‘For example,’ said Hubert, ‘if the sun went out all at once, we wouldn’t even notice until eight minutes later. That’s the time it takes the sun’s light to reach us. And yet it’s the closest star to us!’
‘And what about the others, the ones that are further away?’
‘Some died out millions of years ago,’ said Hubert. ‘But by the time the light reaches us, we see them as they were back then.’
My, my, thought Hector, so we’ve found a way to turn back time.
‘So if you travelled a very long way from earth faster than the speed of light, you’d see earth as it was hundreds or thousands of years ago?’
‘Yes, but it’s impossible. Because you can’t go faster than light. At best, if you could zoom off at the same speed as light, you’d still see the earth exactly as it was when you left it, so you wouldn’t have got much out of going.’
‘Why can’t we go faster than light?’
‘There are several answers to that. We are made of fairly heavy atoms. So we can’t go faster than light, which itself has neither mass nor weight. You could also say that the faster a body goes, the more energy is needed to make it go faster, according to the general theory of relativity. So, when you approach the speed of light, you’d need infinite energy to go faster, and nothing and no one has infinite energy.’
Hector thought that Roger would have said that God has infinite energy, and that only God could have taken you back in time. Besides, He Himself had created it, according to different philosophers who believed in Him.
‘So we can’t go back in time?’
‘Nope.’
‘Can we travel into the future?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Hubert.
Amazing! thought Hector. People could travel into the future, but no one had mentioned it in the newspapers.
‘But how?’
‘Perhaps you know that the biggest discovery of relativity is that time doesn’t go by everywhere always at the same speed.’
Hector vaguely remembered this.
‘Basically, time goes by slower for you if you’re going faster or if you’re passing close by a very heavy body, like Earth for instance.’
‘Do you have an example?’
‘Yes, of course. If you were on a spacecraft travelling at close to the speed of light while I stayed on Earth, and I was able to look at your watch through a telescope, I’d see yours running more slowly than mine, even if we were wearing exactly the same type of watch . . .’
‘And what about when I got back to Earth?’
‘I’d be twenty years older than you, whereas from your point of view you’d only have been travelling for a few days.’
Hector thought to himself that this was the kind of time travel you didn’t necessarily want to do! Travelling into the future and coming back to find all the people you loved very old, or even long since dead!
‘And there’d be no going back,’ added Hubert.
HECTOR AND THE LOTTERY TICKET
HECTOR asked Hubert if looking at the stars made you believe in God.
‘Do you know the story about the first cosmonaut who came back to earth saying, “I journeyed into the heavens, but I never saw God or the angels”?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, a surgeon, one who believed in God, replied, “I’ve operated on brains, but I’ve never seen a single thought!”’
Hector said to himself that, contrary to what psychiatrists sometimes said, some surgeons were really very intelligent.
They decided to head back, because it was beginning to get really cold, and Hector wished he was wearing the extra-warm anorak he’d had when he was with the Inuit.
‘Some of my colleagues who believe in God say the proof that He exists is that we wouldn’t exist if the laws of physics had been the slightest bit different.’
Hubert explained that the world worked according to three or four laws. Each one corresponded to a specific number that was called a constant, because it never changed. Hector remembered having learnt the ‘g’ constant for the law which explained how fast things fell, as the cable car might on the way back down. Hubert knew some other constants for more complicated laws, like the speed of light or how atoms fell together.
‘Now, if these four constants were slightly different, the laws of physics wouldn’t be the same. The universe couldn’t have got started, if you like. The stars would have collapsed in on themselves and everything would have fused together. That’s not the Big Bang any more, but the Big Crunch. Or else, everything would have vaporised. And so the Big Bang wouldn’t have worked, and we wouldn’t have a nice expanding universe with conditions for life on at least one planet, as we do now. They say it’s not chance that the constants of physics are like that, out of millions of different possibilities, and it proves that God exists.’
‘And what do you think of that?’
‘If the laws were different, we wouldn’t be here to wonder about the existence of God anyway. So, just because we’re the result of one combination out of millions of possible combinations, it doesn’t prove that it was God’s choice. Similarly, if you buy the one ticket out of millions that wins the lottery, that doesn’t prove that it was God’s doing . . .’
‘And you?’ asked Hector.
‘I believe in God,’ said Hubert. ‘But it doesn’t have anything to do with all that,’ he said, motioning towards the sky.
Just then, a young astronomer came to tell Hubert that he had to come and see something.
Hector followed them, but he was a little disappointed – he had been expecting to look at the stars through the telescope but these were just computer screens with all sorts of waves and numbers which scrolled by at top speed.
‘We’re verifying a hypothesis,’ said Hubert.
He tried to explain the hypothesis to Hector: the more the stars moved away from each other, the faster and faster they did so . . . A little like: the more a person grows away from you, the faster and faster they do so, but Hector thought it best not to share this comparison with Hubert.
‘And parallel universes?’ asked Hector.
He was remembering Madame Irina and the shaman.
‘That’s a good question,’ said Hubert.
