Landfall

by John McWilliams

“Yes, lift me up.”

  “It’s way down the field—okay, okay, fine.” Lauren lifted the tablet and tried to aim the lens.

  Ellis rested his head against his folded fingers and chuckled.

  “I don’t see it.” Arthur’s hologram, refracting in the windowpane, had become a light show. “A little more to the right.”

  “It’s way down the field, sir.” Lauren glared at Ellis. He could at least back her up.

  Ellis drank his coffee luxuriously.

  “Sir?”

  “All right, all right, set me down.”

  Lauren couldn’t really blame Arthur. The G10-X was as sleek as a fighter jet and as luxurious as a yacht—a yacht that could cruise at Mach 5, at ninety thousand feet, while comfortably seating ten.

  Arthur, back on the table, ran a hand over his bald head as if he’d actually been disheveled by the move.

  “Okay, enough of these shenanigans. What have you got?” Arthur asked.

  Hey, they were his shenanigans! “We believe—” Lauren hesitated.

  “Is it the real deal, or what?”

  “We believe so, sir.” Lauren cleared her throat. “Field analysis shows that the residue on the capsule’s skin is consistent with the high energies associated with orbital reentry, and the composite material used to form the skin has a carbon base molecular structure that—”

  “Lauren, Lauren, spare me the gory details. Is it Helios or not?”

  “It is,” Ellis said.

  Arthur glanced at Ellis, then stared at Lauren. “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my God…” Arthur rubbed his temples. “All right, what else?”

  “Two items, sir,” Lauren said. “One: It looks like Dr. Lee must have deployed the capsule intentionally—or at least, someone did. It could have reentered automatically, but it sure wasn’t attached to the space station at the time of the explosion. There appears to be no damage to the capsule, specifically with its docking mechanism.”

  “But,” Ellis interjected, “we still need to research the way these systems worked—especially Helios’s automated reentry capabilities.”

  “It seems unlikely,” Lauren added, “that Helios could have deployed all by itself. But we don’t really know what the deal is with that, yet.”

  “I see.” Arthur frowned. “And your partner managed to get through the day without beating anyone to death?”

  “Not to death, no, sir,” Lauren replied.

  Arthur seemed to be struggling with the temptation to ask. He put something in his mouth and bit into it. Lauren was pretty certain it was a Rolaids. “All right. And item number two?”

  “We found something inside the capsule,” Lauren said.

  Ellis placed the silver case on the table.

  “We found this in the lap of a scarecrow.”

  “A scarecrow?”

  “A spacesuit propped up to look like someone was inside it,” Ellis explained. “I’ll send you some pictures.”

  A moment later, Arthur studied the images on his tablet.

  “And it gets stranger,” Lauren told him. “Inside this case we found components of an experiment Dr. Lee had been working on—called the AWX experiment. It had to do with sending messages back in time. And we found this note.” She held up a plastic evidence bag.

  “‘Your move’? Whose move?”

  “We have no idea. Are you at all familiar with this experiment, sir?” Lauren figured this might be the reason why he, and others, were so freaked out about the Helios discovery.

  “I’ve heard rumors…” He waved off the question, then tried to answer it anyway. “I was just an analyst back then, so I wasn’t really privy to any of this. And the old files are so sanitized, they’re useless. But I do believe they saw him—and perhaps his experiment—as a major security threat.”

  “So why do you think he’d send this stuff back?” Lauren asked. “And why would he blow up the space station?”

  “I don’t know.” Arthur rubbed his brow. “From what I understand, it’s possible we forced him into a corner.”

  “I knew this guy didn’t go nuts,” Lauren said.

  “Now, hang on,” Arthur told her. “Don’t start with that stuff. Certainly there were mistakes made, but that was thirty years ago and nobody wants that old hornet’s nest shaken up again. Not given today’s politics.

