Analog SFF, March 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Why won't they see us?” Paul wailed as he waved and jumped.

  From the phone came a voice. “Kif. Get the hell out of there fast. Kif. Can you hear me?"

  Kiefer's lower lip quivered. He slammed closed the phone and began to cry.

  Adrian turned to Alex and Paul. “Get out of here!” he shouted. Then he added. “Hurry! Bring help.” He knew he was only saying that to give them an excuse to run; there was no way on Earth that they'd be able to bring help in time.

  Alex and Paul stood as if rooted.

  The wolf howled again, but nobody paid attention.

  "Go!” Adrian screamed, raising his fist. “Forget your gear. Just go!"

  Alex and Paul, as one, ran off the median toward a southbound exit.

  Adrian glanced over his shoulder at the helicopters. They were getting very close. And so was the ominous cloud. Then, abruptly, Adrian stood and began running.

  "Don't leave me!” Kiefer cried out.

  Adrian sprinted down the median to where he'd kicked his jumpsuit. He swept up the bright orange ball, then yanked and pulled it back into the form of a jumpsuit. Frantically, he began waving it at the helicopters. They should be able to see this even on Mars.

  Adrian started to cough as the edge of the cloud enveloped him, but still he waved the neon-orange suit. Then things went dark. He thought he must be blacking out, but saw that the rear helicopter had switched off the purple beam. He thought the front helicopter had stopped emitting the gas, but wasn't sure. Then he did feel himself blacking out for real.

  * * * *

  Adrian woke to find himself in a hospital room. The three scouts were there also, Kiefer in bed while Paul and Alex, dressed only in hospital gowns, played cards at a table. Adrian understood why Kiefer was there and could guess why he himself was there. But the other two? He'd seen them run to safety.

  Adrian sat up, drawing the attention of the other three. “Hi!” he said.

  Kiefer filled him in. “The helicopters stopped, thanks to you, and a few minutes later, an ambulance came and took us all away."

  "This isn't a local hospital,” said Alex. “It's in Albany, I think."

  "But you and Paul weren't hurt,” said Adrian. “Why did they take you two here?"

  Alex shrugged.

  "All I know is,” said Paul, “that they took enough blood from us to feed a colony of vampire bats."

  Adrian wrinkled his nose. “I don't understand this."

  Then a nurse came in and Adrian did understand. She wore a jumpsuit rather like his had been but white, and it had pockets. Her hands were protected by surgical gloves and she wore a heavy facemask. She was young and Adrian speculated that without her protective-wear, she would probably look gorgeous.

  She came up to his bed.

  "This is a quarantine ward, isn't it?” said Adrian.

  "Yes,” she said, her voice muffled. “But no longer for you.” She looked at him critically. “Do you think you can walk?"

  Adrian swung his feet to the floor and pulled down on the hem of his gown. “Yeah. I'm fine."

  "Good.” She pointed to the floor. “Step into those slippers and follow me.” She smiled. “And by the way, you have a visitor."

  Adrian smiled, sheepishly. “Could I get dressed, first?"

  "Not in here. We've got your clothes in an examination room. You'll have to get dressed there."

  "Is it my dad?” Adrian asked.

  "Someone else,” said the nurse. “Let's go."

  "Yeah. Okay. Just a sec.” Adrian said goodbye and thanks to the scouts. He promised to mail his borrowed clothes back to Kiefer and the two scribbled each other's e-mail address on a hospital note pad. Then Adrian followed the nurse from the room. He had an uneasy feeling that he was being transferred away because he was a convicted criminal and they didn't want him to contaminate the scouts.

  The nurse slipped off her protective respirator. “You're quite the hero, you know,” she said, breaking in on his thoughts and giving the lie to them.

  "What?"

  "The way you saved young Kiefer, there."

  Adrian felt himself blush. Yes, she was attractive. He tried to think of something to say that wouldn't ring of false modesty, but before he got the chance, she said, “Oh, I forgot. Your father is driving down to bring you back home. He should be here in a few hours."

