The Early Asimov. Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  I nodded sourly. Everyone knows about that since Hiroshima in the last war but one.

  “All right, then,” he went on, “that’s good for a start. Now, if you take a brown mass of matter and apply temporal translation to it-you know, send it back in time-you are, in effect, creating matter at the point in time to which you are sending it. To do that, you must use an amount of energy equivalent to the amount of matter you have created. In other words, to send a gram-or, say, an ounce-of anything back in time, you have to disintegrate an ounce of matter completely, to furnish the energy required.”

  “Hm-m-m,” I said, “that’s to create the ounce of matter in the past. But aren’t you destroying an ounce of matter by removing it from the present? Doesn’t that create the equivalent amount of energy?”

  And he looked just about as annoyed as a fellow sitting on a bumblebee that wasn’t quite dead. Apparently laymen are never supposed to question scientists.

  He said: “I was trying to simplify it so you would understand it. Actually, it’s more complicated. It would be very nice if we could use the energy of disappearance to cause it to appear, but that would be working in a circle, believe me. The requirements of entropy would forbid it. To put it more rigorously, the energy is required to overcome temporal inertia and it just works out so that the energy in ergs required to send back a mass, in grams, is equal to that mass times the square of the speed of light in centimeters per second. Which just happens to be the Einstein Mass-Energy Equivalence Equation. I can give you the mathematics, you know.”

  “I know,” I waxed some of that misplaced eagerness back. “But was all this worked out experimentally? Or is it just on paper?”

  Obviously, the thing was to keep him talking.

  He had that queer light in his eye that every research student gets, I am told, when he is asked to discuss his problem. Hell discuss it with anyone, even with a “dumb flatfoot”-which was convenient at the moment.

  “You see,” he said like a man slipping you the inside dope on a shady business deal, “what started the whole thing was this neutrino business. They’ve been trying to find that neutrino since the late thirties and they haven’t succeeded. It’s a subatomic particle which has no charge and has a mass much less than even an electron. Naturally, it’s next to impossible to spot, and hasn’t been spotted yet. But they keep looking because, without assuming that a neutrino exists, the energetics of some nuclear reactions can’t be balanced. So Pop Tywood got the idea about twenty years ago that some energy was disappearing, in the form of matter, back into time. We got working on that-or he did-and I’m the first student he’s ever had tackle it along with him.

  “Obviously, we had to work with tiny amounts of material and… well, it was just a stroke of genius on Pop’s part to think of using traces of artificial radioactive isotopes. You could work with just a few micrograms of it, you know, by following its activity with counters. The variation of activity with time should follow a very definite and simple law which has never been altered by any laboratory condition known.

  “Well, we’d send a speck back fifteen minutes, say, and fifteen minutes before we did that-everything was arranged automatically, you see-the count jumped to nearly double what it should be, fell off normally, and then dropped sharply at the moment it was sent back below where it would have been normally. The material overlapped itself in time, you see, and for fifteen minutes we counted the doubled material-”

  I interrupted: “You mean you had the same atoms existing in two places at the same time.”

  “Yes,” he said, with mild surprise, “why not? That’s why we use so much energy-the equivalent of creating those atoms.” And then he rushed on, “Now I’ll tell you what my particular job is. If you send back the material fifteen minutes, it is apparently sent back to the same spot relative to the Earth despite the fact that in fifteen minutes, the Earth moved sixteen thousand miles around the Sun, and the Sun itself moves more thousand miles and so on. But there are certain tiny discrepancies which I’ve analyzed and which turn out to be due, possibly, to two causes.

  “First, there is a frictional effect-if you can use such a term-so that matter does drift a little with respect to the Earth, depending on how far back in time it is sent, and on the nature of material. Then, too, some of the discrepancy can only be explained by the assumption that passage through time itself takes time.”

  “How’s that?” I said.

  “What I mean is that some of the radioactivity is evenly spread throughout the time of translation as if the material tested had been reacting during backward passage through time by a constant amount. My figures show that-well, if you were to be moved backward in time, you would age one day for every hundred years. Or, to put it another way, if you could watch a time dial which recorded the time outside a ‘time-machine,’ your watch would move forward twenty-four hours while the time dial moved back a hundred years. That’s a universal constant, I think, because the speed of light is a universal constant. Anyway, that’s my work.”

  After a few minutes, in which I chewed all this, I asked: “Where did you get the energy needed for your experiments?”

  “They ran out a special line from the power plant. Pop’s a big shot there, and swung the deal.”

  “Hm-m-m. What was the heaviest amount of material you sent into the past?”

  “Oh”-he sent his eyes upwards-”I think we shot back one hundredth of a milligram once. That’s ten micrograms.”

  “Ever try sending anything into the future?”

  “That won’t work,” he put in quickly. “Impossible. You can’t change signs like that, because the energy required becomes more than infinite. It’s a one-way proposition.”

  I looked hard at my fingernails: “How much material could you send back in time if you fissioned about…oh, say, one hundred pounds of plutonium.” Things, I thought, were becoming, if anything, too obvious.

