Transgression

by R. S. Ingermanson

  “If he was afraid of you, then why did he steal my backpack and trash it? There’s nothing in it.”

  “Does he know that? Obviously, he thought something was there. Is anything missing?”

  Ari sighed. “It’s hard to say. He didn’t exactly put it back in alphabetic order.”

  “But if he found it, why was he nervous just now when I went to visit him?”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Ari said.

  “It has to make sense,” Rivka said. “He created the wormhole for a reason. He came back to this particular time for a reason. He’s lying to me for a reason. Why the gun? Why the lies?”

  Ari’s face turned pale. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Isn’t what obvious?” Rivka felt the blood rushing through her temples. She didn’t want it to be obvious. Please, God, no.

  “He came here to kill somebody.”

  “That’s…crazy.”

  “Of course it’s crazy. Damien’s crazy. And I just remembered something.” Ari tugged at his beard. “Back in the lab, when I discovered you were gone, Dov and I looked through Damien’s laptop.”

  “And…?”

  “He had a copy of the Unabomber Manifesto. It was one of the most recent documents in his word processor. I remember one of the phrases was highlighted in red. Something about, ‘That is why we had to kill people.’”

  “No!”

  “And there was something else.” Ari closed his eyes in concentration. “One of the postdocs brought in a printout Damien made on the laser printer. Weird stuff, unreadable.”

  “You saw it?”

  “I did, but it made no sense. A spreadsheet. Some columns had just numbers. Others had letters. Neither Dov nor I could figure it out.”

  “Did you bring it?”

  Ari shook his head. “Dov walked off with it just before I came through the wormhole.”

  “We need that paper.”

  “We need a gun,” Ari said.

  Hana stood staring at them, her eyes wide. “I have done something very wrong.”

  “No, Hana,” Rivka said. “You did exactly the right thing.”

  “But you are going back to your country, and I will not see you again.”

  Rivka didn’t know what to say to that.

  “We’ve got to find Brother Baruch,” Ari said. “Before we go back to the wormhole.”

  “He may not want to come with us,” Rivka said. “I mean, with the three of us.”

  Ari looked at Hana. “Oh,” he said. “That’s a problem.”

  Rivka pushed him toward the door. “Go find him. He needs you right now. We have time. Bring him with you and meet me at the cave at noon.” She turned to Hana and explained what they were planning.

  Ari shouldered his backpack and then hesitated. “I don’t want to leave you unprotected.”

  “I’m not worried,” Rivka said. “Dr. West is afraid of me. And if he’s got a gun, you wouldn’t be much protection anyway.”

  “Do not worry, Rivka,” Hana said, smiling brightly. “The truth-tellers say that you and I will be quite safe.”

  Chapter 22

  Damien

  DAMIEN SAT SWEATING IN THE shade of the Temple Mount and adjusted his compact binoculars. The mouth of the cave came into focus. There! Rivka and Hana appeared from the south. From the opposite direction came Ari and someone else—a man with a thick beard and one of those bizarre contraptions that the Orthodox wore on their foreheads when they prayed.

  Damien checked his watch. 11:55 A.M. They were just a hair early.

  The foursome met outside the cave. Rivka hugged Hana. Ari’s friend kissed him on both cheeks and then on the neck. Ari kissed him back.

  Damien almost gagged. He hadn’t realized until now that Ari was one of...those. A queer. Wherever they went, those kind always found each other pretty quick.

  Ari and Rivka and Hana went inside the cave. The other one, Ari’s boyfriend, stood stiffly outside, his head turning this way and that, as if looking for someone.

  Me. Damien smiled. He’s on the lookout for me.

  Damien checked the time again. 12:01. When he looked again at the cave, Rivka had come outside. She spoke briefly to the queer. Damien couldn’t read her lips. He was going to have to learn the language eventually, but that would have to wait until he had accomplished his mission.

