Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  Julia nibbled on a lock of hair, concentrating hard. "Is there any way to know where—I mean when—he went? Can you even know whether it was to the past or the future?"

  The first explanation had been hard enough, Harry thought. The next part will really be difficult. "I know exactly to when Faisel went, because he had no choice. I assume that you won't mind my skipping some heavy-duty math."

  Julia snorted.

  "Okay, then," Harry continued. "The energy requirement to go anywhen is phenomenal. Not even the full stored power of the superconducting storage ring suffices for most destinations. There is, in fact, only one practical destination, a single time-shift interval whose energy requirement is currently practical.

  "Einstein showed that gravity is only a manifestation of mass, a curvature of the space-time continuum caused by the presence of mass. No mass, no gravity. Time is similar—it passes only in relationship to . . . stuff. Each astronomical object, each planet, has a single achievable time transfer influenced by—and that can be calculated from—net local gravitation effects. That interval depends on its own mass, its sun's, and the galaxy's.

  "It took me a while to figure it out, but yes, I know where Faisel went. He went more than a thousand years into our past."

  * * *

  The long-suppressed story at last revealed, Harry was ready to move from coffee to liqueur. He poured Amaretto all around. "Can you see why I was less than eager to tell that tale?"

  Ambling seemed greatly relieved by the strange narrative. "So Faisel must have triggered his homemade atom bomb on arrival in the past to repay the energy loan. Some of the power he unleashed snapped back to repay his energy debt, destroying the institute. The radiation remained in the past, probably covered by an avalanche. Small wonder no evidence was ever found."

  "I still don't get it." Julia spoke before Harry could express his own misgivings. "Why perform such an elaborate suicide? Steal plutonium, build an atom bomb, build a time machine, travel back a thousand years, then blow himself up where no one would ever know what had happened? I mean, what was the point?"

  Ambling set down his drink. "Islam was in cultural ascendancy through most of the Middle Ages, something we Westerners have mostly forgotten. You can bet Moslems remember having won the Crusades. It makes a strange kind of sense that a depressed suicidal Arab chose to die then."

  Harry could only shrug. "I didn't know about the plutonium until today, yet I always believed that Faisel had a way to stay in the past. I always believed that he had a purpose. Learning about the plutonium hasn't changed my intuition."

  Julia was browsing the living-room bookshelves; they were well stocked with science fiction. She had homed in on the ample collection on time travel. "I finally understand your taste in reading material. Even if Faisel did find a clever way to avoid self-destruction, isn't he now safely off in a new parallel universe, someone else's problem?" She tapped the spine of a novel. "That's how it works in this story."

  "Sorry, folks," Harry said. "I've got one more lecture. I've read those stories, sure. Many do split the universe whenever more than one outcome is possible. How convenient: Never decide between outcomes, just spawn another universe." Harry waved his arms grandly over his head. "See them all, a vast continuum of universes. Here's a universe wildly different from ours—say, where Hitler won World War II. Here's another where I chose Irish Cream instead of Amaretto, and another where I stumbled and spilled a drop on the floor.

  "It would be easiest to think that Faisel can't change the past, that he can only start yet another set of new universes. If you ask me, it's also nonsense: a false worship of symmetry. Where do you suppose the energy could come from to create all those parallel universes?"

  Ambling retrieved a novel from the shelf and flipped idly through it. "Okay, so Faisel went into our past. There was surely no way back for him. Even if Faisel somehow survived the trip, he's long dead. We've already survived whatever mischief he may have planned."

  Harry had read the book Terrence held. In it, the paratime police conveniently put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Was life ever that simple?

  He chugged the rest of his drink. "Not exactly. Faisel went into the past five years ago. We've only experienced the effects of his first five years there."

  "Huh?" Julia looked at him blankly. "Take pity on the physics-impaired."

  "This explanation really cries out for pencil and paper, but I'll see what I can do." Harry rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Let's try this. We all move into the future at one rate: one second per second. That's as true for stranded time travelers as for you and me. All right so far?" She nodded tentatively. "The timeline must be consistent from end to end. For example, our Johnny is eight years old now because he was born eight years ago. We haven't yet experienced what he'll do when he's ten.

  "In its own weird way, even time travel observes cause and effect. We can't see effects at our end of the must-remain-consistent timeline until Faisel has had the chance to cause them.

  "Still think we've survived everything he can do in the past? Here's a disproof by contradiction. Suppose we can detect something today that Faisel did—will do—ten years after he went back. Whatever that effect is, it had to have a cause. Since Faisel has only been in the past for five years, as he sees the timeline, he hasn't yet been that cause. In other words, we've assumed that he's the cause and shown it would violate timeline consistency for him to do so.

  "Ergo, barmaid," Harry flourished his empty glass, "the assumption won't fly. We can't yet see an effect from Faisel's travels that he hadn't caused in his first five years there."

  Julia nibbled her lower lip, ignoring Harry's hint. "If he's in the past, how could he not affect the timeline daily? It could be something completely innocent. Maybe because of what he eats, someone starves who should be my ancestor. Maybe because he kills a wolf, someone who once died childless now lives to have them."

