Time Travel Omnibus, page 915
“I have brought you more than signs,” he said. “I have brought you wonders.”
He produced a package of books, small paperbound editions such as I had not seen before. I took them in my hands. The titles had a ring to them: The Gathering Storm, Their Finest Hour, Blood, Sweat and Tears.
Then I saw the name of the author. It was mine own.
“What are these?” I said.
“Your memoirs,” he said. “The war years, at least.”
“Then I survive,” I said.
“More than that. You win.”
“I am glad to hear it.”
“It was touch-and-go for a while,” he said. “But that was not the worst of it.”
“Oh? Then what was the worst of it?”
I have not often seen a man look so forlorn. “The cost,” he said. “The sheer waste. The horror.”
I did not know how to comfort him. I set the books down on a heap of bricks, then brought out cigars and offered him one. He seemed delighted to take it. His face shed its melancholy and he exhibited an exhilaration I have seen only in the shining eyes of schoolboys encountering their idols on the sidelines of a cricket pitch.
“I knew you would be here tonight, alone,” he said, when he had puffed his cigar alight. He had studied my life, he said, choosing a night when I had come to the old place, away from memoranda and telephones and committees, to wrestle with my old black dog of a mood that had gripped me since the terrible raid on Coventry two nights ago.
He savored the rich Cuban leaf, blew out a long stream of blue smoke, then said, “But now you can stop all of it before it happens—the Blitz, the Battle of the Atlantic.” He looked wistful for a moment, then continued. “My mother’s younger brother drowned when his ship was torpedoed off Newfoundland in 1942. Fifty years later, she still cried for him.”
“I am very sorry,” I said.
“But you see, now he doesn’t have to die,” he said, gesturing to the books with the hand that held the cigar so that a scattering of ash fell upon the cover of the one entitled The Hinge of Fate. “It’s all in there. Hitler’s plans, his blunders. His invasion of Russia, D-Day, all of it.”
I looked at the books atop the bricks but did not touch them.
“Now you can strike where he is weakest, shorten the war, save tens of millions of lives.”
“Are there others like you?” I asked. “Other travelers through time?”
He told me that the channels by which he had come back to me were abstruse, unknown to any other. He had hit upon time travel by the most outrageous twist of odds. “But once I knew I could come here, I had to,” he said. “The war was the most terrible thing that ever happened. But with these books, you can prevent the worst of it.”
“Hmmm,” I said. “Show me.”
He bent to retrieve one of the volumes. I reached for a brick.
I mortar a second layer of bricks over the first, tapping each carefully into line with its brothers. The man from the future lies with his wonders beneath the fire-hardened oblongs. His books are ashes now.
I wonder if he understood, as the light was going out of his eyes, that I must accept all the horrors to come. That is the price to be paid for the knowledge he had brought me, the knowledge that we will be able to endure and that then will come brighter days.
But would they still come if I had looked into those books? If I could see the present as the past through my own future eyes, would I not surely wander from the path that I now tread in darkness, though with a good hope that it will lead us eventually to those broad sunny uplands?
I must choose the devil I know, though I know him now to be even more horrid than I feared, because the devil I don’t know may well be even worse.
Yet the man from the future has not striven in vain. He has done much good. Because of him, my black dog is once more whipped back to his dark kennel.
I finish the second layer of bricks, stand and brush the dirt from the knees of my trousers. I lay the trowel on the unyielding surface.
I shall carry on. We shall see it through.
THE WAVE-FUNCTION COLLAPSE
Steven Utley
All he can do at first is stare dully through the window at the barren Paleozoic landscape. Then focus sharpens, his mind begins to work again, disbelief increases in inverse proportion to subsiding shock, and soon his thoughts seem to outrace the helicopter’s shadow below. He constructs his first hypothesis: Somebody’s made a terrible mistake. By the time the machine swoops in low over the bay and circles to land on the ship’s flight deck, the hypothesis has mutated into a suspicion: Somebody’s playing a terrible practical joke. As he steps down from the cabin, he is almost angry enough to punch somebody, anybody—even the civilian liaison, who emerges from a group of Navy men, but whose solemn expression disarms him.
The liaison shakes his hand and guides him down into the ship, talking all the while. “We’ll expedite your return, of course, you’ll be home before noon, someone is going to be there to pick you up and, ah, take you wherever you need to go, damn, I’m so sorry.”
Expedite, he thinks. Return. Home.
He gropes for the meanings of the words, cannot quite get hold of them, gives up the effort, consoles himself with the savage thought, Yeah, well, if this is a monstrous prank, somebody’s sure as hell gonna catch seven kinds of hell for it. One doesn’t with impunity throw the jump station off its holy schedule for the sake of a laugh. One doesn’t get away with saying something about a man’s wife that’s neither true nor funny. He is amused by the latter qualification. A laugh or a sob escapes. Especially if it’s not funny.
