Time Travel Omnibus, page 722
The second target was the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. From a deserted warehouse that would survive the quake—but not the following fire—we watched and took movies as buildings tumbled down around us and embattled firemen in horse-drawn fire trucks strove in vain to quench a hundred blazes.
Moments before the fire reached our building, we fled into the present.
The films were spectacular.
We were ready to tell the world.
There was a meeting of the AAAS in Santa Cruz in a month. I called the program chairman and wangled a spot as an invited speaker without revealing just what we’d accomplished to date. I planned to show those films at the talk. They were to make us instantly famous.
The day that Dancer died we had a going away party, just Lisa and Dancer and I. He knew he was going to die; I’d told him and somehow he believed me. He always believed me. We stayed up all night, playing Dancer’s second-hand mandolin, painting psychedelic designs on each other’s bodies with grease paint, competing against each other in a marathon game of cut-throat Monopoly, doing a hundred silly, ordinary things that took meaning only from the fact that it was the last time. About four in the morning, as the glimmer of false-dawn began to show in the sky, we went down to the bay and, huddling together for warmth, went tripping. Dancer took the largest dose, since he wasn’t going to return. The last thing he said, he told us not to let our dreams die; to stay together.
We buried Dancer, at city expense, in a welfare grave. We split up three days later.
I kept in touch with Lisa, vaguely. In the late seventies she went back to school, first for an MBA, then law school. I think she was married for a while. We wrote each other on Christmas for a while, then I lost track of her. Years later, I got a letter from her. She said that she was finally able to forgive me for causing Dan’s death.
It was a cold and foggy February day, but I knew I could find warmth in 1965. The ripples converged.
Anticipated questions from the audience:
Q (old, stodgy professor): It seems to me this proposed temporal jump of yours violates the law of conservation of mass/energy. For example, when a transported object is transported into the past, a quantity of mass will appear to vanish from the present, in clear violation of the conservation law.
A (me): Since the return is to the exact time of departure, the mass present is constant.
Q: Very well, but what about the arrival in the past? Doesn’t this violate the conservation law?
A: No. The energy needed is taken from the Dirac sea, by the mechanism I explained in detail in the Phys. Rev. paper. When the object returns to the “future,” the energy is restored to the sea.
Q (intense young physicist): Then doesn’t Heisenberg uncertainty limit the amount of time that can be spent in the past?
A: A good question. The answer is yes, because we borrow an infinitesimal amount of energy from an infinite number of particles, the amount of time spent in the past can be arbitrarily large. The only limitation is that you must leave the past an instant before you depart from the present.
In half an hour I was scheduled to present the paper that would rank my name with Newton’s and Galileo’s—and Dirac’s. I was twenty-eight years old, the same age that Dirac was when he announced his theory. I was a firebrand, preparing to set the world aflame. I was nervous, rehearsing the speech in my hotel room. I took a swig out of an old Coke that one of my grad students had left sitting on top of the television. The evening news team was babbling on, but I wasn’t listening.
I never delivered that talk. The hotel had already started to burn; my death was already foreordained. Tie neat, I inspected myself in the mirror, then walked to the door. The doorknob was warm. I opened it onto a sheet of fire. Flame burst through the opened door like a ravenous dragon. I stumbled backward, staring at the flames in amazed fascination.
Somewhere in the hotel I heard a scream, and all at once I broke free of my spell. I was on the thirtieth story; there was no way out. My thought was for my machine. I rushed across the room and threw open the case holding the time machine. With swift, sure fingers I pulled out the Renselz coils and wrapped them around my body. The carpet had caught on fire, a sheet of flame between me and any possible escape. Holding my breath to avoid suffocation, I punched an entry into the keyboard and dove into time.
I return to that moment again and again. When I hit the final key, the air was already nearly unbreathable with smoke. I had about thirty seconds left to live, then. Over the years I’ve nibbled away my time down to ten seconds or less.
I live on borrowed time. So do we all, perhaps. But I know when and where my debt will fall due.
Dancer died on February 9, 1969. It was a dim, foggy day. In the morning he said he had a headache. That was unusual, for Dancer. He never had headaches. We decided to go on a walk through the fog. It was beautiful, as if we were alone in a strange formless world. I’d forgotten about his headache altogether, until, looking out across the sea of fog from the park over the bay, he fell over. He was dead before the ambulance came. He died with a secret smile on his face. I’ve never understood that smile. Maybe he was smiling because the pain was gone.
Lisa committed suicide two days later.
You ordinary people, you have the chance to change your future. You can father children, write novels, sign petitions, invent new machines, go to cocktail parties, run for president. You affect the future with everything you do no matter what. No matter what I do, I cannot. It is too late for that, for me. My actions are written in flowing water. And having no effect, I have no responsibilities. It makes no difference what I do, not at all.
When I fled the fire into the past, I tried everything I could to change it. I stopped the arsonist, I argued with mayors, I even went to my house and told myself not to go to the conference.
