“We’re on the south side of the mountain. Those two apertures open onto a narrow gorge that makes them invisible from outside. And then everything is also very well camouflaged.” explained the professor.
A small shuttle was parked a bit farther down, by the nearer door. Much of the cave was occupied by a sort of semicircular track protected by a transparent tunnel.
A few people, apparently staffmembers, were in some kind of control room beyond the semicircle. Others were coming and going, more or less busily.
“Fantastic!” murmured the professor, again.
Now the bustle had quieted. Only two people, probably carrying out the final checks on and around the shuttle, were still moving. Then they too left. It seemed that everything was ready.
The pilot—that fashion victim, whatever his name was—was talking on his cell, probably with the control room. Breaking off the conversation, he motioned to the others to follow him, and walked toward the shuttle.
It was a six-seater, and Helias understood why there would be six of them in the departing group. In addition to himself, Kathia, the professor and the pilot, there were two ‘chaperons’, probably a security detail of sorts. One was tall and swarthy, with a heavy jaw and a scar down his chin, ill-concealed by thick stubble. The other was thin, dark blond—though his hair seemed inclined to beat a retreat—and a bit older. Neither said a word, limiting themselves to minimal movements: latching their seat belts; putting on their helmets.
The pilot started the engines and the shuttle lifted off the ground. The countdown started on a display. 148, 147, 146.
“They’ve already told you what will happen shortly, I imagine.” remarked the professor, leaning towards Helias’s ear from his position behind him.
“More or less.” answered Helias, twisting around in his seat. As he did so, he caught Kathia’s eye, as she sat alongside him in the row to the left, less than a meter away. Apparently his face betrayed a certain unease, since Kathia was watching him steadily and smiling, as if to calm him.
“Are you afraid, young man?”
“Shouldn’t I be?”
“Not at all! Everything will be just fine, you’ll see.”
124, 123, 122.
Meanwhile the other door, at their left, had slowly opened and a shuttle similar to theirs appeared.
“Things’ll be fine. Guaranteed.” repeated the professor as he watched the other shuttle taxi in.
“Only remember, my boy, that you mustn’t let anything frighten you. Whatever happens. Or you think is happening.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see in a little while. But why do you ask? Didn’t they explain it to you?”
“Explain what?”
“There’s not enough time now. We’re almost ready to leave.”
99, 98, 97.
The overhead lights and those in the shuttle had dimmed, and now only the inside of the transparent tunnel was illuminated as they entered.
“Magnetic fields activated.” said the pilot.
“Did they tell you about the two membranes?” continued the professor.
“Yes, something was mentioned.”
“Now they’re being charged. They are barely a couple of millimeters apart. But they have to be crossed at very high speed. The first subtracts the first half of your energy, and in those two millimeters time no longer passes for your body. The second membrane takes the other half from you, and your time will be inverted. As you are going out of the second membrane, you belong to the other arrow of time. That’s why you have to cross them quickly. It can’t be much fun to prolong a situation where your heart, or a lung, or even your brain, is in slices, with each going its own way, can it? Fantastic! Don’t you think?”
The professor was clearly speaking more for himself than for Helias. Like a little boy gazing at his ice cream in happy anticipation before starting on it in earnest.
“So you can expect a violent acceleration slightly before crossing the membranes. Maybe six or seven seconds before. But remember, no panic.”
“Have you done this before?”
“No.”
“But I have.” interjected Kathia with her most reassuring look.
“Helmets.”
18, 17, 16.
“Pressurization.”
They were now nearing the end of their quarter-circle and, around the curve, could glimpse the translucent membranes.
As he looked in that direction, however, Helias realized that another shuttle, in the other half of the transparent tunnel, was moving toward the membranes. And toward them. It must be the one he had seen taxiing a little while before. But he had stopped watching it to listen to the professor’s explanations.
“What do they think they’re doing?” he couldn’t help but mutter inside his helmet.
10, 9, 8.
“Acceleration.” said the pilot.
“But what are they doing? Are they accelerating too? They’ll collide with us!” shouted Helias.
“No panic.” repeated the professor.
“It’s just us, going away.” explained Kathia in reassuring tones, as she grasped and squeezed his hand.
Helias had no time to say or do anything else, apart from instinctively bracing his feet. Beyond the translucent membrane he could see the other shuttle hurtling toward them. But there was no crash. As the two shuttles reached the membranes simultaneously, they disappeared layer after layer, as if they were cancelling each other out. The ‘impact’ lasted the barest instant. And then Helias found himself on the other side of the membranes, together with the others, a few moments before the impact. Still with the membranes ahead of him. But this time they were moving away, backwards. As if they had bounced back, rather than passing to the other side.
The control room had seen the two shuttles collide and annihilate each other. Leaving no trace. Except for the enormous amount of energy absorbed by the membranes and now stored elsewhere. The shuttle and its passengers no longer existed. But they belonged to the past and were going backwards in time, exactly where they had been seen to pass, in the other part of the semicircle.
“Inversion.” the pilot had said. And the cave had spun over, floor down. And the membranes were now moving away behind their back.
