Seventy years later, I remembered the story my transfinite math teacher told and put it together with Dirac’s theory. Like putting an extra guest into a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, I figured out how to borrow energy from the Dirac sea. Or, to put it another way: I learned how to make waves.
And waves on the Dirac sea travel backward in time.
Next we had to try something more ambitious. We had to send a human back farther into history, and obtain proof of the trip. Still we were afraid to make alterations in the past, even though the mathematics stated that the present could not be changed.
We pulled out our movie camera and chose our destinations carefully.
In September of 1853 a traveller named William Hapland and his family crossed the Sierra Nevadas to reach the California coast. His daughter Sarah kept a journal, and in it she recorded how, as they reached the crest of Parker’s ridge, she caught her first glimpse of the distant Pacific ocean exactly as the sun touched the horizon, “in a blays of cryms’n glorie,” as she wrote. The journal still exists. It was easy enough for us to conceal ourselves and a movie camera in a cleft of rocks above the pass, to photograph the weary travellers in their ox-drawn wagon as they crossed.
The second target was the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. From a deserted warehouse that would survive the quake – but not the following fire – we watched and took movies as buildings tumbled down around us and embattled firemen in horse-drawn firetrucks strove in vain to quench a hundred blazes. Moments before the fire reached our building, we fled into the present.
The films were spectacular.
We were ready to tell the world.
There was a meeting of the AAAS in Santa Cruz in a month. I called the program chairman and wangled a spot as an invited speaker without revealing just what we’d accomplished to date. I planned to show those films at the talk. They were to make us instantly famous.
The day that Dancer died we had a going-away party, just Lisa and Dancer and I. He knew he was going to die; I’d told him and somehow he believed me. He always believed me. We stayed up all night, playing Dancer’s second-hand mandolin, painting psychedelic designs on each other’s bodies with grease-paint, competing against each other in a marathon game of cut-throat Monopoly, doing a hundred silly, ordinary things that took meaning only from the fact that it was the last time. About four in the morning, as the glimmer of false-dawn began to show in the sky, we went down to the bay and, huddling together for warmth, went tripping. The last thing he said, he told us not to let our dreams die; to stay together.
We buried Dancer, at city expense, in a welfare grave. We split up three days later.
I kept in touch with Lisa, vaguely. In the late seventies she went back to school, first for an MBA, then law school. I think she was married for a while. We wrote each other cards at Christmas for a while, then I lost track of her. Years later I got a letter from her. She said that she was finally able to forgive me for causing Dan’s death.
It was a cold and foggy February day, but I knew I could find warmth in 1965. The ripples converged.
ANTICIPATED QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE:
Q (old, stodgy professor): It seems to me this proposed temporal jump of yours violates the law of conservation of mass/energy. For example, when a transported object is transported into the past, a quantity of mass will appear to vanish from the present, in clear violation of the conservation law.
A (me): Since the return is to the exact time of departure, the mass present is constant.
Q: Very well, but what about the arrival in the past? Doesn’t this violate the conservation law?
A: No. The energy needed is taken from the Dirac sea, by the mechanism I explain in detail in the Phys Rev paper. When the object returns to the “future,” the energy is restored to the sea.
Q (intense young physicist): Then doesn’t Heisenberg uncertainty limit the amount of time that can be spent in the past?
A: A good question. The answer is yes, but because we borrow an infinitesimal amount of energy from an infinite number of particles, the amount of time spent in the past can be arbitrarily large. The only limitation is that you must leave the past an instant before you depart from the present.
In half an hour I was scheduled to present the paper that would rank my name with Newton’s and Galileo’s – and Dirac’s. I was twenty-eight years old, the same age that Dirac was when he announced his theory. I was a firebrand, preparing to set the world aflame. I was nervous, rehearsing the speech in my hotel room. I took a swig out of an old Coke that one of my grad students had left sitting on top of the television. The evening news team was babbling on, but I wasn’t listening.
