Crosstime Traffic, page 7
Royce felt an uneasy chill. “You mean that this might not be entirely over for me?” he said. “There might be some sort of after-effects?”
“There might be,” Hammond admitted. “We just don’t know.”
Then they were in Chin’s examining room, and Royce was obediently taking his shirt off.
The exam found nothing out of the ordinary. After the physical was done, Hammond and Chin asked Royce to stay for observation; he reluctantly agreed.
They were paying him, after all—ten dollars an hour, they’d promised.
A nurse brought him a magazine, and he sat and read. The magazine seemed oddly slippery, which he attributed to nerves; he couldn’t see any shaking, but his hands did seem somehow unsteady.
It was tiring, reading the tiny print when it didn’t want to hold still, so after awhile he put it down, lay back on the couch, and took a nap.
When he awoke it took a moment to remember where he was. He sat up and looked at the clock—he had slept through the night. He must have been much more tired than he had realized.
And he hadn’t had any dinner; he was ravenous. He glanced around.
There was a magazine on the table, and at first he thought it was the one he had been reading, but that had been Newsweek and this one was Time. He wondered why anyone would have switched it.
The door was closed; he stood up and opened it.
The hallway was empty and silent.
He hesitated, but then shrugged. What the hell, he thought, he wasn’t a prisoner or anything, he was a volunteer. There wasn’t any reason to bother anybody here, or settle for infirmary food. He had his wallet in his pocket, after all.
He walked up the hill to the edge of campus and got himself a breakfast at P.J.’s Pancake House. then drifted back.
Just where to go was a good question; he could go back to his room, or to the infirmary, or to the gadget room in the basement of Palmer. If he went back to his room Hammond and the rest would probably be pretty pissed, and there wasn’t anything he wanted to do there in any case. If anything was happening, he’d miss it.
They probably expected to find him at the infirmary, but it was boring, sitting around there reading last week’s news.
He headed for the physics lab.
Brzeski was asleep in a chair in the corner, his head down on the desk, the computer screen in front of him displaying an array of complex mathematics. Hammond and the other guy were poring over a stack of papers.
“Hey,” Royce called. “What’s happening?”
The two looked up, startled.
Royce looked back, startled.
“Hey,” he said. “What happened to the mustache?”
The Middle Eastern guy’s right hand flew to his face, feeling the bristly black hairs; Hammond turned to look at him.
“No,” Royce said, “I meant your mustache, Dr. Hammond.”
Hammond stared at Royce, his hand creeping up to feel his own upper lip.
There was no mustache there, only a faint dark fuzz that had resulted from not yet shaving that morning. “What mustache, Mr. Royce?” Hammond asked.
“Your mustache,” Royce insisted. “You had one yesterday, a thin one sort of like Clark Gable. Made you look like...well, you had a mustache.”
Hammond and his associate looked at each other, then back at Royce.
“I have worked with Dr. Hammond for three years now,” the other one said, “and I have never seen him wear a mustache.”
“Are you quite sure I had one, Mr. Royce?” Hammond asked.
“Quite sure, yeah,” Royce agreed.
“That was before the trial?”
“Before the experiment and after, yeah; you had it last night when you left me at the infirmary.”
The two looked at each other again; then, abruptly, there were three of them, as Dr. Brzeski was simply there, standing beside them. Royce stared.
“I think,” Dr. Brzeski said, “we have a problem.”
6
The tools that gave them the final clue weren’t any complicated pieces of laboratory apparatus, but the office photocopiers.
Included in the notebook Royce had carried was a page of random numbers, on the theory that this would provide an ideal way to check for small random changes. It was a photocopy of one that Dr. Hammond had kept on his desk, and the theory was that the two sheets of paper could be held up to a bright light, superimposed over one another, and any differences would show up immediately.
This had in fact been done immediately after the experiment, and no differences had been detected.
When Royce had appeared, inquiring after Hammond’s mustache, the two were compared again, and no fewer than eleven digits had changed.
The two sheets were then taken upstairs to the office of the departmental secretary, where two photocopiers resided. The original was put in one machine, the copy that Royce had carried in the other, and both machines set to turning out copies one after another.
Every copy of the original was identical, from the first until the machine ran out of toner some seven hundred pages later.
The first copy of the copy was just as Hammond had recorded it moments before, with eleven differences from the original. So was the second, and the third.
Around the seventieth copy, though, there were twelve differences.
Around the hundredth there were thirteen.
By the time that machine ran out of toner, some eight hundred and fifty copies later, the page that Royce had brought with him was no longer even in the same typeface as the original, and some thirty digits, out of three thousand, were different.
To Royce, the one he had brought had not changed at all, but the others had.
To Hammond, the one Royce had brought had been steadily altering, while everything else remained constant.
And it wasn’t just the paper; Hammond’s mustache had disappeared, Brzeski had changed his shirt and shaved, and various other things had altered over time, while to the scientists none of these had altered, but Royce had—his clothing and hairstyle were no longer what the physicists remembered from before the experiment.
