Split Second (22 page)

Blake thought that it was, although he also decided he would
never fully grasp how this worked. That no one ever would.

He glanced at Walsh and he could tell the physicist was ecstatic.
He was receiving the kind of answers to fundamental questions of physics the
likes of which might be revealed only once in a generation, if that.

“All of this may be fascinating,” continued Knight. “But also
a potential problem for us. Because when you alter the timeline, the universe
makes as few changes as possible. You have two phones, but everything else
remains unchanged.”

“Right,” said Blake. “You just change a name, the rest of the
novel is untouched and unfolds exactly as before.”

“Yes. A tiny ripple is created exactly where you changed
history, but the rest of the mighty river rages on, unchanged. Just because a
split second of history is wiped out when I send my phone back, everything else
in the universe, not directly influenced by this event, goes forward the same
way it did.”

“So you send your phone back a split second,” said Jenna,
“and the universe starts over from this point. But if a man had an orgasm
during the forty-five microsecond period that got erased, when the universe
goes forward again, he’ll have the exact same orgasm, and the exact same sperm
will outcompete all the others in a race to the egg.”

Knight’s mouth dropped open. “That’s right,” he said. “Great
example to really drive the concept home. Although I must say it isn’t exactly
the first one most people think of,” he added in a way that made it clear this
was an understatement. “But unless the phone I sent back smacks the man in the head
when he’s about to . . . ejaculate . . . his ejaculation, and everything else
in the universe, would unfold the same way.”

“So why is this a potential problem for you?” asked Blake.

“I’ll have to explain with more examples. Say it’s eleven
a.m., and I program my device to send my phone back an hour in time, exactly
when the clock strikes noon. Noon arrives and the device sends it back to
eleven. So the me at eleven now has two phones, and the universe does a restart
from there. The old future no longer exists. But . . .” he paused once again
for effect, “because the rest of the universe unfolds as before, my original
phone is still in the chamber, and the device is still programmed to send it back
at noon. That hasn’t changed. So even though I now have two phones, if I do
nothing, the computer will send the original phone back
again
.”

“But once you see you already have two phones,” said Blake,
“you can just cancel these instructions.”

“Easy to do when you have an hour to play with,” said Knight.
“But in forty-five microseconds you don’t have
time
to cancel your instructions. So boom, you have two cell
phones, and in the new reality you continue to have two, no matter what else
happens. But the time machine exists in this new reality, cocked and ready to
go. So you move forward forty-five millionths of a second and, boom, the button
is triggered again, and an instant earlier you now have
three
phones. And
these
three are here to stay on the new timeline, no matter what happens. But then,
boom, the machine is triggered again and an instant earlier, now you have
four.”

There was a long, stunned silence in the motel room.

Knight waited patiently for his audience to wrap their minds
around this.

“So it isn’t just a duplication machine,” said Blake finally.
“It’s a duplication machine that makes infinite copies.”

“Yes, in theory. Fortunately, in practice, here is
what happens: The original phone sent back ends up fifty-eight feet away from
itself, on its own private real estate. But the
second
time the original phone is sent back, the second time it
runs through the loop, the phone arrives at the precise location in space as the
first time it was sent back. While this could result in the mother of all
explosions, as Jenna suggested, it doesn’t. Nuclear repulsion prevents this.
Matter
exerts such a strong repulsive force that other matter trying to occupy the
exact same space is deflected away to a more receptive location. Like forcing
two opposing magnets together. The instant you let go, they will push each
other away. The third time through the loop, the new incoming phone has to be
deflected even farther away, since it has to bypass two phones. And so on.

“Eventually, the phone has to be
deflected such a great distance from its arrival coordinates that time travel
stops working. The system doesn’t have the energy to send something through
time that has to be deflected so far away. Which is why your phone can’t
materialize in a wall or a mountain. For a wall, it will take the path of least
resistance and appear just beside the wall, in open space. For a mountain,
assuming no open space is near enough, time travel just won’t work.”

“So eventually the endless loop
stops,” said Jenna, “but how many phones do you end up with before this
happens?”

Knight shrugged. “I’d have to do the math, but basically you
can fill a space about eighty times the size of your time machine. So I can send
whatever fits inside my—call it a large suitcase-sized device—and fill a space about
eighty times this much volume with phones before time travel fails.”

