Silverberg’s introduction to “Trip” in the collection
Trips, vol. 4 of
the Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg (Subterranean Press,
2009), states
that he wrote the story with the goal of being the ultimate alternative universes story, and
he lived up to that goal, devising nearly a dozen alternative Bay Area universes for his hero
Cameron to express his wanderlust. Admittedly, there’s no actual time travel because the
story was part of an anthology of ultimate sf, and Silverberg left the time travelin’ to
Philip K. Dick’s “
A Little Something for Us
Tempunauts.” But there is a world that Cameron thinks is a 1950s San Francisco (it
isn’t) and there’s a chance that Cameron experiences the passage of time at
rates that differ from world to world.
Warning: The first publication
of the story in that ultimate anthology (Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction
Anthology) was “cut to shreds” by a ham-handed editor at Charterhouse, so your best
bet is to read it in one of Silverberg’s later collections.
— Michael Main
There’s an infinity of worlds, Elizabeth, side by side, worlds in which all possible
variations of every possible event take place. Worlds in which you and I are happily
married, in which you and I have been married and divorced, in which you and I don’t
exist, in which you exist and I don’t, in which we meet and loathe one another, in
which—in which—do you see, Elizabeth, there's a world for everything, and I’ve been
traveling from world to world.