Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  THEORY OF RELATIVITY

  by Jody Lynn Nye

  Jody Lynn Nye lists her main career activity as “spoiling cats.” She lives northwest of Chicago with two of the above and her husband, author and packager Bill Fawcett. She has written twenty-three books, including five contemporary fantasies, three SF novels, four novels in collaboration with Anne McCaffrey, including The Ship Who Won, a humorous anthology about mothers, Don’t Forget Your Spacesuit, Dear!, and over sixty short stories. Her latest books are License Invoked, cowritten with Robert Asprin, and Advanced Mythology, fourth in the Mythology 101 series.

  Dr. Barry Seacliff

  Tekno-Books

  tkbGreenBayWisconsin.com

  Dear Barry,

  Thanks very much for the opportunity to submit to the digest of time-travel abstracts.

  You’ll probably be surprised to see that my document is 450 pages long. I know you requested papers no more than fifteen thousand words, but I think once you begin to read it, you’ll see that I needed to get this all down as best I can so that none of it is lost. I’ve excerpted the entire document at the end, but I hope you’ll see fit to publish the whole thing.

  My paper includes full diagrams and equation models for the B3 Trans-temporal Drive that controlled my module, named for the three scientists instrumental in its development. I’ve got Caltech lab’s permission for its publication. (See copyright notices on the title page of my paper.) In space travel, similar technology creates a wormhole effect large enough for a small solid body to pass beneath the fabric of space, but it occasionally bypasses time as well, creating short jumps into the future or past. This variation of the B3 takes advantage of the temporal anomaly. In other words, the side effect is the one we wanted.

  It may surprise you to know that the multiple-tree dimension theory that many scientists have espoused is true. The ever-branching tree of possibilities makes it difficult to go far back or far forward in time, not to mention the resulting logarithmic increase in power consumption. So my task was to find a branch at which two measurable points in history diverged, but no more than a hundred years in the past.

  It might also surprise you that I didn’t choose to travel farther back than a few generations. The reasoning was simple: the longer the gap between my “present” and my landing point in the past, the greater by a factorial, even exponential, equation the number of possible futures that I might accidentally return to. Therefore, instead of traveling to the Renaissance or the age of dinosaurs, long-time dreams of mine, we limited the scope of this initial inquiry. Once we’ve worked out all the bugs, I’m going back far enough at least to commission Tiepolo to paint my portrait as a birthday gift for my mother. I like his color pallette. I’d prefer John Everett Millais, but by the Victorian era everything was too well documented for a commissioned painting to go unremarked. One thing we’re already learning about visiting the past is to frequent eras where our passage will be easily forgotten, lest we alter the time-streams too much to find our own future again.

  I was always fascinated by a book I read as a child about a man who had discovered how to live along the Y-axis of time. Simply speaking, it would be as though you turned sharp right when everyone else was traveling straight along that X-axis, and continued to exist forever in that moment of, say, June 4, 2005, existing in a past that everybody in one’s common reality had left behind. By focusing the “future” tendency of the wormhole drive against its “past” tendency, my craft was intended to drill along that June 4th until I came to another, recognizable reality, on that X-axis but a new Y-axis. It’s not perfectly stable, but, you know, close enough for government work.

  We theorized that there are many alternate dimensions because history branches from multiple alterations in from a single incident. There are many choices, but we, now, are aware only of the one that we have made or are living. There should be an infinity of realities out there. I needed only one.

  The easiest path was to make use of my own history. I set out to look for a counterpart of my own existence. Using the theory of random actions creating parallel dimensions, it interested me to discover someone whose life could be exactly like mine, if not for a single incident from which our lives diverged.

  The capsule departs from a pad in a vacuum chamber inside the Caltech lab. You have to come out here sometime and watch a launch. It’s very impressive. Everybody who can jams into the observation room. The whole place is painted white except the launch pad, which is a dark-green, meter-thick bed of friction-resistant polymer fifty meters by twenty. The H. G. Wells, one of the four crafts Caltech is using, sits in the middle looking like a gigantic copper multivitamin.

