Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  I had to be ready to go on my own. June is brave but not bold. This is what I would call an effect of nature versus nurture. In my field if you don’t jump in and volunteer, you never get the recognition of your peers. She had always had a desk job. I shouldn’t have worried.

  “Are you kidding?” she said, with delight. “An opportunity like this comes along once in a lifetime. Or, in our case, a pair of lifetimes. What do we wear?”

  The Wells came to a halt in the tidal rocks under the pier in New York harbor. It was more than usually tight quarters in the capsule, considering that under our protective suits we both had to wear heavy skirts and shirtwaists and, oh, those button-up boots! The outfits came from a costumer in La Jolla that both of us had rented Halloween costumes from, though “my” proprietor was a woman named Sam, and hers was a male Sam. I was happy to see so many things in common between our two timelines, even though the differences can be jarring. Get this: in their world the strip Calvin and Hobbes wasn’t about historical philosophers! Oh, they’re philosophers, all right, but not the way you think. Hint: Calvin wears jammies.

  A straightforward trip into the past was what the B3-T2 was designed to make, but never on this scale before. I’d been so worried about the drive making a century-long jump successfully that I hadn’t paid much attention to how June was reacting to having her insides spun into pudding.

  My passenger was huddled down at her end of the tube in a mass of skirts, her eyes closed and fists clenched around a sick-box.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Uungh.”

  I opened the hatch and took a look at the world of the nineteenth century. It was just before dawn on a nippy autumn day. Feeble, gray light picked out the pilings that rose above us and the sooty clouds in the sky above the pier. The quayside smelled worse than anything I could have dreamed. I’d forgotten that old New Yorkers poured untreated sewage into the harbor for centuries. The port of New York was busy. Fishing and trading ships came and went. In the distance I could see a liner. It had to be the one carrying Isaac Finkelstein and his wife.

  Gagging, I wriggled out onto the rocks and took off my coverall.

  “Come on, June,” I pleaded with her. Without looking up, she shook her head. “The ship’s coming in. Hurry! This is what you came for.”

  She lifted a woeful face to me at the bottom of the well, her pale face lit red, white, and green by the worklights in the relief station. “All right,” she said, pathetically. “Then I can die in peace.”

  “That’s the spirit.” I helped her crawl out of her jumpsuit and pulled down her skirts. “Let’s go meet history.”

  Hats! I hadn’t thought of hats. I didn’t want us to stand out in the crowd. But it turned out to be all right. Not every woman had one. I was relieved, but sorry I’d forgotten. The cold wind nipped at my ears and cheeks. June’s nose was red. I supposed mine was exactly the same. We grinned at one another with excitement. Thousand of people crowded together, all talking in a dozen different languages, waiting for the arrival of the next boat bringing immigrants to new opportunities. This was the business end of the funnel that trickled people into America.

  “Hey, twins!” a man said in a harsh nasal voice, grabbing each of us by the shoulder and spinning us around. He was unshaven and had a broken front tooth. “Hiya, ladies. Welcome to America!”

  “T’ank you,” June said, affecting an accent. I didn’t even have to tell her to. A sharp glance from her reminded me the basic person was identical to me, and I would have thought of it on my own. “It’s a New World.”

  “What’s that smell?” a man in uniform asked. “Some kind of medicine?”

  “For the phlegm,” I said, trying to sound hoarse and pointing vaguely at my throat. He was smelling the insect repellent that both of us were wearing, to save us from the ambient wildlife that could be infesting the people around us. God knew how long I would be in isolation back home if I came back with vermin from the past! The man edged a few inches away from me, which is where I wanted him.

  You could decide you wanted to be there when man first walked on the moon, or when Benjamin Franklin first harnessed electricity, but for me the most electrifying moment I could imagine was standing in that crowd clutching that little, worn photograph of my ancestor as the original and his little family came down the gangplank of the ship at Ellis Island. We almost missed him. I was craning my head the wrong way when June grabbed me hard in my whalebone-covered ribs.