‘And are there any good answers?’
‘Some physicists have thought that there isn’t just one space-time, like the one in which I’m talking to you, here, now, but that there are others, each with a different probability of existence.’
‘So it’s possible?’
‘Let’s just say that it would be compatible with some theories put forward by some very serious people.’
Hector thought of Madame Irina and her little trains, and also the shaman and his journeys. Were they and others like them able to travel in the curvatures of space-times?
‘Sometimes,’ said Hubert, ‘I tell myself that in a parallel universe my wife hasn’t left me and we’re very happy. But, just my luck, I’m stuck in the space-time where things turned out badly!’
Hector thought that if one day time travel became a possibility, psychiatrists would have a lot less work.
Before going to bed, he wrote:
Time Exercise No. 20: Read a good science book about time and the theory of relativity. Spend a bit of time understanding why if we can’t go faster than the speed of light then we can’t go back in time.
He remembered that a great scientist had written several books about this, and some of them had lovely pictures to help explain things. This scientist’s body had been paralysed little by little by a terrible illness that doctors didn’t yet know how to cure, but even though his body could no longer move much, that didn’t stop his mind travelling alongside the light from the stars, the expanding universe and time.
HECTOR AND YING LI AT THE TOP OF THE
MOUNTAIN
HECTOR was standing at the top of the mountain. He saw Ying Li coming to meet him on a little path. It was very cold and Ying Li was wrapped in a great big fur coat with a hood which made her look a bit like an Inuit.
She smiled as she got closer to Hector. Just then, he realised that they didn’t need to actually speak, since they were speaking to each other in their thoughts. And Ying Li told him that, the other day, she’d wanted to thank him for changing her life, but she hadn’t had the nerve.
Hector replied that it was life that had changed them both. Anyway, sooner or later, someone would have wanted to change Ying Li’s life, because they would have wanted to save her from the situation she was in when Hector first met her. Ying Li gave a little nod, and in front of them appeared the softly lit bar where they’d met. But Hector couldn’t see himself there, just lots of beautiful girls with men who were pleased with themselves, and Ying Li leaning her elbows on the bar right beside a Chinese man with his hair plastered back and a gold watch, who was drinking cognac and laughing as he stroked her arm. Ying Li was pretending to be happy and to find him funny. Then Hector saw her sitting on a bed in a hotel room looking sad, with a fat white man stark naked in the bathroom telling her with a laugh to come and join him. And then he saw her very late at night and very tired eating Chinese noodles in a little café with a friend who had too much make-up on and looked very tired too. He could see Ying Li at the bar again, with other men who were putting their arms round her waist and whispering in her ear, and then he saw her sitting on a big sofa in the shadows beside men who took her hand and fondled her breasts. And during this time Ying Li drank more and more cognac, and he saw her getting fatter and older. Then he saw her on a train arriving at quite a sad Chinese city with lots of factory chimney stacks, and he saw a big factory where Ying Li screwed little screws into little thingamajigs surrounded by hundreds of workers, and then, in the evening, he saw her coming home to quite a nice house where her mother and her two sisters lived, with a little shop that her mother ran, because that was what she had to show for all those years spent in bars and hotels – a nice house and a little shop – while the other workers went back to sleep in dormitories. And, in the evening, Ying Li helped her mother a bit in the little shop, and she also helped look after her sisters’ children. Her sisters had husbands who also worked in the factory. But Ying Li didn’t have a husband, because no husband would have wanted a girl who wasn’t a spring chicken any more, and who’d spent too much time far away in the big city full of bars and hotels.
Hector realised that he’d just seen Ying Li’s life without him, and that this life was as real as the other one, and that perhaps it existed in a parallel universe like those of Madame Irina and her friends, the presentists.
And, at the same time as he felt his heart go out to the Ying Li who was still living that life, he didn’t know who to thank for having met the Ying Li who was standing beside him now. But she knew who to thank, because she gave Hector a little bow with her hands together as they did in the old monk’s country before very respectable people, or before the statue they called the Enlightened One.
HECTOR CAN’T DREAM IN PEACE
JUST then, Hector woke up. The telephone was ringing in his bedroom. It was Édouard!
‘It’s the shaman again. Now he says you have to go to an island.’
‘But I’ve just come from one,’ said Hector, because the Chinese city he’d just come from was indeed an island.
‘No, it can’t be that one. The shaman said: “An island where the Kablunaks live a little like the Inuit.”’
Hector couldn’t hear Édouard very well, because there was lots of music and noise in the background. Édouard told him that he was in the last Kablunak town before Inuit country, where there were quite a few bars and some hotels.
‘I’m not sure I’m completely cured,’ said Édouard, who was having a bit of trouble with his words.
Hector remembered that, before, Édouard had been a regular at the softly lit bar where he’d met Ying Li.
He went back to sleep.
Hector was zooming along on a snowmobile with Roger, who seemed even more enormous muffled up in bearskins, and Noumen, the big dog, was bounding along beside them.