  “Just wrap things up and get back as quickly as you can. I’ll coordinate with the Canadians about getting Helios back to the States, and get a forensic unit set up at Sea-Tac. In the meantime, you two get that case down to Dr. Watson at Los Alamos and see what he can make of it. And double-check with NASA’s historical archives to make sure these items match the actual items that went up. I don’t want to find out we’re chasing somebody’s crop circle.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lauren said.

  “Okay, there’s one other thing,” Arthur said. “I was in a meeting this morning with the CDC. This superbug virus is getting worse. So be vigilant. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And don’t be bringing that shit back to me.”

  “We won’t, sir.”

  “And take care of my plane.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Anything else? Special Agent Cole, you have anything to add?”

  “… There is one other thing,” Lauren said. “I had to discharge my weapon.”

  “Do we have a mess to clean up?” Arthur asked.

  “She had to scare away a bear,” Ellis said.

  “What kind of bear?” Arthur put another Rolaids in his mouth.

  “A grizzly,” Ellis told him. “A big brown one.”

  “Bigger than you?” Arthur quipped.

  “He didn’t see it,” Lauren said. “Special Agent Cole was inside the capsule at the time. And I just shot at the thing to scare it.”

  “Well, Annie Oakley, I can’t imagine you’d miss.” The deputy director thought a moment. “All right, just leave the bear out of your report. Why are we even wasting time talking about a bear? Lauren…” The deputy director seemed to blush. “I’ll spot you one of my bullets to cover the one you fired.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And Special Agent Cole…” Arthur gritted his teeth. “For God’s sake, keep your partner safe. That’s your damn job.” Arthur’s projected image flickered, then vanished.

  “Now we’re counting bullets?” Ellis looked around the airport coffee shop, returning his gaze to Lauren. “Careful that bullet doesn’t come on a necklace.”

  “Oh, you’re imagining things. He just doesn’t want to clutter up the report, that’s all.” Lauren sipped her hot chocolate and stared out at the falling snow. In the background she could hear the clatter of plates and the ambient buzz of conversation. She corralled her hot chocolate’s whipped cream and spooned it into her mouth. She looked across the table.

  Ellis was watching her.

  “This hot chocolate is really good.”

  Chapter 6

  At 6:05 A.M. the following morning, Lauren and Ellis touched down at Los Alamos County Airport. The altitude for the flight that morning had been a relatively low sixty-five thousand feet, due to the short distance and the fact that overland supersonic speeds were only allowed along the transcontinental corridor—and even then only by “low boom” designed aircraft (of which the G10-X qualified). The G10-X was also FRC (fully remote certified), meaning there were no pilots on board.

  By 7:15 A.M., Lauren and Ellis were having coffee with Dr. Alan Watson in the Applied Physics building at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

  “Three times in one year?” Dr. Watson raised his cup.

  “Just can’t seem to stay away.”

  Dr. Watson, a lanky man with close-cropped gray hair, looked particularly frazzled this morning. His desk was a trash heap of papers, electronic circuit boards, and vacuum chamber parts; his hands were jittery and there were a number of coffee cups scattered about the office. The cup he was currently drinking from had t
he word “coffee” written on it in big bold letters. Lauren wondered if that was a safety precaution.

  Presently, they were seated at a workbench at the center of the room.

  “We know these things must look like antiques to you,” Lauren said, as Ellis opened the silver case and turned it toward Dr. Watson. “But anything you can tell us about what they are and how they worked would really help our investigation.”

  “You know,” Dr. Watson said, picking up the cube with the words “AWX Temporal Transceiver” written on it, “I was so excited when you called that I stayed up half the night researching Dr. Lee’s work. Fascinating, fascinating stuff.” He studied the cube carefully, giving the other components a mere cursory glance. Then with his palsied hands he set the cube back into the die-cut foam.

  “Now, before you go getting your hopes up too high,” he said, “I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell you whether Dr. Lee was successful or not. His research was a little like alchemy. Alchemy in the sense that what he was doing was making these huge leaps based on some rather flimsy assumptions. Of course, he had the money to do whatever he wanted—and not that he was the first to do such a thing—but the leaps he made do make his work kind of hard to follow. Clever man, though. Very clever.”