Helias was in an adrenaline rush, and realized that he was still fiercely clutching Kathia’s hand in his.
“Here we are. Fantastic!” exclaimed the professor.
“And there we are, slightly before starting to accelerate. Except that now we’re moving away from the membranes. Like us, in fact. Here and there simultaneously. But ‘we’ are a little older. And so we remember being there…. Fantastic!”
“But why did we come out backwards? We went in face forward and came out back to front. Why?”
“Because a time inversion also entails a space inversion, otherwise the transformation would be improper. The Lorentz total inversion, remember? And why were you frightened when you saw the other craft? Don’t you remember the Feynman diagrams? And yet I explained them to you, as I recall….” he said as he took off his helmet.
“Eh, it’s one thing having them explained to you or even thinking about them. Living inside them is another thing altogether. And then, as you will remember, I also fell asleep that time, when you were explaining…. Professor, why are you taking off your helmet?”
“Because what I didn’t remember is that you have to travel on an empty stomach. Or maybe I didn’t think it mattered. Where is the bag?”
The big doors began to open. Helias turned to the porthole to look at the other shuttle. It had just left, or in other words was coming out of the tunnel as he watched, while the outside lights and those inside it brightened. For a fleeting instant, he was able to make out the faces of the people on board. And he couldn’t restrain himself from putting his thumbs in his ears—or where his ears would have been if they weren’t covered by the helmet—and fluttering his fingers at the professor, who was looking towards him from the other sh
uttle. Satisfied, he looked ahead, down the narrow gorge at a sliver of starry sky, repeating to himself, “Fantastic! Fantastic!”.
The professor had just come back from the lavatory, looking distinctly unsettled.
They had come out of the gorge and were flying over the castle and lake.
It was suppertime, and there were only a few scattered people going about their business around the castle. Walking, obviously, backwards. While the waves, yellow and orange ripples reflecting the light from the castle, lapped outward, away from the shore.
“Everything okay, professor?”
“Yes. Much better. Thanks.”
“How is it that we’re flying over the castle? Are we determined to attract attention to ourselves?”
The professor didn’t seem to be quite back to normal yet. It was Kathia who answered.
“They can’t see us. The magnetic field that surrounds and isolates us can be configured to block our advanced radiation, which is what would make us visible in the other time direction. Likewise, we’re transparent to the retarded radiation of the matter around us, and so we’re perfectly invisible to the other arrow of time.”
Helias seemed doubtful. The professor chipped in.
“As I’ve already told you, we all can intercept, and thus see, only the radiation coming from our own past. And so we now see ordinary matter thanks to its advanced radiation, to which, however, that matter is transparent, as it comes from its future. In other words, we can see ‘all’ the advanced radiation, except for any which might have been absorbed by ‘antimatter’. For me, in fact, you and the entire craft are not transparent. Nevertheless, we should be able to ‘see’ through the walls of the building below us, for example, or the starry sky through the mountains, or even the sun through the planet, and so forth. But no, we can’t, it wouldn’t be practical. We’d run the risk now of crashing into that dark mountain, and we’d be perennially disoriented and confused, like in a world made of glass. The fact is, that even if advanced radiation doesn’t interact with matter, crossing opaque matter changes its polarization, and this becomes a selective means of reconstructing a ‘normal’ image. This glass in the shuttle portholes filter the appropriate polarizations so that we don’t perceive light as total chaos. Would you like a demonstration? Pilot, excuse me, could you please go back down towards the building again and dial back the filter effect?”
The shuttle reversed its course and approached the castle, hovering in midair. Gradually the outer walls and windows became transparent, as did the objects and people beyond the walls, and the floors and secondary walls. Like stained glass, its colors layered atop those behind, dimmer and dimmer as the distance and the intervening mass increased. Or like patchy reflections in a shop window, where the darker spaces still afford glimpses of the interior. From their vantage point, they could see people climbing the stairs backwards, probably on their way to the dining hall. A shower was running, the spray rising and climbing back into the nozzles, a girl coming out of the stall with her hair completely dry. And Kathia’s interposed face, winking at him.
Just as gradually, the walls became opaque once more, and the shuttle resumed its trip.
“How is it that when we were in the cave, before being inverted, we could see the shuttle—ourselves, that is—going into the past?”
“Because we hadn’t blocked out our advanced radiation yet. Otherwise we wouldn’t have seen ourselves ‘arriving’ and ‘coming in’, and so we wouldn’t have been able to ‘open’ and ‘close’ the doors, or vice versa, if you prefer.”
“So we saw the shuttle’s advanced radiation. But shouldn’t we also have seen the retarded radiation of the matter behind it? Like a sort of ghosting?”
“It depends on the relative intensity of the light in the background. In our case, the craft was well lit, the background less so, particularly when the cave lights were dimmed and the craft was illuminated by the light from the tunnel. You could see it before, though. If you had been paying attention, you would have seen the shaded areas look practically transparent, as if the craft were a bright reflection in a window.”