I never delivered that talk. The hotel had already started to burn; my death was already foreordained. Tie neat, I inspected myself in the mirror, then walked to the door. The doorknob was warm. I opened it onto a sheet of fire. Flame burst through the opened door like a ravening dragon. I stumbled backward, staring at the flames in amazed fascination.
Somewhere in the hotel I heard a scream, and all at once I broke free of my spell. I was on the thirtieth story; there was no way out. My thought was for my machine. I rushed across the room and threw open the case holding the time machine. With swift, sure fingers I pulled out the Renselz coils and wrapped them around my body. The carpet had caught on fire, a sheet of flame between me and any possible escape. Holding my breath to avoid suffocation, I punched an entry into the keyboard and dove into time.
I return to that moment again and again. When I hit the final key, the air was already nearly unbreathable with smoke. I had about thirty seconds left to live, then. Over the years I’ve nibbled away my time down to ten seconds or less.
I live on borrowed time. So do we all, perhaps. But I know when and where my debt will fall due.
Dancer died on February 9, 1969. It was a dim, foggy day. In the morning, he said he had a headache. That was unusual, for Dancer never had headaches. We decided to go for a walk through the fog. It was beautiful, as if we were alone in a strange, formless world. I’d forgotten about his headache altogether, until, looking out across the sea of fog from the park over the bay, he fell over. He was dead before the ambulance came. He died with a secret smile on his face. I’ve never understood that smile. Maybe he was smiling because the pain was gone.
Lisa committed suicide two days later.
You ordinary people, you have the chance to change the future. You can father children, write novels, sign petitions, invent new machines, go to cocktail parties, run for president. You affect the future with everything you do. No matter what I do, I cannot. It is too late for that, for me. My actions are written in flowing water. And having no effect, I have no responsibilities. It makes no difference what I do, not at all.
When I first fled the fire into the past, I tried everything I could to change it. I stopped the arsonist, I argued with mayors, I even went to my own house and told myself not to go to the conference.
But that’s not how time works. No matter what I do, talk to a governor or dynamite the hotel, when I reach that critical moment – the present, my destiny, the moment I left – I vanish from whenever I was, and return to the hotel room, the fire approaching ever closer. I have about ten seconds left. Every time I dive through the Dirac sea, everything I changed in the past vanishes. Sometimes I pretend that the changes I make in the past create new futures, though I know this is not the case. When I return to the present, all the changes are wiped out by the ripples of the converging wave, like erasing a blackboard after a class.
Someday I will return and meet my destiny. But for now, I live in the past. It’s a good life, I suppose. You get used to the fact that nothing you do will ever have any effect on the world. It gives you a feeling of freedom. I’ve been places no one has ever been, seen things no one alive has ever seen. I’ve given up physics, of course. Nothing I discover could endure past that fatal night in Santa Cruz. Maybe some people would continue for the sheer joy
of knowledge. For me, the point is missing.
But there are compensations. Whenever I return to the hotel room, nothing is changed but my memories. I am again twenty-eight, again wearing the same three-piece suit, again have the fuzzy taste of stale Cola in my mouth. Every time I return, I use up a little bit of time. One day I will have no time left.
Dancer, too, will never die. I won’t let him. Every time I get to that final February morning, the day he died, I return to 1965, to that perfect day in June. He doesn’t know me, he never knows me. But we meet on that hill, the only two willing to enjoy the day doing nothing. He lies on his back, idly fingering chords on his guitar, blowing bubbles and staring into the clouded blue sky. Later I will introduce him to Lisa. She won’t know us either, but that’s okay. We’ve got plenty of time.
“Time,” I say to Dancer, lying in the park on the hill. “There’s so much time.”
“All the time there is,” he says.
