It is a fact that Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25 (in 1642). I mentioned this one evening when Jackie and I were with a group of friends in a Sonora bar. After some debate, we decided that the date is too much to be a coincidence: Providence is trying to tell us something.
We finally agreed that the time has come for a change. We’re all part of Western scientific civilization, after all, and things have been dominated for too long by traditions rooted in ancient Palestinian mysticism. In future, therefore, we decided that as far as we are concerned, the customary holiday season celebrates the birthday of the intellectual founder of mathematical, analytical method. Further, to commemorate the formulation of his famous universal law, the name of the feast shall be changed from “Christmas” to “Gravitational mass,” or, more simply, “Gravmas.”
Who knows?—the whole thing could spread like wildfire. Two thousand years from now, it might form the basis for the philosophy and worldview of a whole, new global culture, which by that time may revolve around a race of supertech, spacegoing Chinese. . . .
* * *
“Is that you, Li?” Cheng Xiang called, looking up from the notescreen propped against his knee. He had been amusing himself with a few tensor integrals to clear his mind before taking his morning coffee.
The sounds of movement came again from upstairs. Moments later, his ten-year-old son appeared, floating down the staircase on an anti-g disk. “Good morning, father.”
“Merry Gravmas.”
“And to you.” Li hopped off the disk and stood admiring the decorations that the family robot had put up overnight. There were paper chains hanging in hyperbolic catenary curves and sinusoids, Gaussian distribution bells, and pendulums wreathed in logarithmic spirals. In the corner opposite the total-sensory cassette player, there stood a miniature apple tree with binary stars on top, a heap of gaily wrapped gifts around its base, and its branches adorned with colored masses of various shapes, a string of pulsing plasma glows, and striped candies shaped like integral signs. “It looks nice,” Li said, eyeing the presents. “I wonder what Santa Roid has brought this year.”
“You’ll have to wait until your brother and sister get here before you can open anything,” Xiang told him. “What are they doing?”
“Yu is sending off a last-minute Gravmas present to a schoolfriend over the matter transmitter to Jupiter. Yixuan is helping Mother program the autochef to cook the turkey.”
“Why does everyone in this family always have to leave everything until the last minute?” Xiang grumbled, setting down the screen and getting up. “Anyone would think it wasn’t obvious that the ease of getting things done varies inversely as the square of procrastination.”
Li walked over to the window and gazed out at Peking’s soaring panorama of towers, bridges, terraces, and arches, extending away all around, above, and for hundreds of meters below. “How did Gravmas start?” he asked his father.
“Hmph!” Xiang snorted as he moved to stand alongside the boy. “Now isn’t that typical of young people today. Too wrapped up in relativistic quantum chromodynamics and multidimensional function spaces to know anything about where it came from or what it means. It’s this newfangled liberal education that’s to blame. They don’t teach natural philosophy any more, the way we had to learn it.”
“Well, that kind of thing does seem a bit quaint these days,” Li said. “I suppose it’s okay for little old ladies and people who—“
“They don’t even recite the laws of motion in school every morning. Standards aren’t what they used to be. It’ll mean the end of civilization, you mark my words.”
“You were going to tell me about Gravmas . . .”
“Oh, yes. Well, I presume you’ve heard of Newton?”
“Of course. A newton is the force which, acting on a mass of one kilogram, produces an acceleration of one meter per second per second.”
“Not a newton. The Newton. You didn’t know that Newton was somebody’s name?”
“You mean it was a person?”
Xiang sighed. “My word. You see—you don’t know anything. Yes, Newton was the messiah who lived two thousand years ago, who came to save us all from irrationality. Today is his birthday.”
Li looked impressed. “Say, what do you know! Where did this happen?”
“In a quasi-stable, in a little town called Cambridge, which was somewhere in Britain.”
“That’s in Europe, isn’t it?” Li said.
“Oh, so you do know something.”
“My friend Shao was in Europe last year,” Li went on distantly. “His parents took him on a trip there to see the ruins. He said it was very dirty everywhere, with the streets full of beggars. And you can’t drink the water. It sounds like a strange place for a civilization like ours to have started from.”
“Strange things happen . . .” Xiang thought for a while. “Actually, according to legend, it didn’t really start there.”
“What?”
“Gravmas.”
“How do you mean?”
