Time Travel Omnibus, page 980
“No, sir, not at all. I’m really from the future, and I’m prepared to prove it.” He reached into his inside pocket and withdrew a small, carefully wrapped parcel which he handed to Darwin. “Please, sir, unwrap it.”
Albright watched anxiously as Darwin took the proffered parcel, fumbled with the paper and opened the small cardboard box. With a soft cry he gently lifted out its contents.
With relief, Albright continued. “In 1862 you published a book on orchid fertilization, including a description of Angraecum sesquipedale, a Madagascar orchid species with an eleven and a half inch nectary. You predicted that there must be a sphinx moth with a proboscis long enough to reach the nectar.
“In 1903, just before the Church clamped down all the way on biological inquiries, a collector named Morgan found the moth in Madagascar. He named it Xanthopan morgani praedicta to honor your prediction.” He looked at the small brown object in Darwin’s palm. “We thought you might like to see it.”
“Most remarkable. I am most gratified to see this.” Darwin looked it over carefully before replacing it in the box. “I should like to study this more fully. The proboscis is curled, but it does appear to be fully long enough to extract nectar from the comet orchid.” He looked at Albright. “Was this what you wanted to discuss?”
“No, sir, this was for your pleasure only.”
Darwin straightened up with a jerk. “Of course, this lovely specimen does not, in itself, prove that you are what you say. The moth does not evince a date of discovery.”
“I am aware of that. On the other hand, you have not heard of the discovery, so I could be telling the truth.” Albright smiled. “But in either case it indicates sincerity on my part.”
“That is indeed a reasonable argument. Do you have any other . . . proofs?”
Albright’s smile faded. “We thought long and hard about that. There are few objects which cannot be falsified—books and newspapers with later dates could have been printed at any time, for example. Same with coins. Also, there are certain limitations on objects that may be carried back into the past. We are only beginning to learn about them by experimentation, but it appears as though future technology cannot go backwards in time. In other words, it cannot exist before it was invented.”
He looked up with a pleading expression. “That also seems reasonable, does it not? We hoped that the moth would make the journey, because others of its kind exist in 1866. And, I, of course, for the same reason.” He smiled nervously. “Humans are an old technology. So I bring only my argument, which I beg to be allowed to present.”
Darwin drew out a watch on a chain and squinted at it before tucking it back into his vest pocket. “Very well, I’m willing to continue our discussion, although I withhold judgment on your fantastic claim.” They resumed walking. “So, what part of my work did you wish to discuss?”
“A work that you are contemplating, but have not yet written. A work that is unnecessary to the acceptance of your theory, but which will cause a great deal of harm to the future of science. A great deal of harm. I am here to beg you not to pursue this work. And I have but little time to do it.”
“Really? You know of a work I have not yet written? I am confounded.”
“Our records are not complete, for reasons which I shall attempt to make clear, but they lead us to believe that about now you are working on a book entitled, An Answer to the Religious Opposition to the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man.”
“Your knowledge is not quite precise. I have made a few notes about the subject, solely to keep track of arguments in opposition. I believe I have said so in a letter or two.”
“Yes, sir, I know, but trust me, that book will be published, in 1884.”
Darwin looked unhappily at Albright. “So far in the future, then, the attacks will continue?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Thwack!
Clink.
Another circuit of the Sandwalk completed, another flint knocked off the pile.
“I admit to initially being puzzled, then irked, by the blind rejection of my Theory by a rigid biblical interpretation by . . . by certain minds. And then Captain FitzRoy’s suicide has preyed heavily on my mind these last months.” He looked up. “You know of Captain FitzRoy?”
FitzRoy! If only Darwin knew how much he despised that name! He had been brought up under the gaze of that ubiquitous face! He had grown to hate the mutton chop sideburns, the disdainful expression, the deep-set eyes with their arrogant stare. Darwin spent five pleasant years with the man, but I have been forced to live by FitzRoy’s tyrannical pronouncements all of my life! He stifled the passionate tirade that threatened to burst from his lips. Instead he nodded mutely.
