by Paul Pipkin
Near the end of our farther yesteryear, she’d attempted to poison my love with a lurid recitation of having done her intended, along with two of his friends, at a church youth outing—the location being plausible enough for the time and place. However, I would later realize that it had to have been a fantasy. There was no way those boys had it up for pulling a train. Not a matter of scruples. Their cowboy image notwithstanding, such indulgence was far too country for Texas city kids of that era. Having to get naked and perform in each other’s presence, and thereby kicking in the boys’ ubiquitous homophobia, pretty much rendered group sex implausible.
My reaction to the purported ravishment was, at the time, “inappropriate” even to me, not to mention probably providing her with horrified confirmation that I could be regarded as a wrong person. Inexplicably aroused, I found myself loving her even more. Now I had to wonder—might that early expression of voyeurism, with a discernible masochistic edge, have tightened a kink that would finally help bend my attention after Seabrook’s strange devices? In any event, I did love her yet. Read my story and tell me how could I not.
In our adult era, I had begun to press for additional dimensions to our renewed relationship, to get it out of the bedroom alone. So, we had begun taking lunch, almost daily, in a park on the San Antonio River where we could talk and feed the ducks. Middle-aged love is different. It can be calmer and more thoughtful. Still, it was there that I argued with the preposterous concern of distress to her grown children, of whom I knew only vaguely, never having been allowed to meet them. My take was that adults who owed her their lives should damned well put up with her. I knew that the end was near when, at our usual parting kiss, she dropped her chin.
I would learn so much more about JJ, and our world, and myself that it would strain the limits of credulity. Suffice it to say that you now possess the constellation of events that sparked the inception of my quest. If you are inclined, as was my little love, to serve the gods of the mundane at all costs, you may then regard what followed as obsession going over into dementia. If so, then seek other reading material. For you will surely abhor the circumstances that followed from my determination to conclude the unfinished story of William Seabrook.
Driven by the subjective need to unravel the mysteries of the aberrant memories with their twists and warps of chronology, of just what the hell had happened to me then and later, I turned a different eye to my youthful fantasies of other worlds, other realities. Increasingly, I no longer cared about very much apart from this single eccentric interest. My life winding down, only an elderly dog left dependent on me—it takes no deep psychology to comprehend such a solitary obsession.
I’d found that almost all authorities agreed that Murray Leinster had published the oldest and wildest explicitly branching-worlds story as far back as 1934. Many later authors took inspiration from this original piece. Greg Benford, a physicist and science fiction writer, would ultimately speculate whether Everett himself might not have drawn his original notion from Leinster. A daring concept for a physicist, to suggest that a scientist might have been inspired by a science fiction writer rather than the other way around!
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A MYSTERY MAN OF PHYSICS, Hugh Everett III devised the “relative state” formulation of quantum mechanics around 1956. Given its bizarre and supposedly counterintuitive properties, his vision of a cosmos with essentially infinite numbers of branching realities received scant credence when published the following year.4 Even rendered into more popularly accessible form in the seventies, it was ridiculed as pure science fantasy until theoretical work late in the century suggested that bases for practical experimentation existed. To be coldly realistic, you might say, until the invisible government perceived such benefits as unbreakable cryptography in it.
The viewpoint of another generation ruled in that earlier world. Our old redbrick school building would never have survived a good earthquake. Nevertheless, when the siren sounded, we were required to crawl under our desks and pathetically hide our eyes with our little hands against the imaginary blast. As an eleven-year-old looking up at the arched tops of the high windows, still opaque with the blackout paint from the last war, I had known only that I was regularly made afraid. Forget Happy Days and similar tripe. On the whole, the children of the fifties did not dream, for to dream was only to ride the nightmare.
I found it depressingly easy to sum up in a few sentences everything that was publicly known about “the late Hugh Everett,” as he was commonly referenced. It was not easy to locate even so much as an exact date of death. For a while, I wondered if he might not have been a suicide, as had Seabrook and a number of other principals in this strange saga. Eventually, I concluded that his relationship to the Cold War defense establishment had at least some bearing on the dearth of information.
I’d grown exasperated with intriguing but vague descriptions such as “maverick physicist,” “unaffiliated with institutions,” et cetera. With some amusement, I noted that, in physical science’s own political paraworld, one unaffiliated with any academic institution is deemed to have left the field. What a naughty boy Everett must have been to follow the Cold War example set by Teller and numerous other Dr. Strangeloves.
It was painful to learn of a lecture trip Everett made during the late seventies to the University of Texas at Austin, careening about the campus in a Cadillac with steer horns. In those years I’d owned a successful nightclub in the North Texas Metroplex. I’d possessed the liberty and interest to attend his lecture, had I known about it. With renewed popular interest, Everett had planned to do more work, but died of a heart attack in 1982. Sadly, I knew that the earlier collaborators had distanced themselves, to greater or lesser degrees, from his theory.
