“A pseudoscientific rationale for ghosts?”
“For ghosts, hauntings, and a few other supposedly paranormal phenomena. If calling that rationale
‘pseudoscientific’ pleases you, be my guest.” He crossed the workshop and removed the transcordion from Blair’s hands. “The point is that Joshua is already psychically geared to a specific set of these geographic memories. When we drop him back to the Pleistocene—with his active cooperation—he’ll find himself in a physical dimension congruent with that epoch as it actually occurred. Joshua’s name for what he does in his dreams—spirit-traveling—is a good name for what White Sphinx is all about, too.
Like my term dreamfaring, though, it does ignore the important aspect of bodily displacement. But there’s really no reason to—”
“We’ll be installing him in a bloody diorama of the Pleistocene! A simulacrum of East Africa two million years ago! That’s not time travel, Kaprow—that’s a contemptible fraud!”
Kaprow’s eyes seemed to bob in their almost transparent whites. “That’s what my government thought, too. To begin with.”
“Until they discovered they could sell Zarakal a worthless bill of goods for a couple of military bases.
That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?”
“You’re also receiving several hundred million dollars of direct American aid. That played a rather substantial role in President Tharaka’s decision to permit the bases, wouldn’t you say? Besides, he’d made up his mind on that point a month or two before White Sphinx was part of your working vocabulary. We’re gravy, Joshua and I. Why are you making ugly accusations?”
“Gravy or no gravy, Kaprow, it doesn’t forgive the duplicity of this diorama business.”
“Please listen to me, Dr. Blair. Joshua may be going back to a ‘diorama’ of the Pleistocene, or a
‘simulacrum,’ to use another of your words, but it’s going to be a living diorama, a perfect simulacrum.”
The Great Man’s forehead wrinkled skeptically.
“Time travel as H. G. Wells envisioned it is an utter impossibility. The future is forever inaccessible because it hasn’t happened yet. It has no pursuable resonances. The past is accessible only because of adepts like Joshua here, a person whose collective unconscious—whose psyche, if you prefer—establishes an attunement to a particular place at a particular time. This is an extremely rare talent.”
“Curse,” Joshua said.
“All right, curse. I’m afraid I agree with you. But it permits time travel of a vivid secondary sort, and it’s not to be spurned as either worthless or trivial.”
“A dream fossil is a worthless fossil, Kaprow.”
“Dr. Blair, you should count yourself lucky that one of the people afflicted with this curse—I know of only three others, although worldwide there may be a few hundred—happens to be a young man with an attunement to the time and place of your own researches. Had his spirit-traveling taken him to the Trojan War, say, I’d probably be talking to a high-ranking classicist from Asia Minor. And you could have kissed this entire project goodbye.”
“Name another,” Joshua said.
“Another what?”
“Another person afflicted with the curse.”
“Well, I’m one, I’m afraid.” Kaprow pulled a folding chair away from the desk and sat down in it with his face in profile to the other men. “The first I ever knew to exist. That’s why I’ve made a career of trying to harness the energy of my dreams.” He chuckled glumly. “Even convinced the Pentagon there was a valuable military application for my work. Believed it myself.”
“Oh? And what was that?”
“Well, Dr. Blair, the introduction of agents—call them saboteurs, if you want—into the time flow downriver from the present. To warn of the attack on Pearl Harbor, say, or to prevent the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Or, somewhat closer to home, to dispatch murderers like Idi Amin and Pol Pot even before they come to power.”
“That’s rather grandiose, isn’t it? Not to mention irresponsible. Those ‘cures’ would invariably trigger events impossible to anticipate. The results might prove worse than the original diseases.”
“You’re correct in theory, of course.”
“And in fact?”
“Time travel of that effective sort is out of the question. We can go back to a past exactly like our real past, but because it’s a projection, or a resonance, of an inaccessible reality, we’re powerless to bring about changes in our consensus present. It’s a vantage without teeth.”
“I’ll be damned if I care for it, Kaprow. We’ll be sending young Joshua here into a landscape of phantoms.”
“They’ll have teeth, though. He’ll perceive them to be every bit as real as himself.”
The paleontologist shook his massive head, shifted his feet among the cables on the concrete floor.
“In one sense, Dr. Blair, what we must accept is better than the alternative you seem to desire. It would be folly to send a contemporary human being to a crucial juncture in the evolution of our species—the old story of the time traveler shooting one of his ancestors. Joshua could conceivably disrupt the course of evolution, bequeathing to our conjectural present a world in which humanity never quite arose from its hominid forebears.”
“I’ll be careful. Word of honor.”
“But by sending him to a perfect simulacrum of the Pleistocene,” the physicist continued, “we sidestep the Grandfather Paradox without sacrificing the concept of time travel. In my opinion, Dr. Blair, what White Sphinx has accomplished is a small miracle. Not only do we have our cake, we eat it too. We can visit our ancestors with impunity.”
Joshua said, “The only danger is to the time traveler himself. He might be eaten by ghosts.”
“True enough,” Kaprow admitted.
Kaprow never talked about his own attunement. He never talked about previous experiments with the apparatus designed to translate a dreamfarer bodily into the past. He never bragged that already there had been several successful trial runs of his equipment—not at Eglin, because Kaprow had never located a dreamfarer afflicted with a Gulf Coast attunement, but in both Western Europe and the Black Hills of South Dakota. He never mentioned that the Oglala Lakota tribesman who had gone dreamfaring aboard his equipment the previous winter had returned unharmed and promptly refused any further jaunts to the nineteenth century. In fact, Kaprow never talked about either his successes or his failures, and Joshua learned about them—a few of them, at any rate—by discreetly pumping the man’s assistants.
One evening in late September, however, Kaprow invited Joshua home with him for TV dinners and drinks. The physicist had a tiny cottage on the beach, and the first thing Joshua noticed about it when he stepped through the door was that every wall was lined with books. Most of them appeared to be math or science texts, but the glass-fronted cabinet near the kitchen was devoted entirely to tomes about Germany’s Third Reich: memoirs, biographies, historical studies, photographs, psychological monographs, and even a healthy smattering of novels, although until this moment Joshua had supposed Kaprow completely indifferent to fiction. Fiction with a specific historical basis was apparently another matter.
The fried chicken in the frozen TV dinners seemed to have been basted with orange marmalade, and the mashed potatoes were like warm lumps of moist flour, but neither Joshua nor Kaprow was a dedicated gourmet, and they ate without complaining. Afterward, Kaprow broke out a bottle of Napoleon brandy that made up handsomely for the minor indignity of the dinner. They sat in the living room, in the gathering dusk, and drank. The books on the shelves grew darker and darker, and Joshua found himself sinking by twilight degrees into a state of mellow grogginess.