GRIDLOCK

Where would you go if you had invented a time machine, but could not steer it?

John Thurman Smith stood on the balcony and gazed into the night. Manhattan was ablaze with lights as people went about their business in the city’s multitude of kilometer-tall residence towers. He faced outward, letting the cold wind ruffle his hair while it cleared his head. The drink he had brought with him sat untouched on the stainless steel guardrail that encircled the balcony.

The party inside had been going on for the better part of two days, long enough that most of the original guests had long since departed. If anything, it had grown larger as the first group had been replaced by a second (and in some cases, a third) wave of arrivals. Smith would have liked to go home, as well. He couldn’t. Not only was the party taking place in his apartment, he was the guest of honor.

He listened as the sound of laughter and applause burst forth from his darkened living room. They must be showing the holograms he had taken aboard Kon Tiki III again. The autocamera had caught him just as a giant wave had washed him overboard during a storm. The hologram showed him frozen in time up to his neck in froth. His sour expression epitomized all the injustice heaped on mere mortals by an uncaring universe. It was very funny!

The sounds from the party got louder, then quieted again. Someone had exited through the door leading from the living room to the balcony. He turned to see a woman silhouetted in the flickering light. She was blonde, beautiful, and of indeterminate age. She seemed to glide to where he supported himself with his elbows resting on the railing.

“Hello,” she said in a husky contralto. “I wondered where the great adventurer had gone.”

He smiled his professional greeting smile. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

She held out her hand, betraying the fact that she was older than she looked. Ever since an outbreak of pseudo-leprosy fifteen years earlier, bowing had been much in vogue. “Irina Scorvini, Mr. Smith. I arrived an hour ago. If you came out here for solitude, I’ll go away and leave you alone.”

“Nonsense. It was getting stuffy inside. I stepped out for a breath of fresh air.”

She gazed out across the city in the same direction he had been looking. “The lights are very beautiful tonight, aren’t they?”

“That they are.”

After another moment, she seemed to come to some internal decision. She said, “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, Mr. Smith?”

“I’m John to my friends. What’s the question?”

“I was watching the pictures inside. Why do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Risk your life the way you do? This Kon Tiki expedition was hardly your first escapade. You climbed Mount Everest two years ago. If I remember correctly, you celebrated the Armstrong Tercentennial by hiking across the Sea of Tranquility in an antique spacesuit. Are you trying to commit suicide?”

He smiled. “Hardly. The fax services exaggerate the danger. True, I followed Sir Edmund Hilary’s original route up Everest, but I had the latest in climbing gear, a modern oxygen breather, and full communications with the Everest Summit Hotel. As for my vaunted stroll across Mare Tranquillitatis, the suit may have been a replica of an Apollo moonsuit, but my environmental control system was the best money could buy.”

“And your recent voyage aboard a log raft?”

He shrugged. “I could have summoned up rescue within twenty minutes if I’d gotten into trouble.”

“But you were nearly lost at sea!”

“I had a safety line. I was also wearing a locator beacon.”

“But isn’t it dangerous to do all of these things alone?”

He laughed. “Believe me, if I could have found someone to go with me, I would have. I’m afraid people aren’t very adventuresome.” He peered at her in the light from the living room. She had the most beautiful green eyes. Also, the wind whipped her gauzy gown in a most fetching manner. “Are you really interested in why I do these things?”

“I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”

“Very well. How old are you?”

She smiled in a way that told him that she had been born when no gentlemen would ever ask that question of a lady. “I will be 78 next August.”

“Funny, you don’t look it.”

“Of course not. Physically, I haven’t changed since I was thirty.”

He nodded. “And barring accidents, you can expect to be young and healthy for another century at least. I, on the other hand, am only 26.”

“All the more reason for you to be careful. You have so much to live for.”

“The truth, Irina, is that I find modern society boring. People never seem to do anything. They are vicarious spectators. They wrap themselves in so many layers of swaddling that they can never hope to experience life in the raw. When was the last time someone punched you in the nose?”

