Time Travel Omnibus, page 647
Men put this supreme man into the machine. Even so, Madonna and Child does haunt the world’s mind . . . and a soft femininity prevails—men’s skirts are the new soft gracious mode of dress in the West. Yet he is now so noble, so handsome in his youth, so glowing and strong; such a Zarathustra, locked up in there.
(2018)
He can only be 21 or 22. The world adores him, mothers him, across the unbridgeable gulf of reversed time. No progress in the Solar System, let alone on the interstellar front. Why should we travel out and away, even as far as Mars, let alone Pluto, when a revelation is at hand; when all the secrets will be unlocked here on Earth? No progress on the tachyon or negative-time fronts, either. Nor any further messages from him. But he is his own message. His presence alone is sufficient to express Mankind: hopes, courage, holiness, determination.
(2019)
I am called back from retirement, for he is holding up signs again: the athlete holding up the Olympic Flame.
He holds them up for half an hour at a stretch—as though we are not all eyes agog, filming every moment in case we miss something, anything.
When I arrive, the signs that he has already held up have announced:
(Sign One) THIS IS A VERY SLOW TIME MACHINE. (And I amend accordingly, crossing out all the other titles we had bestowed on it successively, over the years. For a few seconds I wonder whether he was really naming the machine—defining it—or complaining about it! As though he’d been fooled into being its passenger on the assumption that a time machine should proceed to its destination instanter instead of at a snail’s pace. But no. He was naming it.) TO TRAVEL INTO THE FUTURE, YOU MUST FIRST TRAVEL INTO THE PAST, ACCUMULATING HINDWARD POTENTIAL. (THIS IS CRAWLING DOWNHILL)
(Sign Two) AS SOON AS YOU ACCUMULATE ONE LARGE QUANTUM OF TIME, YOU LEAP FORWARD BY THE SAME TIMESPAN AHEAD OF YOUR STARTING POINT. (THIS IS SLIDING UPHILL.)
(Sign Three) YOUR JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE TAKES THE SAME TIME AS IT WOULD TAKE TO LIVE THROUGH THE YEARS IN REAL-TIME; YET YOU ALSO OMIT THE INTERVENING YEARS, ARRIVING AHEAD INSTANTLY. (PRINCIPLE OF CONSERVATION OF TIME.)
(Sign Four) SO, TO LEAP THE GAP, YOU MUST CRAWL THE OTHER WAY.
(Sign Five) TIME DIVIDES INTO ELEMENTARY QUANTA. NO MEASURING ROD CAN BE SMALLER THAN THE INDIVISIBLE ELEMENTARY ELECTRON; THIS IS ONE “ELEMENTARY LENGTH” (EL). THE TIME TAKEN FOR LIGHT TO TRAVEL ONE EL IS “ELEMENTARY TIME” (ET): I.E., 10 -23 SECONDS; THIS IS ONE ELEMENTARY QUANTUM OF TIME. TIME CONSTANTLY LEAPS AHEAD BY THESE TINY QUANTA FOR EVERY PARTICLE; BUT, NOT BEING SYNCHRONIZED, THESE FORM A CONTINUOUS TIME-OCEAN RATHER THAN SUCCESSIVE DISCRETE “MOMENTS” OR WE WOULD HAVE NO CONNECTED UNIVERSE.
(Sign Six) TIME REVERSAL OCCURS NORMALLY IN STRONG NUCLEAR INTERACTIONS I.E. IN EVENTS OF ORDER 10--23 SECS. THIS REPRESENTS THE “FROZEN GHOST” OF THE FIRST MOMENT OF UNIVERSE WHEN AN “ARROW OF TIME” WAS FIRST STOCHASTICALLY DETERMINED.
