Time Travel Omnibus, page 775
“Much to your surprise and delight, after an absence of three years less a month, I turned up in our rooms at 221B Baker Street, disguised, if I recall correctly, as a shabby book collector. And soon you had fresh adventures to chronicle, beginning with that case of the infamous Colonel Sebastian Moran and his victim, the Honorable Ronald Adair.”
“Yes,” said I. “Wondrous it was.”
“But Watson, let us consider the facts surrounding my apparent death at the Falls of Reichenbach on May 4th, 1891. You, the observer on the scene, saw the evidence, and, as you wrote in ‘The Final Problem,’ many experts scoured the lip of the falls and came to precisely the same conclusion you had—that Moriarty and I had plunged to our deaths.” “But that conclusion turned out to be wrong.”
Holmes beamed intently. “No, my good Watson, it turned out to be unacceptable—unacceptable to your faithful readers. And that is where all the problems stem from. Remember Schrodinger’s cat in the sealed box? Moriarty and I at the falls present a very similar scenario: He and I went down the path into the cul-de-sac, our footprints leaving impressions in the soft earth. There were only two possible outcomes at that point: Either I would exit alive, or I would not. There was no way out, except to take that same path back away from the Falls. Until someone came and looked to see whether I had reemerged from the path, the outcome was unresolved. I was both alive and dead—a collection of possibilities. But when you arrived, those possibilities had to collapse into a single reality. You saw that there were no footprints returning from the falls—meaning that Moriarty and I had struggled until at last we had both plunged over the edge into the icy torrent. It was your act of seeing the results that forced the possibilities to be resolved. In a very real sense, my good, dear friend, you killed me.”
My heart was pounding in my chest. “I tell you, Holmes, nothing would have made me more happy than to have seen you alive!”
“I do not doubt that, Watson—but you had to see one thing or the other. You could not see both. And, having seen what you saw, you reported your findings: first to the Swiss police, and then to the reporter for the Journal de Genève, and lastly in your full account in the pages of the Strand.” I nodded.
“But here is the part that was not considered by Schrodinger when he devised the thought experiment of the cat in the box. Suppose you open the box and find the cat dead, and later you tell your neighbor about the dead cat—and your neighbor refuses to believe you when you say that the cat is dead. What happens if you go and look in the box a second time?”
“Well, the cat is surely still dead.”
“Perhaps. But what if thousands—nay, millions!—refuse to believe the account of the original observer? What if they deny the evidence? What then, Watson?”
“I—I do not know.”
“Through the sheer stubbornness of their will, they reshape reality, Watson! Truth is replaced with fiction! They will the cat back to life. More than that, they attempt to believe that the cat never died in the first place!”
“And so?”
“And so the world, which should have one concrete reality, is rendered unresolved, uncertain, adrift. As the first observer on the scene at Reichenbach, your interpretation should take precedence. But the stubbornness of the human race is legendary, Watson, and through that sheer cussedness, that refusal to believe what they have been plainly told, the world gets plunged back into being a wavefront of unresolved possibilities. We exist in flux—to this day, the whole world exists in flux—because of the conflict between the observation you really made at Reichenbach, and the observation the world wishes you had made.”
“But this is all too fantastic, Holmes!”
“Eliminate the impossible, Watson, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Which brings me now to the question we were engaged by this avatar of Mycroft to solve: this paradox of Fermi. Where are the alien beings?”
“And you say you have solved that?”
“Indeed I have. Consider the method by which mankind has been searching for these aliens.”
“By wireless, I gather—trying to overhear their chatter on the ether.”
“Precisely! And when did I return from the dead, Watson?”
“April of 1894.”
“And when did that gifted Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, invent the wireless?”
“I have no idea.”
“In eighteen hundred and ninety-five, my good Watson. The following year! In all the time that mankind has used radio, our entire world has been an unresolved quandary! An uncollapsed wavefront of possibilities!”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the aliens are there, Watson—it is not they who are missing, it is us! Our world is out of synch with the rest of the universe. Through our failure to accept the unpleasant truth, we have rendered ourselves potential rather than actual.”
I had always thought my companion a man with a generous regard for his own stature, but surely this was too much. “You are suggesting, Holmes, that the current unresolved state of the world hinges on the fate of you yourself?”
“Indeed! Your readers would not allow me to fall to my death, even if it meant attaining the very thing I desired most, namely the elimination of Moriarty. In this mad world, the observer has lost control of his observations! If there is one thing my life stood for—my life prior to that ridiculous resurrection of me you recounted in your chronicle of ‘The Empty House’—it was reason! Logic! A devotion to observable fact! But humanity has abjured that. This whole world is out of whack, Watson—so out of whack that we are cut off from the civilizations that exist elsewhere. You tell me you were festooned with demands for my return, but if people had really understood me, understood what my life represented, they would have known that the only real tribute to me possible would have been to accept the facts! The only real answer would have been to leave me dead!”