  The answer came quickly: “In plutonium fission,” he said, “not more than one or two percent of the mass is converted into energy. Therefore, one hundred pounds of plutonium when completely used up would send a pound or two back into time.”

  “Is that all? But could you handle all that energy? I mean, a hundred pounds of plutonium can make quite an explosion.”

  “All relative,” he said, a bit pompously. “If you took all that energy and let it loose a little at a time, you could handle it. If you released it all at once, but used it just as fast as you released it, you could still handle it. In sending back material through time, energy can be used much faster than it can possibly be released even through fission. Theoretically, anyway…

  “But how do you get rid of it?”

  “It’s spread through time, naturally. Of course, the minimum time through which material could be transferred would, therefore, depend on the mass of the material. Otherwise, you’re liable to have the energy density with time too high.”

  “All right, kid,” I said. “I’m calling up headquarters, and they’ll send a man here to take you home. You’ll stay there a while.”

  “But-What for?”

  “It won’t be for long.”

  It wasn’t-and it was made up to him afterwards.

  I spent the evening at Headquarters. We had a library there-a very special kind of library. The very morning after the explosion, two or three operators had drifted quietly into the chemistry and physics libraries of the University. Experts in their way. They located every article Tywood had ever published in any scientific journal and had snapped each page. Nothing was disturbed otherwise.

  Other men went through magazine files and through book lists. It ended with a room at Headquarters that represented a complete Tywoodana. Nor was there a definite purpose in doing this. It merely represented part of the thoroughness with which a problem of this sort is met.

  I went through that library. Not the scientific papers. I knew there’d be nothing there that I wanted. But he had written a series of articles for a magazin
e twenty years back, and I read those. And I grabbed at every piece of private correspondence they had available.

  After that, I just sat and thought-and got scared.

  I got to bed about four in the morning and had nightmares.

  But I was in the Boss’ private office at nine in the morning just the same.

  He’s a big man, the Boss, with iron-gray hair slicked down tight. He doesn’t smoke, but he keeps a box of cigars on his desk and when he doesn’t want to say anything for a few seconds, he picks one up, rolls it about a little, smells it, then sticks it right into the middle of his mouth and lights it in a very careful way. By that time, he either has something to say or doesn’t have to say anything at all. Then he puts the cigar down and lets it bum to death.

  He used up a box in about three weeks, and every Christmas, half his gift-wraps held boxes of cigars.

  He wasn’t reaching for any cigars now, though. He just folded his big fists together on the desk and looked up at me from under a creased forehead. “What’s boiling?”

  I told him. Slowly, because micro-temporal-translation doesn’t sit well with anybody, especially when you call it time travel, which I did. It’s a sign of how serious things were that he only asked me once if I were crazy.

  Then I was finished and we stared at each other.

  He said: “And you think he tried to send something back in time-something weighing a pound or two-and blew an entire plant doing it?”

  “It fits in,” I said.

  I let him go for a while. He was thinking and I wanted him to keep on thinking. I wanted him, if possible, to think of the same thing I was thinking, so that I wouldn’t have to tell him

  Because I hated to have to tell him-

  Because it was nuts, for, one thing. And too horrible, for another.

  So I kept quiet and he kept on thinking and every once in a while some of his thoughts came to the surface.

  After a while, he said: “Assuming the student, Howe, to have told the truth-and you’d better check his notebooks, by the way, which I hope you’ve impounded-“

  “The entire wing of that floor is out of bounds, sir. Edwards has the notebooks.”

  He went on: “ All right. Assuming he told us all the truth he knows, why did Tywood jump from less than a milligram to a pound?”

  His eyes came down and they were hard: “Now you’re concentrating on the time-travel angle. To you, I gather, that is the crucial point, with the energy involved as incidental-purely incidental.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said grimly. “I think exactly that.”

  “Have you considered that you might be wrong? That you might have matters inverted?”

  “I don’t quite get that.”

  “Well, look. You say you’ve read up on Tywood. All right. He was one of that bunch of scientists after World War II that fought the atom bomb; wanted a world state-you know about that, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “He had a guilt complex, “ the Boss said with energy. “He’d helped work out the bomb, and he couldn’t sleep nights thinking of what he’d done. He lived with that fear for years. And even though the bomb wasn’t used in World War III, can you imagine what every day of uncertainty must have meant to him? Can you imagine the shriveling horror in his soul as he waited for others to make the decision at every crucial moment till the final Compromise of Sixty-Five?

  “We have a complete psychiatric analysis of Tywood and several others just like him, taken during the last war. Did you know that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s true. We let up after Sixty-Five, of course, because with the establishment of world control of atomic power, the scrapping of the atomic bomb stockpile in all countries, and the establishment of research liaison among the various spheres of influence on the planet, most of the ethical conflict in the scientific mind was removed.

  “But the findings at the time were serious. In 1964, Tywood had a morbid subconscious hatred for the very concept of atomic power. He began to make mistakes, serious ones. Eventually, we were forced to take him off research of any kind. And several others as well, even though things were pretty bad at the time. We had just lost India, if you remember.”

