The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  “I don’t know what I know,” Abrahmson said. “Except that at this point the story’s on hold. Until we find out more.”

  I was glad to hear he sounded scared. “That’s a good idea,” I said. “I’ll be back to you.”

  “Take care of yourself,” Abrahmson said. “God knows what that subatomic radiation can do to the body and mind. Or maybe it’s all just coincidence. God only knows. Take care of yourself.”

  “Right.” Subatomic radiation. Abrahmson’s latest culprit. First it was a virus; now it was radiation. I’d said the same stupid thing to Lauren, hadn’t I? People like to latch on to something they know when faced with something they don’t know – especially something that kills some physicists here, a reporter there, who knew who else. But radiation had nothing to do with this. Stopping it would take a lot more than lead shields.

  I tracked down Richard Hays. I was beginning to get a further inkling of what might be going on, and I needed to talk it out with one of the principals. One of the last remaining principals. It could save both our lives.

  I used my NYPD clout to intimidate enough secretaries and assistants to get directly through to him.

  “Look, I don’t care if you’re the bleeding head of the FBI,” he said. He was British. “I’m going to talk to you about this just once, now, and then never again.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. So please tell me what you think is happening here. Then I’ll tell you what I know, or think I know.”

  “What’s happening is this,” Hays said. “I was working on a project with my colleagues. That’s true. But I came to realize the project was a dead-end – that the phenomena we were investigating weren’t real. So I ceased my involvement in that research. I have no intention of ever picking up that research again – of ever publishing about it, or even talking about it, except to indicate that it was a waste of time. I’d strongly advise you to do the same.”

  I had no idea how he talked ordinarily, but his words on the phone sounded like each had been chosen with the utmost care. “Why do I feel like you’re reading from a script, Dr Hays?”

  “I assure you everything I’m saying is real. As you no doubt already have evidence of yourself,” Hays said.

  “Now you look,” I raised my voice. “You can’t just sweep this under the rug. If the universe is at work here in some way, you think you can just avoid it by pretending you don’t know about it? The universe would know about your pretense too – it’s after all still part of the universe. And word of this will get out anyway – someone will sooner or later publish something. If you want to live, you’ve got to face this, find out what’s really happening here, and—”

  “I believe you are seriously mistaken, my friend. And that, I’m afraid, concludes our interview, now and forever.” He hung up.

  I held on to the disconnected phone, which beeped like a seal, for a long time. I realized that the left side of my body hurt, from my chest up through my shoulder and down my arm. The pain had come on, I thought, at the end of my futile lecture to Hays. Right when I’d talked about publishing. Maybe publishing was the key – maybe talk about dissemination of this information, as opposed to just thinking about it, is what triggered the universe’s backlash. But I was also sure I was right in what I’d said to Hays about the need to confront this, about not running away . . .

  I put the phone back in its receiver and lay down. I was bone tired. Maybe I was getting a heart attack, maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I was still in shock from my dip in the Sound. I couldn’t fight this all on my own much longer.

  The phone rang. I fumbled with the receiver. How long had I been sleeping? “Hello?”

  “Dr D’Amato?” a female voice, maybe Lauren’s, maybe Nurse Johnson’s. No, someone else.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Jennifer Fenwick.”

  Fenwick, Fenwick – yes, Jennifer Fenwick, the last quantum physicist on this project. I’d wheedled her number from Abrahmson’s secretary and left a message for her in Australia – the girl at the hotel wasn’t sure if she’d already left. “Dr Fenwick, I’m glad you called. I, uhm, had some ideas I wanted to talk to you about – regarding the quantum signalling project.” I wasn’t sure how much she knew, and didn’t want to scare her off.

  She laughed, oddly. “Well, I’m wide open for ideas. I’ll take help wherever I can get it. I’m the only damn person left alive from our research group.”

  “Only person?” So she knew – apparently more than I.

  I looked at the clock. It was tomorrow morning already – I’d slept right through the afternoon and night. Good thing I’d called my office and gotten the week off, the absurd part of me that kept track of such trivia noted.

  “Richard Hays committed suicide last night,” Fenwick’s voice cracked. “He left a note saying he couldn’t pull it off any longer – couldn’t surmount the paradox of deliberately not thinking of something – couldn’t overcome his lifelong urge as a scientist to tell the world what he’d discovered. He’d prepared a paper for publication – begged his wife to have it published posthumously if he didn’t make it. I spoke to her this morning. I told her to destroy it. And the note too. Fortunately for her, she had no idea what the paper was about. She’s a simple woman – Richard didn’t marry her for her brains.”

  “I see,” I said slowly. “Where are you now?”

  “I’m in New York,” she said. “I wanted to come home – I didn’t want to die in Australia.”

  “Look, you’re still alive,” I said. “That means you’ve still got a chance. How about meeting me for lunch” – I looked at the clock again – “in about an hour? The Trattoria Il Bambino on 12th Street in the Village is good. As far as I know, no one there has died from the food as yet.” How I could bring myself to make a crack like that at a time like this, I didn’t know.

  “OK,” Fenwick said.