  He was handsomer than his photograph. Shorter than I thought he’d be, Isaac Finkelstein had wavy, very black hair and bright green eyes that startled in a face tanned by the sun on his passage from Europe. The woman with him, our great-grandmother, was a shy girl with a mass of light brown hair piled on her head and held down by the shawl that also covered her shoulders. In her arms was a sleeping baby, my great-uncle Jacob. As they came down the gangplank, we crowded in behind, making sure we didn’t look out of place, becoming a couple of the huddled masses. Our history. Our shared history.

  Not having papers that could be stamped, we had to wait out of hearing as the immigration officers welcomed the couple to America. We managed to get on the boat from Ellis Island to Manhattan and followed the Finkelsteins all the way down the swaying gangway to the dock.

  As they debarked, they were swallowed up by a mob of thousands, all talking, crying, laughing, shouting offering jobs and accommodations, some real, some bogus. This was New York, America, the land of opportunity, where gold lined the streets. Where someday, in two different dimensions, we would be born. I felt tears come to my eyes, and shook my head, overwhelmed with pride and awe.

  “Is that it?” June shouted in my ear. “Don’t you want to see which choice he makes? Because it’s coming.”

  For the moment she was the bold one, and I was shy. I hesitated. The decision really had already been made, by our great-grandfather’s waiting relatives. Where would they advise him to go? I almost didn’t want to know. Whatever he chose to do, it wouldn’t make one or the other of us less real, right? In a thousand other realities he never got on the boat at all, or he died in Europe, so there were no great-grandchildren to go looking for him a hundred and twenty years later. But it did matter. I could hardly meet June’s excited eyes. How will she feel when she finds out he picked my reality?

  “We’ve got to,” I said at last, looking into a face as eager as my own. Was my own. “We’ve come all this way.”

  The two of us elbowed our way into the crowd, catching up at last with the young couple, who were looking bewildered at suddenly having arrived at their goal and having no idea what to do next.

  “Itzhik? Itzhik!” a man’s voice shouted. “Itzhik Finkelshtein!”

  My great-grandfather looked around, startled, and his face grew even more handsome as he smiled at the bowlegged little man in the flat cap who waddled up and threw his arms around them.

  My ethics professor once said that history is all the small stories combined into one great narrative. Here was one of the small stories of the turn of the twentieth century. We were a part of it, and it was a part of us. I was glad to have someone to share the moment with, even if it was only me. We kept as close as we could, trying to understand what they were saying in their thick accents over the noise. Which was it? New York or Princeton?

  The little man waved his arms enthusiastically. “. . . in Chicago! You must go . . .!”

  “Chicago, eh?” Isaac Itzhik Finkelstein Fenstone said thoughtfully.

  June and I looked at each other. As one, we shook our heads.

  All the nitty-gritty’s in the main text. I think you’ll get a kick out of it. I stayed with June while I wrote most of it. She’s good. She gave me some pointers for punching it up. If you can skim it in the next few days and give me a call to say it’s all right, then I can go with a clear conscience. The me that’s at home doesn’t actually leave on this mission until Friday, but I didn’t want to miss my deadline which falls in the week before I would b
e leaving. I realize I took a risk overlapping my own present to drop this off, and I don’t want to arrive back for good until after I’d left, if you see what I mean.

  I ought to be back some time next week. June and I are going looking for the us whose past began in Chicago. I’ll call you when I get home.

  By the way, a bit of trivia: in June’s dimension TeknoBooks publishes fiction, if you can imagine. But you’ll be pleased to know you and Dr. Gruneberg are just as well respected.

  It’s been a wonderful trip—or at least it will be. Tell you more when I see you.

  Thanks a lot for the assignment.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Rachel Fenstone

  CONVOLUTION

  by James P. Hogan

  James P. Hogan began writing science fiction as a hobby in the mid-1970s, and his works have been well received within the professional scientific community as well as among regular science-fiction readers. In 1979 he left DEC to become a fulltime writer, and in 1988 moved to the Republic of Ireland. Currently he maintains a residence in Pensacola and spends part of each year in the United States.

