by Anthology
“The ship will be here soon enough.”
Not soon enough to suit him. He could hardly believe it was finally happening.
At least she was talking to him now. He had to say what was on his mind before it was too late.
“Mae, I’m sorry.”
“Okay, you’re sorry.”
“I was trying to do the right thing.” Even as he spoke the words he realized how inadequate they were. “I wanted to protect you.”
“From what?”
“From Conway.”
She looked at him with pity. “He was just a foolish boy.”
“I was trying to help you.”
“Didn’t you think I could take care of myself?” she asked.
He stopped trying to justify himself to her. He hadn’t known then that she was stronger than him, stronger than Conway, stronger than both of them put together—but he knew it now.
He was grateful that it would all soon be in the past. But he had one more thing to say. “Mae, I’m in love with you.”
“Didn’t you know I like women?” she said. There was no malice in her tone.
Herel didn’t breathe for some few seconds. At last he exhaled.
All right, then. He’d never had a chance with her. All right. It was better this way.
The hum grew louder still, and they went to the window to watch the ship arrive. Peering into the darkness, Herel saw nothing.
“Are you sure it’s coming?” he asked, conscious of a stricture in his chest.
“Yes.”
The humming stopped. Herel could hear himself breathing. His vision shook with each of his heartbeats.
And then it was there. It seemed to emerge all at once into the light cast from the window. What he could see of it was sleek and strange, designed perhaps a thousand years or ten thousand years beyond his time. He was awestricken to think of how much its makers must have known—or would know . . .
Somewhere inside the time knot was another Kerr hole, and he would be dropped into it. It had to be. Would he go forward? Would he be drawn back to his own time? Or would he go somewhere and sometime he’d never dreamed of? It didn’t matter, as long as the ship took him away from the time station.
He got into his suit and went to the airlock. He put on his helmet and tested his air supply. This was it.
He slammed his palm against the switch and opened the inner hatch.
Entering the airlock, he faced the outer hatch. He opened it, taking pleasure in the sound of oxygen rushing in from the ship. The light coming from inside it was so bright it hurt his eyes. Its interior seemed tantalizingly familiar, but that couldn’t be. He couldn’t remember the future.
He saw shiny, unidentifiable objects. One of them came to life in the patch of brilliance cast into the airlock. It was a robot.
It stood and looked down at him, a slender, bronzed humanoid with the graceful lines of a racehorse, some three meters tall.
Herel pushed himself forward.
The robot effortlessly picked up a box, serpentine arms spanning its width. The box’s smoky sides did not hide what was inside it.
It was Conway.
He was desiccated, but his shriveled nakedness was recognizable inside his transparent coffin. His skin was gray paper glued to bones, his tats almost indiscernible from the leathery wrinkles. His lips were pulled back to bare his filed teeth in a terrible grin. He was curled up like a fetus.
Herel stopped, shocked to see the corpse. Conway was small, so very small.
Herel rebuked himself for hesitating. A dead man couldn’t hurt him. He moved forward again.
Something held him back.
He looked down to see tendrils lashing out and coiling around his arms and legs. The station’s maintenance system was restraining him.
The impassive robot watched as Herel was dragged back through the inner hatch. He struggled, but he was helpless as more tendrils slithered over his body. As thin as they were, their grip was steel.
The robot entered the time station and set the box down just inside the examination room. It stepped back through the airlock and returned to the docking node without turning around, like a film running in reverse.
“Good-bye, Herel,” Mae said. Her voice was muffled through his helmet.
“Mae!” he cried to her in terror as he was pulled farther and farther from the airlock. “What’s happening to me?”
“You’re staying here.”
He was carried past her. She was buoyant as tendrils helped her put on her pressure suit. They seemed to caress her. Scores of them, hundreds of them, swayed about her like seaweed in a gentle current.
“What are you doing?” he cried.
“I’m leaving.”
“But how?”
It was the first time he’d heard her laugh since he’d killed Conway.