She frowned and got a far off look in her face. “When I was twelve. I called Tommy Rankine a name and he hit me.”

“What risks have you taken since?”

“As few as I could manage,” she replied with more honesty than he expected.

“That makes my point. Life without risk is tasteless. There is more to living than merely accumulating birthdays.” He stopped and gauged his listener’s reaction. Something was wrong.

“Don’t stop,” she urged.

“Nothing more to say,” he demurred. “Now then, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“Please do.”

“My lifestyle is very attractive to certain women. When you came out here, I had you classified as someone interested in an evening’s recreation. I think I have made a mistake. Who are you?”

“I told you. My name is Irina Scorvini.”

“That isn’t what I meant. Why did you come here? You don’t strike me as someone looking for a romp.”

She sighed. “You are very perceptive for one so young. Yes, I have an ulterior motive. I am Director of the Time Laboratory and we have need of a man of your talents.”

“Oh? To do what?”

“I’m not free to discuss the matter here. However, if you will accompany me, I guarantee that you won’t be bored.”

He thought about it for a moment, then said, “Sure, why not? The party was beginning to drag anyway.”

#

Two hours later, the aircar containing Smith and Professor Emeritus Irina Scorvini, Ph.D., began letting down toward a great pyramid of a building on the outskirts of Mexico City. The car made a sweeping turn before flaring to a landing. Smith peered at the multicolored lights in the park below. “What, no dinosaurs?”

“Very funny.”

After landing, Irina led him to the pyramid’s rooftop entrance, down a flight of stairs, and through a long hall to an auditorium-size conference room. The sole occupant of the room was a mustachioed man seated at one end of an enormous mahogany table.

“John Smith, may I present Doctor Pedro Arturo Vasquez, Deputy Director of the Time Laboratory?”

The two men exchanged greetings, after which Irina directed Smith to a seat next to Vasquez. She took the chair opposite them.

“How much do you know about the time laboratory, John?”

“Precious little. You’re funded by the planetary government and do research into the nature of time travel.”

“That is more than 98% of the public knows about us,” Vasquez replied with a hearty laugh which caused ripples in his oversize paunch. “Time travel has been a great disappointment to most people ever since its discovery in the mid-twenty-first century.”

“You mentioned dinosaurs,” Irina said. “I would give fifty years off my life to see a dinosaur. The sad truth is that our machines can never bring us back photographs of dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, or Paleolithic man.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a matter of control. While we can modulate our machine’s displacement in time fairly well, we have no control at all over where they emerge. Once it has been time shifted, a machine may materialize anywhere in the universe where the local mass density is less than 10 atoms per cubic centimeter. In a way, that is lucky. It means our machines will never materialize inside a planet or a star.”

“What you are saying,” Smith said, “is that you can’t steer!”

“Correct,” Irina replied. “The theory of time travel offers us no hope that we will ever be able to control the spatial coordinates of our points of emergence. Where a time machine materializes is governed solely by random quantum effects.”

“Surely you can see our problem,” Vasquez said, giving Smith a mild whiff of garlic breath. “In one hundred years of operations, we’ve collected literally millions of holograms taken from deep interstellar space. Every damned one of them portrays a starfield more or less identical to the one you can see from the roof of this building!”

“How do you know you are going into the past then? Maybe your machines are merely flying off into space somewhere.”

“Not possible. We always measure the temperature of the CBR on emergence,” Vasquez responded. “That tells us the date to within 100 million years or so.”

“CBR?”

“Cosmic background radiation. The universe started out as a point of nearly infinite density that exploded outward in what we refer to as ‘The Big Bang.’ That original explosion has been expanding for 14.2 billion years now. As the universe expands, the radiation released by The Big Bang has been cooling off - ‘red shifting’ in scientific parlance. In our epoch, the temperature of this cosmic background radiation has reached 2.7 degrees Kelvin. The CBR is the quiet hissing noise you hear when you focus a radio telescope on a dark region of sky.