  Considering that I was in India at the time, I remembered. But I still wasn’t seeing his point.

  “Now, what,” he continued, “if dregs of that attitude remained buried in Tywood to the very end? Don’t you see that this time-travel is a double-edged sword? Why throw a pound of anything into the past, anyway? For the sake of proving a point? He had proved his case just as much when he sent back a fraction of a milligram. That was good enough for the Nobel Prize, I suppose.

  “But there was one thing he could do with a pound of matter that he couldn’t do with a milligram, and that was to drain a power plant. So that was what he must have been after. He had discovered a way of consuming inconceivable quantities of energy. By sending back eighty pounds of dirt, he could remove all the existing plutonium in the world, End atomic power for an indefinite period.”

  I was completely unimpressed, but I tried not to make that too plain. I just said: “Do you think he could possibly have thought he could get away with it more than once?”

  “This is all based on the fact that he wasn’t a normal man. How do I know what he could imagine he could do? Besides, there may be men behind him-with less science and more brains-who are quite ready to continue onwards from this point.”

  “Have any of these men been found yet? Any evidence of such men?”

  A little wait, and his hand reached for the cigar box. He stared at the cigar and turned it end for end. Just a little wait more. I was patient.

  Then he put it down decisively without lighting it. “

  “No,” he said.

  He looked at me, and clear through me, and said: “Then, you still don’t go for that?”

  I shrugged, “Well-It doesn’t sound right.”

  “Do you have a notion of your own?”

  “Yes. But I can’t bring myself to talk about it. If I’m wrong, I’m the wrongest man that ever was; but if I’m right, I’m the rightest.”

  “I’ll listen,” he said, and he put his hand under the desk.

  That was the pay-off. The room was armored, sound-proof, and radiation-proof to anything short of a nuclear explosion. And with that little signal showing on his secretary’s desk, the President of the United States couldn’t have interrupted us.

  I leaned back and said: “Chief, do you happen to remember how you met your wife? Was it a little thing?”

  He must have thought it a non sequitur. What else could he have thought? But he was giving me my head now; having his own reasons, I suppose.

  He just smiled and said: “I sneezed and she turned around. It was at a street comer.”

  “What made you be on that street corner just then? What made her be? Do you remember just why you sneezed? Where you caught the cold? Or where the speck of dust came from? Imagine how many factors had to intersect in just the right place at just the right time for you to meet your wife.”

  “I suppose we would have met some other time, if not then?”

  “But you can’t know that. How do you know whom you didn’t meet, because once when you might have turned around. you didn’t; because once when you might have been late, you weren’t. Your life forks at every instant, and you go down one of the forks almost at random, and so does everyone else. Start twenty years ago, and the forks diverge further and further with time.

  “You sneezed, and met a girl, and not another. As a consequence, you made certain decisions, and so did the girl, and so did the girl you didn’t meet, and the man who did meet her, and the people you all met thereafter. And your family, her family, their family-and your children.

  “Because you sneezed twenty years ago, five people, or fifty, or five hundred, might be dead now who would have been alive, or might be alive who would have been dead. Move it two hundred years ago: two thousand years ago, and a s
neeze-even by someone no history ever heard of-might have meant that no one now alive would have been alive…

  The Boss rubbed the back of his head: “Widening ripples. I read a story once-”

  “So did I. It’s not a new idea-but I want you to think about it for a while, because I want to read to you from an article by Professor Elmer Tywood in a magazine twenty years old. It was just before the last war…

  I had copies of the film in my pocket and the white wall made a beautiful screen, which was what it was meant to do. The boss made a motion to turn about, but I waved him back.

  “No, sir,” I said. “I want to read this to you. And I want you to listen to it.”

  He leaned back.

  “The article,… I went on, is entitled: ‘Man’s First Great Failure!’ Remember, this was just before the war, when the bitter disappointment at the final failure of the United Nations was at its height. What I will read are some excerpts from the first part of the article. It goes like this:

  “’…That Man, with his technical perfection, has failed to solve the great sociological problems of today is only the second immense tragedy that has come to the race. The first, and perhaps the greater, was that, once, these same great sociological problems were solved; and yet these solutions were not permanent, because the technical perfection we have today did not then exist

  “‘It was a case of having bread without butter, or butter without bread. N ever both together…

  “‘Consider the Hellenic world, from which our philosophy, our mathematics, our ethics, our art, our literature-our entire culture, in fact-stem…In the days of Pericles, Greece, like our own world in microcosm, was a surprisingly modem potpourri of conflicting ideologies and ways of life. But then Rome came, adopting the culture, but bestowing, and enforcing, peace. To be sure, the Pax Romana lasted only two hundred years, but no like period has existed since…

  “‘War was abolished. Nationalism did not exist. The Roman citizen was Empire-wide. Paul of Tarsus and Flavius Josephus were Roman citizens. Spaniards, North Africans, Illyrians assumed the purple. Slavery existed, but it was an indiscriminate slavery, imposed as a punishment, incurred as the price of economic failure, brought on by the fortunes of war. No man was a natural slave-because of the color of his skin or the place of his birth.