Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

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Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3 Page 20

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff


  This was Harry's first time at the Particle Accelerator Symposium. He didn't know a soul here. He looked around the big ballroom, by then almost empty, and sighed. Lunch at a Manhattan deli near where the new World Trade Center towers were rising had just about drained the day's meager meal budget. Maybe he should just retreat to his room.

  Still, his stomach was grumbling. Food to soak up the margaritas, no matter how institutional, would be wise. The half box of chocolate-covered somethings in his briefcase wouldn't cut it. In his hotel room he'd only mope around, anyway, missing Julia. He stayed to graze the free hors d'oeuvres table for a while longer.

  When the evening birds-of-a-feather session started (Harry never did catch the topic, something about relativistic muons), he followed the crowd into the nearby meeting room. The gangling Indian physicist trying to run the forum was too shy to ride herd on the tipsy crew. Before long, an SF enthusiast—hardly a rarity at a physics conference—had hijacked the session. Soon they were talking about faster-than-light communications with tachyon beams, reactionless space drives, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It wasn't really physics, but it was fun.

  The bull session continued until well past midnight, ending only after the rustlings of impatient janitors became intrusive. The most garrulous members of the group, Harry among them, adjourned to a back booth in the hotel's lounge. He ordered a platter of nachos and a pitcher of margaritas, thinking budget be damned.

  The conversation wandered into time travel and down the Teflon-coated slope into the grandfather paradox. Could you travel back in time and kill your grandfather before your father, let alone you, were even born? If you succeeded, then who was it who performed the mission? If now no one goes back, then what's to stop grandma and grandpa from having at it? Back and forth they went, pointlessly arguing about cause and effect and alternate universes.

  It was then that Harry's big mouth struck. "That's not how time travel really works." Damn! Why had he spoken? He hadn't told the entire story to anyone, not even Julia. After all, who would believe it? But these were physicists. If they believed that he believed it, his reputation would be shot.

  The meeting hijacker, a red-haired grad student from MIT, eyed him speculatively. "You know this from personal experience, do you?" The line got a laugh—not much more than a chuckle, really, but enough to trigger Harry's stubborn streak. He knew what he knew, and he would edit as he went along. Harry pictured the next few minutes in his mind's eye: He'd tell what would come across, safely, as a cock-and-bull story, his new friends would realize that they'd been had, and someone would buy him a drink. It seemed workable.

  "Experience?" Harry whispered conspiratorially. His companions leaned closer. "In a manner of speaking, yes." He straightened out of his habitual slouch, propping his elbows on the table and leaning forward confidentially. The flickering flame in the candle-globe centerpiece cast light and shadow across four expectant faces. The lounge's background murmur chose that instant to fall into a momentary hush. He glanced at the neighboring booths, as though to reassure himself that no one was eavesdropping.

  "It happened five years ago. Spring. My wife and I were on vacation—a second honeymoon of sorts. We were backpacking across France . . ."

  VOSGES MOUNTAINS, FRANCE, 2004

  Dawn peeked red-eyed over the hills. For all that the calendar said Mai, at this altitude the dew was frozen. Harry inched across the paired sleeping bags, planning to snuggle up to Julia for warmth. No one was home.

  He might as well get up, too. Harry crawled out of the sleeping bags, stood, and stretched. They had camped beside a small stream; he gritted his teeth, then scooped a handful of icy water onto his face. It worked faster than coffee.

  They had stopped for the night in a small clearing high in the foothills of the Vosges. Dense forest stretched all around, as far as the eye could see. Birds chirped and chattered among the trees. A few hundred yards to the east lay the cave where he had damn near broken his ankle on their first trip.

  Only a wispy contrail high in the cloudless sky hinted at civilization. Even in the wild, though, Julia disliked stubble. Harry poked the banked fire back to life, then assembled his gear while water came to a boil in a small pan. There was no reasonable place to set his little shaving mirror. He rested the metal disk against a small rock and sat tailor style in front of it.

  He couldn't complain about the reflection. Genetics could take credit for the strong jaw, the jet-black hair, and the pale blue eyes—and, for that matter, for the broad-shouldered, six-foot-two frame the mirror did not capture. Julia's love of camping and hiking had added a deep tan and character lines. Some combination of genetics and the exercise kept him trim and fit. Julia liked to imagine that he'd had to beat the girls off with a stick before she met him—a fantasy of which he had done nothing to disabuse her.

  Harry tied four short lines with baited hooks to low-lying branches that overhung the stream. He assumed his wife was off somewhere with her sketchpad. For Julia, this was a working vacation. The sketches could well pay for the trip: They were good. Still, he wished she'd get back soon. He was ready for breakfast—and things weren't ever as good without her.

  Her petite figure finally emerged from the woods upstream. She'd gathered her flowing blond hair into a long, high ponytail. She was wearing tight jeans and a red sweater: Practical, yet sexy—that was Julia. Sketchpad under her arm, she moseyed up to him. "Hey, lazybones. What does a working girl have to do around here to get breakfast?"

