in until the fourteenth draft (of seventeen) of "The Pluto Incident." In the end, I couldn't justify it in terms of the story, and it pushed the story over the word limit.
This
Faster-than-light travel is not all that wonderful to look forward to. It leaves a sore feeling in your jaw that lasts several hours. It feels similar to biting down on a jawbreaker. If it was not for the fact that it would take millions of years to visit planets outside our solar system otherwise, it would have never been invented.
Creating an engine that could cross the galactic gaps in space proved to be one of the most difficult advances in the history of humanity. Compared to faster-than-light engines, time travel was easy to discover. It was discovered in the early twenty-third century.
Galactic gaps have length and width. They have a lot of length and width! Time is measured entirely different. Once scientists discovered how to measure time in the same way they measured distance, the rest was easy. The entirety of time up to the twenty-third century fit neatly on a quarter (yes, there is still money in the future).
The trick was shrinking a human so that he could fit onto time and slip into another time period. Dr. Simeon Mach, the German scientist credited with making time travel possible, created a shrink gun that could accomplish the task. After being shrunk, the average adult could cross whole millennia with a single step. Mach made adjustments to his gun and tried again. Then you could cross approximately one year with a step. At a brisk run, you could cross a millennium in just under five minutes.
Once you reached the year you wanted to visit, you would carefully slip through time and land on matter. Science fiction novels have predicted that careless time travelers could muck up the future. Since there is not much mucking you can do when you are less than a millimeter tall, there was never a problem with mucking.
Faster-than-light engines are not near as easy to explain, so I will not even try. It took Lord Drybel and a team of 118 British scientists sixteen years just to design the exhaust system.
became this in the final draft
Faster-than-light travel is not all that wonderful to look forward to. It leaves a sore feeling in your jaw that lasts several hours—similar to biting down on a jawbreaker. If it was not for the fact that it would take millions of years to visit planets outside our solar system otherwise, it would have never been invented. Creating an engine that could cross the galactic gaps of outer space proved to be one of the most difficult advances in the history of humanity. It took Lord Drybel and a team of 118 British scientists sixteen years just to design the exhaust system.
This deleted scene is significant because I'm developing a Map Makers spin-off titled The Misadventures of the Tiny Time Traveler (I'm developing it as an audio drama series). Yes, I'm developing a spin-off from a deleted scene. And yes, I'm still going to call it a spin-off of Map Makers even though the scene was cut from Map Makers.
Another fun fact: In the original draft of "The Pluto Incident" there was an additional character recruited as a map maker named Totter Oswald. She was a tomboyish character I dropped after the first draft. I hoped I could better develop the characters with a smaller group of main characters. I really like the name Totter, so I'll probably eventually use it for another character if not in Map Makers than in another story.
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