  “But if he had been at all successful, someone would have picked up on his work, right?” Lauren asked.

  “I’m afraid funding to further the work of the madman who blew up the International Space Station would have been quite difficult to come by. So not a lot happened for quite some time. Today, however, there are a number of people working in this field. And one did an excellent job of detailing Dr. Lee’s work. She—Dr. Jane Carrols—claims that Dr. Lee’s work was based on a paper by James A. Caruthers, who proposed that, hypothetically, in accordance with Feynman and Wheeler’s absorber theory, one could inject an interference wave into a certain type of crystal called a ‘tuned crystal’ and send information back in time.

  “You see, Feynman and Wheeler postulated that transmitted particle-waves actually travel forward and backward in time. Simply put, when the forward-going wave reaches its destination, it sends a rebounding wave back to cancel out the backward-going wave. Caruthers proposed that if one could ‘affect’ the rebounding wave, one could ‘affect’ the canceling effect it has on the backward-going wave—what we call the advanced wave. And in this manner, signal modulation could be introduced and information sent backward in time. This is the idea behind what Dr. Lee called his Advanced Wave Interference Modulation Experiment—or just AWX for Advanced Wave Experiment.

  “It would be interesting to see if it’s still ringing.” Dr. Watson picked up the gold cube and rotated it in his hand. “Presumably, inside this cube is a tuned crystal. Probably about the size of a quarter.”

  “And it might be ringing?” Lauren asked.

  “Yes. This crystal that Dr. Lee manufactured is… well, I like to think of it—its lattice structure—as a kind of network of tiny tuning forks, all propagating vibrations, all perpetually keeping each other ringing. It’s kind of like a superconductor of phonons. You see, time symmetry in the quantum treatment of phonons can be applied in much the same way that one applies it to general electromagnetic field equations.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry—not to get too technical. The point is that information introduced into the crystal as a modulated signal has the potential to exist in there for quite some time. Generally, it takes years to see one of these things decay.”

  “So, you’re saying it’s possible that the information Dr. Lee injected into that crystal could still be in there—ringing?” Ellis asked.

  “It’s possible. But don’t expect it to be anything more than some binary code—encoded numbers or something like that. Remember, if he had something to tell us, here in the future, he would have simply written us a note.” Dr. Watson held out the cube in the palm of his hand. “What’s interesting is that, in theory, this thing is like a flash drive that takes any information uploaded into it and makes it automatically available to anyone at any point in time.”

  “Assuming it works,” Lauren said.

  “Yes, assuming it works.”

  “But,” Ellis said, “in order to send a message to someone back in time, you’d have to make sure that person had the crystal in hand—back there—otherwise they’d never see it, right?”

  “That’s right,” Dr. Watson agreed. “But think about it. This is exactly how we send messages forward in time. I don’t mean microseconds into the future, as in radio waves or what have you. I mean messages to people years in the future. Let me tell you, it’s no small feat that we can send messages to just the right space-time coordinates that far out.

  “Allow me to explain.” Dr. Watson went over to his desk and returned with a notepad and pen. “To fully appreciate how one would send a message backward in time, one must first appreciate how we send messages forward in time. Consider a simple forward-going message.”

  Dr. Watson wrote on the pad, “Greetings from the past!” Then he stared at his watch.

  “Okay. That’s ten seconds.” He held up the note. “This is a message from ten seconds in the past. Amazing, isn’t it?” He chuckled. “Okay, you’re not so impressed. But think about what I just did. I sent a message to the future from a moment that is, at least from our perspectives, completely disconnected from us across space and time. I mean, where is that moment now? It’s gone. But this message has made it here to me—to us.

  “Still not impressed? Well, consider then that the Earth is spinning at about 1,000 miles per hour and revolving around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour; the solar system is making its way through the Milky Way at about 515,000 miles per hour, and we could keep going on and on. But even if we account for just these speeds, in ten seconds the information on this notepad has traveled more than 1,600 miles.