(Sign Seven) (And this is when I arrived, to be shown Polaroid photographs of the first seven signs. Remarkably, he is holding up each sign in a linear sequence from our point of view; a considerable feat of forethought and memory, though no less than we expect of him.) now, the "big numbers" of UNIVERSE ARE ALL RELATED; THUS PRESENT SIZE OF UNIVERSE IS 1O40 EL, THE PRESENT AGE IS 1O40 ET. ET IS INVARIABLE & FROZEN IN; YET UNIVERSE AGES. AT ANY POINT IN TIME IT IS X TIMES ET OLD. (T - X X ET.) X EQUALS ET TIMES THE RADIUS OF UNIVERSE (R) DIVIDED BY RATE OF EXPANSION (X = ET X R/r) = 35 YEARS, AT PRESENT.
(Sign Eight) CONSTRUCT AN “ELECTRON SHELL” BY SYNCHRONIZING ELECTRON REVERSAL. THE LOCAL SYSTEM WILL THEN FORM A TIME-REVERSED MINICOSMOS & PROCEED HINDWARDS TILL X ELAPSES WHEN TIME CONSERVATION OF THE TOTAL UNIVERSE WILL PULL THE MINI-COSMOS (OF THE VSTM) FORWARD INTO MESH WITH UNIVERSE AGAIN I.E. BY 35 PLUS 35 YEARS.
“But how?” we all cried. “How do you synchronize such an infinity of electrons? We haven’t the slightest idea!”
Now at least we knew when he had set off: from 35 years after 1985. From next year. We are supposed to know all this by next year! Why has he waited so long to give us the proper clues?
And he is heading for the year 2055. What is there in the year 2055 that matters so much?
(Sign Nine) I DO NOT GIVE THIS INFORMATION TO YOU BECAUSE IT WILL LEAD TO YOUR INVENTING THE VSTM. THE SITUATION IS QUITE OTHERWISE. TIME IS PROBABILISTIC, AS SOME OF YOU MAY SUSPECT. I REALIZE THAT I WILL PROBABLY PERVERT THE COURSE OF HISTORY & SCIENCE BY MY ARRIVAL IN YOUR PAST (MY MOMENT OF DEPARTURE FOR THE FUTURE); IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW YOUR PREDICAMENT TOO EARLY, OR YOUR FRANTIC EFFORTS TO AVOID IT WOULD GENERATE A TIME LINE WHICH WOULD UNPREPARE YOU FOR MY SETTING OFF. AND IT IS IMPORTANT THAT IT DOES ENDURE, FOR I AM THE MATRIX OF MAN. I AM LEGION. I SHALL CONTAIN MULTITUDES.
MY RETICENCE IS SOLELY TO KEEP THE WORLD ON TOLERABLY STABLE TRACKS SO THAT I CAN TRAVEL BACK ALONG THEM. I TELL YOU THIS OUT OF COMPASSION, AND TO PREPARE YOUR MINDS FOR THE ARRIVAL OF GOD ON EARTH.
“He’s insane. He’s been insane from the start.”
“He’s been isolated in there for some very good reason. Contagious insanity, yes.”
“Suppose that a madman could project his madness—”
“He already has done that, for decades!”
“—no, I mean really project it, into the consciousness of the whole world; a madman with a mind so strong that he acted as a template, yes a matrix for everyone else, and made them all his dummies, his copies; and only a few people stayed immune who could build this VSTM to isolate him—”
“But there isn’t time to research it now!”
“What good would it do shucking off the problem for another thirty-five years? He would only reappear—”
“Without his strength. Shorn. Senile. Broken. Starved of his connections with the human race. Dried up. A mental leech. Oh, he tried to conserve his strength. Sitting quietly. Reading, waiting. But he broke! Thank God for that. It was vital to the future that he went insane.”