“Looks like the rest of my sentence has been commuted,” she said, accepting her helmet from a waving skein of tendrils. “And yours is just beginning.”
“But they can’t do this!” he shouted, bound and helpless. “It’s impossible!”
“Is it?” she said, not bothering to put on the helmet.
“Mae—”
She was inside the hatch.
“Mae! Don’t go!”
She floated through the airlock.
“Mae!” he screamed, writhing in the grip of the tendrils. “Don’t leave me alone! Please!”
She didn’t look back.
“Mae!”
She was rising into the light when the inner hatch closed.
INSIDE THE BOX
Edward M. Lerner
The lecture hall was pleasantly warm. Behind Thaddeus Fitch, busily writing on the chalkboard, pencils scratched earnestly in spiral notebooks, fluorescent lights hummed, and feet shuffled. A Beach Boys tune wafted in through open windows from the quad.
Or so, in any case, the professor imagined the lecture hall. Chittering, muttering students squirming in their seats this morning drowned out the customary sounds. Or what he thought he remembered to be the customary sounds . . .
Chalk squeaked as Thaddeus, with more energy than artistry, began sketching a stick-figure quadruped. “I’ll explain this cat momentarily, class.” Shrodinger’s thought-experiment cat. Today’s Introduction to Physics lecture introduced the counterintuitive topic of quantum mechanics. “Recall from your reading that the behavior of atoms and their constituent parts cannot be fully described by such conventional characteristics as position and momentum. More precisely, how we think about those descriptive terms must change.” He continued drawing as he spoke, the cube in which he was attempting to enclose the cat somewhat out of perspective. He winced as the chalk snapped, its tip caught by the hole that should not be there. Should it?
“In classical physics, we can, with sufficient care and expense, measure to arbitrary precision the position and momentum of any particle. At sufficiently tiny scales, however, nature does not behave as we expect. Instead, in those infinitesimal domains, we discover that certain parameters exhibit heretofore imperceptible granularity or lumpiness—what physicists call quantization. Further, we cannot measure at quantum scales without influencing whatever is being measured. The math is inappropriate for”—beyond—“this class, but a consequence of quantization is that we cannot have absolute knowledge of subatomic particles.”
His crude diagram complete, Thaddeus pivoted to face the packed auditorium. “If we know an electron’s position quite exactly, we can know little about its momentum. If we know its momentum, we can tell little about where it is. We are reduced to probabilistic descriptions of where the particle may be, and where it may be going.” Doggedly, he ignored the arm waving from the second tier of seats. “But can this uncertainty manifest itself in the macroscopic world we experience? That is what Erwin Shrodinger set out to consider . . .”
“Professor.” Young Mr. McDowell’s tone, although respectful, was quite insistent. The sophomore stood to emphasize his seriousness. “We
—the class, that is—we feel we should discuss yesterday’s events.”
A flood of . . . memories? . . . displaced whatever the student said next. A near-miss handgun attack. A flung knife by chance impaling a pigeon inopportunely availing itself of the open window. A hurtling hand grenade vanished in mid-arc.
Thaddeus shook himself by the mental lapels. Nonsense. Pointing at the board, he continued. “Returning to today’s subject, Dr. Shrodinger devised a thought experiment to illustrate quantum uncertainty. My cartoon reveals the inside of the box, but imagine that its walls are quite opaque, quite impenetrable.” Beside the stick-figure cat, he drew a tiny square. “This mechanism contains a bit of radioactive material. Detection of a single radioactive decay,” and he tapped the board once with his chalk stump, “releases poisonous gas.”
He was explaining a decay event as a particle’s spontaneous emission from an atomic nucleus—a manifestation of positional uncertainty—when murmurs of protestation stopped him. Hairs rose on the nape of his neck. In the otherwise jammed hall, one cluster of seats remained unoccupied. It was where something had happened.
Only it couldn’t have.
Mr. McDowell was still, or once again, on his feet. He followed Thaddeus’ gaze to the empty few chairs. “We don’t understand abouthimeither, sir. The . . . intruder.”
