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by Gregory Benford


  “You talk like you went. You know, in sentences.”

  “I’ve done some screenwriting. It helps.”

  “Any movies I might have seen?”

  “Dick Godfather Jaws Indiana Jones Dinosaurs Lost in Time.”

  “Bullshit.” She makes a scornful face.

  “No, really.”

  “Then you must be—”

  The phone rings, cutting her off.

  24 Flangetti contacts Charlie in the spring about meeting to share his findings. The day is hot, with horsetail clouds skittering across an azure sky. Charlie is wearing his gym clothes, planning to go to the beach afterward for some pickup basketball. He’s already had his run and push-ups and weights. Going off the valproate is giving his body back his youth.

  The private dick is wearing the same plaid suit. Bad taste is eternal. Flangetti has found a miscellany of things for Charlie to look at. Something about a minor actress called Mona Lewinsky. A mail-order service called Yoo-Hoo, which sells customized greeting cards. Flangetti has brought science fiction, plenty of it. A novel called Replay. A book by Jack Finney, Time and Again Timescape, by James Benford.

  “You might find Timescape interesting. The guy who wrote it teaches at the University of California. Chemistry, something like that.”

  “Berkeley? UCLA?”

  “Nope. UC Irvine, just up MacArthur from PCH. You haven’t seen it?”

  “No reason to.” Except for working with Phil Dick on the High Castle screenplay, Charlie has become the Hermit of Laguna Beach, reading scripts sent down by messengers, working the phone. Even meditating.

  “You might enjoy the novel. I couldn’t get past the third chapter—all those English people, kinda boring. But it’s about 1962 connecting with 1998. It was like some of the things you say.”

  “Boneford?”

  “Benford.”

  * * *

  Charlie reads the novel all the rest of the day and on into the night. He finishes by noon the next day, his hair matted with sweat, bread crumbs on his rumpled shirt. He lies propped up on the white cushions of his Bauhaus sofa, cans of Coke lined up on the glass coffee table next to him. Too much to take in . . . He closes his eyes and falls asleep instantly.

  The phone rings: James. He wants to know when Charlie is going to join him. Charlie tries to think of an excuse, but he can’t find one. He stammers as he tries to beg off, but James keeps insisting that Charlie join him.

  The phone rings again. Charlie wakes with a start, sour mouthed.

  James? It was a dream. The goddamn novel has screwed up his reality. Much more of this and I’ll be talking to the walls. And they’ll answer.

  * * *

  James Benford’s office is packed with books and papers, a few astronomical paintings of planets and galaxies on the walls. He seems to organize by the fossil method, with oldest paper on the bottom of teetering stacks. The man himself has a full ruddy-brown beard and thick plastic glasses, and is moderately tall and fit.

  “Now, what can I do for you, Mr. Moment?”

  “Charlie.”

  “Call me Jim. I’ve seen several of your movies. I was surprised by Dick, I’ll admit.”

  “I was too.”

  Benford’s frown says he isn’t sure what to make of this remark. He clears a chair for Charlie to sit in. They get comfortable, Benford rocking slightly from side to side and wringing his right wrist in an odd way, as if he is trying to stay limber.

  “I just finished reading Timescape.”

  Benford’s chest visibly swells. “Did you like it?”

  Writers are always praise hungry. “It’s the most important book I’ve ever read.”

  Benford pauses. He must get crank visitors, who usually open with outrageous admiration. Charlie knows that he wonders if this beardless young man in gym clothes could really be Charles Moment of Action Pictures. Benford remarks that he has heard about him from his friends in the B-movie business, but the face doesn’t fit his mental image of the man.

  “I’ve recently shaved my beard off, if you’re wondering.” Charlie finds Benford almost perfectly transparent. He likes that about the man.

  “No, no. I’m just not used to people from the film community having such a high opinion of my work.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean. I do have an interest in optioning the novel for a movie.” Charlie can see the cash registers lighting up in Benford’s eyes. No harm in that, Charlie thinks.

  “Well. Really.”

