Helias realized only then that he had no idea of the date of any of these events. His throat dry, he asked “Meaning? How long ago?”.
The counselor was watching him closely, more and more closely. But the answer came from the professor.
“A bit more than three earth-years ago, my boy. Three years before you were transmitted to Alkenia. And now look at that sheet of paper. It’s a copy of a message found at the station after the disappearances.”
Helias stretched out a hand toward the table. When he touched the paper, his hand began to tremble.
The message was hand-written, probably in a hurry. The script was middling in size, slightly slanting.
“23 May ED—My son was here. He took it. My husband is wounded”
Evidently there had been no time to write more.
Helias had paled, and his hand would not stop shaking.
“It’s your mother’s handwriting, isn’t it?”
Helias had to swallow several times before he was able to speak.
“W…what kind of a joke is this?” he stammered, looking bewilderedly from one man to the other.
“I’ll get you a glass of water.” said the professor, rising.
The glass of water arrived right away, but Helias, huddled with his head between his hands, didn’t even see it. After a while he glanced up, took the glass and barely wet his lips.
“What kind of joke is this?” he repeated, staring into space.
The counselor, who had not taken his eyes off Helias for an instant and continued to watch him searchingly, answered “It’s not a joke. This is really your mother’s handwriting.”
“And so you think that I took the compiler…. And maybe, while I was there, that I wounded my father…. Is that right?”
“We believe what your mother says. We have no reason not to.”
Helias raised his head and looked at the counselor, the strain and suffering in his eyes frightening to behold.
“And why, supposedly, would I have done such a thing?”
“We are certain that you took it. How and why is something you have to explain to us. We’ll leave you alone to think about it.”
And, leaving, he took the sheet that had dropped to the tabletop.
Kathia, on the other side of the partition, suffered silently.
The counselor handed the sheet to the professor.
“Measure it, please.”
The professor took the sheet with caution, placed it on the desk and held a sort of sensor over it. Then he looked at the computer.
“Full scale.” he said.
It was all so absurd. Why was everything so completely absurd?
How could they even think such a thing? Didn’t they know him well enough? Hadn’t they read his thoughts enough, peered into practically every nook and cranny of his brain? Didn’t Kathia know everything there was to know about him? Or didn’t they trust her either? Where was she? She, and all that talk about reliability? That, more than anything else, was the absurd thing: first they say they know him better than he knew himself, and then they come out with all these groundless accusations.
But they had been categorical: “We are certain that you took it.”.
Or was he the one who didn’t remember? Had they removed it from his memory? Or maybe it was…. But of course! It must be like that! That was the only possible explanation.
The counselor and the professor still had not returned. By now, Helias had recovered from the state of prostration he had fallen into.
The strange thing now was that he realized he hadn’t been especially shocked to hear that his parents had been involved, as he was himself, in this business of the compiler. Had been, or were involved? A shiver ran through Helias. The counselor had said they had disappeared. And if they were still alive? Perhaps prisoners? A sudden agitation threatened to overwhelm him. No. Relax. He had already spent too much time vainly hoping to see them come back, to embrace them once again. Until he had finally managed to come to terms with it. No. Enough of wallowing in painful hope.
But he couldn’t help seeing them again in his mind’s eye, just as he had known them. And his throat tightened. And tears welled in his eyes. But without rolling down his cheeks.
He hadn’t been especially shocked. Why? Perhaps because other emotions had been more powerful? He hadn’t had time to be shocked. That message accused him, or so it seemed. And everything else was shoved into the background.
Or perhaps this revelation, more than being a shock, had enabled him, more or less consciously, to explain a number of things to himself. At least some of the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place. And some questions had automatically been answered. Even though, as is always the case, every new answer led to new questions.
Now he knew what his parents did, always so far from home. And how important, and secret, their scientific research was. But how, and why, were they involved with the Thaymites?
It was equally clear to him—though some points were still obscure—that his part in this whole thing was strictly dependent on his parents’ past. And that the fact that he had been chosen for this mission was anything but an accident.
The professor and the counselor finally returned.
Helias regarded them triumphantly.
“When do we leave?” he said.
A tear of joy and a smile illuminated Kathia’s face.
For the first time, the counselor’s gaunt face was also wearing a smile.
“Good. I see that we’ve probably all reached the same conclusion. Excuse us for the somewhat brutal methods. But the only way we knew of to get you to see intuitively what we felt we had deduced was to trigger a strong emotion in you. It was the only way, and we needed your confirmation.”
“Let me try to understand this better. Three years ago, when you found that message, you immediately started tailing me?”
“Yes, we started watching you then. First for a short period, just to make sure you hadn’t done it, or at least not yet. Then, more or less sporadically, and with different people, taking turns, to make sure nothing happened to you, that you weren’t approached by the wrong people or, above all, that you didn’t disappear too. And finally Kathia took over. And the rest, more or less, you know.”
