“Who was Murphy?” she asked.
“Funny thing,” I said, “but I’ve heard at least ten different stories about him. The inventor of the parachute but not the first successful parachute. The guy who invented a safety hatch for submarines, that was supposed to make it impossible to dive with a hatch open, but actually made all the hatches open at the bottom of the dive. A man who ran a mail-drop blackmail operation and was caught in the Tsunami of 2002, which kept him from getting to the post office but allowed the post office to stay open and send the mail. The navigator on the Titanic. All sorts of stories about the guy, actually. I always figured most of them were folklore, but maybe in all of history there was just one Murphy, and he has multiple pasts in which he always ends up coining his law, the same way that the multiple American pasts always seem to have the ’27 Yankees and the Wright brothers.”
“And you’re suggesting—”
“That maybe perverse anticausality—just call it perversity— is just a physical factor in the universe, like entropy or gravity. Maybe it normally occurs at such a small level that people who encounter it don’t think enough of it to care very much; or they notice it, like Murphy, but they don’t try to do anything about it systematically. This implies that either the background level of perversity is increasing—or it might be caused by Iphwin himself. Maybe he’s got the first economic unit that’s both big enough and self-aware enough to detect perversity, so that he sees it happening, where none of the markets did.”
“How would we test that?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I was just seeing if there was any reason to question an assumption that we were making, that there was a real enemy somewhere doing something, and not just the system itself generating the events. But though it could be the system, it could just as easily be a real enemy. And having been beaten the hell out of by Billie Beard, I find it hard to think of her as just a system artifact, or purely an expression of the law of perversity.” I looked at my watch. “Probably about time to get ourselves up to the office. I guess we should think about what sort of experiment would allow us to distinguish between a physical law and a physical enemy—but that would depend on knowing what an enemy could do, and until three days ago I wouldn’t have believed that anybody could tamper with causality.”
When we got to the office, about five minutes early, the only instruction was to continue experiments by whatever means we wished; there was also a budget that told us that we had a ridiculous amount of money to play around with.
“What say we go do research in Fiji for a year?” Helen said, grinning at me.
“I’m worried about getting shot,” I said, “so how about we beat the bad guys and then honeymoon in Fiji?”
“Oh, all right,” she said. “Has anyone ever told you you’re excessively responsible?”
“Nearly everyone. Let’s see. One thing we could try to develop is a map of all these alternate pasts we’re finding—they seem to occur in families, like the way that Terri is from a world that includes the Reichs and Empires, like I am, or that Kelly and you both share Diego Garcia, with all of our personal histories tangled up into something you can’t unscramble when we tried to fit them together, so we seem to all be from different worlds, but not from evenly distributed different worlds—there wouldn’t be that many similarities in such a small group if the distribution were even across the infinite possibilities. It suggests that there’s some huge diversity of pasts out there, but it’s grouped into a much smaller number of ‘supergroups’ or ‘history families’ or whatever you want to call them.”
“Have you thought of an experiment?”
“Let’s try this one. We’ll send a small payment to anyone who answers a questionnaire, identifying as many things as they can and labeling the rest ‘never heard of it.’ Sort of like what the shrinks did with us, you know. And we’ll make it sort of a chain letter—there’s another payment for anyone who modifies the quiz according to directions, and then sends it on to another person. The modification will be adding a couple of things to be identified to the list—that way we’re not just restricted to what we know about, so that if there’s some Supreme Court case called Hickenlooper versus Iowa or something, that’s important in histories that neither of us has, it stands a good chance of being added to the list. We could pay the first few thousand respondents and cut it off after three hours; the net’s a big place and that would give us a starting map, to see whether addresses correspond to histories, for example.”
That took us the better part of the morning, devising a questionnaire, a payment system that couldn’t be cheated too easily, and a system for modifying the questionnaire that still would not let them cheat on the payment system. It was ten-thirty before we managed to fire it off; we had agreed we wouldn’t check until everything had come in, which wouldn’t be till one-thirty, so we spent two hours reviewing all the mystery cases: shipments that arrived before orders or were transformed into other objects by the time they arrived, nonexistent branches of the company that left frantic messages—and then, just as often, called in to thank ConTech’s central office for the help. Some ships and planes had vanished; one ship had been found floating without a crew, a hundred miles from its exact duplicate, which was also crewless. A few days later the whole crew turned up in jail, four thousand miles away, having been there since before the voyage started.
“There’s definitely something peculiar about time in all of these,” Helen offered, after an hour. “Doesn’t it look as if many of them are cases of time flowing backward or going into a loop?”
I nodded. “From the results we can’t tell if time is looping, or if it’s just caused by there being a multiple stream of pasts. Maybe the shipment that arrives before the order just has a past where the order was dated earlier. Maybe the two ships are both from pasts where the ship just vanished.”
“But if the ship vanished in the past, how can it be here today?”
I swallowed hard, because I had thought of something that might upset Helen. “Helen, if there are multiple pasts, and if there are going to continue to be multiple pasts—and we haven’t seen anything putting a stop to them—then there have to be multiple presents, because we’re the past of the future. And since the future is the present of the future—”
“God, that makes my head hurt, but I see what you mean. We can’t assume we’re the only present...” She stared at me. “A few months ago you were very, very drunk and you told me about something called the Many Worlds Interpretation. What was that?”
I shrugged. “I hadn’t thought of it, but it’s another hypothesis we could add. Down at the quantum level—we’re talking subatomic particles here, really small stuff, nothing you can observe in everyday life—there’s a little problem called the uncertainty principle.”
“I’ve heard of that. Doesn’t it mean that the observer creates reality or something like that?”
“That’s what it means in the humanities, where people just pin new labels on ideas they inherited from the Greeks. But what the uncertainty principle means in physics is a lot stranger and much more rigorously demonstrated. Suppose you had a car whose speedometer could only register five speeds—maybe zero, two miles per hour, ten miles per hour, twenty-six, and a hundred and ten. It would always register one of them, and the closer your actual speed was to one of those speeds, the more likely it would be to register that speed.”