The Past Through Tomorrow

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Why, that’s utterly unreasonable,” protested Barstow. “Impossible. We haven’t the boats to do it.”

  Lazarus said nothing. He was ceasing to have opinions.

  Zaccur changed his opinion quickly. Lazarus acquired one, born of experience. While urging his cousins toward the field where embarkation was proceeding, he found himself lifted up, free of the ground. He struggled, his arms and legs met no resistance but the ground dropped away. He closed his eyes, counted ten jets, opened them again. He was at least two miles in the air.

  Below him, boiling up from the city like bats from a cave, were uncountable numbers of dots and shapes, dark against the sunlit ground. Some were close enough for him to see that they were men, Earthmen, the Families.

  The horizon dipped down, the planet became a sphere, the sky turned black. Yet his breathing seemed normal, his blood vessels did not burst.

  They were sucked into clusters around the open ports of the New Frontiers like bees swarming around a queen. Once inside the ship Lazarus gave himself over to a case of the shakes. Whew! he sighed to himself, watch that first step—it’s a honey!

  Libby sought out Captain King as soon as he was inboard and had recovered his nerve. He delivered Sarloo’s message.

  King seemed undecided. “I don’t know,” he said. “You know more about the natives than I do, inasmuch as I have hardly put foot to ground. But between ourselves, Mister, the way they sent my passengers back has me talking to myself. That was the most remarkable evolution I have ever seen performed.”

  “I might add that it was remarkable to experience, sir,” Libby answered unhumorously. “Personally I would prefer to take up ski jumping. I’m glad you had the ship’s access ports open.”

  “I didn’t,”—said King tersely. “They were opened for me.”

  They went to the control room with the intention of getting the ship under boost and placing a long distance between it and the planet from which they had been evicted; thereafter they would consider destination and course. “This planet that Sarloo described to you,” said King, “does it belong to a G-type star?”

  “Yes,” Libby confirmed, “an Earth-type planet accompanying a Sol-type star. I have its coordinates and could identify from the catalogues. But we can forget it; it is too far away.”

  “So…” King activated the vision system for the stellarium. Then neither of them said anything for several long moments. The images of the heavenly bodies told their own story.

  With no orders from King, with no hands at the controls, the New Frontiers was on her long way again, headed out, as if she had a mind of her own.

  “I can’t tell you much,” admitted Libby some hours later to a group consisting of King, Zaccur Barstow, and Lazarus Long. “I was able to determine, before we passed the speed of light—or appeared to—that our course then was compatible with the idea that we have been headed toward the star named by Kreel Sarloo as the destination ordered for us by his gods. We continued to accelerate and the stars faded out. I no longer have any astro-gational reference points and I am unable to say where we are or where we are going.”

  “Loosen up, Andy,” suggested Lazarus. “Make a guess.”

  “Well… if our world line is a smooth function—if it is, and I have no data—then we may arrive in the neighborhood of star PK3722, where Kreel Sarloo said we were going.”

  “Rummph!” Lazarus turned to King. “Have you tried slowing down?”

  “Yes,” King said shortly. “The controls are dead.”

  “Mmmm… Andy, when do we get there?”

  Libby shrugged helplessly. “I have no frame of reference. What is time without a space reference?”

  Time and space, inseparable and one— Libby thought about it long after the others had left. To be sure, he had the space framework of the ship itself and therefore there necessarily was ship’s time. Clocks in the ship ticked or hummed or simply marched; people grew hungry, fed themselves, got tired, rested. Radioactives deteriorated, physio-chemical processes moved toward states of greater entropy, his own consciousness perceived duration.

  But the background of the stars, against which every timed function in the history of man had been measured, was gone. So far as his eyes or any instrument in the ship could tell him, they had become unrelated to the rest of the universe.

  What universe?

  There was no universe. It was gone.

  Did they move? Can there be motion when there is nothing to move past?

  Yet the false weight achieved by the spin of the ship persisted. Spin with reference to what? thought Libby. Could it be that space held a true, absolute, nonrelational texture of its own, like that postulated for the long-discarded “ether” that the classic Michelson-Morley experiments had failed to detect? No, more than that—had denied the very possibility of its existence?

  —had for that matter denied the possibility of speed greater than light. Had the ship actually passed the speed of light? Was it not more likely that this was a coffin, with ghosts as passengers, going nowhere at no time?

  But Libby itched between his shoulder blades and was forced to scratch; his left leg had gone to sleep; his stomach was beginning to speak insistently for food—if this was death, he decided, it did not seem materially different from life.

  With renewed tranquility, he left the control room and headed for his favorite refectory, while starting to grapple with the problem of inventing a new mathematics which would include all the new phenomena. The mystery of how the hypothetical gods of the Jockaira had teleported the Families from ground to ship he discarded. There had been no opportunity to obtain significant data, measured data; the best that any honest scientist could do, with epistemological rigor, was to include a note that recorded the fact and stated that it was unexplained. It was a fact; here he was who shortly before had been on the planet; even now Schultz’s assistants were overworked trying to administer depressant drugs to the thousands who had gone to pieces emotionally under the outrageous experience.

