Dinoshift
J. Brian Clarke
Anyone tampering with the past had better try Real Hard to anticipate all possible consequences. Some, of course, are harder than others... .
J. Brian Clarke
Dinoshift
Stipulation:
The present is inviolable. It cannot be altered by changing the past. The future is not so inviolable—
When Frederick Marion Degru-ton published his paper Phased Timeshift Dispersion in the summer of 2119, critics quickly recalled the ancient arguments against time travel. As one writer succinctly put it, “It makes wonderful science fiction. But fiction can tolerate the contradiction, for instance, of a man going back in time and becoming his own ancestor. Science cannot.”
Nevertheless it was not long before Degruton was reluctantly persuaded into a TV studio, where interviewer-journalist Gail Sovergarde turned on her famous charm.
“Dr. Degruton, I understand your paper has created quite a stir in the scientific community I mean, time travel! So I hope you will forgive me if I ask a question I am sure you have already heard a thousand times. Can we now change the past?”
“No.”
A small man, sandy-haired and painfully shy, Degruton had decided the only way to preserve his equanimity before this disconcerting female, was to say as little as possible.
“I am so glad you said that.” Her smile made him melt. “Because to change the past is to change the present. Is that not so?”
“That is the accepted—” He shuffled uncomfortably, “—way of looking at it.”
“But a valid one, surely?”
“I suppose so.”
“Ah.” She nodded knowingly. “So despite your discovery, I still cannot go back and dispose of my grandfather before he had children.”
“Good heavens!” Degruton was shocked. “Why would you want to do that?”
Disconcerted by the scientist’s literal interpretation of the elderly cliche, Sovergarde hurriedly rephrased. “Then if we cannot change the past, what can we change? Presuming, of course, time travel is possible.”
“Read my paper, Ms. Sovergarde. Believe me, the calculations have been checked and double-checked by the top people in the field.”
She held up a folder. “Triplechecked, Dr. Degruton. I have been assured your reasoning is impeccable. So, again, I ask the question. What can we change?”
“Not so much change, as create.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“If we go back a couple of thousand years and arrange for the—ah— removal of a certain itinerant preacher before he started his ministry, Christianity would never have happened. Right?”
“Of course. That is obvious.” “Obvious only in another continuum, Ms. Sovergarde. Not in our own—in which Christianity is an incontrovertible fact.”
“I see.” After a slight hesitation, Sovergarde asked thoughtfully, “You are talking about an alternate history, aren’t you?”
“Well I—” Degruton looked at the woman with dawning respect. Never much interested in the comings, goings and various scandals associated with the current crop of video personalities, he came to the interview assuming this was just another shallow, statuesque brunette with the gift of gab and an astronomical clothing budget. But with the sudden realization that Sovergarde was more than just flesh-and-blood cardboard, the scientist blushed and began to stammer. “Y—yes, in a—ahemm—sort of—”
Her smile was disarming, and with an effort of will he forced himself to meet her questioning gray eyes. Somehow, her projection of innocent curiosity inspired confidence. “You are familiar with the concept of alternate histories, Ms. Sovergarde?”
“In a science-fictional sort of way. As I understand it, if someone from our time goes back and changes or prevents some pivotal event of history, instead of altering our past, the time traveler has by his action created a branching alternate in which, for instance, Christianity never existed. That alternate would be another timeline, parallel yet separate from our own.”
“Timeline is the popular word. I prefer continuum. Anyway, in the greater multiverse of which our own cosmos is but an infinitesimal part, it is conceivable that infinite possibilities already coexist in an infinite series of continuums. By the way, I erred when I implied alternates are created. Any manipulation of a past event simply opens the door to the most appropriate of those infinite possibilities.”
“But it is so theoretical.”
“Not at all. In fact, my colleagues and I have already demonstrated the concept in the laboratory. The partitions are not impenetrable, you see. We set up an experiment in which we changed an event in past time, returned to the present, and then shifted sideways to observe the consequences of our manipulation.” Sovergarde lifted both hands in protest. “Partitions? Sideways? Sorry Doctor, you just lost me.”
“The experiment was on a modest scale of course, involving nuclear reactions over nanoseconds of time. Partitions are simply the boundaries separating the alternate continuums from each other as well as from Prime, which is our own continuum. Sideways refers to our ability to shift across those partitions.”
“Getting back to Christianity—” Suspecting he should have chosen a less controversial example, Degruton sighed. “If our time traveler somehow prevents Christianity ‘getting off the ground’ so to speak, he then has the remarkable option of being able to follow the development of a non-Christian continuum at any moment during its history, up to and including the alternate’s calendar equivalent of our present.”
“But not beyond?”
“Beyond?”
“Into the future.”
Degruton looked wistful. “That would be interesting, wouldn’t it?” He frowned and shook his head. “Unfortunately, that is one barrier beyond which we cannot go. As with the speed of light, nature has its limits.”
“So the future can only arrive the old-fashioned way?”
“By becoming the present? Precisely.”
