Transgression

by R. S. Ingermanson

  “Yes,” Rivka said. “That is the custom, and many other things which you would find strange. I know it is hard for you to understand. My friend needs a place to stay, and he has money. Can you help him find lodgings that would be fitting?”

  Hana thought for a moment. “There is a house empty not far from where I live. The husband died, and the wife went back to her family. The landlord has not been able to rent it because people say it is cursed. Is your friend afraid of a curse?”

  “No, of course not,” Rivka said.

  Hana’s eyes widened. “He must be a very righteous man that he does not fear a curse,” she said. “Come with me, and we shall see if the house can be had. We must hurry. Soon it will be time to make Shabbat.” She turned and headed for the south end of the Temple Mount without looking back.

  “Let’s go,” Rivka said. “It won’t be the King David Hotel, but you’ll have a bed.”

  “I don’t mind roughing it.” Dr. West began walking after Hana. He handed Rivka a few silver coins. “I don’t know what these are worth in this economy, but take them. You may need some money.”

  Somehow, that melted a few of Rivka’s suspicions. These old coins had to be valuable.

  Time would tell if she could trust Dr. West, but for the moment…she’d just have to play things by ear.

  Chapter 10

  Ari

  ARI SCROLLED DOWN THE UNABOMBER Manifesto. “Dov, look at this garbage!” He pointed to a sentence Damien had highlighted in red. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people. What kind of fool would believe this nonsense?

  “Your friend is mentally unstable, evidently,” Dov said. “How did you guess his password again? I do not understand.”

  “I didn’t guess it,” Ari said. “Damien is paranoid about losing data, so he installed a keystroke grabber in his start-up folder. It keeps a record of everything he types, in case his machine were to crash while he was typing something important. It recorded everything he typed, even passwords. I scanned the dump file and found it.”

  Dov shook his head. “You are very clever.”

  “No, Damien is stupid,” Ari said. “He’s overly safety-conscious, and it caught up with him. When I get my hands on him, I’m going to twist his head off.” Which went against his pacifist convictions, but everybody had a limit to what they could take. Damien had gone far over the line. He must be punished for this. Severely.

  “What if he changes something in the past?” Dov asked. “He seems to admire this Unabomber very much. Perhaps he will go back a few years and prevent this man from being arrested.”

  “That’s crazy,” Ari said. “You can’t change history. The trajectory of the universe through phase space is single-valued.”

  Dov nodded. “I do not understand, but I am sure you are right. And yet, what prevents him from doing something terrible? If he were to assassinate David ben Gurion before our War of Independence, then there would most likely be no State of Israel today, yes?”

  “Nothing prevents him,” Ari said. “But you don’t understand. He won’t.”

  “How do you know?” Dov asked.

  Ari was beginning to get impatient. “Because I have read the history books. The past has already happened. Wherever Damien has gone, he has done nothing. More precisely, he has done exactly what he must do in order to ensure that the past we have read about in the history books would happen just as those books describe. If only those books had been more detailed, they would have described his actions. Since they do not describe his actions, we know that he did nothing important.”

  “And you do not know how far back he has gone in time?”

  “No, I don’t know the calibration constant that relates Damien’s measurements to actual time. That is determined by the number of turns in his Rogowski coils, and I have never bothered with such details. Have you been able to decipher that spreadsheet?”

  Dov frowned at the document for a moment. “Not yet, I am sorry.” He shook his head, folded the sheet, and jammed it in his pocket. “And what about Rivka?” he asked. “I will have to notify the dig director if she is missing. Are you certain that she went through the wormhole?”

  “Almost certain,” Ari said. His heart hiccuped. “I feel responsible for her.”

  “Rivka is tough and smart,” Dov said. “She will come back. How long can you keep the wormhole alive?”

  Ari turned to look at Dr. Hsiu, whom he had pressed into service to keep watch on the monitors. “How is the wormhole, Dr. Hsiu?”

