Complete Stories (7 page)

She had to break off and grab one of the twins, who had been about to try to stick her finger into a phase-mirror. A smell was filling the room, and we noticed that the other twin had opened one of the propane gas-valves set in the table.

“I better get these bad children out of here,” Klara exclaimed. “But it’s marvelous, Ion. And William, you must be very clever to have helped Ion build this!” A flash of lips, a swirl of fur, and she was gone.

I picked up the toy car and examined it closely. Even I had trouble believing my description of what had happened. How would the right end know to produce pairs in the right order to build up car and anti-car from nose to wheel to tail? And where would the energy have come from? Granted that a fantastic amount of energy was stored in the fantastically expensive quarkonium, but still …

Ion was sitting at his desk writing, his back to me. Despite what Klara had said, the two descriptions did
not
come to the same thing. Was this car the
same
as the original car, or was it only an
identical copy
? I had to know!

Suddenly I thought of a way to test the difference. I would let the car roll towards the tunnel, and at the last minute I would stop it from going in. A decisive experiment.

Suppose Ion was right. Suppose that car (3) was just a time-traveled car (1). What then? If car (1) did not go in the tunnel, then car (2) and car (3) would not come into existence.

But suppose I was right. Suppose that the whole effect was just advanced potential pair-production, triggered by car (1)’s approach. What then? Car (2) and car (3) would already have been created even if, at the very last second, car (1) did not actually enter the tunnel.

In terms of Ion’s spacetime diagram, what I was going to do was to stop car (1) at the time marked “X.” If car (3) came out anyway, then I was right. If car (3) didn’t come out, then Ion was right.

I started the car and set it down. “Look, Ion.” I didn’t bother saying more…he would understand. I fixed my mind on grabbing the car at the last possible instant before it went through the…looking-glass. I leaned over the table, concentrating. I didn’t dare look away to see if car (3) came out of the other end or not.

I seized car (1) just before its nose touched the phase-mirror. Then I stepped back and looked down the table. There was no car (3) at the other end…and no antimatter car (2) at my end. Ion was right.

I returned the little car to the starting position and let it run through the time-tunnel undisturbed, trying to see it Ion’s way.

A car moving
right to left
is the same as a car moving
left to right and backwards in time
. Suddenly I could see the pair-production and the mutual annihilation as corners in time. Ion was right, he really was. We had time-travel, admittedly over just a three-second range, but time-travel nonetheless. Even the strange fact that the phase-mirrors turned things backwards as well as reversing them in time made sense. The fact that the front of the car moved backwards in time as soon as it passed through the left end meant that a normal observer
had
to see it as disappearing first.

“Well?” Ion was smiling his wide, mirthless smile, his eyes picking my brain.

I nodded. “Okay. But how does the car get through the phase-mirrors? They felt so hard when I was gluing them together.”

Ion shrugged. “How does a reflection get through an ordinary looking-glass? It is the property of a mirror to produce images. But this particular mirror works only when the guiding-field is on.” He pointed to the left end of the time-tunnel.

Time-tunnel
. As I said the word to myself, my last remaining question dissolved. If car (1) was car (2) was car (3), then no mass or anti-mass at all was really being created or destroyed. So of course there were no huge energy drains or blasts going on. Looked at differently, the quarkonium plates were a closed system which could pass energy back in time…so the pair-producing drew its energy from the annihilation, even though it happened first.

I nodded again, harder. “Okay. But now what?”

“Aren’t you worried about time-paradoxes anymore?” Ion’s voice was challenging, almost angry. It was as if he hadn’t wanted me to agree with him…hadn’t wanted it to be true. The next question: What if one were to stop car (1) if and only if car (3) has already appeared?

I didn’t say it, but he could see it in my eyes. The fear. Suddenly fatherly, he patted me on the shoulder. “Take the rest of the afternoon off, William. I want to write all of this up before…before I continue.”

I nodded and left him there. I spent the next few hours drinking Schlossquell beer, and then I went to the Eros House, a shabby building full of legal prostitutes. With the lights off, I could almost believe I was with Klara. Later I had more beer.

I slept badly that night. At four in the morning an unpleasant dream woke me up so completely that I couldn’t go back to sleep. It was a scene inspired by Kafka’s
The Castle
.

In the dream, through some transmutation, the Heidelberg castle is…
science
. Endless corridors, doors, people to meet. On the white plaster walls there are things like fire-alarms, little hammers mounted over glass plates. Behind the glass is…
cyanide
, thick gas, swirling, deadly. I hurry down a hallway, a sheaf of papers in my hand. Someone is in front of me, tangible, but invisible. My other self? Somehow the person moves so as to always be in my blind spot. A question is posed, the unspeakable question which the castle itself embodies. My tongue is slow and sticky. Yes and no. A bell is tolling. Yes and no. The hammers quiver… .

The world is clouds and fog patches, a confused smear which no magical apparatus can sharpen up. The cat knows.

That morning I found Ion sitting at his desk. He was asleep, with his head on his crossed arms. One of the phase-mirrors was cracked! Had Ion had some sort of tantrum? I examined the hairline crack. Of course the vacuum was ruined now. I wondered if the quarkonium plate could be repaired. There were some individual Lego-blocks scattered around the floor and table. Apparently Ion had been there all night.

I stood over him for a moment, looking at him with something like affection. I had been worried, too worried to even …

“William?” The voice was blurred. His eyes flickered open, then shut. “Is it raining?”

This struck me as a very odd question. It was, in fact, a marvelously sunny day, the first taste of spring. The sky was a delicate blue and the birds were singing. A square of sunlight was lying on Ion’s desk!

“It’s sunny, Ion.”

“I thought it was. And I thought it was raining.” His voice was muffled, and seemed somehow to come from underneath his head.

