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 wasn’t logical, of course, that this retroactive rearrangement of the past should happen in stages. With everyone’s 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 experiment’s 190 million years.
But there wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 tachyons—particles 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. “It’s all going to be fine. Just let yourself-go, and don’t try to fight it. You won’t like it at first, but all the worst stuff comes right at the beginning, and then it’s 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 there’s anyone in the world who’s closer and dearer to you than your twin brother, Sean thought, it’s 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 he’d 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 scientists—a quasiconductor man named John Terzunian—dozing in the darkness.
Eric went over to him. Touched him gently on the shoulder.
“Johnny? Johnny, wake up. It’s 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. “Don’t worry. I won’t 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. “Nobody’s had much sleep for three or four nights in a row, now. I wouldn’t 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 they’d have to get a proper night’s 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 weren’t Sean and Eric Gabrielson at all, not really. Not to him. They were two entirely other people: Sean1 and Eric1. Yesterday’s selves. They hadn’t 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, tomorrow’s Eric, an unreal Eric. That was all right. He didn’t feel unreal. He wasn’t 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. I’ve only experienced a few minutes of elapsed time since the whole thing started.”