“Obviously, the farther you go back in time, the hotter the CBR. It rises a few degrees every billion years or so. By measuring its temperature wherever our machines emerge, we can calibrate how far they’ve traveled backward in time.”

“If you can’t send your machines back to historic or pre-historic times, what good are they?” Smith asked.

“Despite our limitations,” Irina replied, “we do important work. By observing the universe in previous epochs, we measure things the astronomers cannot. For instance, it was the Time Laboratory which first derived the correct value for the Hubble Constant.”

Smith had no idea what the Hubble Constant was, but decided not to pursue the matter.

Irina continued. “Three years ago, Pedro and I had an insight into how we might reach a particular point in space and time. On the strength of that insight, we were able to obtain a substantial increase in our funding.”

“Wait a minute,” Smith replied. “I thought you said that it was theoretically impossible to steer a time machine!”

“Our solution hinges on a rather special case. There is one point we can be confident of hitting.”

“Where?”

“Why , The Beginning, of course. If we put enough energy into the time field, we can send our machines back the full fourteen billion years to The Big Bang!”

#

Smith looked at the two scientists and wondered if he had fallen into an asylum for the criminally shortsighted. He blinked. “You lost me there. I don’t see the point.”

“Think of the universe as a giant funnel, Smith,” Vasquez said. “The spout is The Big Bang and the mouth is the far future. As you go backwards in time, the universe shrinks. Therefore, the volume in which a time machine can materialize also shrinks. At the very beginning, the volume is so small that it may be considered a single point.”

“It was a single point, wasn’t it?” Smith asked. Science had bored him in school, but at least he had learned that much. “Besides, the density at the beginning of time was a hell of a lot higher than 10 atoms per cubic centimeter!”

Vasquez looked at his superior. “We do seem to be getting ahead of ourselves, don’t we, Irina?”

“Let me tell it,” the laboratory director said. She turned to Smith. “Are you familiar with the concept of black holes?”

“Vaguely.”

“A black hole occurs when a massive star runs out of fuel and gravity causes it to collapse in upon itself. The force of the collapse is strong enough to squeeze the star’s substance right out of existence, transforming it into a dimensionless point of infinite density.

“Such a hole is dimensionless. It does not appear so to us, however. The reason for that is that a black hole is surrounded by an ‘event horizon,’ which encompasses the region of space where escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. Since nothing can go faster than the speed of light, the volume defined by the event horizon appears to us to be a sphere of absolute darkness. The size of that sphere depends on the amount of mass that has fallen down the hole, and can be quite large. For instance, the hole at the center of our galaxy is approximately the size of the Earth - or rather, the volume inside its event horizon is.”

“What has this to do with the Big Bang?”

“It is directly applicable. In one sense, the universe itself is a black hole. It possesses an overall density large enough that one must exceed the speed of light to escape it. Therefore, the universe possesses an event horizon that defines the farthest point our telescopes can ever hope to see. The current event horizon is several billion light-years from here, of course. However, at the beginning of The Big Bang, when the universe was a dimensionless point of energy, its event horizon measured some 12 light-minutes in diameter.”

“It was, in effect, a giant black hole?” Smith asked.

“Precisely,” Irina replied. “That was the insight which Pedro and I had. We realized that if we sent our machines back to The Beginning, they would arrive in an empty bubble of space some twelve light-minutes in diameter. There they would remain until the expanding shockwave from The Big Bang collapsed their time fields and kicked them back to us.”

“What did you expect to get back? A cloud of superheated vapor?”

“Not at all. We calculate that it takes several nanoseconds for the explosion to build in strength until it becomes dangerous. In that time, we can analyze the energy spectrum, detect elemental particles, and perform all manner of useful observations. The machine returns to us long before the explosion can damage it.”

“So what went wrong?”

Vasquez stared at Smith for a second. “What makes you think something went wrong?”

“Why else am I here?”