Sovergarde pursed her lips with dis-« appointment and consulted her notes. “About this technique—”
“We call it Shift Dispersion, or SD.”
“All right, SD. Does it have a practical application?”
“Does a baby, Ms. Sovergarde? Give it time.”
“Then do you have anything in mind? I mean, on a larger scale than the experiment you just described?” “Oh indeed.”
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“Not really. After all, we are at the beginning of years of development work. But perhaps—” Degruton hesitated, then added weakly, “Really, it is rather premature.”
The famous Sovergarde smile. “Oh Doctor, do tell.”
Degruton blushed, took a deep breath. “Dinosaurs.”
Ten years later.
The Francis Bacon was a big ship, originally constructed as a bulk carrier for the Mars run. Now rebuilt to carry the massive SD generator in the main hold, her Sovergarde fusion-drive had brought her to station above the ecliptic in just over nine weeks.
Despite the ship’s size, personnel quarters were limited and cramped. So the presence of Gail Sovergarde, in addition to a dozen scientists and technicians, was initially resented by those of the ship ’s crew who assumed the journalist’s only asset, other than her looks and her network’s financial resources, was her famous grandfather. But Gail’s willing acceptance of routine chores, plus her charm and obvious intelligence, soon made her friends with everyone—including, to Degruton’s surprise—the other four women on board.
Degruton’s own relationship with this surprising female had matured over the years to something he thought was even better than marriage. Their commitment had no formal contract, their work frequently kept them apart, yet every reunion had the giddy, sensual a
spect of a couple of teenagers discovering each other for the first time.
But it was entirely business when Gail entered SD Control as Degruton and a couple of colleagues anxiously watched data scroll across a screen. “How’s it coming?”
Without looking around, Mary Scheaffer waved a hand. “Hi, Gail.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Not really. Just the usual glitches.” Gail glanced at the countdown display on the bulkhead. “Seventeen hours to go. Are we going to make it?”
“Damn right we are.” Mike Brown, the other member of Degruton’s primary team, swung his chair around and grinned at the tousle-haired journalist. Even at forty-two, with no makeup, a touch of gray in her dark hair, and clad in a baggy coverall, the journalist continued to attract the appreciative male eye. Mike added, “What about your doubts, lady? Still have them?”
She shrugged. “I am like a lot of people, I guess. Intellectually I know we can’t change our own past, and have proved it. But gut-wise—”
Her mind went back four years, to the first full-scale test of SD. She remembered the nerve-wracking hours during which she wondered if man had finally tweaked nature’s nose once too often—
From a site in Nebraska, they time-shifted to around 500 a.d. and released a few horses into the broad grasslands of first-millennium America. A dozen mares, a few foals and a couple of stallions galloping away across the prairie, hardly seemed enough for the nucleus of a viable population. Yet Alternate 1-2125, the modern-time equivalent which was the result of that experiment, turned out to be a revelation—with Europe still in the steam age, and its few North American coastal colonies warily co-existing with a continent-spanning Inca Federation.
Unlike Prime, in which a few hundred mounted conquistadors under the leadership of Cortes and Pizarro conquered the Americas for Spain, in Al the thundering cavalry regiments of the Inca had been more than enough to snuff out the European upstarts.
Despite Gail’s misgivings, the return to Prime was anticlimactic, proving what Degruton and her own common sense always insisted—that because Prime’s past was unalterably written into the fabric of spacetime, its present, although older by the six weeks subjective time they were away, remained as familiar as an old and comfortable shoe.
Yet the nagging voice remained, like a constant itch that could not be scratched—
Gail blurted, “It’s not so much what we re doing, Mike, as the degree of what we’re doing! Introducing a few horses a few hundred years before their time did not seem such a big deal, yet look how that ended up! Now we are about to do something on a global scale .” She took a deep breath. “All at once!”
Aware Degruton was also looking at her, she snapped, “What is the matter, Freddy dear? Am I repeating myself again?”
“I am afraid you are, dear.” He smiled and rubbed a hand through what was left of his hair. “Anyway, do you think you can stop it?”
It was not a challenge; he was not that type. It was a simple question.
Gail admitted wearily, “Of course not. I only report events, I don’t influence them.” She hesitated. “But I do try, don’t I?”
“Damn right you do. Fortunately our dedication is immune even to your charms.” Degruton stretched aching muscles and yawned. “Anyway, one or a thousand new alternates, it doesn’t really matter. Prime will still be there when we get back; slightly soiled and slightly glorious as always, but there.”
Gail whispered. “But we’re about to create a whole new Earth. Totally different—”
“Create?” Degruton shook his head. “It beats me why you insist on looking at it that way. We are not God, you know.”
“I know. It is what worries me.”
Although the calculations were meticulous and had monopolized the Luna Institute’s computers to the extent a deputation of angry cosmolo-gists demanded Degruton either stop or get out, the results were still based on theory. So when one of the detects reported a mass approximately where and when it was supposed to be, excitement was tempered by doubt as they waited for refinement of the incoming data.
