Watson, Ian - SSC (2 page)

 
          
Besides
theoretical physics, basic space science has by now been hugely sidetracked by
his presence.

 
          
The
lead hope of getting man to the stars was the development of some deep-sleep or
refrigeration system. Plainly this does not exist by 2015 or so—or our
passenger would be using it. Only a lunatic would voluntarily sit in a tiny
compartment for decades on ends, ageing and rotting, if he could sleep the
time away just as well, and awake as young as the day he set off. On the other
hand, his life-support systems seem so impeccable that he can exist for decades
within the narrow confines of that vehicle using recycled air, water and solid
matter to 100 per cent efficiency. This represents no inconsiderable outlay in
research and development—which must have been borrowed from another field,
obviously the space sciences. Therefore the astronauts of 2015 or thereabouts
require very long-term life support systems capable of sustaining them for
years and decades, up and awake. What kind of space travel must they be engaged
in, to need these? Well, they can only be going to the stars—the slow way;
though not a very slow way. Not hundreds of years; but decades. Highly
dedicated men must be spending many years cooped up alone in tiny space-craft
to reach Alpha Centaurus, Tau Ceti,
Epsilon
Eridani or
wherever. If their surroundings are so tiny, then any extra payload costs
prohibitively. Now who would contemplate such a journey merely out of
curiosity?
No one.
The notion is ridiculous
—unless
these heroes are carrying
something to their destinations which will then link it inexorably and
instantaneously with Earth. A tac- hyon descrambler is the only obvious
explanation. They are carrying with them the other end of a
tachyon-transmission system for beaming material objects, and even human
beings, out to the stars!

 
          
So,
while one half of physics nowadays grapples with the problems of reverse-time,
the other half, funded by most of the money from the space vote, pre-empting
the whole previously extant space programme, is trying to work out ways to
harness and modulate tachyons.

 
          
These
faster-than-light particles certainly seem to exist; we’re fairly certain of
that now. The main problem is that the technology for harnessing them is needed
beforehand
, to prove that they do
exist and so to work out exactly
how
to harness them.

 
          
All these reorientations of science—because of him sitting in his
enigmatic vehicle in deliberate alienation from us, reading
Robinson
Crusoe, a strained expression
on his face as he slowly approaches his own personal crack-up.

 
          
(1996)

 
          
If you were locked up in a VSTM for X years, would you want a
calendar on permanent display—or not?
Would it be consoling or taunting?
Obviously his instruments are calibrated— unless it was completely fortuitious
that his journey ended on
1 December 1985
at precisely
midday
! But can he see the calibrations? Or would
he prefer to be overtaken suddenly by the end of his journey, rather than have
the slow grind of years unwind itself? You see, we are trying to explain why he
did not communicate with us in 1995.

 
          
Convicts
in solitary confinement keep their sanity by scratching five-barred gates of
days on the walls with their fingernails; the sense of time passing keeps their
spirits up. But on the other hand, tests of time perception carried out on
potholers who volunteered to stay below ground for several months on end show
that the internal clock lags grossly—by as much as two weeks in a three month
period. Our VSTM passenger might gain a reprieve of a year—or five years!—on
his total subjective journey time, by ignoring the passing of time. The
potholers had no clue to i night and day; but then, neither does he! Ever since
his arrival, lights have been burning constantly in the laboratory; he has been
under i constant observation. . . .

 
          
He
isn’t a convict, or he would surely protest, beg to be let out, throw himself
on our mercy,
give
us some clue to the nature of his
predicament. Is he the carrier of some fatal disease—a disease so incredibly
infectious that it must affect the whole human race unless he were isolated?
Which can only be isolated by a time capsule? Which even isolation on the Moon
or Mars would not keep from spreading to the human race? He hardly appears to
be. . . .

 
          
Suppose
that he had to be isolated for some very good reason, and suppose that he
concurs in his own isolation (which he visibly does, sitting there reading
Defoe for the nth time), what demands this unique dissection of one man from
the whole continuum of human life and from his own time and space? Medicine,
psychiatry, sociology, all the human sciences are being drawn into the problem
in the wake of physics and space science. Sitting there doing nothing, he has
become a kind of funnel for all the physical and social sciences: a human black
hole into which vast energy pours, for a very slight increase in our radius of
understanding. That single individual had accumulated as much disruptive
potential as a single atom accelerated to the speed of light—which requires all
the available energy in the universe to sustain it in its impermissible state.

 
          
Meanwhile
the orbiting tachyon laboratories report that they are just on the point of
uniting quantum mechanics, gravitational theory and relativity; whereupon they
will at last “jump” the first high-speed particle packages over the C-barrier
into a faster-than-light mode, and back again into our space. But they reported
that
last year—only to have their
particle packages “jump back” as antimatter, annihilating five billion
dollars’ worth of equipment and taking thirty lives. They hadn’t jumped into a
tachyon mode at all, but had “mobiused” themselves through wormholes in the
space-time fabric.