Irina sighed. “You are quite right, John. So far, we have succeeded in reaching The Beginning with two machines. The results have been … disappointing.”

“How so?”

“How long a machine will stay in the past depends on where in the bubble of space it materializes. Still, no matter how quickly the initial shockwave reaches it, up until that time, the universe should be totally black. There is absolutely nothing to sense. No light, no energy, and especially no cosmic background radiation!”

“And that wasn’t what you found?”

Irina shook her head. “The first machine detected an average CBR temperature of 20 degrees Centigrade and a random fluctuation 15°C around that. There shouldn’t be any CBR at all, and the fluctuation is totally incomprehensible.”

“How long was the machine in the past?”

“Three minutes 12 seconds.”

“And the second machine?”

“Four minutes, 25 seconds. The CBR readings were more or less the same both times.”

“Tell him the rest,” Vasquez said.

Irina chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “Energizing a time field for such a long trip is terribly expensive, John. Our appropriation allowed us to budget for up to 100 trips. By materializing throughout the 12 light-minute bubble of space, we hoped to emerge within a few light-seconds of the point where The Big Bang began. Out of 75 attempts, however, we failed to reach The Beginning a total of 73 times. We have no idea why.”

“What has all of this to do with me?”

“Our previous machines have been instrumented to observe the cataclysmic birth of the universe. They were not optimized for general observations. It is our intent to use our remaining energy budget to send a different type of machine into the past. This one will be equipped with the widest possible range of sensors. It has occurred to us that there is one very general observation tool that we have not tried yet.”

“What is that?” Smith asked.

“We would like to send an observer. There should not be anything to see at The Beginning, but we cannot afford to take chances. We’d like to send you!”

#

The time machine was a sphere some two meters in diameter. It was an instrument probe that had been modified to carry a man. It was smooth save for the various instrumentation ports and the hundred-centimeter square window set directly in front of the pilot’s cramped seat. It reminded Smith of some of the first space capsules.

“What sort of instruments are those?” he asked, pointing toward the square boxes that dotted the sphere’s interior bulkhead.

“Film cameras,” Irina said.

“Kind of old fashioned, aren’t they?”

She shrugged. “All of our modern equipment uses the principle of photonics. Pedro believes that there is something about conditions at The Beginning that cause photonic devices to malfunction. For that reason, we have provided this machine with the widest possible range of technologies. Film photography may be archaic, but it was used for centuries with good results.”

“I take it you don’t believe your failure was due to a malfunction,” he said.

She hesitated. “I can’t help wondering if we are up against some sort of exclusion principle.”

“What’s that?”

“Consider the black hole that we were discussing earlier. Once inside the event horizon, nothing can get out. Not light, or mass, or information. What goes on inside the hole can never be known by those outside. The astrophysicists say that information exchange through an event horizon is excluded and that an exclusion principle is at work.”

“And you think the same is true for visiting the moment of the Big Bang?”

“How else can our failures be explained?”

He shrugged. “It’s too deep for me. I’m just the bus driver here.”

She turned to him. “Then you accept our offer?”

“I’m tempted,” he admitted. “Still, I need more information. As I told you at my apartment, I do not jump into these things foolishly. Why don’t either you or Vasquez go?”

Irina smiled. “As you said, some of us aren’t adventurous.”

“Why not? Is it dangerous to travel in time?”

“Oh no! People do not ride the machines anymore, but when the laboratory was first built, several successfully traveled backward in time. They all returned safely and showed no ill effects afterwards.”

“Any chance I might collide with one of your previous probes?”

“None. Time fields cannot overlap. No machine can approach another closer than about 50 meters.”

“So what is there to worry about?”

Again, she bit her lip in a way that Smith found very fetching. Her evening gown looked out of place in the cavernous laboratory from which the machines were launched. Still, he was glad that she had not changed into something more appropriate.

“There is a theoretical danger. It involves the exclusion principle.”

“Oh?”

