Blood of the Heroes

by Steve White

  Well , thought Jason with an inward sigh, I always did like a challenge.

  Rutherford fiddled with the controls again, and a new face appeared—a far less interesting one, from Jason’s standpoint. Male, gaunt-featured … and definitely middle-aged.

  “Wait a minute—” Jason began.

  Rutherford overrode him. “Dr. Sidney Nagel—quite possibly Earth’s premier living authority on the history and archaeology of the Aegean Bronze Age, despite his relative youth.”

  ” ‘Relative youth’? He’s—”

  “I am aware that he is somewhat older than most people we send back in time to primitive milieus. But we have assured ourselves that he will be up to the hardships involved. He met all our health and fitness requirements.” Rutherford smiled. “He had incentive to do so, after a career spent trying to resolve mysteries by educated guesswork and inferences from a heartbreakingly few hard facts. Offered an opportunity to actually see the era … well, he would have been willing to sell his soul to the Devil for it, in an age when such things were thought possible. Nowadays, he was willing to undergo a hard regimen of physical conditioning, and pass our standard training course in low-technology survival.”

  Jason studied the image. There was something to be said for that kind of motivation. And yet, as he looked at the professorial face with its humorless mouth and dark-brown eyes flanking a substantial beak of a nose, he found himself thinking: A Rutherford in training.

  “I suppose,” he said aloud, “that neither of them knows anything about time travel.”

  “Well, I imagine they know what the average well-informed layman knows, from the popular literature on the subject.”

  “Which means they know nothing,” said Jason dourly.

  “I am counting on you to repair that lack.”

  “Me? But you’ve got all the top experts working for you.” Jason shifted in his chair.

  “Experts tend to stupefy the listener with technical jargon and unnecessary detail. Certain unkind persons have even accused me of this sort of behavior. An introduction from someone whose knowledge is of a practical nature, acquired in the field, might be more useful.”

  “Some sense in that.” Agreeing with Rutherford caused Jason physical pain.

  “In fact,” Rutherford continued, on a rising note of self-satisfaction, “you can begin their orientation at once.”

  “What? You mean they’re here in Athens?”

  “I thought it well to bring them here, in anticipation that you would wish to meet your team members without delay.” Rutherford stood up. “Shall I send for them?”

  For an instant, Jason’s resentment came roaring back in full force. His mouth almost opened to tell Rutherford where to put this mission, to declare that he would legally contest the Service’s right to order him into the past… .

  The past when—how did Rutherford put it?—Earth was young. Jason’s eyes strayed to the Acropolis. I wonder what was there then?

  And besides, Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez did look awfully intriguing… .

  “Well, I don’t suppose it could hurt to talk to them.”

  Rutherford smiled and spoke into a grille on his desktop. “Please ask them to come in.”

  Chapter Two

  Please be seated,” Rutherford told them as they entered. “Permit me to introduce Commander Jason Thanou, your mission leader.” He was on his best behavior, giving Jason his Rangers rank and even pronouncing his surname correctly. (“Thane-oh,” not “Than-ooh.”) He then proceeded to introduce the new arrivals, which was redundant but which gave Jason a chance to study them.

  Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez wasn’t quite as tall as he’d imagined from her face, which was probably just as well from the standpoint of blending into the Bronze Age population. She wasn’t short, though, and her figure was a solidly constructed hourglass. The latter was obvious even in the no-nonsense jumpsuit she was wearing—maroon, which complemented her coloring. She gave Jason a brief smile of measured cordiality.

  Dr. Nagel was very much as per expectations, aside from being somewhat stockier than his sharp features suggested. His consciously old-fashioned, expensively fusty clothing was the uniform of academia. Jason noted a tightening of his thin lips at Rutherford’s use of the term “mission leader.” As soon after the introductions as politeness permitted—or perhaps just slightly sooner than that—he turned to Rutherford, ignoring Jason.

  “I say, Kyle, given my credentials in Aegean Bronze Age studies, surely it should be myself who—”

  “No, Sidney. I remind you of the Articles of Agreement you signed with the Temporal Regulatory Authority.”

  “Well, er, yes, I seem to recall some legalistic boilerplate. But I naturally assumed that it didn’t apply in my case.”

  “Revise your assumptions.” Rutherford’s brusqueness with a kindred spirit was almost shocking, until Jason recalled how the old bastard could be when it came to defending his administrative turf. “The Authority has exclusive jurisdiction of all extratemporal activities. That has been settled beyond dispute for a generation. And the Temporal Service is the Authority’s enforcement arm. Every expedition into the past is required to be under the supervision of a Service representative whose legal powers are comparable to those of a ship’s captain in the age of sail—and for much the same reasons. If you find you are unable in good conscience to abide by these terms, your only honorable course is to withdraw from the expedition.” Rutherford took on a crafty look. “I daresay we could probably find a willing replacement from among the ranks of your colleagues.”

