Too bad we didn’t have cable. Cable would have provided the most comprehensive window on modern culture I know. But newspapers would help, and so would radio. Essentially, the Colonel could never disguise himself as a native of this century without a passing knowledge of current events and modern history, and the media was the quickest way to go about getting it.
I closed my eyes, hoping we wouldn’t have to do this, praying that we’d somehow get him home before we had to play catch up with history.
Chapter 18
Early that evening on my way to the kitchen I saw that the door to the coat closet was still open, blocked by Uncle John’s box of books. As I shoved the box back into the closet, I noticed what I hadn’t noticed earlier when I was hunting up the typewriter: right there on the top of the stack was The Treasury of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Treasury is not an actual multi-volume encyclopedia set, by the way, but a single volume containing articles and information from past editions of the Britannica — a collection of obsolescence, if you will. I picked it up hoping to find more reference books beneath it, but all I found were paperbacks and several old issues of Coastal Living. I tucked the Treasury under my arm and closed the closet door. In the kitchen, I tossed the book onto the counter and inspected the contents of the fridge.
I hate cooking. I really do. And tonight I really couldn’t deal with it. So I tossed some frozen lasagna into the oven and threw together a salad. I laid out plates and flatware, folded napkins into triangles, and checked our supply of wine. We had at least 45 minutes before the lasagna was done, time enough to relax on the deck, so I poured two glasses of rosé, got out some brie and crackers, and found a tray to put it all on.
And then I remembered the book. I paused, flipped the book open and idly ran down the table of contents until something interesting caught my eye. It was Einstein’s article on relativity as it appeared decades ago in The Britannica’s thirteenth edition.
The theory of relativity, that is, which refers to space and time.
Immediately I forgot about the wine and brie and the lasagna in the oven. The article is short, less than 12 pages, but dense. I read it through rapidly, hunched over the counter. Then I straightened, picked up the book and walked rapidly back to the living room where the Colonel was reading Tristram Shandy. At the sound of my footsteps, he looked up.
“Where did you disappear to?” he asked, glad (I thought) of a diversion.
“I was making dinner.”
“Shall we eat then?”
“Not yet. I thought you might want to see this first.”
I extended the Treasury to him, opened to the Einstein article. His expression sharpened instantly.
“Our relativity man,” he said at once.
“It’s an article he wrote for The Britannica,” I said. “For the thirteenth edition, whenever that was.”
He seemed to think this was riveting news. “The Britannica?” he asked, turning the book over in his hands.
“Yes. It’s an—”
“I know what it is. Don’t tell me it’s been reduced to a single volume.”
I did a double-take. “How do you know about The Britannica?”
“It was published at least a decade ago. I mean, a decade before I…ah, before I arrived here.”
“It’s that old?” I asked.
“You needn’t make it sound like the pyramids.” The Colonel thumbed through the pages for a minute. “Oh, I see what this is. A condensation. A collection of—”
“Yes. I know. Look, just read the—”
“I’m trying to, Mrs. Finlay. If you would simply—”
“It has a lot of formulas in it,” I pointed out, interrupting one last time. “The article, I mean.”
The Colonel raised his eyes from the page, giving me a look of pained boredom. “I can see that, Mrs. Finlay.”
“Well, we can probably skip over them. I mean, I think Einstein put them in just to prove—”
But the Colonel had already turned his attention back to the page. “Actually, Mrs. Finlay, I’m rather good at mathematics.”
I paused for a minute, thinking about his answer. “How do you know that?”
With elaborate patience, the Colonel inserted his finger between the leaves of the article and closed the book. “I just do, Mrs. Finlay,” he said, rising from the sofa. “The same way I know I’m a first-rate horseman, a fair swordsman and, truth be told, a poor shot. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to read this little essay in peace.”
He stalked from the living room to the study, and I could tell by the squeak of the chair that he had settled himself behind the desk. I threw myself down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling for twenty minutes. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I followed him into the study and perched myself on the edge of the desk.
“Well?” I asked.
“Shush,” he said, waving me away like an annoying fly.
I waited a few more minutes and then tried again. “What do you think?” I asked.
“I think we’re in over our heads,” he said, raising his eyes to mine. “But I also think this paragraph in particular is pretty important.” He slid the book to me, his finger tapping impatiently at a place on the page.
“In their applications,” I read aloud, “space (place) and time always occur together. Every event that occurs in the world is determined by the space co-ordinates x, y, z, and the time-co-ordinate t. Thus the physical description was four dimensional right from the beginning…” My voice drifted off, and I finished the rest of the paragraph silently. Somewhere I had heard that time was the fourth dimension, but I had no idea of the significance of it, and reading Einstein’s article hadn’t clarified a single thing.
I looked at the Colonel. “So?”
“Elsewhere in this article, Einstein goes on to describe time as a four-dimensional continuum. I suppose I’m curious, really, about the use of the word continuum. It makes me think of a river.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” I mused. Then an idea jolted me. “Oxbows,” I said aloud. “You know, a place where a river makes a tight loop. In a rainy season or during a flood, it can even flow back into itself.”
