Five minutes later the glider and missing benchtop reappeared. The returning bench parts meshed perfectly with the stubs left behind.
A rush of near-transcendent proportions ran through me. I could hardly believe I had solved the time travel problem then followed it up by keeping the glider in the same place it had left from relative to the Earth. And I had added other features as well. With expanded circuitry, I could program the thing to go any place I wanted. The Moon, for instance. Or Mars. But my knowing that the Creation Equation had entirely different outcomes for travel into the past tempered my elation.
The past, after all, was where I needed to go. Yet whenever I entered a negative value representing the past, the equations blew up into a mass of infinities. Undefined outcomes. Even after cancelling many of them out using renormalization techniques, numerous infinities remained. The little machine could travel to the past. I was sure of that. What I wasn’t sure of was the consequence. Ell’s time glider obviously did it with no problem, but hers was centuries more advanced than mine. So travel to the past would have to wait.
The time had finally come to test a live subject. I opened the vault door and stepped out into the hall where Otha had left the carrying cage. As I reentered the lab I said, “Ell, I’d like you to meet Schrödinger.”
“No, Cager. You’re not going to test that thing on a cat. No. Absolutely not.”
“There’s no problem. If the IC chips come through undamaged, a biological specimen should be okay. I’d go myself, but the compartment’s not big enough. I’m that sure it’s safe.”
“Then I’ll go. I’m small enough to fit in there.”
“No.”
“Well, you just said it was safe.”
“Well …, forget it. I’ll figure out another way.” I let Schrödinger out of his cage. He occupied Ell for the next hour.
***
A week later I decided to send an early prototype back a microsecond in time. I had to do something to overcome my lack of headway, if you could call travel to the past headway, and I figured a microsecond couldn’t screw things up too badly. I punched in the settings and engaged the actuator.
Nothing happened.
“Maybe it was too fast for us to see it,” Ell said.
“No, it should have cut the cord, and that would have caused it to fall into the net. I’ll try again.”
I got the same result. The little prototype refused to budge.
I spent the afternoon working on the infinities the Creation Equation produced when I introduced values representing the past into the time variables. Finally Ell came over and studied my work for some time before saying, “You’re trying to solve the problem in eleven dimensions. Why don’t you simplify it down to one. Travel in only the time direction. Forget for the moment about having the machine come out where you want it. See what that does.”
She began drawing diagrams on one of the whiteboards while I tried her suggestion.
“Here,” she said pointing to a simple graph. “All of those undefined points fall right here. They’re not scattered randomly through the past.”
It took me a few seconds to figure out the coordinate system she was using. Then it hit me. The equation only produced infinite values in the range between the present and when the glider tried to occupy an area where it previously existed. A few more calculations confirmed such a situation would instantly destroy the quantum entanglements driving the time travel in the first place. It all made sense. Finally.
“I think you’ve got it. When we tried to send it back a microsecond, the glider would have intersected its past self. That would have destroyed it creating a grandfather paradox, so it didn’t even try. Apparently you can’t fool the universe.”
“Well, suppose you sent it back to before it was constructed. Then it couldn’t interfere with itself.”
“I don’t think that would work either, because I suspect we’d have tried it at some point and we’ve never found the little glider here in the lab before I made it.”
“Hummm.” Ell furrowed her brow. “I see what you’re saying. I wish Lovely Pebble had downloaded more data about her glider when she made me.”
I palmed my forehead. “Actually, we’re making it too complicated. All we have to do is send it back to a different location so it doesn’t meet up with itself.” I rigged another net across the room and grabbed the more advanced prototype that let me set coordinates. “I’ll send it back thirty seconds. It should come back over there.” I nodded toward the other net.
“I doubt it, Cager. If that were so, it would be there now.”
I stopped work and rested my forehead on my arms. “You have a very annoying way of being right all the time, Ell.” Straightening, I reached for the remote. “But I’m going to try it anyway. Just to see.” To my surprise, the machine vanished.
Ell and I watched the net across the room. It remained empty. “Maybe it takes it thirty seconds to catch up with us again.” But after more than a minute the net was still empty.
“Where did it go?” Ell asked not seeming to expect an answer.
I stepped back over to the lab bench and shuffled through the pile of papers filled with equations as if I expected the answer to leap off the table at me. Several million dollars’ worth of chips had just vanished and I had no idea where they had gone or why. How was I ever going to go back and undo the events of the day Joey was taken if I couldn’t even get the prototype to go back thirty seconds? And now I had lost the prototype. Schrödinger hopped up on the bench, and situated himself in the middle of the papers preparatory to preening his hind leg. I threw my pencil down and said, “Let’s get out of here. I need to clear my head.”
“Maybe a sail,” Ell suggested. “Schrödinger can come too.”
“Yeah, Okay. As long as he gets his butt shipshape. Looks like he’s about got that problem licked, though.”
“Cager!”
Chapter 49
We drove down to Monterey, buying kitty litter along the way, and set sail on the evening tide. Ell, was well-read by now and aware of Erwin Schrödinger and his eponymous cat. Certainly enough to appreciate the link between Schrödinger and the entanglement problem I was dealing with.