NEEDLE IN A TIMESTACK
Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg is an American writer widely known for his science fiction and fantasy stories. He is a many-time winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, was named to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999, and in 2004 was designated a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. His books and stories have been translated into forty languages. Among his best-known titles are Nightwings, Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, and the three volumes of the Majipoor Cycle: Lord Valentine’s Castle, Majipoor Chronicles, and Valentine Pontifex. His collected short stories, covering nearly sixty years of work, have been published in nine volumes by Subterranean Press. His attraction to the time travel theme is most notable in his novel-length work in books such as Hawksbill Station, House of Bones and Up the Line. This story was originally published in Playboy in June of 1983.
Between one moment and the next the taste of cotton came into his mouth, and Mikkelsen knew that Tommy Hambleton had been tinkering with his past again. The cotton-in-the-mouth sensation was the standard tip-off for Mikkelsen. For other people it might be a ringing in the ears, a tremor of the little finger, a tightness in the shoulders. Whatever the symptom, it always meant the same thing: your time-track has been meddled with, your life has been retroactively transformed. It happened all the time. One of the little annoyances of modern life, everyone always said. Generally, the changes didn’t amount to much.
But Tommy Hambleton was out to destroy Mikkelsen’s marriage, or, more accurately, he was determined to unhappen it altogether, and that went beyond Mikkelsen’s limits of tolerance. In something close to panic he phoned home to find out if he still had Janine.
Her lovely features blossomed on the screen – glossy dark hair, elegant cheekbones, cool sardonic eyes. She looked tense and strained, and Mikkelsen knew she had felt the backlash of this latest attempt too.
“Nick?” she said. “Is it a phasing?”
“I think so. Tommy’s taken another whack at us, and Christ only knows how much chaos he’s caused this time.”
“Let’s run through everything.”
“All right,” Mikkelsen said. “What’s your name?”
“Janine.”
“And mine?”
“Nick. Nicholas Perry Mikkelsen. You see? Nothing important has changed.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes, of course, darling. To you.”
“Keep going. What’s our address?”
“11 Lantana Crescent.”
“Do we have children?”
“Dana and Elise. Dana’s five, Elise is three. Our cat’s name is Minibelle, and—”
“Okay,” Mikkelsen said, relieved. “That much checks out. But I tasted the cotton, Janine. Where has he done it to us this time? What’s been changed?”
“It can’t be anything major, love. We’ll find it if we keep checking. Just stay calm.”
“Calm. Yes.” He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath. The little annoyances of modern life, he thought. In the old days, when time was just a linear flow from then to now, did anyone get bored with all that stability? For better or for worse it was different now. You go to bed a Dartmouth man and wake up Columbia, never the wiser. You board a plane that blows up over Cyprus, but then your insurance agent goes back and gets you to miss the flight. In the new fluid way of life there was always a second chance, a third, a fourth, now that the past was open to anyone with the price of a ticket. But what good is any of that, Mikkelsen wondered, if Tommy Hambleton can use it to disappear me and marry Janine again himself?
They punched for readouts and checked all their vital data against what they remembered. When your past is altered through time-phasing, all records of your life are automatically altered too, of course, but there’s a period of two or three hours when memories of your previous existence still linger in your brain, like the phantom twitches of an amputated limb. They checked the date of Mikkelsen’s birth, parents’ names, his nine genetic coordinates, his educational record. Everything seemed right. But when they got to their wedding date the readout said 8 Feb 2017, and Mikkelsen heard warning chimes in his mind. “I remember a summer wedding,” he said. “Outdoors in Dan Levy’s garden, the hills all dry and brown, the 24th of August.”
“So do I, Nick. The hills wouldn’t have been brown in February. But I can see it – that hot dusty day—”
“Then five months of our marriage are gone, Janine. He couldn’t unmarry us altogether, but he managed to hold us up from summer to winter.” Rage made his head spin, and he had to ask his desk for a quick buzz of tranks. Etiquette called for one to be cool about a phasing. But he couldn’t be cool when the phasing was a deliberate and malevolent blow at the center of his life. He wanted to shout, to break things, to kick Tommy Hambleton’s ass. He wanted his marriage left alone. He said, “You know what I’m going to do one of these days? I’m going to go back about fifty years and eradicate Tommy completely. Just arrange things so his parents never get to meet, and—”
“No, Nick. You mustn’t.”