The Colonel saw it instantly. “That’s a thought,” he said admiringly. “A very good thought. Assuming you can even compare time to a physical thing like a river—”
“But if you can, why couldn’t time have twists and turns like a river does? Say the river is time—”
“And space — or place,” the Colonel amended, “ — is the shoreline.”
“Exactly. Then imagine a stretch of river that makes a wide bend, coming back close to the spot where it originally turned.”
“An oxbow.”
“Right. If you were in a canoe, it could take a long time to paddle around that bend.”
“But if you got out and portaged across the land, you could pick up the river again in a tiny fraction of the time — river miles in this case being many more than land miles.”
“And if the river was at flood stage,” I went on, “you could simply paddle across what is normally dry land—”
“Or get caught in a rogue current and swept across—”
“Exactly. And if the river is time and the shore is place, you could find yourself unexpectedly—”
“In the future,” the Colonel finished for me.
We sat silently for a moment.
“Or in the past,” the Colonel went on, “depending on which way the current runs.”
I let the thought drift, then picked it up again. “Or … imagine a delta. If time resembles a winding river, and there are shortcuts like channels cutting across a point of land, then the channel could empty back into the river the same way a delta does. You know, like the Nile when it empties into the sea, or the Amazon or the Mississippi when they—”
“And this would prove … what?”
“Nothing. It proves nothing. But it’s another variation, another twist or complication. You could paddle
into a channel, or get swept into one, or fall into one — and then the channel fans out into smaller and smaller channels, some emptying you out further up and others further down the shoreline of the river.”
“Which means,” he picked up, “if time is laced with twists and turns and threaded with channels and streams, you could tumble out almost anywhere.”
We looked at each other for a long minute. Finally, the Colonel cleared his throat. “I don’t think we have the least idea what we’re talking about,” he said quietly.
I glanced down at the article and knew, suddenly, that it contained concepts I would never in my lifetime understand. “Neither do I,” I said reluctantly. I liked my river/shore analogy too much to give it up easily, and yet I realized it was nonsense. Irritably, I pushed the book aside and strode out to the deck (unlocking the door first) where I watched a pelican swoop low over the water. Behind me, I heard the Colonel rise from the desk.
“Fortunately, some things are timeless,” he said quietly. He came up behind me, standing just inches away. “The evening sky,” he went on, his voice low and thoughtful. “The rhythm of the tide.”
We stood together quietly in the gathering dusk, listening to the surf, watching light from the sun setting behind us play on the water before us. “Look,” the Colonel said, touching my shoulder. “Just beyond the breakers.”
I followed his gaze and saw a school of dolphins breach and slip beneath the waves, then breach again, over and over, gliding easily through the sea as they worked their way up the beach, heading north. Suddenly, I was hyperaware of the Colonel’s presence beside me. I heard the sound of his breath in the silence, the creak of his knees as he moved, the slip of taut fabric against muscle as he braced his arms on the railing. I smelled the scent of soap. I fancied I could feel the warmth of him radiating toward me.
When had I begun to find him this attractive?
As the last dolphin swam out of sight, I stepped away. “Let’s have some dinner,” I said.
Chapter 19
The following morning, after a fair amount of preparation beforehand, we went to the library at the community center in Hatteras. I led the Colonel into the library and scouted out the circulation desk, where I filled out a membership card and explained why my local address was different from the one on my driver’s license. Then the librarian directed us toward a row of six computers, each tucked into its own carrel.
“Take your pick,” she said pleasantly. “You’re the only ones using them this morning.”
I thanked her and hustled the Colonel into the rear-most carrel. Before us sat a state-of-the-art Gateway with a flat screen monitor. I looked at the Colonel expectantly.
“What is this?” he asked, remembering to keep his voice down.
“What do you mean, what is this?” I was taken aback. “It’s a computer, for God’s sake.”
“This is it? This is your highly touted computer, icon of your century, pinnacle of your technology? This … this … unprepossessing box?”
“Box? It has Pentium 4 and a gazillion gigabytes! What on earth did you expect?”
“Something much more impressive. Something awe-inspiring. Something like…”
“What?” I prompted.
“The great pipe organ at St. Helen’s.”
I stared at him, utterly dumfounded.
“In Oxfordshire,” he added, as if that clarified things.
And then it hit me. “You’ve remembered something,” I exclaimed too loudly. “You’ve remembered Oxfordshire!”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose I have,” he agreed, sounding startled and rueful at the same time. “In truth…” He paused, glancing at me bleakly. “I studied at Oxford, at Christ Church College. How could I have forgotten that? How could I have forgotten so much of my life?”
I wanted to reassure him. I wanted to point out that he was remembering more of his past each day. But I knew how trite, almost patronizing, that would sound, so instead I said nothing.
The Colonel shrugged and turned to the computer, running his fingers lightly over the monitor, touching the keyboard.