“Ridiculous! To enter the machine next year he must already be alive! He must already be out there in the world projecting this supposed madness of his. But he isn’t. We’re all separate sane individuals, all free to think what we want—”
“Are we? The whole world has been increasingly obsessed with him these last twenty years. Fashions, religions, life-styles: the whole world has been skewed by him ever since he was born! He must have been born about twenty years ago. Around 1995. Until then there was a lot of research into him. The tachyon hunt. All that. But he only began to obsess the world as a spiritual figure after that. From around 1995 or 6. When he was born as a baby. Only, we didn’t focus our minds on his own infantile urges—because we had him here as an adult to obsess ourselves with—”
“Why should he have been born with infantile urges? If he’s so unusual, why shouldn’t he have been born already leeching on the world’s mind; already knowing; already experiencing everything around him?”
“Yes, but the real charisma started then! All the emotional intoxication with him!”
“All the mothering. All the fear and adoration of his infancy. All the Bethlehem hysteria. Picking up as he grew and gained projective strength. We’ve been just as obsessed with Bethlehem as with Nazareth, haven’t we? The two have gone hand in hand.”
(Sign Ten) I AM GOD. AND I MUST SET YOU FREE. I MUST CUT MYSELF OFF FROM MY PEOPLE; CAST MYSELF INTO THIS HELL OF ISOLATION.
I CAME TOO SOON; YOU WERE NOT READY FOR ME.
We begin to feel very cold; yet we cannot feel cold. Something prevents us—a kind of malign contagious tranquillity.
It is all so right. It slots into our heads so exactly, like the missing jigsaw piece for which the hole lies cut and waiting, that we know what he said is true; that he is growing up out there in our obsessed, blessed world, only waiting to come to us.
(Sign Eleven) (Even though the order of the signs was time-reversed from his point of view, there was the sense of a real dialogue now between him and us, as though we were both synchronized. Yet this wasn’t because the past was inflexible, and he was simply acting out a role he knew “from history”. He was really as distant from us as ever. It was the looming presence of himself in the real world which cast its shadow on us, molded our thoughts and fitted our questions to his responses; and we all realized this now, as though scales fell from our eyes. We weren’t guessing or fishing in the dark any longer; we were being dictated to by an overwhelming presence of which we were all conscious—and which wasn’t locked up in the VSTM. The VSTM was Nazareth, the setting-off point; yet the who Je world was also Bethlehem, womb of the embryonic God, his babyhood, childhood and youth combined into one synchronous sequence by his all-knowingness, with the accent on his wonderful birth that filtered through into human consciousness ever more saturatingly.)
MY OTHER SELF HAS ACCESS TO ALL THE SCIENTIFIC SPECULATIONS WHICH I HAVE GENERATED; AND ALREADY I HAVE THE SOLUTION OF THE TIME EQUATIONS. I SHALL ARRIVE SOON & YOU SHALL BUILD MY VSTM & I SHALL ENTER IT; YOU SHALL BUILD IT INSIDE AN EXACT REPLICA OF THIS LABORATORY, SOUTHWEST SIDE. THERE IS SPACE THERE. (Indeed it had been planned to extend the National Physical Laboratory that way, but the plans had never been taken up, because of the skewing of all our research which the VSTM had brought about.) WHEN I REACH MY TIME OF SETTING OUT, WHEN TIME REVERSES, THE PROBABILITY OF THIS LABORATORY WILL VANISH, & THE OTHER WILL ALWAYS HAVE BEEN THE TRUE LABORATORY THAT I AM IN, INSIDE THIS VSTM. THE WASTE LAND WHERE YOU BUILD, WILL NOW BE HERE. YOU CAN WITNESS THE INVERSION: IT WILL BE MY FIRST PROBABILISTIC MIRACLE. THERE ARE HYPERDIMENSIONAL REASONS FOR THE PROBABILISTIC INVERSION, AT THE INSTANT OF TIME REVERSAL. BE WARNED NOT TO BE INSIDE THIS LABORATORY WHEN I SET OUT, WHEN I CHANGE TRACKS, FOR THIS SEGMENT OF REALITY HERE WILL ALSO CHANGE TRACKS, BECOMING IMPROBABLE, SQUEEZED OUT.
