The Entropy Effect

by Vonda N. Mcintyre Неизвестный Автор

  “And they all evolve from your first use of the time-changer.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid so.”

  “What happened when you tried to alter those events?”

  “I’ve tried once so far. I went back to persuade myself not to demonstrate time-travel. I stayed only a moment. Because I saw one of my friends kill me—another me, I mean, one from my future, or another time-track . .. I’ve been afraid to try again. I know I must, eventually, but...”

  “Your chances of altering events from so far in the future are negligible.”

  “I have to try.”

  “I am not so far removed.”

  “You’d go back again—and try to stop me?”

  “I promised you not to interfere with your friends.” Spock looked away. “My oath seems ... a trivial matter, compared to what will occur if I do not break it.”

  “I doubt your oath is ever trivial to you, Mr. Spock,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “May I release you from your promise?”

  “I cannot say. Are you the same being I gave it to?”

  “I think I must have been. So much has happened, and my memories of the time before I went mad have grown foggy. But it sounds familiar, and it’s certainly something I would have demanded of you, when I was younger and more foolish. Mr. Spock, I beg of you to let me release you from your promise. I swear to you that to the best of my knowledge, I have the right.”

  “I must go back to the start of the unravelling,” Spock said, “whether you have the right to permit me to do so or not. I am grateful for your oath, and I will try to accept it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Spock.” Dr. Mordreaux hesitated. “There’s something else I have to tell you, though.

  It wouldn’t be fair not to.”

  “What is it?”

  “The farther you go, the more often, the more damaging it is to your system. It isn’t only the continuum that’s thrown into disarray. You’ve noticed the effects of time-travel on your body?”

  “I have experienced ... some discomfort.”

  “Discomfort, hm? Well, everyone knows Vulcans are hardier than humans. Still, it is dangerous and it is cumulative. It’s only fair to tell you that, before you decide what to do.”

  Spock did not even pause. “The choice is between travelling farther back in time, or returning to my own time to face dishonor, shame for my family, and death. I do not see that that is a particularly difficult decision to make.” He picked up his changer.

  Mordreaux picked up his, too. “Maybe I should go with you.”

  “That is both unnecessary and irrational. You would be jeopardizing your life, though your chances of accomplishing anything approach zero.”

  Mordreaux rubbed his fingers over the amber-bauble surface of his changer. “Thank you, Mr. Spock. The more often I’ve moved through time, the more frightened I’ve gotten of it. I don’t look forward to dying.”

  Dr. Mordreaux led Spock to his own rooms in Aleph Prime: the rooms of the earlier Dr. Mordreaux, the one now in the hospital awaiting transfer to the Enterprise . He had lived in an older section of the space station, midway between the core park and the glimmering outer shell. Asteroids formed the substructure of the city: here the corridors resembled tunnels, the rooms, caves.

  Dr. Mordreaux’s possessions lay in a shambles. Books and papers littered the floor, and the screen of the computer terminal blinked in the way self-aware machines have when their memories are ripped out

  or scrambled. The furniture had been overturned, and shards of crockery covered all the floors.

  “It appears you objected strenuously to your arrest.”

  “Maybe I’m not in the same track I thought I was,” Mordreaux said. “But I don’t remember any where I didn’t go quietly.”

  He shuffled through the destruction, to the back room, the laboratory, where the disorder was less extensive. The transporter did not appear damaged. Mordreaux glanced into its workings.

  “They’ve taken the changers, of course,” he said, “but the rest of it looks all right.”

  He tightened a few connections while Spock worked out the coordinates he would need to use to go back before the track of maximum probability began to split into multiple disintegrating lines.

  “The transporter’s set,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “How about you?”

  “I am ready,” Spock replied. “What will you do, sir?”

  “As soon as you leave, I’ll return to my own time. If I can.”

  Spock stepped up on the transporter platform, holding his time-changer in both hands.

  “Goodbye, Dr. Mordreaux.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Spock. And thank you.”

  Spock replied by touching the controls of the changer. The two energy fields interacted in a rage of light, and Spock vanished.

  From Spock’s viewpoint, the cavern-like back room of Dr. Mordreaux’s apartment faded out through spectral colors, red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple to blazing ultra-violet as the energy increased; Spock felt himself being pulled through a void, then thrust back across the ultra-violet energy barrier, through the rainbow, into normal space. He felt himself materialize again, one molecule at a time, as the beam wrenched him back into existence.

  He staggered, lost his balance completely, and crashed to the stone floor, falling hard, barely managing to curl himself around the time-changer so it was not damaged. He rolled over on his back, staring upward, momentarily blinded. He started to get up, but froze with an involuntary gasp of pure flaming agony.

  Startled voices surrounded him, then shadows: he was still dazzled by the assault of ultra-violet light. He flattened his palms against the cool floor and shut his eyes tight. The pain had become too great to ignore or put aside.

  He tried and failed to free any single voice from the tangle around him. He could hear and sense consternation, surprise, outrage. The Aleph Prime authorities must have followed him and Dr.

  Mordreaux, or kept the room under surveillance: now they had come to arrest them, more important, to stop them, and nothing would ever convince anyone that he and Dr. Mordreaux were attempting something utterly essential.

