Hey, he said. Over here. Me. Anybody going to say hello to me?
There was a sudden stunned silence in the room. They had all been so busy running through the final insane settingup procedures that they hadnt even noticed him materialize. But they noticed him now.
The second backswing! someone cried. Here he is!
Absolutely, Sean said. The big surprise. The walking, talking paradox man. Youve never seen anything like me, right? You dont remember seeing any of us heading backward before, is that it?
Not yet, replied Dr. Ludwig. His voice sounded thick and hoarse. He looked a little dazed, as though perhaps he hadnt been fully prepared for what was happening. Even he, who had spent years thinking about these concepts while he was planning the experiment. You are the first, but of course not the last. Others will come before you, but we do not remember them yet. You are Sean, yes? Making your second shunt, the minus-fifty-minute swing. But soon there will be Eric at minus five hundred minutes, coming in yesterday evening.
Sean laughed.There will be Eric, coming in yesterday evening? I like the way you say that.
We will come to remember his visit, yes, after he has made it. We will need an entirely new grammar to speak of these things. Past tense and future tense lose their meanings when cause and effect are broken free from all mooring. You understand what I am saying?
Absolutely, Sean said.
On this shunt all of it made perfect sense to him. How different from his experience at plus five minutes, when fog was so thick in his brain! Thank God his mind was working right again. It had been scary to think he might have been rendered stupid forever by his trip through time.
It wasnt logical, of course, that this retroactive rearrangement of the past should happen in stages. With everyones memories of the hours and days just prior to Time Zero being altered again and again, each time a wider swing brought a new Eric or a Sean back to some point earlier than the last one.
Logically all such changes in the past should occur at once. From the moment the final switch was thrown, there would always have been Erics and Seans scattered all up and down the time-stream across the whole span of the experiments 190 million years.
But there wasnt anything logical about time-travel in the first place, Sean knew. It gloriously defied all the laws of cause and effect. And so evidently each swing of the pendulum was going to produce a completely new version of the past. Reality would be fluid from now on, and no one within that shifting reality would ever be aware of the changes. They could never remember the past as it used to be. The moment the change was made, the past would always have been the way it was now.
Only he and Eric, the daring young men on the flying trapeze, moving as outside observers, would be able to comprehend the havoc they were wreaking as they flashed back and forth across the fabric of time, reweaving it as they went. And even they would start to lose track of the changes as the paradoxes mounted.
He walked over to Eric and Sean1. God, they looked pale and sweaty! That was embarrassing. They were really nervous. He didnt remember having felt that nervous himself when it had been his turn to be Sean1, fifty minutes ago. He thought of himself as having waited calmly, coolly, confidently for his launching into the time-shunt.
But he realized that he was probably kidding himself. The way Sean1 looked now was the way he himself must have looked fifty minutes ago, because he had been Sean1 then. There was no hiding from the truth of that. He had been scared stiff. Fifty minutes ago he had been sitting there waiting to be converted into a cluster of tachyonsparticles that move faster than light and travel backward in time in an anti-time universe. What the singularity coupling did was turn him into a tachyonic replica of himself, throwing off showers of anti-time energy that would be exactly balanced by the time-force liberated in the opposite direction. At least that was what it was supposed to do. And he had been sitting there wondering if it would.
Well, it had. And here he was.
They were staring goggle-eyed at him. As though he had no business being there. As though he were some evil being who had come to haunt the place.
Sean smiled.
Relax, he said. Its all going to be fine. Just let yourself-go, and dont try to fight it. You wont like it at first, but all the worst stuff comes right at the beginning, and then its okay.
A little comfort, a little friendly cheer. It was the least he could do for them, he thought. For Ricky. And also for Sean, who was sitting there looking so pale and miserable. His brother and his other self. If theres anyone in the world whos closer and dearer to you than your twin brother, Sean thought, its your other self.
5. Eric -5×102minutes
The big room was oddly peaceful, here on the night before the experiment. It was about two in the morning. The overhead lights were turned off, and the only illumination came from a couple of green security lamps off to the side.
Nobody seemed to be there when Eric stepped off the shunt platform after a moment of arrival vertigo blessedly more brief than it had been the last time. He looked around. Nobody here at all? That was peculiar. They knew what time hed be due to arrive on this swing. Even if most of them would be asleep at this hour, resting up for the big day ahead of them tomorrow, somebody should have been here to debrief him when he showed up.
Then he noticed one of the younger scientistsa quasiconductor man named John Terzuniandozing in the darkness.
Eric went over to him. Touched him gently on the shoulder.
