Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  You or I might have merely stipulated that it was impossible for an ordinary positive energy particle to make a transition to negative energy. But Dirac was not an ordinary man. He was a genius, the greatest physicist of all, and he had an answer. If every possible negative energy state was already occupied, a particle couldn’t drop into a negative energy state. Ah ha! So Dirac postulated that the entire universe is entirely filled with negative energy particles. They surround us, permeate us, in the vacuum of outer space and in the center of the earth, every possible place a particle could be. An indefinitely dense “sea” of negative energy particles. The Dirac sea.

  His argument had holes in it, but that comes later.

  Once I went to visit the crucifixion. I took a jet from Santa Cruz to Tel Aviv, and a bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. On a hill outside the city, I dove through the Dirac sea.

  I arrived in my three-piece suit. No way to help that, unless I wanted to arrive naked. The land was surprisingly green and fertile, more so than I expected. The hill was now a farm, covered with grape arbors and olive trees. I hid the coils behind some rocks and walked down the road. I didn’t get far. Five minutes on the road, I ran into a group of people. They had dark hair, dark skin, and wore clean, white tunics. Romans? Jews? Egyptians? How could I tell? They spoke to me, but I couldn’t understand a word. After a while two of them held me, while a third searched me. Were they robbers, searching for money? Romans, searching for some kind of identity papers? I realized how naive I’d been to think I could just find appropriate dress and somehow blend in with the crowds. Finding nothing, the one who’d done the searching carefully and methodically beat me up. At last he pushed me face down in the dirt. While the other two held me down, he pulled out a dagger and slashed through the tendons on the back of each leg. They were merciful, I guess. They left me with my life. Laughing and talking incomprehensibly among themselves, they walked away.

  My legs were useless. One of my arms was broken. It took me four hours to crawl back up the hill, dragging myself with my good arm. Occasionally people would pass by on the road, studiously ignoring me. Once I reached the hiding place, pulling out the Renselz coils and wrapping them around me was pure agony. By the time I entered return on my keypad I was wavering in and out of consciousness. I finally managed to get it entered. From the Dirac sea the ripples converged . . .

  and I was in my hotel room in Santa Cruz. The ceiling had started to fall in where the girders had burned through. Fire alarms shrieked and wailed, there was no place to run. The room was filled with a dense, acrid smoke. Trying not to breathe, I punched out a code on the keypad, somewhere, anywhere other than that one instant . . .

  and I was in the hotel room, five days before. I gasped for breath. The woman in the hotel bed shrieked and tried to pull the covers up. The man screwing her was too busy to pay any mind. They weren’t real anyway. I ignored them and paid a little more attention to where to go next. Back to ’65, I figured. I punched in the combo . . .

  and was standing in an empty room on the thirtieth floor of a hotel just under construction. A full moon gleamed on the silhouettes of silent construction cranes. I flexed my legs experimentally. Already the memory of pain was beginning to fade. That was reasonable, because it never happened. Time travel. It’s not immortality, but it’s got to be the next best thing.

  You can’t change the past, no matter how you try.

  In the morning I explored Dancer’s pad. It was crazy, a small third floor apartment a block off Haight Ashbury that had been converted into something from another planet. The floor of the apartment had been completely covered with old mattresses, on top of which was a jumbled confusion of quilts, pillows, Indian blankets, stuffed animals. You took off your shoes before coming in—Dancer always wore sandals, leather ones from Mexico with soles cut from old tires. The radiators, which didn’t work anyway, were sprayed in Dayglo colors. The walls were plastered with posters: Peter Max prints, brightly colored Eschers, poems by Allen Ginsberg, record album covers, peace rally posters, a “Haight is Love” sign, FBI ten-most-wanted posters torn down from a post office with the photos of famous antiwar activists circled in Magic Marker®, a huge peace symbol in passion pink. Some of the posters were illuminated with black light and luminesced in impossible colors. The air was musty with incense and the banana sweet smell of dope. In one corner a record player played “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” on infinite repeat. Whenever one copy of the album got too scratchy, inevitably one of Dancer’s friends would bring in another.