Darwin seemed not to notice his companion’s anguish. He continued, “Despite our initial camaraderie on the Beagle, we argued much during the voyage. I disappointed him severely by not finding substantiation for the Book of Genesis in my observations of the natural world. As I found more variation among the species, so he became more and more rigid and resisted all interpretations that conflicted in any way with the most literal reading of the Bible.” He shook his head. “We last met as friends in 1857, when he came to stay at Down House for two nights, but the visit was not a success. We parted coolly, and never met again.”
1857. A visit with FitzRoy. Albright made a mental note. As a leading Darwin scholar, even he hadn’t been aware that the two had continued on social terms after the voyage. A familiar ache gripped him. So much has been lost.
Seemingly gripped by memories, Darwin continued his monologue, an intense expression on his face. “After the publication of the Origin, he became a violent objector to my work. I, on the other hand, could not see why Natural Selection threatened his religion. Finally, he became convinced that he had nurtured a blasphemer on board the Beagle, and he turned it over and over in his mind until I fear it unhinged him. In despair at what he viewed as the triumph of my satanic views, he took his life most cruelly April last.”
“It was a tragedy,” Albright said with vehemence. “His suicide created one of the most powerful martyrs in history.”
Darwin turned to him with a perplexed look, but continued, “I feel compelled to set down the arguments pro and con my theory, in the hope that others of his religious rigidity might be dissuaded from this unfortunate act. The Church must not be used as an impediment to thinking!”
“And yet such an intended act of mercy will have such terrible consequences,” murmured Albright.
“Indeed? My book?”
“Absolutely. That book started a chain of events that became a crusade against science throughout Europe and the Americas that continues even today, some three hundred years later.”
“Three hundred years—”
Albright waved away his objections, plunged on. “Imagine, sir, that it is 1884, and your book—the book you are going to write—has just been published. As they did for the Origin, your old supporters, Huxley and Hooker, defended you most ably. And by then there were others convinced by your arguments and evidence.”
“Most gratifying.”
“Yes, but more importantly, the Church hierarchy took the criticism very badly. The bishops accused you of setting man’s ingenuity against God’s word. Worse, the public supported them, especially in the face of the very unpopular Neanderthal fossils from Germany. People did not want to believe they were descended from apes and barbarous tribes of men.”
“Indeed, it is perhaps an unpopular idea, but inescapable. Man is not exempted from the rest of the animal kingdom in this regard.”
“I agree, but it fueled the flames of the rebellion. Many men like FitzRoy joined together in a campaign to expunge what they termed the ‘heresy of evolution’. They called themselves the Fitzrovians, and demanded a literal interpretation of the events set forth in Genesis.”
“And who spoke against them?”
“Nobody, there’s the tragedy. Men of science thought it would pass, and that they could safely ignore what they saw to be religious zealots. But those ideas started to snowball, and what ensued was a great resurgence of fundamentalist religion, and a suppression of science. Schools were forbidden to teach about evolution and natural selection; then it spread to the other sciences. For over two centuries, men of science have had to labor secretly, in great peril.”
“I cannot believe that account, Mr Albright. Rational thought and scientific endeavor are seen as honorable professions in Europe and have for some three hundred years. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were great astronomers in the sixteenth century, well respected and rewarded by the Danish crown.”
Thwack!
Clink.
Albright was sure those two sounds would be indelibly burned into his memory no matter what happened. That, and the sounds of the birds.
“Yes, but Kepler’s mother was tried as a witch in Germany, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for insisting that the Earth circles the sun, and well into the seventeenth century, Galileo was forced to recant that same doctrine.”
Darwin looked at him sharply. “You know your history well, for a man from so far in the future.”
“We have learned the whole history of suppression these long years. Oh, we are desperate to be free! Believe this if nothing else.” In anguish Albright tore open his shirt to reveal an elaborate, garishly colored tattoo of a cross.