“Shouldn’t we have seen the interior of the shuttle too? In other words, its advanced radiation that wasn’t intercepted by the fuselage?”
“No. For two reasons. The interior lights were very dim, so we would have seen hardly anything anyway. In addition, we were already in the craft, with the filter windows.”
Helias felt that he needed to rest and relax a little. He laid his head on the back of his seat and, eyes half closed, felt again for Kathia’s hand, squeezing it gently.
He could see the subdued lights in the cabin through his eyelashes. He turned his head a little to look outside. They were gaining altitude over a broad valley, ready to crest the mountains at its edge, their snowy peaks glazed with starlight. Light from Nasymil, rising on the horizon.
The professor seemed to be his old self again. He was talking in his helmet, without knowing whether anyone was listening or not. As if he were giving a speech to an inattentive audience. Talking about the light from the stars and the remote galaxies. About how the farther away they were, the more you could see into their distant future. The opposite of what happens for the normal astronomer, who observes their distant past. And he hoped that there would soon be detectors made of antimatter that would be able to provide details of the universe’s future which, together with our knowledge of its past, would make it possible to answer many of the open questions of cosmology and astrophysics. Indeed, such discoveries could not fail to lead to a sweeping revolution in these fields of science, the likes of which had perhaps never been seen before.
The professor continued with increasingly incomprehensible examples, something about the evolution of active galactic nuclei, distinguishing between—or equating, it really wasn’t at all clear—radio sources, Seyfert galaxies, quasars, blazars, and something to do with the constellation Lacerta. But Helias had stopped listening. He was attracted by that glow on the horizon, now reflected in the waters of a river that was flowing back to the spring. Part of the river branched off toward the left, and further on he could see the waters merging, collecting together in a pool as if to gather the energy needed for the breathtaking leap back to the top of the cataract.
Soon the sun rose. Just as it was setting for the ‘others’. But Helias knew that ‘his’ sun, the one he saw, was a little older.
Older, but growing younger.
They were climbing. Faster and faster.
Helias was extremely uncomfortable. Not because of the acceleration, he didn’t even notice that. It was seeing the planet fall away beneath them, so quickly. It was that overwhelming nostalgia for good, solid ground under your feet. It was no longer knowing ‘up’ from ‘down’, and your mind can’t keep track. He had never done anything like this before, never had what liftoff really means brought so forcefully home to him, with the planet plummeting away. And a mixture of intellectual euphoria and raw, atavic terror coursed through him. He was also very, very dizzy. Except for the transmission from the Earth to Alkenia—but he had slept through that—his only other experience of the kind had been, years ago, his departure for Mars. Then, though, there was no view of the liftoff from the spaceship.
They arrived at the Scientific Station well ahead of time, all a little dazed after the trip, some perhaps drowsy. The pilot urged the passengers to rest, and the seats tilted backwards. The professor asked to be woken a bit before the transmission. Kathia and Helias did the same. The countdown on the display showed slightly less than an hour.
Only four minutes to go. The engines started again and the shuttle proceeded toward the fluorescent loop. The Thaymite cargo ship, just out, moved backwards toward the loop. They had to enter together, less than a fraction of a second apart, at different angles and converging in the loop a few meters away.
The pilot ordered silence, though none of them dared speak anyway. A device was determining the necessary triangulations, which appeare
d on a screen. When the shuttle was within a few centimeters of the exact relative position, the pilot activated the automatic stage: from then on, the shuttle would maintain the triangulation however the cargo ship varied its speed. Helias found himself thinking that all this had already happened, in the other time direction: so why all this precision and pinpoint timing? But the answer was obvious: so that everything would happen as it had already happened.
A few seconds. A few meters. Again, the feeling was that they were going to crash against the ‘other’, just as they had felt before, in the tunnel with the membranes. But the magnetic field had opened, unleashing a violent rain of plasma.
Then nothing. As if nothing had happened, the cargo ship was now moving away, backwards, on their right. As if they had passed straight through each other, unwaveringly, each maintaining its own energy and its own route.
But it wasn’t the same station anymore. And that green, white and blue planet down there was not Alkenia, but Thaýma.
Not even the time to admire the scenery. A new countdown had begun. And was already about to end. A rapid reversal of route. An acceleration and another plunge. Without even time to see what the counterpart ‘coming’ from Alkenia might be.
And there was Alkenia again, three years earlier. But no counterpart in sight. Helias asked the professor to explain.
“I don’t know, my boy. Perhaps, simply, we can’t see whatever it is because we’re now in Alkenia’s cone of shadow and consequently it’s not illuminated by the sun.”
“But there’s the light from Nasymil. Look at the station, you can see it quite well.”
“The station is big. Our object could be small and far away by now, or it could simply be black and opaque. Or against the light from Nasymil.”
“But we didn’t see it before, either, coming in.”
“Well, everything happened so quickly that I might not have seen it even if it was an enormous, coruscating ham sandwich. Maybe we were looking in the wrong place. Or maybe it was below us. Did anybody see anything?”
The Dark Arrow of Time Page 12
