STRETCH OF TIME

 

Making a successful time machine doesn't necessarily mean you can travel through time.

 

RUTH BERMAN

 

"But I can do it." Sylva Fontis ran her left hand through the short curls of her hair as if trying to wring better words out. As always when excited, she lost command of her Standard and began to stammer in Italian. She fell silent, let the hand drop, shrugged and stood still, staring en­viously across the desk at Jason Kent's calm, distinguished face under its thatch of calm, distinguished gray hair. He even looked like a head-of-the-department at Luna University, which she thought an un­fair additional gift of the gods.

"Syl, are you feeling all right?"

"No. My stomach is tied up in square knots." She grinned, sud­denly impish. "But what you mean is: am I sane?"

Kent absently drew the end ball back from his desk-sized model of the conservation of energy. He let the ball drop. It floated leisurely down and struck the next ball. He watched as the little spheres clicked each other forward and back again. "Yes," he said, "I suppose that is what I mean." He looked up at the round, serious face. "Oh, for God's sake, sit down. You look sane, I'll say that for you."

"Thanks." Fontis perched herself on the chair at the side of the desk and wound her feet around the chair legs. She had still not lost the newcomer's subconscious fear of floating away in the light gravity, af­ter two and a half years at Lun-U. "I can't prove it," she said, "but I can show you."

"What? You mean you've actually built a. . . a. . ."

"Dimensional Revolver, I call it," she said helpfully.

Kent snorted. "Sounds more like some kind of pistol than a time ma­chine, if you ask me. And you ac­tually tried it out?"

"Yes."

Kent waited, but Fontis did not go on. "Well?" he said. "So what did you do, bring back the results of the Centauri Probe? Kill your grand­mother?"

"No. I didn't travel in time at all, if you get right down to it."

"Syl—" Kent said, exasperated, then broke off and waited some more.

"I was afraid to move, if you fol­low me." Fontis wriggled on the chair seat and retwined her feet into another improbable configuration. "I could see me in cross-section stretch­ing out in an endless line straight back to the past horizon: a long, olive-green pipe with a ridge of olive-green where my arm was—" She pulled away from the memory and said lightly, "Why do all the pressure suits have to be such drab colors?"

"Pressure suits?" said Kent. The conversation seemed to be getting out of hand.

"Well, I wasn't sure rotated air would be breathable. It seemed like an obvious precaution."

"Oh. All right."

"Although, at that," she said thoughtfully, "I shouldn't talk about, looking at the past horizon. There wasn't any horizon. It was a true Euclidean plane. The lines just stretched back until optics took over and made them seem to come to a point. It's a pity we're so shut in here—the way the walls of the lab closed in it was like looking down a long tunnel. It would be interesting to see a more open landscape ...

"Then I started wondering what the Revolver itself looked like in cross-section extended back in time that way. It'd turned me to the side of the hand that wasn't holding it, you see. That is, I had it with me, in my left hand, but the cross-section of it into the past must have been there on the other side of the cross-section of me. I could see it would take too long to get around me pastward, and futureward I couldn't see any­thing; it was like trying to see through one-way glass. I was afraid to try walking into it." She hunched her shoulders as if trying not to shiver at the idea. "So I twisted back into normal space again. And I came to you. If you'd be willing to try it yourself—"

"No, thanks."

"But—"

Kent rubbed his palm on the fake-wood pattern of the plastic desk and imagined a rectangular arch of tan-colored plastic extending . . . five years? ten? He could not remember when the budget had last allowed for new desks. "No," he repeated. "For example: how do you know that your invention isn't actually a new kind of hallucinogen rather than a time machine?"

"Oh, but—" Fontis protested, and stopped again. She considered, then unwound her feet to free her body for a massive shrug. "Possible, but not probable, sir."

"Hm-m-m. . . I see," said Kent. "But maybe we can work out a test for you to run to give us something objective. Give me some more in­formation. I gather your . . . Dimensional Revolver is not an eleva­tor with centuries instead of floors?"

"No, nothing so pretty." Fontis sat forward, becoming suddenly both eager and relaxed as she described her pet. "We live in four dimensions and see three. The Revolver turns a subject so that one of the dimensions he sees is the temporal. Say you see up and down, right and left. In nor­mal space, the third dimension you see is forward and backward, but now . . . then . . . in that case ... you see future and past instead."

"Except you didn't actually see the future."

"No."

"A shame." Kent sighed and looked put-upon. "Why couldn't you be interested in something normal, like a faster-than-light drive for the starships?"