Mycroft sent us back in time, but rather than returning us to 1899, whence he had plucked us, at Holmes’s request he put us back eight years earlier in May of 1891. Of course, there were younger versions of ourselves already living then, but Mycroft swapped us for them, bringing the young ones to the future, where they could live out the rest of their lives in simulated scenarios taken from Holmes’s and my minds. Granted, we were each eight years older than we had been when we had fled Moriarty the first time, but no one in Switzerland knew us and so the aging of our faces went unnoticed.
I found myself for a third time living that fateful day at the Falls of Reichenbach, but this time, like the first and unlike the second, it was real.
I saw the page boy coming, and my heart raced. I turned to Holmes, and said, “I can’t possibly leave you.”
“Yes, you can, Watson. And you will, for you have never failed to play the game. I am sure you will play it to the end.” He paused for a moment, then said, perhaps just a wee bit sadly, “I can discover facts, Watson, but I cannot change them.” And then, quite solemnly, he extended his hand. I clasped it firmly in both of mine. And then the boy, who was in Moriarty’s employ, was upon us. I allowed myself to be duped, leaving Holmes alone at the Falls, fighting with all my might to keep from looking back as I hiked onward to treat the nonexistent patient at the Englischer Hof. On my way, I passed Moriarty going in the other direction. It was all I could do to keep from drawing my pistol and putting an end to the blackguard, but I knew Holmes would consider robbing him of his own chance at Moriarty an unforgivable betrayal.
It was an hour’s hike down to the Englischer Hof. There I played out the scene in which I inquired about the ailing Englishwomen, and Steiler the Elder, the innkeeper, reacted, as I knew he must, with surprise. My performance was probably halfhearted; having played the role once before, but soon I was on my way back. The uphill hike took over two hours, and I confess plainly to being exhausted upon my arrival, although I could barely hear my own panting over the roar of the torrent.
Once again, I found two sets of footprints leading to the precipice, and none returning. I also found Holmes’s alpine stock, and, just as I had the first time, a note from him to me that he had left with it. The note read just as the original had, explaining that he and Moriarty were about to have their final confrontation, but that Moriarty had allowed him to leave a few last words behind. But it ended with a postscript that had not been in the original:
My dear Watson [it said], you will honor my passing most of all if you stick fast to the powers of observation. No matter what the world wants, leave me dead.
I returned to London, and was able to briefly counterbalance my loss of Holmes by reliving the joy and sorrow of the last few months of my wife Mary’s life, explaining my somewhat older face to her and others as the result of shock at the death of Holmes. The next year, right on schedule, Marconi did indeed invent the wireless. Exhortations for more Holmes adventures continued to pour in, but I ignored them all, although the lack of him in my life was so profound that I was sorely tempted to relent, recanting my observations made at Reichenbach. Nothing would have pleased me more than to hear again the voice of the best and wisest man I had ever known.
In late June of 1907,I read in The Times about the detection of intelligent wireless signals coming from the direction of the star Altair. On that day, the rest of the world celebrated, but I do confess I shed a tear and drank a special toast to my good friend, the late Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
THE CHRONOLOGY PROTECTION CASE
Paul Levinson
Wherein the Universe gives new meaning to the phrase “Publish and Perish. . . .”
Carl put the call through just as I was packing up for the day. “She says she’s some kind of physicist,” he said, and although I rarely took calls from the public, I jumped on this one.
“Dr. D’Amato?” she asked.
“Yes?”
“I saw you on television last week—on that cable talk show. You said you had a passion for physics.” Her voice had a breathy elegance.
“True,” I said. Forensic science was my profession, but cutting edge physics was my love. Too bad there wasn’t a way to nab rapist murderers with spectral traces. “And you’re a physicist?” I asked.
“Oh yes, sorry,” she said. “I should introduce myself. I’m Lauren Goldring. Do you know my work?”
“Ahm . . .” The name did sound familiar. I ran though the Rolodex in my head, though these days my computer was becoming more reliable than my brain. “Yes!” I snapped my fingers. “You had an article in Scientific American last month about some Hubble data.”
“That’s right,” she said, and I could hear her relax just a bit. “Look, I’m calling you about my husband—he’s disappeared. I haven’t heard from him in two days.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well that’s really not my department. I can connect you to—”
“No, please,” she said. “It’s not what you think. I’m sure his disappearance has something to do with his work. He’s a physicist, too.”
Forty minutes later I was in my car on my way to her house, when I should have been home with a pizza and the cat. No contest: a physicist in distress always wins.
Her Bronxville address wasn’t too far from mine in Yonkers.
“Dr. D’Amato?” She opened the door.
I nodded. “Phil.”
“Thank you so much for coming,” she said, and ushered me in. Her eyes looked red, like she suffered from allergies or had been crying. But few people have allergies in March.
The house had a quiet appealing beauty. As did she.
“I know the usual expectations in these things,” she said. “He has another woman, we’ve been fighting. And I’m sure that most women whose vanished husbands have been having affairs are quick to profess their certainty that that’s not what’s going on in their cases.”