(Sign Twelve) I WAS BORN TO INCORPORATE YOU IN MY BOSOM; TO UNITE YOU IN A WORLD MIND, IN THE PHASE SPACE OF GOD. THOUGH YOUR INDIVIDUAL SOULS PERSIST, WITHIN THE FUSION. BUT YOU ARE NOT READY. YOU MUST BECOME READY IN 35 YEARS’ TIME BY FOLLOWING THE MENTAL EXERCISES WHICH I SHALL DELIVER TO YOU, MY MEDITATIONS. IF I REMAINED WITH YOU NOW, AS I GAIN STRENGTH, YOU WOULD LOSE YOUR SOULS. THEY WOULD BE SUCKED INTO ME, INCOHERENTLY. BUT IF YOU GAIN STRENGTH, I CAN INCORPORATE YOU COHERENTLY WITHOUT LOSING YOU. I LOVE YOU ALL, YOU ARE PRECIOUS TO ME, SO I EXILE MYSELF.
THEN I WILL COME AGAIN IN 2055. I SHALL RISE FROM TIME, FROM THE USELESS HARROWING OF A LIMBO WHICH HOLDS NO SOULS PRISONER, FOR YOU ARE ALL HERE, ON EARTH.
That was the last sign. He sits reading again and listening to taped music. He is radiant; glorious. We yearn to fall upon him and be within him.
We hate and fear him too; but the Love washes over the Hate, losing it a mile deep.
He is gathering strength outside somewhere: in Wichita or Washington or Woodstock. He will come in a few weeks to reveal himself to us. We all know it now.
And then? Could we kill him? Our minds would halt our hands. As it is, we know that the sense of loss, the sheer bereavement of his departure hindwards into time will all but tear our souls apart.
And yet . . . I WILL COME AGAIN IN 2055, he has promised. And incorporate us, unite us, as separate thinking souls—if we follow all his meditations; or else he will suck us into him as dummies, as robots if we do not prepare ourselves. What then, when God rises from the grave of time, insane?
Surely he knows that he will end his journey in madness! That he will incorporate us all, as conscious living beings, into the matrix of his own insanity?
It is a fact of history that he arrived in 1985 ragged, jibbering and lunatic—tortured beyond endurance by being deprived of us.
Yet he demanded, jubilantly, in 1997, confirmation of his safe arrival; jubilantly, and we lied to him and said YES! YES! And he must have believed us. (Was he already going mad from deprivation?)
If a laboratory building can rotate into the probability of that same building adjacent to itself: if time is probabilistic (which we can never prove or disprove concretely with any measuring rod, for we can never see what has not been, all the alternative possibilities, though they might have been), we have to wish what we know to be the truth, not to have been the truth. We can only have faith that there will be another probabilistic miracle, beyond the promised inversion of laboratories that he speaks of, and that he will indeed arrive back in 1985 calm, well-kept, radiantly sane, his mind composed. And what is this but an entrée into madness for rational beings such as us? We must perpetrate an act of madness; we must believe the world to be other than what it was—so that we can receive among us a Sane, Blessed, Loving God in 2055. A fine preparation for the coming of a mad God! For if we drive ourselves mad, believing passionately what was not true, will we not infect him with our madness, so that he is/has to be/will be/and always was mad too?
Credo quia impossibilis; we have to believe because it is impossible. The alternative is hideous.
Soon. He will be coming. Soon. A few days, a few dozen hours. We all feel it. We are overwhelmed with bliss.
Then we must put him in a chamber, and lose Him, and drive Him mad with loss, in the sure and certain hope of a sane and loving resurrection thirty years hence—so that He does not harrow Hell, and carry it back to Earth with Him.
[*] The term VSTM is introduced retrospectively in view of our subsequent understanding of the problem (2010).