  He answered with a leer.

  "Again?" Laughing, she plopped down beside him. "What ever will you expect for dinn . . . ?"

  He covered her lips with his own.

  All the frost had melted when they woke for the second time. She cleared her lovely throat. "About breakfast, sir."

  His fishing lines still hung limply in the rippling current. "Funny thing, sport, these snooty French fish refuse to consort with Americans. We have instant coffee, a couple of eggs, and some bread. Period. You wanna hitch a ride into Metz after breakfast for some real food, or will we live on twigs and berries?"

  * * *

  Julia opted for town. Their tattered map led them to a deeply rutted dirt road, where an old man with a roving eye stopped for them. Well, for her. Julia charmed the beret off him; he reciprocated by letting them ride in the back of his horse-drawn farm wagon. They bounced along into some small market town, from which their Europasses got them onto the train up the Moselle valley into Metz.

  They splurged on a hotel room with a private bath, then Julia went shopping for new camping supplies. Phase one complete: He was unsupervised in Metz. Julia had insisted on this trip as a mental-health break for him; vacation or not, he meant to visit the nearby Rothschild Institute. The Rothschilds—surprise, surprise—had financed the world's largest superconducting storage ring.

  Harry exhumed the one fresh change of clothes from his backpack. Clean wrinkles were as close as he could come to respectability. He left Julia a note.

  She had long ago shamed him into studying French, "the language of culture and science." ("Not in this century," he'd grumbled, but he'd learned anyway. It beat reading the subtitles when she picked the movie.) Here in the Alsace-Lorraine, his guttural accent wasn't even terribly unusual. He tried it out on the skeptical guard at the institute's gatehouse.

  "Dr. Bowen, you say?" The sentry ineffectively covered a yawn. He needed dental work.

  "Oui. Tell Alain, I mean Dr. Garreau, that we met at a colloquium at Drexel Institute." That had been two years ago, and only a brief conversation—a chat over coffee after the presentation, really—but Harry hoped it would be enough to get him in.

  He never learned if it would have been. The guard had just lifted the telephone handset when an explosion rocked the grounds. The gatehouse leapt a foot into the air, crashed back, then shuddered again when the ground wave hit. A wrought-iron gate burst from its hinges, to hang askew from its still-standing mate by a shared padlock. H
arry glimpsed a horrified look on the no-longer-bored guard as they dashed through the broken gates toward the main building.

  Screams and smoke poured from the shattered edifice. The second and third stories on the uphill side had crumbled; somehow, groaning support columns in the basement continued to bear the redistributed load. Harry kicked open a sagging door and ran inside. The guard followed.

  Dazed people in bloody lab coats stumbled through thick smoke. Downstairs, someone howled. Harry climbed over the rubble—chunks of plaster, splintered doors and furniture, smashed laboratory equipment—that covered the stairs and clogged the basement's main corridor. Coughing from the acrid fumes, he went toward the screams. Klaxons wailed in the distance, hopefully ambulances from the town.

  The cries were getting weaker; he dare not hesitate. A ceiling fixture dangled by its wires, sparking; with each shudder of the settling building, the lamp jiggled and danced. He scavenged a mop from a janitor's closet and, holding the arcing wires at bay, edged past.

  Double doors, nothing remaining but splinters on hinges, ended the hallway. Beyond them, someone whimpered. A lump of falling plaster shattered at his feet as he scuttled inside.

  He found a random jumble of equipment racks, lab benches, storage cabinets, computers, and Dewar flasks. Dented and cracked, the cryogenic flasks spewed a surrealistic fog that coiled and crept about the large laboratory. Whoever had called out lay hidden in the mist.

  He shouted encouragement as he groped through the room, shivering in the frigid, waist-high haze. The whimpering echoed eerily in the misty chamber, providing no guidance to its source. He kept searching as he inched around obstacles hidden in the vapors.

  A sob came from almost underfoot, and he saw her. Rime and plaster dust coated her face and hair; he could not guess her age. A storage cabinet across her legs pinned her to the floor.

  Harry reached under the cabinet and tugged. Nothing. He tried again, more desperately. As something tore in his back, unknown items rocked inside. The cabinet scarcely budged. It had landed doors down—he couldn't unload it.

  Harry recovered the mop. With a stool on its side for a fulcrum, he levered the cabinet up a few inches. Grunting from the effort, balancing on one foot, he kicked some nondescript refuse under the cabinet. The woman's face was ashen. He put all his weight on the mop handle; this time, using a smashed oscilloscope, he propped the cabinet up higher. With a final heave, the cabinet crashed aside. Glass inside tinkled.

  He had uncovered a new horror—a crushed Dewar. Liquid helium had frozen her from the waist down; one thigh, ultrabrittle from the cold, had shattered. Blood seeped from the red ice of a jagged stump, flash-cauterized by the extreme cold. As Harry's guts clenched, the ceiling collapsed across several nearby workbenches.

