Complete Stories (6 page)

Klara was thirty-five, about halfway in age between Ion and I. Before long I was thoroughly infatuated with her, and flirted shamelessly. Ion must have noticed, but perhaps he welcomed the excitement for Klara. Or perhaps he pitied me too much to object.

I got in the habit of dropping my spoon at most of our frequent common meals. Bent and straining under the table, I would stare at Klara’s legs. She could feel my gaze, and would slowly rub her nylons against each other. When I sat up she would give me a look of dreamy speculation, her full lips parted to show a few of her perfect teeth. I hoped my hopes and dreamed my dreams.

Meanwhile, Ion and I were working long hours on our joint project. His intention was to push the Feynman time-reversal theory of antimatter hard enough to get time-travel. He had the clout to get the necessary components and material—some of them totally new. My job was to assemble the components into a working system.

There is something magical about scientific apparatus. A witch doctor assembles decorated stones, special herbs, pieces of rare animals…and he expects that putting these valued objects together will cause something unusual to happen. Spirit voices, levitation, miracle cures …

The constructions of engineers and physicists are not really so different. Bits of etched silicon, special chemicals, oddly shaped pieces of metal…the experimentalist places them together, and suddenly one has a radio, or an airplane, or an X-ray machine.

Stepanek’s design for a time-machine was a bit more obviously allied to sorcery than is customary. The key components were six of the brand-new “phase-mirrors.” It was only as a result of his years-long friendship with the director of the Max Planck Institute that Ion was able to get these fantastically rare and valuable plates of…what?

The phase-mirrors were made of a completely new type of substance called quarkonium, a hyperstable compound something like metallic helium—but with some of the protons’ component quarks replaced by the newly obtainable “bottom” quarks. Quarkonium is, strangely enough, neither matter nor antimatter. The stuff exists in some fantastically charged tension between the two. The fact that quarkonium is thus hyperstable made it possible that, in certain circumstances, the phase-mirrors could emit or absorb almost their entire mass-energy without disintegrating.

Two of the thin, inflexible quarkonium plates were square, and four were longish rectangles. I assembled the six into a box, setting an evacuation nozzle into the hole with which one plate had been provided. The material was strange to work with, slippery and utterly rigid. Although they were supposed to be a sort of mirror, the plates did not reflect images in any ordinary way…at least not most of the time. But, over and over, as I was assembling the phase-mirrors into a box, I seemed to glimpse isolated images of my fingertips here and there on the mirrors’ surfaces.

We spent forty-eight hours pumping the box out to a state of near-perfect vacuum, and then sealed it off. While the pump was running, Ion instructed me to mount a series of wire loops on the table, loops which could be charged to produce a weakly guiding magnetic field. We set the box in the middle of the loops, and that was about it. A transparent box like an aquarium with a glass top. Ion called the box a time-tunnel, but I found this colorful description misleading.

We ran our first tests with an electron beam. The idea was that a signal could come out of one end of the box before it went in the other. It’s called an advanced potential in quantum mechanics. We got the results Ion had predicted, so we moved up to atomic nuclei, and then to a series of larger and larger iron bullets.

Shooting the bullets into that phase-mirror box made me a little nervous… . I expected the box to shatter. But somehow it didn’t. I assumed it was because the quarkonium plates were, in some sense, liquid, and thus able to close up after a rapid enough object.

I believed that for a while, anyway. But before long I had come to believe something stranger…that the box was able to create and destroy matter/antimatter pairs. But where was the energy coming from? And where did it go?

Ion had an explanation. But I was not ready to accept his description of what we had built. That way lay madness.

“Do you know what your husband and I have done?” I asked Klara at lunch the last day of February. The twins had already left the table to do their homework. I glanced at Ion, and he gave me an encouraging nod. Until now I had been sworn to silence.

Klara looked a bit nervous at my question. Ion was, I had learned, something of a philanderer. What a fool to betray a woman as wonderful as Klara!

“Nothing too depraved, I hope?” Her voice was gay, but with the faintest tremolo of real worry. She drew out a cigarette and placed it between her wonderful lips, waiting for the touch of my lighter…the lighter which I had bought solely so that I could light Klara’s cigarettes. She tilted her head back, away from the smoke, and looked at Ion questioningly.

He smiled his broad, mirthless smile. “William and I have assembled a rather interesting piece of apparatus. It creates and destroys matter, according to William’s way of looking at things.”

Klara arched her eyebrows at me. “Is that true, William? Perhaps you have solved the energy crisis?”

I laughed, a bit exasperated by Ion’s misdirection. “No, no. This is a very expensive machine to build. We have used most of the quarkonium in the world to build it. And really it creates and absorbs matter/antimatter
pairs
, rather than just matter. But Ion thinks …

Ion was pouring himself a glass of wine, and the carafe clattered against his glass. “I do not
think
, William, I
know
. We have built a time-machine.” Suddenly, on some level, we were fighting over Klara.

She blew a thick stream of smoke and put out her cigarette. “I would like a time-machine. Then I could see what the castle looked like in 1400, before the French blew it up. And I’d like to see dinosaurs. And fashions one thousand years from now.” It was clear she didn’t believe Ion. “Dearest, do you think you could bring me back a kitchen-robot from the future? It would be even nicer than that dishwasher you’re always promising to get me!”

Ion was breathing heavily. He had had several glasses of kirsch before lunch. This quarrel had been brewing for three months. I thought his experiment interesting, but I saw no reason to take Feynman’s theory so literally as to assert that we had produced time-travel. Ion could see this in my eyes.