  Minutes ticked by, and Rivka was obviously getting agitated. She paced back and forth. The queer stood motionless, except for his head, which slowly swiveled back and forth, his eyes scanning the area. He looked just like one of those CIA spooks who used to come to international physics conferences in the bad old days before the Cold War went kaput.

  Rivka kept looking at her watch and talking to the queer.

  Then Hana came running out, her face flushed with excitement. She shouted something at Rivka and pointed inside.

  Rivka gave one last look around, then shouted one word. Damien! Even through a jiggly pair of binoculars, he could lip-read his own name.

  Rivka turned and scurried into the cave. Hana followed her in. A minute later, she came back outside. Alone. Crying.

  The queer turned and asked her something.

  She nodded and buried her face in her hands. The queer moved to comfort her, but she pulled away and stepped back into the cave. He made no move to follow her.

  Damien put his binoculars back in their case, pocketed them, and stood up. He had seen enough. Ari and Rivka were gone.

  Very good. He was alone again.

  Somewhere, less than a mile away, was Paul of Tarsus. With luck, he would have a bullet in his head by sundown tomorrow.

  And if that failed, Damien would have a second chance the day after. Rivka wouldn’t be there to help him find the Chamber of Hewn Stone, but he had figured out a solution anyway. Like a lot of things, the answer turned out to be obvious when you changed the question.

  * * *

  Rivka

  Rivka rushed into the cave. Hana had told her to hurry.

  Ari knelt at the far end of the cave, almost in the wormhole, his cell phone jammed against his ear. His knuckles looked white, even in the faint light. When he spotted Rivka, he beckoned her frantically. She ran the length of the cave.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Dov,” Ari said into the phone. “Tell her what you told me.” He handed her the phone.

  Rivka pressed it to her ear. “Hello, Dov.”

  Dov’s voice was a whisper, barely audible. “Rivka, shalom. The whole world knows you are gone. It is disaster here. When you come back, you will be quarantined for three weeks. Your American president commands that you and Professor West must return at once, lest you disturb the past and destroy the world.”

  “Dov, Dr. West won’t come back unless we force him,” Rivka said. “What we need is a weapon—a gun. Can you get us one?”

  “I do not know,” Dov whispered. “The door to the wormhole is guarded. No one may go through from this side. If you return now, it will be permanent. So please to take excellent notes, yes?”

  “Yes,” Rivka said. “It’s…awesome here, Dov. I can’t wait to tell you about it.”

  “You must hurry,” Dov said. “There is a problem. The Haredim are fighting to shut down the time machine before Shabbat. You have two days left. You must persuade Professor West to return before then.”

  “I’ll pass that along,” Rivka said. “But Dr. West is acting strangely. He has a gun. We think he plans to use it.”

  “I would suggest that you prevent him, Rivka. There is much fear here, and they watch me like an eagle.”

  The sound of a toilet flushing filled the earpiece. Rivka yanked the phone away from her ear. “What the—?” She turned to Ari. “Was that what I think it was?”

  He grinned. “We were fortunate. Dov was in the gentlemen’s room when I placed my call.”

  She held the phone to her ear again. “Good luck, Rivka,” Dov said. “I must also speak to Ari again, please.”

  Rivka ha
nded Ari the phone and stood up. The door to the lab was how far away? Three or four feet? It might as well be three or four light-years. If she went through it, she would not come back.

  “Dov!” Ari shouted. He stood up and stared at the phone. “Dov!”

  “What happened?” Rivka asked.

  “We were cut off,” Ari said. “He may have been interrupted.”

  Rivka began pacing. “Now what do we do?”

  “We must do our duty,” Ari said. “As a reserve officer in the Israel Defense Forces, I have my orders from the prime minister.”

  “You’re in the reserves?”

  He gave her an odd look. “Everybody is in the reserves. Except the Haredim.”

  “What are your orders?”

  Ari speed-dialed a number and waited, holding the phone between them. “Answer the phone, Dov!” he whispered at the device.

  It rang and rang and rang.

  Finally Ari snapped it shut. “Perhaps he was discovered. I do not think we can speak to him again.”

