“All right,” Terzunian said. “We’d better get down to work, then. I’m supposed to ask you questions about your psychological and physical state upon arrival. Here—the camera’s on. Testing. Testing.” He seemed twitchy, ill at ease, afraid of messing anything up. Well, Eric thought, he’s 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 years—Project 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-time—and 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.
Eric’s first reaction on hearing that was to imagine himself-running backward along the earth’s geological history as if seeing a film from back to front—soaring 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 Sean’s 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 understood—or 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.
That’s 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 hadn’t 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 nobody’s 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 didn’t 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 wouldn’t 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.
That’s nice, Eric thought. And went back to his doctoral thesis on Arctic amphibian life in the Mesozoic period.
They’re looking for twins with scientific background, someone told him.
Eric simply shrugged.
Ideally they want one twin who’s a physicist and one who’s a paleontologist, someone else told him. In order to maximize the value of their observations.
Right. Eric was a paleontologist. Sean was a physicist.
That’s very interesting, Eric said, still showing no interest-at all. I suppose we’re not the only twins who meet that requirement. They’ll find someone sooner or later who’ll be willing to risk the trip.
Then one day Sean turned up and said, “Don’t 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.”
“There’s 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 uneasiness—no, 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.