Time Travel Omnibus, page 916
She nods. “The wave-function’s just an expression. You can say a particle has both position and velocity, but if you try to fix the exact position, the particle doesn’t have any velocity, and if you try to measure the velocity, the particle is in motion and isn’t anywhere in particular. The wave-function’s an expression of the probabilities of a particle assuming each possible state at the instant you measure it. Until that instant, all possible states exist in a potential sense.”
“I understand enough. The wave-function goes from an indefinite state to a definite one only when you measure it. And whenever a collapse occurs, reality splits into as many parallel realities as are needed to accommodate each possible outcome of measurement. I mean to find the right reality. The one where my wife hasn’t died. I mean to interfere with this wave-function and put off the collapse.”
The liaison steps toward him, then away as he gestures with the wrench. “I realize that this must be very painful for you, but you have to face up to reality, you know.”
“I reject the reality I’m being offered. I want—I mean to find a different reality. Get these techs to twiddle some knobs, cross some wires, so I get sent to a slightly different universe.”
“ ‘Twiddle some knobs, cross some wires!’ ” The chief tech looks as though she has heard blasphemous or perhaps only imbecile utterances. “What you’re asking is impossible.”
“No. This terrible thing that’s happened, that everybody tells me has happened, that’s what’s impossible. I’m talking about a possibility. A possible universe.”
“Okay, let me put it this way. Even if it was possible for us to do what you want us to do—and it isn’t—the result you’re hoping for’s so improbable—”
“But not impossible.”
“But so very improbable. Look, suppose we did twiddle some knobs and cross some wires for you—not that we’re going to, but just suppose we did, and you got, ah, there—and nothing was different?”
“Then I’d talk your twin into shooting me through again, and if necessary, her twin, and then hers. Until I got where I wanted to go. Maybe if you gave me a note I could show to your twin—”
The liaison interrupts to ask, “Will you excuse me for a moment while I discuss something with the Navy?”
“Go ahead.”
The liaison motions the Navy officer into a corridor, out of sight and out of earshot, and asks, “Can’t you get him out of there?”
“He’s a big strong guy, and he’s found himself a big heavy wrench, and at the moment he’s not in his right mind. I understand he’s torn up about his wife. But I don’t want any of my people getting hurt. They have wives and husbands, too.”
“Isn’t there another way into that compartment?”
“Yes, but he’s got the door dogged good and tight.”
“Well, how about pumping in sleep gas or something?”
The officer does not have to answer this question, so eloquent is his expression just at the moment.
“Well,” says the liaison, “we can’t just let him stay in there.”
“Why not? Let him stay in there for a while. He can’t hurt anything, just bang on the bulkhead a bit. He’ll come out peacefully once he calms down.”
The liaison glances at his wristwatch. “If we don’t get him to the jump station in the next eleven minutes, it’ll be tomorrow or next Tuesday before we can get him home. The family needs him there to help with, you know, arrangements.”
“Then promise him whatever he wants, and he’ll come out right now,” and the officer motions to the doctor and the chief tech to join them.
“But,” the liaison sputters, and gets no farther, because there is a glint of steel in the officer’s eye.
“Promise him whatever he wants.”
“Ah,” says the liaison.
“Of course,” says the doctor.
“Whatever,” says the chief tech.
On receipt of the promise, the man drops the wrench with a clang and emerges from his cubby-hole, at which point several carefully selected bluejackets, each much stronger of grip and longer of reach than a jump-station tech, move in and restrain him until the doctor has stuck a hypodermic needle into him with the comment, “Just a mild sedative.” The next thing he knows is the sinus-burning tang of ozone. The next thing he knows after that is where he is. The jump-station techs are at their places, he is strapped to a gurney. The liaison and the doctor move into his field of vision, and he strains against the straps and manages to croak, “You’re killing her! You’re taking away the only chance she has.”
“Ah, my friend,” and the liaison’s voice, like his face, is full of solicitude, “I’m sorry, but she’s already dead.”
“Provisionally,” he gasps, “she’s only dead provisionally!”
The mild sedative, however, is having the effect of a strong one, and sleep comes before it can be recognized for what it is. Bulkheads become permeable membranes through which Dreamland oozes and ebbs like an impatient sea wooed by a jealous moon. Then he feels himself hurtling away from the world, toward some other.
“Poor bastard,” says the liaison.
“Yeah,” says the Navy doctor. “It’d be nice if he actually could slip into the universe he wants.”
The chief jump-station tech shakes her head. “Nobody gets to pick the universe they’re in. If they could, nobody’d hang around in the universes where there’s death and sickness—”
“His wife,” the liaison tells her severely, “died in a car crash. He just heard the news this morning.”
She looks scornfully at the two men. “Well, it’s a shame, but it only goes to show. I still say he must’ve seen too many sci-fi shows. Those goddamn things give people such unrealistic expectations.”
“Nevertheless,” the doctor begins, “I hope he,” but the chief tech suddenly pushes past him and the liaison to glare and bawl at her people, “Let’s scramble, boys and girls, we’re on a goddamn schedule here!” and her people do scramble.