“I am an acolyte of the Holy Order of Scientism, for over two centuries the only way for a few to keep alive the flame of learning untainted by religious dogma. We seek to know the world the way it is, not the way it is ordained to be by the Hierarchy of Fitzrovians. Only now are we beginning to move out from the shadow of the Church. But we have lost so much time, and it may be too late.”
Darwin was visibly taken aback, and stammered, “Is that . . . adornment real?”
“The tattoo? Yes, and another like it on my back. I’ll take them with me to the grave.”
“But . . . why? Of what use is such . . . adornment?”
“Fealty, for some. For others such as myself, disguise. Although it is true that the hold of the Church is gradually loosening, we have lost over two centuries of scientific understanding. Two centuries! Our climate is changing and we don’t know why, the world’s population is soaring, the forests were cut or burned, the deserts advance, the air is brown, the waters are poisoned and the people sicken.”
“Surely, the leaders—”
“Either the Hierarchy doesn’t care or they are unable to manage the crisis. Whichever it is, there is little expectation that we can cure the world with our present state of knowledge anyway. It was a desperate hope, but perhaps by changing the past we can recapture that lost time.”
“You speak of lost time, yet you claim to be from the future, therefore you have the ability to travel through time. Surely that is remarkably advanced science.”
“The time travel device was an accidental discovery. We don’t know how it works, but it does, at least for short trips. If I am able to change our past, by dissuading you from publishing that book, we don’t know what will happen. We hope it will change the future for the better. But maybe it cannot be changed. Our philosophers have debated long and deeply about this: maybe I exist only because the events in my past unfurled as they have. Perhaps in another—” He stopped short as a wave of dizziness hit him.
Wha—? Oh no, not yet. He peeled back his sleeve to look at his watch. It’s not time yet!
Darwin was looking at him sharply. “Are you ill, sir?”
“No, just . . . dizzy. Perhaps the temporal travel device has affected me.”
“Young man, your tale is most persuasive, although I can scarcely believe one book of mine could be so pivotal in history.”
Albright recovered himself. “All our historical research indicates just that, sir. What we know of causality tells us that the form the future takes has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Even a seemingly minor event can have great consequences. And, for a man of your renown, that new book was not a minor event.”
Darwin stared at him intently. “Just how did you plan to dissuade me?”
“By doing what I just did, telling you what is going to happen if you do publish it.”
“What if I refuse, or am not convinced? I admit that it irks me greatly that certain bishops are so opposed to my ideas.” He looked at Albright sharply. “Are you prepared to accept failure?”
Albright hesitated, suddenly aware of the heavy lump in his overcoat pocket. “Mr Darwin, sir, I . . . we wish you no harm, but we are determined not to fail our world.”
“I see. You will stop me by force if necessary.” Darwin looked at him as if appraising what means Albright would use.
Albright nodded slightly. I’m losing him, he thought unhappily. “If I can persuade you that there is independent proof of your theory, would you be satisfied?”
Darwin drew himself up. “Proof? Young man, I have labored for decades on my theory of Natural Selection. I truly believe that I have amassed an overwhelming body of evidence—”
“Someone has found the mechanism for inheritance.”
Darwin stopped short. “The mechanism? What do you mean?”
“Well, not the actual . . . ah . . .” He fought back another wave of dizziness. “Well, you understand, not the actual, uh, bodies in the cell, but the mathematics of inheritance.”
Darwin stared uncomprehendingly.
Albright rushed on. “There’s a book, just published, by Gregor Mendel, about experiments he did with garden pea plants. He has established that there is a unit of heredity, some . . . factor passed from parent to offspring, in a regular and repeatable way. Some of these factors are transmitted visibly, and are called dominant. Others become, ah, latent in the process and are called recessive. With the correct crosses, Mendel could make them reappear in later generations, so he knew they were still there, albeit hidden.”
A look of awe slowly washed over the older man’s face and his mouth worked as he silently wrestled with the implications.