“If such a principle exists - and remember, it is only an hypothesis - it means that human beings can never know what happened during that first moment in time. We may well have suffered instrument malfunctions in the two machines that made it to The Beginning. That may have been the reason they were successful. The others did not complete their jumps because their instruments were not malfunctioning. If there is an exclusion principle at work, any probe capable of returning meaningful data will automatically be prevented from reaching The Beginning.”

Smith shrugged. “That’s why you are sending me, isn’t it? So that I can observe in the event of an instrument malfunction.”

“Don’t you see, John? By providing you with a window, we have turned you into one of our instruments. If you observe and report, then you violate the exclusion principle!”

“Are you saying that there’s no chance of this machine reaching The Beginning if I’m alive and awake?”

“That is one possibility. The other is that you may make it, but that you yourself could malfunction.”

“How?” he asked. “Die? Go blind?”

“We don’t know.”

He frowned. “What about the instruments in the two probes? Did they check out after their return?”

She nodded. “They passed every diagnostic test we could think of.”

“Then what is there to worry about?”

“We don’t know,” she replied. “That is what has us worried.”

He slowly circled the small spherical craft with Irina in tow. Vasquez was watching them from a catwalk that ran completely around the cavern. Finally, Smith stopped and gazed through the observation hatch of the machine. The window was five centimeters thick and solid when he rapped on it with his knuckles.

“Seem’s sturdy enough,” he said. “I’ll do it!”

“You’ll pilot the machine?” she asked.

“Hell, yes! It sounds like fun.”

#

John Thurman Smith sat in a powered lounger in Irina Scorvini’s private office and sipped a tall cold drink of something he did not recognize. It had fruit juice in it and not a little alcohol. It soothed him as he lay back and collected his thoughts. His jumpsuit showed large splotches under his arms and down his back, while his hair was plastered to his head from perspiration. No one had told him the time machine would get so hot.

He had checked his chronometer just before they had pried him out of his spherical coffin. The total trip into the past had taken 90 minutes. His machine had not reached The Beginning on the first jump, or on the eighteen tries that had followed.

A time machine that does not make it to The Beginning materializes in a universe very different from the one he was used to. It halts a few million years short of The Big Bang. In that early universe, the sky is filled with a red the color of old coals where subtle shadings mark the places giant protostars are being born.

Each time he discovered himself in the protostar universe, Smith palmed the control that returned him to the Time Laboratory. There he had waited while the machines that generated the time field recharged themselves. Then he had jumped again. On the twentieth attempt, he arrived in a place that was vastly different from the protostar universe. One look out the window told him that he had made it to the bubble of space that was his goal.

His first sight of The Beginning had told him something else. In one breathtaking moment, all that was mysterious became blindingly clear. He knew the reason the previous probes had brought back such confusing data. He also knew, as Irina Scorvini had suspected, that human beings were forever precluded from observing The Big Bang. The reason for this had nothing to do with universal exclusion principles. The answer was far simpler and much more surprising!

“Did you make it?” Irina asked, speaking for the first time since white-coated technicians had helped him out of the capsule and out of the spacesuit he had worn. Pedro Vasquez sat across the office from her, nervously twirling the ends of his mustache.

“I made it,” Smith confirmed between sips.

“Well, what did you see?”

“Have you checked the cameras yet?”

“They are being unloaded now. We’ll have the film developed within the hour.”

“Good. I will need photographic evidence to back up what I am about to tell you. It’s the only way anyone will ever believe me.”

“Out with it man!” Vasquez growled.

Smith set his glass down and turned to face the deputy director of the laboratory. “One thing I learned from my travels is that the universe is a very large place indeed. How many stars would you say are in an average galaxy, Vasquez?”

“Approximately 100 billion.”

“And how many galaxies in all?”

“A trillion or more.”

“Did it ever occur to either of you that there might be other intelligent races out among the stars?”

“Of course,” Irina said. “It’s a mathematical certainty.”