  "Home? But—"

  She laughed. “Oh, you're not a felon anymore. You've been pardoned, or your appeal succeeded or something like that. I don't know the details."

  The news took his breath away. “That's ... that's wonderful!"

  The nurse gave a good-natured laugh and sent him into an examination room. “I'll send in your visitor.” As she started to close the door, she added, “You'll have time to get dressed."

  As Adrian dressed, he noticed that the borrowed shorts and shirt had been laundered. And that made him wonder: Why was everyone quarantined, and why wasn't he himself quarantined anymore?

  A knock interrupted his thoughts. He opened the door and admitted a man he'd never seen before.

  "Adrian?” said the man.

  "Yes, sir?"

  "I'm Robert Bernhardt, Kiefer's father.” The man sat in one of the two chairs in the room and indicated that Adrian sit in the other. “First, I want to thank you for saving my son's life."

  "I didn't do anything special.” Adrian bit his lower lip, then pressed on. “Could you tell me what's going on? Why are we at this hospital?"

  Mr. Bernhardt told him about the “median-disease” virus and that Adrian's blood analysis showed that he was virus free. “They have an idea what gave you the immunity. But they're astonished that it developed so fast."

  "And the scouts?” said Adrian. “Kiefer?"

  Mr. Bernhardt shook his head slowly.

  "I'm sorry to hear that about Kiefer,” said Adrian. “We've sort of become friends."

  "Yes. He's told me that.” Mr. Bernhardt leaned forward. “Did you happen to see any of the dwarf cats on the median?"

  "What?” Adrian canted his head. “Yes. Why?"

  "And,” Mr. Bernhardt went on, “by any chance, did one of them scratch you?"

  "Scratch me.” Adrian pointed to his arm. “It bit me. Here. You can still see the fang marks."

  "Kiefer didn't get bitten though, did he?"

  "No.” After a few seconds of silence, Adrian added, “He was about to be, but I scared away the cat."

  Mr. Bernhardt's face showed a twinge of sadness followed immediately by a pained smile. He stood and extended his hand. “It's been good meeting you, Adrian.” He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “Kiefer asked me to go back to the median to pick up the scout gear. And I will.” He sighed. “But I've got to find one of those cats,” he said softly, as if to himself. “I've got to."

  * * * *

  A bright light came from the sky. And then a bad smell came down. A bad cloud. We choked and coughed and coughed blood. We were too weak to hunt. All the rats gone. I am alone. No cat moves. I am hungry. And I feel very bad.

  Copyright © 2010 Carl Frederick

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers

  Time travel has been around at least since the eighteenth century, but it took Charles Dickens (in A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843) to introduce the concept into general consciousness. Even then, time travel was always accomplished by supernatural means: angels, demons, spirits of one kind or another.

  It wasn't until 1881 that an author came up with a method of time travel linked to a machine: that was Edward Page Mitchell in The Clock That Went Backward. H.G. Wells deserves credit for being the first author (in English, at least) to use a true “time machine"—and it's not in the story you're thinking of. Wells’ short story “The Chronic Argonauts” appeared in 1888, and tells the story of an inventor named Dr. Moses Nebogipfel and his invention, a machine that travels in time. In the end, Dr. Nebogipfel departs, searching for an era
more suited to his abilities. (And admit it, haven't we all wanted to do the same, at one point or another?) Wells revisited the concept of mechanical time travel in 1895, with the much more successful short novel The Time Machine.

  Science fiction in the Gernsback age (before 1939) did not concern itself much with time travel. But in the Campbell “Golden Age” and later, authors such as Heinlein, Asimov, and Poul Anderson took up the theme and wrote some of the seminal works of temporal journeying—many of them in Analog's predecessor, Astounding.

  With a background like that, it may seem heretical to raise the question of whether time travel is truly science fiction at all.

  One quick and dirty distinction between science fiction and fantasy is this: sf deals with things that are possible, while fantasy is the realm of the impossible. And despite a few promising loopholes in quantum physics, time travel is very probably not possible, at least in the universe as we currently understand it.