Johnny? Johnny, wake up. Its me, Eric, making the minus-five-hundred-minute shunt.
What? Who? A look of sudden panic. Oh, God, I must have slumped off.
Happens to anyone, Eric said. The other man looked hardly older than he was, maybe twenty-five, twenty-six, barely past his doctorate. His hair was thinning already. His eyes were jet black and very bloodshot. Dont worry. I wont tell. Everyone else is asleep, huh?
Terzunian nodded. The last one left an hour ago. We drew lots for who would stay till you came in.
And you lost.
A sheepish smile. Nobodys had much sleep for three or four nights in a row, now. I wouldnt mind being sacked out right this minute. But somebody had to be here to meet you.
Sure, Eric said. I understand.
He thought of Sean1 and Eric1, snoring away in the dorm section a couple of hundred yards from the lab. For them, he knew, edginess had fought a battle with exhaustion and exhaustion had won.
Well, it was a good idea for them to be sleeping. This would be the last chance theyd have to get a proper nights sleep in the year 2016 for a long time to come. Little more than eight hours from now they were going to set out on a journey that would carry them some 95 million years in each direction before they saw their own home year again. Adrift in the time-stream, swinging back and forth, swooping through the eons.
It was strange, thinking of Sean1 and Eric1 as them instead of us. But he had to. Those two guys sleeping down there in the dorm werent Sean and Eric Gabrielson at all, not really. Not to him. They were two entirely other people: Sean1 and Eric1. Yesterdays selves. They hadnt yet begun to oscillate in time. They still had no real idea of what any of this was going to be like.
To them, if they thought of him at all, he would be Eric2, an Eric of the future, tomorrows Eric, an unreal Eric. That was all right. He didnt feel unreal. He wasnt living in tomorrow. He was living in now. It was a now that kept sliding around between past and future, but all the same it was the only now he had. He was real enough to himself: the true and authentic Eric. And the true and authentic Sean, for him, was the one who was nearly seventeen hours away just now, up there at the plus-500-minute level, at the opposite end of the time-travel seesaw that they were riding.
Everything in balance. Everything symmetrical.
It all had the intense bright clarity of a very powerful dream. Except it was actually happening to them, and it would go on happening for something like ninety-five million years.
Terzunian said, Can I get you anything? A drink of water? Something to eat?
No, thanks, Eric said. So far as subjective time goes, this is still just the beginning of the experiment for me. Ive only experienced a few minutes of elapsed time since the whole thing started.
All right, Terzunian said. Wed better get down to work, then. Im supposed to ask you questions about your psychological and physical state upon arrival. Herethe cameras on. Testing. Testing. He seemed twitchy, ill at ease, afraid of messing anything up. Well, Eric thought, hes been involved with this project for years, and now here it is, actually happening.
Actually happening. Yes.
There were times when he had trouble believing that he and Sean had really agreed to do it. Of course they had known about the experiment for yearsProject Pendulum had gotten underway when they were still in high school, as soon as the development of artificially produced mini-singularities had provided the technological basis for traveling in time.
Sean had brought home a pile of theoretical papers about it. Explaining how the phase-linkage coupling of a minute black hole, identical to those that are found all over interstellar space, and its mathematical opposite, a white hole, created an incredibly powerful force that ripped right through the fabric of space-timeand how that force could be contained and controlled, like a bomb in a basket, so that it could be used as a transit tube for making two-way movements in time.
Erics first reaction on hearing that was to imagine himself-running backward along the earths geological history as if seeing a film from back to frontsoaring through the epochs, past the Pleistocene and the Pliocene into the days of the dinosaurs, the early amphibians, the trilobites, back even to the primordial days when there was nothing on the surface of the world except a bare granite shield rising above a steaming sea. Tremendous! To see it all. Not to have to reconstruct it from compressed strata and scattered fossils, but to look at everything with your own eyes while it still existed.
His second reaction was to think that the whole notion was completely crazy, a fantastic pipe dream.
No, Sean had said. It really can work. Here, let me show you the equations
And Sean had scribbled equations for him until he begged for mercy. Math on Seans level was a mysterious language to him, as remote and inaccessible as the language the ancient Egyptians spoke in their dreams. The more Sean explained of it, the less Eric understoodor cared. But Sean was convinced that the theory of time-shunting was correct, and Sean was usually right about anything he investigated with such passion. At least in the world of physics.
Thats extraordinary, Eric had said, figuring that fifty or sixty years of heavy-duty work would be necessary, at the very least, before time travel was anything more than a set of fascinating equations. And then he put it all totally out of his mind. He had other things to think about that seemed more urgent, like going to college, and his graduate work in paleontology after that.