‘What you have to understand,’ said Roger, frowning, ‘is that eternity isn’t time which lasts for ever! Eternity is outside time; it encompasses the past, the present and the future all at once. Only God is eternal!’
At these words, Noumen looked at them with his pale eyes and said, ‘Of course, but then what did God do before the world was created? Was there time then?’
‘God sees the past, the present and the future at the same time,’ said Roger. ‘For Him, time doesn’t go by. God is outside time, He’s in eternity!’
‘That doesn’t answer my question,’ said Noumen with a cheerful little yap.
‘The present is just a reflection of eternity in time!’ Roger cried out.
‘Fine words,’ retorted Noumen, ‘but wouldn’t the answer to the mystery of life in time and space lie outside time and space? If that’s true, then where does the answer lie?’
Roger wanted to answer, but just then they went too fast over a big bump, and Roger and Hector and the snowmobile were catapulted into the air while Noumen barked and the telephone rang.
It was Clara.
‘I had an awful dream,’ said Clara, sounding all upset.
‘Everything’s fine,’ said Hector. ‘What kind of dream?’
‘You didn’t come back,’ said Clara. ‘You became a kind of monk with a shaved head and orange tunic, right at the top of a mountain. Lots of pretty Chinese women came to bow and pray to you.’
‘That doesn’t sound too awful,’ said Hector, smiling.
‘Stop it! It was awful, awful,’ said Clara, laughing and crying at the same time.
Hector asked her how she was doing, and Clara said she was doing better. She had been to see old François, and they’d talked about time passing.
‘He’s going to write to you. But not to talk about me, of course.’
Old François couldn’t talk to Hector about Clara. It was what they call doctor–patient confidentiality, and psychiatrists almost always respect it.
Afterwards, Hector tried to go back to sleep, but he couldn’t.
An island where the Kablunaks live a little like the Inuit?
This time, he was back at the station on the mountain with the little wooden train, and the old Chinese man with the cap was holding his ticket out to him.
‘Don’t you recognise me?’ he asked Hector.
No, Hector didn’t recognise him . . .
Then the phone rang again. It was Marie-Agnès.
‘Ahh,’ she said, ‘I’ve had a devil of a time getting hold of you.’
‘Why not use the internet?’ asked Hector, who was a little annoyed at being woken up for the third time.
‘Oh, I’ve never really known how to work those things. Anyway, my Paul wanted to invite you to a big conference. A conference about time with lots of big names from different fields.’
Hector knew that these days, no matter what the conference was about, somebody always invited a psychiatrist. It was a little like smoked salmon at a buffet: it isn’t always good, but if there isn’t any, people will miss it. So he didn’t much fancy going to this conference.
‘Look,’ said Marie-Agnès, ‘I can tell that you’re not wildly enthusiastic about it, but I’d really like you to come.’
‘Why?’
‘My Paul’s just had a massive panic attack. I found him shaking all over when I woke up, and really not happy at all. “I control everything,” he told me, “and yet I control nothing.” I knew right away that he was in a bad way. So I thought it would do him good to see you, and pretty quickly too. But, of course, he’ll never
admit that he needs to see a psychiatrist . . . So I told him I was going to call you, about the conference . . .’
Marie-Agnès told him where she and Paul were waiting for him to come and join them, and then Hector knew for sure that he had to go there straight away.
An island where the Kablunaks live a little like the Inuit!
HECTOR MEETS AN IMPORTANT MAN
‘I’M very glad you came,’ said Paul. ‘I’m sorry we only let you know at the last minute.’
Behind Paul, Hector could see the columns of a ruined temple outlined against the deep blue of the sea. Marie-Agnès, Paul and he were sitting on a stone bench which, in the shade of an olive tree, looked almost as old as the temple.
Marie-Agnès seemed delighted – she was very proud to show off her wonderful Paul to Hector and to show off her brilliant psychiatrist to Paul, and also to think that perhaps they were going to get on well.
Still, Hector had noticed the flicker of panic in Paul’s eyes. He wondered when they’d have the chance to talk about it.
‘Your name isn’t on the programme yet, but we’re printing a new one right now. We’ll have it in . . . a few minutes,’ said Paul, looking at his watch.
At first sight, Paul hardly looked much older than Hector. Hector could see that he didn’t have any grey hair at all, but now, thanks to the nurse’s remark, he knew that this just meant Paul had an excellent hairdresser. Hector could also see that Paul had practically none of those little wrinkles around his eyes. He wondered if it was because he’d found an anti-ageing cream that was better than all the rest, or if his doctor or surgeon colleagues had managed to smooth away those signs of ageing.
Paul talked quickly and fidgeted a lot in his chair. Under his shirt, you could make out real muscles, and you got the feeling he kept in shape by working out. So, all in all, you might have thought he was much younger than he really was. Except in certain lights, Hector had noticed. When the light hit him from above, like in this blazing sunshine, you could suddenly see that Paul’s face was that of a man his age (that’s to say, a good dog and a half more than Hector).
Hector and the Search for Lost Time Page 10