  Since every millimeter the wormhole has to stretch matters, the capsule isn’t very wide, but it’s long. I weigh a little under 60 kilos. In an environment suit I can turn around and reach everything in the cockpit just by stretching my arms. I can hand myself up and down inside the capsule to the other stations, such as telemetry, entertainment and galley, sleep/cryostasis, and relief. This is the same configuration used for long-distance space exploration. About three people can exist inside here, if you don’t mind looking at your companion’s feet most of the time. There’s just room to slip by one another. It’s not an environment for the claustrophobe. I like it. It’s womblike. Instead of feeling closed in, I feel safe. It’s all a matter of perspective, since the ship takes its crew hurtling through a temporary singularity that wants to crush anything passing though it out of existence. I slid into the cockpit, pulled down the flap seat, and strapped myself in. The heavy shielding slides shut, and Mission Control gives the pilot final instructions. Once the drives kick in, s/he’s out of touch. As the field begins to form around the capsule, it rises off the pad, glowing like an ember. Then, with a bang that used to blast out the windows, it’s gone.

  I’ve made short hops back along our X-axis of a few moments or a few hours. If you get another briefing before you step into a TT module, please let me say don’t eat breakfast first. No matter how well prepared you are, your stomach hates the sideslip of light-speed g-force. You don’t get the full brunt of the rotation of the drive surrounding the shielded capsule, but your body knows something is going wrong out there. The construction does obviate windows, but since you’re exceeding the speed of light, there’s nothing to see anyhow. The most astonishing thing about the trip is the lack of sensation of movement, since you’re not really going anywhere, you’re going anywhen.

  I was nervous when the drive stopped. Sensors on the skin are supposed to detect variations in ambient temperature outside the range between -20° and 32° Celsius and restart the drives, so I don’t land in nuclear war or nuclear winter. If I could trust it, the gauge said it was 19° out there. Had it failed, I could be stepping out into vacuum or a volcano. I peeled back the hatch.

  And saw California. You won’t believe what a letdown that was, seeing dusty stucco buildings and landscaped gardens covered a quarter-inch deep in ash from the biennial forest fires that had just ended. Now, instead of proving I’d traveled cross-dimensionally, I had to prove that I’d moved in time at all, instead of just teleporting my capsule out of the lab and into the ornamental rockery behind the Arts & Sciences building.

  Clothing was no clue. Under my protective suit I had on a denim-colored coverall, which fit into the crowd of students and faculty roaming around this campus as well as it had at the one I had just left a few minutes before. No one looked twice at a thirty-something white woman with brown hair in a clip at the back of her neck. I felt anonymous, but somewhere someone must know me.

  You wonder about the first thing you would do if you suddenly found yourself in my position. I could have done a lot of things, but I let curiosity get the better of me: I went to find a phone. I wanted to call me and see if I was at home.

  Everybody carries a miniature personal communications unit these days, but for quicklink data transmission and a more stable connection there’s still no substitute for a booth.
They’re subsidized these days, probably to make sure people use them, though there’s a block on pay-per-minute sites, but information and local calls are free. National directory assistance had no listing for Rachel Fenstone and only one entry for a Dr. Fenstone, right there in Pomona. I called it, but to my shock a man answered.

  “Jeremy Fenstone,” the voice said. The number belonged to my youngest brother! So where was I?

  “Hi, it’s me,” I said, clutching the handset like a lifeline, which it was. I hoped I wasn’t dead in this world.

  “Hey,” he said, friendly but unexcited, exactly as my brother would have done. So I or someone who sounded like me was alive and on speaking terms. “What’s up?” Uh. What next? “I, um. Can you . . .? Did I . . . give you the new number for my office?”

  Thank heaven for the vagaries of the mass-communication system! I could hear him hitting keys. “No. The last number I had for you was 8094-555-2389. Is it different now?”

  “Uh, no. That’s right. Just making sure. Gotta go.”