  “Imagine trying to accomplish what this notepad has done with a particle beam. Where would we aim it? How could we possibly predict where the Earth will be in ten seconds? There are no absolute references out there, just relative ones based on other astronomical bodies. It would be like trying to predict where a grain of sand, tossed about at sea, will end up based on the relative positions of other grains of sand. And then, only those at our grain of sand’s depth—remember, we can’t even see the fourth dimension.

  “So, what’s this notepad’s secret? Well, obviously, it’s that it travels with us—through time. And this is how Dr. Lee’s crystal works—in principle—only going backward in time. Limiting, perhaps, but it’s the only way to direct a message to the right space-time coordinates.”

  “And so you just have to hope someone sees your message?” Ellis asked.

  “That’s what I did.” Dr. Watson held up the pad. “It was only ten seconds, so there was a pretty good chance that we would see it. Of course, a fire alarm could have gone off and we could have been rushed out of the building and the note destroyed in the fire. Nothing’s guaranteed, not when it comes to humans and events outside of our present moment of awareness. Although, I suppose if you want to get nitpicky, even present events only have a statistical chance of being true.”

  “But,” Lauren said, “what if Dr. Lee were to try to do the same demonstration—only going backward in time? So first he receives the message. And then, what if the building burns down? Now he can’t send the message that he’s already received.”

  “Lauren, Lauren, Lauren…” Dr. Watson patted one of her hands. “I know where you’re going with this, but time paradoxes are a myth. If that situation were to occur, then he simply wouldn’t have received the message in the first place—in all likelihood. Or there’d have to be some other explanation, that’s all. There’s something called the Novikov self-consistency principle, which states that any event that would cause a paradox has a zero probability of happening.

  “But”—Dr. Watson pointed at the ceiling—”as much as this sounds like some kind of safety feature within nature, it’s actually a very dange
rous thing.”

  “In what way?” Ellis asked.

  “First, remember that the message receiver and the message sender’s worlds exist simultaneously. Space and time exist as a continuum. So don’t think in terms of having to go to the future first in order to send a message back to yourself. You’re already there.

  “Now, let’s say you set up a time-messaging experiment and successfully receive your message from the future. But then the you in the future decides not to send the message back. Well, all you’ve managed to do is destroy the most likely way in which the message gets sent. Because the one thing you do know is that you did receive the message.

  “So, on a distribution curve that represents all the possible scenarios in which the message gets sent, you managed to eliminate the most probable—and probably safest—one. That leaves nothing but all the crap at the bottom of the curve—crazy scenarios like, I don’t know, a lightning strike that causes a relay to fire which in turn somehow sends the message, or perhaps you simply have a stroke and fall on the send button. Who knows?”

  “Someone could send the message from further in the future, too, right?” Lauren said.

  “Absolutely. You really have no way of knowing when the message came from. But then you have to ask, Why did they send the message? You may know your own motives—but people in the future? Who knows what they could be up to? You see, by trying to set up a paradox, all you’re really doing is moving the freakier scenarios up the probability curve.”

  “So you just have to hope your future self doesn’t succumb to the temptation of not sending the message?” Ellis asked.

  “No, no, no. You simply have to keep the cat in the box.” Dr. Watson smiled at their blank stares. “As in Schrödinger’s cat—the thought experiment in which a cat is placed inside a sealed box with a nuclear trigger that may or may not release a poison gas. The idea is that there’s no way of knowing if the cat is dead or alive without opening the box. So, until the box is opened, both possibilities exist.”

  “What’s that got to do with time-messaging?” Ellis asked.

  “Oh—simple. If the receiver of the message stays inside a box, the sender doesn’t know if the receiver received the message. So he’s powerless to set up a paradox. In fact, Dr. Jane Carrols—that researcher who did such a great job detailing Dr. Lee’s work—actually proposed two commandments that one must adhere to in order to perform a safe time-messaging experiment.”