"Not possible," she said, and one side of her face twisted up as she rec­ognized the irony of the disclaimer. "But I admit it's an interesting topic. We're probably never going to have practical star travel without FTL ships."

"Not necessarily." Kent enjoyed quibbling, especially on his pet sub­ject. "With a ship at a reasonably high sub-light speed, as soon as the engineers manage to build one, you could reduce a twenty-year trip to a few days of the travelers' time by the clock paradox, and then reduce the journey to a few days of Earth's time by going back in time as far as needed. How long is a year anyway, spatially speaking?"

"I don't know. I told you I don't have the theory worked out," Fontis said apologetically.

The end-of-period bell whined. They both checked their watches, surprised at how much time had passed.

"You have a class now?" Kent asked.

"Yes. Bonehead physics." She wrinkled her nose. "I get to tell a bunch of drowsy sophomores all about the Theory of Relativity and the constancy of the speed of light and its importance in so many equa­tions and so on, and how interesting that is."

Kent shook his head. "Phony en­thusiasm will turn them off faster than open dullness."

Fontis smiled sheepishly. "I'm not that bad in class. I get interested in it once I get going."

"Suppose I burned a piece of pa­per, or something like that," Kent said. "Could you go into the past and bring it back?"

"I don't know if it's possible to en­ter the past that way," she said hesitantly. "The paradoxes, you know what I mean?"

He nodded.

"I'd rather stick to simple observa­tions, for the time being."

"All right," said Kent, leaning back in his chair. "Come in again af­ter class. I'll have a test ready for you." He glanced sharply at Fontis to see what her reaction would be.

She jumped up, her round face looking as exalted as was possible to nonascetic features. "Thank you, sir," she said. She stood quietly smil­ing for a moment, then scrabbled her notebooks together and went loping out the door.

Kent sat fidgeting for a few mo­ments, then got up and began pacing around the little office. At the end of the third circuit he told himself, "Oh, for God's sake; you sit down." He eyed the various objects on his desk, then dumped the last remaining chocolate bar out of a candy dish and dropped the bar into a desk drawer. He unhooked one of the little brass balls from the energy model and flipped it into the empty dish. He shoved the dish to the far corner of the desk and looked at it quizzically for a few moments. Then he shrugged his shoulder a little and pulled out the budget papers he had been working on before Fontis came in. He worked doggedly for the next hour, allowing himself a break at every quarter hour to be spent daydreaming about Next Year When It's Someone Else's Turn To Be Chairman.

The daydream, however, failed to relax him as it should have. Thoughts of his having time to work on his own research again led him to thoughts of research in general and straight back to Sylva Fontis. She was building up material for quite a dissertation—although he was still not convinced that it was a dis­sertation in physics. He hoped it wasn't dangerous. Quite apart from the presumed Loss to Science (he lingered on the phrase, visualizing Science as a Little Bo Peep trying to hook in little lambs of scientists), he had a terror of the job which inevita­bly followed any casualty, of inform­ing family and friends and (prob­ably) lover.

But in another year his turn would be up, and someone else in the de­partment would have to take on the chairmanship, and he could get back to his own work. After all, research was the primary purpose of his job, and . . .

Each time he caught himself re­peating the cycle, he pulled the bud­get back and tried fiercely to concen­trate on it. He wondered how Sylva Fontis was doing at explaining the constant value of the speed of light, and scolded himself again for getting nothing done. But when he stopped for the third time, he was startled to realize that he had almost completed a reasonable first draft of a priority­ for-grants list.

When the class period ended, Kent took the little brass ball out of the candy dish and hooked it back on the model. Then he sat quietly, stewing over what Fontis had told him and trying to isolate the wrong­ness he felt in her account. He did not stop until an olive-green ar­mored knight came clomping lightly into the office.

He blinked, and the vision re­solved itself into Sylva Fontis in her pressure suit carrying a shield-shaped network of crystal threads on her left arm. The threads were woven together in a complex pattern that caught even the carefully neu­tral, diffuse Base lighting and flashed it back in fires of blue and green.

"That it?" he said, nodding at the crystal web.

"Yes. Have you thought of a test?" Her voice lost all overtones, coming through the suit's speaker, and sounded cold and flat. Kent could only guess at the intensity that should have been in the words.

"Yes," he said. "I had something in here." He tapped the dish. "Tell me what it was."

"Uh . . . I don't know if I'll recog­nize it in cross-section."