“Nevertheless,” the liaison tells the doctor as they turn to go, “I hope so, too.”
WORKING ON BORROWED TIME
Jack Campbell
Tinkering invites countertinkering, which can turn attempted solutions into Big Problems . . .
The Here and Now which I call home has a number of advantages compared to most earlier There and Thens, one of which is air conditioning. I was still wiping sweat from my forehead and contemplating the fairly recent dust of now-ancient Egypt on my sandals when Jeannie interrupted my work. “You have a call from Mr. Farrow.”
I automatically looked up, even though my implanted assistant couldn’t be seen, and fastened an annoyed glare on the nearest wall. “Tell him I just got home and ask him to call me back in a few hours.”
“He says it’s very urgent.”
I smothered an exasperated reply. Whenever I got together with other temporal interventionists we usually ended up discussing one of the still-unsolved mysteries of the universe; why we had access to all of human history but never seemed to have any time to spare. “Okay. Put him on.”
An image of Bill Farrow appeared before me, his usually cheerful face looking worried. I started talking before he could. “Look, I’m sure this is really important, but I just got back from dodging homicidal priests through the City of the Dead so I could stop someone from looting a tomb a few millennia before it was supposed to be looted. In other words, I had a really long night last night a long time ago. Can’t this wait?”
Bill frowned. “You guys always talk funny.”
“T.I.’s, you mean? It comes from living in circles. Can this wait?”
“No.”
I smothered another exasperated expression and tried to look halfway accommodating. “What’s up?”
“Tom, we’ve been friends since college, right?”
“Right.”
“Have I ever remembered stuff that wasn’t true?”
I started to give a flippant reply, then thought better of it. “No.” Not more so than anyone else, that is. But I didn’t want to get into Quantum Memory Effect at the moment.
“Then why . . .” He looked bewildered now. “I was preparing a lecture for my classes, and went to check some of the information, and, and . . .”
“Something didn’t match?”
“Not at all! How could I have forgotten London, England was destroyed by an asteroid in 1908 Common Era?”
“It was?”
“Yes!”
“Jeannie, please check Bill’s last statement for accuracy.”
Her voice sounded as calm and confident as always. “Historical databases all agree that London, England was destroyed in 1908 CE. I am unable to check the accuracy of Mr. Farrow’s alleged forgetfulness.”
“Thanks.” I shook my head. “That’s not what I remember, either, Bill.”
Bill spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “But that’s what happened! Every history I’ve consulted says so. How could we misremember something like that? How could I misremember it? Imperial England is my specialty.”
I rubbed my forehead to fight off the first twinges of a headache. It looked like this conversation would take a while whether I wanted it to or not. “Have you ever heard of Quantum Memory Effect?”
“Uh, no.”
“Human brains work partly on a quantum level. That’s how we accomplish creative work, and it’s why our minds can accept apparent multiple realities simultaneously. You know, like fiction. But it also has an effect when there’s been a temporal intervention that causes changes to ripple up through history. Thanks to QME, you remember something being a certain way, and it’s not, even though you’re positive you couldn’t be mistaken. That’s because part of you is still remembering a reality that has been altered, a reality that no longer actually happened. Usually, it’s just something small and insignificant. But if a really big change happens downtime, it can cause really big changes uptime.”
Bill didn’t look reassured. “But your assistant—”
“Jeannie—and every other artificial intelligence—doesn’t work the same way as our brains do. Not yet. They can only accept one reality at a time, even though they can shuffle through alternatives very quickly.”
“You’re saying London wasn’t destroyed in Edwardian times?”
“Well, no. I mean, it obviously was. But it apparently wasn’t before. Maybe. Now it was.”
“I don’t understand. You’re talking in circles again.”
Despite everything, I laughed briefly. “Because that’s how I have to think. You can think in linear terms of before and after. But I have to deal with causality loops brought into existence when someone uptime goes downtime and changes something. The cause of the action takes place after the action, you see. It’s a causality loop through time, not a straight line.”
Bill didn’t look reassured, then he looked puzzled. “What does that all mean? Look, what’re we arguing about, anyway?”
“You wanted me to explain why you didn’t remember London being destroyed.”
“London? You mean the 1908 CE event? Of course I remember that. I wrote my thesis on it.”
I looked away for a moment, startled by the rapid progress of the QME. When I looked back, Bill’s image was gone. “Jeannie, did Mr. Farrow terminate that call or did something else happen?”
“I require further information to answer your question.”
I pointed, unnecessarily, at the spot where the image had been. “Mr. William Farrow. The call he made to me just now. How did it terminate?”
“You were not engaged in a call. Your last call was made seven minutes ago to notify your employers of your successful completion of your mission.”
“I see.” Or, at least, I was afraid I did. “Please put through a call to Mr. Farrow.”
“I have no data for a Mr. Farrow in your personal contact file. Please provide more identifying information.”
I stared at the spot where Bill’s image had been, rubbing my chin this time. He wasn’t there anymore, and he wasn’t in the contact list I maintained for friends. Someone had made an intervention downtime, something that might’ve made William Farrow disappear completely from existence, like that man who’d famously walked around the horses, or maybe he’d just shifted to a new reality where he and I weren’t friends. I don’t like interventions that mess with my friends. “Jeannie, how many names are in my personal contact file?”