  Yes, but: loopholes aside, time travel is one of those concepts that has been, as they say, grandfathered in. Sure, the laws of physics make it most unlikely that a real time machine could ever exist—but the same can be said for faster-than-light travel, miniaturization, psionics, and other staples of science fiction. In truth, this is one of those questions that prove that science fiction and fantasy are more a continuum, rather than mutually exclusive categories.

  There's a fairly pragmatic rule of thumb that helps draw the line in most time travel stories, and it's based on the exact method used for moving through time. If the temporal displacement is carried out by supernatural forces, magical spells, or sheer force of will, then the story is presumed to be fantasy. If the time travel takes place using a machine, vehicle, gadget, or some other technological-sounding method, then you're most likely dealing with science fiction.

  There are many very fine time travel fantasy tales (as well as a great many more dreadful ones, especially since Diana Gabaldon's excellent Outlander series established the field of “time travel romances"). Among them are Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Jack Finney's Time and Again, Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return (filmed as Somewhere in Time), and even Audrey Niffeneggar's recent The Time Traveler's Wife. But we're here to talk about science fiction, not fantasy.

  In sf, there are two basic ways to approach time travel, and both of them revolve around what's called the Grandfather Paradox. For those who aren't familiar with this situation, here's how it goes: A time traveler goes back into the past and kills her own grandfather in the cradle. But if Grandpa dies before he gets together with Grandma, then the time traveler will never be born ... so she won't be able to go back and kill Gramps. But if Gramps lives, then his granddaughter will be born after all, will grow up to become the time traveler, and will go back to kill him.

  One way out of the Grandfather Paradox is to assume a multiverse of many different parallel and divergent universes. (I talked about the multiverse and alternate universes in more detail a while ago, in the October 2009 issue.) Our hero kills Grandpa and instantly an alternate timeline branches off: one that contains both dead infant Gramps and the adult time traveler. Unless she can cross universes, the traveler is marooned in a world in which she will never exist. Sometimes there is only one timestream, with previous alternate histories erased.

  Various authors have played with this basic notion, perhaps the most definitive being David Gerrold in The Man Who Folded Himself.

  This approach leads naturally to a much grander concept, that of a corps of time travelers on a mission to police the multiverse and steer the timeline(s) in the direction that seems best to them. Among the classic examples are Jack Williamson's Legion of Time, Poul Anderson's Time Corps series, Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity, Kage Baker's Company series, Heinlein's later “World as Myth” novels, and the Time Lords of Doctor Who.

  Back to the Grandfather Paradox. There's another answer, and that's to assume that the timestream is absolutely invariant. Everything that has happened will always have happened. No matter how hard our intrepid hero tries, she will never succeed in killing the infant Grandpa. Her gun will jam, her garrote cord will break, the stresses of time travel will have rendered her poison harmless. Even if she does kill Gramps, it will turn out that Grandma was having an affair with someone else, who (surprise) was her real grandfather. Anything that seems to be a paradox will inevitably have a logical explanation. In this sort of tale, people are always becoming their own ancestors or descendants (or both), or taking the place of some actual historical figure whom they've accidentally removed from history.

  As near as I can tell, the first person to explore this idea was Heinlein, in the story “By His Bootstraps” (in the October 1941 issue of Astounding). He later refined the notion in a shorter and tighter story called “—All You Zombies—” in which a whole raft of seeming paradoxes turn out to be nothing more than a matter of perspective. In The Door Into Summer, Heinlein explored the question once again; his hero traveled both forward and backward in time and tied up every loose end. Quite a while later, Michael Moorcock's powerful Behold the Man showed a time traveler who went back to first-century Jerusalem in search of the historic Jesus, with shattering consequences.