  The postdoc wiped his damp forehead. “Very difficult,” he said. “Wormhole not stable. Changes this way, that way, very bad. Power supply has bad component.”

  “And we can’t shut it down to change it,” Ari said. “We’ll just have to keep it alive as long as possible.”

  The power supply sparked.

  “Sorry,” Dr. Hsiu said. “I adjust, and then sparks. Very, very bad.”

  Ari closed his eyes and tried to think. Damien had to be crazy. What was his game? Why had he gone? To change something? If so, he was doomed to failure. Physics said so, and physics was never wrong.

  Except when it was.

  Who, before the 1960s, would have guessed the universe could allow CP violation? But experiment said it did.

  Ari suddenly felt sick.

  What to do? Every instinct in his body told him to wait. Damien would come back, fearful that the wormhole would collapse and strand him. Rivka would return, too.

  Unless something prevented her. Or someone.

  What if Damien had taken her with him by force? What if he didn’t mean to come back? What if he wouldn’t allow Rivka to return?

  Ari might wait for hours, days, weeks, dying a little inside every second.

  No!

  No, he wouldn’t let Damien make the rules. He had already done that, allowing Damien access to the lab when he wasn’t around. And now here was the result: an unauthorized wormhole and two people missing. Why had he ever trusted Damien?

  But to go through the wormhole after them terrified him. In all likelihood, he would only make things worse by chasing Damien and Rivka. He would make Damien even crazier, Rivka more angry at him. And who knew where the wormhole led, or when? It could take Ari into the middle of the Russian revolution, or a desert island, or the lair of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Also, the device had gone unstable. If it collapsed, he would not be coming back.

  Yet if it posed a potential danger for him, then it meant certain danger for Rivka. That he could not allow. He had blundered badly last night, had alienated her, had allowed her to leave. He had not intended to do any of that, but she had dragged the truth out of him and then been repelled by that truth. He would never abandon the truth, but if there was any hope of any future with her, he wanted it.

  Wanted it more than anything else.

  Ari opened his eyes and looked at his cousin. “Dov, I think you should notify your dig director. In my opinion, there is a strong chance that Rivka may never come back. Her parents should be informed.” A small lie in the service of the truth.

  Dov’s face turned pale. He slowly pulled out his cell phone and began punching in numbers.

  “Not here.” Ari pointed at the capacitors. “There will be electrical interference with your phone signal. Make your call in the hallway, away from the power supplies.”

  Dov nodded and began walking toward the front of the lab.

  Ari watched him go. Shalom, my friend. His head felt strangely light. He tapped Dr. Hsiu on the arm. “I’m going to have a look at those capacitors,” he said. “Don’t touch the controls for a few minutes, or you’ll fry me.”

  Dr. Hsiu’s eyes widened. “Not safe, not safe!”

  Ari shouldered his backpack and walked rapidly toward the power supply. Behind him, he heard Dr. Hsiu saying something, but the blood roared in his ears and he could hear nothing, could feel nothing but the clammy sweat on his back. He reached the power
supply and kept walking past it to the doorway. Behind him came a shout. Ari yanked open the door, stepped through, and slammed it shut behind him.

  Darkness enveloped him.

  I’m crazy, crazy, crazy. What if she doesn’t want me?

  But it didn’t matter what Rivka thought she wanted. He was going to pursue her until he caught her. Whatever it took.

  * * *

  Ari

  Twenty minutes later, Ari walked into a Jerusalem both wonderful and awful—a city he had barely imagined. With each step, he felt more like a foreigner. Men and women in four-cornered tunics turned to stare at him as he walked by. For one thing, he stood almost a head taller than anyone else. Also, he wore blue jeans and a black T-shirt with the Maxwell equations on the front. And who in this world had ever seen a neon-blue backpack? Only his leather sandals seemed in place, but nobody paid much attention to those.