I smiled. “OK, I’m willing to start with the assumption that your case is different. Tell me how.”
“Would you like a drink, some wine?” She walked over to a cabinet, must’ve been turn of the century.
“Just ginger ale, if you have it,” I said, leaning back in the plush Morris chair she’d shown me into.
She returned with the ginger ale, and some sort of sparkling water for herself. “Well, as I told you on the phone, Ian and I are physicists—”
“Is his last name Goldring, like yours?”
Lauren nodded. “And, well, I’m sure this has something to do with his project.”
“You two don’t do the same work?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “My area’s the cosmos at large—big bang theory, blackholes in space, the big picture. Ian’s was, is, on the other end of the spectrum. Literally. His area’s quantum mechanics.” She started to sob.
“It’s OK,” I said. I got up and put my hand on her shoulder.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t OK. Quantum mechanics could be frustrating, I know, but not that bad. Why am I using the past tense for Ian?”
“You think some harm’s come to him?”
“I don’t know,” her lips quivered. She did know, or thought she knew.
“And you feel this has something to do with his work with tiny particles? Was he exposed to dangerous radiation?”
“No,” she said. “That’s not it. He was working on something called quantum signaling. He always told me everything about his work—and I told him everything about mine—we had that kind of relationship. And then a few months ago, he suddenly got silent. At first I thought maybe he was having an affair—”
And the thought popped into my head: if I had a woman with your class, an affair with someone else would be the last thing on my mind.
“But then I realized it was deeper than that. It was something, something that frightened him, in his work. Something that I think he wanted to shield me from.”
“I’m pretty much of an amiable amateur when it comes to quantum mechanics,” I said, “but I know something about it. Suppose you tell me all you know about Ian’s work, and why it could be dangerous.”
What I, in fact, fully grasped about quantum mechanics I could write on a postcard to my sister in Boston and it would likely fit. It had to do with light and particles so small that they were often indistinguishable in their behavior, and prone to paradox at every turn. A particularly vexing aspect that even Einstein and his colleagues tried to tackle in the 1930s involved two particles that at first collided and then traveled at sublight speeds in opposite directions: would observation of one have an instantaneous effect on the other? Did the two particles, having once collided, now exist ever after in some sort of mysterious relationship or field, a bond between them so potent that just to measure one was to influence the other, regardless of how far away? Einstein wondered about this in a thought experiment. Did interaction of subatomic particles tie their futures together forever, even if one stayed on Earth and the other wound up beyond Pluto? Real experiments in the 1960s and after suggested that’s just what was happening, at least in local areas, and this supported Heisenberg’s and Bohr’s classic “Copenhagen” interpretation that quantum mechanics was some kind of mind-over-matter deal—that just looking at a quantum or tiny particle, maybe even thinking about it, could affect not only it but related particles. Einstein would’ve preferred to find another cause—non-mental—for such phenomena. But that could lead to an interpretation of quantum mechanics as faster-than-light action—the particle on Earth somehow sent an instant signal to the particle in space—which of course ran counter to Einstein’s relativity theories.
Well, I guess that would fill more than your average postcard. The truth is, blood and semen and DNA evidence were a lot easier to make sense of than quantum mechanics, which was one reason that kind of esoteric science was just a hobby with me. Of course, one way that QM had it over forensics is that it rarely had to do with dead bodies. But Lauren Goldring was wanting to tell me that maybe it did in at least one case, her husband’s.
“Ian was part of a small group of physicists working to demonstrate that QM was evidence of faster-than-light travel, time travel, maybe both,” she said.
“Not a product of the mind?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “not as in the traditional interpretation.”
“But doesn’t faster-than-light travel contradict Einstein?” I asked.
“Not necessarily,” Lauren said. “It seems to contradict the simplest interpretations, but there may be some loopholes.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Well, there’s a lot of disagreement even among the small group of people Ian was working with. Some think the data supports both faster-than-light and time travel. Others are sure that time travel is impossible even though—”
“You’re not saying that you think some crazy envious scientist killed him?” I asked.
“No,” Lauren said. “It’s much deeper than that.”
A favorite phrase of hers. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“Well, Stephen Hawking, for one, says that although the equations suggest that time travel might be possible on the quantum level, the Universe wouldn’t let this happen. . . .” She paused and looked at me. “You’ve heard about Hawking’s work in this area?”
“I know about Hawking in general,” I said. “I’m not that much of an amateur. But not about his work in time travel.”
“You’re very unusual for a forensic scientist,” she said, with an admiring edge I very much liked. “Anyway, Hawking thinks that whatever quantum mechanics may permit, the Universe just won’t allow time travel—because the level of paradox time travel would create would just unravel the whole Universe.”
“You mean like if I could get a message back to JFK that he would be killed, and he believed me and acted upon that information and didn’t go to Dallas and wasn’t killed, this would create a world in which I would grow up with no knowledge that JFK had ever been killed, which would mean I would have no motive to send the message that saved JFK, but if I didn’t send that message then JFK would be killed—”