During my research, I realized that there had never been much imperative toward democratization of scientific information in the West. Quite the contrary. Before the Second World War, only a handful of scientists and science writers, principally in Britain, undertook to explain to the people what science was all about. This “Invisible College,” primarily of leftist political persuasion, included J.B.S. Haldane and J.D. Bernal. On the literary side, they were linked with Aldous Huxley and Olaf Stapledon. In science, their tradition led back to the great Paul Dirac.
In the pivotal years of 1938–41, their efforts grew frenetic. Through the cold British rain, they could watch across the Channel the rampage of a beast that made the monsters of our own societies look benign by comparison. In the fall of 1939, the war machine began to roll. On the Continent, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and the other great physicists who did not have to run for their lives were forced into a lackadaisical abstractedness by the preposterous tenets of “Aryan science.”
During the war, state security consumed all the powers, and the Cold War came hard on its heels. Thanks largely to the influx of German and Jewish scientists, America had come up to speed in physics. Scientific American was no longer, as it had been earlier in the century, on a par with Popular Mechanics. While we ate off Formica and watched Ozzie and Harriet struggle with chrome toasters, there came a move in government actively to suppress the dissemination of most scientific information. Speeches in the Congressional Record tended not so much toward hysteria about Communist agents as to ridiculous propositions that high-school students might build atomic bombs in the bathtub. Fear of the people themselves! Ideology lapsed into an elitist mode. You were supposed to “trust” those who “knew more.”
As with a rumor in 1938 that the Nazis had split the atom, a certain moderation of this stratification of society into initiates and morons became necessary during panic over Soviet space successes. Still, this would remain the atmosphere Hugh Everett came up against when, by the year of Sputnik, he extracted from quantum mechanics a truly rationalist interpretation. I mean to say, the one that would allow even a single universe to exist without some subjective observer to magically “collapse the wave function.”
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BY THE DARK DECEMBER OF 1941, as the world’s empires locked in a struggle to the death, the great Richard Feynman had visualized a physical entity whose very existence was defined by reciprocal interaction with its own past. He had already developed an approach that many regard as the precursor of the many-worlds interpretation. Feynman had broken with convention to present the novel image of a particle “turning a corner” in time. I didn’t believe that he could have arrived at a concept of converging pasts without some preconceived notion of the branching worlds.5
Simultaneously, in England, the little engineer J.W. Dunne was nearing the end of his life. Before “turning the corner,” he’d been feverishly trying to explain, to a war-haunted world, the implications for human immortality of the physics of time. Fiction writers close to the sciences spun fantasies that would sometimes spookily illustrate those notions. The collective mind at work, or something else? I wondered what the good Catholic boy Hugh Everett had begun to read by age eleven.
A movement caught out of the corner of my eye had interrupted my musings. When I glanced about, nothing was there. The dog was outside, and my living room was silent, empty. It had been too large for a mouse, and there had not been a cat around for years. Trying to return to my work, I found myself confused by one of those uncanny moments when the arrangement of materials on my desk seemed quite unlike I had thought I’d left it. I could not refrain from processing the momentary episode in terms of my fascinations.
Driving against fatigue on the Laredo highway, I’d once or twice swerved to avoid a figure suddenly glimpsed on the shoulder. Looking back, there would be no one in sight. If we live that near to a hallucinatory state—if just a tiny biochemical change can induce visions, then why cannot we conjure, almost at will, those beloved images we would most desire to see?
I wondered at such episodes, which all experience with some regularity. Might they not be fleeting perceptions of moments in other worlds, where the cat was on patrol and there was indeed a hitchhiker by the roadside? Might not we appear as ghosts in their worlds, as they in ours?
Could such seemingly random sightings constitute “observations” more sweeping than the alternate paths of single particles? Might communication among world-branches, “calls” made over an “Everett phone,” be more readily received than visualized in all the elaborate setups of “hard” science fiction? Might not the technological foo-foo be but metaphor for a faculty more accessible than our ordinary sense of sanity finds comfortable? If so, what signposts might guide observations along and across a network of branching time-highways? Did more recent science suggest any kind of grid lines that might be discernible to a perception extended across a branching cosmos?
My admittedly subjective obsession could focus on at least one demonstrable concern. One thing that I could get my hands on was the anomaly of the preconception, the notion, of the branching worlds having worked itself out in literature decades before Everett’s formalism of 1956–57. I addressed myself to this evolution of ideas, from the presumed completion of quantum formalism in the twenties to the more recent interpretations.
I then recalled an article I’d read some years before by David Deutsch, then a young physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. Speculating about the future possibilities of quantum computing, he’d convinced me from a philosophical standpoint that the many-worlds interpretation constituted the only truly rationalist, materialist resolution of the quantum impasse.6
I found a few recent articles by and about Deutsch, who’d become a major theoretician of quantum computing. I was elated to learn that a new book had just been released. In it, he described the use of an algorithm developed by Peter Shor of Bell Labs, among the earliest mathematical processes for quantum computer setups, that seemed to necessitate the employment of computation resources in many worlds simultaneously. Arguing that the classical idea that there is only one universe was thus destroyed, Deutsch threw down the gauntlet to those still clinging to a single-universe worldview. He challenged them to explain how Shor’s algorithm works. In fact, that question had been addressed years before the work of Deutsch—or Shor—had posed it.