  Ari felt intensely embarrassed by the stares. Obviously, he had come far back in time. He had just seen the Temple, destroyed more than nineteen centuries ago. To his eye, it looked like Herod’s Temple, the final remodeling begun by King Herod less than a century before its final destruction. Why had Damien come back twenty centuries? Accident or intentional? And how did Rivka fit into this?

  It shocked him to see just how big ancient Jerusalem had been. How could he hope to find Rivka? Crowds of people packed the roads. Could they all be residents? If not, why had they come?

  Then he saw something familiar. The Pool of Siloam lay just ahead. It hadn’t changed in twenty-seven hundred years. That was a fixed point in this crazy world. He had almost got killed in there, once upon a time. Happy memories. Despite that, its relative seclusion would be better than people gawking at him out here on the street.

  He ducked inside the walls of the pool area and heaved a sigh of relief. At once, the place grew dead quiet. He saw a number of young women standing around with clay water pots resting on the ground beside them. Several of the women approached Ari, nudging each other, whispering, and pointing at his blue jeans.

  “Shalom, my friends,” Ari said in biblical Hebrew. Years ago, as a teenager, he had read quite a bit of the Bible in its quaint old Hebrew, at the insistence of his ultraorthodox stepfather. The religious instruction had only bored him. Even then, he had read Darwin and knew that Genesis was nothing more than the mythology of desert nomads. He remembered enough of the biblical idioms to make himself understood. “I am looking for a friend of mine. She is dressed somewhat like I am. Perhaps you have seen her today?”

  Blank stares greeted him. Then one of the women spoke to him, a torrent of syllables which sounded a bit like Hebrew, only different. Very different. Aramaic, he guessed. He had studied only a little Talmud before quitting altogether. Had he studied more, he would have learned some Aramaic. But he hadn’t known that as a fourteen-year-old. Too late now.

  “Do any of you speak Hebrew?” he asked. “Ivrit?”

  The women suddenly backed away from him. One of them shouted something at him in an angry tone.

  What was the problem? Were they allergic to Hebrew? Something must lie behind their strange behavior, but he couldn’t fathom it at the moment.

  He decided to leave. Obviously, he wouldn’t get any information here, much less a warm welcome. It couldn’t be any worse out on the streets.

  Rivka wasn’t here, but she was somewhere nearby. She had to be. And someone had seen her. Many people must have seen her. He had to find one of them who spoke Hebrew. If he could find an interpreter, he would be in business.

  And who would speak Hebrew in this city of Jews? Scholars, aristocrats, that sort of person.

  Where would they live? Ari could easily guess. In every city he had ever seen, the rich people lived on the hilltops, while the poor lived in the low-lying areas. The Pool of Siloam huddled in the lowest part of the city.

  Obviously, he should head uphill. Ari took a last look around the pool, then strode out of the gate and up the long avenue heading west, uphill. The sun hung high in the sky. That should give him plenty of time to find an interpreter.

  * * *

  Dov

  Dov downshifted as he approached the tight curve. The engine of his VW whined as the car slowed. Anxiety had knotted up his stomach all day, since the terrible moment when he saw Ari closing the door that led into the wormhole.

  “You shouldn’t have called the police,” Jessica said.

  “I did not call them,” Dov said, accelerating out of the turn. “I called the department chairman. What was I supposed to do? Leave the Chinese physicist to deal with it alone? How was I to know that the chairman would call the police?”

  Jessica sighed loudly. She had gotten hysterical earlier today, when Dov went back to the youth hostel and told her that Rivka was missing—apparently transported back to some unknown time. And that was nothing, compared to the reaction of Ari’s mother.

  “Are they really going to shut it off next weekend?” Jessica asked.

  “Maybe not,” Dov said. “But if you saw the device, you would understand. Every minute, the physicists have to readjust the machine. When they do that, the power supply sparks. According to the rabbis, they are making fire, and that is not allowed on Shabbat.”

  “You’re telling me that nobody turns on their lights on Shabbat?” Jessica asked. “Nobody drives a car?”

