The Humboldt Effect

by Delia Huddy

A time machine brings a man from biblical times into the present, and the scientist who volunteers to return the man to his own time is trapped in the past

Genres: Science Fiction

157 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Delia Huddy worked as an editor in children’s publishing in a long career that included many happy years at Julia MacRae Books in London, after which she became editorial director at Random House UK. She was also an author of novels, picture books, and younger fiction. At the end of her life, in 2005, Delia Huddy was working on the text for The Christmas Eve Tree.

Reviews

[Yuvaraj kothandaraman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is named after the fictional physics principle at its heart: the Humboldt Effect. In the story, a brilliant young physicist named Tom Humboldt discovers a way to make time run backwards in a controlled area. This ability to manipulate time becomes known as "the Humboldt Effect."

But there is also a metaphorical meaning. The Humboldt Effect is named after the real explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled the world and made discoveries that had ripple effects far beyond what he probably imagined. The book suggests that every major scientific discovery creates consequences that spread outward in ways we cannot predict or control. The experiment itself triggers a chain reaction of events that transforms the lives of Luke, Mary, Arthur, and everyone involved. The "ripple effects" of the experiment are the real Humboldt Effect on these characters.

"The Humboldt Effect" is a science fiction novel written by Delia Huddy, published in 1982 by Greenwillow Books. The book combines hard science fiction with intimate character drama. It is set primarily in two locations: the Institute in London where theoretical physics research happens, and the Mediterranean Sea where a submarine serves as the platform for the time machine experiment. The story explores themes of friendship, loyalty, ambition, love, and the moral cost of scientific discovery. The book is gripping, claustrophobic, and ultimately unsettling because it shows how scientific achievement can come at an enormous human price.


PART ONE: DECEMBER TO APRIL - THE SETUP
The novel opens in December with Luke Crantock, a young physicist, encountering his old friend Mary Talbot at a BBC Radio Three concert in Knightsbridge, London. Mary is in a state of agitation with an angry rash covering her face. She looks radically different from the elegant woman Luke remembers from their time together at the Institute for Advanced Physics in Europe. Mary is struggling with a life decision: whether to marry Arthur Smith.

Mary and Arthur are mismatched in every obvious way. Arthur is ungainly, spotty, heavily bespectacled, dressed poorly in shabby jeans. He is from the north of England, speaks bluntly, lacks social polish. Mary comes from an aristocratic, wealthy family. She is beautiful, sophisticated, well-dressed, speaks with cultured affection. Yet Mary has fallen deeply in love with Arthur while working together on a research team at the Institute. Their relationship began as a joke to shock her glamorous friends, but evolved into genuine, intense love.

Luke and Mary walk through London on a bitter, snowy day. They end up at the Natural History Museum. In the Whale Hall, while standing on a balcony overlooking a massive blue whale, a freak electrical storm strikes with extraordinary intensity. Lightning flashes directly overhead. Thunder shakes the building. During this moment of violence and chaos, Mary experiences something strange. She loses time, loses awareness of where she is. She cries out Arthur's name. When the storm passes, she faints. Luke finds her unconscious on the museum floor.

Luke is mystified by this incident. He wonders if Mary was struck by electricity, if she experienced shock. But Mary describes something different. She felt transported somewhere else. She cannot remember where or what happened, but she knows it was more than just a storm.

When Arthur arrives at the museum (he was supposed to meet Mary for tea), he finds Luke helping Mary recover. Despite the bizarreness of the day, Mary tells Arthur that she has decided to marry him. The storm, whatever it was, has resolved her indecision. She says she wants to marry him. Arthur, emotional and unable to believe his luck, agrees.

The couple marries in April at a grand wedding in a West End hotel. The contrast between the two families and their social circles is stark. Mary's relatives represent old money, breeding, elegance. Arthur's family represents solid, no-nonsense northern values. Tom Humboldt, now a professor at twenty-six, appears at the wedding and discusses physics equations with Luke on pieces of paper. Arthur and Mary leave for their honeymoon. Everyone wonders if their mismatched marriage can possibly work.

PART TWO: THE EXPERIMENT AT SEA
Six months after the wedding, the story shifts to a submarine called the Artemis in the Mediterranean Sea. A team of physicists and technicians has gathered to conduct an experiment based on Tom Humboldt's time machine theory. Tom believes he can create a controlled bridge to the past using tachyons (theoretical faster-than-light particles) and time physics.

Luke is the lead scientist on the submarine. Arthur Smith is also there, working as part of the team. Other team members include Dotty Lowenstein (a brilliant mathematician), Sheila Norton, Barry Lambert, Graham, and various others. A submarine Captain, Bradley, commands the vessel.

The experiment is designed to create a temporal field that allows controlled access to the past. The mechanism involves helium, anti-alpha radiation, cascade multipliers, and fission stacks. Extensive monitoring and computer links connect the submarine to laboratories in London where Tom oversees the operation.

