I stared at the instrument. “It’s wrong! Days wrong.”
“It is. How many days?”
“A bunch. Twenty-one, or twenty-two. Mac, it’s reading earlier now than when we arrived at the caesura. I know, because I recorded the time when we turned off the drive. That instrument is supposed to be foolproof. I can’t imagine what could make it malfunction the way it has.”
“Nor can I. And I think it didn’t. When we passed through the caesura, we entered a universe where time runs in the opposite direction from here. At a different rate, too—we felt we were only there for a short while, but we traveled back more than three weeks. The Hoatzin was close the caesura. We know matter passes through…”
I turned to look around me. Over at the other side of the living capsule, Abdi was quietly at work on his suit helmet. McAndrew’s words disturbed him not at all. And McAndrew was smiling at me, not at all like a madman. Was I the one who was losing it?
“Mac, do you realize what you’re suggesting? If you’re right, anyone could travel out, just the way we did, and they would have a way to move backward in time.”
“Aye.”
“But that’s impossible. Time travel is impossible. The whole idea leads straight into loads of paradoxes.”
“It does seem to.” He sat down next to me, and suddenly seemed to notice what he was holding. He lifted the sandwich to his nose and sniffed, as though he had never seen it before. He nodded. “Salami. And paradoxes. Right enough. We’ll have to work through those, but that will be part of the fun.”
“And causality, Mac? What about causality? It’s a law of nature.”
“It is. It is indeed.”
He nodded thoughtfully, and took a bite. His next words were distorted and barely intelligible.
“Causality is a law of nature, true enough. But Jeanie, that’s all it is. A law of nature. It’s not like the second law of thermodynamics. It’s not The Law.”
The Compleat McAndrew Page 44