No Enemy but Time (36 page)

“An intertemporal communicator,” the physicist replied. “I call it a transcordion, though, because that's catchier.”

Joshua lowered his feet from the desk and studied the instrument. It appeared quite simple. It had a keyboard something like a typewriter's and a display area where messages could appear.

“All right. I give up. What are we supposed to
do
with them?” Blair asked Kaprow.

“Communicate, of course. Go ahead and exchange a few messages. It'll make you both feel better.”

“Oh, I daresay.”

“You know how to type, don't you?”

“Two-finger hunt-and-peck. In the early days of the National Museum I was my own bloody secretary—reports to the government, requests for funds, all that sort of rot. I vowed to give up typing forever. Now, for God's sake,
this
.”

“Send Joshua a message.”

“What do I want to say?” He pondered the problem.

As he pondered, Joshua decided to plunge. “
Now is the time,
” he typed, “
for all old men to fade
from the dreams of their dotage.
”

Blair received the message and pointed his chin at Joshua. “Are you referring to me?”

“Touch the key marked
Clear
and send him a reply,” Kaprow urged the Great Man.

His naked forehead furrowed nearly to his crown, Blair complied: “
Old dreamers never fade, they
just fossilize.
”

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“
Fossil lies are the stock and trade of fading paleontologists.
”

“The hell you say.” Blair played the transcordion to this effect: “
Desist and decamp, Joshua Kampa.

Josh me no more, I pray.
”

Joshua responded, “
A prayer from Blair is hardly fair. It
'
s not the Darwinian Way.
”

Aloud the Great Man said, “Rotten doggerel. And what does it prove, Dr. Kaprow? That fifteen feet apart we can send and receive like genuine radio men?”

Kaprow sat down on the edge of his desk and folded his arms across his belly. “It proves they're operating, Dr. Blair. They'll do just as well when you're separated by time as well as space. Every set of transcordions shares a crystallographic harmony that's independent of temporal considerations. They'd interresonate even if we sent Joshua to, God forbid, the Precambrian—so long as we didn't displace him spatially, too. Then we'd have to put up with a radio delay like those familiar to astronauts. Between a Now and a Then that are spatially congruent, though, the transcordions provide virtually instantaneous communication.”

“Does ‘instantaneous’ mean anything under such circumstances?” Joshua asked.

“Call it a metaphor, then. The transcordions operate on a principle of physical correspondences rather than on the doubtful proposition of simultaneity. Simultaneity's an assumption of no real usefulness when you're dealing with persons sundered from each other by time. By definition, the past and the present do not, and cannot, coincide.”

Joshua said, “Or they'd be the same thing.”

Kaprow accepted Joshua's remark with a distracted nod. “However, in another sense, perhaps they are.”

“Oh, God,” Blair interjected. “One hand clapping.”

“No, don't worry. I'm not going to go Zen on you just yet. The instantaneousness I'm talking about derives from a metaphorical simultaneity based on the concord between the time-displaced receiver and its mate. In a physical dimension about which we are pathetically ignorant, the past does indeed run parallel to the present.”

Joshua slid his transcordion across the desk to Kaprow, who picked it up and fondled it absent-mindedly. If the past and the present ran parallel to each other, why, damn it all, they
were
simultaneous. At least insofar as Joshua could get a grip on the matter. What good was a metaphor that muddled your metaphysics past all rational recourse? In comparison, one hand clapping was altogether comprehensible....

“Wait a minute,” Joshua cried. “Time travel involves movement in space, too, doesn't it?”

“Of course it does. Every particle of matter travels along a world line consisting of three dimensions in space and one in time. Once we've transferred the physical components of White Sphinx to the Lake Kiboko Protectorate, Joshua, and once you've harnessed yourself to the Backstep Scaffold, we'll reverse the equations of motion for the finite region of space enclosing you. Then we'll transport that region backward along its various world lines to the destination dictated by your dreamfaring.”

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“My spirit-traveling, you mean.”