“So you see,” continued Albright, “if an organism exhibits an unfavorable factor and dies because of it, and this happens to all the other individuals with the same factor, it will be eliminated from the population.” Bright sparks flashed across his eyes. He reached into his coat and clutched the weapon. “It’s the mechanism for nashural s’lection!”
“The mechanism for natural selection. Yes. It could very well be. I will need to see that book! Tell me again who is the author?”
“M . . . M . . . Mendel,” he slurred. “G . . . G . . . Gregor Mendel, a m . . . m . . . monk, an Augush . . . tini . . . tian.”
“What did you say? I couldn’t understand. Speak up, please!”
Albright stared fuzzily. The scene around him was becoming grainy. Still time. In desperation he yanked his arm out of his pocket, aimed the antique pistol at Darwin. God help me. He squeezed the trigger as greyness descended.
The crackling noise awakened her. Solange started up, feeling woozy and a bit unclear. She absentmindedly put her hand up to her hair to tuck a stray red curl into . . . nothing.
“Rats, must’ve dozed off.”
The screen in front of her was full of diagonal lines.
“That does it. I can’t do any assignment if the freaking Viewer conks out on me.”
Electronics never worked for her. This morning already her chronometer had failed to network with her wakeup implant. She’d almost missed her session with the TVS. She’d rushed to the library in the nick of time, shouldered her way past the waiting students and jammed her ID thumbprint down just as the robo-librarian was about to give her slot away. As it was she’d lost fifteen minutes.
Someone pounded on the door. “Two minutes!”
She checked the big chronometer.
“Hell, my session’s over! What’d I see anyway?”
The vidrecorder was still running. She shut it off and removed the spool.
The door opened suddenly. The librarian rolled in. “Time’s up,” it rumbled. “Please relinquish the Temporal ViewScreen.”
“Okay, okay, keep your treads on,” she muttered. “I’m leaving.”
Her eye fell on the assignment sheet. “Observation of Charles Darwin during writing of The Origin of Species, 1858.”
It was clearly marked “Easy”. Hell, she hadn’t even been able to tune the freaking gizmo to that date. It’d stuck on 1866. Well, she’d done something different. But what? She felt for the spool in her pocket.
Whatever I see, I’ll just be creative with my interpretation, she thought. After all, what difference could it make what some old guy was thinking three hundred years ago?
She hurried out into the bright new morning in search of coffee.
INSIDE THE BOX
Edward M. Lerner
The lecture hall was pleasantly warm. Behind Thaddeus Fitch, busily writing on the chalkboard, pencils scratched earnestly in spiral notebooks, fluorescent lights hummed, and feet shuffled. A Beach Boys tune wafted in through open windows from the quad.
Or so, in any case, the professor imagined the lecture hall. Chittering, muttering students squirming in their seats this morning drowned out the customary sounds. Or what he thought he remembered to be the customary sounds . . .
Chalk squeaked as Thaddeus, with more energy than artistry, began sketching a stick-figure quadruped. “I’ll explain this cat momentarily, class.” Shrodinger’s thought-experiment cat. Today’s Introduction to Physics lecture introduced the counterintuitive topic of quantum mechanics. “Recall from your reading that the behavior of atoms and their constituent parts cannot be fully described by such conventional characteristics as position and momentum. More precisely, how we think about those descriptive terms must change.” He continued drawing as he spoke, the cube in which he was attempting to enclose the cat somewhat out of perspective. He winced as the chalk snapped, its tip caught by the hole that should not be there. Should it?
“In classical physics, we can, with sufficient care and expense, measure to arbitrary precision the position and momentum of any particle. At sufficiently tiny scales, however, nature does not behave as we expect. Instead, in those infinitesimal domains, we discover that certain parameters exhibit heretofore imperceptible granularity or lumpiness—what physicists call quantization. Further, we cannot measure at quantum scales without influencing whatever is being measured. The math is inappropriate for”—beyond—“this class, but a consequence of quantization is that we cannot have absolute knowledge of subatomic particles.”