“Coincidence?” Mike wondered aloud. “Or just bloody good luck?”
“We will know for sure in an hour or two,” Degruton muttered as he watched the wavering blip on the screen.
“Why so long?” Gail asked.
“The detects are pretty widely spread, in space as well as time. Twenty-Three is doing its best, which is not too bad for a probe the size of a basketball. Eight is coming within range, and Forty-Eight is not far behind. Those three should give us a pretty good fix.” “But you launched more than a hundred!”
He looked up. “I’d have launched a thousand if we had the budget and room for that many.”
“Three percent.” Mary paused, added thoughtfully, “You know, that’s not so bad.”
Degruton nodded. Based on data from thousands of core samples taken in and around the asteroid’s supposed impact point near the Yucatan peninsula, the computer’s projection of the incoming trajectory turned out to be both surprising and fortuitous. The asteroid had been a rogue; a solitary interstellar interloper arcing into the Solar System from high above the ecliptic. Unlike the countless anonymous chunks of cometary debris which had always orbited the Sun, this was a loner which theoretically could be located. Hopefully, they had done exactly that.
Mike checked the readings. “Minus sixty-six million years, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. Close enough, I’d say. Let’s arm Bertha.”
Degruton shook his head. “Not yet. Bertha stays asleep and harmless until we are absolutely sure.”
So they waited as the cloud of tiny detects which had been launched in a fan-shaped pattern north of the Sun, flickered in and out of time and space. Snug in its bulge on the underside of the Francis Bacon, enough explosive power to cinder half a continent or divert an asteroid continued its mechanical slumber.
The pattern on the screen changed.
“Eight is within range,” Mike reported.
“And—?”
“Just a sec.” Mike checked the scrolling figures. “Intersect in 290 days.”
“Intersect?” Gail queried.
“With Earth’s orbit. So far the data’s not complete enough to determine if there will be actual impact. Whatever it is could still miss by a couple of million klicks.”
“Equivalent to a bullet parting your hair,” Mary explained solemnly. “Unpleasant, but not fatal.”
“Not this baby,” Mike declared flatly. “It’s it!”
“What makes you so sure?” Gail asked as she tried to ignore the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “As Mary just said—”
“—If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck—”
“—It is the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs,” Degruton interjected tiredly as he lifted both hands and rubbed his temples. He took a deep breath, pressed a switch. “Gerry? Time to wake up Bertha.”
The voice of Captain Geraldine Fuchs echoed the doubts of Gail Sovergarde. “Are you sure? I don’t want to commit on a hunch.”
“You are watching the data?”
“Of course.”
“Then be honest, Gerry. You know damn well it’s no hunch.”
A sigh. “When will you know enough to commit for launch?”
“We have enough to commit right now. We can tweak Bertha’s course as more data comes in.”
“OK. We need half a day for checkout. Launch any time after fourteen hundred hours tomorrow.”
Later, Gail slipped out of SD Control and hauled herself up the access well to the bridge. She found the captain alone, standing in front of a direct vision port and staring at the stars. The captain did not turn around as the journalist entered. Instead, she wondered aloud, “Do you think we will ever get there?”
“Where?”
Fuchs gestured. “Out there.”
“Of course we will.”
The captain turned around. Her thin, bony face was expressionless. “What make
s you so sure?”
“Because there are people like you and—” Gail hesitated.
“Degruton?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder.”
Fuchs returned to the command chair. “I will do it, of course. Launch, I mean. And I will watch and dutifully applaud when Bertha explodes and nudges that asteroid so it won’t hit Earth sixty-something million years ago.”
“And then?”
“I won’t sleep a solitary wink until we get back and find home is where and how we left it!”
Gail sat down at the vacant first officer’s station. “Me too,” she admitted. She looked around the deserted bridge. “Where is everyone?”
“Down below, with Bertha. I may be uneasy about it, but I intend to have the job done right.”
“Gerry, the concept has been proved. Whatever new alternates we create or open up, Prime’s present is untouchable. It cannot change.”
The captain nodded. “You were there when they did the thing with the horses, weren’t you?”
Gail nodded. “I was also there when they time-shifted ahead fifteen centuries to see the outcome.”
“What kind of world was it?”
“Is,” Gail corrected firmly. She took a deep breath. “Steam trains, paddle wheelers, gas lights, one or two minor wars. A Tudor named Henry the Tenth on the English throne, and a North American federation of Inca chiefdoms with not much technology beyond good roads and the telegraph.
I could have survived on that world, I suppose, but I was glad beyond relief when we shifted back to Prime.”
“I can believe that.”
Fuchs stared at her visitor from below lowered eyelids. She found Gail Sovergarde pleasant enough, as long as she did not dwell on the contrast between the journalist s lush looks and her own scrawny hair-in-a-bun appearance. “You still wonder if we’re spitting in God’s eye, don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t put it that extreme.”
“I would. I have a nasty feeling we are going to regret this.”
“I already told you—”
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