  Sighing, Harry poured refills all around. "We're getting unnecessarily glum, I think. Terrence, you're the historian, so correct me if I'm mistaken. I was taught history is robust. Things happen when conditions are ripe. Look how often inventors independently get the same ideas at about the same time. No, I doubt that Faisel can influence history very much."

  Harry handed his guest what he considered a more plausible time-travel adventure. "Now you've heard the whole story. It's strange, mind-bending . . . and utterly useless. It's a great story, but in the larger scheme of things, so what? On the off chance that I'm right, we've got a twenty-first-century Moslem fanatic safely trapped in France during the darkest of the Dark Ages. If Faisel truly has a nuke, I'd much rather believe that he's in A.D. 730 than in the here and now."

  Terrence's liqueur glass slipped from his hands and shattered on the planked-oak floor. His face was ashen.

  * * *

  To be continued.

  Fish Story, Episode Nine: Love at First Bite

  Written by Dave Freer, Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis

  Illustrated by Barb Jernigan

  "And the world will descend again into primordial slime!" said our host.

  "Primordial slime!" We raised our glasses and drank.

  Under the circumstances it would have taken a very, very stupid man to do otherwise. If he'd wanted us to drink the damned slime we'd have been delighted to oblige. As it was, it might have been preferable to what we were drinking. Perhaps if you had a coiled shell, and an indeterminate number of ropy, slimy tentacles striped in alternating fire-engine red and puke green, this might be your favorite tipple. I met someone once who thought ouzo was magnificent stuff, so anything is possible. He'd quite have liked this brew. It was greenish milky-colored, aniseed-scented and highly alcoholic. "The finest of old Atlantis's brews," said our host with all the nostalgia that only an extremely large Ammonite can put into the writhing of his tentacles. "Back from before the lease lapsed and the tenants got evicted."

  "Tastes like ouzo," said Stephen Speairs, determined to prove that nearl
y getting us all killed once wasn't bad enough. The last time . . . well Wales and whales do have a lot in common. All right . . . Maybe it was just my experience. Whales are grey and what I remember of Wales was grey too, although that might have been the mist, drizzle and then torrential downpour, and some blurred vision caused by falling off the back of a bike and protecting the beer in my hand instead of my head. One has ones own perceptions and priorities. Reluctantly, I have to admit that sometimes they're wrong. I have been told that Wales is beautiful and that beer is replaceable and heads are not. I take the scientific approach to these matters and require proof.

  "Ouzo! Humph." Snorted the ammonite Cthulhu, spraying us all with a fine dusting of ink. " Greeks. Upstarts. They stole the idea from us. It was . . . But we claimed it back and made it better."

  "How?" I looked at the cloudy green liquid again.

  "We added a distillation of wormwood. Artemisia absinthum."

  Which could just explain how come we were drinking with the worlds largest potential supply of calamari. Absinthe—or the green fairy—was supposed to be hallucinogenic. Right now the hallucination theory was more attractive than being on a seaweedy island, that showed signs of being underwater recently, somewhere in the middle of the chillier parts of the South Pacific, with creatures that either belonged in Paleolithic history or in the dark pages of old horror novels, or possibly both.

  Our arrival here in R'yleh had been clouded by a little a little awkwardness. That and ink. Mark Twain said you should never argue with a man who buys his ink by the quart. This is true. I'd like to add the Dexter Guptill corollary: "You should really, really never argue with a megalomaniacal thirty ton proto-cephalopod who produces ink by the forty-four gallon drum." Along with: "When buildings start sprouting tentacles it is probably time to give up the sauce. Or drink a lot more of it," that may go down in the annals of history as two of my greatest wise sayings.

  Cthulhu had been somewhat upset by our apparent liking for whales. It turns out the ammonites are all called Cthulhu. It's sort of like "Bruce and Sheila" except Sheila's called Cthulhu too. To avoid confusion, to explain it Monty Python terms. It also explains—besides their regenerative powers—why killing Cthulhu is like searching for the logic in New Zealand Immigration laws (which is why Cthulhu was found on a remote island in the South Pacific, not Wellington, where it should be), a task which is more difficult than trying to persuade the Flatwoods Monster to attend a Labour Party conference in Blackpool. Trust me. I've tried both. Not killing Cthulhu, the other two. Cthulhu was of course mind-bogglingly evil and planning to return the world to oceans full of primordial slime—in other words, she was a sort of fairly normal politician, and one with more good points than average. "So what is the difference between this stuff and absinthe?" I asked. I was quite proud of that conversational gambit. You can tell Guptill is at his best after being wrapped in a vast suckered tentacle and sprayed with ink.

  Cthulhu shrugged, which is quite a sight in a thirty-ton ammonite. There was a lot of it to quiver. "Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. This stuff just makes you stoned." She was drinking it by the quart.

  "You can't get absinthe any more," explained Dann Douglas. "They stopped selling all Thujone-containing liquors a good half century ago. But you can still get Cthulhu-juice at the convocations."