“What about time? Do you suppose there were races that developed before the Earth cooled, and others who will come into existence long after our sun has sputtered out?”

“Highly likely. What has this to do with the problem at hand, John?”

“Have you considered that every race which reaches a certain technological level will probably invent time travel? What are the chances that any of them will be able to steer their machines any better than we can?”

“They won’t be able to.”

“What if they all come up with the idea of sending their machines to the one point in the universe where they can be sure to arrive? What if they aim for a bubble of empty space 12 light-minutes in diameter where they can observe the creation of the universe?”

There was a long silence. Finally, Irina said, “I suppose it could get crowded.”

“You’re damned right it could! You were correct, Irina. We will never see the Big Bang. We won’t see it because that whole volume of space is crammed with time machines! They are jammed time field to time field until the whole damned pygmy universe is gridlocked!”

“What sort of machines?” she asked.

“All kinds. I saw big things that looked like passenger liners, small balls that must have been instrument packages. There are cigar shapes, and cubes, and one helluva lot of spheres. Some are radiating light as though they are trying to compete with The Big Bang. Others do not even reflect. The only way you can see them is by their silhouette against the more distant machines. They’re packed so close together that I couldn’t see more than a dozen kilometers in any direction!”

“Then the time machines are the source of our anomalous CBR readings?”

He nodded. “Your instruments were detecting the heat and light from the machines and averaging them out. The fluctuations are caused by a kind of Brownian motion.”

“Jesucristo!”Vasquez swore. “Then our failures…”

“Were due to the fact that every possible position in that entire 12 light-minute volume of space is occupied by a time machine. There have to be trillions of them! The time fields are packed edge to edge everywhere. I have no idea what factor selects which machines make it to the bubble and which do not. How can one machine get there before another when all machines arrive at the same instant?”

“That will bear thinking about,” Irina agreed. “Obviously, the majority of probes fail because they can’t find an empty parking place.”

“Obviously,” Smith agreed.

“Did you see nothing of the Big Bang?” Vasquez asked.

“How could I? All I saw for 5.6 minutes were time machines. Then I found myself back here.”

Irina looked at Vasquez. “Can you imagine what the total collection must mass?” she asked, suddenly excited. “This changes every assumption we’ve ever made about the creation of the universe!”

Vasquez was no longer sitting. He had begun to pace the floor. “If we can see these other beings, we can communicate with them. That means we can exchange knowledge across unimaginable gulfs of time and space.”

“But we’d only have a maximum of six minutes in which to communicate,” she told her subordinate.

He shrugged. “We broadcast everything in high speed bursts. They do the same.”

Irina’s face lit up. “Then the information exchange is already going on, and we have it recorded on the instruments we sent back with Smith!”

“Of course. It must be,” he said. “We’d better get that data reduced as quickly as we can. I wonder what we should look for first.”

Irina was not listening. She sat on the edge of Smith’s lounger and hugged him. The warmth and perfume of her was a tonic after the discomfort of the past hour and a half. “You’ll be famous for this, John! Possibly the most famous man who ever lived.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Of course. You are the man who opened space and time for us. You guided us to the universal meeting place. There must be millions of different species out there, all anxious to exchange ideas. We’re about to join in that exchange.” She picked up her hand computer and began to figure. “Let’s see. We made it three times in 95 attempts. That means, on average, we will succeed once every thirty tries.

“We’re going to need a much bigger budget if we are to properly exploit this. Too bad the bubble is not larger. It would increase the number of machines that can congregate there and lengthen the average stay time as well. It would be much more efficient.”

Smith nodded. “I only wish I’d had a longer stay.”

Irina looked up from her calculation in surprise. “Why is that?”

He smiled in remembrance. “The being in the next machine over was almost human. We started a conversation using gestures. She was very beautiful, even considering the pointed ears and the greenish cast to her skin. Also buxom. If I had had another few minutes, I might have convinced her to join me in my machine. After all, there are better ways to spend time stuck in traffic than staring out the window!”

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