Despite the general sense of urgency, he does not go immediately to the head of the line at the jump station and, so, through and straight home to the twenty-first century of the Common Era. He does not even go to the jump station to wait, but to sick bay. It takes time to make the station’s tight schedule flex enough to accommodate him, and he has certain preparations to make in the meantime. One does not simply fling oneself through a hole in spacetime or whatever it is. He really wants, would give anything (he tells himself), for a good stiff drink or even a bad limp one, but what he gets instead is a quick physical examination and an emetic. “It’s never a good idea to make the jump on a full stomach,” the Navy doctor reminds him. “Dramamine is ineffective in the prevention or treatment of time-travel sickness.”
While the liaison and the Navy doctor confer in a corner, he cools his heels and the minutes drag on and doubt eats away at his disbelief and the likelihood that this is a joke recedes. A lump of sorrow is forming in the center of his chest. It cannot be, he thinks, no it cannot be cannot cannot.
From a pocket of his patched work shirt (still permeated with the grime of inland proto-North America) he removes an old-fashioned paper envelope on which his name has been inscribed with a calligraphy pen, and from the envelope he takes several folded sheets of old-fashioned stationery, smoothes them across his thigh, and reads, “There’s something very nineteenth-century—at least, something very romantic-novel-heroine-ish (whether fainting from the vapors category or ripped bodice/heaving bosom kind)—about writing letters and sending them floating off into the unknown after you. I suspect I’m going to spend a fortune on postage while you’re gone. I’ve already sent one letter your way this week, but I won’t say I hope it’s caught up with you ‘by now.’ Even traveling by slow boat to wherever you ‘are,’ it must have reached you before the end of the Paleozoic age. Now I’ve made my head hurt. Einstein notwithstanding, these revved-up ape brains of ours cling tenaciously to Newtonian notions of absolute time. We live in the now, trailing, to be sure, a few seconds of the past as we press ahead into the future, but it’s always now wherever (whenever) we go. What’s happening in the Andromeda galaxy this instant? Yes, of course, we can know only what happened there a million years ago, yet I exist in this instant, and the universe, too, and that includes Andromeda. And existence requires that something be happening. (I detest metaphysics. The universe exists even when we aren’t looking at it or thinking about it.) And what about four hundred million years? You are supposed to have a synchronous anchor embedded in your proper matrix, which is here (with moi) (sigh)—so say the physicists, anyhow. But doesn’t that fly in the face of relativity? Isn’t it too too Newtonian? Too too tootsie. Old song, I think. I’ve been too long without sleep. And, already, too long without you.”
He holds the pages close to his face and inhales a subtle scent of her, and this helps him to decide on a course of action.
At length he is transferred to a little room adjoining the jump station. When the senior jump-station technician pops in to say that there will be an open slot in the schedule in about forty-five minutes, he clutches at her sleeve and demands that she refresh his memory on a couple of points.
“Explain,” he says, “this business about the synchronous link.”
He tightens his grip as she tries to pull away. She shoots a look at the doctor, who shoots one back. Its meaning is clear: Please just humor him, he’s suffered a terrible blow.
“The link,” she says, “it’s sort of like a brake or an anchor.”
“Brake, anchor, what does it do?”
“It’s, well, unless you can follow the math—”
“The hell with the math, tell me what it does.”
She jerks her sleeve free and glares first at him, then at the doctor, then back at him. Somehow jump-station techs have got the strange notion into their heads that they are an elite and therefore not quite answerable to just anyone. She would be perfectly within what she regards as her rights were she to tell him to take a flying leap at the moon. Nevertheless, possibly because the Navy doctor is present and Navy officers count for more than, say, someone who has obviously been off in the primeval hinterlands studying weird bugs and pond scum, she says, snappishly, “The link does what a link does. It connects. It synchronizes this spacetime matrix with the one on the, uh, other side.”
“So an hour passes here as it passes there.”
“Right.”
“An hour or a day or a year.”
“Right” (testily).
“So if you leave there on a Friday night and spend a weekend here and then go back, it’s Monday when you get there.”
“Basically that’s it, yes.”
“You can’t twiddle with some knobs, shave off a day or two? So I’d leave here on Monday but get there on Saturday afternoon, say?”
Incredulity and contempt commingle in her expression. “This isn’t some damn sci-fi show.”
“But—”
“Nobody is messing with the link, period.”
Damn, he thinks, scratch one plan of attack. “Then what about the many-worlds thing? Tell me about that.”
The senior jump-station tech grimaces, looks imploringly at the doctor. “I got a schedule to keep, y’know.”
“Please,” says the doctor. “It won’t take but a moment.”
“The idea is,” says the tech, grinding the words between her back teeth, “every possible universe is created at the instant it becomes possible. Like if it’s possible for you to jump to either side, to the left or the right, you jump to the left in one universe and to the right in another. And you don’t jump at all in still another universe.”
“How do you know which universe you’re in?”
“You split and get duplicated along with everything else when the universe splits and duplicates itself. You’re always in the universe you’re supposed to be in.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m not. Not yet. Listen. I have a plan.”
The tech glances anxiously at her watch. “And I have a schedule, and I’m off it. Sorry.”