“Let me ask a couple of personal questions….”
“Go ahead….”
“What became of my parents? And Kathia?”
“About your parents, unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find out anything else. But the search continues, even though hopes are fading.”
“And Kathia?”
“You can see her whenever you like.” said the professor, beaming. “In fact, counselor, didn’t we have something the two of us had to get done, back in my office? A question of five or ten minutes, say? Afterwards they could join us there, couldn’t they?”
The two men made off. A sliding door, so well camouflaged that it had escaped his notice, opened at the bottom of the room. A couple of seconds, and Kathia appeared. Helias jumped up and went to her. But not before bruising his knee slightly when he banged it against the corner of the table.
“When do we leave?” repeated Helias Kadler.
“This very evening.” answered the professor.
“There’s one thing I don’t quite get. Haven’t you always told me that you had a veto against interfering with the past? So when did you change your mind?”
“In reality nothing’s changed. The veto is still there.” answered the counselor pensively.
“And so?”
“And so nothing. There’s no way of preventing what we’ve already done, or rather, what we are now choosing to do. The stakes are too high, in any case; we have no other options.”
“Are you thinking of asking for a special permit?”
“No. Special permits do not exist. There’s nothing of the sort.”
“And then?”
“And then it’s easy. We’ll do it secretly.”
“Ah!”
Hel
ias weighed this in his mind for a while. Then he continued.
“Why do you think my mother wrote that message?”
“The most obvious answer is: to leave a trace, a sign of what happened.”
“That’s it? Could she have been trying to urge us to go, as in fact is happening? Without that message we would not be preparing to leave now.”
“I see.” replied the professor. “It would be a concrete version of the ‘Now you talk’ that we know so well. To tell the truth, though, that seems to me to be overestimating your mother a bit, don’t you think? Especially considering the anxiety and stress she was going through, no?”
“Hard to overestimate my mother. Particularly in stressful moments, when she was even more clear-thinking than usual.”
The professor glanced slyly at Helias.
“So that could be who you got it from…. Hmm, possible. Maybe not probable, but possible. ‘My son was here.’ meaning, ‘So have him come here.’….”
“And, ‘My husband is wounded’ could mean ‘Come save him’.”
“Yes. We already thought of that. Whatever your mother’s real intentions might have been.”
“Do we know anything else about what we’re going there to do, or rather, what we’ve done?”
“Nothing more than vague assumptions. Which in any case might be best ignored. They might turn out to be misleading. We’ll probably need all your capacity for intuition, and any assumptions we make now could interfere with it. A blank slate, my boy. We’ll leave here well equipped. That’s for certain. Nothing else is.”
“So you are coming too….”
“Well, I know that I probably won’t be any use. But an experience like this… why, I wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world.”
“Is there a specific reason for leaving this evening? And a reason why you hid things from me until the last minute?”
“I’m willing to bet you’ve already figured out the answer to the first question by yourself. As for the second, I’d prefer not to answer, at least for now.”
It was Kathia who responded.
“Currently, we only have one route available for going back there at that time. If we were to leave now for the solar system, with back-now we’d arrive twenty-six days after our departure from Earth. But we have to get there one thousand one hundred and fifty-four days before, which corresponds to a round trip between here and Thaýma, always with back-now, obviously.”
“So we leave this evening, we go to Thaýma and come back here some one thousand one hundred-odd days ago and, with the first available back-now, we end up on Earth in that period. Have you calculated everything in detail? Waits and downtime included?”
“We have to keep waits and downtime to a minimum because we can’t afford to stay out too long on our own, given that we won’t be able to take on supplies between one transmission and the other, since not only are we going backwards, but we’re also doing it in secret. We won’t go to Earth directly, as there weren’t any transmissions to Alkenia around that twenty-third of May. Instead, we’ll go straight to the Martian station where it all happened, and where there was a transmission to Alkenia that day, which we’ll be able to use for our back-now down there. Mars, though, has no labs for time inversion, which we’ll have to go through in order to interact with events and do our bit, as well as to be able to come back up here to our own time. Consequently, once we’ve got to the Martian station, we’ll have to go to Earth, be inverted, and return to Mars.”
“But aren’t the stations all carefully monitored by you Thaymites? How can there be clandestine back-now trips?”
“As you know, back-now consists of swapping the traveler for part of the antimatter needed for transmission. In other words, whereas a normal transmission, without back-now, uses a mass of antimatter equal to the load to be transmitted, with back-now we sneak ourselves in as a portion of the antimatter, and so the release of antimatter measured at the station is less than expected. Actually, though, this release is seen as a less-than-expected acquisition of antimatter by the receiving station, the station where we sneak in, and as a defective release at the transmitting station, where we go out. A back-now can’t be prevented, unless there’s a tip-off beforehand. Normally, the missing masses are noted at the end, and that’s about it.”
“And so our trips should have left a trace. Have you checked?”
