“Well, look,” Eric said, “there really isn’t anything to report yet. Give me another few shunts and I’ll have plenty to say.Plenty.”
But who will I say it to, he wondered? When I’m 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 singularities—zones of strangeness where nothing behaved according to the rules of the ordinary universe—held 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. Ludwig’s 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 minutes—hardly 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 didn’t last nearly as long.”
“Yet it was stronger than what you felt on the one backswing you’ve made so far.”
Sean nodded. “It’s as though there’s 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 there’s 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. “They’d better. We’re 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. “It’ll be nice not to get an attack of the dizzies every time we arrive,” he said. “In some of the places where we’re going to turn up we may need to hit the ground running.”
7. Eric + 5×103minutes
If nobody minds very much,” Eric said, “I’d like to have a quick look at today’s 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 weren’t 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 hoax—some kind of psychological experiment, maybe? And they had given him a paper with a phony date, so that he’d be fooled into believing—
That’s mighty paranoid thinking, Ricky-boy,he told himself.All this is real. You’d better believe it.
He glanced quickly over the front-page stories. Tenth anniversary of lunar settlement celebrated here and on the moon. The President’s 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 didn’t 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 alteration—the plucking of a flower, the squashing of a bug—might 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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.