And Schrödinger—the cat, not the man—generated his own entanglements. He was more venturesome than Maggie, who had died some years before, and more nautical. His white tail was thick as a hawser. A large patch of black covered his left eye. There was a definite air of piracy about him. And he stayed in the middle of everything happening on deck, promenading fearlessly along the gunwales while we were underway. One misstep and he would be overboard. But he never misstepped.
“How does he manage not to fall?” Ell asked, as Schrödinger came mincing aft from the bowsprit where he had crouched for the past half hour watching Lovely Pebble part the waves beneath him.
“He doesn’t let the forces going down overcome the forces going up, I guess. One miscalculation, though, and he’s a goner.”
And with that last statement I was struck by the similarity of the overboard cat and the lost glider prototype. Then an image of throwing Schrödinger off the bowsprit into an ocean of time flashed into my head. All Schrödinger had to do was wait for the boat to catch up with him and be pulled back aboard. But if I threw him off the stern, that was entirely different. Even if he could swim as fast as the boat, he could never catch it.
Was that what happened to my glider? I sent the thing back in time thinking it would eventually catch up to us again. Yet that had never quite made sense to me. Now it seemed obvious. When the glider arrived in the past, it began traveling forward in time again. But when it got to where we had sent it back, we were already in its future. It could never catch us again. Which meant it couldn’t change my world. I would always be in its future.
A flood of relief washed over me. That also meant my son, Jimmy, was still alive living a perfectly normal life out in his future. It wasn’t that my coming back meant he had never been born. It was t
hat he had just never been born in the time segment I was in now. His nonexistence was chasing him through history, but it would never catch him. I sat up with such a jolt it startled Schrödinger, who lost his footing and slipped over the side. Barely managing to catch the teak coaming with one paw, he meowed plaintively until I grabbed his front legs and heaved him back aboard, whereupon he continued his hazardous traipse along the coaming as if nothing had happened. But he had solved my problem for me.
I now knew how to send a glider into the past and retrieve it. All I needed was one more actuator. And I wouldn’t have to change anything on a manned glider. I would be the actuator to engage the leap forward again. How had I missed that? The glider had to be instructed to return to the future. It would never catch up if it just rode along in whatever time it found itself.
Chapter 50
Back at the vault I wasted no time rewiring the initial prototype glider to verify my insight. It was a simple test but effective in confirming the Schrödinger Overboard Hypothesis as Ell referred to the effect.
The most significant change I made was adding a timer circuit to reengage the actuator to return the glider to our present time. That was necessary even for short time hops since we now knew the glider, like the overboard cat, couldn’t swim upstream against time fast enough to catch up with us again.
Then we rigged a set of battery-powered toy tractor treads on the glider. Ell had purchased a small video camera to verify that the glider/tractor chimera performed as programmed. The camera recorded its observations in a two-minute loop on an EEPROM chip. After mounting the recording camera on the glider cum tractor, I stood an eraser up in front of it. We switched the machine on but didn’t engage the activator to send it back in time. The tractor treads jolted to life, drove the machine forward a foot knocking over the eraser, then backed up while recording the entire sequence. When we downloaded the video, it gave a clear picture of what had occurred, clearly showing the toppled eraser.
Otha brought us a card table, which I set up next to the workbench. Ell stood an erase up on the table, and I positioned the glider and engaged the actuator. The eraser was still standing when the mechanism returned, though the recovered video from the past clearly showed a toppled eraser.
“So,” Ell said, “our earlier selves must have been expecting the tractor to appear and push the eraser over before vanishing back to our future. But they have no memory of sending it back. While we remember sending it back but have no memory of witnessing the event we set in motion. It takes both versions of us to recall the whole process. To me, it both makes sense and doesn’t make sense at the same time.”
“I know. I’d like to delve deeper into the intricacies, but I have a feeling that would take months. And we need to move on.”
***
The next morning we entered the vault with a white lab rat and a wildly distracted Schrödinger who eyed the rat with an intensity that disturbed Ell. The rat made it safely to both the future and the past and returned with no discernable anomalies.
With only mild objection from Ell, I shoved Schrödinger into the glider. He started to meow his disapproval but, midway through, vanished along with the glider. Five minutes later he reappeared mid-meow and seemed not to be aware he had just time-hopped across the room.
“I think we’re ready for a manned glider now.”
“Not quite,” Ell said. “Have you forgotten about the problem of the glider appearing in the same space as another mass? Or that the drop-nets have been stopping its fall? If you go back to Stubbinville, you’re going to have to come out at least a few hundred feet up to avoid anything on the ground so you’ll need some way to ease yourself down once you get there.”
“Ell ….” As usual, she was right. “So now I have to make the thing fly, too. Even if I got the landing coordinates exact, I can’t be sure someone wouldn’t be standing there.” It was a blow. I had solved all of the impossible challenges only to be brought down by the same problem the Wright Brothers had faced.
“I’m sorry, Cager.”