"Doesn't matter. You'll be able to describe the color, size, shape." Kent again tried to visualize a cross-sec­tion of the universe stretching straight back into the past.

"Yes, sir."

The web had only one control, a switch on the inside, dimly visible to him through the translucent crystals. She turned it to the side, closing it, and the wrongness came clear at last in Kent's mind. It should have turned.

A medusa's knot of threads joined together in the center of the web. "No!" Kent shouted.

At the center of the web, reflected lights gathered, and shone intoler­ably bright.

Kent blinked, and the blaze was gone, leaving a large dark spot in the center of his vision. He pushed him­self out of his chair. Perhaps he 'could still get over the desk in time to stop her.

The joints of the pressure suit slowly bent and sagged, held partly upright by the stiffness of the suit it­self.

"Too late," Kent thought. But he jumped the desk anyway and was able to catch the body before it fin­ished falling, and he settled it into a chair. He unsealed the helmet and felt for the pulse at the ear.

She was alive.

Kent leaned back on the desk, feeling suddenly too old to support himself even in the weak gravity. It occurred to him that, indeed, she had to be alive—otherwise, she would not have made it back to the "present" and would, he supposed, have sim­ply vanished away. He shivered and felt profoundly grateful that he was not going to have to announce any such unprecedented casualty.

He began methodically unsealing the other seams, releasing the stench left behind by recycled sweat and urine. He gagged and had to stop to turn up the room's air-conditioner.

Fontis opened bloodshot eyes and began feebly trying to undo the rest of the suit.

"Sit still," ordered Kent. He slipped the web off her arm, then went around to the front of his desk and rummaged through until he found the chocolate bar, which he unwrapped and brought to her. "Can you manage that?"

She bit off a third of it by way of answer, and crunched it down. "God, I'm hungry!" she said. She finished off the chocolate, then put up a hand to feel the loose flesh at her throat. "I wanted to lose a few pounds, but this is ridiculous." A little chocolate had melted on her palm. She licked it off. "Mr. Kent, I'm sorry, I couldn't find anything in there."

"Later, Syl. You need proper food and rest." He buzzed the Base cafe­teria and arranged to have a tray brought to Fontis' quarters. "Feel up to walking—just a little more?"

She nodded, and stood up, wrig­gling to let the pressure suit fall off. Leaning on Kent's arm, she stepped on each of the boots in turn, pulling her feet out of them. They left the suit sprawled on the floor, and Kent half led, half carried her out.

The food was there ahead of them, and Fontis began gulping it down, beginning with the dessert. Once the ice cream was down, she forced her­self to chew and swallow slowly, for fear of making herself sick.

"How many days were you in there, anyway?" Kent asked.

She darted a look up at him and stopped eating long enough to give a sigh halfway between a sob and a chortle. "I spent two days . . . I mean, it felt like two days . . . I mean—" She broke off and rumi­nated. "If I can call it days."

"Metadays," Kent suggested.

"All right, metadays. I spent two of them slogging along before I real­ized what all those damn straight lines into the past meant and turned back."

Kent nodded. "I should have real­ized it when you said you'd seen yourself the other time in straight lines. You should have seen a curve or an angle from when you'd walked into the room, even if you hadn't moved at all since. So, time is so long that the immediate past is as far back as you can see before the laws of perspective take over and make the lines converge. I'm afraid your time machine isn't very practical," he added, with careful lightness. "Practical? That's for engineers," she said, trying to match his tone. Kent pursed up one side of his mouth and considered the matter. "No," he said, "I'm afraid what it'd take would be the FTL drive."

"That's not my field."

"I know," said Kent. "It's mine."

She looked up at him and in­spected his face. The even features did not let the emotion show which she heard in his voice, but she was almost sure he had sounded en­vious—of her, as unlikely as that seemed. "Well," she said, "I don't see why you should have realized, when I was the one who had it star­ing me in the eyes. And I was telling my sophomores all about it just two days ago. I told them that the value of the speed of light is a constant that turns up all over the place. So an hour is . . ." She rubbed her hand across her forehead. "I'm too tired to multiply," she said. "But one second is 186,000 miles long. And there I was trying to cover several minutes."

She swallowed the last of her al­gae sandwich and lay down, already half asleep.

Kent dimmed the light and, pick­ing up the empty tray, left the room. As he walked down the corridor, his thoughts took up again the pleasant daydream of Next Year When It's Someone Else's Turn To Be Chair­man. It would feel good to get back to research again, and leave adminis­trative chores to his successor.