Albright watched anxiously as Darwin took the proffered parcel, fumbled with the paper and opened the small cardboard box. With a soft cry he gently lifted out its contents.
With relief, Albright continued. “In 1862 you published a book on orchid fertilization, including a description of Angraecum sesquipedale, a Madagascar orchid species with an eleven and a half inch nectary. You predicted that there must be a sphinx moth with a proboscis long enough to reach the nectar.
“In 1903, just before the Church clamped down all the way on biological inquiries, a collector named Morgan found the moth in Madagascar. He named it Xanthopan morgani praedicta to honor your prediction.” He looked at the small brown object in Darwin’s palm. “We thought you might like to see it.”
“Most remarkable. I am most gratified to see this.” Darwin looked it over carefully before replacing it in the box. “I should like to study this more fully. The proboscis is curled, but it does appear to be fully long enough to extract nectar from the comet orchid.” He looked at Albright. “Was this what you wanted to discuss?”
“No, sir, this was for your pleasure only.”
Darwin straightened up with a jerk. “Of course, this lovely specimen does not, in itself, prove that you are what you say. The moth does not evince a date of discovery.”
“I am aware of that. On the other hand, you have not heard of the discovery, so I could be telling the truth.” Albright smiled. “But in either case it indicates sincerity on my part.”
“That is indeed a reasonable argument. Do you have any other . . . proofs?”
Albright’s smile faded. “We thought long and hard about that. There are few objects which cannot be falsified—books and newspapers with later dates could have been printed at any time, for example. Same with coins. Also, there are certain limitations on objects that may be carried back into the past. We are only beginning to learn about them by experimentation, but it appears as though future technology cannot go backwards in time. In other words, it cannot exist before it was invented.”
He looked up with a pleading expression. “That also seems reasonable, does it not? We hoped that the moth would make the journey, because others of its kind exist in 1866. And, I, of course, for the same reason.” He smiled nervously. “Humans are an old technology. So I bring only my argument, which I beg to be allowed to present.”
Darwin drew out a watch on a chain and squinted at it before tucking it back into his vest pocket. “Very well, I’m willing to continue our discussion, although I withhold judgment on your fantastic claim.” They resumed walking. “So, what part of my work did you wish to discuss?”
“A work that you are contemplating, but have not yet written. A work that is unnecessary to the acceptance of your theory, but which will cause a great deal of harm to the future of science. A great deal of harm. I am here to beg you not to pursue this work. And I have but little time to do it.”
“Really? You know of a work I have not yet written? I am confounded.”
“Our records are not complete, for reasons which I shall attempt to make clear, but they lead us to believe that about now you are working on a book entitled, An Answer to the Religious Opposition to the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man.”
“Your knowledge is not quite precise. I have made a few notes about the subject, solely to keep track of arguments in opposition. I believe I have said so in a letter or two.”
“Yes, sir, I know, but trust me, that book will be published, in 1884.”
Darwin looked unhappily at Albright. “So far in the future, then, the attacks will continue?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Thwack!
Clink.
Another circuit of the Sandwalk completed, another flint knocked off the pile.
“I admit to initially being puzzled, then irked, by the blind rejection of my Theory by a rigid biblical interpretation by . . . by certain minds. And then Captain FitzRoy’s suicide has preyed heavily on my mind these last months.” He looked up. “You know of Captain FitzRoy?”
FitzRoy! If only Darwin knew how much he despised that name! He had been brought up under the gaze of that ubiquitous face! He had grown to hate the mutton chop sideburns, the disdainful expression, the deep-set eyes with their arrogant stare. Darwin spent five pleasant years with the man, but I have been forced to live by FitzRoy’s tyrannical pronouncements all of my life! He stifled the passionate tirade that threatened to burst from his lips. Instead he nodded mutely.