  One voice threaded through the mass of noise.

  “Mr. Spock? Are you all right?”

  He blinked slowly several times and his vision gradually returned. The professor bent over him, frowning with concern.

  “How did you get here? What are you doing here?”

  Spock pushed himself upright, a lurching, graceless motion. Cramps reverberated up and down all the long muscles of his body and he felt as though the room were spinning around him. He refused to accept that perception; he forced his eyes to focus on Dr. Mordreaux, sitting on his heels beside him.

  It was not the Dr. Mordreaux he had just left: it was a far younger man, a man who looked nearly the same as he had years before, when Spock knew him at the Makropyrios. In a month he would have aged ten years, after the stress of accusation, trial, and sentencing.

  “May I help you up?” Mordreaux asked courteously. He extended a hand but did not touch Spock, and Spock shook his head.

  “No. Thank you.” He got to his feet, awkwardly but under his own power. The time-changer thumped against his side.

  “Where in heaven’s name did you get that?” Mordreaux asked. “And where did you come from?”

  “What’s wrong?” someone called from the other room, and one of the two people standing in the doorway turned back to answer.

  “Somebody just materialized on the changer platform.”

  “Well, Mr. Spock, it’s been a long time.” Dr. Mordreaux gestured toward the changer. “Longer for you than me, I think, if we count from the Makropyrios.”

  “I came to warn you, Dr. Mordreaux,” Spock said. His voice sounded weak and he could not halt the shaking of his knees and hands. He straightened up, forcing away the pain, confronting it directly. Several of the people from the sitting room crowded in at the doorway: Dr. Mordreaux’s friends, the people whose dreams had sent him on a fatal cours
e. Spock had hoped to arrive when Dr. Mordreaux was alone.

  “Come sit down,” the professor said. “You look like death.”

  Even for Spock there came a point where he had to admit his limits. He limped into the adjacent room and took the chair Dr. Mordreaux offered.

  The people in the doorway moved aside for him, and stood together in a suspicious circle: six adults, four children.

  “What does he want, Georges?”

  “Well, Perim, I don’t know yet.” He motioned for everyone to sit.

  “Are you a Vulcan?” one of the children asked.

  “This is Mr. Spock,” Dr. Mordreaux said. “He was one of my very best students when I was a physics teacher, and now he works on a starship. At least I believe he does now —but he may have begun to do something else by the time he comes to us from.”

  “No,” Spock said. “I still serve on the Enterprise .”

  One of the younger people, no more than student age himself, handed Spock a glass of water. He sipped from it.

  “That’s about enough of old times and afternoon tea,” said Perim. He took the hand of the child who had spoken and drew her away from Spock and Mordreaux. “What’s he doing here? It’s a damned inconvenient time to visit. Unless he’s come to stop us.”

  “Is that why you’re here, Mr. Spock?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.” He glanced from one face to another, wondering which person had reacted—would react—with such fear and violence when the future Dr. Mordreaux attempted what Spock was about to try now. The group of time-travelers drew together, and Spock felt their rising anger and apprehension.

  “Sir,” Spock said, “within a month, you will be accused of murdering all these people. The charge will be proven against you, as will the charge of unethical experimentation upon intelligent beings. Your work will not be vindicated; it will not even be classified and controlled. It will be suppressed. It engenders such apprehension among judicial and executive officials that they will see no other way to restrain what you have created. You will be sentenced to rehabilitation. The Enterprise is assigned to transport you. During the voyage, you cause the deaths of the commander of security and of Captain James T. Kirk.”

  “That’s preposterous!”

  “It is true. You must not continue this experiment. It leads only to disaster.”

  “Wait a minute,” said one of the time-travelers. “You’re saying we shouldn’t go. You want us to stay here.”

  “You must.”

  “We can leave a record of our plans so Georges won’t get into trouble—we’ve all agreed to try out his theories.”

  “Agreed, hell,” said a middle-aged woman perched on the back of a couch. “We talked him into letting us do it.”

  “Several of you do leave records,” Spock said. “They are used as evidence of his persuasive abilities.

  Of his power over you, if you wish.”

  Dr. Mordreaux flung himself into a chair. “I thought I had taken enough precautions to avoid that difficulty,” he said. “But certainly I can take other measures.”

  “They will not be sufficient,” Spock said. “Or, rather, perhaps they would be, but you must not carry out this plan. Your fate, the fate of these few people—that is relatively trivial compared to the wider

  implications of the work. The displacement of your friends permanently into the wrong continuum creates a strain that space-time cannot withstand.”

  “Good lord,” Perim said. “You sound like you’re talking about the end of the universe.”

  “In time, that is what it amounts to.”

  “In time that’s what everything amounts to!” said the middle-aged woman.

  “Not in less than one hundred Earth-standard years.”

  Silence.

  “What a load of crap,” the woman said sharply. “Listen, Mr. Spock, whoever you are, wherever, whenever, you’ve come from, I don’t care how terrific a physics student you used to be, I’ve been through those equations myself and I don’t see any opportunity at all for the creation of torsion in the continuum.”