  "Convocations?" asked Stephen Speairs, as calmly as if he hadn't been the cause of our tentacle encounter.

  "You know, when the guys—low, mixed-blood types like me according to Lovecraft—get together and chant 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn' and sacrifice a few victims, talk about the coming of the end of the world and then get completely pie-eyed on Cthulhu-juice and end up sleeping with someone you would rather not have. Rather dull really. But it is tax-deductible. Cultist meetings, conventions, who can tell the difference?" explained Dann.

  Thinking about it I had to admit he was right. I'd been a good few scientific conventions that could have been described as much like that.

  "So how did you end up caught up in all of this?" asked Speairs.

  Dann sighed. "Caught up is the right word. I am . . . or was once . . . a big game fisherman. I thought I would catch all of the largest species of fish in the sea. I started in a quite an ordinary way—salmon in Siberia, Giant Trevally in Cosmoleto. Then I got into collecting records. Monstrous catfish in the Mekong. Sailfish. Then sharks... and I became obsessed with Megalodon. And in following up the reports . . . found myself here."

  "Reports?" I asked, scenting the famous pong of an urban legend.

  "Of a very large shark. Possibly the largest to ever swim," he said, sadly. "Megalodon."

  "Carcharadon megalodon," I said. "Or Carcharacoles megalodon, depending on which side of the taxonomic fence you land on. I've been out of it for a while so I don't what the thinking is these days."

  "Probably thinking you don't have a clue what you're talking about," said Stephen cheerfully lighting another coffin nail. "I don't." How he had dry and uncrushed cigarettes at this stage of our misadventure must remain a mystery to me.

  "Do you know what a great white shark is? I asked, cursing myself. Thanks to "Jaws" everyone thought they knew. Most of them thought it was something with the intellect of Einstein, and the desire for blood of Rambo . . . which was about right, except for a few minor details. Like it was actually the intellect of Rambo, and as bloodthirsty as Einstein. Yeah, yeah. They're big carnivores. They eat seals. They eat relatively few tourists, as even big dumb carnivores with brains the size of Bob Mugabe's conscience know that anything that eats tourist food is likely to give you secondary poisoning. We probably taste vile.

  "Big sharks that eat people," said Stephen, obliging me.

  "Well, you're half right. They can get up to about eighteen feet long and can weigh in at near four thousand pounds. Bigger than your average carp. So yes, they're big."

  "But there were stories of bigger ones, far bigger ones, from the coast of Australia," said Dann. "Fish of up to thirty-six feet. That was the record for many years."

  "The stories didn't stand closer inspection. Whale sharks, Basking sharks, just plain exaggeration."

  Dann shook his head. "And if you dig far enough and go back far enough, you have reports from the Atlantic, the Stronsay beast, which was fifty-five feet long and identified as a shark from a close examination of its vertebrae. But for frequency and size they all came down to the South Pacific. Port Fairy was a whaling and sealing port . . ."

  "Ah, back down to whales," said Stephen.

  I snorted. Sharks are my interest. "Thirty-six feet long, it was supposed to be. . . . And when they examined the jaw, they decided it was a serious error of measurement and that it was merely seventeen feet long."

  Dann fixed me with a manic stare. "Aha . . . If they examined the right jaw, Mister Guptill."

  Stephen Speairs chuckled. "Yeah they probably looked at the left jaw. That came from a smaller fish."

  By the way Dann looked at him I could tell this came under the heading of "not very funny." "I tracked down the original jaw," he said. "The incident happened in 1870 in South Australia—it was a pretty wild and woolly place in those days. Museums weren't secured the way they are now. And there were some big great whites being caught in that area. Someone swapped the jaws in late 1800's. I found the real one, the original. The real jaw came from a Megalodon. A juvenile Megalodon."

  "Stupid, badly behaved brat, served it right," said Cthulhu. "Always too greedy."

  "But why would anyone swap the jaw for that of a smaller fish? And why keep it secret . . ." I asked, in spite of my self.

  Dann jerked a thumb at his monster master. Well, he had stopped us from being devoured, over the confusion about Wales. "I think Cthulhu just answered your question."

  "We bred them to try and control whale numbers. Ungrateful, that's what they are. To so bite the tentacle that feeds them," said the vast ammonite. I was doing my best to pretend I wasn't drinking something alcoholic and
hallucinogenic with a monster that promised world domination and destruction. This sort of statement made that pretense hard.

  "I guess it might be easier to get people to believe a fisherman might exaggerate the size of fish a tiny bit," admitted Stephen, with the reluctance of a true fisherman.

  Dann nodded. "Yes, all they needed to do was add a tiny bit of doubt, and people believed there was good reason for it. No one ever believes fishermen's stories."

  "All true fishermen are intrinsically honest," I said defensively. "I can prove this. None of them work in the South African banking industry."

  They looked at me in puzzlement. Obviously this joy had never come their way. "So?"

  "Trust me. According to my experiences, if they did, you couldn't trust them." It suddenly occurred to me that Stephen might possibly be a banker. It didn't look likely, but still. "You're not in banking are you?"