Darwin seemed not to notice his companion’s anguish. He continued, “Despite our initial camaraderie on the Beagle, we argued much during the voyage. I disappointed him severely by not finding substantiation for the Book of Genesis in my observations of the natural world. As I found more variation among the species, so he became more and more rigid and resisted all interpretations that conflicted in any way with the most literal reading of the Bible.” He shook his head. “We last met as friends in 1857, when he came to stay at Down House for two nights, but the visit was not a success. We parted coolly, and never met again.”
1857. A visit with FitzRoy. Albright made a mental note. As a leading Darwin scholar, even he hadn’t been aware that the two had continued on social terms after the voyage. A familiar ache gripped him. So much has been lost.
Seemingly gripped by memories, Darwin continued his monologue, an intense expression on his face. “After the publication of the Origin, he became a violent objector to my work. I, on the other hand, could not see why Natural Selection threatened his religion. Finally, he became convinced that he had nurtured a blasphemer on board the Beagle, and he turned it over and over in his mind until I fear it unhinged him. In despair at what he viewed as the triumph of my satanic views, he took his life most cruelly April last.”
“It was a tragedy,” Albright said with vehemence. “His suicide created one of the most powerful martyrs in history.”
Darwin turned to him with a perplexed look, but continued, “I feel compelled to set down the arguments pro and con my theory, in the hope that others of his religious rigidity might be dissuaded from this unfortunate act. The Church must not be used as an impediment to thinking!”
“And yet such an intended act of mercy will have such terrible consequences,” murmured Albright.
“Indeed? My book?”
“Absolutely. That book started a chain of events that became a crusade against science throughout Europe and the Americas that continues even today, some three hundred years later.”
“Three hundred years—”
Albright waved away his objections, plunged on. “Imagine, sir, that it is 1884, and your book—the book you are going to write—has just been published. As they did for the Origin, your old supporters, Huxley and Hooker, defended you most ably. And by then there were others convinced by your arguments and evidence.”
“Most gratifying.”
“Yes, but more importantly, the Church hierarchy took the criticism very badly. The bishops accused you of setting man’s ingenuity against God’s word. Worse, the public supported them, especially in the face of the very unpopular Neanderthal fossils from Germany. People did not want to believe they were descended from apes and barbarous tribes of men.”
“Indeed, it is perhaps an unpopular idea, but inescapable. Man is not exempted from the rest of the animal kingdom in this regard.”
“I agree, but it fueled the flames of the rebellion. Many men like FitzRoy joined together in a campaign to expunge what they termed the ‘heresy of evolution’. They called themselves the Fitzrovians, and demanded a literal interpretation of the events set forth in Genesis.”
“And who spoke against them?”
“Nobody, there’s the tragedy. Men of science thought it would pass, and that they could safely ignore what they saw to be religious zealots. But those ideas started to snowball, and what ensued was a great resurgence of fundamentalist religion, and a suppression of science. Schools were forbidden to teach about evolution and natural selection; then it spread to the other sciences. For over two centuries, men of science have had to labor secretly, in great peril.”
“I cannot believe that account, Mr Albright. Rational thought and scientific endeavor are seen as honorable professions in Europe and have for some three hundred years. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were great astronomers in the sixteenth century, well respected and rewarded by the Danish crown.”
Thwack!
Clink.
Albright was sure those two sounds would be indelibly burned into his memory no matter what happened. That, and the sounds of the birds.
“Yes, but Kepler’s mother was tried as a witch in Germany, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for insisting that the Earth circles the sun, and well into the seventeenth century, Galileo was forced to recant that same doctrine.”
Darwin looked at him sharply. “You know your history well, for a man from so far in the future.”
“We have learned the whole history of suppression these long years. Oh, we are desperate to be free! Believe this if nothing else.” In anguish Albright tore open his shirt to reveal an elaborate, garishly colored tattoo of a cross.