 
          
Nevertheless,
prisoner of conscience (his own conscience, surely!) or whatever he is, our
VSTM passenger seems nobler year by year. As we move away from his terminal
madness, increasingly what strikes us is his dedication, his self-sacrifice (for
a cause still beyond our comprehension),
his
Wittgensteinian
spirituality. “Take him for all in all, he is a
Man.
We shall not look upon his like.

 
          
.
. .”
Again?
We shall look upon his like. Upon the man
himself, gaining stature every year! That’s the wonderful thing. It’s as though
Christ, fully exonerated as the Son of God, is uncrucified and his whole life
re-enacted before our eyes in full and certain knowledge of his true role.
(Except . . . that this man’s role is silence.)
Undoubtedly
he is a holy man who will suffer mental crucifixion for the sake of some great
human project. Now he re-reads Defoe’s
Plague
Year
, that classic of collective incarceration and the resistance of the
human spirit and human organizing ability. Surely the “plague” hint in the
title is irrelevant. It’s the sheer force of spirit, which beat the Great
Plague of
London, that
is the real keynote of the
book.

 
          
Our
passenger is the object of popular cults by now—a focus for finer feelings. In
this way his mere presence has drawn the world’s
peoples
closer together, cultivating respect and dignity, pulling us back from the
brink of war, liberating tens of thousands from their concentration camps.
These cults extend from purely fashionable manifestations—shirts printed with
his face, now neatly shaven in a Vandyke style; rings and worry-beads made from
galena crystals—through the architectural (octahedron-and-cube meditation
modules) to life-styles themselves: a Zen-like “sitting quietly, doing
nothing.”

           
He’s Rodin’s Thinker, the
Belvedere Apollo,
and Michelangelo’s
David
rolled into one for our world as
the millenium draws to its close. Never have so many copies of Defoe’s two
books and the Jules Verne been in print before. People memorize them as
meditation exercises and recite them as the supremely lucid, rational Western mantras.

 
          
The
National Physical Laboratory has become a place of pilgrimage, our lawns and
grounds a vast camping site—
Woodstock
and Avalon,
Rome
and
Arlington
all in one. About the sheer tattered
degradation of his final days less is said; though that has its cultists too,
its late twentieth-century anchorites, its Saint Anthonies pole-squatting or
cave-immuring themselves in the midst of the urban desert, bringing austere
spirituality back to a world which appeared to have lost its soul—though this
latter is a fringe phenomenon; the general keynote is nobility, restraint,
quiet consideration for others.

 
          
And
now he holds up a notice.

 
          
I IMPLY NOTHING. PAY NO ATTENTION TO MY
PRESENCE. KINDLY GET ON DOING YOUR OWN THINGS. I CANNOT EXPLAIN TILL 2000.

 
          
He
holds it up for a whole day, looking not exactly angry, but slightly pained.
The whole world, hearing of it, sighs with joy at his modesty, his
self-containment, his reticence, his humility. This must be the promised 1995
message, two years late (or two years early; obviously he still has a long way
to come). Now he is Oracle; he is the Millennium. This place is
Delphi
.

           
The orbiting laboratories run into
more difficulties with their tachyon research; but still funds pour into them,
private donations too on an unprecedented scale. The world strips itself of
excess wealth to strip matter and propel it over the interface between
sub-light and trans-light.

 
          
The
development of closed-cycle living pods for the carriers of those tachyon
receivers to the stars is coming along well; a fact which naturally raises the
paradoxical question of whether his presence has in fact stimulated the
development of the technology by which he himself survives. We at the National
Physical Laboratory and at all other such laboratories around the world are
convinced that we shall soon make a breakthrough in our understanding of
time-reversal—which, intuitively, should connect with that other universal
interface in the realm of matter, between our world and the tachyon world—-and we
feel too, paradoxically, that our current research must surely lead to the
development of the VSTM which will then become so opportunely necessary to us,
for reasons yet unknown. No one feels they are wasting their time. He is the
Future. His presence here vindicates our every effort—even the blindest of
blind alleys.

 
          
What
kind of Messiah must he be, by the time he enters the VSTM? How much charisma,
respect, adoration and wonder must he have accrued by his starting point? Why,
the whole world will send him off! He will be the focus of so much collective
hope and worship that we even start to investigate Psi phenomena seriously: the
concept of group mental thrust as a hypothesis for his mode of travel—as though
he is vectored not through time of 4-space at all but down the waveguide of
human will-power and desire.

 
          
(2001)

 
          
The
millennium comes and goes without any revelation. Of course that is
predictable; he is lagging by a year or eighteen months. (Obviously he can’t
see the calibrations on his instruments; it was his choice—that was his way to
keep sane on the long haul.)

 
          
But
finally, now in the autumn of 2001, he holds up a sign, with a certain quiet
jubilation:

WILL I LEAVE 1985 SOUND IN WIND & LIMB?

           
Quiet jubilation, because we have
already (from his point of view) held up the sign in answer:

yes
!
yes
!

           
We’re all rooting for him
passionately. It isn’t really a lie that we tell him. He did leave relatively
sound in wind and limb. It was just his mind that was in tatters. . . . Maybe
that is inessential, irrelevant, or he wouldn’t have phrased his question to
refer merely to his physical body.