  She was waiting for me when I arrived. On the way down, I’d fantasized that she’d look just like Lauren. But in fact she looked a little older and wiser. And even more frightened.

  “All right,” I said after we’d ordered and gotten rid of the waiter. “Here’s what I have in mind. You tell me as a physicist where this might not add up. First, everyone who’s attempted to publish something about your work has died.”

  Jennifer nodded. “I spoke to Lauren Goldring the afternoon she died. She told me she was going to the press.”

  I sighed. “I didn’t know that – but it supports my point. In fact, the two times I even toyed with going public about this, I had fleeting interviews with death. The first time in the water, the second with some sort of pre-heart attack, I’m sure.”

  Jennifer nodded again. “Same for me. Wheeler wrote about cosmic censorship. Maybe he was on to the same thing as Hawking.”

  “All right, so what does that tell us?” I said. “Even thinking about publishing this is dangerous. But apparently it’s not a capital offense – knowing about this is in itself not fatal. We’re still alive. It’s as if the universe allows private, crackpot knowledge in this area – cause no one takes crackpots seriously, even scientific ones. It’s the danger of public dissemination that draws the response – the threat of an objectively accepted scientific theory. Our private knowledge isn’t the real problem here. Communication is. The definite intention to publish. That’s what kills you. Yeah, cosmic censorship is a good way of putting it.”

  “OK,” Jennifer said.

  “OK,” I said. “But it’s also clear that we can’t just ignore this – can’t expect to suppress it in our minds. Not having any particular plan to publish won’t be enough to save us – not in the long run. Sooner or later after a dark silent night we’d get the urge to shout it out. It’s human nature. It’s inside of us. Hays’s suicide proves it – his note spells it out. You can’t just not think of something. You can’t just will an idea into oblivion. It’s self-defeating. It makes you want to get up on the rooftop and scream it to the world even more – like a repressed love.”
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br />   “Agreed,” Jennifer said. “So what do we do, then?”

  “Well, we can’t go public with this story, and we can’t will ourselves to forget it. But maybe there’s a third way. Here’s what I was thinking. I can tell you – in strict confidence – that we sometimes do this in forensics.” I lowered my voice. “Let’s say we have someone who was killed in a certain way, but we don’t want the murderer to know that we know how the murder took place. We just deliberately at first publicly interpret the evidence in a different way – after all, there’s usually more than one trauma that can result in a given fatal injury to a body – more than one plausible explanation of how someone was killed. Slipped and hit your head on a rock, or someone hit you in the head with a rock – sometimes there’s not much difference between the results of the two.”

  “The universe is murderous, all right, I can see that, but I don’t see how what you’re saying would work in our situation,” Jennifer said.

  “Well, you tell me,” I said. “Your group thinks it built a wormhole that allows signalling through time. But couldn’t you find another phenomenon to attribute those effects to? After all, we only have time travel on the brain because of H. G. Wells and his literary offspring. Let’s say Wells had never written The Time Machine. Let’s say science fiction had taken a different turn. Then your group would likely have come up with another explanation for your findings. And you can do this now anyway!” I took a sip of wine and realized I felt pretty good. “You can publish an article on your work, and attribute your findings to something other than time travel. Indicate they’re some sort of other physical effect. Come up with the equivalent of a false phlogiston theory, an attractive bogus conception for this tiny sliver of subatomic phenomena, to account for the time-travel effects. The truth is, few if any serious scientists actually believe that time travel is possible anyway, right? Most think it’s just science fiction, nothing else. Who would have reason to suspect a time-travel effect here unless you specifically called attention to it?”

  Jennifer considered. “The graduate research assistants worked only on the data acquisition level. Only the project principals, the seven of us,” she caught her breath, winced – “only the seven of us knew this was about time travel. No one else. Ours were supposedly the best minds in this area. Lot of good it did us.”

  “I know,” I tried to be as reassuring as I could. “But then without that time-travel label, all you’ve got is another of a hundred little experiments in this area per year – jeez, I checked the literature, there are a lot more than that – and your study would likely get lost in the wash. That should shut the universe up. That should keep it safe from time travel – send the scientific community off on the wrong track, in a different direction – maybe not send them off in any direction all. Could you do that?”

  Jennifer sipped her wine slowly. Her glass was shaking. Her lips clung to the rim. She was no doubt thinking that her life depended on what she decided to do now. She was probably right. Mine too.

  “Exotic matter is what makes the effect possible,” she said at last. “Exotic matter keeps the wormhole open long enough. No one knows much about how it works – in fact, as far as I know, our group created this kind of exotic matter, in which weak forces are suspended, for the first time in our project. I guess I could make a case that a peculiar property of this exotic matter is that it creates effects that mimic time travel in artificial wormholes – I could make a persuasive argument that we didn’t really see time travel through that wormhole at all; what we have instead is a reversal of processes to earlier stages when they come in contact with our exotic matter; no signalling from the future. You know – we thought the glass was half full, but it was really half empty.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s still not going far enough. You’ve got to be more daring in your deception – come up with something that doesn’t invoke time travel at all, even in the negative. Publishing a paper with results that are explicitly said not to demonstrate time travel is akin to someone the police never heard of coming into the station and saying he didn’t do it – that only arouses our suspicion. I’m sorry to be so blunt, Jennifer. But you’ve got to do more. Can’t you come up with some effects of exotic matter that have nothing to do with time travel at all?”