She withdraws toward her ozone-reeking sanctum and has just got through the door when he moves to follow. Just before the door swings shut behind her, he sees her see him coming and hears her yelp for help and feels her not inconsiderable weight thrown against the door. The doctor tries to pull him away, but he is a big man hardened by field work and efficiently stiff-arms the man while pushing the woman on the opposite side of the door steadily backward. Suddenly, she stops resisting. He tumbles through the door, and a couple of junior techs grab him.
They do not grip him quite firmly enough. He sends one of them spinning against their boss and as those two go down together in a noisy heap he simply brushes away the other, who lacks not only the grip but the reach as well. Reinforcements are on the way, however. He bolts. He disappears further into the depths of the ship. By the time the public-address system barks out a “Now hear this!” he has found himself a cubby-hole and a heavy wrench with which to discourage anything as unsubtle as a frontal assault. Thus entrenched, he ponders the puzzle he knows he must solve if he is to save his wife’s life.
The Navy officers and enlisted personnel are not fools, they know their ship, and in short order they have located the man. Getting him out of his hiding place without hurting him or being hurt by him is another matter. Duly summoned, the liaison arrives with the doctor in tow and without preamble says, “We know you’re upset, you have our deepest sympathy, but we’re here to help you, so just come out of there right now, okay?”
Dangling his wrench negligently, the man answers, “First tell me about the cat in the box.”
Nonplussed, the liaison looks at the doctor and the Navy officer and is met with blank stares.
“I know you’re distraught,” says the liaison, “but,” and is cut short with, “What I am is desperate. I’ve been thinking in here, and I believe I may have the solution to my problem. But I’ve got to be sure I’m remembering stuff correctly. I need to know about the cat in the box.”
Nearby, though out of the man’s line of sight, the doctor abruptly turns and vanishes down a corridor.
“I don’t think I understand,” says the liaison. “What cat in what box? Look, can’t we discuss this back at the jump station? That slot in the schedule won’t be there much longer, you know. The chief tech says she can’t promise there’ll be another one before next shift.”
“The slot can wait until I’m sure of my plan.”
“What plan? Look, why don’t you just come out of there? We’re here for you.”
“I appreciate that. I appreciate everybody’s concern. Thank you, everybody, for your sympathy and condolences. But I’m hoping to obviate the need for sympathy and condolences, and what I really need is your understanding and your cooperation.”
“You have them, you know that!”
“Don’t patronize me. Hear me out. Whatzisname, the physicist, says we’re not actually in Paleozoic time, but some alternate dimension, universe, whatever. I never thought much about it before today. Now it’s what I have to believe.”
The doctor returns, practically dragging along the senior tech by her hand. The liaison heaves a sigh of relief and says, “Here’s someone who should be able to tell you what you want to know,” and he separates her from the doctor and draws her into the man’s line of sight.
Clearly unhappy with this treatment, the chief tech swats the liaison’s hands away. “Okay,” she says, “I’m here.”
“Please refresh my memory,” says the man. “I’ve been trying to remember the experiment with Whatzisname’s cat. The one inside the box.”
“Schrödinger’s cat.”
“That’s the one. Schrödinger locked a cat in a box with a radioactive substance and a Geiger counter.”
“Actually, it was a thought experiment. He didn’t really—”
“Whatever. The point is, the cat’s in the box, and—and what?”
“There’s one chance in two that within a certain length of time the radioactive substance will emit an electron that’ll make the Geiger counter click. If the Geiger counter clicks, it activates some device that kills the cat.”
“Yeah. And there’s no way to tell if the cat’s alive or dead unless and until you look inside the box.”
“Yeah.”
“Until you do look inside, the cat is neither alive nor dead.”
“Um, well, it actually has to be one or the other, of course.”
“Dead or alive.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s no way it can be neither of those things or a little of each?”
“Uh, well,” the chief tech says uneasily, “of course it can’t.”
“But in principle the cat is neither alive nor dead so far as it matters in the world outside the box.”
“Uh, yeah, sort of. In principle.”
“And there’s something called the, uh, wave—wave fraction?”
“Wave-function.”
“The wave-function, yes. So tell me about this wave-function.”
“The whole experiment, the box and the cat and the rest, they’re a system, and the so-called wave-function gives probabilities, nothing more, on how the system will work. It’s equally probable that the cat is dead or alive. When you open the box and observe which state the cat is actually in, dead or alive, the wave-function is said to collapse.”
“The wave-function ceases to be a wave-function only as soon as you try to observe it?”
“Yeah.”
The man grins triumphantly. “Thank you,” he tells the tech, “thank you, thank you, thank you,” and to the liaison he says, “My course is clear.”
“It is?”
“You can’t send me through just yet. Not for a while, in fact. Maybe not for a long while.”
“Why not?”
“It’s her only chance.”
“Whose?” During this brief exchange, the liaison’s color has undergone dramatic variations.
“My wife’s. The only way to keep her alive until I figure out my next move. Listen. Until I actually go through, what you say has happened hasn’t happened. There’s a chance it hasn’t, anyway. She’s like the cat in the box. Not alive, maybe, but not dead, either.”
“You’re pinning too much on an abstraction,” says the liaison, turning to the chief tech halfway through uttering the sentence, “on a mathematical fiction, right?”