But then came news that the first displacement machine had actually been built and tested. Eric paid some mild attention to that. Robots equipped with data-recording gear and cameras went off, so it was claimed, on safaris in time. The robots made their journey and returned to the same instant from which they had been sent off. To the watching scientists the elapsed time of the experiment was zero. So there was no way of telling that anything had happened, except for the power drain that the instrument measured and except for the paradoxes.
The paradoxes! Even though the robots hadnt seemed to go anywhere, they turned up in the laboratory hours and days and weeks before they had been sent out. That gave everyone headaches, thinking about it. The past kept flowing and shifting around, and nobodys memory was a safe place: things were always getting different from what you thought you remembered.
And the robots also turned up an equal number of hours and days and weeks after the experiment, flashing suddenly into existence in the laboratory and staying around for a few minutes, maybe an hour or two, before vanishing again.
The robots seemed to have suffered no ill effects from their mysterious journeys. They appeared still to be in fine working order. But the cameras they carried yielded nothing but fogged film. Sean explained that film emulsion was evidently unable to withstand the tachyon storms to which it was exposed during the time shunts. The data-recording gear had produced scrambled digital readouts, just static, probably for the same reason.
Oh, Eric had said. Tachyon storms, is that it?
He didnt bother asking for more elaborate explanations. Not then.
They sent living creatures through the machine, too turtles, frogs, rabbits. The usual nature organizations complained about that, but the animals all came back safely. Back from where? Who could say? No question that they had gone somewhere. The usual time-displacement paradoxes had been observed: rabbits popping out of nowhere in the laboratory three days before the start of the experiment, and doing the same thing three days after the experiment, too.
That was interesting, a remarkable achievement. If the rabbits could be sent three days backward and forward in time, they might well have gone a million years, or fifty million. Still, what could a turtle or a rabbit tell anybody about the way the Mesozoic really looks, or the world of A.D.One Million? You could send a turtle to the end of time and back, and it wouldnt give you one syllable of useful information about its trip.
So of course they called for volunteers.
Human time-travelers would have to go through the machine in order to get any significant results. Only a lunatic, Eric figured, would volunteer for a deal like that.
The word went out that they wanted to use a pair of identical twins, because there had to be an exact balance of momentum down to the last milligram. Twins, because they had the same bone structure and pretty much the same distribution of body fat, would make it that much easier to attain that balance.
Thats nice, Eric thought. And went back to his doctoral thesis on Arctic amphibian life in the Mesozoic period.
Theyre looking for twins with scientific background, someone told him.
Eric simply shrugged.
Ideally they want one twin whos a physicist and one whos a paleontologist, someone else told him. In order to maximize the value of their observations.
Right. Eric was a paleontologist. Sean was a physicist.
Thats very interesting, Eric said, still showing no interest-at all. I suppose were not the only twins who meet that requirement. Theyll find someone sooner or later wholl be willing to risk the trip.
Then one day Sean turned up and said, Dont you think it could help your research a little if you got a look at some living Mesozoic critters, Ricky?
And now here he was five hundred minutes in his own past, locked into an unstoppable series of ever-widening swings in time, back and forth, back and forth, minutes and hours and months and years and centuries and eons. Like a dream, a very strange and intense dream, a dream brighter and sharper than any reality he had ever experienced.
Go ahead, Terzunian said. This is the minus-five hundred minute level, John Terzunian speaking. Eric Gabrielson has just arrived right on schedule: the third backswing. He pointed at Eric to give him his cue. Okay. Make your report.
Theres not a lot to tell. Easy arrival, none of the queasiness I felt when I made the minus-five-minute shunt. Just a fast flicker of discomfort, then everything normal. Some minor spatial displacement: I came in a couple of feet to the left of my departure point. No fatigue so far. Maybe some mild uneasinessno, uneasiness is too strong a word, a little edginess, maybe
Terzunian was staring at him. There was a peculiar expression on his face, what seemed to be a mixture of fascination and envy and what might have been something like pity.
Well, look, Eric said, there really isnt anything to report yet. Give me another few shunts and Ill have plenty to say.Plenty.
But who will I say it to, he wondered? When Im nine and a half years in the past? Or 950,000 years in the future?
6. Sean + 5×102minutes
This time it felt as if some giant had scooped him up, popped him into a slingshot and whirled him around, and tossed him with all his might. When he landed, the sides of the laboratory were circling around him like the rim of a big centrifuge and the floor was rocking wildly from side to side. The place might just as well have been a carnival funhouse. Sean flung himself down flat, hanging on for all he was worth.