  “But today I would like to talk with you about the ideas in the book.”

  “Really?” Benford’s eyebrows ascend almost to his hairline.

  “Yes. In your book you have the physicists in 1998 send a signal to the physicists in 1962, altering history. Using those faster-than-light particles, tachyons.”

  “Yep. It’s an alternate-universe plot, really.”

  “So you think there are multiple alternate universes?”

  “Um, maybe.”

  “Like that episode of Star Trek with the bad Kirk and the bad Spock?”

  Benford laughs. “Sort of.”

  “And time can flow both ways?”

  “I got a fan letter with a joke about that. A barman says: ‘We don’t serve faster-than-light particles here.’ Then a tachyon enters the bar.”

  Charlie doesn’t laugh and neither does Benford, who shrugs. “Physics jokes are tough. So, yes—paradoxes arise with time travel. The Grandfather Gotcha, I call it. Though I don’t think that we could actually send your body back to 1962, for example.”

  “What about my mind?”

  “That depends on what you mean by ‘mind.’ Why do you ask, anyway?”

  Charlie thinks about what to say to Benford. Should he just tell him the truth? No. I need to get what I can from him as a scientist. I don’t want him backing away from me as a lunatic.

  “I have a screenplay device in mind.”

  Benford scowls skeptically. Maybe he’s already been burned in Hollywood’s labyrinths. To deflect him, Charlie asks, “What do you think of Everett’s multiverse idea?”

  Benford blinks. “Fun to think about, logically defensible. Nobody really believes it—but I found it handy. Writers are magpies.”

  Charlie keeps his voice flat and factual. “Timescape was economical, supposing that the Everett interpretation didn’t really apply to every event. That it only worked when there was a causal paradox.”

  Just as Charlie has often seen many Hollywood writers brighten when a studio figure likes their ideas, Benford nods eagerly. “Then the universe splits into as many versions as it takes to cover all the possibilities. No more than that. So you could send some grandfather-killing message and Grandfather would die. But not in the universe you are doomed to inhabit. Instead, another universe appears, unknown to you. The new universe is entangled with the first, while the paradox is created. Then they part ways. In the new one, dear old Grandfather dies and you never happen at all. No paradox, since the tachyon signal that killed Gramps came from your universe, where you’re still stuck.”

  Charlie nods. “Nifty. Any evidence for that?”

  Benford shrugs. “I’ve got a plasma lab to run and grants to write. Those are the real science fiction—the fantasy is the budget section.”

  “But how does the time travel part work in your theory?”

  “In Timescape I tried to finesse the paradoxes by combining special relativity, those tachyons, with quantum mechanics.” Benford yawns. “Right now people like Tipler are advertising making a time machine using a rotating black hole with the mass of a small galaxy. If you don’t have tachyons, time travel seems to require vast projects.”

  Charlie sees Benford is losing interest. A knock at the door diverts the man’s attention further—a student’s head appears. “Come back during office hours,” Benford says curtly.

  Charlie counters quickly, “So what would a time travel theory look like?”

  “You’d have to go with the full-bore Everett interpre
tation. See, in quantum cosmology there is no single history of space-time. Instead, all possible histories happen simultaneously. For the vast preponderance of cases, no problem”—he grins—“that ontological bloat of an infinitude of worlds has no observable consequences. It’s just a way of talking about quantum mechanics.”

  “You mean they don’t exist?”

  “Not in any way you can measure. Think of unending sheets stacked on end and next to one another, like the pages in a magazine. Time lines flow up them. A causal loop snakes through these sheets, so the parallel universes become one. If the grandson goes back in time, he crosses to another time-sheet. There he shoots Granddad and lives thereafter in that universe. His granddad lived as before and had grandchildren, one of whom disappears, period. Game over.”

  “So time travel occurs because of . . . what?”

  “Y’see, quantum mechanics always furnishes as many linked universes as there would be conflicting outcomes—it’s quite economical. All those universes form part of a larger object. According to quantum theory, that big library of sheets is the real arena where things happen.” Benford gazes out one of the windows of his office at the hills of the UCI campus and sighs. “Cosmic stuff indeed.”