  “What are your orders, Ari?”

  Ari jammed the phone into his pocket and stood up straight. His black eyes glowed. “To return with Damien West and you as soon as possible, doing no damage to the fabric of history.”

  Rivka felt light-headed. “And what if we can’t?”

  “Then I am to do what is best for the State of Israel,” Ari said. “If that requires me to kill Damien West and you and myself, then I am ordered to do so.”

  * * *

  Rivka

  They sat just inside the cave waiting for dusk. For all they knew, Dr. West might be watching the entrance. If he came to the cave…. Rivka shivered. They would have no defense at all. The best they could do was wait awhile and then sneak back into the city when it got on toward darkness.

  Meanwhile, they had sent Baruch and Hana to complete a special task. Rivka worried that Baruch would feel ill-at-ease with Hana. But nobody but Baruch could do his part; nobody but Hana could do hers. They would have to work together.

  Rivka and Ari passed the time talking, sitting on the floor of the cave with their backs against the wall, not too close together, not too far apart. Even here in the cave, the heat of the day sapped their energy.

  “Dov will have a chance tomorrow at 4 A.M.” Ari said. “He will smuggle us the document and a gun. Maybe two guns.”

  “Why didn’t the prime minister just send in the army to find us all?” Rivka asked.

  “He is afraid.” Ari gave an ironic smile. “They are all afraid that you or I or Damien will do something to disrupt history. If three of us are a danger, how much more so a squad of soldiers.” He shook his head. “They are fools, of course.”

  “You’re pretty confident, aren’t you?” Rivka asked.

  “Because I am correct,” Ari said. “It is a logical impossibility that we can change the past. There are only two possibilities to describe our situation. We have tunneled back in time, either within our own universe or into some other.”

  Rivka smiled. “I can’t argue with that. So?”

  “Suppose we have gone back in time within our own universe,” Ari said. “We know that the trajectory of the universe through phase space must be single-valued.”

  “Um…what?” Rivka said.

  “In simple terms, the past must be globally consistent. The past cannot be both one thing and another. If we have returned to our own past, it is because in that past, three persons arrived from the future.”

  “And their names were Ari Kazan, Rivka Meyers, and Damien West,” Rivka said. “So what happened to them?”

  “We do not know. They interacted with people and did things which possibly appeared to them to influence their own past. However, they were merely performing the very acts in that past—this present in which we now find ourselves—which would ensure that the world will take the course which you and I know it will take.”

  “So they were necessary.”

  “Exactly,” Ari said. “Without them, the ensuing twenty centuries would have been different, and they most probably would not have existed.”

  “Okay—” Rivka said, not at all sure that this made sense. “But you said there were two possibilities.”

  “Suppose we have entered a different universe,” Ari said. “Then, by definition, we can do no harm to our own.”

  “Does that make any sense, to go to another universe?”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Ari said. “There could be infinitely many universes that we know nothing about. It is a well-known theory of quantum mechanics, the many-universe theory. And Hawking’s quantum cosmology begins with a wave function of the universe, involving an infinite number of possible universes.”

  Rivka hesitated, afraid to press. “Could…HaShem be in one of those universes?”

  A thin smile creased Ari’s face. “It is possible. Or he could be in all of them, or none of them, or above them all.”

  “Where do you think HaShem lives?” Rivka felt her heart pounding, but she had to know.

  “I think…” Ari scratched his beard and then cleared his throat. “Rivka, I have never denied the logical possibility of God. Einstein’s God. Reason. Beauty. Truth. Above the universe, ordering it. But not a personal God. Not one who intervenes, not one who answers prayer. Not HaShem of the Bible.”

  Rivka felt two thin beads of sweat roll down her sides.

  Ari coughed. “But a physicist never trusts to logic alone, Rivka. A physicist requires experimental evidence. It need not be much. Einstein won his second Nobel prize on the strength of a single observation of the gravitational lensing of starlight during the solar eclipse of 1919, confirming a prediction of his theory.”