As the experiment builds toward its critical moment, tension rises. Everyone understands the risks. If something goes wrong, the results could be catastrophic. The experiment begins with preliminary tests. Everything proceeds according to plan. The monitors show good readings. The computers coordinate perfectly between the submarine and London.

Then at the crucial moment, disaster strikes. Arthur is standing on the outside of the submarine casing, monitoring the test area. A massive wave rises up. In the chaos, a figure appears in the waves. It is a small ship with a tattered sail, being tossed by the storm. Men cling to its side. Suddenly, a figure is thrown from the ship into the sea.

As the temporal field activates at maximum power, the submarine is struck by an enormous wave. Arthur is thrown off the casing by the force of the water. He disappears into the sea.

For two agonizing hours, the submarine searches for Arthur. The Captain commands the crew to comb the area systematically. But the sea has claimed him. Or so everyone believes. Then they find someone in the water and pull him aboard. But it is not Arthur. It is a strange man with long black hair, wearing ancient crude clothes that are soaked with salt water. He is conscious but disoriented, unable to speak coherently in any language the crew recognizes.

The horrifying truth becomes clear: the Humboldt Effect has worked. The time machine has created a bridge to the past. It has pulled a man from ancient times into the present. But the cost has been terrible. Arthur, who was standing at the junction point of the temporal field, has been swept away. Whether he has been thrown into the past or simply lost to the sea, no one knows.

THE MAN FROM THE PAST: JONAH
The rescued man is kept below deck on the submarine. Luke eventually realizes who this man is based on his description and behavior. The man is Jonah, the biblical figure. He appears to be from ancient times, possibly from the Mediterranean region around 4th century B.C. He is traumatized, confused, unable to understand where he is or what has happened to him. He does not speak English. He has been pulled violently from his own time into a world he cannot comprehend.

Over time, it emerges that Jonah has been psychologically connected to Arthur through the temporal field. The connection is incompletely described in the novel, but the implication is that Arthur, standing at the test area, became a conduit for bringing Jonah forward to 1982. When the field collapsed, Arthur was pulled toward the past while Jonah came to the future.

PART THREE: ARTHUR'S JOURNEY THROUGH TIME
Arthur finds himself on the beach near Jaffa (the ancient port of Joppa) in what he gradually realizes is the 4th century B.C., not the modern 1980s. The beach where the ancient sailing ship deposited him is empty and virgin, covered with nothing but sand. There are no planes overhead, no modern development, no signs of twentieth-century civilization. He realizes with horror that he is in the past, not the present.

In a state of panic and desperation, Arthur must survive. He is weak, hungry, thirsty, injured. His only possession is one contact lens (a gift from Mary) that stayed lodged under his eyelid through the sea. He has the clothes on his back (a Batman t-shirt and ripped jeans).

Over days of walking through the desert, drinking from dried-up stream beds, eating wild figs, and struggling through sand dunes, Arthur makes a profound intellectual connection. He realizes that the submarine that picked up Jonah is the great fish that swallowed Jonah in the biblical story. He figures out that the experiment occurred at the ancient port of Jaffa, and that the Humboldt Effect must have coincided with the biblical events described in the Book of Jonah.

Arthur does mathematical calculations. He knows that Luke will attempt to return Jonah to his own time. He knows the experiment requires the same location and the same conditions. Arthur reasons that Luke will bring the submarine back three days later (the time Jonah spent in the whale). If Arthur can get to a location on the coast where Luke will deposit Jonah, Luke might be able to find him.

Arthur steals an ass (donkey) from a camel caravan and rides north toward Haifa. He walks nearly sixty miles through dangerous territory, driven by the image of Mary in his mind. The journey is harrowing. He is in constant pain, barely conscious at times, delirious from thirst and exhaustion. But his mind, his survival instinct, and his need to get back to Mary drive him forward.

PART FOUR: THE RESCUE
Three days later, Luke and team members return to the same location to conduct a second Humboldt Effect experiment to send Jonah back to his own time. They search the beach and see a figure on a distant hill, shouting and waving. It is Arthur. He is skeletal, burned by the sun, covered in wounds, barely able to move. But he is alive.

Luke, in the dinghy, pulls Arthur out of the sea again. Arthur is delirious with fever and joy. He tells Luke about Jonah, about working out the biblical connection, about walking sixty miles through the desert. He explains that he kept going because he could not abandon Mary. Mary's image, her memory, kept him going.

When they activate the Time Field for the second experiment to return Jonah, the force is tremendous. The dinghy is nearly torn apart as they are dragged back through time. But they make it. They escape the collapsing temporal field with Arthur alive. Jonah is returned to his own time.

When Luke left them at the flat after Arthur's return, Arthur was holding on to Mary as if he would never let her go again. There is hope, Mary said. Oh Luke, there is hope, isn't there?