  But Libby could not explain it and, lacking data, felt no urge to try. What he did want to do was to deal with world lines in a plenum, the basic problem of field physics.

  Aside from his penchant for mathematics Libby was a simple person. He preferred the noisy atmosphere of the “Club,” refectory 9-D, for reasons different from those of Lazarus. The company of people younger than himself reassured him; Lazarus was the only elder he felt easy with.

  Food, he learned, was not immediately available at the Club; the commissary was still adjusting to the sudden change. But Lazarus was there and others whom he knew; Nancy Weatheral scrunched over and made room for him. “You’re just the man I want to see,” she said. “Lazarus is being most helpful. Where are we going this time and when do we get there?”

  Libby explained the dilemma as well as he could. Nancy wrinkled her nose. “That’s a pretty prospect, I must say! Well, I guess that means back to the grind for little Nancy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you ever taken care of a somnolent? No, of course you haven’t. It gets tiresome. Turn them over, bend their arms, twiddle their tootsies, move their heads, close the tank and move on to the next one. I get so sick of human bodies that I’m tempted to take a vow of chastity.”

  “Don’t commit yourself too far,” advised Lazarus.

  “Why would you care, you old false alarm?”

  Eleanor Johnson spoke up. “I’m glad to be in the ship again. Those slimy Jockaira—ugh!”

  Nancy shrugged. “You’re prejudiced, Eleanor. The Jocks are okay, in their way. Sure, they aren’t exactly like us, but neither are dogs. You don’t dislike dogs, do you?”

  “That’s what they are,” Lazarus said soberly. “Dogs.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t mean that they are anything like dogs in most ways—they aren’t even vaguely canine and they certainly are our equals and possibly our superiors in some things… but they are dogs just the same. Those t
hings they call their ‘gods’ are simply their masters, their owners. We couldn’t be domesticated, so the owners chucked us out.”

  Libby was thinking of the inexplicable telekinesis the Jockaira—or their masters—had used. “I wonder what it would have been like,” he said thoughtfully, “if they had been able to domesticate us. They could have taught us a lot of wonderful things.”

  “Forget it,” Lazarus said sharply. “It’s not a man’s place to be property.”

  “What is a man’s place?”

  “It’s a man’s business to be what he is… and be it in style!” Lazarus got up. “Got to go.”

  Libby started to leave also, but Nancy stopped him. “Don’t go. I want to ask you some questions. What year is it back on Earth?”

  Libby started to answer, closed his mouth. He started to answer a second time, finally said, “I don’t know how to answer that question. It’s like saying, ‘How high is up?’”

  “I know I probably phrased it wrong,” admitted Nancy. “I didn’t do very well in basic physics, but I did gather the idea that time is relative and simultaneity is an idea which applies only to two points close together in the same framework. But just the same, I want to know something. We’ve traveled a lot faster and farther than anyone ever did before, haven’t we? Don’t our clocks slow down, or something?”

  Libby got that completely baffled look which mathematical physicists wear whenever laymen try to talk about physics in nonmathematical language. “You’re referring to the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction. But, if you’ll pardon me, anything one says about it in words is necessarily nonsense.”

  “Why?” she insisted.

  “Because… well, because the language is inappropriate. The formulae used to describe the effect loosely called a contraction presuppose that the observer is part of the phenomenon. But verbal language contains the implicit assumption that we can stand outside the whole business and watch what goes on. The mathematical language denies the very possibility of any such outside viewpoint. Every observer has his own world line; he can’t get outside it for a detached viewpoint.”

  “But suppose he did? Suppose we could see Earth right now?”

  “There I go again,” Libby said miserably. “I tried to talk about it in words and all I did was to add to the confusion. There is no way to measure time in any absolute sense when two events are separated in a continuum. All you can measure is interval.”

  “Well, what is interval? So much space and so much time.”

  “No, no, no! It isn’t that at all. Interval is… well, it’s interval. I can write down formulae about it and show you how we use it, but it can’t be defined in words. Look, Nancy, can you write the score for a full orchestration of a symphony in words?”

  “No. Well, maybe you could but it would take thousands of times as long.”

  “And musicians still could not play it until you put it back into musical notation. That’s what I meant,” Libby went on, “when I said that the language was inappropriate. I got into a difficulty like this once before in trying to describe the light-pressure drive. I was asked why, since the drive depends on loss of inertia, we people inside the ship had felt no loss of inertia. There was no answer, in words. Inertia isn’t a word; it is a mathematical concept used in mathematically certain aspects of a plenum. I was stuck.”

  Nancy looked baffled but persisted doggedly. “My question still means something, even if I didn’t phrase it right. You can’t just tell me to run along and play. Suppose we turned around and went back the way we came, all the way to Earth, exactly the same trip but in reverse—just double the ship’s time it has been so far. All right, what year would it be on Earth when we got there?”

  “It would be… let me see, now——” The almost automatic processes of Libby’s brain started running off the unbelievably huge and complex problem in accelerations, intervals, difform motion. He was approaching the answer in a warm glow of mathematical revery when the problem suddenly fell to pieces on him, became indeterminate. He abruptly realized that the problem had an unlimited number of equally valid answers.

