Time Travel Omnibus, page 776
“That’s it,” Lauren said. “Except on the quantum level you might achieve that paradox by sending back information just a few seconds in time—say, in the form of a command that would shut down the generating circuit and prevent the information from being sent in the first place—”
“I see,” I said.
“And, well, because things like that, if they could happen, if they happened all the time, would lead to a constantly remade, inside-out, self-effacing universe. Hawking promulgated his Chronology Protection Conjecture’—the Universe protects the existing time line, whatever the theoretical possibilities of time travel.”
“How does your husband fit into this?” I asked.
“He was working on a device, an experiment, to disprove Hawking’s conjecture,” she said. “He was trying to create a local wormhole with temporal effects.”
“And you think he somehow disappeared into this?” Jeez, this was beginning to sound like a bad episode of “Star Trek.” But she seemed rational, everything she’d outlined made sense, and something in her manner continued to compel my attention.
“I don’t know,” she looked like she was close to tears again.
“All right,” I said. “Here’s what I think we should do. I’m going to call in Ian’s disappearance to a friend in the department. He’s a precinct captain, and he’ll take this seriously. He’ll contact all the airports, get Ian’s picture out to cops on the beat—”
“But I don’t think—”
“I know,” I said. “You’ve got a gut feeling that something more profound is going on. And maybe you’re right. But we’ve got to cover all the bases.”
“OK,” she said quietly, and I noticed that her lips were quivering again.
“Will you be all right tonight? I’ll be back to you tomorrow morning.” I took her hand.
“I guess so,” she said huskily, and squeezed my hand.
I didn’t feel like letting go, but I did.
The news the next morning was terrible. I don’t care what the shrinks say: flat-out confirmed death is always worse than ambiguous unresolved disappearance.
I couldn’t bring myself to just call her on the phone. I drove to her home, hoping she was in.
She opened the door. I tried to keep a calm face, but I’m not that good an actor.
She understood immediately. “Oh no!” she cried out. She staggered and collapsed in my arms. “Please no.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and touched her hair. I felt like kissing her forehead, but didn’t. I hardly knew her, yet I felt very close to her, a part of her world. “They found him a few hours ago near Columbia University. Looks like another stupid, senseless, goddamned random drive-by shooting. That’s the kind of world we live in.” I didn’t know whether this would in any way lessen her pain. At least his death had nothing to do with his work.
“No, not random,” she said, sobbing. “Not random.”
“OK,” I said, “you need to rest, I’m going to call someone over here to give you a sedative. I’ll stay with you till then.”
The medic was over in fifteen minutes. He gave her a shot, and she was asleep a few minutes later. “Not random. Not random,” she mumbled.
I called the Captain, and asked if he could send a uniform over to stay with Lauren for the afternoon. He wasn’t happy—his people were overworked, like everyone—but he owed me. Many’s the time I’d saved his butt with some piece of evidence I’d uncovered in the back of an orifice.
I dropped by the autopsy. Nothing unusual there. Three bullets from a cheap punk’s gun, one shattered the heart, did all the damage, Ian Goldring’s dead. No sign of radiation damage, no strange chemistry in the body. No possible connection that I could see to anything Lauren had told me. Still, the coroner was a friend, I explained to him that the victim was the husband of a friend, and asked if he could run any and every conceivable test at his disposal to determine if there was anything different about this corpse. He said sure. I knew he wouldn’t find anything, though.
I went back to my office. I thought of calling Lauren and telling her about the autopsy, but she’d be better off if I let her rest. I was tired of looking at dead bodies. I turned on my computer and looked at its screen instead. I was on a few physics lists on the Internet. I logged on and did some reading about Hawking and his chronology protection conjecture.
“Lady physicist on the phone for you again,” Carl called out. It was late afternoon already. I logged off and nibbed my eyes.
“Hi,” Lauren said.
“You OK?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I just got off the phone with one of the other researchers in Ian’s group, and I think I’ve got part of this figured out.” She sounded less tentative than yesterday—like she was indeed more on top of what was actually going on, or thought she was—but more worried.
I started to tell her, as gently as I could, about the autopsy.
“Doesn’t matter,” she interrupted me. “I mean, I don’t think the way that Ian was killed has any relevance to this. It’s the fact that he was killed that counts—the reason he was killed.”
The reason—everyone wants reasons in this irrational society. Science in the laboratory deals with reason. In the outside world, you’re lucky if you can find a reason. “I know it’s painful,” I said. “But Ian’s death had no reason—his killer was likely just a high-flying kid with a gun. Happens all the time. Ian was just in the wrong place. A random victim in the murder lottery.”
“No, not random,” Lauren said.
She’d said the same thing this morning. I could hear her starting to sob again.
“Look, Phil,” she continued. “I really think I’m close to understanding this. I’m going to make a few more calls. I, uh, we hardly know each other, but I feel good talking this out with you. Our conversation last night helped me a lot. Can I call you back in an hour? Or maybe—I don’t know, if you’re not busy tonight—could you come over again?”