  Nagel’s face darkened with emotion. “You mean that impudent puppy Boudreau! Or Markova, with her asinine, unacceptable theory that—” He got himself under control with a comically visible effort. “Of course not, Kyle. I have every intention of following the Authority’s guidelines to the letter. I never meant to imply otherwise. And I have no doubt that Mr. Thanou’s competence is of a high order.”

  “The Authority has the fullest confidence in him,” said Rutherford pointedly.

  “I’m sure we all do, regardless of … er, that is …” Nagel’s we , addressed to Rutherford, had held a certain near-imperceptible intonation that Jason had learned to recognize. It meant “we Earthmen .” But now Nagel trailed off to a miserable halt, having belatedly realized that making his meaning explicit might not be advisable. What brought him to that realization was a glare from Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez—another outworlder—under which he now wilted.

  Oh, yes, Jason sighed inwardly. This trip is going to be lots of fun.

  “And now,” said Rutherford after letting Nagel suffer for a few seconds, “I’ve asked Commander Thanou to give you the benefit of his extensive experience by answering any questions you may have about the theory and practice of time travel.”

  Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez broke the awkward pause. “Actually, Commander, it might be better if you would simply run through the basics for us. I probably don’t know enough about the subject to be able to frame questions.”

  At least she admits it , thought Jason. Nagel, now himself again, sat back with the superior smile of the overspecialized academic, secure in the certainty that his expertise in his particular field qualified him as an expert in every field.

  “Surely, Ms. Sadaka-Ramirez,” said Jason, giving her the look of undivided attention that he’d always found got the best results with women, “you must have some questions in your mind about it. Most people seem to, even though we’ve been doing it for a while now.”

  “Well, yes. I’m just afraid they’ll seem foolish. I’ve read something of the history of time travel as a concept. It used to be a common fictional device, but one which was clearly understood to be impossible in the real world.”

  “So was beating the limiting velocity of light,” Jason pointed out. “Until someone actually found a way around it. Around , not through. That’s a crucial distinction.”

  “Understood,” she nodded. “But time travel was regarded as a fundamental
philosophical impossibility, because of the paradoxes it allowed for. As somebody once put it, if you could travel into the past, then what was to prevent you from killing your grandfather before he met your grandmother? In which case, you would never have been born … and so how could you have traveled back in time and killed him?”

  “The ‘Grandfather Paradox,’ it was called,” Jason nodded. “The classic response to it was: ‘Why should I want to kill him? I think he’s a wonderful old fellow.’ ” He held up a forestalling hand. “Yes, of course I’m being facetious. The possibility still exists, even if only for doing it by accident. And, in the entire scope of the future, there are bound to be people with good reasons for wanting to change history—killing Hitler while he was still just a bum in pre-World War I Vienna, for example, or similar cases in the early stages of the Transhuman movement. But please continue.”

  “The other problem was perhaps not as immediately obvious. If you could travel into the future and come back with, say, next week’s racing results, it would mean information was being transmitted at more-than-infinite velocity, violating the relativistic lightspeed limit—which, as you’ve indicated, can’t be violated, just evaded in certain mathematically limited ways. In fact, it would violate causality itself.” She looked at Jason levelly and spoke in a challenging tone which was clearly habitual with her. “As far as I can see, those arguments are still as valid as they ever were. But they can’t be, can they? After all, time travel is now so well established that it needs a bureaucracy to regulate it. So please help me with this.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Jason, “you haven’t begun to exhaust the philosophical objections to time travel. Actually, I think you may have had the right idea the first time; I’ll just start at the beginning, and hopefully the answers to your questions will become apparent.” He turned to Nagel with a smile. “I apologize in advance if I seem to be patronizing you by lecturing you on what you may already know.” Thus giving you a taste of being patronized, you pompous, conceited jackass! he loudly did not add. Without giving Rutherford a chance to summon up a warning glare, he started in.

  “About seventy years ago, Weintraub made the crucial discovery that all matter possesses what he termed ‘temporal energy potential,’ an ‘anchor’ holding it in time. He confirmed this experimentally by manipulating it so as to displace objects in time. Those first experiments involved subatomic particles, and the displacement was of infinitesimal duration. Only with the most sensitive of measuring instruments was it possible to observe that the particles appeared a few microseconds before the experiment, remaining for a period measured in nanoseconds—the same period for which they vanished after the power was turned on—and then ‘snapping back’ to their proper time. Temporal energy potential is very stubborn stuff. It also exists only up to the constantly advancing ‘present.’ This, by the way, answers the second objection you raised, Ms. Sadaka-Ramirez. The future is, in an absolute sense, nonexistent until it happens. There can be no travel into it.

  “At first Weintraub’s discovery, however revolutionary in theoretical terms, had no practical application. Nobody, it seemed, had to worry about murdered grandfathers. But then, twenty years later, Fujiwara discovered an all-or-nothing process by which the temporal energy potential of objects could be cancelled entirely.”