“It’s not your fault, Ell.” I gave her a reassuring hug. Alien though she was, Ell relished hugs. “Well, there must be a solution. Surely I haven’t come this far to fail on something as simple as flight. But frankly I just don’t see any practical way to make the glider fly.”
“You’re not giving up are you?”
I sighed. “No. I won’t give up. I just need another break to figure it out. I’m pretty sure the Creation Equation holds no solution. But maybe there’s an answer. Somewhere.”
“Should Schrödinger get his butt shipshape?”
“If he wants to go whaling, he should.”
Chapter 51
The sky was as blue as I had ever seen it. And the boundless Pacific as flat. Over the past week an offshore breeze had knocked down all but the most gentle ocean swells. In my mind, the world took on the property of an unbroken Cartesian plane. Only a single cloud dead ahead served as a reminder the world was three-dimensional.
Ell and Schrödinger were already out on the bowsprit platform. Both wearing the same thing. I popped opened a cold beer and leaned back against a davit to study the lone cloud, hoping for inspiration. Something both elegant and simple. I imagined the cloud to be a time machine just arriving from the future. But nothing came to mind to make the glider float like that cloud.
Then my aeronautical reflections shattered as a great commotion arose from the bow.
Ell was hanging onto the forestay pointing southward. Billowing spumes jetted skyward a quarter mile away and drifted slowly west. The approaching pod of whales would intersect Lovely Pebble if I stopped her. Instead I brought her about on a northerly course and spilled wind from the main to slow her until the pod caught up. When the whales were a hundred feet astern I winched the mainsheet in and Lovely Pebble leapt forward. In another minute the pod surrounded us.
Ell was screaming and hanging off the bowsprit then climbing out over the stanchions. I called to her to stay behind the lifelines. Chastened, she climbed back but lost none of her passion for the passing whales. I paid out the genoa sheet a half turn on the winch and picked up a quarter knot. That kept us in the midst of the pod for several minutes before they sounded and came up a hundred yards off our port bow. I tried to rejoin them, but they pulled away at a leisurely pace and vanished within a half-hour.
Schrödinger remained on the foredeck as Ell made her way aft. “Oh, Cager. Did you see them? Did you see them? What a beautiful planet you have.”
“See what?”
“Stop that.” She dropped down next to me. “I’ll never forget that ever, even with this human memory so full of gaps and misinterpretations.”
I tossed her a beer and set us on a close haul back to Monterey. I was no nearer solving the flight problem but was content that Ell had gotten to sail for a time with her whales. She was abandoned here on our strange world with only me for companionship. I wondered if she was as lonely as I had been before she arrived. But she seemed happy enough, so I said nothing.
Not being ready to go ashore after such an eventful afternoon, we anchored out off the marina that evening. I furled the genoa then dropped the main and mizzen and secured the sail covers over them. It wasn’t long before Schrödinger hopped up onto the main’s cover and draped himself over the boom watching through hungry, amber eyes as we filled his nose with the aroma of barbequing steaks. After dinner and a bottle of wine, Ell went below and brought up Schrödinger’s food bowl. When he saw her spill some nuggets into it, he hopped down from the sail cover to the cabin top then to the starboard seats before alighting on the cockpit deck and I knew instantly how to fly the glider wherever I wanted it to go.
Chapter 52
Schrödinger’s incremental descent from the boom to the cockpit deck had provided the answer to flying the glider. The solution had been obvious all along. I just needed to continuously update the coordinates I had been punching in manually to maneuver the machine to a specific place
and time. If the machine popped out two thousand feet above the target area and started falling, all I had to do to stop the fall was continually reprogram the position settings to hop it back up to where it was before it started falling. And, for that matter, I could use the same repositioning technique to go any direction. The glider could just “fly” from one hop location to the next until it landed. And it could do it whether it was a quarter inch or a mile. It was just a matter of rapidly updating the settings electronically instead of manually.
I decided a joystick would be the best mechanism for doing this. A selector switch on the console would let me choose the magnitude of the repositioning commands being fed to the stick. I could calibrate increments of time in milliseconds, seconds, or any increment on out to billions of years. I didn’t anticipate using more than decades, but the physicist in me added the rest because it was simple to do. Likewise, I would use speed in distance per second. The distance increments could be anything—millimeters, meters, kilometers. We could even leave the local star system, if we were foolish enough to attempt such a trip.
A controller chip would update the output of the joystick to the machine’s quantum drivers in millisecond intervals. By selecting from the scale of settings, I could control the magnitude of the glider’s incremental leaps across either time or space or both. And that was the key to flying the glider. By pushing the joystick forward, backward, or sideways to constantly update the machine’s position settings in space a thousand times a second, I could go in whatever direction I wanted. Or I could just hover in one spot.
I hired two top game programmers, and told them to build a system that fed data to a gaming computer to do exactly what I wanted the real glider to do. A week later they had it operational. The stick controlled a computer image. A little thumbwheel embedded in the top of the stick controlled up and down motion. Pulling an embedded trigger switched it into time travel mode. They pointed out trying to operate in both space and time simultaneously was quite difficult and suggested operating in either one mode or the other at a time for simplicity’s sake.
A Gift of Time Page 24