  She drained her wine glass and put it down, neither half full nor half empty. Completely empty. “This goes against everything in my life and training as a scientist,” she said. “I’m supposed to pursue the truth, wherever it takes me.”

  “Right,” I said. “And how much truth will you be able to pursue when you’re like Hays and Strauss and the others?”

  “Einstein said the universe wasn’t malicious,” she said. “This is unbelievable.”

  “Maybe Einstein was saying the glass was half empty when he knew it was half full. Maybe he knew just what he was doing – knew which side his bread was buttered on – maybe he wanted to live past middle age.”

  “God Almighty!” She slammed her hand on the table. Glasses rattled. “Couldn’t I just swear before you and the universe never to publish anything about this? Wouldn’t that be enough?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “From the universe’s point of view, your publishing a paper that explicitly attributes the effects to something other than time travel seems much safer – to you as well as the universe. Let’s say you change your mind, years from now, and try to publish a paper that says you succeeded with time travel after all. You’d already be on record in the literature as attributing those effects to something else – you’d be much less likely to be believed then. Safer for the universe. Safer for you. A paper with a false lead is not only our best bet now, it’s an insurance policy for our future.”

  Jennifer nodded, very slowly. “I guess I could come up with something – some phenomenon unrelated to time travel – unsuggestive of it. The connection of quantum effects to human thought has always had great appeal, and even though I personally never saw much more than wishful thinking in that direction.”

  “That’s better,” I said quietly.

  “But how can we be sure no one else will want to look into these effects?” Jennifer asked.

  I shrugged. “Guarantees of anything are beyond us in this situation. The best we can hope for are probabilities – that’s how the QM realm operates anyway, isn’t it? – likelihoods of our success, statistics in favor of our survival. As for your effects, well, effects don’t have much impact outside of a supportive context of theory. Psalm 51 says, ‘Cleanse me with hyssop and I shall be clean’ – the penicillin mold was first identified on a piece of decayed hyssop by a Swedish chemist – but none of this led to antibiotics until spores from a mold landed in Fleming’s Petri dish, and he place them in the right scientific perspective. Scientists thought they had evidence of spontaneous generation of maggots in old meat, until they learned how maggots make love. Astronomers saw lots of evidence for aluminiferous ether, until Michelson-Morley decisively proved that wrong. You’re working on the cutting edge of physics with your wormholes. No one knows what to expect – you said it yourself – yours were the best minds in this area. You can create the context. No one’s left to contradict you. Let’s face it, if you word your paper properly, it will likely go unnoticed. But if not, it will point people in the wrong direction – and once pointed that way, away from time travel, the world could take years, decades, longer, to look at time travel as a real scientific possibility again. The history of science is filled with wrong glittering paths, tenaciously taken and defended. That’s the path of life for us. I’m not happy about it, but there it is.”

  Our food arrived. Jennifer looked away from me, and down at her veal. I hadn’t completely won her over yet. But she’d stopped objecting. I understood how she felt. To theoretical scientists, pursuit of truth was sometimes more important than life itself. Maybe that’s why I went into flesh-and-blood forensics. I pushed on.

  “The truth is, we’ve all been getting along quite well withou
t time travel anyway – it could wreak far more havoc in everyone’s lives than nuclear weapons ever did. The universe may not be wrong here.”

  She looked up at me.

  “It’s all up to you now,” I said. “I’m not a physicist. I can’t pull this off. I can take care of the general media, but not the scientific journals.” I thought about Abrahmson at Newsday. He hadn’t a clue which way was up in this thing. He’d just as soon believe this nightmare was all coincidence – the ever popular placeholder for things people didn’t want to understand. I could easily pitch it to him in that way.

  She gave me a weak smile. “OK, I’ll try it. I’ll write the article with the mental spin on the exotic effects. Physics Review D was given some general info that we were doing something on exotic matter, and is waiting for our report. It’ll have maximum impact on other physicists there. The human mind in control of matter will be catnip for a lot them anyway.”

  “Good,” I smiled back. I knew she meant it. I knew because I suddenly felt very hungry, and dug into my own veal with a zest I hadn’t felt for anything in a while. It tasted great. Two particles of humanity had connected again. Maybe this time the relationship would go somewhere.

  It occurred to me, as I took Jennifer’s hand and squeezed it with relief, that maybe this was just what the universe had wanted all along.

  As they say in the Department, an ongoing string of deaths is a poor way to keep a secret.

  WOMEN ON THE BRINK OF A CATACLYSM

  Molly Brown

  One of the hardest types of time-travel story to write is that involving a time loop, a kind of endless knot or Shrivatsa which has no beginning or end but, like the serpent Ouroboros, seems to be chasing or even consuming its own tail. The classic examples are “By His Bootstraps” (1941) and “All You Zombies . . .” (1959) by Robert A. Heinlein, both of which are too easily available to reprint here. Instead I wanted to use this lesser known but equally complex, and much more amusing, example.