  Fire blocked the entrance of the lab. Flames licked hungrily at the wreckage. A loud booming began somewhere behind him, and he glanced over his shoulder. The guard from the gatehouse was pounding on a small, high window. Embedded reinforcing wire kept the shattered glass from falling free. "Out! Out!" the guard screamed. "The building is coming down!" He battered and battered, the reinforced glass finally yielding to his fire ax.

  Harry grabbed the woman under her armpits and hoisted her over his shoulder. Mercifully, she fainted. Trying not to see any body parts fall, he stumbled through the smoke to the window. The guard dropped his ax to reach through for her. Harry pushed; with a ripping of fabric, the woman popped through.

  He took a final look around the lab. What had happened here? The scorched and shattered apparatus across the room was the epicenter of an explosion. Through the smoke, Harry recognized an arc of superconducting storage ring. Two of its superconducting magnets glowed white-hot. Near the magnets, a wire-wrapped bulk smoldered. A drop of molten metal fell as he watched, disappearing into the sea of flames.

  "Out now!" The guard looked fearfully at something over his head. "Give me your hands!" He plunged his own arms through the broken window to reach for Harry. "Quick!"

  Harry no longer had the strength to boost himself the five feet to the window. Thick smoke choking him, he grabbed on to the guard's arms. He was pulled roughly through the small opening, then dragged across the bumpy ground away from the conflagration. The ambulance roared away on squealing tires the moment the paramedics had belted him in.

  Harry was in no condition to notice the blanket-shrouded passenger in the other stretcher, her face covered.

  NEW YORK CITY, 2009

  ". . . When without warning, the lab exploded. I ran in to see if I could help."

  Harry did not elaborate. The dead woman still came in his nightmares. She turned out to be—have been—the director of the institute. Harry stopped to sip some of the melted ice in his margarita glass. "Miraculously, there was only one fatality in the accident.

  "The explosion and resulting fire largely destroyed the institute and its records. Only two people were in the lab when it happened. Apparently only they had any knowledge of the experiment. The authorities, as far as I know, never assigned a cause to the explosion more specific than a catastrophic discharge of the storage ring.

  "I only got a quick look at the lab. When I told the investigators what I'd seen, they politely"—condescendingly—"expressed their doubts. One told me that if indeed I saw what I said I'd seen, the juxtaposition of equipment must somehow have resulted from the explosion, not preceded it."

  His audience listened in rapt silence. "I couldn't explain it, either—but I had seen it. All that stored energy, terawatts of it, petawatts for all I know, rigged to discharge through a single enormous coil, enclosing a volume little larger than a phone booth. Massive superconducting cables connected the cavity to the storage ring. The cavity itself was empty.

  "Two years passed before I believed. Guys, it was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle." Puzzled expressions quickly changed to tentative looks of understanding. "Okay, I think you see it. The common statement of the principle is that you can't simultaneously determine the position and momentum of a particle. That's not obviously germane, which is why you were all surprised. But the other formulation of the principle—that's something else again.

  "The more precisely you determine a particle's energy, the less exactly you can pin down that particle in time. That's hardly news. We encounter it again and again inside our bubble chambers, in those strange, never-again-seen, subatomic fragments that somehow appear in the wreckage of particle collisions. They're transient freaks of nature, doomed to disappear in the infinitesimal fraction of a second before they violate the law of conservation of energy." Terrence, a prematurely balding Englishman who, Harry seemed to remember, was a postdoc from Cambridge, began smiling enigmatically. The fellow had deduced where Harry was going . . . or thought he had.

  "The people at Rothschild Institute must have applied this principle on a grand scale. Never mind subatomic oddities—they dealt with a macroscopic mass. Using enough energy, instantaneously discharging everything in the superconducting storage ring, they expected to observe a measurable temporal effect." He looked each of them directly in the eyes. "Time travel, gentlemen."

  One of his audience, a theoretician from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cleared his throat hesitantly.

  "Have a problem, Roger?"

  "You mentioned two casualties, but only one fatality. I gather that the survivor was seriously injured, but didn't he ever say anything?" Beside Roger, and unseen by him, Terrence's grin was fast outgrowing the bounds of English understatement.

  Harry did his best to look innocent. "I mentioned two experimenters, Roger, not two casualties. They never found the man." Everyone except poor, oblivious Roger was smiling now.

  "Terawatts? Surely he was vaporized when the coil discharged! How could he not be considered a fatality?"

  Harry said, "The explosion bent the coil, exposing the enclosed space. It contained the only distinctly undamaged spot in the lab. I saw controls inside the enclosure."

  "So?"


  "He traveled in time." Harry shrugged. "If there was ever a way to return him, the explosion destroyed it."

  Roger startled at Terrence's sudden cackle, in which the others quickly joined. Roger scanned the laughing faces, then turned questioningly back to the storyteller. Harry just smiled.

  "Aw, shit." Roger's face turned beet red. He looked sheepishly into his empty glass. "I hate being so gullible. The least you can do is spring for my refill."

 

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