  To date, he has published twenty-one novels, a nonfiction work on Artificial Intelligence, and two mixed collections of short fiction, nonfiction, and biographical anecdotes entitled Minds, Machines & Evolution and Rockets, Redheads & Revolution. He has also published some articles and short fiction. Further details of Hogan and his work are available from his web site at http://www.jamesphogan.com.

  Professor Aylmer Arbuthnot Abercrombie looked up irascibly from the chore of tidying up his notes as the call tone sounded from his desk terminal. He moused the screen’s cursor to the Call Accept icon and clicked on it. “Yes?”

  A window opened showing the head of a youth aged twenty or so, with collar-length, studentish hair, a wispy attempt at a beard, and shoulders enveloped in a baggy sweater. “Oh, er, Jeremy Qualio here, Professor.” He was a postgraduate that Abercrombie had assigned a design project to, in one of the labs below in the building. “We were expecting you here at ten-thirty, sir.”

  “You were?”

  “To review the test of the transcorrelator mixing circuit. You were going to help us set the power parameters for the output stage.”

  “I was?”

  “We’ve completed the runs with simulated input data and normalized the results. They’re here ready for you to check through now.”

  “They are?” Abercrombie’s brow knitted into a frown. He cast around the littered desk for his appointments diary on the off chance that it might give him a way out, but couldn’t see it. He was cornered. “Very well, I’ll be there shortly,” he replied, and cut off the screen.

  Abercrombie left his “public” office at the front of the lab area, which he used for receiving visitors and dealing with routine day-to-day affairs. On the way out, he stopped by the open cubicle and reception desk from where the stern, meticulous, and fearsomely efficient figure of Mrs. Crawford, the departmental secretary and custodian of all that pertained to proper procedures, commanded the approach from the elevators.

  “Do you have my appointments diary, by any chance?” Abercrombie inquired. “I appear to have mislaid it.” “You took it back this morning.”

  “Did I?”

  “After I found it again, the last time.” The pointed pause, followed by a sniff, invited him to reflect on the enormity of his transgression. “You know, Professor, it really would be more convenient if you’d keep your schedule electronically, as do other members of the staff. Then I could maintain a copy in my system, which wouldn’t get mislaid. And I’d be in a position to give timely reminders of your commitments—which it seems you are in some need of.”

  Abercrombie shook his head stubbornly. “I won’t go into that again, Mrs. Crawford. You know my views on computerized records. Nothing’s private. Nothing’s safe. They can get into your system from China. The next thing you know, some fool who doesn’t know a Bessel function from a Bessemer furnace is publishing your life’s work. No, thank you very much. I prefer not to become public property, but to keep my soul and my inner self to myself.”

  “But that’s such an outmoded way to think,” Mrs. Crawford persisted. “It’s absurd for somebody with your technical expertise. If I may say so, it smacks of pure obstinacy. With the encryption procedures available today . . .” But Abercrombie had already stopped listening and stalked away to jab the call button by the elevator doors.

  “Oh, and by the way,” he threw back over his shoulder while he waited, “has that FedEx package arrived from Chicago yet?”

  “Yes. I’ve already told you so, Professor.”

  “When?”

  “Less than half an hour ago.”

  Abercrombie checked himself long enough to send back a perplexed, disbelieving look before stepping into the elevator. Mrs. Crawford shook her head in exasperation and returned her attention to the task at hand.

  Jeremy Qualio and Maxine Turnel, his bubbly, bespectacled, blond-haired partner on the project, were waiting in the prototype lab with the bird’s nest of wires, chips, and other components connected to an array of test equipment. The results from their trial runs of the device were displayed on a set of monitors. Abercrombie jutted his chin and scanned over the bench with a series of short, jerky motions of his head.

  The layout was neat for a lab prototype, with careful wiring and solid, clean-looking joints; the data had been graphed onto screens showing time and frequency series analysis, along with histograms of statistical variables, all properly annotated and captioned. A file of hard copy was lying to one side for Abercrombie’s inspection. He looked at the circuit work again and grunted. “You’ve used nonstandard colors for the board interconnections. I expect the approved coding practices to be observed.”

