“Idiot!” Dr. Ludwig blazed. “Imbecile!” Eric had never seen him so furious.“ ‘I’m not really here’? what are you talking about? Who put such nonsense into your head?”
“The mathematical model—” Eric stammered. “Sean explained to me that—”
“Sean! That other maniac!” Dr. Ludwig clenched his fists and shook them in frustration. In a tightly controlled voice he said, “Listen to me, Eric, and listen carefully. You are on a pendulum, yes, and you do occupy every point between Time Zero and Time Ultimate. But you can still be harmed at any point in that entire sequence of nearly two hundred million years. And if you are—if you are—” He looked ready to explode. “The past is fluid! The future is yet unborn! Anything can be changed! Anything! Who knows what will befall the entire history of the world, if anything happens to you? Who knows?”
12. Sean -5×105minutes
Without warning the mild May night gave way to a glorious May morning—May of the year before. Sean was back in 2015, 347.2 days before the beginning of the experiment.
He stood blinking in the sudden sunlight. The shunts were coming much more easily now, causing little or no sense of transition as he shuttled between past and future. He was outside the laboratory. Outside the campus, in fact, half a mile or so east of it in downtown Pasadena. The first significant spatial displacement, he realized. The early shunts had moved him no more than a few inches from his Time Zero position on the shunt platform, but by now the jumps were getting big enough to carry him a fair distance.
Casually he strolled down Colorado Boulevard, heading east.
It surprised him that nobody from the lab was waiting here to meet him when he arrived. Up till now they hadn’t allowed him to be alone for a moment. At each of his previous shunts—plus five minutes, minus fifty minutes, plus five hundred minutes, minus five thousand minutes, plus fifty thousand minutes—they had clustered around him as soon as he showed up. Now here he was half a million minutes in the past and they had left him completely on his own. Why weren’t they here?
Then he realized that at this stage of the project, back in May of 2015, he and Eric hadn’t even been selected yet to be the experimental subjects. The preliminary screening interviews were still going on, all that interminable testing and questioning and checking.
So as of this moment the Project Pendulum people didn’t even know who they were going to be sending on the shunt, let alone what time of day or month their time-travelers were going to be turning up in the past. How could they? Time Zero itself had kept getting postponed again and again. The choice of April 19 at half past ten in the morning as the final-final day and hour and minute for the departure point hadn’t been nailed down until the third of March, just six weeks before the day of the experiment.
And even after they had picked it, the Project people would still have had somehow to send information back to themselves of the year before, notifying themselves that experimental subject Sean Gabrielson was due to be popping out of nowhere in downtown Pasadena at such-and-such a time of the morning on such-and-such a day in May, 2015, which would be precisely 347.2 days prior to the beginning of the great time-travel event.
Probably they could have done it by sending off a preliminary shunt carrying a robot with the schedule. Maybe they should have done it, on the theory that it was best not to let their time-traveler have to fend for himself back here. But Project Pendulum’s funds had been running pretty low in the final few weeks. Most likely there hadn’t been any slack in the budget for extras like that. So they hadn’t been able to send the word to anyone back here in 2015 that he’d be coming this way.
But he could.
Sean grinned slyly. He was tempted to saunter over to the Cal Tech campus right now and drop in at the laboratory.
“Hi,” he would say. “I’m Sean Gabrielson. You’re going to pick me next month for the shunt. Let’s all take an hour off and go out for some pizza, okay?”
He could do that, sure. But suppose they didn’t like his dropping in like that. Suppose it struck them as a cocky smartass sort of thing to do. Suppose they decided to dispense with the Gabrielson twins entirely, and pick a different pair of candidates for the shunt. What then? What would happen to him, back here in 2015? Out like a snuffed candle, that’s what. He’d never get to see the far future or the distant past, or anything else. He’d go right back to being a graduate physics student in the year 2016 and he’d have no memory of any of the shunts he’d already experienced, let alone the ones that were still to come.
He didn’t want to risk that.
But there was something he could do. It carried some paradox risk also, but he thought it was relatively safe. And useful, in a manner of speaking. And fun.
He thought back to last year, to the final few weeks before the names of the successful candidates for the shunt were announced. Six different pairs of twins had been in the running. Sean had figured all along that he and Eric had the best shot, because they wanted a physicist and a paleontologist, and he and Eric were the only ones who really fulfilled that requirement. But toward the end he had begun to think that the choice might land on one of the other sets of twins. Those shy Bengali girls, the Chakravarti sisters, maybe. They were mathematicians, but one had some sort of a background in archaeology. They were very, very bright. And, most important of all, they had the backing of their countryman, the Project Pendulum theoretician Dr. Mukherji.
Right before the choice was due to be announced, Sean had absolutely convinced himself that it was going to be the Chakravartis. He could already feel the disappointment seeping into his soul, and knew that it would embitter him for the rest of his life. A chance to travel to the ends of time, and it had slipped away from him! For days he could hardly sleep or eat. He was half crazy with tension most of the time, snapping and snarling at everybody.
Well, now that he was back here again at the time when that had been going on, he could spare himself all that anguish, couldn’t he? Tell himself not to worry, let himself know that everything was going to turn out fine?
A phone booth loomed before him at the corner of Colorado and Fair Oaks. He stepped inside and pressed his thumb to the identification plate. The telephone asked him for the number he wanted and he gave his own.
“The line is busy,” the telephone told him.
“Break in on him. This is an emergency.”
“One moment, please.”
Then his own voice said irritably, “All right, but if this is any kind of sales pitch—”
“Don’t worry, fellow. It’s a legitimate call,” Sean said.
“Who’s there?”
“You mean you don’t recognize my voice?”
A pause. “Ricky?”
“Close. Try again.”
“Look, I’ve got no time for guessing games. I happen to be in the midst of very important—”
“Sure you are. I know that. Listen, dope, you’re talking to Sean Gabrielson.”
“What?”
“Sean2, let’s say. I’m just passing through.”
“What?”
“On my way to the year 2025. And then back to 1921.”
“What? What?”
“Maybe you aren’t as bright as they say you are, buddy. If all you can do is honk like a duck.”
“Hey, I don’t have to listen to this kind of crazy—” came the angry voice from the speaker grille, and then the CONNECTION INTERRUPTED light went on.