“Huh? What?”
Without answering he signaled the waiter and told it to bring back the big phone book, extended area. I said, “What’s the matter? You calling the wagon for me?”
“Not yet.” He thumbed through the enormous book, then stopped and said, “Dan, scan this.”
I looked. He had his finger on “Davis.” There were columns of Davises. But where he had his finger there were a dozen “D. B. Davises” —from “Dabney” to “Duncan.”
There were three “Daniel B. Davises.” One of them was me.
“That’s from less than seven million people,” he pointed out. “Want to try your luck on more than two hundred and fifty million?”
“It doesn’t prove anything,” I said feebly.
“No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t. It would be quite a coincidence, I readily agree, if two engineers with such similar talents happened to be working on the same sort of thing at the same time and just happened to have the same last name and the same initials. By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget—especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself—that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen. This looks like one. I like that a lot better than I like the theory that my beer buddy has slipped his cams. Good beer buddies are hard to come by.”
“What do you think I ought to do?”
“The first thing to do is not to waste your time and money on a psychiatrist until you try the second thing. The second thing is to find out the first name of this ‘D. B. Davis’ who filed this patent. There will be some easy way to do that. Likely as not his first name will be ‘Dexter.’ Or even ‘Dorothy.’ But don’t trip a breaker if it is ‘Daniel,’ because the middle name might be ‘Berzowski’ with a social-security number different from yours. And the third thing to do, which is really the first, is to forget it for now and order another round.”
So we did, and talked of other things, particularly women. Chuck had a theory that women were closely related to machinery, both utterly unpredictable by logic. He drew graphs on the tabletop in beer to prove his thesis.
Sometime later I said suddenly, “If there were real time travel, I know what I would do.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“About my problem. Look, Chuck, I got here—got to ‘now’ I mean— by a sort of half-baked, horse-and-buggy time travel. But the trouble is I can’t go back. All the things that are worrying me happened thirty years ago. I’d go back and dig out the truth...if there were such a thing as real time travel.”
He stared at me. “But there is.”
“What?”
He suddenly sobered. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
I said, “Maybe not, but you already have said it. Now you’d better tell me what you meant before I empty this here stein over your head.”
“Forget it, Dan. I made a slip.”
“Talk!”
“That’s just what I can’t do.” He glanced around. No one was near us.
“It’s classified.”
“Time travel classified? Good God, why?”
“Hell, boy, didn’t you ever work for the government? They’d classify sex if they could. There doesn’t have to be a reason; it’s just their policy. But it is classified and I’m bound by it. So lay off.”
“But—Quit fooling around about it, Chuck; this is important to me. Terribly important.” When he didn’t answer and looked stubborn I said, “You can tell me. Shucks, I used to have a ‘Q’ clearance myself. Never suspended, either. It’s just that I’m no longer with the government.”
“What’s a ‘Q’ clearance?”
I explained and presently he nodded. You mean an ‘Alpha’ status. You must have been hot stuff, boy; I only rated a ‘Beta.’ ”
“Then why can’t you tell me?”
“Huh? You know why. Regardless of your rated status, you don’t have the necessary ‘Need to Know’ qualification.”
“The hell I don’t! ‘Need to Know’ is what I’ve got most of.”
But he wouldn’t budge, so finally I said in disgust, “I don’t think there is such a thing. I think you just had a belch back up on you.”
He stared at me solemnly for a while, then he said, “Danny.”
“Huh?”
“I’m going to tell you. Just remember your ‘Alpha’ status, boy. I’m going to tell you because it can’t hurt anything and I want you to realize that it couldn’t possibly be of use to you in your problem. It’s time travel, all right, but it’s not practical. You can’t use it.”
“Why not?”
“Give me a chance, will you? They never smoothed the bugs out of it and it’s not even theoretically possible that they ever will. It’s of no practical value whatsoever, even for research. It’s a mere by-product of NullGrav— that’s why they classified it.”
“But, hell, NullGrav is declassified.”
“What’s that got to do with it? If this was commercial, too, maybe they’d unwrap it. But shut up.”
I’m afraid I didn’t, but I’d better tell this as if I had. During Chuck’s senior year at the University of Colorado—Boulder, that is—he had earned extra money as a lab assistant. They had a big cryogenics lab there and at first he had worked in that. But the school had a juicy defense contract concerned with the Edinburgh field theory and they had built a big new physics laboratory in the mountains out of town. Chuck was reassigned there to Professor Twitchell—Dr. Hubert Twitchell, the man who just missed the Nobel Prize and got nasty about it.
“Twitch got the notion that if he polarized around another axis he could reverse the gravitational field instead of leveling it off. Nothing happened. So he fed what he had done back into the computer and got wild-eyed at the results. He never showed them to me, of course. He put two silver dollars into the test cage—they still used hard money around those parts then—after making me mark them. He punched the solenoid button and they disappeared.
“Now that is not much of a trick,” Chuck went on. “Properly, he should have followed up by making them reappear out of the nose of a little boy who volunteers to come up on the stage. But he seemed satisfied, so I was—I was paid by the hour.