“Sit down,” I told him. “I’ll be back in a second.”
I strode out of our carrel to a cluster of reading tables and grabbed a chair. As I turned to drag it toward our cubicle, I saw that we had been joined by another researcher, two carrels in front of us. He/she was partially obscured by the enclosing carrel, providing me only a glimpse of a T-shirt. Swell, I thought. Already our privacy was compromised.
I slid the chair into our cubicle, trying to minimize noise, and settled in next to the Colonel. “Let me show you how this works,” I said, and for the next few minutes I showed him how to use the mouse to guide the cursor, how to click on icons and menus, how to access the server and how to type in web addresses. Like any neophyte, his typing was slow and tentative. Eventually we arrived at Google, and at that point I took over.
“What is this Google thing?” he asked.
“A search engine.”
“Why on earth is it called Google?”
“No clue.”
“And a search engine would be?”
“Just watch,” I said, and typed in the words time travel.
Instantly Google brought up a page of links. Beside me, the Colonel leaned in toward the screen. But he wasn’t looking at the links Google found. He was looking at the line at the top of the screen that read: results 1-10 of 15,700,000 for Time Travel.
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “Fifteen million results for time travel?”
“Shush!” I admonished him. “There’s a person at another terminal trying to work.”
“But so many!” the Colonel protested.
I pointed my chin in the direction of the T-shirt person. “Try being a little considerate,” I murmured piously.
The Colonel rolled his eyes, but this time he whispered. “How do we investigate fifteen million references?”
“We need to narrow the parameters of our search,” I said, scrolling down the page. “But still, we have several possibilities right here.” I pointed with the cursor to a NOVA link for an article about Carl Sagan. Below it was another link to a piece on time travel and physics from Stanford University.
“Who is Carl Sagan?” the Colonel asked, but I had already clicked on the link and was scanning the text.
“Let’s print this out,” I muttered, executing a shortcut to the print menu.
The Colonel shot me a baffled glance. “They have a letter press here?”
“A laser printer.” I got up and tugged lightly at his sleeve. “Come with me,” I said, leading him to the reference desk where already the printer was smoothly spilling out our pages. The Colonel was enthralled.
“Is this all you need?” the reference worker smiled at us. “Or shall we run a tab?”
“A tab,” I smiled back. “There’re be quite a few more pages, I’m afraid.”
We returned to our carrel and clicked on the Stanford link. We scanned the article, printed it out, and went on to another link and another, printing those out as well.
The Colonel carefully watched everything I did. “Your, um, search mechanism—”
“Engine,” I corrected.
“Engine,” he amended. “Could we feed it another research topic?”
I nodded and returned to the top of Google’s page. “Here,” I said, moving aside. “You do it.”
Hunting slowly through the keys, the Colonel typed r-e-l-a-t-i-v-i-t-y.
“Click on search,” I prompted, and the Colonel did. Instantly the screen filled with new results. “Oh, we’re in luck,” I said cheerily. “Only a million and a half of these.”
There were links to Cambridge, UCLA, the University of Chicago, NOVA and a hundred other sites. We browsed through half a dozen pages and ran off several articles. After that, we tried rephrasing our search several times to limit our hits, and printed out a few more items of interest.
Eventually, we flopped back in our chairs.
“Do you know what strikes me about all of this?” I asked.
“That there’s so much written about it?”
“Yes. And more than that. It seems to capture the imagination, the enthusiasm, of so many people.”
The Colonel thought for a minute. Then he said, “When we were scanning through some of those articles, there was a mention of Da Vinci and his diagrams of flying machines.”
“You mean the part about how they would have worked if he had had an engine to operate them?”
“Precisely,” he said. “And how your modern flying machines employ the same concepts, the same designs, he articulated centuries ago. Anyway, my point is—”
“That conjecture leads to function?”
“Yes, exactly. Given enough time.” He paused. “No pun intended.”
We stared at the monitor for a few moments, lost in thought. Eventually I roused myself. “I’ve had it,” I said.
“And I as well.” the Colonel replied. “Actually, we need to leave in any case. I have a thousand questions to ask you about what we’ve just done today, and if I try to quiz you here, I’m quite sure to annoy you.”
“You’ll annoy me no matter what.”
“That’s absolutely true,” the Colonel agreed. “So it would be better if we were in a place where we’re free to raise our voices and quarrel.”
We smiled at each other like old friends, logged out and went home.
*****
Over the next twenty-four hours, we buried ourselves in printouts. Armed with pens and highlighters, we puzzled over “arrows of time” and hyperspace; black holes, white holes, and worm holes; gravity and antigravity; the principles of self-consistency, least action, and minimal action; Einstein Field Equations, the Casimir effect, and quantum vacuums. We learned that black holes represent a bridge between two regions of flat “spacetime;” that many scientists believe Einstein’s theory of relativity is the best theory of time and space we have, and that there is nothing in his equations to prevent time travel.
Out of Time Page 13
