The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  I turned again, and felt the queasiness and pain leap within me, and I knew I was very close.

  I stopped the car and got out, the gun in my pocket and my hand on the gun, my other hand holding the knife.

  One house had a light in the window; the homes on either side were dark. I scanned, and I knew that that light was it, the center of the unreality – maybe not the tamperer himself, but something, a focus for the disturbance of the flow of history.

  Perhaps it was an ancestor of the tamperer; I had encountered that before.

  I walked up the front path and rang the bell.

  I braced myself, the knife in one hand, the gun in the other.

  The porch light came on, and the door started to open. I threw myself against it.

  It burst in, and I went through it, and I was standing in a hallway. A man in his forties was staring at me, holding his wrist where the door had slammed into it as it pulled out of his grip. There had been no chain-bolt; my violence had, perhaps, been more than was necessary.

  I couldn’t take risks, though. I pointed the gun at his face and squeezed the trigger.

  The thing made a report like the end of the world, and the man fell, blood and tissue sprayed across the wall behind him.

  A woman screamed from a nearby doorway, and I pointed the gun at her, unsure.

  The pain was still there. It came from the woman. I pulled the trigger again.

  She fell, blood red on her blouse, and I looked down at her as the pain faded, as stability returned.

  I was real again.

  If the man were her husband, perhaps she was destined to remarry, or to be unfaithful – she would have been the tamperer’s ancestor, but he might not have been. The twisting of time had stopped only when the woman fell.

  I regretted shooting him, then, but I had had no choice. Any delay might have been fatal. The life of an individual is precious, but not as precious as history itself.

  A twinge ran through my stomach; perhaps only an aftereffect, but I had to be certain. I knelt, and went quickly to work with my knife.

  When I was done, there could be no doubt that the two were dead, and that neither could ever have children.

  Finished, I turned and fled, before the fumbling police of this era could interfere.

  I knew the papers would report it the next day as the work of a lunatic, of a deranged thief who panicked before he could take anything, or of someone killing for perverted pleasure. I didn’t worry about that.

  I had saved history again.

  I wish there were another way, though.

  Sometimes I have nightmares about what I do; sometimes I dream that I’ve made a mistake, killed the wrong person, that I stranded myself here. What if it wasn’t a mechanical failure that sent the machine into flux. What if I changed my own past and did that to myself?

  I have those nightmares sometimes.

  Worse, though, the very worst nightmares, are the ones where I dream that I never changed the past at all, that I never lived in any time but this one, that I grew up here, alone, through an unhappy childhood and a miserable adolescence and a sorry adulthood – that I never travelled in time, that it’s all in my mind, that I killed those people for nothing.

  That’s the worst of all, and I wake up from that one sweating, ready to scream.

  Thank God it’s not true.

  THE CHRONOLOGY PROTECTION CASE

  Paul Levinson

  We close this short sequence with a story that takes the basic concept of Fritz Leiber’s “Try and Change the Past” and develops it to the ultimate, exploring how time and the universe protects itself.

  Paul Levinson is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City and has written extensively on the subject in Mind at Large (1988), The Soft Edge (1997), New New Media (2009) and many similar books. He also finds the time to broadcast regularly on radio and TV, write songs and the occasional science-fiction story. The following introduced his forensic scientist and investigator Phil D’Amato, who finds himself up against the mysteries of the universe and the perils of alternate sciences. He features in two more short stories and the novels The Silk Code (1999), The Consciousness Plague (2002) and The Pixel Eye (2003). Amongst his other novels is the time-travel adventure The Plot to Save Socrates (2006).

  Carl put the call through just as I was packing up for the day. “She says she’s some kind of physicist,” he said, and although I rarely took calls from the public, I jumped on this one.

  “Dr D’Amato?” she asked.

  “Yes?”

  “I saw you on television last week – on that cable talk show. You said you had a passion for physics.” Her voice had a breathy elegance.

  “True,” I said. Forensic science was my profession, but cutting-edge physics was my love. Too bad there wasn’t a way to nab rapist murderers with spectral traces. “And you’re a physicist?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, sorry,” she said. “I should introduce myself. I’m Lauren Goldring. Do you know my work?”

  “Ahm . . .” The name did sound familiar. I ran through the rolodex in my head, though these days my computer was becoming more reliable than my brain. “Yes!” I snapped my fingers. “You had an article in Scientific American last month about some Hubble data.”

  “That’s right,” she said, and I could hear her relax just a bit. “Look, I’m calling you about my husband – he’s disappeared. I haven’t heard from him in two days.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well that’s really not my department. I can connect you to—”

  “No, please,” she said. “It’s not what you think. I’m sure his disappearance has something to do with his work. He’s a physicist too.”

  I was in my car forty minutes later on my way to her house, when I should have been home with pizza and the cat. No contest: a physicist in distress always wins.

  Her Bronxville address wasn’t too far from mine in Yonkers.

  “Dr D’Amato?” she opened the door.

  I nodded. “Phil.”