“A week later one of those cartwheels reappeared. Just one. But before that, one afternoon while I was cleaning up after he had gone home, a guinea pig showed up in the cage. It didn’t belong in the lab and I hadn’t seen it around before, so I took it over to the bio lab on my way home. They counted and weren’t short any pigs, although it’s hard to be certain with guinea pigs, so I took it home and made a pet out of it.
“After that single silver dollar came back Twitch got so worked up he quit shaving. Next time he used two guinea pigs from the bio lab. One of them looked awfully familiar to me, but I didn’t see it long because he pushed the panic button and they both disappeared.
“When one of them came back about ten days later—the one that didn’t look like mine—Twitch knew for sure that he had it. Then the resident O-in-C for the department of defense came around—a chair-type colonel who used to be a professor himself, of botany. Very military type... Twitch had no use for him. This colonel swore us both to double-dyed secrecy, over and above our ‘status’ oaths. He seemed to think that he had the greatest thing in military logistics since Caesar invented the carbon copy. His idea was that you could send divisions forward or back to a battle you had lost, or were going to lose, and save the day. The enemy would never figure out what had happened. He was crazy in hearts and spades, of course...and he didn’t get the star he was bucking for. But the ‘Critically Secret’ classification he stuck on it stayed, so far as I know, right up to the present. I’ve never seen a disclosure on it.”
“It might have some military use,” I argued, “it seems to me, if you could engineer it to take a division of soldiers at a time. No, wait a minute, I see the
hitch. You always had ’em paired. It would take two divisions, one to go forward, one to go back. One division you would lose entirely... I suppose it would be more practical to have a division at the right place at the right time in the first place.”
“You’re right, but your reasons are wrong. You don’t have to use two divisions or two guinea pigs or two anything. You simply have to match the masses. You could use a division of men and a pile of rocks that weighed as much. It’s an action-reaction situation, corollary with Newton’s Third Law.” He started drawing in the beer drippings again. “MV equals mv...the basic rocket-ship formula. The cognate time-travel formula is MT equals mt.”
“I still don’t see the hitch. Rocks are cheap.”
“Use your head, Danny. With a rocket ship you can aim the kinkin’ thing. But which direction is last week? Point to it. Just try. You haven’t the slightest idea which mass is going back and which one is going forward. There’s no way to orient the equipment.”
I shut up. It would be embarrassing to a general to expect a division of fresh shock troops and get nothing but a pile of gravel. No wonder the ex-prof never made brigadier. But Chuck was still talking:
“You treat the two masses like the plates of a condenser, bringing them up to the same temporal potential. Then you discharge them on a damping curve that is effectively vertical. Smacko!—one of them heads for the middle of next year, the other one is history. But you never know which one. But that’s not the worst of it; you can’t come back.”
“Huh? Who wants to come back?”
“Look, what use is it for research if you can’t come back? Or for commerce? Either way you jump, your money is no good and you can’t possibly get in touch with where you started. No equipment—and believe me it takes equipment and power. We took power from the Arco reactors. Expensive...that’s another drawback.”
“You could get back,” I pointed out, “with cold sleep.”
“Huh? If you went to the past. You might go the other way; you never know. If you went a short enough time back so that they had cold sleep...no farther back than the war. But what’s the point of that? You want to know something about 1980, say, you ask somebody or you look it up in old newspapers. Now if there was some way to photograph the Crucifixion...but there isn’t. Not possible. Not only couldn’t you get back, but there isn’t that much power on the globe. There’s an inverse-square law tied up in it too.”
“Nevertheless, some people would try it just for the hell of it. Didn’t anybody ever ride it?”
Chuck glanced around again. “I’ve talked too much already.”
“A little more won’t hurt.”
“I think three people tried it. I think. One of them was an instructor. I was in the lab when Twitch and this bird, Leo Vincent, came in; Twitch told me I could go home. I hung around outside. After a while Twitch came out and Vincent didn’t. So far as I know, he’s still in there. He certainly wasn’t teaching at Boulder after that.”
“How about the other two?”
“Students. They all three went in together; only Twitch came out. But one of them was in class the next day, whereas the other one was missing for a week. Figure it out yourself.”
“Weren’t you ever tempted?”
“Me? Does my head look flat? Twitch suggested that it was almost my duty, in the interests of science, to volunteer. I said no, thanks; I’d take a short beer instead...but that I would gladly throw the switch for him. He didn’t take me up on it.”
“I’d take a chance on it. I could check up on what’s worrying me...and then come back again by cold sleep. It would be worth it.”
Chuck sighed deeply. “No more beer for you, my friend; you’re drunk. You didn’t listen to me. One,”—he started making tallies on the tabletop —“you have no way of knowing that you’d go back; you might go forward instead.”
“I’d risk that. I like now a lot better than I liked then; I might like thirty years from now still better.”