  Rutherford, who had been doing an admirable job of holding his tongue, could no longer contain himself. “The mathematical underpinning of this process is one which—”

  “—you don’t want to hear about,” Jason finished for him firmly. “Believe me, you really don’t.” Rutherford subsided unhappily, and Jason resumed. “All you need to know is that the process is controllable, so that matter can be sent back in time to a desired date in the past—and will remain in the past until its temporal energy potential is restored by use of a ‘temporal retrieval device’ or TRD, whereupon it ‘snaps back’ to the linear present.”

  “Uh … excuse me,” Deirdre ventured. ” ‘Linear present’ … ?”

  “Sorry. That’s a convenience label we use for the fact that time passes at the same rate for a temporally displaced object as it does in the ‘present’ from which the object was displaced. This became apparent in Weintraub’s pioneering experiments, as I indicated earlier. And it proved to hold true for living beings as well, contrary to some earlier theoretical speculations that living matter constituted a ‘reverse state of entropy’ or something like that.” Jason saw from his listeners’ expressions that he was starting to lose them. Even Nagel’s know-it-all look was wavering. “Let me put it this way. Suppose you were sent back in time from the Authority’s displacer stage in Australia at 10:00 A.M. on June 1, and spent five days and one hour in the past before your TRD activated. You would then reappear on the stage at 11:00 A.M. on June 6. That’s flat. Remember what I said before about the constantly advancing wave front between the past and the future that we call the ‘present’? Well, you’re wedded to it. You can’t just pick a date and time you’re going to return to. This is an immutable fact that the Service has to live with. It’s fundamental to our operating procedures.

  “Now, the displacement of matter back into the past requires a massive physical installation and a tremendous expenditure of energy. The actual energy requirement is tied to two factors: the mass being displaced, and how far back that mass is being sent. For this displacement, it’s going to cost a lot to send even the three of us.” From Rutherford’s direction came a grunt of sad accord. “Furthermore, for objects of significant mass an initial energy surge is required—an ‘oomph’ if you will.” Jason pretended not to notice Rutherford’s wince of pain. “This sends the object in question back about three hundred years before the effect becomes controllable. Therefore you can’t be sent to a time any more recent than that. Incidentally, this disposes of another theoretical difficulty with time travel; there is no possibility of going back and meeting your own younger self.

  “Anyway, there is only one such installation. It’s here on Earth—”

  “Naturally,” Nagel interjected.

  Jason gritted his mental teeth. But Nagel, however insufferable, was right. Only on this planet was there a past—a human past, anyway—to be explored.

  “—in Western Australia,” Jason finished, proud of himself for his level tone of voice. “It had to be built in a relatively empty country, as far as possible from large population centers, because the energy requirements could only be met by an antimatter power plant. It’s the only such power plant on the surface of Earth—or of any other inhabited planet—rather than in orbit like all the others. There are elaborate fail-safe systems in place, and the chances of an accident are considered vanishingly remote. But …” Jason let the thought trail off.

  Nagel momentarily let his guard slip, and his expression showed that he’d never considered this issue. “Then why isn’t this installation placed in space as well?”

  “A reasonable question, Dr. Nagel.” Jason decided he might as well be conciliatory, especially inasmuch as it really was a reasonable question. “In fact, for reasons which are too technical to go into just now, time travel will only work within, and in relation to, a substantial gravity field. If you think about it, this has to be the case. Otherwise … well, someone who traveled into the past would find himself watching Earth recede at roughly eighteen miles a second as it revolves around the Sun, and wishing he’d thought to wear a space suit.” Actually, it was worse than that, given the Sun’s orbital velocity around the center of the galaxy … and that was just for starters. But Jason decided to keep it simple. “Another fortunate consequence: it doesn’t matter where the displacer is located on the surface of the planet producing the gravity field. The displacer stage can whisk you anywhere on Earth at the same time it’s displacing you into the past. We won’t have to make our way across the ancient world from Australia to Greece.”

  Nagel leaned forward, now openly intrigued. “But why hasn’t this made all forms of public transport
ation on Earth obsolete? World-wide teleportation—”

  “It doesn’t work that way. Remember the three-hundred-year minimum trip into the past? You have to go at least that far back. And when your TRD activates and you regain your temporal energy potential, you snap back to exactly the same location you were displaced from, due to conservation-of-energy considerations. Anyway, even if it was possible to flick people around in the present, the expense would limit it to being a toy for the super rich.”

  Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez spoke up. “You keep talking about this ‘TRD.’ …”

  “Right—the temporal retrieval device. As I’ve explained, it takes a huge, expensive, energy-intensive installation we call the ‘displacer’ to cancel an object’s temporal energy potential and send it into the past. But restoring that temporal energy potential so that the object returns to the linear present is almost unbelievably easy. For a human-sized object—with its clothing and as much mass as a human can conveniently carry—all it takes is a device that can be miniaturized to the size of a small pea, drawing an insignificant amount of energy. Good thing, too; this makes time travel practical.”