“Eighty six.”
There should’ve been an even one hundred, a number I’d stuck to so I could keep the file from bloating into uselessness. I was certain of that, even though doubt nagged at me in a way I recognized. “Confirm. Eighty six?”
“No. Eighty five.”
Damn. I’d lost another in that second of time. It’d been a big intervention, then. Not just ripples causing localized effects that dampened out as they ran up through the inertia of history, but a big wave crashing through time and rearranging what had been. Big wave, big intervention. London, 1908.
And I had to assume I was just experiencing the front of that wave. As a T.I., I’d developed some extra resistance to changes working their way through time. No one knows for sure why that is, but even with that resistance, if I was still here when the crest hit . . . maybe I’d change enough not to remember what had been, either. I didn’t know what that new reality would be like, but I had a feeling anyone willing to destroy a city to bring it about wasn’t interested in building a better tomorrow in any way I’d approve of.
“Jeannie, I need to do a jump.”
“Your credit reflects payment for your intervention in Egypt.”
For what that was worth. Museums hated losing objects from their collections, but couldn’t budget much to get them back, especially since they often couldn’t prove they’d ever had them. Also unfortunately, T.I.’s are prohibited from soliciting work, even in what I assumed was a good cause. “Will my current credit line cover a jump downtime to 1908 CE?”
“Yes. It will be close to maximized, however. I am required to counsel against making a jump on borrowed funds with no specific client.”
“Thank you. Counsel noted.” I glanced around the room, noticing a blank space where I was sure a picture ought to be. A picture of what? The memory was already blurring. “When exactly was London destroyed? And what does history say did it?”
“Old London was destroyed just before dawn on 30 June, 1908 CE by an atmospheric explosion attributed to a meteor impact with the Earth.”
A meteor? There must be another explanation, even though I now had memories of a New London crowding into my head. I waited a very long second while Jeannie set up the jump.
“The period immediately prior to the destruction is inaccessible,” she reported.
“Inaccessible? How can it be inaccessible?”
“I cannot determine the reason. I can jump you in four months prior.”
Too long. “That’s the closest you can get?”
Another long second passed. “I can access 28 June, 1908. There’s a very narrow window available.”
I needed to change out of my outfit and get into clothes at least halfway appropriate for the period. “How long can you hold that window?”
“I do not know. It appeared on my third access scan and may disappear just as quickly.”
“Then let’s go. Right now.”
A moment later, I dodged into an alley while the locals were still trying to figure out if they’d really seen a man dressed like an ancient Egyptian court functionary standing in the middle of a street in very early twentieth-century London.
“Jeannie, I’d appreciate suggestions on how to get Here and Now clothing.”
“You should acquire such clothing prior to a jump.”
“You’re supposed to tell me things I don’t already know.” I spent a moment becoming aware of my surroundings. Something scuttled through a pile of trash not far from me. The tang of horse manure and assorted less pleasant scents filled the air. Downtime cities stink. Downtime people usually do, too. I coughed, glancing up at the soot-laden sky. “They burn coal for heat Here and Now, don’t they?”
“Yes. I can describe the effects of the coal burning residues on health if you desire.”
“No, thanks.”
The sky seemed darker than it should be, though, even through the smog. I got a glance of a sunbeam spearing through the sky and realized the Sun was setting. Jeannie’s narrow window must have been late in the day, leaving me that much less time to discover what had destroyed London and whether I could stop it.
I studied the nearest pile of trash, kicked it a few times, waited for various unseen somethings to scurry out of it, then reached down and pulled out a broken wooden chair leg about the length of my forearm. Then I waited for the sky to get darker.
As I’d expected, the street lighting of the period wasn’t up to the task. It never is. I reached out through the gloom, grabbed a passing stranger who seemed about my size, yanked him into the alley, then menaced him with my club. A few minutes later, my victim was trussed up in strips torn from my Egyptian get-up, and I was wearing somewhat ill-fitting but appropriate clothing and striding rapidly down the street. As rapidly, that is, as my Here and Now footwear permitted. My feet, accustomed most recently to sandals, sent out pain messages with almost every step in the heavy, stiff shoes I’d appropriated. Just my luck that in this Here and Now feet were supposed to accommodate themselves to shoes rather than the other way around.
When I’d put a good deal of distance between me and my mugging victim, I found a bench and sat down to think. I was here. The day after tomorrow, something really bad was going to happen to London. I needed a lead. Fortunately, whoever was carrying out this intervention had to have left footprints of some kind. All I had to do was spot those footprints within less than two days in a very large and primitive city. I watched the foot and vehicle traffic going by, coughed some more, and wished I had more time to work with and more ideas.
A boy’s voice was yelling out something. I looked that way, and saw he was selling newspapers. I slapped my forehead, drawing an alarmed look from a passerby. Maybe it was some lingering effect of the intervention wave, but I’d failed to immediately focus on the obvious and best search method.