But that’s not how time works. No matter what I do, talk to a governor or dynamite the hotel, when I reach that critical moment—the present, my destiny, the moment I have left—I vanish from whenever I was, and return to the hotel room, the fire approaching ever closer. I have about ten seconds left. Every time I dive through the Dirac sea, everything I changed in the past vanishes. Sometimes I pretend that the changes I make in the past create new futures, though I know this is not the case. When I return to the present, all the changes are wiped out by the ripples of the converging wave, like erasing a blackboard after a class.
Someday I will return and meet my destiny. But for now, I live in the past. It’s a good life, I suppose. You get used to the fact that nothing you do will ever have any effect on the world. It gives you a feeling of freedom. I’ve been places no one has ever been, seen things no one alive has ever seen. I’ve given up physics, of course. Nothing I discover could endure past that fatal night in Santa Cruz. Maybe some people would continue for the sheer joy of knowledge. For me, the point is missing.
But there are compensations. Whenever I return to the hotel room, nothing is changed but my memories. I am again twenty-eight, again wearing the same three-piece suit, again have the fuzzy taste of stale cola in my mouth. Every time I return, I use up a bit of time. One day I will have no time left.
Dancer, too, will never die. I won’t let him. Every time I get to that final February morning, the day he died, I return to 1965, to that perfect day in June. He doesn’t know me, he never knows me. But we meet on that hill, the only two willing to enjoy the day doing nothing. He lies on his back, idly fingering chords on his guitar, blowing bubbles and staring into the clouded blue sky. Later I will introduce him to Lisa. She won’t know us either, but that’s okay. We’ve got plenty of time.
“Time,” I say to Dancer, lying in the park on the hill. “There’s so much time.”
“All the time there is,” he says.
ON THE WATCHTOWER AT PLATAEA
Garry Kilworth
There was the chilling possibility, despite Miriam’s assurance that she would dissuade the government from physical confrontation, that I might receive the order to go out and kill my adversary in the temple. They might use the argument that our future existence depended on an answer to be dredged up from the past. I wondered if I could do such a thing: and if so, how? Would I sneak from the watchtower in the night, like an assassin, and murder him in his bed? Or challenge him to single combat, like a true noble warrior is supposed to? The whole idea of such a confrontation made me feel ill and I prayed that if it should come to such a pass, they would send someone else to do the bloody job. I have no stomach for such things.
It was a shock to find that the expedition could go no further back than 429 BC: though for some of us, it was not an unwelcome one. Miriam was perhaps the only one amongst us who was annoyed that we couldn’t get to Pericles. He had died earlier, in the part of the year we couldn’t reach. So near—but we had hit a barrier, as solid as a rockface on the path of linear time, in the year that the Peloponnesian War was gaining momentum. It was the night that Sparta and its allies were to take positive action against the Athenians by attacking a little walled city-state called Plataea. Plataea, with its present garrison of 400 local hoplites and some eighty seconded Athenians, was virtually the only mainland supporter of Athens in the war amongst the Greeks. It was a tiny city-state, even by ancient world standards—perhaps a mile in circumference—and it was heavily outnumbered by the besieging troops led by the Spartan king, Archidamus. It didn’t stand a chance, but by God it put up resistance which rivalled The Alamo for stubbornness, and surpassed it for inventiveness.
Miriam suggested we set up the recording equipment in an old abandoned watchtower on a hill outside the city. From there we could see the main gates, and could record both the Spartan attempts at breaching the walls and the defenders as they battled to keep the invaders at bay. The stonework of the watchtower was unstable, the timber rotting, and it was probably only used to shelter goats. We did not, therefore, expect to be interrupted while we settled in. In any case, while we were “travelling”, we appeared as insubstantial beings and were seldom confronted. The tower was ideal. It gave us the height we needed to command a good view, and had aged enough to be a respectable establishment for spectral forms.
There were three of us in the team. Miriam was the expedition’s leader; John was responsible for the recording equipment; and I was the official communicator, in contact with base camp, AD 2017. By 429, we were not at our harmonious best, having been away from home for a very long time: long enough for all our habits and individual ways to get on each other’s nerves to the point of screaming. I suppose we were all missing home to a certain extent, though why we should want to go back to a world where four-fifths of the population was on the streets, starving, and kept precariously at bay by the private military armies of privileged groups, was never raised. We ourselves, of course, belonged to one of those groups, but we were aware of the instability of the situation and the depressingly obvious fact that we could do nothing to influence it. The haves were no longer in a position to help the have nots, even given the desire to do such. One of the reasons for coming on the expedition was to escape my guilt—and the constant wars between the groups. It was, as always, a mess.
“What do base say?” asked Miriam.
I could see the watch fires on the nearby city walls through her ghostly form, as she moved restlessly around the walkway of the tower. John was doing something below.
“They believe the vortex must have an outer limit,” I said. “It would appear that we’ve reached it.”
This didn’t satisfy her, and I didn’t expect it to. Miriam did not operate on beliefs. She liked people to know.
“But why here? Why now? What’s so special about the year 429? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“You expect it to make sense?”
“I had hoped . . . oh, I don’t know. An answer which wasn’t still a question I suppose. Doesn’t it worry you? That suddenly we come up against a wall, without any apparent reason?”