“Supposedly it was already a holiday that some ancient Western barbarian culture celebrated before then, and we stole it. It was easier to let people carry on with the customs they’d grown used to, you see. . . . At least, that’s how the story goes.”
“I wonder what the barbarian culture was like,” Li mused.
“Nobody’s quite sure,” Xiang said. “But from the fragments that have been put together, it seems to have had something to do with worshiping crosses and fishes, eating holly, and building pyramids. It was all such a long time ago now that—“
“Look!” Li interrupted, pointed excitedly. Outside the window, a levitation platform was rising into view, bearing several dozen happy-looking, colorfully dressed people with musical instruments. The strains of amplified voices floated in from outside. “Carol singers!” Li exclaimed.
Xiang smiled and spoke a command for the household communications controller to relay his voice to the outside. “Good morning!” it boomed from above the window as the platform came level.
The people on board saw the figures in the window and waved. “Merry Gravmas,” a voice replied.
“Merry Gravmas to you,” Xiang returned.
“May the Force be proportional to your acceleration.”
“Are you going to sing us a carol?” Xiang inquired.
“But of course. Do you have a request?”
“No, I’ll leave it to you.”
“Very well.”
There was an introductory bar, and then,
“We three laws of orbiting are,
Ruling trajectories local and far.
Collisions billiard,
Particles myriad,
Planet and moon and star.
O-ooo . . .”
I sometimes suspect that one of the reason writers write is that it gives them an excuse to do the research. In an age when people are constantly being urged to be goal-oriented and efficiency-conscious, and get sent by their firms to seminars to learn how to manage their time, it’s easy to develop a guilt complex over reading anything other than a company procedure manual. But I find the most enjoyable reading is that which is purely for fun or out of curiosity—with no conceivable relevance to making money, furthering one’s career, or with any other such redeeming quality whatsoever. One solution to any residual guilt from company indoctrination is to be a writer. Then it becomes possible to relax and enjoy whatever one pleases, rationalizing it by the thought that “Who knows? I might need if for a book one day.”
I remember once, when I was in my teens, a friend accused me of never being bored by anything—which can be an unforgivable aberration among teenagers. I had never thought about that, but it seemed worth investigating. I resolved, therefore, that to test the allegation, I would force myself to read for one hour on the dullest subject I could think of. I couldn’t think of anything that sounded more dull than Greek architecture, and so, when I was next in the public library, I took down a couple of formidable-looking tomes on the subject and steeled myself. It turned out to be fascinating, and I ended up staying until closing time.
It’s easy to get carried away, sometimes. Voyage From Yesteryear featured a huge, fusion-powered spacecraft, with a population of tens of thousands, that traveled to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us. The entire structure rotated to simulate gravity, and at one point I was writing a part of the story that included a conversation between a boy who was born during the voyage, with no experience of planetary gravity, and his father, who grew up on Earth. To the boy it was self-evident that a thrown baseball moves in a straight line, and the hand of the catcher is carried in a curve by the spin of the ship to intercept it; but the notion of something going up, reversing, and coming down again made no intuitive sense at all. Then, having written that much, I found it difficult to convince myself that a baseball trajectory as seen by somebody on the inside of a spinning structure would look like the curve of one thrown up from the ground on Earth. I spend a whole week deriving from first principles a set of equations to transform curves from fixed to rotating coordinates and drawing graphs of the results—the simulation of “real” gravity turned out to be surprisingly close. Then, of course, I had to write the procedure into computer programs “in case I need to do it again some day” (I never have). That took another week. And after all that, when I finally edited the draft, I deleted the paragraphs in which the conversation took place, because by that time it didn’t seem so important.
The Proteus Operation required a lot of research into modern history and World War II, the beginnings of nuclear physics and the Manhattan Project, and on the biographies of the several real-life people who appeared in the story. There was a six-month gap between my writing the prologue and Chapter One—a result of getting carried away again.
When I was writing Inherit the Stars back in England, I received a lot of help with background material from my customers. One of them was a physicist at Sheffield University, called Dr. Grenville Turner, who used one of our computers to analyze moonrock samples from the Apollo missions. On one occasion, while we were eating lunch on the campus lawns, I mentioned the idea of having the moon captured by the earth, as is described in the book. Gren though for a while as he munched a sandwich, and then said suddenly, “You’re dead! It won’t work.”
“Why not?” I asked him.
“Stromatolites.”
“Never heard of them.”