“You should get some sleep,” I urged. “Klara must be worried.”

“I’m scared to move.” A long pause. “I might disperse even more.”

Disperse
? A strange word to use. Wave-packets disperse, but people …

“Read my notes,” Ion said, “I …” He let his voice trail off, and just sat there, eyes closed, his head resting on his crossed arms. There seemed to be something under his arms, some sort of pillow.

I picked up the lab book lying on his desk. It started with a description of the apparatus and the first experiments we had conducted. Nothing new there. I flipped forward a few pages.

There was a diagram like the one Ion had drawn for Klara. Under it was a sketch of the Lego car and a description of the two experiments, the one where the car comes out of the time-tunnel before it goes in, and my variation, where the car is stopped from going in, and therefore does not come out.

Ion had conducted a third experiment. The car was to roll towards the tunnel while he watched both ends. His plan was to stop car (1) if car (3) appeared, and to let car (1) go if car (3) did not appear. This meant that a car would come out of the right end of the tunnel if and only if no car came out of the right end of the tunnel. Yes if and only if no.

Think about it. Either car (3) appears or it doesn’t. Case I: Car (3) appears. So Ion stops car (1) from entering the tunnel. So car (3) doesn’t appear. Case II: Car (3) doesn’t appear. So Ion lets car (1) into the tunnel. So car (3) appears.

Question: When Ion actually ran the experiment, did car (3) appear? Answer: Yes and no.

I closed the lab book and looked around the room. The scattered bits of Legos…how many?

“What happened, Ion? Did the car come out of the tunnel?”

“Yes,” Ion said, raising his head from on top of his arms.

“No,” Ion said, uncrossing his arms and raising up his other head from under his arms.

The two faces looked at me, each of them a bit translucent, a bit unreal. The two necks merged into his collar, making a solid, tubular letter “Y.”

I gagged and stepped back.

The phone began to ring. The second of Ion’s heads…the no-head…seemed not to hear it, and continued to stare at me with those prehensile eyes. Eyes which reached deep into my mind.

But at the same time, Ion’s head groped up the receiver and held it to the first head…the yes-head…to one of the shimmering ears. I could hear Klara’s tiny voice. She sounded angry, accusing.

“I was working,” the yes-head said.

“Your boyfriend is here,” the no-head said, noticing the conversation. “I’m going to show him something.”

Ion let the phone drop and walked over to the laboratory table. The no-head, the mean one, was doing the talking. Whichever head was talking tended to be bigger. It was as if the silent head corresponded to some part of Ion which was father away…drifting towards some parallel universe.

“I’m in a mixed state, William. I ran the paradox. It had to come out both ways.” He turned the switch to power-up the guiding-field. It was dangerous to be restarting it without a vacuum in the chamber.

The no-head bent down, peering into the cracked phase-mirror. He was still talking to me. “I know how you think I look. But that’s just your projection. Actually it feels…marvelous. You’ll see in …”

“Get out, William,” the yes-head cried. “Before it’s too late.”

Klara’s voice was quacking from the dangling phone receiver. I could feel myself going mad, as surely as cloth tearing. I seized the phone to speak to her. “This is William. Ion’s had a terrible accident. He …”

There was a crash behind me. I whirled around. The time-tunnel was billowing smoke and the phase-mirrors had smashed into pieces. For a second I couldn’t see Ion through the smoke, but then he came at me.

A tangle of twenty or a hundred thin necks writhed out of his open collar, and on the end of each tentacle-like neck rode a tiny grimacing head, and every little head was screaming at me in a terrible tiny voice… .

He dispersed completely after that. As different variants of Ion Stepanek split off into different universes, each corresponding head would shrink…get “farther away”…and a copy of his body would split off with it, twisting and dwindling. I don’t know how long it took; I don’t know how I could have seen it; I wish I could forget it. The horrible squid-bunch of necks, each little head screaming out something different…I hope he’s really gone.

I live with Klara now, and I wear Ion’s clothes. I have taken over his job at the Institute…they think he’s resigned. Klara forged his signature on the letter.

It’s a good life, except for having to cut the buds off my neck every morning. The wart-like little heads. Some look like me, and some look like him. Klara says I only imagine them, and that there’s nothing on my neck but eczema.

I still have the specs for the time-tunnel. Maybe I’ll rebuild it, and observe a yes-and-no, and disperse. I’ll go into the mixed state and come out…who knows…maybe in heaven. But I don’t really need the machine anymore.

Mixed states happen all the time. Say someone asks you whether or not you want to kill yourself. Before they asked, maybe you weren’t really all that much for or against suicide. That’s your original mixed state. But answering the question is like being born. You have to stick out a yes-head or a no-head to answer. And the other one has to get shaved off.

It could be any question. Do you like milk? Who are you going to vote for? Are you happy? Do you understand what I’m talking about?

In a way, mixed states are nice. Not naming things, and not forcing them to be this way or that, but just…letting them go. Satori. There’s a Zen question for it: “What was your original face before you were born?”

My original face. A mixed state. I don’t need a machine, no heap of glass and wire. I’m just going to walk out on the bridge towards the castle. I’ll stop. Out there, in the wind, one needs not choose this bank or that. There are other alternatives.

============

Written in Spring, 1979.

Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact
, March, 1981.

My family and I lived in Heidelberg from 1978 to 1980. I was there on a two-year grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The grant came through just as I was losing my first teaching job in Geneseo (a.k.a. Wankato, a.k.a. Bata). My formal duties in Heidelberg were zero: I was given a soundproofed office and a typewriter. As well as doing research on Georg Cantor’s theories of infinities, I spent a lot of my time writing science-fiction. At this point in my career I didn’t know that I would be able to complete and sell novels, so I put a great deal of energy into writing stories.