  “Yes, Professor,” Qualio agreed, looking a bit crestfallen.

  But Abercrombie couldn’t fault their experimental design and procedure as they went through it and discussed details for over an hour. The analysis was comprehensive, with computation of error probabilities and the correct algorithms for interpolation and best-curve fits. Maxine took the absence of further criticism as indicating a rare opportunity to probe the obsessive screen of secrecy that Abercrombie maintained around his work. She and Qualio had been given just this subassembly to develop to a specification in isolation. Abercrombie hadn’t told them its purpose, or the nature of the greater scheme of which it was presumably a part.

  “We’re still trying to figure out what it’s for,” she told him, doing her best to sound casual and natural. “What, exactly is a ‘transcorrelator’ ? The inducer stage seems to create an electroweak interaction with the nuclear substructure that stimulates a range of strong-domain transitions that we’ve never heard of before.”

  Qualio came in. “They’re not mentioned in any of the standard references or on the Net. It’s as if we’re dealing with a new area of physics.”

  “That’s not for you to speculate about,” Abercrombie said. “All you’ve done is graduate from basic training in the army of science. It doesn’t give you a voice in deciding strategy. Leave the big picture to the generals.” He gave a curt nod in the direction of the bench. “Satisfactory. Have the report written up by the end of the week.”

  “Yes, Professor,” Qualio said. Maxine flashed him a look with a shrug that said, Well, we tried. Abercrombie picked up the folder of hard copy and turned to leave.

  “I told you. It has to be something military,” he overheard Maxine whisper as he went out the door.

  After stopping for lunch in the cafeteria, Abercrombie took the stairs back up through the warren of partitioned offices and labs that now filled the space amid the massive brick walls and aged wooden floors of the original building. The City Annexe of Gates University’s Physics Department occupied a converted warehouse on the downtown waterfront of what was no longer a major trading port. Hence, it had been acquired at a knock-down price and qualified for the city’s urban-renewal gran
t scheme, making it a fine investment property for the university trustees. It was also where the department secluded its oddball projects and other undertakings that the governors preferred to keep out of sight, away from its main, prestigious campus. They were retained, as often as not, to humor some high-paying source of research grants or other primary influence on funding.

  No premature publicity, Abercrombie reiterated to himself as he emerged on his own floor and weathered Mrs. Crawford’s Gorgonesque stare to return to his lab. When this project came to fruition, it would be the news event of the century. And not just with the public media. Everyone who was anyone worth talking about in the entire physics-related sector of the scientific Establishment would learn of it in a mass-announcement that Abercrombie had been preparing as methodically as the design studies and calculations that had occupied him for eight years. He had all the names listed, covering academic, private, and government science elites throughout the world. This would be his ticket to a Nobel Prize and permanent fame as surely as geometry had immortalized Euclid and the laws of motion were virtually synonymous with Newton. Maybe even more. The things that Nobels had been awarded for seemed mundane in comparison. Perhaps, even, a new grade of award would have to be instituted especially for him.

  He came to the inner, windowless workshop area that he had designated as the place where the device would be assembled, and stopped for a moment to picture it completed. It wouldn’t be especially heavy or bulky—little more than a metal lattice boundary surface to define and contain the varichron field, with a control panel supported on a columnar plinth, and the generating system and power unit beneath. If anything, it would resemble an oversize parrot cage with a domed cap, standing on a squat cylindrical base. Howard Jaffey, the dean, and the few others from the faculty who were in the know as to the aim of Abercrombie’s project, were polite in avoiding mention of it; but with a billionaire like Eli Zaltzer writing the backing, and the amounts that he lavished on the university as a whole, nobody had been inclined to turn the proposal down, even if they secretly thought Zaltzer was an eccentric. Well, let them think what they liked, Abercrombie told himself. The parts were coming together now, and the initial tests were under way. It wouldn’t be much longer before the full system was assembled—three months, maybe, in his estimation. They’d be singing a different tune then, when the whole world came flocking to his door. Never mind for a better mousetrap. Abercrombie was going to give them a working time machine!