“I know. But I’d love to.” He knew he couldn’t, and not just because it would be murder. It was essential that Tommy Hambleton be born and grow up and meet Janine and marry her, so that when the marriage came apart she would meet and marry Mikkelsen. If he changed Hambleton’s past, he would change hers too, and if he changed hers, he would change his own, and anything might happen. Anything. But all the same he was furious. “Five months of our past, Janine—”
“We don’t need them, love. Keeping the present and the future safe is the main priority. By tomorrow we’ll always think we were married in February of 2017, and it won’t matter. Promise me you won’t try to phase him.”
“I hate the idea that he can simply—”
“So do I. But I want you to promise you’ll leave things as they are.”
“Well—”
“Promise.”
“All right,” he said. “I promise.”
Little phasings happened all the time. Someone in Illinois makes a trip to eleventh-century Arizona and sets up tiny ripple currents in time that have a tangential and peripheral effect on a lot of lives, and someone in California finds himself driving a silver BMW instead of a gray Toyota. No one minded trifling changes like that. But this was the third time in the last twelve months, so far as Mikkelsen was able to tell, that Tommy Hambleton had committed a deliberate phasing intended to break the chain of events that had brought about Mikkelsen’s marriage to Janine.
The first phasing happened on a splendid spring day – coming home from work, sudden taste of cotton in mouth, sense of mysterious disorientation. Mikkelsen walked down the steps looking for his old ginger tomcat, Gus, who always ran out to greet him as though he thought he was a dog. No Gus. Instead a calico female, very pregnant, sitting placidly in the front hall.
“Where’s Gus?” Mikkelsen asked Janine.
“Gus? Gus who?”
“Our cat.”
“You mean Max?”
“Gus,
” he said. “Sort of orange, crooked tail—”
“That’s right. But Max is his name. I’m sure it’s Max. He must be around somewhere. Look, here’s Minibelle.” Janine knelt and stroked the fat calico. “Minibelle, where’s Max?”
“Gus,” Mikkelsen said. “Not Max. And who’s this Minibelle?”
“She’s our cat, Nick,” Janine said, sounding surprised. They stared at each other.
“Something’s happened, Nick.”
“I think we’ve been time-phased,” he said.
Sensation as of dropping through trapdoor – shock, confusion, terror. Followed by hasty and scary inventory of basic life-data to see what had changed. Everything appeared in order except for the switch of cats. He didn’t remember having a female calico. Neither did Janine, although she had accepted the presence of the cat without surprise. As for Gus – Max – he was getting foggier about his name, and Janine couldn’t even remember what he looked like. But she did recall that he had been a wedding gift from some close friend, and Mikkelsen remembered that the friend was Gus Stark, for whom they had named him, and Janine was then able to dredge up the dimming fact that Gus was a close friend of Mikkelsen’s and also of Hambleton and Janine in the days when they were married, and that Gus had introduced Janine to Mikkelsen ten years ago when they were all on holiday in Hawaii.
Mikkelsen accessed the household callmaster and found no Gus Stark listed. So the phasing had erased him from their roster of friends. The general phone directory turned up a Gus Stark in Costa Mesa. Mikkelsen called him and got a freckle-faced man with fading red hair, who looked more or less familiar. But he didn’t know Mikkelsen at all, and only after some puzzling around in his memory did he decide that they had been distantly acquainted way back when, but had had some kind of trifling quarrel and had lost touch with each other years ago.
“That’s not how I think I remember it,” Mikkelsen said. “I remember us as friends for years, really close. You and Donna and Janine and I were out to dinner only last week, is what I remember, over in Newport Beach.”
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 6