“The terminology's of no consequence. The dreamfarer is himself the key to the journey, because time, like our universe, is an attribute of consciousness. In fact, it's possible that it has no significant meaning apart from consciousness. White Sphinx cannot shift inanimate objects—these transcordions, for instance—into the past without the intervention of a living psyche.”

The workshop, with its corrugated walls and cold concrete floor, its high fluorescent tubes and hanging pulleys, its snakelike electrical cables and blocky machine presses, seemed more than an ocean away from the grasslands, rhino wallows, and wattle huts of East Africa. Indeed, it was. It was a little cathedral to human progress, a memorial to the evolution of insight and ingenuity. It was a starting place. Joshua was not sure, however, that he liked it very much.

“Listen,” he said. “I've been thinking about this, about my ... my
physical
displacement into the past.”

“That's natural enough,” Kaprow said. “And?”

“I'll be going back to the general vicinity of Lake Kiboko's eastern shore almost two million years ago.”

“The site of our most productive digs,” Blair put in.

“Okay. But I'm going to end up in an ancient Africa that occupies the same space-time coordinates as present-day Africa. Have I got that right, Dr. Kaprow?”

“Pretty much. I won't quibble with your construction of the matter.”

“How?” Joshua demanded. “How does that happen? Our sun, the solar system, the whole damn galaxy—they're
moving
, aren't they?”

“Right. At a speed of approximately six hundred million miles a year, foot to the floorboard.”

“Then to what goddamn East African Pleistocene will I really be going? It won't be the same one that existed two million years ago. The Earth supporting that geological epoch no longer exists. That Earth is a ghost-Earth a giga-zillion miles behind us somewhere, and there's no way to set me down on it without some sort of zippy, faster-than-light contraption. Right?”

“Right,” Kaprow acknowledged.

“Well, I don't think that"—he nodded at the buslike vehicle beside Blair—"qualifies. In fact, I'm sure it doesn't. So where the hell exactly am I going to end up?”

Blair's expression betrayed surprise, dismay, chagrin. Joshua's objections, as Joshua himself could see, were ones that he had never considered. The idea that time travel has a spatial dimension was a novelty to him, a revelation. It gave the paleontologist pause. If Joshua did not emerge from Kaprow's machine into a primeval world of hominids, dinotheres, and antlered giraffes, but instead into a formless void like the clock tick before Creation, Blair had no hope of obtaining any concrete proof of his theories about human origins. Further (no small consideration), Joshua might gasp for breath, draw none, and die. Was it possible that Blair had delivered his developing third-world country into the arms of the Americans for a trade-off of dubious long-term benefit? Had he been duped?

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“Listen,” said Kaprow, addressing both men. “My previous work—some of it in West Germany, so that I know I'm not dealing solely with a local phenomenon—has demonstrated that common to every Earthbound site all along its distribution across the time axis, there's a kind of persistent ... well, call it a geographic memory. That memory, Dr. Blair, is objectifiable. In other words, it's
visitable
.”

“A pseudoscientific rationale for ghosts?”

“For ghosts, hauntings, and a few other supposedly paranormal phenomena. If calling that rationale

‘pseudoscientific’ pleases you, be my guest.” He crossed the workshop and removed the transcordion from Blair's hands. “The point is that Joshua is already psychically geared to a specific set of these geographic memories. When we drop him back to the Pleistocene—with his active cooperation—he'll find himself in a physical dimension congruent with that epoch as it actually occurred. Joshua's name for what he does in his dreams—spirit-traveling—is a good name for what White Sphinx is all about, too.

Like my term dreamfaring, though, it
does
ignore the important aspect of bodily displacement. But there's really no reason to—”

“We'll be installing him in a bloody
diorama
of the Pleistocene! A simulacrum of East Africa two million years ago! That's not time travel, Kaprow—that's a contemptible fraud!”

Kaprow's eyes seemed to bob in their almost transparent whites. “That's what my government thought, too. To begin with.”