Stromatolites turned out to be a kind of fossil coral found in Australia that preserves records of the tides from hundreds of millions of years ago. Stromatolites show that lunar tides have existed since the beginnings of Earth’s history, and therefore the moon couldn’t have arrived comparatively recently in the way the book said. I eventually managed to fudge that around in such a way that it actually became supporting evidence for the capture theory, but the reason I mention it here is that it led me off into a new line of research on the ancient Earth and the processes that have shaped it into what it is today. I believe that much of this kind of thing is taught in schools these days, but it was all new and fascinating to me, because, as you may recall, the curriculum that I took hadn’t been updated since the days of King James the whichever. Some other readers may not have met this in school, either. So, for them—or maybe anyone interested in finding out if they can be bored, if it sounds like that kind of subject; but they may get a surprise—here is a distillation from the notes I compiled. They’re not doing anyone much good in the bottom of my filing cabinet.
What do the coastlines of South America and Africa, an Australian aborigine’s fireplace, and earthquakes have to do with the world’s oldest magnetic tape recorder?
The answer to this question provides a good example of how science works, following up every clue, fitting together scraps of seemingly unrelated information, and sometimes turning conventional wisdoms around completely in order to arrive at the right question. It also provides a fascinating insight into some of the processes that have shaped the world on which we live.
The story begins back in the days when it first became possible to construct accurate maps. People began noticing the similarity in shape between the coastlines of South America and Africa, and couldn’t avoid the feeling that the pieces “ought,” somehow, to fit together. The first recorded thought of this kind was voiced by the English philosopher and scientist, Francis Bacon, in 1620. This soon led the more curious among mankind—which of course includes just about every scientist—to ask, “Were South America and Africa ever joined together?” and, “If they were, why aren’t they now?”
A clear answer to the first question required a precise definition, expressible in numbers in the way scientists like, of just what, “joined together” means. The problem is that the coastlines that happen to exist today aren’t really the thing to go by. As a glance at any physical map will show, coastlines are fairly arbitrary and can change beyond recognition with even minor variations in sea level. If all the ice in the Earth’s polar caps and glaciers were to melt, sea level would rise by about two hundred feet, and the large areas that we find plastered with fossil remains of shallow-water animals and plants on what today is dry land testify that this has indeed happened on numerous occasions. Conversely, estimates of the amount of ice that must have existed during the recent Pleistocene ice age suggest that sea level then must have been seven hundred feet lower than today. Hence, we need a more meaningful boundary than contemporary coastlines to define the continents.
For the most part, continents are surprisingly flat on top—which is why small changes in sea level can make such big differences to coastlines—and slope gently out into the oceans to the edge of the continental shelf, which off New York, for example, lies about five hundred feet deep and one hundred miles into the Atlantic. Beyond the shelf, the seabed falls steeply and levels out again at an average depth of ten thousand feet to become the floor of the deep-ocean basins. Somewhere down this “continental slope,” therefore, lies the “true” edge of what constitutes a continent.
A number of best-fit-by-eye attempts were made to match South America and Africa at various depths, and although yielding similar results, they all rested ultimately on the somewhat vague assertion that “it looks about right,” which lacks testable precision and is the kind of thing guaranteed to make scientists uncomfortable. So, in 1955, Sir Edwin Bullard, professor of geophysics at the University of Cambridge, and a research student called Everett, developed a computer program that would calculate a best fit as the solution that gave the minimum area of gaps and overlaps between two corresponding contours anywhere down the continental slopes. The fit that finally met this criterion occurred at the five-hundred fathom (three-thousand-foot) contour, at which depth the average misfit was between fifty and sixty miles. Three small overlap areas occurred: one where the northeast corner of Brazil intruded upon the projecting area of the river Niger, and two submerged areas that lay farther south. All in all, the result was considered excellent. To achieve this fit, South America needed to be rotated through an angle of 57 degrees about the point on the earth’s surface at latitude 40 degrees north, longitude 30.6 degrees west, which is in the Atlantic, close to the western Azores. Try it on a map and see.