It was Brzeski who finally came up with a theory to account for this, and explained it to Royce.
“Think of all those universes we talked about as parallel lines,” he said, “and each version of you is like a ball rolling down the line, from past to future.”
Royce nodded.
“Well, we had thought of those lines as little grooves, and we were going to nudge you up out of one groove and into the next.”
Royce nodded again.
Brzeski grimaced. “It seems we got our analogy wrong, though; they aren’t grooves, just lines on a flat surface. We gave you a push sideways, and you moved off your original line—but instead of dropping into the next groove, you’ve just kept on rolling across the surface, from one line to the next, at an angle. There are no grooves, nothing to stop you from sliding on across the different lines forever. You have the same futureward vector as you started with, but you’ve added a small crosstime vector, as well.”
“So how do I stop it?”
Brzeski shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted.
Royce stared at him.
“There may be friction,” he said. “In fact, there probably is some sort of friction, because after all, you interact with your surroundings—we gave a crosstime shove to what was in the sphere, and that’s just a finite mass, made up of you and the notebook and a lot of air and miscellaneous particles, which means a finite momentum; as the molecules of your body are replaced with molecules that were not in the sphere, that momentum will be dissipated, and your average velocity as a system, if we can call it that, will be reduced. We have no way of measuring the reduction, though, no way of knowing when it’ll slow you down to a stop.”
Royce was glad that Physics 101 was a course he had not flunked—he thought he understood this explanation. “Well, can you put me back in the machine and shove me back the other way, cancel out the momentum?” he asked.
Brzeski hesitated before replying, “No.”
After a moment he realized that wasn’t adequate, and explained, “We can’t aim the thing; in fact, I think it’s stuck pointing in one direction, so to speak. If we put you in it again and shoved, it wouldn’t slow you down, it would speed you up. Didn’t Hammond warn you about that, that we didn’t think you could ever get back to your home universe?”
“Yeah,” Royce admitted. “He said something about that.”
“We’ll work on it,” Brzeski assured him. “Hang in there.”
“Yeah,” Royce said, “but how long is it going to take? Am I stuck here until you get it worked out? So far all the changes have been stupid little stuff, but what happens if something important changes? How often am I going to make these hops from one universe to the next?”
Brzeski swallowed. “I thought you understood,” he said. “You’re making hops, as you call it, constantly, every second, every instant. You’re not in the same universe you were in five minutes ago, or ten seconds ago, or even when I started this sentence. You’re falling, or rolling, or however you want to describe it, through one universe after another—but the transitions are instantaneous, and the differences are so minute and so scattered that you don’t see most of the changes. The population of China could have gone up or down by a million in a single transition, and you wouldn’t know, because it’s outside your immediate area. Whole planets could vanish or appear, and you wouldn’t notice. There must be millions, billions of changes happening every second, for there to have been any you observed directly in the...” He glanced at his watch. “...nineteen hours since you got your push.”
Royce puzzled with this for a moment, then asked, “But then how can you talk to me? How can you even see me, if I’m only in your universe for an instant?”
“Because it isn’t just a single you,” Brzeski explained. “There were an infinite number of closely-bunched worlds where this experiment was tried, where you were the subject, and where the results were the same. That means an infinite number of versions of you, all moving together through an infinite number of worlds.” He sighed. “Think of two sets of parallel lines, set at an angle, crossing each other. The intersections of the lines form a line of their own, and that’s the line we’re interacting along. You aren’t the same Dave Royce that I started explaining this to; you’re just one of millions who have flashed through this universe, and millions of adjacent universes, each of you hearing an instant of this in each of those different realities.”
“Danny Royce,” Royce said. “Danny, not Dave.”
Brzeski blinked, and looked down at his notes.
“The one we started with,” he said, “was Dave. See?” He held up a sheet of paper, and Royce read the line near the top, “Subject volunteer David H. Royce.”
A chill ran through him.
“So there are a million of us,” he said. “Can you stop us, somehow? Or tell where we’re going?”
Brzeski shook his head. “No,” he said. “All we can do is hope that I’m right about friction slowing you down.”
6
They tried anyway, of course; they measured everything they could think of to measure, ran dozens of computer models, considered a hundred different ways to recalibrate the gadget.
Nothing held out any hope. For weeks, he lived in an uncomfortable world of constant small changes, a world all his own, moving at an angle to everyone else. Small objects moved about untouched, sometimes hopping instantaneously from one place to another as he watched; people did the same. Hair, clothing, and make-up could change at any instant; conversations sometimes shifted directions in the middle of a sentence, or even a word.
And then came the day when he woke up on his cot in the basement of Palmer and found two people sitting nearby, not Hammond and Brzeski, but Hammond and Dave Royce.
He had reached universes where the experiment had not been done, where no one had volunteered; Dave Royce, who was otherwise almost indistinguishable from Danny Royce, had considered it, and had backed down.