THE RECOVERY AT THE WHALE HALL
But the hope is bittersweet. Arthur is physically saved, but his mind is damaged. After his rescue and medical treatment, Arthur returns to consciousness but cannot remember who he is. He has complete amnesia. He does not remember his name. He does not remember Mary. He does not recognize Luke. He shows no interest in anything. For months, he sits staring into space, wanting only peace.

Mary is devastated. She visits Arthur daily, but he pushes her away. The man she loves does not know her. He seems to hate her presence. Her despair deepens as Arthur fails to recover his memory.

Seven months after his return, Luke and Mary devise a desperate plan. They realize that Arthur's journey through time may be connected to the biblical story of Jonah. Arthur was thrown into the sea just as the biblical Jonah was. They take Arthur to the Natural History Museum's Whale Hall on a wet, windy afternoon when it is closed to the public.

They leave Arthur standing alone on the balcony overlooking the great blue whale. Then they recreate the storm from that day using a tape recorder with sounds and a flashlight that flashes like lightning. Over the noise of the recording, Luke calls out repeatedly: "Jonah. Jonah. Jonah." The word echoes weirdly through the dark hall.

For agonizing minutes, Arthur does not respond. Then slowly he straightens up. Suddenly he cries out in despair. The cry tears at Luke and Mary's hearts. But this is the breakthrough. The connection between Arthur and Jonah's biblical story triggers something in his damaged consciousness. Arthur has remembered. They took him home in a taxi. He was like a man drugged, like someone emerging from a heavy sleep, totally disoriented and afraid. But for the first time in seven months, he was aware.

THE ANNIVERSARY CHAPTER - ONE YEAR LATER
One year after plans were first made for the Humboldt Effect, the team gathers at the Institute. Arthur is recovering but his recovery is incomplete. He is no longer in a catatonic state but he has lost his scientific abilities. He will never be the brilliant physicist that Tom Humboldt once called "the finest, most truly original physicist of his year." But he is alive and aware.

Mary reveals to Luke that she had been connected to Jonah all along. Her strange turns earlier in the book were not about Arthur. They were about Jonah. She explains the significance: the sailors in the Bible cast lots to decide who should be thrown overboard, just as the biblical account describes. She and Luke gave the biblical story new significance. Arthur figured out the Jonah connection and used it to navigate back to Haifa.

Luke is offered the position of Director of the Institute. Tom Humboldt is leaving to pursue theoretical physics at another institution and wants Luke to take over. But Luke is wracked with guilt. He worries that he would be betraying Arthur by accepting the job. He wonders if he should let the Institute fail rather than leave Cambridge and his doctorate plans.

Mary tells him sharply that he cannot use Arthur as an excuse. She says she had to make her own decision about Arthur. She married him because they were meant to be together. The best decision Luke made was taking Jonah back. And Luke brought Arthur through it all.

She argues that Arthur's life was the Institute. Arthur believed in it completely. If Luke abandons it, he abandons Arthur's life work and all that Arthur sacrificed for. Luke must make up his own mind. If he truly believes in the work, his heart must be in it or it is no good.

THE FINAL RESOLUTION
Tom raises his glass at the gathering and announces Luke's new position as Director of the Institute. Luke looks at his team: Nick, Kristof, Graham, Dotty, Sheila, Becky, Alan Bleriot, and even Barry Lambert. He looks at Tom and realizes their roles have changed. They are now equals.

Luke speaks with confidence and authority. He tells the team that they have made amazing discoveries but the past is over. The future is where they must concentrate their efforts. He wants no one with doubts about the importance of their work. He speaks of Arthur, acknowledging that Arthur is "as much part of the Institute" as anyone there, even in his absence and altered condition.

Luke's first action will be to get some Brasso and clean the brass plate by the front door.

Luke walks away along the River Thames. He has decided to abandon his doctorate and accept responsibility for the Institute. He reflects that Arthur managed to travel sixty miles through the Israeli desert in terrible conditions. Luke is simply walking through London streets, yet it feels equally difficult. He acknowledges that Arthur still has his dignity and that his sacrifice demands that the work continue.

The book ends with everything complicated and unresolved. Arthur is recovering but will never be the brilliant scientist he was. Mary is married to a man who does not remember her. Luke has put aside his own dreams and ambitions. But they will move forward together because the Institute, and the work Arthur believed in, matters more than individual hopes and dreams.

The book's greatest strength is its refusal to provide simple answers. The Humboldt Effect works. The time machine successfully bridges to the past. But the cost is Arthur's consciousness and identity (at least partially). There is no happy ending. There is only a bittersweet resolution where everyone survives but is changed forever by what they have experienced.

The Anniversary chapter elevates the book by showing not just the scientific achievement but the long-term human consequences. One year later, Arthur is still struggling. Mary is still suffering. Luke must sacrifice his dreams. But they move forward because something larger than themselves (the work, the Institute, the pursuit of knowledge) demands it.

[colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

read 05.17.84