NEWTON’S GIFT
Paul J. Nahin
It would be so easy to change history, now that the time machine was available.
Wallace John Steinhope was a sensitive human being, a person deeply concerned about the welfare of his fellow creatures. Any act of injustice, however slight, made his breast pound with righteous indignation. He was a champion of fair play, and his motto in life was taken from the ancient English rule of law—“Let right be done!”
Even while still a lonely, reclusive child, Wallace’s heart ached mightily when he read of the laborious, boring, mind-dulling calculations endured by the great mathematicians of old. Just knowing, thinking, of Gauss’s marvelous mind wasting literally months of its precious existence grinding out tedious mathematics that even a dullard could do today in a minute, on a home computer, was sheer agony for Wallace. Contemplation of the God-like Newton suffering endless delays in his gravity research, all because of a simple miscalculation of the length of a degree of longitude, was almost unbearable.
Indeed, Newton played a special role in Wallace’s life (and he in Newton’s, as we shall soon see). While the other great mathematical physicists had merely been hindered in their work by the lack of modern computational aids, Newton had squandered so much valuable time in other, nonscientific pursuits! His quasireligious writings alone, over half a million words, exceeded his scientific writings, What a waste! Wallace wondered endlessly over the reason for this strange misdirection of talent and bored his friends to the edge of endurance with his constant brooding on the mystery. Still, they all liked and admired Wallace enormously so put up with it. But more than one of them had sworn to throw up the next time Wallace mentioned Newton during a wedding(but that’s another story).
So deep was Wallace’s anguish for his predecessors that even as he grew older and his own tremendous talents as a mathematical physicist gained him an international reputation, thoughts of the unmeasurable misery of his scientific ancestors were never far from his mind, it was most appropriate, then, that his greatest discovery gave him an opportunity to do something! And Wallace John Steinhope vowed to help. He became convinced that it was his purpose on Earth—he could not, he would not hesitate. As he strapped the knapsack-size time machine onto his chest, his excitement was, therefore, easy to understand.
“It is done! And I am ready. I will travel back and bestow this gift of appreciation, this key to mental relief, on the great Newton himself!” Wallace cradled a small, yet powerful hand-calculator in his palm. If was a marvel of modern electronics. Incorporating large-scale integrated circuitry and a Z-8000 microprocessor solid-state chip, the calculator required only a small, self-contained nuclear battery for its power. It could add, subtract, multiply, divide, do square and cubic roots, trig and hyperbolic functions, take powers, find logarithms, all in mere microseconds. It was programmable, too, able to store up to 500 instructions in its micromemory. The answers it displayed on its red, light-emitting diode readouts would liberate young Isaac from the chains of his impoverished heritage of mathematical calculation. No more Napier’s bones for Newton!
But Wallace John Steinhope was no fool. He understood, indeed feared, time paradoxes. He knew Newton could be trusted with the secret, but it wouldn’t do for the calculator to survive Newton’s time. So Wallace had incorporated a small, self-destructing heat mechanism into it. After five years of use, it would automatically melt itself into an unrecognizable, charred slag mass. But that would be enough time for its task to be completed. The emancipation of Newton’s mighty brain from tedium!
Pleased enormously at the thought of the great good he was about lo confer, Wallace set the time and space coordinates for merry old England, flipped the power switch on, and vanished.
Materializing in the Lincolnshire countryside in the spring of 1666, he began his rendezvous with destiny. If was the second and final year of the great bubonic plague, and Newton, seeking refuge from the agony and death plundering London and threatening his college of Trinity at Cambridge, had returned home to work in seclusion. The years of the Black Death were Newton’s golden years, when the essentials of calculus would be worked out, when the colored spectrum of white light would be explained, and when the principle of the law of gravitation would be grasped. But how much easier it would all be if Newton were released from the binding chains of dreary calculation. Wallace’s gift would slip the lock on those chains! Accelerate genius!