“You first appeared—that is, your analogues did—about six weeks ago,” Dave explained. “It was pretty weird; at first everyone thought I had a long-lost twin brother turning up. Really gave me the creeps, seeing you.”
Danny, staring at his doppelganger in uneasy fascination, shuddered slightly and said, “I can understand that.”
“Before you bother to ask—I mean, I guess you will, because all the others did, practically every five minutes—we can’t do anything to stop your crosstime drift. Things are different here, yeah, but that’s because the experiments didn’t go as far as they did where you world. The equipadget got built, here, but I didn’t volver tried it out on humans.”
Danny blinked; the conversation was fragmenting more than usual. Perhaps that had something to do with being near a major transition, between universes that had done the experiment and universes that hadn’t. There was no pattern to the changes that he could detect, but they did sometimes seem to come in bunches.
Then Dave was gone, and Dr. Hammond was saying, “...Six weeks to study your situation, but as yet we haven’t made much progress.”
Then Dave was back.
6
He lived in the basement for another week. He no longer had a room, of course, since in these universes it was Dave Royce, not Danny, who was a student on the verge of flunking out. Danny Royce didn’t exist at all, or at any rate had not existed prior to six weeks before.
The one encouraging piece of news, received in a rather fragmented conversation with Dr. Brzeski, was that his situation might actually have been improved by this doubling-up.
“In all the universes where a Dave or Danny Royce was sent out,” Brzeski explained, “that created a sort of vacuum, we think, that all the others, coming up behind, can move into easily. This may, in fact, be one reason that you’re moving far more quickly than we would have expected—only the very first in the sequence had to overcome any significant resistance. Now that you’re into universes where this didn’t happen, though, friction should be much greater.”
Royce frowned. “But I’m still following seven weeks’ worth of myself,” he said. “Aren’t they all pulling me along?”
Brzeski frowned and scratched at his beard. “Maybe,” he admitted, “but not as much as they were, I don’t think.”
Before Royce could say anything, the tail-end of another conversation intruded, as Brzeski said, “...your best chance.”
“What’s my best chance?”
“Waiting it out,” Brzeski said, “I just said looks bad, and I wish I could be be be be more timistic.”
“What looks bad?” Royce hated this sort of thing, where attempts to communicate went in bizarre and unexpected directions without warning.
“Your situation. I mean, with the dead ones.”
“Dead ones? What dead ones?”
Brzeski sighed. “Here we go again. I was explaining, for about the hundredth time, that the first few of you to arrive in our universe were dead. We don’t know what killed them. It scared the hell out of us when the first live one arrived—having a dead body appear in the physics lab was bad enough, but when it sat up and started asking questions...”
Brzeski vanished.
6
By the end of the third month Royce was absolutely convinced that the changes were speeding up, not slowing down; the friction theory didn’t seem to be working.
Dr. Brzeski no longer existed; the physicist with the Middle Eastern name was now Dr. Hamid, which Royce was fairly certain was not what he had heard originally; Douglas Royce had not been admitted to the university, but had been wait-listed and not made the final cut; no Dave or Danny Royce had ever existed, prior to some forty days ago. The gadget had never been built; Hammond’s work in parallel-world theory was entirely theoretical.
The fact that it was no longer six weeks since the first appearance worried him.
Then he found out about the body.
Or bodies.
“We don’t understand what’s happening, exactly,” Hammond explained, “But dead bodies have appeared in the basement lab, and then disappeared again, and sometimes this coincides with a live Royce, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
“A live Royce?” Royce asked. “You mean there’s more than one?”
“I mean that you appear and disappear, and even when you’re here you flicker sometimes.”
Royce could understand that; he had sometimes seen other people flick about, or blink in and out of existence. He had not realized that he was doing it.
Upon consideration, though, he thought he could explain it. He was becoming an expert on the practical ramifications of crosstime travel, from first-hand experience combined with an urgent personal interest. Some of his other selves were diverging slightly as they moved through time. Some had died, some had moved about in different ways.
And the existence of more than one at a time—that needed more thought, but he had a guess.
“It’s friction,” he said. “When I move, and eat, and breathe, I interact with the air around me, and so on, and that increases the air resistance, sort of. Not air resistance, exactly, but...”
“Temporal resistance,” Hammond suggested.
“Right, temporal resistance,” he agreed. “So when some of me stop eating and breathing, or do so differently, then that changes the amount of resistance they encounter. So dead bodies ought to be moving faster across time than the live versions.” He considered that. “So they’re coming from behind me,” he said. “I’ve slowed down more than they have, and they’ve zipped past me.”
He looked at himself for a moment, and then the duplicate was gone again.
“And I’ll bet we’re bumping against each other, too,” he said. “Some of us would be slowed down by collisions, and some would be sped up—whole chunks of the sequence, millions at a time. That would account for some of the flickering, too, as we get spaced out further. My part must be speeding up a little, because the changes have been coming more quickly for me. But it means there is friction, and eventually I’ll come to rest. Right?”