“Okay, so take the Long Sleep again; it’s safer. Or just sit tight and wait for it to roll around; that’s what I’m going to do. But quit interrupting me. Two, even if you did go back, you might miss 1970 by quite a margin. So far as I know, Twitch was shooting in the dark; I don’t think he had it calibrated. But of course I was just the flunky. Three, that lab was in a stand of pine trees and it was built in 1980. Suppose you come out ten years before it was built in the middle of a western yellow pine? Ought to make quite an explosion, about like a cobalt bomb, huh? Only you wouldn’t know it.”
“But—As a matter of fact, I don’t see why you would come out anywhere near the lab. Why not to the spot in outer space corresponding to where the lab used to be—I mean where it was...or rather—”
“You don’t mean anything. You stay on the world line you were on. Don’t worry about the math; just remember what that guinea pig did. But if you go back before the lab was built, maybe you wind up in a tree. Four, how could you get back to now even with cold sleep, even if you did go the right way, arrive at the right time, and live through it?”
“Huh? I did once, why not twice?”
“Sure. But what are you going to use for money?”
I opened my mouth and closed it. That one made me feel foolish. I had had the money once; I had it no longer. Even what I had saved (not nearly enough) I could not take with me—shucks, even if I robbed a bank (an art I knew nothing about) and took a million of the best back with me, I couldn’t spend it in 1970. I’d simply wind up in jail for trying to shove funny money. They had even changed the shape, not to mention serial numbers, dates, colors, and designs. “Maybe I’d just have to save it up.”
“Good boy. And while you were saving it, you’d probably wind up here and now again without half trying...but minus your hair and your teeth.”
“Okay, okay. But let’s go back to that last point. Was there ever a big explosion on that spot? Where the lab was?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then I wouldn’t wind up in a tree—because I didn’t. Follow me?”
“I’m three jumps ahead of you. The old time paradox again, only I won’t buy it. I’ve thought about theory of time, too, maybe more than you have. You’ve got it just backward. There wasn’t any explosion and you aren’t going to wind up in a tree...because you aren’t ever going to make the jump. Do you follow me?”
“But suppose I did?”
“You won’t. Because of my fifth point. It’s the killer, so listen closely. You ain’t about to make any such jump because the whole thing is classified and you can’t. They won’t let you. So let’s forget it, Danny. It’s been a very interesting intellectual evening and the FBI will be looking for me in the morning. So let’s have one more round and Monday morning if I’m still out of jail I’ll phone the chief engineer over at Aladdin and find out the first name of this other ‘D. B. Davis’ character and who he was or is. He might even be working there and, if so, we’ll have lunch with him and talk shop. I want you to meet Springer, the chief over at Aladdin, anyway; he’s a good boy. And forget this time-travel nonsense; they’ll never get the bugs out of it. I should never have mentioned it...and if you ever say I did I’ll look you square in the eye and call you a liar. I might need my classified status again someday.”
So we had another beer. By the time I was home and had taken a shower and had washed some of the beer out of my system I knew he was right. Time travel was about as practical a solution to my difficulties as cutting your throat to cure a headache. More important, Chuck would find out what I wanted to know from Mr. Springer just over chops and a salad, no sweat, no expense, no risk. And I liked the year I was living in.
When I climbed into bed I reached out and got the week’s stack of papers. The Times came to me by tube each morning, now that I was a solid citizen. I didn’t read it very much, because whenever I got my head soaked full of some engineering problem, which was usually, the daily fripperies you find in the news merely annoyed me, either b
y boring me or, worse still, by being interesting enough to distract my mind from its proper work.
Nevertheless, I never threw out a newspaper until I had at least glanced at the headlines and checked the vital-statistics column, the latter not for births, deaths, and marriages, but simply for “withdrawals,” people coming out of cold sleep. I had a notion that someday I would see the name of someone I had known back then, and then I would go around and say hello, bid him welcome, and see if I could give him a hand. The chances were against it, of course, but I kept on doing it and it always gave me a feeling of satisfaction.
I think that subconsciously I thought of all other Sleepers as my “kinfolk,” the way anybody who once served in the same outfit is your buddy, at least to the extent of a drink.
There wasn’t much in the papers, except the ship that was still missing between here and Mars, and that was not news but a sad lack of it. Nor did I spot any old friends among the newly awakened Sleepers. So I lay back and waited for the light to go out.
ABOUT THREE IN the morning I sat up very suddenly, wide awake. The light came on and I blinked at it. I had had a very odd dream, not quite a nightmare but nearly, of having failed to notice little Ricky in the vital statistics.
I knew I hadn’t. But just the same when I looked over and saw the week’s stack of newspapers still sitting there I was greatly relieved; it had been possible that I had stuffed them down the chute before going to sleep, as I sometimes did.
I dragged them back onto the bed and started reading the vital statistics again. This time I read all categories, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, adoptions, changes of name, commitments, and withdrawals, for it had occurred to me that my eye might have caught Ricky’s name without consciously realizing it, while glancing down the column to the only subhead I was interested in—Ricky might have got married or had a baby or something.
I almost missed what must have caused the distressing dream. It was in the Times for 2 May 2001, Tuesday’s withdrawals listed in Wednesday’s paper: “Riverside Sanctuary...F. V. Heinicke.”
The Door Into Summer Page 14