Heads nodded. Voices rang out in agreement. A hundred pairs of eyes beseeched Thaddeus. He relented. “My unborn grandson, you mean. It’s impossible, you know.”
“But professor . . .”
With outstretched arm and firm voice, Thaddeus interrupted. “You know what you saw, you were going to insist. What you, and your colleagues in later sections of the class, all saw. Or what, rather, you’ve now convinced yourselves you saw, after repeated retellings of the tale.” He lowered his arm and voice. “Surely there is a simpler explanation than the impossible.
“A time-travel lecture, illustrated with the grandfather paradox, in a hot, stuffy classroom. A passing car backfires. A guest audits the lecture, someone with red hair like mine. Thrill-seeking students attend later sections of the lecture, and their rumor-fed expectations stoke our own fevered imaginations.”
Thaddeus took a deep breath. “What I, too, admit to remembering did not happen. It cannot have happened. This can only have been an instance of mass hysteria.”
“Like UFO sightings,” someone called out.
“Or the Salem witch trials,” Thaddeus agreed. Better a moment of soft-headed gullibility than to deny causality. Not that he cared for either of his options . . .
Young McDowell persisted. “Professor, the blackboard has a bullet hole. And how do you explain that the attacks stopped? They ended—you ended them—when you announced you would never have children.”
Thaddeus braced himself against his lectern. “A hole was surely in the board all along, unnoticed until the suggestive backfire. And our visitor likely vanished by no more mysterious a means than,” and he gestured to the rear of the auditorium, “that rear exit door.” Still, his memory insisted his doppelganger had disappeared—to the future?—from beneath a pile-up of angry students. “Would you choose to re-experience our welcome?”
That drew nervous giggles.
“Ladies and gentlemen, yesterday we spoke about cause and effect. Now you claim that my grandson traveled through time to kill me, and that I defeated his attack by my declaration I would have no children.
“If so, no grandson ever traveled back to cause my decision. Will I still make that decision? Might I now have children?” Doubts blossomed on their faces, and he hammered the figurative nail into the metaphorical coffin. “How, if I halted the attacks by deciding never to have children, can you remember my grandson?”
Whispering stopped as Thaddeus rapped the oaken lectern. “Back to Shrodinger’s cat. Has an electron, its exact position uncertain, chanced to manifest itself outside an atomic nucleus? That is, has a radioactive decay occurred to cause release of the poisonous gas? Remember, we cannot see inside the box. Class?”
Confusion returned, but of a more academic nature than the controversy just concluded. (Concluded, mocked some corner of Thaddeus’ thoughts, or simply set aside?)
“A show of hands, please. Who thinks the cat is alive?” A few hands rose tentatively. “And who thinks the cat is dead?” More hands. “Not everyone expressed an opinion. Do the rest of you imagine it’s a vampire cat—the undead?”
The chuckle was overlong and overloud. He wasn’t the only one still on edge. “In the closed system of the sealed box, we cannot know the cat’s status. Neither living nor dead is the correct answer—at least by the formalism of quantum mechanics. There is only probability until the box is opened and an outcome observed. Until then, all possible outcomes are said by physicists to be in superposition.”
A familiar arm waggled. Thaddeus managed not to sigh. “Yes, Mr. McDowell.”
“But what does it mean?”
“The math of quantum mechanics is crisp, beautiful, and wonderfully predictive. What is not clear,” what not even Albert Einstein could discern, “is the physical meaning of that mathematical formalism. Some argue that to ask the question is impermissible. Some assert that the realm of quantum mechanics is so removed from our senses we’re unequipped to judge.” That, of course, was why Shrodinger devised the cat in the box. A cat is not a subatomic particle . . .
Why did his mind keep wandering?
“There are several interpretations, all unprovable, of the mathematical formalism. Living or dead: To have but one outcome when the box is opened is unaesthetically asymmetric. Hence, one theory has it that both outcomes occur—which implies the spawning of another universe. More generally, whenever an uncertainty at the quantum level must resolve itself into a particular result, the universe itself must split into many, one to instantiate each possible outcome. If we, the occupants of one universe, unseal the box to let loose a live cat, in another universe, the occupants must encounter a dead feline.”