What this says is that at this depth the continents match in a way that seems too close to be explained away by coincidence. The operative word here, however, is “seems”—coincidences do happen. To elevate the idea above pure speculation, we need some corroborating evidence. The problem is similar to that of deciding if the two doors of a closet have been cut from the same piece of timber, in which case the obvious thing to look at first is the grain pattern across the join. It’s important, of course, to distinguish between similarities that mean something and others that don’t, such as scratches made after the doors were hung in place. In the case of continents, an example of the latter would be the evidence of extensive rain forests which geologists a few million years from now will observe in the basins of the Amazon and the Congo. Obviously they would be wrong if they inferred from this that the two places had been joined in the twentieth century—the match would be simply the result of similar environments working on similar raw materials.
The true “grain” of continents consists of the mountain belts and old, deep-lying rock strata. When these significant geological formations were distinguished and compared for age and structural characteristics, they showed an extraordinarily good correspondence across the best-fit join selected by the computer analysis. Furthermore, nothing comparable to them appears in the structure of the ocean floor separating the two regions today. Now if somebody observed that the two closet doors matched but the fixed upright strip between them was different, he would conclude that the doors had been cut from the same piece of wood at some time, and the upright inserted between them afterward—it’s the simplest explanation that fits the facts. The same conclusion followed, too, for the continents. Data on the ages of the relevant rock formations indicated that the join had persisted until at least five hundred million years ago. All this was not especially new. As long ago as 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener based his then revolutionary proposal of continental drift on exactly this kind of information, and his work was subsequently expanded by many investigators.
So, we have five hundred million years as an upper limit for the date of separation. How about a lower limit? It turned out that the areas of overlap in the best-fit solution enable a date to be fixed for this, too. Any parts of the continents that overlap must have formed after there was a gap for them to form in. One of these regions was the Niger Delta. The sediments that make up this formation are all younger than fifty million years and extend well over a hundred miles into the Gulf of Guinea. This says that the separation must have been at least this much by that time. To narrow these limits down further, we need to introduce glaciation and ice sheets into our story.
Between 350 and 250 million years ago, the continents of the southern hemisphere were covered extensively by ice. Rocks can be carried over enormous distances by moving ice, and are dumped wherever they happen to have got to when the ice melts—for example, Norwegian rocks carried by the glaciers of the most recent ice age are quite common in parts of Britain. Huge glacial deposits exist today all over eastern Brazil, which appear to have resulted not from the melting of glaciers localized in valleys, but of vast sheets of ice. In some places these deposits are more than two thousand feet thick—about ten times the depth of the deposits left by the recent ice age in Europe. The thrust patterns in the wrinkles and folds of the underlying rock indicate that the ice moved from southeast to northwest, i.e., from somewhere in the direction of the Atlantic. Well, where did all that material come from?
Let’s be scientific and consider the alternatives before jumping to conclusions. Is it possible, for instance, that a large landmass once existed between today’s coast and the continental shelf, which was shoveled up by the ice and carried inland? Not really. All the studies that have been made of glaciation indicate that ice sheets don’t work that way. They scratch and polish existing terrain, and carry away the looser debris, but they don’t grind whole slabs of continent down to nothing. And besides, although one hundred million years sounds a long time, it isn’t anywhere near long enough for that kind of major surgery. Very well, could there have been another continent offshore in what today is the South Atlantic—an “Australantis?” No. This conjecture runs into trouble, too, for despite romantic legends to the contrary, continents don’t sink beneath the sea. Oceanic crust—the material that forms the floors of the ocean basins—is entirely different from continental crust. The floor of the South Atlantic is perfectly normal, which means that any continent that once existed there would somehow have had to transform itself from twenty-five-mile-thick continental crust into five miles of oceanic crust plus twenty miles of upper mantle (the deeper layer that lies beneath the crust all over the earth), or else have disappeared without trace.
So let’s take the simple way out again, and go back to our original idea. If Africa was joined to Brazil at one time, we have a ready-made source for all those Brazilian glacial deposits. What’s more, investigations in western Africa revealed widespread evidence of glacial erosion in an east-west direction—i.e., out into the Atlantic—but very little in the way of subsequent deposits left by melting. And as a clincher, the Brazilian deposits include many erratic blocks of such rock as quartzite, dolomite, and chert, which resemble none of the structures that make up Brazil, but which are common in southwest Africa. Quantitative analysis of the glacial evidence brings the upper limit for the date of separation down from five hundred million years to two hundred million. We still have fifty million years as the lower limit.