  “You have erred. The error was inevitable, but you have erred nonetheless.”

  “Georges, dammit—” She turned toward Mordreaux.

  “It’s true, Mr. Spock. I worried that the transfer might cause some distortion. But it just doesn’t happen. Nothing in the equations shows it.”

  “You have erred,” Spock repeated. “Your plans distort reality to such an extent that the increase of entropy accelerates. The effect is not large at first, of course—but within twenty years larger stars have begun to nova. Precarious ecosystems have begun to fail.”

  “Prove it,” said Perim.

  Spock glanced toward the computer terminal in the corner of the room. “I will show you the derivation,” he said.

  He worked at the keyboard for half an hour. The children played games in another corner. After a few minutes most of the other adults drew back, unable to follow the progression of a proof far out of any of their specialties, but the middle-aged woman, Mree, and Dr. Mordreaux watched carefully. Perim, the young girl’s father, loomed, arms crossed over his chest, at Spock’s left shoulder.

  Spock gave himself some clear space in the middle of the screen and typed in a new equation.

  “What the bleeding hell is that?” Mree said.

  “Profanity is not necessary,” Spock said. “I will explain anything you find beyond your comprehension.”

  “It isn’t beyond my comprehension,” she said angrily. “It’s a correction factor, that’s obvious enough. You can prove any damned thing you please if you throw in correction factors.”

  “Mree,” Dr. Mordreaux said, “please let him finish before you get angry. And Mr. Spock, Mree built the time-changer in the first place. If you could hold down the sarcasm a bit I think we’d all be happier.”

  “I intended no sarcasm,” Spock said.

  “All right. But it’s safe to assume that both Mree and I can follow whatever you put on the screen, as long as you don’t pull anything out of thin air, which as far as I can tell is exactly where you got that.”

  Spock sat back, resting his hands on his knees and gazing at the video screen. “That is the equation I derived from observations I am, in this time-stream, preparing to begin. As you can see, the current numerical value is extremely small, but as you can also see, it is dependent on the value of t minus t1, squared. In short, its value not only increases, its increase accelerates.” He bent over the keyboard again and showed how the correction factor fit into the original equations.

  Dr. Mordreaux whistled softly.

  “Georges,” Mree said, “there isn’t a shred of evidence for that factor!”

  “That’s quite true,” Mordreaux said. “What about it, Mr. Spock?”

  ‘There is no evidence for its existence because it does not yet exist. The value of t is dependent upon the moment at which you begin to distort the temporal continuum by sending people back in time, and leaving them there.”

  Mree muttered something profane and disbelieving. “That’s the stupidest argument I ever heard. It’s completely circular.”

  “Dr. Mordreaux has created the circle,” Spock said.

  “You’re trying to save James Kirk’s life, aren’t you?” Mordreaux glared at Spock, his mood changing from calmness for the first time. “Of course, it’s obvious. He must be an exceptional person. I admire your loyalty, Mr. Spock, but it isn’t any reason to ruin the plans of all my friends. You’ve warned me and that’s sufficient—I won’t allow myself to be arrested after I’ve sent Mree and the others back. I’ll go back myself if necessary.”

  “Been trying to persuade you to do that all along,” Mree said.

  Spock stood and faced his old teacher. “Dr. Mordreaux, Vulcans do not lie. The entropy effect caused me considerable ... distress—” It took a great deal of effort for him to admit that, true as it was—“when I discovered it. I believed I had made a mistake. But you—a future version of y
ou, who has been trying to repair the continuum even as I have tried—assured me I had not. He comes from the time when the effects are having serious consequences.”

  Mordreaux scowled at him. “Vulcans say they don’t lie, but for one thing the statement isn’t necessarily true and for another you aren’t a Vulcan. Not entirely. And human beings are the best liars in the universe.”

  “I... I have endeavored to enhance the Vulcan elements of my background, and suppress the human characteristics.”

  “Why won’t you just accept my compromise? You won’t be involved in what I’m doing, your ship will never be called to Aleph Prime, and your captain will be safe.”

  “The fate of James Kirk is not involved with what I have told you. Whether he lives or dies has nothing

  to do with what will occur if you go through with your plans.”

  “Where’s this fabled version of me, then? Why doesn’t he come back and tell me all this himself?”

  Spock started to answer. But behind him, Perim suddenly grabbed him, catching him in a headlock and dragging him off-balance.

  “We can’t let him stop us! Help me tie him up and let’s go—”

  Spock let himself be pulled back until Perim himself was off-balance, then the Vulcan ducked down and around and threw the larger man over his shoulder, to the floor. Perim lay stunned, no longer a danger, and Spock turned back toward Dr. Mordreaux, satisfied that he had discovered which of the professor’s friends had a quick temper.

  “You tried,” Spock said. “You tried at least twice. The second time—”

  An instant too late, he felt the hand grip his shoulder.

  The fingers dug in, seeking and finding the vulnerable nerve before he could react. All feeling left him. He stayed on his feet another moment, swaying, then collapsed.

  Through a haze of paralysis, Spock saw Mree bend over him. “He’ll be okay, Georges,” she said. “But Perim’s right—Let’s get out of here before it’s too late.”