More murmuring. This time Thaddeus let bewilderment run its course. As young minds grappled with countless myriads of branching universes newborn each moment, into Thaddeus’ own churning mind popped the vision of two commingled universes. Of two possible professors in superposition. From what source might free will arise, except for quantum uncertainty?
Children or not? Memories or hallucination? A bullet hole or just a hole?
Clanging yanked his attention back to the lecture hall. An unseasonably warm autumn day and an alarm: almost surely a fire drill. “Attention, everyone! Leave in an orderly fashion. Assemble on the quad.” Thaddeus watched the students stand, form lines, file efficiently from the room, his eyes sweeping from exit to exit to exit. His thoughts remained in turmoil.
“Mr. McDowell!” The lad was at the blackboard. Had he likewise concluded this must be a fire drill? “Cease your foolishness and go now.” Thaddeus’ eyes resumed their sweep. When his gaze next touched the front of the auditorium, the area was empty. A hastily scrawled phrase had appeared below Shrodinger’s cat. He squinted to read it.
Now what had he been thinking about?
The students filtered back from the sunny quad into the hall. A few glanced unsubtly at the wall clock. The hour was almost up. He could have dismissed them straight from the quad, instead of squeezing in a final few minutes of lecture.
“A pleasant day for a fire drill.” Thaddeus picked up a piece of chalk. “Where were we?”
Tittering erupted as he looked to the flawless blackboard. His face, thankfully hidden from the class, reddened. “Quite clever.” He briskly erased the scribbled graffito that had appeared beneath his crudely drawn sketch of Shrodinger’s cat. The chuckling grew. “Very clever, indeed.”
He wished he had dismissed them from the quad. A minute later the bell rang, ending the session. Grinning students in twos and threes bustled from the hall.
His humble drawing followed the student witticism into oblivion. Not that it mattered; the caption h
ad been memorable enough. Straightening a sheaf of lecture notes, Thaddeus wondered whether even Einstein would have agreed.
“The cat knows.”
IF EVER I SHOULD LEAVE YOU
Pamela Sargent
When Yuri walked away from the Time Station for the last time, his face was pale marble, his body only bones barely held together by skin and the weak muscles he had left. I hurried to him and grasped his arm, oblivious to the people who passed us in the street. He resisted my touch at first, embarrassed in front of the others; then he gave in and leaned against me as we began to walk home.
I knew that he was too weak to go to the Time Station again. His body, resting against mine, seemed almost weightless. I guided him through the park toward our home. Halfway there, he tugged at my arm and we rested against one of the crystalline trees surrounding the small lake in the center of the park.
Yuri had aged rapidly in the last six months, transformed from a young man into an aged creature hardly able to walk by himself. I had expected it. One cannot hold off old age indefinitely, even now. But I could not accept it. I knew that his death could be no more than days away.
You can’t leave me now, not after all this time, I wanted to scream. Instead, I helped him sit on the ground next to the tree, then sat at his side.
His blue eyes, once clear and bright, now watery with age and surrounded by tiny lines, watched me. He reached inside his shirt and fumbled for something. I had always teased Yuri about his shirts: sooner or later he would tear them along the shoulder seams while flexing the muscles of his broad back and sturdy arms. Now the shirt, like his skin, hung on his bones in wrinkles and folds. At last he pulled out a piece of paper and pressed it into my hand with trembling fingers.
“Take care of this,” he whispered to me. “Copy it down in several places so you won’t lose it. All the coordinates are there, all the places and times I went to these past months. When you’re lonely, when you need me, go to the Time Station and I’ll be waiting on the other side.” He was trying to comfort me. Because of his concern, he had gone to the Time Station every day for the past six months and had traveled to various points in the past. I could travel to any of those points and be with him at those times. It suddenly struck me as a mad idea, an insane and desperate thing.