“So there isn’t a way to just make a single copy?” asked Blake.

“No, there is. You can make as many as you’d like. Humans can’t
operate at the microsecond level, but computers can. So I have the computer
send the phone back forty-five microseconds. From a location I would call the
sending station
. At the receiving
station the phone appears in the past. Now there are two phones, fifty-eight
feet apart. The receiver is rigged so that the instant a sensor records the
phone has appeared, it signals the sending station, fifty-eight feet distant, to
abort sending the original phone back. So what happens in practice is you send
the phone back, get two phones, and then turn the system off.”

Blake shook his head. “How can any of this even be possible?”
he asked. “How can the universe work this way?”

“How can anything be possible?” replied Knight. “How did our
universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each with hundreds of
billions of stars, arise from a single point smaller than an atom?”

“This has been fascinating . . .
Edgar
,” said Jenna. “Truly. But no more time travel theory. Let’s
get to the part where Nathan comes in. Why is he dead? Why have we been
hunted?”

Knight sighed. “I understand your impatience, Jenna, I really
do. But I promise you, I’m almost there.”

38

Blake had studied Edgar Knight ever
since his video image had appeared on the Best Border Inn’s television, trying
to employ what he had learned about reading body language while taking
specialized courses at Fort Benning. This was not an exact science, in the best
of times, and it was made harder by the fact that his mind kept either getting
blown by the utterly fantastic nature of Knight’s revelations, or getting fried
as he tried to understand concepts out of his depth, which required a diagram,
at minimum, to truly understand.

Even so, he believed that much of
what the man was saying was the truth. He seemed genuine. He didn’t come across
as hiding an evil or sadistic streak. At least not in a way that was obvious.
But innate human nature could be hidden, and truth skillfully adhered to yet distorted
at the same time. So the jury was very much out on the man.

As for Jenna, she had stab wounds to
her psyche that couldn’t be more raw, and Blake could tell she was desperate to
uncover Knight as a villain, as someone against whom she could target her
venom, extract her revenge.

And poor Dan Walsh. Blake still
believed asking him to sit out this call had been the right choice, but the man
was jumping out of his skin he was so eager to join in.

Now that he thought of it, it was lucky
the physicist
wasn’t
involved. Blake
could only imagine how long the call would take, and how much further over his
head it would get, if Walsh and Knight were allowed to discuss these advances in
scientific depth.

“At first we thought time travel was
utopia,” continued Edgar Knight, his pocked face slightly tilted and his dark
blue eyes gleaming. “The answer to the world’s prayers. Take nearly infinite
dark energy, harness it to push something through higher dimensions, just a
hair, and end up with a matter generator. A matter duplicator. Think of all the
good it could do humanity.”

“Why do I have the feeling there’s
a
but
coming?” said Jenna.

“Because there is. Nearly free
duplication, and the ability to make massive quantities of whatever you want,
has a dark side as well, as do most things. Markets would collapse. Gold bars
could be duplicated until they filled stadiums. Diamonds could become as common
as sand. Oil and Rolex watches. Rare stamps. And most disruptive of all,
computer chips and electronics.”

Knight cleared his throat. “Imagine
that Apple releases its next great electronic gadget that it’s spent billions
developing,” he continued, “or Intel a chip it’s spent
tens of billions
to develop. And then, boom, a single one is
purchased and duplicated millions and millions of times over a few day period, at
virtually no cost, since the energy used is siphoned from a nearly infinite pool.
Why purchase when you can pirate? When you can duplicate?”

 
“And why kill yourself trying to innovate when
you know you’ll just be pirated?” said Blake.

“Exactly,” said Knight. “But most ominous
of all is the production of super pure uranium. Uranium enrichment is
difficult, time-consuming, and a key step in the construction of nuclear bombs.
The difficulty of obtaining this enriched element is the only thing that keeps
every terrorist on the planet from having their own nuke—and let me tell you,
they wouldn’t hesitate to use them. But what if a microscopic bit of enriched
uranium could be turned into a
mountain
in a single day?” He paused to let this sink in. “What about heroin? LSD?
Difficult to manufacture chemical toxins?”

Blake had been thinking this truly
was utopia, that the world would adjust, economies would adjust, and that the
good outweighed the bad—until Knight had mentioned uranium. Blake had dealt
with the fanatics enough to know that if they could magically duplicate weapons
and uranium the human race would be extinct soon afterward. He was beginning to
see what the fuss was about.