  He never locked the door. “Somebody wants to rip me off, well, hey, they probably need it more than I do anyway, okay? It’s cool.” People dropped by any time of day or night.

  I let my hair grow long. Dancer and Lisa and I spent that summer together, laughing, playing guitar, making love, writing silly poems and sillier songs, experimenting with drugs. That was when LSD was blooming onto the scene like sunflowers, when people Were still unafraid of the strange and beautiful world on the other side of reality. That was a time to live. I knew that it was Dancer that Lisa truly loved, not me, but in those days free love was in the air like the scent of poppies, and it didn’t matter. Not much, anyway.

  NOTES FOR A LECTURE

  ON TIME TRAVEL (continued)

  Having postulated that all of space was filled with an infinitely dense sea of negative energy particles, Dirac went on further and asked if we, in the positive-energy universe, could interact with this negative energy sea. What would happen, say, if you added enough energy to an electron to take it out of the negative energy sea? Two things: first, you would create an electron, seemly out of nowhere. Second, you would leave behind a “hole” in the sea. The hole, Dirac realized, would act as if it were a particle itself, a particle exactly like an electron except for one thing: it would have the opposite charge. But if the hole ever encountered an electron, the electron would fall back into the Dirac sea, annihilating both electron and hole in a bright burst of energy. Eventually they gave the hole in the Dirac sea a name of its own: “positron.” When Anderson discovered the positron two years later to vindicate Dirac’s theory, it was almost an anticlimax.

  And over the next fifty years, the reality of the Dirac sea was almost ignored by physicists. Antimatter, the holes in the sea, was the important feature of the theory; the rest was merely a mathematical artifact.

  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 further 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 traveler 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 the cleft of rocks above the pass, to photograph the weary travelers in the 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 fire trucks 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. Dancer took the largest dose, since he wasn’t going to return. 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 on 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 explained 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, 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 ravenous 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. He never had headaches. We decided to go on 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 your 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. 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 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 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 have 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 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.

  ROAD MAP

  F.M. Busby

  He woke, hungry. The waking was sudden, not like his usual gradual drift to consciousness; he was fully alert. He opened his eyes and saw blurred masses of bright color—he couldn’t bring them into sharp focus. He tried to bring his hands up to rub the sleep away. He couldn’t do it; he felt the texture of cloth under his hands and vaguely saw them move, but something was wrong with his control, his coordination.

  For a moment he was close to panic. Then he thought, Whatever it is, it doesn’t hurt—and I can feel and move; there’s no paralysis or numbness. Searching for an explanation, he won
dered if he’d had some sort of surgery, and was suffering aftereffects from the anesthetic.

  He couldn’t recall planning or needing any operation, but temporary amnesia might be another side-effect. The thought encouraged him—rather, the realization that his mind was working well enough to think of it. Deliberately, he began to test his memory of the basic facts about himself: name, age, marital status, state of health—the lot.

  Ralph Ascione, age fifty-eight, two years a widower—he paused to weather one of his still-frequent bursts of missing Elizabeth, and caught it short of seeing her death again.

  Health good, so long as he took care of his heart. Thought of that organ also gave him pause, but he decided his symptoms were nothing like those of his one serious attack. The mental recitation continued; the facts were all there: height, weight, home address, date of his son’s imminent wedding, and all the numbers that specified the life of Ralph Ascione. His memories were sharply defined and readily accessible. The only thing that eluded him was any explanation of his condition.

  What more could he learn of it? He listened, but heard only vague sounds that told him nothing. His mutinous hands brushed nothing but cloth. His tongue touched bare gums; where were his dentures? The air smelled of hospital; that part of his guess was probably right

  He squinted and tried to focus his eyes. If he were seeing at all correctly, his bed was a cage, at least five or six feet high—but open at the top. He considered the possibility of insanity but rejected it; the discrepancies that disturbed him were physical. And he didn’t feel sick . . .

  Below his middle was warm wetness; whatever his ailment, it included incontinence. He felt depression; maybe his state was worse than he had thought.

  A new sound came; in the blurred distances, something moved. Vaguely seen, a huge face loomed over him and made soft, deep clucking noises. Then he understood.