He stood up suddenly, almost as if to attack me. Was he, on top of it all, jealous of my attentions to Klara? New Year’s Eve, after he had passed out, Klara and I, how close we had come! I tried to keep this out of my eyes. I stood up clumsily, and my chair fell to the floor behind me.

“Don’t panic, William,” Ion said, shrugging on his suede jacket. “I only thought we could give Klara a demonstration.”

The twins, attracted by the noise of my chair, had come running in from the study, and insisted that they too be allowed to come see Daddy’s machine. Ion acquiesced, on the condition that they bring a certain toy.

We all bundled into our coats…Klara wore a charming fox coat sewed in herring-bone strips…and we walked the three blocks to the Physics Institute.

The twins ran ahead of us, screaming and trying to slide on the frozen puddles. Klara walked between Ion and me, linking an arm with each of us. The sky was low and grey. The eternal mist seemed to form a circular wall around us, always ten meters off.

“Should we show Klara the bullet series?” I asked Ion, speaking across Klara’s lovely, upturned face.

Ion pursed his lips and shook his head. “Too fast. Klara has to see it to believe it.”

“Believe what?”

“We have a sort of tunnel,” I explained. “The size of a toy train tunnel. And if we shoot a bullet through it, the bullet seems to come out the right end
before
it goes in the left.”

Klara laughed. “Now
that
sounds useful. We could use one of your machines in the tunnel under the castle…where those dreadful traffic jams are.”

“Actually,” Ion said, “I thought I
would
use a little car today—the little three-wheeler that I helped the twins make last night.”

The twins had brought the little car, a bright red-yellow-blue mass of Lego blocks. On the top was a battery-run motor, with a cog wheel linked by a black plastic chain to a gear on the single front wheel.

Klara examined our “time-tunnel” with interest. The core of it was the shoe-box-sized vacuum chamber made of phase-mirrors. You could see in quite easily. The thick loops of the guiding-field wires arched over the box like croquet wickets.

I removed the rifle from its mount on one end of the lab-table, and waited while Ion got the car from the little girls.

Then, bustling a bit, he lined up his three women in chairs against the wall, and set the car down at one end of the table. I cleared my throat, preparatory to telling them what they might expect, but Ion shushed me.

“First let them see, and
then
we’ll discuss it.”

I taped an iron nail to the bottom of the Lego car, and dialed the guiding-field’s power up to some hundred times the level we had used before. The Lego car made a pretty big test-particle.

In all frankness, I expected the experiment to be a failure. The car would roll up to the phase-mirror box, bump into the side and stop…nothing more. But I was wrong.

As the little car labored across the table towards the left end of the box, something happened at the right end. Seemingly out of no place, an identical Lego car pushed out of the right end of the tunnel and went chuffing on its way! “And there’s one inside now, rolling left!” Klara exclaimed, leaning forward. She was right. For a few seconds there were
three
Lego cars on the table.

Car (1): The original car, still approaching the tunnel’s left entrance. Car (2): The one moving in the tunnel, from right to left. Car (3): The new one moving away from the right end of the tunnel.

And then car (1) and car (2) met at the left-end mirror. They melted into each other…nose into nose, wheel into wheel, tail into tail. It was like watching a Rorschach ink-blot disappear into its central fold.

One of the twins squealed and ran to catch car (3) before it ran off the other end of the lab table. I took it from her and examined it closely. Car (3) appeared to be identical to car (1). We had already done this experiment with electrons and with small bullets…but one bullet or electron is much like another. Until now I had been unwilling to accept Ion’s interpretation of our experiment. But it certainly looked as if car (3) really
was
car (1).

Ion stepped to the blackboard and drew a diagram.

“Look,” he said to Klara. “Here’s a spacetime diagram of what happens. If we think of the zigzag line as the history of a particular object, what we have is this: First, car (1) goes forward in time till it gets to the left phase-mirror. Second, inside the tunnel it flips and moves backwards in time, but still left-to-right, and we call it car (2). Third, upon passing through another phase-mirror it flips back to run forward in time again, and is called car (3). By evolving into car (3), the original car (1) manages to come out of the right end a few seconds earlier than it goes in the left.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” I interrupted. “But we can read the picture a bit differently. Just think of moving that space-axis upwards through time, and see what happens. First there’s just car (1) moving to the right. Then suddenly something happens at the right end of the tunnel. Car (2) and car (3) come into existence together—by a process called pair-production. Car (3) is matter and car (2) is antimatter. With enough energy present, you can convert zero Lego blocks into plus-forty-nine Lego blocks and minus-forty-nine Lego blocks. You can get something from nothing…as long as you get anti-something too.”

My voice was baying evangelically. At Wankato State the students used to call me “Rover.” Now Klara smiled at me. Politely. She didn’t know what I was talking about. Ion hid a smile by pretending to rub his nose.

I continued, “When car (2) meets car (1), the two disappear into a burst of energy. It’s called mutual annihilation. Matter plus antimatter makes pure energy. The first puzzling thing about the experiment is how the tunnel knows to produce the appropriate matter/antimatter pair in time. But quantum mechanics does allow for action at a distance.
Advanced potentials
. Presumably an advanced potential from the approaching car (1) triggers the pair-production of …”

Klara looked quite blank by now. I broke off the exposition and made my point. “All three cars are different. Car (2) is antimatter traveling forward in time, not car (1) traveling backwards in time. And car (3) is just a sort of correction term.”

Klara looked from one of us to the other, smiling a bit. “Ion’s right,” she said finally, and with a nod of her head. “Anyone can see that the little car which came out is the same as the one that went in.” She caught my dejected expression and laughed. “Well, what’s the difference anyway? Whether the thing in the tunnel is a particle going backwards in time or an anti-particle going forward in time. It comes to …”