She didn’t have to ask twice. “I’ll see you at seven. I’ll also bring some food in case you’re hungry—you have to eat.”
I knew even before I drove up that something was wrong. I guess my eyes, after all these years of looking around crime scenes, are especially sensitive to the weak flicker of police lights on the evening sky at a distance. The flicker still turns my stomach.
“What’s going on here?” I got out of my car, Chinese food in hand, and asked the uniform.
“Who the hell are you?” he replied.
I fumbled for my ID.
“He’s OK,” Janny Murphy, the uniform who’d come to stay with Lauren in the afternoon, walked over. “He’s forensics.”
The food dropped from my hand when I saw the expression on her face. Brown moo-shoo pork juice dribbled down the driveway.
“It’s crazy,” Janny said. “Doc says it’s less than one in ten thousand. Some rare allergy to the shot the medic gave her. It wasn’t his fault. It somehow brings out an asthma attack hours later. Fifty percent fatality.”
“And Lauren—Dr. Goldring—was in the unlucky part of the curve.”
Janny nodded.
“I don’t believe this,” I said, shaking my head.
“I know,” Janny said. “Helluva coincidence. Physicist and his wife, also a physicist, both dying like that.”
“Maybe it’s not a coincidence,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Janny said.
“I don’t know what I mean,” I said.
“Is Lauren—is the body—still here? I’d like to have a look at her.”
“Help yourself,” Janny gestured inside the house.
I can’t say Lauren looked at peace in death. I could almost still see her lips quivering, straining to tell me something, though they were as sealed as the deadest night now. I had an urge to kiss her face. I’d known her all of two days, wanted as many times to kiss her. Now I never would.
I was aware of Janny standing beside me.
“I’m going home now,” I said.
“Sure,” Janny said. “The captain says he’d like to talk to you tomorrow morning. Just to wrap this whole mess up. Bad karma.”
Yeah, karma, like in Fritz Capra’s Tao of Physics. Like in two entities crossing each other’s paths and then never more touching each other’s destinies. Like me and this soul with the soft, still lips. Except I had no power to influence Lauren, to make things better for her any more. And the truth is, I hadn’t done much for her when she was alive.
I was awake all night. I logged on to a few more fringy physics lists with my computer and did more reading. Finally it was light outside. I thought about calling Stephen Hawking. He was where? California? Cambridge, England? I wasn’t sure. I knew he’d be able to talk to me if I could reach him—I’d seen a video of him talking through a special device—but he’d probably think I was crazy when I told him what I had to say. So I called Jack Donovan instead. He was another friend who owed me. I had lots of friends like that in the city. Jack was a science reporter for Newsday, and I’d come through for him with off-the-record background on murder investigations in my bailiwick lots of times. I hoped he’d come through for me now. I was starting to get worried. He had lots of connections in the field—he could talk to scientists who’d shy away from me, my being in the department and all.
It was seven in the morning. I expected to get his answering machine, but I got him. I told him my story.
“OK,” he said. “Why don’t you go see the captain at the precinct, and then come over to see me? I’ll do some checking around in the meantime.”
I did what Jack said. I kept strictly to the facts with the captain—no suppositions, no chronological or any other protection schemes—and he took it all in with his customary frown. “Damn shame,” he muttered. “Nice lady like that. They oughta take that sedative off the market. Damn drug companies are too greedy.”
“Right,” I said.
“You look exhausted,” he said. “You oughta take the rest of the day off.”
“More or less what I had in mind,” I said, and left for Jack’s.
I thought my office was high-tech, but Jack’s Hempstead newsroom looked like something well into the next century. Computer screens everywhere you looked, sounds of modems chirping on and off like the patter of tiny raindrops.
Jack looked concerned. “You’re not going to like this,” he said.
“What else is new?” I said. “Try me.”
“Well, you were right about my having better entree to these physicists than you. I did a lot of checking,” Jack said. “There were six people working actively in conjunction with Ian on this project. A few more, of course, if you take into account the usual complement of graduate student assistants. But outside of that, the project was sealed up pretty tightly—not by the government or any agency, but by the researchers themselves. Sometimes they do that when the research gets really flaky—like they don’t want anyone to know what they’re really doing until they’re sure they have a reliable effect. You wouldn’t believe some of the wild things people have been getting into in the past few years—especially the physicists—now that they have the Internet to yammer at each other.”
“I’m tired, Jack. Please get to the point.”
“Well, four of the seven—that includes Ian Goldring—are now dead. One had a heart attack—the day after his doctor told him his cholesterol was in the bottom 10 percent. I guess that’s not so strange. Another fell off his roof—he was cleaning out his gutters—and severed his carotid artery on a sharp piece of flagstone that was sticking up on his walk. He bled to death before anyone found him. Another was struck by a car—DOA. And then there’s Ian. I could write a story on this even without your conjecture—”
“Please don’t,” I said.
“It’s a weird situation, all right. Four out of seven dying like that—and also Goldring’s wife.”
“How are the spouses of the other fatalities?” I asked.