  Charlie ventures, “What could cause, say, transfer of—well, maybe identity?”

  “Huh?”

  “Minds, I mean. Transfer of minds, information? The whole quantum thing, that kind of connection entails—what did you call it? Entangled?”

  “Two things that share the same quantum mechanical description. We call it the state function.”

  “So two things that are twins—”

  Benford laughs. “Not exactly. Hell, I’m a twin.”

  Charlie blinks. “Fraternal or identical?”

  “Fraternals are just womb mates. We are the closest form of identicals, mirror twins. Very close in interests, too. Greg is doing research at Physics International.”

  “A physicist as well? I guess genetics count. So are you two—”

  “Quantum entangled? Nope—takes a lot more for that! We’re big, classical objects, not wispy quantum stuff like information.” He laughs merrily. “Look, let’s go to lunch.”

  Charlie can see Benford is getting restless, not a man for endless talk. Glancing at the man’s itchy hands, Charlie is uncomfortably aware that real science is done by people with dirt under their fingernails.

  * * *

  Benford turns out to be an agreeable fellow, from Alabama by way of his father’s military postings in Japan and Germany. Just a bit southern. Talking with animation as he and Charlie walk through the UC Irvine arboretum on their way to lunch, he seems far more interesting than the social scientists Charlie One had to work with. Or have those colorless figures just faded in his recollection? At least this physicist uses little jargon and cheerfully acknowledges that there’s plenty nobody knows.

  Benford takes him to a hamburger place at the student union, improbably called Bogart’s. The menu items are named according to Bogart movies: Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, High Sierra, African Queen. But the food is good and cheap, though they sit at a plastic table with their food on trays. Not quite Beverly Hills, thinks Charlie. But not gloomy George Washington University, either.

  For the first time in this life, Charlie relaxes and talks with Benford, using his full vocabulary and insight. He doesn’t have to pull punches the way he has to at the studio, even with Bob Greenway. Charlie feels a wave of gratitude to Benford, as if the physics professor wrote Timescape expressly for him.

  But Benford is talking, and Charlie knows he shouldn’t behave too oddly, not if he is to get Benford’s help. “. . . Paul Davies’s book on time asymmetry was really the first step in this direction. What I did was make it something real, something that would engage the reader’s imagination.”

  “Without the usual Jules Verne style of magical science.”

  “Or H. G. Wells, a more appropriate point of reference.”

  “Indeed.”

  Benford pauses to take a giant swig of his Coke and bite into his burger with gusto, a little relish falling unnoticed onto his short-sleeved shirt. For a man who has written a novel about time, he seems not to have enough of it. Charlie takes advantage of the pause. “I was wondering about making some changes to the plot, to see if you could find a way to justify them in terms of physics.”

  Benford makes a wordless murmur of assent while chewing, though he looks skeptical of Hollywood plot contrivances.

  “Let’s say we think about sending signals back in time without changing the physical makeup of anything in the past. Suppose we don’t even use any equipment. Just the mind.”

  Benford swallows. “Like the time travel in Finney’s Time and Again or Grimmond’s Replay?”

  “Exactly.” It was Grimwood, actually, but never mind.

  Benford is quick. “Or Peggy Sue . . .” Charlie feels a tremor of fear and stops himself. “Or my Back to the Five-and-Dime.”

  “The film where the guy goes back to the fifties and has a career as a singer?”

  “Exactly.” Charlie is relieved that Benford didn’t catch the slip. Although why should he be worried about a movie that has not been made in this world, Charlie thinks, that Benford couldn’t have seen? Perhaps I have the illusion that Benford is a time traveler too? Could he be another one? I’ll have to watch for that.

  Carefully, Charlie returns to the crucial issue. “How could we explain that in the screenplay? What sort of physical principle might justify the plot device?”

  “Why do you want to go there? We can use tachyons, faster-than-light particles, if we have machines sending signals through time.”