During the period that lasted from 135 million to 100 million years ago (Lower Cretaceous), the strips which today form the South American and African coastal regions both consisted of chains of sedimentary basins—low-lying flooded areas where successive layers of rocks were laid down, the types differing as depth and other environmental factors changed. The sequences of the sediments found on both sides of today’s ocean are similar, and bear no resemblance to the basin floor between the continental slopes. And this, of course, is just what would be predicted if both sequences were in fact formed as parts of the same process at a time when the intervening basin didn’t exist. The case seems to be getting stronger. For a better idea of what kind of process this was, we need to turn to biology.
Fossil remains of fish and other organisms preserved in these sediments, particularly the lower layers, include many freshwater species that could never have survived in seawater. This implies that at up to about the same time on both edges of what is today the Atlantic, the water that was laying down the sediments was not ocean. Then, above the freshwater deposits, we find layers of minerals and salts of the kinds left by evaporating seawater, dating from between 110 million and 100 million years ago and again corresponding on both sides. But above the salts the two sequences begin to diverge; and the more recent they get, the more pronounced the differences become.
This is all consistent with the suggestion of the two continents fracturing from each other at about this time and moving apart. The rift valley opening up between them would give us the chain of low-lying basins, with freshwater runoff from the surrounding highlands, accounting for the earlier sedimentation and fossil record. The sea’s eventual penetration of the rift explains the salt deposits, and the progressively diverging layers above the salts testify to gradually differing sequences of events taking place in what were becoming gradually different places.
Thus, the conclusion seems pretty inescapable that not only do continents break up and move, but their voyages can take them vast distances. In fact, the courses they have followed can be charted with surprising accuracy, which brings us to the next set of clues in our scientific detective story. They concern mysteries that other researchers were finding in the natural magnetism of rocks.
The Earth possesses a magnetic field, which behaves as if there were an enormous bar magnet buried beneath the surface, roughly aligned with the rotational axis. From demonstrations at school with iron filings on a sheet of paper, most people are familiar with the “lines of force” that are said to surround a magnet. A typical line of force from the imaginary terrestrial magnet would emerge from its “north” pole, located not far from the geographic pole, curve up out of the atmosphere like an ICBM to flatten out near the equator, and plunge back down again to reenter the surface and terminate at the magnetic south pole. Now, anybody on the Earth’s surface who decides to measure the characteristics of the force lines in his vicinity (our ever-curious scientist, for example) will discover two things: first, they always point the same way, north-south; and second, they intersect the Earth’s surface at an angle that tilts up or down depending which side of the equator he’s on, and which gets larger as he moves farther away from it—hence the “dip” of a compass needle. Thus a compass will tell him not only which direction is north, but also how far north or south of the equator he happens to be. (It won’t tell him anything about how far east or west of anywhere he is; to know that, he must first get curious about clocks.)
Many rocks contain grains of substances that are naturally magnetic. When these rocks form, either by cooling from volcanic lavas or by settling as sediments, these grains tend to align with the Earth’s field. Hence their tiny individual fields all line up the same way and reinforce, giving the rock as a whole a weak but distinct “fossil magnetism.” Measurement of this can determine how far north or south of the equator a rock sample was when it formed, and which way it was lying at the time, while the time itself can be fixed by atomic dating. The mystery was that the early results of such experiments seemed to indicate that the Earth’s magnetic poles had wandered all over the planet—in fact the poles do move to some degree, but the amounts suggested by the new figures were unheard of. Things got worse when comparisons of results seemed to indicate that the poles must have been in different places at the same time!
Then a group of British investigators looked at the problem the other way round: the same results would have been produced if the poles stayed where they were, but the rocks moved around while they were being formed. Interpreting data from their own country in this fashion, they postulated that in the last two hundred million years, Britain has rotated clockwise through thirty degrees and at the same time traveled a considerable distance northward—which tied in well with depictions of a subtropical prehistoric Britain that had emerged from other work. Other scientists found that a similar interpretation could explain data collected in Australia, and before long everyone was doing it.
South America and Africa turned out to have followed a zigzag course which 350 million years ago would have put the South Pole somewhere inside South Africa. This, of course, explains the huge ice sheets that we met earlier. The line splits at around 100 million years ago to mark the point at which the two continents went separate ways, and provides an independent corroboration of the date arrived at previously from other evidence. The continuing movement northward into warmer climatic zones also explains how the older glacial features of Africa came to lie today beneath layers of coarse rock formed from windblown desert sands.