  “Most people do.” Dov pulled out into the left lane to pass a tourist bus. “The ultraorthodox, which we call in Hebrew the Haredim, do not. And therefore, the State of Israel does not. You have not met the Haredim on our dig, so let me tell you about them. This is not the United States. Our leaders made compromises with the Haredim in 1948, and we continue to live with the results of that now. Had we not done that, there would be no State of Israel. But because we did so, we have an Israel sometimes controlled by religious zealots.”

  “But…we’re talking about a physics lab,” Jessica said. “It’s ridiculous!”

  “Correction,” Dov said, pulling back into the right lane. “We are talking about a physics lab owned and financed by the State of Israel, and it must obey the law of the land. Yes, it is ridiculous, but it is the law. You have many foolish laws in your United States also, yes?”

  “Can’t those physicists write a program to do the adjustments automatically?” Jessica asked. “Then no human would be violating the Shabbat. Isn’t that the way it works?”

  “I asked them that,” Dov said. “Unfortunately, nobody really understands the machine very well. They can write software to control it, but the software must be tested. On what? They must test it on the machine itself. If there is a mistake, then…” Dov made a fist and then let his fingers explode outward. “Poof! Are you willing to take that chance, my friend?”

  “It would be better than just cutting off the power next Friday afternoon, don’t you think?” Jessica sounded angry.

  “Yes, it would,” Dov said. “They will try it, but they are not confident. The physicists have asked us to seek a legal solution—just in case.”

  “Legal? As in lawyers?” Jessica said. “That’s a different matter. Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “You are a lawyer?” Dov asked. He slowed to a stop, then made a right-hand turn onto the dirt road leading to the dig.

  “No, but half my family are lawyers,” Jessica said. “My mother has some second cousins who live in Tel Aviv and Haifa. One of them is a lawyer. My mother wanted me to look them up before I go home.”

  “I suggest that you do so tonight,” Dov said. “But the dig has no money to hire an expensive lawyer. Is he good? Will he work for free?”

  “I hear that she is very good,” Jessica said. “Which probably means she’s expensive. I can ask if she’ll help.”

  “Please do,” Dov said. “I have not yet spoken to Rivka’s parents. Perhaps they can pay. I already know that Ari’s mother will not contribute. She and his stepfather are Haredim, members of the Lubavitcher sect. They will not spend a shekel to defend a viola
tion of Shabbat.”

  “But…lives are at stake!” Jessica said. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  Dov came to a stop in the dusty, unpaved parking lot of the dig. “Yes it would count, if it were true. The principle of pikuach nephesh would apply—the saving of a life. But what evidence can you present that Ari and Rivka are in danger?” He turned to look at Jessica. “I have already considered this line of reasoning. Ari and Rivka are healthy adults who have been inoculated against all major diseases. In a primitive culture without medicine, they might very well live forty or fifty years.”

  “But Rivka could die in childbirth!” Jessica said.

  “Do you have reason to think she is pregnant?”

  “Rivka?” Jessica laughed out loud. “I would bet she’s still a virgin, to be honest.”

  Dov sighed. “That is most unfortunate.” He pounded his hand on the steering wheel. “I do not feel good about this, my friend. It is likely that Ari and Rivka will come back before Shabbat. But we must be prepared for the possibility that they will not. Cases like this often go to the Supreme Court.”

  “On five days’ notice?” Jessica stared at him.

  Dov closed his eyes. He suddenly felt very tired. “In the State of Israel, yes, a case may go to the Supreme Court in a few days. But we have only four, not five. If we argue the case Thursday, then they can decide by Friday.”

  “It sounds hopeless,” Jessica said. “Can’t somebody just go through the wormhole and have a look around—try to find them?”

  “You saw what has happened in the lab,” Dov said. “The police will not unseal the wormhole, except to allow Ari or Rivka or Dr. West to return. Nobody will be allowed to go through from our side. It is a hazard, for one thing. Also, they fear that someone might interfere with the past and thereby destroy the present.”