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“THERE EXISTS A FASCINATING THEORY that two worlds branch from every bit of destiny action,”7 wrote the science fiction author Andre Norton, who had begun her writing in “another world,” where it was years before her readers could be allowed to know she was a woman.
Conducting a systematic search for the specific inputs that had framed my notions, memory returned of hours spent fishing worn covers from high, dark bookshelves in an old library as spooky and exciting to a boy’s eye as anything dreamed by Ray Bradbury. Also, the garish covers of old paperbacks and pulp magazines, purchased for a few cents in used bookshops, logically had to have been from even earlier decades than the hardbounds I recalled. As I recovered bit after bit, the old Halloween thrill returned to quicken my fifty-year-old heart.
In The Door into Summer, Robert Heinlein entertained, then dismissed, the “old” notion of branching time streams. The trick was in the word “old.” A notion might well be old, as old as the fairies in their paraworld beyond the hollow hills, but Heinlein gave one to believe that he was arguing against a scientific theory. His story was in print months before the publication of the theory he had referenced. That was among the mildest of the contradictions.
I had soon begun to go well beyond my own personal time in the pursuit of the research. I didn’t know what my associates thought of my lowered productivity, as I would sign out into the field, then bury myself in more modern libraries. I’d turned out to be a really very good labor representative, in spite of burnout from watching unjust spectacles, such as lifetime employees being sacked while dull and impotent union organizations did nothing. For what little good I’d accomplished, I did not want to be considered as having gone over the top.
A rep may function quite well being thought of as a playlike lawyer, corrupter of public morals, or even as a goon, but “airhead” is not an appropriate image. That simply would not do! However, as with many of the workers I’d helped with problems on the job, my position had “downsizing” clearly scrawled all over it. I knew the job wouldn’t last much longer, so I seized the opportunity to plunge bodily into the questions raised by the developing “temporal anomaly” I was uncovering among writers’ memoirs and publication dates.
Not alone economic struggle, but life itself seems to decree against discovering that anything our secret hearts long to believe just might turn out to be the case. We teach our children the “hard facts of life”—not facts unless they kick you back, right? There is no Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy and, along these lines, your narrator hardly had opportunity to so fantasize.
What I’d expected and hoped to find was that, “somewhere in time,” an esoteric tradition embracing the plurality of worlds had existed in the physical community, as physicists refer to their collective self. I thought that its notions might have been processed through the literati until science fiction writers rendered them into print. This had seemed highly possible in Britain, where the genre was not ghettoized, set apart from literature, as in America.
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“READING HARD SCIENCE FICTION IS A POOR WAY TO LEARN SCIENCE…. The reader of science fiction… may ‘know’ many things that are not so, if only through the process of osmosis.”8
From a standpoint of rigorously proven experimental facts, this caveat should be well taken. However, science fiction fandom has never really shared this perception. Much as they may deny it, the fans have always wished to believe that science fiction has presented them with deeper, profounder truths than it was possible to access otherwise. This was even more the case for those of us who grew up on the old science fiction twenty-five to fifty years ago.
In my quest for information on the many-worlds, I’d turned often to Joe’s resources. A research chemist at a prestigious foundation, he also ha
ppens to be a lifelong science fiction fan. His broad literacy includes the cybernetic, unlike your low-tech narrator, and he also possesses near photographic recall of anything he’s ever read. The data retrievable from his encyclopedic mind was invaluable to me, not to mention his ability to encompass the bulk of my personal madness without wincing.
As Joe sees it, while American science fiction today may not be wholly out of the closet, the young reader, unarguably, is deprived of our earlier thrill. We experienced the reading of science fiction as something of a dirty little masturbatory secret, hence charged with all the lure of the forbidden. Maybe the effect derived from frequently reading it under the covers with a flashlight.
For months, I’d been scouring the libraries and bookshops, digging up the old science fiction I recalled from pre-Everett times that clearly presaged the many-worlds. In the process, I’d identified other, more mainstream literary works predominantly by British authors, which were clearly germane.
That stormy evening… sorry about that, but it really was, you see. The gusting torrents and ball lightning had reminded me too intensely of a night years before. That night Richard, my closest teenage comrade, had entered upon a path of disappointments, on the darker side of love, which would take his life by his midthirties. It had been a common enough story, rejection by a pregnant girlfriend in favor of a rival whom an ignorant community deemed a “better catch.” But, from that night forth, Richard had seemed damned to repeatedly re-create the same failures.
Joe had been in town, and we were at my house reviewing the above-mentioned works. His phenomenal memory aside, neither had Joe actually read these materials for many years. We were both astonished at how precisely the early authors had represented a theory not yet formally constructed.