“I’ll give you one last example,”
said Knight, “a theoretical non-nuclear explosive. One that some believe could ultimately
prove more dangerous than uranium if duplicated in the device. Carbon can form
bonds at a number of different angles. In diamonds, for instance, the carbon
atoms are linked by bonds angled at one hundred and nine degrees. But it’s
possible to force carbon into even tighter, ninety-degree angles. Possible, but
brutally difficult. So you can synthesize a cube of carbon, with eight carbon
atoms each forming a vertex of the cube. This is called
cubane
. This molecule is far and away the highest energy form of
carbon and is under a tremendous amount of strain. Add in some nitrogen and
oxygen in the right places and you get a wonder explosive. Octa-nitro-cubane,”
he said, emphasizing each syllable.

“The problem is,” he continued, “chemical
synthesis to get the tiniest whiff of this substance is a forty-step process,
and most of these steps are treacherous. Despite efforts in military labs for
years, no one has been able to synthesize enough octa-nitro-cubane to even test
it, which is what has kept this molecule theoretical for so long.”

“Until now,” said Blake. “Now you
could whip up a mountain of it in no time.”

“I’m
afraid so,” said Knight solemnly.
“The more we thought about the
potential to use duplication for ill,” he continued, “the more Lee Cargill and
I decided we had to go even blacker. We had to enlist President Janney’s
support to make Q5 the ultimate stealth program, and to ensure this discovery
never saw the light of day. Not easy, given the temptations of unlimited
wealth. But we agreed we would use this discovery to help fight terror. To
duplicate gold and diamonds to buy weapons for third world fighters helping us
in the global conflict. And we formed another shell company that claims to
specialize in the manufacture of drugs that pharmaceutical companies have given
up on, simply because they can’t find a way to make them.”

“Is that common?” said Blake.

“It isn’t uncommon,” replied
Knight. “There are drugs that are extremely effective, but turn out to be
impossible to scale up, to make in quantity. Many decades ago a highly
effective anti-cancer drug was discovered, Taxol, that could only be obtained
from the bark of the Pacific yew tree, killing the tree in the process. After
twenty years of effort by chemists, and hundreds of millions of dollars
invested, a process was finally found to make the drug from the needles of the
tree rather than the bark. Ultimately, years later, a synthetic route was
discovered so that chemists could synthesize this molecule on their own, without
need of the tree.”

Blake rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“So you’re saying you go to companies and say, give us your wonder drugs that
you can’t make, and we’ll supply them for you?”

“Exactly. We can’t tell them how we
do it, of course. But we take the drug and allow runaway time travel, runaway
duplication, to take its course. The companies can’t argue with our success and
assume we’ve come up with some sort of super-secret miracle chemical process.”

“But if you send something back
repeatedly,” said Blake, a disturbed look on his face, “aren’t you resetting
the universe tens of thousands of times? Millions? Just to scale up a drug.”

Knight shrugged. “Yes. But this has
almost no impact on the rest of reality. You can try a thousand different names
for a character in your novel, but it has little impact on the novel. The
reader doesn’t know, or care, that there are nine hundred and ninety-nine
versions that led to the final name. Versions that no longer exist.”

Knight opened his mouth to continue
when Jenna interrupted.

“You said you were getting to where
Nathan comes in,” she said icily. “That was five minutes ago.”

“Just a little more background and
we’re there,” said Knight. “So we established our new Black Ops group,” he
continued hurriedly, “so secretive it made Area 51 look like public access
television. And in addition to using the device for what we considered noble
purposes, we had to make sure no one else ever developed the capability. The US
did the same in the early days of the atom bomb. Imagine after World War II
some college graduate student publishing easy-bake oven instructions for how to
make a nuke—instructions that actually worked. You think the government
wouldn’t move mountains to suppress it?” Not waiting for the obvious answer he
added, “And rightly so.”

Knight sighed. “So we monitored the
leading physicists of our generation,” he said, with an expression suggesting
he felt guilty about doing this. “Hundreds of men and women around the globe we
thought might have the ability to one day stumble upon time travel—or duplication,
if you will—on their own. I’m not proud of this. But in our defense, we had
computers monitoring for key words, so human eyes never invaded privacy unless
we had reason to worry someone had replicated my work. Again, imagine if this
were published and everyone in the world began working on it?”