I shrugged. “Surely natural limitations are a good enough reason. Human endeavour has often come up against such things—the sound barrier, for example. They believed that was impassable at the time, but they got through it in the end. Maybe this is a comparable problem?”
“It’s a bitch, I know that much,” she replied in a bitter tone. “I really wanted Pericles—and the earlier battles. Marathon. Thermopylae. Damn it, there’s so much we’ll have to leave. Mycenae and Agamemnon. We could have confirmed all that. If we can’t go back any further, Troy will remain covered in mist . . .”
Which was not altogether a bad thing as far as I was concerned. Already too many illusions had been wiped away. Why destroy all myth and legend, simply for the sake of facts? It’s a pretty boring world, once the magic has been stripped off.
“Well, perhaps we shouldn’t do it all at once,” I suggested. “I feel as if I’m drowning as it is . . . let someone else destroy Homer.”
She said, “We’re not destroying anything. We’re merely recording . . .”
“The truth,” I said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my tone.
She glared at me, a silvery frown marring her handsome features. We had clashed in the same way several times recently and I think she was getting tired of my outbursts.
“You have an attitude problem, Stan—don’t make it my problem, too.”
“I won’t,” I said, turning away.
In the distance, I could hear the jingle of brass: the Spartan army tramping through the night, their torches clearly visible. These sounds and sights were the cause of some consternation and excitement amongst the Plataeans on the walls of the city. The enemy had arrived. Little figures ran to and fro, between the watch fires. They had known for a few hours that Archidamus was coming: Theban traitors, spies and double agents had been busy during the day, earning a crust. The warnings had come too late for flight, however, and it was now a case of defying the vastly superior force or surrendering the city. Some of the defenders were relying on the fact that Plataea was sacred ground—it had been consecrated after a successful battle with the Persians earlier in the century—but Archidamus was not a man to take much notice of that. There were ways of appealing to the gods for a suspension of holy rights, if the need was there.
I wondered how the Spartans would react if they knew they were being recorded, visually. They were already pretty good at strutting around in grand macho style, cuffing slaves and flaunting their long hair. We had been told that historical recordings such as this would be studied for possible answers to the problems of our own time. I couldn’t help but feel cynical about this idea, though I did not have the whole picture. The future, beyond my own time, had been investigated by another team and the result was a secret known only to that expedition and our illustrious government, but I couldn’t help feeling it was a very bleak picture.
Besides Spartans, the invading army consisted of slave auxiliaries, a few mercenaries and volunteer forces from the cities allied with Sparta: Corinth, Megara, Elis, Thebes and many others. These cities looked to their big cousin to lead them against the upstart Athens, a city-state of little significance until the early part of the century, when it had thrashed a hugely superior force of Persians at the Battle of Marathon, and had since become too big for its sandals. If there was one thing the ancient Greeks could not stand, it was someone thinking they were better than everyone else.
Except for Plataea. Athens stood virtually alone in mainland Greece, though its maritime empire encompassed almost all the Aegean islands and the coast of Asia Minor. One of the reasons why the war would last so long was because a stalemate was inevitable. Athens was a strongly walled city, which included its harbour, and could not be penetrated by a land force. Its formidable bronze-toothed fleet of ramming triremes discouraged any idea of a naval blockade. On the other hand, Sparta had no ships to speak of, was an inland unwalled city, but positively encouraged an invasion of their territory since they relished battles and their hoplites were considered almost invincible. Certainly no Spartan would leave a field alive unless victory had been assured. Direct confrontations with such warriors, cool and unafraid of death, were not courted at all keenly, even by brave Athenians.
So, a military might and a naval power, and rarely the twain met. Stalemate. Little Plataea was in fact nothing more than a whipping boy on which Sparta could vent some of its frustration and spleen.
Miriam was looking through night viewers, at the advancing hordes. She said, “This may be the last historical battle we’re able to record.”
I was glad of that. Expeditions like ours tend to start out fortified by enthusiasms and good nature, only to end in disillusionment and bitter emotions, as any geographical explorer will tell you. Discoveries exact a high price from the finders, who have to pay for them with pieces of their souls.
There was a terrible scream from down below, sending lizards racing up my back. I stared at Miriam. A few moments later, John came up the makeshift ladder, looking disgusted.
“Goatboy,” he explained. “Wandered in looking for a place to hide from the troops, I suppose, now that they’ve closed the city gates. He saw me and ran. That earth floor already stinks to high heaven with goat droppings. They must have been using it for decades.”
Miriam said, “Pull up the ladder, John. We may as well settle for the night. Nothing’s going to happen until morning.”
Below us, the weary Allies began to arrive and put up tents, out of range of any archers who might be on the walls of the city. Trumpets were sounded, informing the Plataeans that a bloody business was about to begin, as if they didn’t know that already. They were pretty noisy in unloading their gear, clattering pots and clanking bits of armour; bawling to one another as new groups arrived, in the hearty fashion of the soldier before the killing starts. We required rest, though we did not sleep while we were travelling, any more than we needed to eat or drink.