  “Yeah.” Whatever branch of science or medicine Jer was practicing, his mind was always elsewhere. “See you.”

  The reverse directory assistance released an address to go with the telephone number Jer had given me. The subtle difference was so unexpected that I almost dropped the receiver: June Fennell, not Rachel Fenstone.

  When I was six, I hurt my mother’s feelings by telling her I wanted to change my name from Rachel to June. Twilight Zone. Dee dee dee dee. I took down the address.

  I found the house on a quiet avenue in a neighborhood with no through-streets. Exactly the kind of place I’d live in, if I didn’t want to be close walking distance from the lab. I saw a dark-haired figure moving around inside the curtained picture window. Its silhouette was so familiar my heart skipped. It was weird. I felt as though I was watching a film someone had taken of me with a hidden camera. But she was real. Unable to wait a moment longer to meet her, I hurried up the walk and rang the bell.

  If you ever happen to meet an interdimensional analog of yourself, I recommend your first words to him not be, “Hi, I’ve come to take you through time in an experimental shuttle, but don’t worry: I’m a trained physicist.” You just might not get the results you were hoping for. But I was so excited to succeed in tracking down a second self that I’m afraid I was thinking she’d react the way I would . . . or be truthful, the way I hope I’d act, if I was confronted without warning by a virtual doppleganger. The scream and the door slammed in my face gave me something to go away and think about. I had to consider a second approach, one more effective and less threatening. I started down the path.

  Before I got to the sidewalk the door opened behind me, and a tentative voice asked, “Are you really?”

  I’m one of six children in my family, but the only girl. Having so many brothers made me a tomboy. I missed the way friends of mine with sisters learned to accept their femininity. When I was growing up, I used to fantasize about having an identical twin. Oh, the twins in my neighborhood assured me the reality wasn’t as great as the dream. They got into squabbles so petty that no one else understood or could intervene, but all I could see was that unbreakable bond where someone was so much like me that I would never really be alone. As my friends said, the reality was different.

  June’s maiden name is Fenstone. Fennell is her nom de plume. She is not a scientist. She’s a technical writer who moonlights as a science fiction author, something I would never have conceived of becoming. Jeremy, instead of studying structural engineering, became a biologist. June went for the softer sciences, but close enough for government research, huh? It had to be. The B3 drive had only enough power for the three legs of the trip we had planned. There wasn’t enough surplus to go shopping along the dimensional divisions to find another test subject. If I was going to try out my theorem, I had to convince this almost-me to participate in the experiment. At the very least I needed information from her. At best, she would be able to help. Once I started to explain my mission, I saw a very familiar light gleam in her—my—eyes.

  We are amazingly alike. She doesn’t have the broken nose I got from catching a baseball with my face, but I don’t have the temple scar she got from opening a window with her head. Both of us are pale, dark-haired, long-nosed cynics. It didn’t freak me out when she spoke, because my own voice sounds deeper to me than hers does.

  We’re both married. Her Len owns a freelance statistical research firm. My Mitchell is a freelance project coordinator for the space/time program. No kids. No surprise. No time. I liked finding out about what I could have become, but it’s creepy, too. I thought I was handling it pretty well because of all the analysis I’ve undergone to prepare for this mission. It only occurred to me in running that June hadn’t been through the therapy, and she accepted the strangeness of the situation and was moving forward. I guess we’re more resilient than I thought. Or at least, that’s the interpretation I put on, “That’s okay. I’ll save the nervous breakdown for later.”

  We decided to call each other “cousin.” That took the heat off arguing over whose timeline was more real. I know both of us had the same feeling, that mine is the true one and hers is an offshoot. You have to think that way, or you’ll go mad. No thinking being can exist believing her- or himself to be second best.