  “I think the movie audience would find the machines and the tachyons a turnoff. Too complicated.”

  “So you want to film my novel without the hard-SF trappings?”

  “Sort of.”

  Benford bristles. “Then what would be left?”

  * * *

  Charlie drives back to Laguna Beach disappointed by the way the meeting turned out, especially after the rapport that he felt he established at first with Benford. Maybe it was Benford’s fear that Action Pictures would rape his book, Charlie thinks. A reasonable enough dread.

  In any case, the physics professor said good-bye without providing a theoretical scenario for Charlie’s form of time travel, though he said he would think about it. Charlie has hopes for Benford, but also a sense of unease. It was tense keeping up his facade around someone who might pick up on the slightest anachronism or counterfactual error. But as he drives along PCH, the gentle waves and salty air of the Pacific calm Moment, sea breezes filling his lungs as he swoops along the curve above a crescent beach at the edge of town. Balmy, beautiful, time stands still.

  But as Laguna Beach itself slides by, his mood darkens. Benford’s talk of twins and quantum entanglements has set his mind buzzing, fretful. He hasn’t thought of his second life as a swap. Charlie One asleep on his sixteenth birthday—what happened to that fresh young mind? He has it riding in him now, but is it somehow copied . . . elsewhere?

  Now the horror of it descends, all the darker as the bright California sunshine around tries to cheer him up. Do Benford’s off-the-cuff remarks mean that Charlie Two woke up as that truck smashed into the Volvo in the year 2000? Then the swap killed Charlie One and let Charlie Two be reborn, in some balancing quantum justice?

  He tries to put those thoughts aside and concentrate on driving up the hill to Merrill’s house. But his mind will not quiet.

  It’s not as if this life didn’t have a darker side before. There was the flickering, and the dreams, nightdreams and daymares where he seemed to inhabit other people and other bodies. Even after he was placed under Habib’s care, the weirdness laced through his Hollywood years, even as the medication pushed the flickering and the dreams away—his previous life submerged. Even while medication and therapy built up his defenses against his dual life, he felt displaced from other people. He has come to
view the endless lines of people, tramping on stirring dust, from the outside. For them, life is a long march, an endless column of souls moving forward through surrounding dark. In that crowd nobody knows where they’re going, but there is plenty of talk, and the fools, some called philosophers, pretend to understand more than they’re saying. There is merry laughter, too, and somebody is always passing a bottle around. But now and then somebody stumbles, doesn’t catch himself right, and falls back a ways. Or just lurches aside and is gone, left behind. The dead. For them, the march stops at that moment. Maybe they have a while longer, lying back there on the hard ground, already wreathed in fog—time to watch the parade dwindle away, carrying its lights and music and loud, fearful jokes.

  For us, the dropouts are back there somewhere, he thinks, fixed in a murky timescape I kept busy forgetting. That I have seen more than once.

  That’s all for them now. It came for Charlie One. And what of his second life?

  * * *

  Once home in the cliff house, Charlie flips open Timescape and tracks down the idea that resonated in his thinking: “When a loop was set up, the universe split into two new universes. . . . The grandson reappeared in a second universe, having traveled back in time, where he shot his grandfather and lived out his life, passing through the years which were forever altered by his act. No one in either universe thought the world was paradoxical.”

  But what does the wave think? The connecting currents? The wave stores information, just as a mind does, and can link brains in separate universes through the information, the mind. Charlie looks out at the foaming sea muttering at the foot of the town and thinks of waves overlapping, summing up into white, salty combers that burst over the heads of unlucky swimmers. Waves of quantum whatever, rebounding from the hard rocks of wholly different universes, carrying their surging energy and information from one hammered shoreline and then out to another, a vast, teeming ocean—or rather, a timescape—forever in ferment.

  He stares out at the tossing froth a long time before he notices that the answering machine is beeping. Interruptions! But he hits the button and listens. Flangetti’s voice startles him out of his concentration. “Look in the Classifieds section of the latest Harper’s Magazine” is the message.

 

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