  In recent years, the multiverse theory of time travel has become almost the default in science fiction. Part of this, I'm sure, is due to the physicists prattling on about parallel universes and alternate timelines as if they invented them, once again stealing our best ideas and transforming them into banal but respectable talk about strings and branes and itty-bitty particles doing bizarre things to one another in the odd corners of spacetime. When Anderson and Heinlein and Doctor Who were exploring the multiverse, it was “just science fiction"—but let a few cosmologists get into a drunken gabfest on a train, and suddenly the idea is respectable, thank you very much.

  Ahem. In any case, it's refreshing to see a major sf writer going back to the “invariant timeline” concept. Which brings us to:

  * * * *

  Time Travelers Never Die

  Jack McDevitt

  Ace, 384 pages, $24.95

  ISBN: 978-0-441-01763-8

  Genres: Trips in Time

  * * * *

  Time Travelers Never Die is another “young man's life changes completely when he receives an unexpected gift from a relative” book. Nothing wrong with that; it's the pattern of many a fine story.

  Michael Shelborne, physicist and renaissance man, vanishes one day. His adult son, Adrian Shelborne ("Shel"), is given a package from his father: in the package are three small devices with cryptic controls and handy belt clips. An accompanying note from Dad instructs Shel to destroy all three devices at once. Like that's going to happen.

  Instead, Shel experiments with the devices (wouldn't you?) and finds that they are—you guessed it—time machines.

  Shel at once goes back in time a week and catches Dad before his disappearance. When asked why he wants Shel to destroy the machines, Dad explains that he and an assistant found out that the invariant timestream does not allow paradoxes. When they tried to force one, going back to alter a trivial recent event, the assistant died of a heart attack. Dad calls this the Cardiac Principle: the continuum does not allow paradoxes.

  Shel, back in the present, has one problem left: where did Dad disappear to? He enlists the aid of his friend Dave Dryden, and soon the two of them are off on time-spanning adventures.

  Shel and Dave's various journeys are the real meat of the book, and they're quite a bit of fun. They head for the Library of Alexandria and bring back copies of lost works by Sophocles and others. They participate in the civil rights march on Selma. They talk to Galileo and track down Dad living happily in Renaissance Italy.

  Although they have both agreed not to attempt to travel into the future, both of course do so—privately. Dave brings back race results and makes a killing at the track; Shel establishes an identity and an alternate home at the end of the twenty-first century. But then Shel le
arns something he shouldn't know: the date and circumstances of his own death.

  From there the book unwinds along an inexorable path, all loose ends fusing together to eliminate any hint of paradox. And even though any halfway-experienced sf reader will know at once where the story is going, it doesn't matter ... getting there is the best part.

  Time Travelers Never Die isn't just a clever and enjoyable time travel adventure. It's also a philosophical and moral meditation on one of the great unanswerable questions. You probably noticed, in the discussion of multiverse vs. invariant timeline, that the dichotomy is essentially the same as that eternal struggle between free will and determinism. This is the real issue that Time Travelers Never Die tackles.

  You see, Shel and Dave have two different ideas about interacting with history. Shel believes that they must do nothing to interfere with the events and people they witness. Dave, on the other hand, wants to participate in history ... even knowing that he is powerless to change things in any substantial way. And in the end, Dave's belief in free will comes into direct conflict with Shel's acceptance of determinism ... a conflict that will have enormous impact on both men.

  * * * *

  The Return

  Ben Bova

  Tor, 432 pages, $25.95

  ISBN: 978-0-7653-0925-9

  Genres: Adventure, Alien Beings

  Series: Voyagers 4, Grand Tour Universe

  * * * *

  There seems to be a tendency, in some venerable science fiction writers, to unify their various works into one great multiverse. Poul Anderson was perhaps the first, linking the Polesotechnic League of Nicholas van Rijn with Dominic Flandry's Terran Empire in one future history. Asimov did it when he brought the Foundation and Positronic Robot series together; Heinlein's later books pulled together everything he'd ever written and threw in the Oz, Barsoom, and Lensman universes for good measure.

  Now Ben Bova is apparently feeling the urge, bringing characters from his Voyagers series into the universe of his Grand Tour.