“I am an acolyte of the Holy Order of Scientism, for over two centuries the only way for a few to keep alive the flame of learning untainted by religious dogma. We seek to know the world the way it is, not the way it is ordained to be by the Hierarchy of Fitzrovians. Only now are we beginning to move out from the shadow of the Church. But we have lost so much time, and it may be too late.”
Darwin was visibly taken aback, and stammered, “Is that . . . adornment real?”
“The tattoo? Yes, and another like it on my back. I’ll take them with me to the grave.”
“But . . . why? Of what use is such . . . adornment?”
“Fealty, for some. For others such as myself, disguise. Although it is true that the hold of the Church is gradually loosening, we have lost over two centuries of scientific understanding. Two centuries! Our climate is changing and we don’t know why, the world’s population is soaring, the forests were cut or burned, the deserts advance, the air is brown, the waters are poisoned and the people sicken.”
“Surely, the leaders—”
“Either the Hierarchy doesn’t care or they are unable to manage the crisis. Whichever it is, there is little expectation that we can cure the world with our present state of knowledge anyway. It was a desperate hope, but perhaps by changing the past we can recapture that lost time.”
“You speak of lost time, yet you claim to be from the future, therefore you have the ability to travel through time. Surely that is remarkably advanced science.”
“The time travel device was an accidental discovery. We don’t know how it works, but it does, at least for short trips. If I am able to change our past, by dissuading you from publishing that book, we don’t know what will happen. We hope it will change the future for the better. But maybe it cannot be changed. Our philosophers have debated long and deeply about this: maybe I exist only because the events in my past unfurled as they have. Perhaps in another—” He stopped short as a wave of dizziness hit him.
Wha—? Oh no, not yet. He peeled back his sleeve to look at his watch. It’s not time yet!
Darwin was looking at him sharply. “Are you ill, sir?”
“No, just . . . dizzy. Perhaps the temporal travel device has affected me.”
“Young man, your tale is most persuasive, although I can scarcely believe one book of mine could be so pivotal in history.”
Albright recovered himself. “All our historical research indicates just that, sir. What we know of causality tells us that the form the future takes has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Even a seemingly minor event can have great consequences. And, for a man of your renown, that new book was not a minor event.”
Darwin stared at him intently. “Just how did you plan to dissuade me?”
“By doing what I just did, telling you what is going to happen if you do publish it.”
“What if I refuse, or am not convinced? I admit that it irks me greatly that certain bishops are so opposed to my ideas.” He looked at Albright sharply. “Are you prepared to accept failure?”
Albright hesitated, suddenly aware of the heavy lump in his overcoat pocket. “Mr Darwin, sir, I . . . we wish you no harm, but we are determined not to fail our world.”
“I see. You will stop me by force if necessary.” Darwin looked at him as if appraising what means Albright would use.
Albright nodded slightly. I’m losing him, he thought unhappily. “If I can persuade you that there is independent proof of your theory, would you be satisfied?”
Darwin drew himself up. “Proof? Young man, I have labored for decades on my theory of Natural Selection. I truly believe that I have amassed an overwhelming body of evidence—”
“Someone has found the mechanism for inheritance.”
Darwin stopped short. “The mechanism? What do you mean?”
“Well, not the actual . . . ah . . .” He fought back another wave of dizziness. “Well, you understand, not the actual, uh, bodies in the cell, but the mathematics of inheritance.”
Darwin stared uncomprehendingly.
Albright rushed on. “There’s a book, just published, by Gregor Mendel, about experiments he did with garden pea plants. He has established that there is a unit of heredity, some . . . factor passed from parent to offspring, in a regular and repeatable way. Some of these factors are transmitted visibly, and are called dominant. Others become, ah, latent in the process and are called recessive. With the correct crosses, Mendel could make them reappear in later generations, so he knew they were still there, albeit hidden.”
A look of awe slowly washed over the older man’s face and his mouth worked as he silently wrestled with the implications.