  But that was impossible. In the real world, not the fantasy world of mathematics, such a situation was absurd. Nancy’s question had to have just one answer, unique and real.

  Could the whole beautiful structure of relativity be an absurdity? Or did it mean that it was physically impossible ever to back-track an interstellar distance?

  “I’ll have to give some thought to that one,” Libby said hastily and left before Nancy could object.

  But solitude and contemplation gave him no clue to the problem. It was not a failure of his mathematical ability; he was capable, he knew, of devising a mathematical description of any group of facts, whatever they might be. His difficulty lay in having too few facts. Until some observer traversed interstellar distances at speeds approximating the speed of light and returned to the planet from which he had started there could be no answer. Mathematics alone has no content, gives no answers.

  Libby found himself wondering if the hills of his native Ozarks were still green, if the smell of wood smoke still clung to the trees in the autumn, then he recalled that the question lacked any meaning by any rules he knew of. He surrendered to an attack of homesickness such as he had not experienced since he was a youth in the Cosmic Construction Corps, making his first deep-space jump.

  This feeling of doubt and uncertainty, the feeling of lostness and nostalgia, spread throughout the ship. On the first leg of their journey the Families had had tha incentive that had kept the covered wagons crawling across the plains. But now they were going nowhere, one day led only to the next. Their long lives were become a meaningless burden.

  Ira Howard, whose fortune established the Howard Foundation, was born in 1825 and died in 1873—of old age. He sold groceries to the Forty-niners in San Francisco, became a wholesale sutler in the American War of the Secession, multiplied his fortune during the tragic Reconstruction.

  Howard was deathly afraid of dying. He hired the best doctors of his time to prolong his life. Nevertheless old age plucked him when most men are still young. But his will commanded that his money be used “to lengthen human life.” The administrators of the trust found no way to carry out his wishes other than by seeking out persons whose family trees showed congenital predispositions toward long life and then inducing them to reproduce in kind. Their method anticipated the work of Burbank; they may or may not have known of the illuminating researches of the Monk Gregor Mendel.

  Mary Sperling put down the book she had been reading when Lazarus entered her stateroom. He picked it up. “What are you reading, Sis? ‘Ecclesiastes.’ Hmm… I didn’t know you were religious.” He read aloud:

  “ ‘Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one place?’

  “Pretty grim stuff, Mary. Can’t you find something more cheerful? Even in The Preacher?” His eyes skipped on down. “How about this one? ‘For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope——’ Or… mmmm, not too many cheerful spots. Try this: ”Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh: for childhood and youth are vanity.‘ That’s more my style; I wouldn’t be young again for overtime wages.”

  “I would.”

  “Mary, what’s eating you? I find you sitting here, reading the most depressing book in the Bible, nothing but death and funerals. Why?”

  She passed a hand wearily across her eyes. “Lazarus, I’m getting old. What else is there to think about?”

  “You? Why, you’re fresh as a daisy!”

  She looked at him. She knew that he lied; her mirror showed her the greying hair, the relaxed skin; she felt it in her bones. Yet Lazarus was older than she… although she knew, from what she had learned of biology during the years she had assisted in the longevity research, that Lazarus should never have lived to be as old as he was now. When he was born the program had reached only the third generation, too few genera
tions to eliminate the less durable strains—except through some wildly unlikely chance shuffling of genes.

  But there he stood. “Lazarus,” she asked, “how long do you expect to live?”

  “Me? Now that’s an odd question. I mind a time when I asked a chap that very same question—about me, I mean, not about him. Ever hear of Dr. Hugo Pinero?”

  “Tinero… Pinero…‘ Oh, yes, ’Pinero the Charlatan.‘”

  “Mary, he was no charlatan. He could do it, no foolin‘. He could predict accurately when a man would die.”

  “But—— Go ahead. What did he tell you?”

  “Just a minute. I want you to realize that he was no fake. His predictions checked out right on the button—if he hadn’t died, the life insurance companies would have been ruined. That was before you were born, but I was there and I know. Anyhow, Pinero took my reading and it seemed to bother him. So he took it again. Then he returned my money.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Couldn’t get a word out of him. He looked at me and he looked at his machine and he just frowned and clammed up. So I can’t rightly answer your question.”

  “But what do you think about it, Lazarus? Surely you don’t expect just to go on forever?”

  “Mary,” he said softly, “I’m not planning on dying. I’m not giving it any thought at all.”

  There was silence. At last she said, “Lazarus, I don’t want to die. But what is the purpose of our long lives? We don’t seem to grow wiser as we grow older. Are we simply hanging on after our time has passed? Loitering in the kindergarten when we should be moving on? Must we die and be born again?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lazarus, “and I don’t have any way to find out… and I’m damned if I see any sense in my worrying about it. Or you either. I propose to hang onto this life as long as I can and learn as much as I can. Maybe wisdom and understanding are reserved for a later existence and maybe they aren’t for us at all, ever. Either way, I’m satisfied to be living and enjoying it. Mary my sweet, carpe that old diem!—it’s the only game in town.”