But the effect lasted only a moment or two. The wild funhouse gyrations slowed down and then they stopped altogether. He patted the floor to make certain it had finished moving. Apparently it had. He got carefully to his feet, steadying himself with his outstretched arms. He took two or three cautious steps. Everything was holding still, now. Fine. Fine.
It takes a little getting used to, he said to nobody in particular.
He looked around. There were new changes in the laboratory. He was five hundred minutes in the future: eigh thours and twenty minutes since the start of the experiment. Night had fallen. The fluorescent lights seemed harsher and brighter. The big room was weirdly quiet, almost ominous.
Tell us what you experienced, Dr. Ludwig said.
Dr. Ludwig and Dr. White were the only people in the room. The technicians must have been sent home. The shunt platform was strangely forlorn and abandoned with no one around it. The two metal seats that flanked the displacement cone might have been nothing more than a couple of classroom chairs. The cone itself seemed trivial, a mere chunk of inactive machinery.
Staring at it, Sean had trouble believing that under that glossy lump of shielding lurked a symmetrical pair of laboratory-generated collapsed stars: a miniature black hole and its mirror image, a so-called white hole. Together they made up a pair of perfectly balanced singularitieszones of strangeness where nothing behaved according to the rules of the ordinary universeheld in an unbreakable coupling. Infinite energy forever circled in a loop between the interlocked event horizons of those singularities. Energy that had opened the time gate through which Sean and Eric had been shunted to begin their immense voyage through time and antitime.
Dr. Ludwigs eyes looked bleary and his plump cheeks were dark with stubble. It was the look of a man who has been in the office too long. When Sean had made his last trip through here at plus five minuteshardly any time at all ago for Sean, eight hours and twenty minutes for them Dr. Ludwig had been pink and freshly shaven.
The first time, Sean said, I thought I was losing my mind. The first forward swing, the plus-five-minutes one. Let me tell you, it was a truly hideous experience.
The forward swings are worse than the backward ones? Dr. White asked.
So it seems. All that disorientation and mental fog, the sheer stupidity that I felt. The first backward swing, the minus-fifty-minutes one, was a little jarring, but nothing like that. And the disturbance only lasted for a moment.
And this time? The second forward swing?
Dizziness, really serious dizziness, everything whirling like mad. But not as strong as the first time and it didnt last nearly as long.
Yet it was stronger than what you felt on the one backswing youve made so far.
Sean nodded. Its as though theres some real effort in making the forward swings, something that demands a lot from you in breaking free of the time fabric. Whereas when you go the other way you slide along the track pretty easily, and theres just the slightest little shimmy of disturbance.
Perhaps so, Dr. Ludwig said. But we have reason to think that the shunt effects in both directions will diminish the farther you get from Time Zero.
Sean grinned. Theyd better. Were not going to be landing in this nice safe lab many more times, are we? The pendulum swings were going to be getting wider and wider. Sudden visions blazed in his mind: the dark steamy past, the shimmering unimaginable future. Itll be nice not to get an attack of the dizzies every time we arrive, he said. In some of the places where were going to turn up we may need to hit the ground running.
7. Eric + 5×103minutes
If nobody minds very much, Eric said, Id like to have a quick look at todays newspaper before I shuffle along toward last month.
The elapsed-time counter in front of him read 83.33 hours. Which was just short of three and a half days since Time Zero. And so this ought to be Friday night, the twenty-second of April.
He saw them exchanging glances. Was it okay to give him a paper? They werent sure. Someone on the psych staff went off to ask Dr. Ludwig, and apparently the answer was yes, because he came back with a newspaper in his hands.
It was a fresh printout. It had that brand-new smell that papers have when they first come from the wall slot. Eric stared at the date.
Friday, April 22, 2016.
So it really was true. He was actually traveling in time.
Unless this was all some crazy hoaxsome kind of psychological experiment, maybe? And they had given him a paper with a phony date, so that hed be fooled into believing
Thats mighty paranoid thinking, Ricky-boy,he told himself.All this is real. Youd better believe it.
He glanced quickly over the front-page stories. Tenth anniversary of lunar settlement celebrated here and on the moon. The Presidents visit to Antarctica. An earthquake in Turkey, 6.3 on the Richter scale, exactly as predicted last month. A big feature at the bottom of the page about the Robot Pride Day parade in Detroit, fifty thousand mechanical workers taking part.
He didnt see any story about the time-travel experiment now underway at Cal Tech.