Jenna nodded at this revelation,
now knowing how Nathan had come into the picture, but didn’t interrupt.

“A year ago,” continued Knight, “I
learned that Cargill had gone off the reservation. He was using the technology
to enrich himself, to gather power. He had become unstable. I confronted him on
this, and he tried to have me killed. The only thing that saved me is that I
had confided in several of his team, who had seen the evidence of this
themselves. He couldn’t be trusted with the technology. I tried to go to the
president, but Cargill had beaten me to it, painting
me
as the one who had gone off the reservation.”

Blake considered. He was an avid
fan of the Marvel universe, and this sounded a lot like a Hydra, Shield
situation. Two organizations that would ultimately be bitter rivals initially
housed together.

“So we broke off from Cargill, literally
and figuratively. I took a number of people with me, and a number of my devices.
I duplicated enough wealth to build a world-class think tank, and a world-class
team of mercenaries, and keep it all private. But Cargill is intent on finding
and destroying me, because he knows I’ll never stop trying to do the same to
him.”

Knight nodded slowly to his unseen
audience. “At long last, Jenna, we’re getting to you. Fast forward to a few
nights ago. Nathan Wexler e-mailed a summary of his findings to Dan Walsh at
UCLA. And Cargill’s computer issued an alarm that was loud enough to wake the
dead. Because Dr. Wexler didn’t just
conjecture
about time travel. He didn’t just claim to have a groundbreaking theory. No, he
wrote the magic words:
forty-five point
one five microseconds
! No way he arrives at this precisely correct figure
if his theory is wrong.”

“Okay, so that would explain why Cargill
sent a team to Nathan’s house,” said Blake. “But if it was all about suppression,
why not destroy everything immediately and kill Dr. Wexler? Why take the drive
and kidnap the man?”

“Because it’s not only about suppression.
Not in this case. Dr. Wexler arrived at the forty-five microsecond figure from
theory
alone. This is
huge
. Extraordinary! Cargill and I would
both give our arms and legs to get a look at it. Who knows what vistas this
might open up?”

“Why is that such a big deal?” said
Blake. “You’ve already perfected your device.”

“I told you I’m an experimentalist.
Not a theoretician. I designed my device based on experiments and intuition,
and discovered that I had sent something back forty-five microseconds. But Nathan
Wexler
derived
this period of time. He
understood
this at a fundamental,
mathematical level. This could revolutionize the process. Who knows what insights
it could give us? I made the system work, but I was driving blind. It’s like the
difference between solving a complex equation using the guess-and-check method,
and using a tool like calculus.”

Knight couldn’t contain his
excitement. “This is exactly analogous to the Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell
situation,” he said, his eyes as wide as a kid in a candy store. “With me as
Faraday and Nathan Wexler as Maxwell.”

“Is that supposed to mean something
to us?” said Blake.

The question visibly pulled Knight
out of his own world and back to sobriety. “Einstein was known to have
photographs of only three scientists hanging on his study wall,” he explained,
“Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell. Until I came along,
Michael Faraday was the greatest experimentalist in history. He had almost no
formal mathematics education, yet his experiments with electricity and
magnetism paved the way for the electric motor, and the marriage of electricity
and technology.”

Knight paused. “But as amazing as
this feat was, Maxwell took this to an entirely new level. He was able to
translate Faraday’s experiments into
theory
.
Into a set of equations that showed that electricity, magnetism, and light were
manifestations of the same phenomenon, and which predicted the existence of
radio waves. His genius, his theoretical insight, paved the way for every major
discovery in modern physics, including relativity and quantum mechanics, which
in turn were the basis for a huge percentage of modern technology.”

Blake glanced at Dan Walsh, whose
nod confirmed the accuracy of what Knight was saying.

“I’m proud to play the role of Michael
Faraday,” said Knight. “But a few nights ago, Nathan Wexler likely emerged as
the next
James Clerk Maxwell
. Who
knows where his insights might lead?”

“Okay,” said Jenna evenly, the
typical disdain in her voice blunted by the unmistakable esteem in which this
man held Nathan, “so Cargill was drooling when he read Nathan’s message.
Because he knew Nathan had hit the jackpot. So he sent a team to our house. But
how did
you
find out about it?”