  There were a lot of other interesting subpoints of history that differ from that we know. President Kennedy did not serve out his second term of office. In fact, he didn’t make it through the first one. Hold onto your ears: he was assassinated by some jerk in Texas. Then Johnson took over. Yeah, I know. You wouldn’t wish that on a hamster. His welfare plans have done incredible damage to the bootstrapping program that Kennedy began in our world. Then the U.S. had an attack of Nixon. Yeah. Sweaty ex-veep Nixon. Two terms. No McGovern at all. The space program never matured beyond a few moon missions. They’ve practically stopped the manned long-range missions, instead shooting the equivalent of computerized monkeys into space. It would make you cry to see NASA so underfunded, but Congress is ruled by pragmatists these days instead of idealists. They’re still poking around in near space. My counterpart was fascinated to read the archive files describing the discovery that the same kind of drives intended to push a solid body beyond two or three times light speed could create a bubble that would cause it to skip through time like a stone.

  I laid out my theory of relative-relativity, and she listened quietly, her eyes never leaving my face. Occasionally she’d grimace or grin. It was funny seeing what my expressions looked like to other people. I told her all about my life, my parents and their parents, going as far back as I knew of. I had a family tree with names, dates, and cities. And she told me all about hers.

  There’s an information game new acquaintances play when they think they might have seen one another somewhere before. If it’s got a name at all, it’s Jewish Geography. Were you at this day camp, did you go to that school, do you shop at these stores, did you attend those conventions or seminars, until the participants figure out if and where they had met before. We went over what we knew of family history until we decided where the split between her timeline and mine must have occurred.

  It took hours to figure out that single incident, and we both slapped our foreheads when we did. It was absolutely simple and straightforward, but much farther back in time than either one of us could have guessed. My maternal grandfather, James, was an inventor. His parents fled to America from Romania, avoiding the ongoing wars in Romania. Relatives met Great-grandpa Isaac Finkelstein at the dock in New York in October 1885, and advised him to go to Princeton, New Jersey, where the university had an extensive physics program and were reasonably decent to immigrant Jews. Great-grandpa ended up cleaning test tubes and working as a dogsbody in the lab. When his eight sons came along, they followed their father into the sciences, but they attended classes at the university, graduating with degrees in medicine or physics. Two of them were still there when Einstein arrived from Germany. In June’
s reality her grandfather was an inventor, too, but his parents settled in New York, where the boys grew up in the tenements not far from where the Marx Brothers were born. Both our grandfathers ended up in Chicago, where they met our grandmothers and started the family we both recognized.

  Our mutual great-grandfather changed the family name from Finkelstein to Fenstone. Mom had kept his name and I had kept hers. June and her mother had done the same thing, or it might have taken me years to find her.

  “Now,” I told her, “if only we can find him.”

  “Wait,” June said, with a mysterious grin on her face. She got up and came back with a heavy, yellowed album.

  She has pictures of our ancestors, real photos. I was thrilled. You can have your history, you can have your science, but here was a piece of my past that I thought was gone forever. The few pictures I had of my grandparents were all burned in the riots of the middle seventies that drove the scientific community underground for a few years. (I can’t throw bouquets at the way they handled their social problems in June’s universe, but I can’t give any extra points to ours. We supported the sciences better; they supported social issues. They had their bloody battles, we had ours. But in the end it’s astonishing how similar the U.S. of our world—sorry, I have to stop saying that, but it’s really the best description—and theirs are. We’re a little more backward than they are in many ways, ditto them, and we’re both catching up to true civilization. I suppose it’s all as Mark Twain said once, “No matter who you vote for, the government gets elected.” Life for regular folks, and I’ve got to include scientists and editors in that mix, just goes on. Entropy evens things out, and outstanding wrongs are redressed. Or not.)

  Now I knew exactly where and when I had to go. We, if she was willing. I put the matter to her again, the way I should have the first time.

  “You don’t have to go, but I do,” I explained. “This is my job. I can’t drag you along. Anything can happen. The shuttle can fail. We can die of a disease that was wiped out before we were born. We could be killed. This could be a one-way trip. I mean, it’s a calculated risk. I have every intention of making it back. Mitch would never forgive me if I didn’t.”