  Rivka studied her fingernails.

  “This morning, my life was saved,” Ari continued. “I do not have a natural explanation. One could construct some such explanation that excludes HaShem, but it would be absurd. The facts are plain. I stopped breathing. Brother Baruch prayed to the God of our fathers. Something healed me—on a time-scale too short for any normal self-healing process. It is enough proof for this simple and foolish physicist.”

  Rivka felt a rush of joy in her veins. Suddenly, tears filled her eyes. Thank you, Father.

  “I do not understand why HaShem should be a personal God,” Ari said. “For that matter, I do not understand why quantum mechanics should be statistical, nor why the universe has survived to macroscopic times. But one does not argue with experiment.”

  There was no doubting Ari had changed in the last few days. Changed a lot. Rivka liked the new Ari. She couldn’t forget what he had told her this morning. He was in love with her. It felt nice, in a way. Kind of like that old movie, Terminator. Ari had come back in time for her. Just for her.

  That was really sweet. There was one little problem, though. She had a rule about guys, based on the hard and cold experiences of a few friends. She didn’t get romantically involved with unbelievers. Period. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not yesterday.

  And yes, it was wonderful that Ari had now conceded a belief in God. But that wasn’t enough. The Haredim believed in God, too. But they foamed at the mouth over Yeshua.

  “Can I…ask you another question?” Rivka felt a gust of fear blow through her.

  “Please.”

  “What do you think about…Yeshua?”

  Ari’s face hardened. “Ze davar aher,” he said. That’s something else. “Do you know how many of our people have been murdered in the name of That Man?”

  Rivka felt her face flushing. “Yes, I know, Ari. I’m a historian, remember? But I’m not talking about his followers, I’m talking about him. Yeshua—a real man who died in this city less than thirty years ago. What do you think of him?”

  Ari’s black eyes glowed with anger. “Rivka, listen to me. I have no need to think of That Man. The actions of his followers for the last two thousand years drown out all else. I will never worship That Man as a god. Never! I would rather die than be a Christian.”

 
; “Okay, okay,” Rivka said. “Sorry I brought up the subject.” What an idiot I am.

  * * *

  Ari

  Ari felt thoroughly sick to his stomach. If he had ever had any chance of earning Rivka’s affections, he had shot himself in the brain with that last outburst. But it was true. Wasn’t that the important thing? He would never lie about his beliefs. Never.

  Footsteps sounded at the entrance to the cave.

  Ari jumped up. If it was Damien—

  Brother Baruch strode in, his face tight with self-control. Hana followed, her eyes aloof, her mouth set primly. Ari didn’t think they had enjoyed their task.

  “Blessed be HaShem,” Baruch said. “I have found a woman who can keep Sister Rivka. Her name is called Sister Miryam, and she is a follower of Rabban Yeshua.”

  “I took your old clothes to the woman’s house,” Hana said to Rivka.

  Ari felt gratified. It was the first sentence he had understood completely in Aramaic. Not that it mattered much. They would only be here another day or two.

  Ari saw that Hana was crying.

  Rivka hugged her. “My friend, it is not safe for me to stay longer in your house. We must not allow Damien to see me, and he is lodging close to your house.”

  Hana nodded. She understood, but she clearly didn’t like it.

  “What now, Brother Ari?” Baruch said.

  Ari shrugged. “When darkness falls, we will go back into Jerusalem and try to sleep. Early tomorrow morning, we will receive the document and the weapons we need.”

  God of our fathers, King of the universe, the first and the last, HaShem! Ari clenched his fists. If ever you answered a prayer, answer this one. Send us a weapon. Without a gun, we are powerless.

  Chapter 23

  Dov

  FOUR IN THE MORNING WAS not Dov’s best time of the day, but it would provide his best chance, he thought. At this hour, Binyamin, the night-shift guard at the door to the wormhole, would be tired. Dov had gotten to know him fairly well in the last few days and thought he might have a weakness.