Applying the same process to the other continents leads to the conclusion that they all originated from the breakup of a single supercontinent, which geologists have christened “Pangea.” In Pangea, the east coast of North America fitted against North Africa; Greenland and Newfoundland closed up and fitted with Europe; and Australia, Antarctica, and India were bunched together along the eastern side of Africa. The group of southern continents was separated from Asia by a V-shaped ocean called the Tethys, whose apex lay in the region of the present eastern Mediterranean. The Tethys was squeezed out of existence when India, Arabia, and part of the Middle East hinged northward like a scissor blade and drove underneath Asia to lift up the Tibetan Plateau (although some people think the Black Sea could be a remnant of it.) The dinosaurs could have marched along in an ancient chain of mountains from Poland and Germany, into the Ardennes of northern France, through Cornwall, Brittany, and Ireland, and down the Appalachians without getting a foot wet. These mountains were formed during an even earlier sequence of events that resulted in the coming together of Pangea itself from previously existing continents.
So, what does the aborigine’s fireplace have to do with all this?
When certain kinds of rock are heated to the right temperature, they will, upon cooling again, take on a weak magnetism aligned with the Earth’s field, just like naturally forming rocks. In 1969 a team of geologists and archaeologists from the Australian National University were collecting samples of the hearthstones of ancient aborigine cooking fires. The problem with one particular set of samples, taken from the shore of a dried-up lake called Lake Mungo, was that the direction of magnetization was the wrong way round: what should have been north was south, and vice versa.
The phenomenon of reversed rock magnetism was not in itself new—in fact, the observation that naturally formed rocks were frequently found to be magnetized the wrong way round was one of the things that had aroused interest in rock magnetism in the first place. Attempts to devise various mechanisms of self-reversal to account for this all came to nothing, which led to general acceptance of the only alternative explanation available: that the Earth’s field itself must have reversed. The picture finally put together from the data indicated that the Earth’s field has been reversing itself at irregular intervals and for erratic periods for as far back as reliable measurements can be made—about ten million years—and there’s no reason to suppose that the same thing wasn’t going on before that. Some “flips” lasted for only a few thousand years, while others persisted for over half a million; on average, the Earth’s field seems to have spend about half its time being “right” and the other half “wrong”—which agrees with the observed fact that about half the rock samples studied have reversed magnetism. The significance of the Lake Mungo results was that they show the reversals to have continued into modern times: the samples date from about thirty thousand years ago, which to geologists is only yesterday.
So what?
Well, it leads up to the answer to the second question we started out with which was: If the continents were joined together once, why aren’t they now? In other words, What makes them move apart? To link this back to rock magnetism, we have to move our investigation off the continents and down into the deep-ocean basins.
Nineteenth century sailors were well aware of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a submerged mountain chain, miles high, that runs all the way down the middle of the North and South Atlantic, from far above Iceland (Iceland is a part of it that protrudes above the surface) to the Antarctic. Later surveys revealed that this formation is just part of a network of ocean ridges that encircle the globe and run through every ocean—although not always down the middle. They can be seen clearly on any world map that shows submarine contours.
In 1960, Professor Harry Hess of Princeton University developed the idea that these ridges were the crests of upflowing currents of fluid rock rising and solidifying from deep below the crust. Material from the underlying mantle was flowing upward to form the ridges, and then spreading out sideways, cooling and sinking as it became more dense, to form newly created ocean floors—visualize two Niagaras face to face and flowing backward. Hess came up with a figure of several centimeters a year for the rate at which the ocean floors are spreading away from the ridges. This doesn’t sound much, but it turns out to be sufficient for all of today’s ocean floor to have been created within the last 200 million years, which is less than 5 percent of geological time. This accounted well for other facts that had been coming to light about ocean beds, and which up until then no one had been able to explain. For one thing, the sediment layers on the ocean floors were far thinner than they should have been if the sediments had been accumulating throughout Earth’s history. And for another, no sample of sediment from the seabeds had ever been recovered that was older than 100 million years. Both these results accorded well with the idea of seafloor spreading . . . but it was all very new, and many scientists felt uneasy about it. Something more conclusive was needed.
It came from other scientists who were sailing research ships around the oceans while the debate was in progress, measuring the magnetic fields above seabeds. The results they were getting were peculiar. They discovered distinct zones of strong and weak fields all over the oceans, and the change from one kind to another could occur over a few miles. Furthermore, the zones were not scattered randomly, but formed well-defined stripes, hundreds of miles long, of alternating field strength. In 1963, two researchers at Cambridge University, Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews, connected them with Hess’s ideas and published a short paper that was to mark the beginning of a new era in the Earth sciences.