“For the first leg, from here to Thaýma, there’s obviously not anything yet. The trip from Thaýma to Alkenia is absolutely forbidden with back-now, like that from Earth to Alkenia, for the same reasons. So it will be something worse than a clandestine back-now. We have an accomplice at the Thaýma station. His job is to release the magnetic field for a few instants half a minute before the transmission to Alkenia that we’ll use today for our back-now down there. As soon as we arrive, then, we’ll stick close to the magnetic ring, letting thirty seconds pass, backward in time, and we’ll jump back into the ring, while an ad hoc ballast load will enable us to reach Alkenia in the past. Both stations will record a series of anomalies….”
“Can you access this information? I mean, what took place on Alkenia at that time?”
Kathia turned to the counselor.
“Have you finally been able to find out about that?”
“No. It’s confidential, protected information, for obvious reasons. And I couldn’t even insist without rousing suspicion. For the Alkenia-Mars leg, the situation’s a bit different. The station was at the experimental stage and the transmission records would have been readily accessible, especially for Professor Nudeliev. Except that everything was seized after the business of the disappearances. In any case, the essential thing is that, from your mother’s message, we know that at least the trip out will not run into problems.”
“Yeah. I wonder why I hadn’t thought about the trip back yet? Maybe because it shouldn’t be in any way illegal, at least in terms of the time direction. Or am I wrong? Or maybe it’ll be even more complicated? I don’t know enough about it….”
“We have a few plans for that too, with a fair amount of flexibility. After all, we don’t have any specific deadline to meet for our return. Nobody’s waiting for us, in the future, not yet, nor do we know when we’ll get back.” said the professor.
“Or if we’ll get back.” added Helias.
“I’d say we’d better get ready now.” said Kathia, looking at the time. “We’ll be leaving Alkenia in five hours. Or rather, if everything has gone according to plan, we left exactly half an hour ago.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that now it’s almost five o’clock, at ten past seven we’ll invert and leave, and at four twenty-four, half an hour ago, ‘we’ll take’ the back-now for Thaýma.”
“So we have over two and a half hours of travel to reach the station. I suppose it’s not the same station where we were transmitted from Earth.”
“Obviously. Earthlings must not know about the transmissions from Thaýma. They’re received at the Scientific Station, staffed entirely by Thaymites. The trip takes a little over two hours, but we prefer to leave a little late, so as not to risk arriving early and missing the jolt.”
“What would happen in that case?”
“Nothing good. The only labs for the opposite time inversion are on Thaýma and on Earth.”
“And when is the next, or I mean the previous, chance at back-now?”
“Five days ago. But our reserve of energy would last much less.”
“Ah! Sorry, but couldn’t we leave a little later? Just enough to make sure we arrive in time?”
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Massimo VillataThe Dark Arrow of TimeScience and Fictionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67486-5_8
8. The Professor, with His Most Blissful Expression
Massimo Villata1
(1)Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, INAF, Pino Torinese (TO), Italy
Massimo Villata
Email: [email protected]
The professor, with his most blissful expression, continued to repeat “Fantastic! Fantastic!”. His eyes were sparkling. He looked like a little boy about to be given the keys to his very own amusement park. If his legs had been shorter, he probably would have been swinging them back and forth beneath his seat.
“Fantastic! Fantastic!”
Helias, by contrast, didn’t see anything fantastic about it. In fact, he was even a bit disappointed. They were in a small dimly lit wagon running along a rail of some kind, down an endless tunnel. Endless and almost entirely dark, with occasional patches of faint light punctuating lengthy stretches of gloom.
He didn’t like the coveralls either. They made him feel clumsy. One size smaller would have been better, he thought. Kathia’s, on the other hand, were maybe a bit too tight. Drew a little too much attention to her figure, if you asked him. Both down below and up top. Particularly up top.
And then there was that other guy, whatever his name was, who looked like he’d just stepped out of a fashion magazine or something. As if he’d been born with those coveralls on. Like a second skin, grown along with him. They should have given him a larger size. And one size smaller for himself. Maybe he’d had it made to measure, what with the job he did. And Kathia was looking at him. And why was Kathia looking at him now?
Kathia started giggling, she’d followed his whole train of thought. She turned toward Helias, goggle-eyed with mock admiration as she slowly ogled him up and down. Then a long, low whistle of appreciation. They both burst out laughing, while the others turned to look.
The wagon started to slow and the tunnel began to brighten.
“Did you pass it on to Mattheus?” asked Kathia.
“Yes. Together with the key to my room.” thought Helias.
Now they had come to a standstill and the doors opened. They all already knew what the professor, who had been waiting in front of the door for some time, would have said as soon as he set foot on the ground.
They were in an enormous cave, lit nearly as bright as day. Part of it seemed to have been dug into the mountain, probably starting from a natural cave, while part was built outwards, ending with two gigantic doors spaced around forty meters apart.
The Dark Arrow of Time Page 11