  “Thank you so much for coming,” she said, and ushered me in. Her eyes looked red, like she suffered from allergies or had been crying. But few people have allergies in March.

  The house had a quiet appealing beauty. As did she.

  “I know the usual expectations in these things,” she said. “He has another woman; we’ve been fighting. And I’m sure that most women whose vanished husbands have been having affairs are quick to profess their certainty that that’s not what’s going on in their cases.”

  I smiled. “OK, I’m willing to start with the assumption that your case is different. Tell me how.”

  “Would you like a drink, some wine?” she walked over to a cabinet, must’ve been turn of the century.

  “Just ginger ale, if you have it,” I said, leaning back in the plush Morris chair she’d shown me into.

  She returned with the ginger ale, and some sort of sparkling water for herself. “Well, as I told you on the phone, Ian and I are physicists—”

  “Is his last name Goldring, like yours?”

  Lauren nodded. “And, well, I’m sure this has something to do with his project.”

  “You two don’t do the same work?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “My area’s the cosmos at large – big bang theory, blackholes in space, the big picture. Ian’s was, is, on the other end of the spectrum. Literally. His area’s quantum mechanics.” She started to sob.

  “It’s OK,” I said. I got up and put my hand on her shoulder. Quantum mechanics could be frustrating, I knew, but not that bad.

  “No,” she said. “It isn’t OK. Why am I using the past tense for Ian?”

  “You think some harm’s come to him?”

  “I don’t know,” her lips quivered. She did know, or thought she knew.

  “And you feel this has something to do with his work with tiny particles? Was he exposed to dangerous radiation?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not it.
He was working on something called quantum signalling. He always told me everything about his work – and I told him everything about mine – we had that kind of relationship. And then a few months ago, he suddenly got silent. At first I thought maybe he was having an affair . . .”

  And the thought popped into my head: if I had a woman with your class, an affair with someone else would be the last thing on my mind.

  “But then I realized it was deeper than that. It was something, something that frightened him, in his work. Something that I think he wanted to shield me from.”

  “I’m pretty much of an amiable amateur when it comes to quantum mechanics,” I said, “but I know something about it. Suppose you tell me all you know about Ian’s work, and why it could be dangerous.”

  * * *

  What I in fact fully grasped about quantum mechanics I could write on a postcard to my sister in Boston and it would likely fit. It had to do with light and particles so small that they were often indistinguishable in their behavior, and prone to paradox at every turn. A particularly vexing aspect that even Einstein and his colleagues tried to tackle in the 1930s involved two particles that at first collided and then travelled at sublight speeds in opposite directions: would observation of one have an instantaneous effect on the other? Did the two particles, having once collided, now exist ever after in some sort of mysterious relationship or field, a bond between them so potent that just to measure one was to influence the other, regardless of how far away? Einstein wondered about this in a thought experiment. Did interaction of subatomic particles tie their futures together forever, even if one stayed on Earth and the other wound up beyond Pluto? Real experiments in the 1960s and after suggested that’s just what was happening, at least in local areas, and this supported Heisenberg’s and Bohr’s classic “Copenhagen” interpretation that quantum mechanics was some kind of mind-over-matter deal – that just looking at a quantum or tiny particle, maybe even thinking about it, could affect not only it but related particles. Einstein would’ve preferred to find another cause – non-mental – for such phenomena. But that could lead to an interpretation of quantum mechanics as faster-than-light action – the particle on Earth somehow sent an instant signal to the particle in space – which of course ran counter to Einstein’s relativity theories.

  Well, I guess that would fill more than your average postcard. The truth is blood and semen and DNA evidence were a lot easier to make sense of than quantum mechanics, which was one reason that kind of esoteric science was just a hobby with me. Of course, one way that QM had it over forensics is that it rarely had to do with dead bodies. But Lauren Goldring was wanting to tell me that maybe it did in at least one case, her husband’s.

  “Ian was part of a small group of physicists working to demonstrate that QM was evidence of faster-than-light travel, time travel, maybe both,” she said.

  “Not a product of the mind?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “not as in the traditional interpretation.”

  “But doesn’t faster-than-light travel contradict Einstein?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Lauren said. “It seems to contradict the simplest interpretations, but there may be some loopholes.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Well, there’s a lot of disagreement even among the small group of people Ian was working with. Some think the data supports both faster-than-light and time travel. Others are sure that time travel is impossible even though—”

  “You’re not saying that you think some crazy envious scientist killed him?” I asked.

  “No,” Lauren said. “It’s much deeper than that.”

  A favorite phrase of hers. “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Well, Stephen Hawking, for one, says that although the equations suggest that time travel might be possible on the quantum level, the universe wouldn’t let this happen . . .” She paused and looked at me. “You’ve heard about Hawking’s work in this area?”

  “I know about Hawking in general,” I said. “I’m not that much of an amateur. But not about his work in time travel.”

  “You’re very unusual for a forensic scientist,” she said, with an admiring edge I very much liked. “Anyway, Hawking thinks that whatever quantum mechanics may permit, the universe just won’t allow time travel – because the level of paradox time travel would create would just unravel the whole universe.”