“Until they discovered they could sell Zarakal a worthless bill of goods for a couple of military bases.

That's what you're trying to say, isn't it?”

“You're also receiving several hundred million dollars of direct American aid. That played a rather substantial role in President Tharaka's decision to permit the bases, wouldn't you say? Besides, he'd made up his mind on that point a month or two before White Sphinx was part of your working vocabulary. We're gravy, Joshua and I. Why are you making ugly accusations?”

“Gravy or no gravy, Kaprow, it doesn't forgive the duplicity of this diorama business.”

“Please listen to me, Dr. Blair. Joshua may be going back to a ‘diorama’ of the Pleistocene, or a

‘simulacrum,’ to use another of your words, but it's going to be a
living
diorama, a
perfect
simulacrum.”

The Great Man's forehead wrinkled skeptically.

“Time travel as H. G. Wells envisioned it is an utter impossibility. The future is forever inaccessible because it hasn't happened yet. It has no pursuable resonances. The past is accessible only because of adepts like Joshua here, a person whose collective unconscious—whose
psyche
, if you prefer—establishes an attunement to a particular place at a particular time. This is an extremely rare talent.”

“Curse,” Joshua said.

“All right, curse. I'm afraid I agree with you. But it permits time travel of a vivid secondary sort, and it's
not
to be spurned as either worthless or trivial.”

“A dream fossil is a worthless fossil, Kaprow.”

“Dr. Blair, you should count yourself lucky that one of the people afflicted with this curse—I know of
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only three others, although worldwide there may be a few hundred—happens to be a young man with an attunement to the time and place of your own researches. Had his spirit-traveling taken him to the Trojan War, say, I'd probably be talking to a high-ranking classicist from Asia Minor. And you could have kissed this entire project goodbye.”

“Name another,” Joshua said.

“Another what?”

“Another person afflicted with the curse.”

“Well, I'm one, I'm afraid.” Kaprow pulled a folding chair away from the desk and sat down in it with his face in profile to the other men. “The first I ever knew to exist. That's why I've made a career of trying to harness the energy of my dreams.” He chuckled glumly. “Even convinced the Pentagon there was a valuable military application for my work. Believed it myself.”

“Oh? And what was that?”

“Well, Dr. Blair, the introduction of agents—call them saboteurs, if you want—into the time flow downriver from the present. To warn of the attack on Pearl Harbor, say, or to prevent the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Or, somewhat closer to home, to dispatch murderers like Idi Amin and Pol Pot even before they come to power.”

“That's rather grandiose, isn't it? Not to mention irresponsible. Those ‘cures’ would invariably trigger events impossible to anticipate. The results might prove worse than the original diseases.”

“You're correct in theory, of course.”

“And in fact?”

“Time travel of that effective sort is out of the question. We can go back to a past exactly like our real past, but because it's a projection, or a resonance, of an inaccessible reality, we're powerless to bring about changes in our consensus present. It's a vantage without teeth.”

“I'll be damned if I care for it, Kaprow. We'll be sending young Joshua here into a landscape of phantoms.”

“They'll have teeth, though. He'll perceive them to be every bit as real as himself.”

The paleontologist shook his massive head, shifted his feet among the cables on the concrete floor.

“In one sense, Dr. Blair, what we must accept is better than the alternative you seem to desire. It would be folly to send a contemporary human being to a crucial juncture in the evolution of our species—the old story of the time traveler shooting one of his ancestors. Joshua could conceivably disrupt the course of evolution, bequeathing to our conjectural present a world in which humanity never quite arose from its hominid forebears.”

“I'll be careful. Word of honor.”

“But by sending him to a perfect simulacrum of the Pleistocene,” the physicist continued, “we sidestep the Grandfather Paradox without sacrificing the
concept
of time travel. In my opinion, Dr. Blair, what
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White Sphinx has accomplished is a small miracle. Not only do we have our cake, we eat it too. We can visit our ancestors with impunity.”