But it would have surprised him if he had. The whole project was classified data, partly because the government wanted it that way and partly because a lot of people were scared stiff of the whole idea of time travel. The response to the earliest announcements of the project had been unexpectedly heated. Certain historians and philosophers had argued that there might be irreparable damage to contemporary life if the past were changed in any way by time travelers. One small alterationthe plucking of a flower, the squashing of a bugmight wipe out whole empires, for all anyone knew. Then too some religious leaders were troubled by the possibility that visitors to the past might discover that scriptural history was inaccurate in some way. And there were always those people who feared any new development in science, especially one as startling and magical as this. So it had been decided on the highest levels not to release any details of Project Pendulum until there had been a chance to study the effects of the first few shunts.
Turning to the sports pages, Eric saw that the Dodgers had just dropped their third straight game in Osaka after losing two out of three in Honolulu. The new baseball season wasnt starting off very promisingly. Things were doing a little better for the local basketball team: the Lakers had won their playoff series against Buenos Aires and were going on now to play Nairobi for the championship.
The weather for the Pasadena area was going to be fair and warm. It had rained in San Francisco yesterday but the storm wasnt expected to reach Southern California. The stock market had had a good day, the Dow Jones averages rising 112 points to 7786. Eric felt curiously superstitious about looking at the obituary page and went past it quickly, averting his eyes.
Here, he said, handing the paper back. Thanks.
How does it feel?
Eric grinned. I always like to see Fridays newspaper on Tuesday, he said. You get a good jump on things that way.
8. Sean -5×103minutes
Four of them were waiting for him on the next swing: Dr. White and Dr. Thomas representing the psychological side of the experiment, Dr. Mukherji and Dr. Camminella representing the theoretical mathematicians.
This was his fourth shunt. It was beginning to mount up now. The swings were calibrated in logarithmically increasing intervals, each one ten times wider than the one before. So he had gone five minutes into the future, then fifty minutes into the past, five hundred minutes into the future, five thousand minutes into the past
Five thousand minutes. Five times 103minutes. Five thousand minutes was 83 hours and 20 minutes, which was 3.46 days. Time Zero for the experiment, the point from which all the shunting began, was Tuesday, the nineteenth of April, 2016, at half past ten in the morning. And here he was, stepping down from the shunt platform three and a half days before that.
The reception committee seemed to be having a little trouble coming to terms with that. They were all trying hard to look cool and collected. Sean could see them working at it.
But they didnt even come close to being able to hide their amazement. Their eyes were wide, their faces were flushed, their tongues kept licking back and forth over dry lips. It was the look of people who knew that they were experiencing something miraculous.
Nice of you all to be here to greet me, he said cheerfully. Im Sean, in case you werent quite certain. Its last Friday night, isnt it?
Friday, yes, Dr. White said. Her voice was thick and husky, choked with emotion. The fifteenth of April.
At eleven-ten P.M.,said Sean. On the button.
On the button, Dr. White said.
Why did they seem so stunned? After all, this was his fourth shunt, two forward and now two back. They ought to be getting used to it by now.
Then he scowled at his own idiocy. He was getting used to it. But it was all new to these people. They were living three and a half days ago, back there before the start of the experiment. This was the first time they were seeing a shunter.
Maybe they had never truly believed the experiment would work. Or maybe they accepted it on a theoretical level but hadnt properly prepared themselves for the real thingfor having him come dropping right out of next Tuesday like this. Despite all the years they had put in, working toward this moment, thinking about what it was going to be like to make time travel an actuality, his arrival must be an overpowering, almost shattering event for them.
Dr. Thomas said, We have a few tests that wed like you to take.
Sean gave him a sour look. Tests?
Dr. Thomas was the teams head psychologist, and he was always saying We have a few tests wed like you to take. Sean had never cared much for the trim, smug little psychologist, who sometimes seemed more like a computerized simulation of a human being than an actual flesh-and-blood person.
In the planning stages of the project he had subjected Sean and Eric to multiphasic electronic devices that buzzed and flashed and screeched maddeningly as they probed the twins minds. The ordeal was necessary, they were told, to find out whether they were stable enough to withstand the stress of time-shunting. Apparently they were.
All right. What more did Thomas need to know now? The biggest test of all was underway this very minute: the experiment itself. Wasnt that enough for him? Sean hadnt been expecting another bout with those instruments of torture.
Over here, please, Dr. Thomas said. Can you walk unaided?
Of course I can walk unaided. You think Ive become brain-damaged?
Please. There isnt much time.