  “You mean like if I could get a message back to JFK that he would be killed, and he believed me and acted upon that information and didn’t go to Dallas and wasn’t killed, this would create a world in which I would grow up with no knowledge that JFK had ever been killed, which would mean I would have no motive to send the message that saved JFK, but if I didn’t send that message then JFK would be killed—”

  “That’s it,” Lauren said. “Except on the quantum level you might achieve that paradox by sending back information just a few seconds in time – say, in the form of a command that would shut down the generating circuit and prevent the information from being sent in the first place—”

  “I see,” I said.

  “And, well, because things like that, if they could happen, if they happened all the time, would lead to a constantly remade, inside-out, self-effacing universe, Hawking promulgated his ‘Chronology Protection Conjecture’ – the universe protects the existing timeline, whatever the theoretical possibilities of time travel.”

  “How does your husband fit into this?” I asked.

  “He was working on a device, an experiment, to disprove Hawking’s conjecture,” she said. “He was trying to create a local wormhole with temporal effects.”

  “And you think he somehow disappeared into this?” Jeez, this was beginning to sound like a bad episode of Star Trek. But she seemed rational, everything she’d outlined made sense, and something in her manner continued to compel my attention.

  “I don’t know,” she looked like she was close to tears again.

  “All right,” I said. “Here’s what I think we should do. I’m going to call in Ian’s disappearance to a friend in the department. He’s a precinct captain, and he’ll take this seriously. He’ll contact all the airports, get Ian’s picture out to cops on the beat—”

  “But I don’t think—”

  “I know,” I said. “You’ve got a gut feeling that something more profound is going on. And maybe you’re right. But we’ve got to cover all the bases.”

  “OK,” she said quietly, and I noticed that her lips were quivering again.

  “Will you be OK tonight? I’ll be back to you tomorrow morning.” I took her hand.

  “I guess so,” she said huskily, and squeezed my hand.

  I didn’t feel like letting go, but I did.

  The news the next morning was terrible. I don’t care what the shrinks say: flat-out confirmed death is always worse than ambiguous, unresolved disappearance. I couldn’t bring myself to just call her on the phone. I drove to her home, hoping she was in.

  She opened the door. I tried to keep a calm face, but I’m not that good an actor.

  She understood immediately. “Oh no!” she cried out. She staggered and collapsed in my arms. “Please no.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and touched her hair. I felt like kissing her forehead, but didn’t. I hardly knew her, yet I felt very close to her, a part of her world. “They found him a few hours ago near Columbia University. Looks like another stupid, senseless, goddamned random drive-by shooting. That’s the kind of world we live in.” I didn’t know whether this would in any way lessen her pain. At least his death had nothing to do with his work.

  “No, not random,” she said, sobbing. “Not random.”

  “OK,” I said, “you need to rest. I’m going to call someone over here to give you a sedative. I’ll stay with you till then.”

  The medic was over in fifteen minutes. He gave her a shot, and she was asleep a few minutes later. “Not random. Not random,” she mumbled.

  I called the captain, a
nd asked if he could send a uniform over to stay with Lauren for the afternoon. He wasn’t happy – his people were overworked, like everyone – but he owed me. Many’s the time I’d saved his butt with some piece of evidence I’d uncovered in the back of an orifice.

  I dropped by the autopsy. Nothing unusual there. Three bullets from a cheap punk’s gun, one shattered the heart, did all the damage, Ian Goldring’s dead. No sign of radiation damage, no strange chemistry in the body. No possible connection that I could see to anything Lauren had told me. Still, the coroner was a friend, I explained to him that the victim was the husband of a friend, and asked if he could run any and every conceivable test at his disposal to determine if there was anything different about this corpse. He said sure. I knew he wouldn’t find anything though.

  I went back to my office. I thought of calling Lauren and telling her about the autopsy, but she’d be better off if I let her rest. I was tired of looking at dead bodies. I turned on my computer and looked at its screen instead. I was on a few physics lists on the Internet. I logged on and did some reading about Hawking and his chronology protection conjecture.

  “Lady physicist on the phone for you again,” Carl called out. It was late afternoon already. I logged off and rubbed my eyes.

  “Hi,” Lauren said.

  “You OK?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I just got off the phone with one of the other researchers in Ian’s group, and I think I’ve got part of this figured out.” She sounded less tentative than yesterday – like she was indeed more on top of what was actually going on, or thought she was – but more worried.

  I started to tell her, gently as I could, about the autopsy.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she interrupted me. “I mean, I don’t think the way that Ian was killed has any relevance to this. It’s the fact that he was killed that counts – the reason he was killed.”

  The reason – everyone wants reasons in this irrational society. Science in the laboratory deals with reason. In the outside world, you’re lucky if you can find a reason. “I know it’s painful,” I said. “But Ian’s death had no reason – his killer was likely just a high-flying kid with a gun. Happens all the time. Ian was just in the wrong place. A random victim in the murder lottery.”