“So you see,” continued Albright, “if an organism exhibits an unfavorable factor and dies because of it, and this happens to all the other individuals with the same factor, it will be eliminated from the population.” Bright sparks flashed across his eyes. He reached into his coat and clutched the weapon. “It’s the mechanism for nashural s’lection!”
“The mechanism for natural selection. Yes. It could very well be. I will need to see that book! Tell me again who is the author?”
“M . . . M . . . Mendel,” he slurred. “G . . . G . . . Gregor Mendel, a m . . . m . . . monk, an Augush . . . tini . . . tian.”
“What did you say? I couldn’t understand. Speak up, please!”
Albright stared fuzzily. The scene around him was becoming grainy. Still time. In desperation he yanked his arm out of his pocket, aimed the antique pistol at Darwin. God help me. He squeezed the trigger as greyness descended.
The crackling noise awakened her. Solange started up, feeling woozy and a bit unclear. She absentmindedly put her hand up to her hair to tuck a stray red curl into . . . nothing.
“Rats, must’ve dozed off.”
The screen in front of her was full of diagonal lines.
“That does it. I can’t do any assignment if the freaking Viewer conks out on me.”
Electronics never worked for her. This morning already her chronometer had failed to network with her wakeup implant. She’d almost missed her session with the TVS. She’d rushed to the library in the nick of time, shouldered her way past the waiting students and jammed her ID thumbprint down just as the robo-librarian was about to give her slot away. As it was she’d lost fifteen minutes.
Someone pounded on the door. “Two minutes!”
She checked the big chronometer.
“Hell, my session’s over! What’d I see anyway?”
The vidrecorder was still running. She shut it off and removed the spool.
The door opened suddenly. The librarian rolled in. “Time’s up,” it rumbled. “Please relinquish the Temporal ViewScreen.”
“Okay, okay, keep your treads on,” she muttered. “I’m leaving.”
Her eye fell on the assignment sheet. “Observation of Charles Darwin during writing of The Origin of Species, 1858.”
It was clearly marked “Easy”. Hell, she hadn’t even been able to tune the freaking gizmo to that date. It’d stuck on 1866. Well, she’d done something different. But what? She felt for the spool in her pocket.
Whatever I see, I’ll just be creative with my interpretation, she thought. After all, what difference could it make what some old guy was thinking three hundred years ago?
She hurried out into the bright new morning in search of coffee.
INSIDE THE BOX
Edward M. Lerner
The lecture hall was pleasantly warm. Behind Thaddeus Fitch, busily writing on the chalkboard, pencils scratched earnestly in spiral notebooks, fluorescent lights hummed, and feet shuffled. A Beach Boys tune wafted in through open windows from the quad.
Or so, in any case, the professor imagined the lecture hall. Chittering, muttering students squirming in their seats this morning drowned out the customary sounds. Or what he thought he remembered to be the customary sounds . . .
Chalk squeaked as Thaddeus, with more energy than artistry, began sketching a stick-figure quadruped. “I’ll explain this cat momentarily, class.” Shrodinger’s thought-experiment cat. Today’s Introduction to Physics lecture introduced the counterintuitive topic of quantum mechanics. “Recall from your reading that the behavior of atoms and their constituent parts cannot be fully described by such conventional characteristics as position and momentum. More precisely, how we think about those descriptive terms must change.” He continued drawing as he spoke, the cube in which he was attempting to enclose the cat somewhat out of perspective. He winced as the chalk snapped, its tip caught by the hole that should not be there. Should it?
“In classical physics, we can, with sufficient care and expense, measure to arbitrary precision the position and momentum of any particle. At sufficiently tiny scales, however, nature does not behave as we expect. Instead, in those infinitesimal domains, we discover that certain parameters exhibit heretofore imperceptible granularity or lumpiness—what physicists call quantization. Further, we cannot measure at quantum scales without influencing whatever is being measured. The math is inappropriate for”—beyond—“this class, but a consequence of quantization is that we cannot have absolute knowledge of subatomic particles.”