“All OK,” Jack said. “But none are physicists. None knew anything at all about their husbands’ work—all of the dead were men. Lauren Goldring is the only one who had any idea what her husband was up to.”
“She wasn’t sure,” I said. “But I think she figured it out just before she died.”
“Maybe they all picked up some virus at a conference they attended—something which threw off their sense of balance, caused their heart rate to speed up,” Sam Abrahmson, Jack’s editor, strolled by and jumped in. Clearly he’d been listening on the periphery of our conversation. “That could explain the two accidents and the heart attack,” he added. “Maybe even the sedative death.”
“But not the drive-by shooting of Goldring,” I said.
“No,” Abrahmson admitted. “But it could be an interesting story anyway. Think about it,” he said to Jack and strolled away.
I looked at Jack. “Please, I’m begging you. If I’m right—”
“It’s likely something completely different,” Jack said. “Some completely different hidden variable.” Hidden variables. I’d been reading about them all night. “What about the other three? Have you been able to get in touch with them?” I asked. “Nope,” Jack said. “Hays and Strauss refused to talk to me about it. Both had their secretaries tell me they were aware of some of the deaths, had decided not to do any more work on the local wormhole project, had no plans to publish what they’d already done, didn’t want to talk to me about it or hear from me again. Each claimed to be involved now in something completely different.”
“Does that sound to you like the usual behavior of research scientists?” I asked.
“No,” Jack said. “The ones I know eat up publicity, and they’d hang on to a project like this for decades, like a dog worrying a bone.”
I nodded. “And the third physicist?”
“Fenwick? She’s in a small plane somewhere in the outback of Australia. I couldn’t reach her at all.”
“Call me immediately if you hear the plane crashes,” I said. I really meant “when” not “if,” but I didn’t want Jack to think I was even more far gone than I was. “Please try to hold off on any story for now,” I said and made to leave.
“I’ll do what I can,” Jack said. “Try to get some rest. I think there’s something going on here all right, but not what you think.”
The drive back to Westchester was harrowing. Two cars nearly side-swiped me, and one big-ass truck stopped so suddenly in front of me that I had all I could do to swerve out of crashing into it and becoming an instant Long Island Expressway pancake.
Let’s say the QM time-travel people were right. Particles are able to influence each other traveling away from each other at huge distances, because they’re actually traveling back in time to an earlier position when they were in immediate physical contact. So time travel on the quantum mechanical level is possible—technically.
But let’s say Hawking was also right. The Universe can’t allow time travel—for to do so would unravel its very being. So it protects itself from dissemination of information backwards in time.
That wouldn’t be so crazy. People are saying the Universe can be considered one huge organism—a Gaia writ large. Makes sense then, that this organism, like all other organisms, would have tendencies to act on behalf of its own survival—would act to prevent its dissolution via time travel.
But how would such protection express itself? A physicist figures out a way of creating a local wormhole that can send some information back in time—back to his earlier self and equipment—in some non-blatantly paradoxical way. it doesn’t shut off the circuit that sent it. So this information is in fact sent and in fact received—by the scientist. But the Universe can’t allow that information transfer to stand. So what happens?
Hawking says the Universe’s first line of defense is to create energy disturbances severe enough at the mouths of the wormhole to destroy it and its time-channelling ability. OK. But let’s say the physicist is smart or lucky enough to create a wormhole that can withstand these self-disruptive forces? What does the Universe do then?
Maybe it makes the scientist forget this information. Maybe causes a minor stroke in the scientist’s brain. Maybe causes the equipment to irreparably break down. Maybe the lucky physicist is really unlucky. Maybe this already happened lots of times.
But what happens when a group of scientists around the world who achieve this time travel transfer reach a critical mass—a mass that will soon publish its findings, and make them known, irrevocably, to the world?
Jeez!—I jammed the heel of my hand into my car horn and swerved. The damn Volkswagen driver must be drunk out of his mind—
So what happens when this group of scientists gets information from its own future? Has proof of time travel, information that can’t be? The Universe regulates itself, polices its timeline, in a more drastic way. All existence is equilibrium—a stronger threat to existence evokes a stronger reaction. A freak fatal accident. A sudden massive heart attack. Another nomotive, drive-by shooting that the Universe already dishes out to all too many people in this hapless world of ours. Except in this case, the Universe’s motive is quite clear and strong: it must protect its chronology, conserve its current existence.
Maybe this already happened too. How many physicists on the cutting edges of this science died too young in recent years? Jeez, here was a story for Jack all right.
But why Lauren? Why did she have to die?
Maybe because the Universe’s protection level went beyond just those who received illicit future information. Maybe it extended to those who understood just what it was doing, just—
Whamp! Something big had smashed into the rear of my car, and I was skidding way out of control towards the edge of the Throgs Neck Bridge, towards where some workers had removed the barriers to fix some corrosion or something. I was strangely calm, above it all. I told myself to go easy on the brakes, but my leg clamped down anyway and my speed increased. I wrenched my wheel around, but all that did was spin me into a backward skid off the bridge. My car sailed way the hell out over the black-and-blue Long Island Sound.