The Vine-Matthews theory pointed out that if the ocean floors were indeed spreading sideways from the ridges and solidifying from a molten state, the kind of magnetic variations observed would be just what should be expected from the periodic reversals of the Earth’s field. A strip of material emerging along the crestline of a ridge at a time when the Earth’s field was in the same direction as it is today would be magnetized in the “right” direction. At some later time, this strip will have been pushed a distance away from the ridge—although still lying roughly parallel to it—by newer material appearing behind. If the Earth’s field had reversed during this interval, the material currently forming along the crest would be magnetized in the opposite direction. Eventually a whole series of strips would appear, alternately magnetized to either add to or subtract from the Earth’s field, depending on its direction at a given time, and this would result in precisely the kind of pattern found by the survey ships. The pattern would, in effect, constitute a series of time markers written magnetically onto the ocean floors, becoming progressively older with increasing distance from the ridge crests.
If this theory is correct, the sequence of field reversals read from the ocean-floor stripes should tally with that deduced from continental rocks. Subsequent comparisons confirmed this to be the case. Also, the patterns of stripes on opposite sides of the ridges are found to be symmetrical about the crestlines, as would be expected from outward spreading in both directions—in the Atlantic, for example, the pattern east of the ridge runs north-south and is a mirror image of the pattern west of it. And finally, rock and fossil samples brought up from the ocean beds by drilling ships tell a continuous story of the ages of the Earth, just like the exposed strata of a cliff face, such as the Grand Canyon; the difference, however, is that the record on the seabed reads sideways, with the youngest rocks lying closest to the ridges and the oldest thousands of miles away—again, just as the theory predicts.
So there you have it—the world’s oldest magnetic tape recorder. Admittedly its specification might look a little odd to anybody familiar with conventional computer magtapes. A regular magtape, for example, moves at a speed of 45 inches per second against this one’s 0.000000037 inches per second (3 centimeters per year), writes at a data density of 1,600 bits per inch, compared to 0.0000032 (1 bit every five miles), and writes at a speed of 7,200 bits per second, versus 0.00000000000013 (1 bit per 250,000 years). That’s really pretty bad as performance standards go, and I can’t see IBM selling very many. On the other hand, though, we shouldn’t forget its high reliability (at least 200 million years without a breakdown, and almost certainly a lot longer), superb rugged construction (unaffected by burial beneath a few miles of seawater and several billion tons of mud), and state-of-the-art technology (obsoletes all earlier models). Any offers?
This all seems to add up to a fairly satisfying answer to the questions we began with. But as tends to be the case in science, one question answered raises others that weren’t there to begin with. Specifically, in this instance, now that we’ve established the continual creation of new crust at the ocean ridges, we find ourselves forced to ask what happens to it afterward. If it remains in existence indefinitely, the Earth would have to be getting bigger to make room for it. But there are many reasons for believing that the Earth isn’t expanding. Therefore the appearance of new crust at the ridges must be balanced by the disappearance of old crust somewhere else. Where, then, and how, is the old crust disappearing? The answers this time lie in the realm of earthquakes and volcanoes.
Earthquake and volcanic activity is mainly confined to a network of narrow belts encompassing the globe—the familiar ones that run across dry land, plus the ocean ridges, whose activity qualifies as volcanic. These belts divide the surface of the earth into about a dozen irregularly shaped “plates,” ranging in size from the Pacific Plate, almost as large as the ocean, down to the Turkish Plate, not much bigger than Florida, which fit together like an enormous piece of spherical crazy paving. The new science of “plate tectonics” (from a Greek word meaning builder) sees changes in the Earth’s surface features as the results of continuous plate movements. The plates are about forty miles thick and carry the continents with them like lumps of solidified low-density slag that have floated to the top of the denser material beneath. Wegener’s original concept of continental drift is not really accurate in this light; it is the plates that “drift,” and the plate margins that separate them bear no resemblance to the outlines of continents.
The two plates that meet along a plate margin can be moving in any of three ways: away from each other, sideways past each other, or toward each other. Gaps between plates don’t happen; when plates move apart, new material from the mantle below flows upward to form new crust which welds itself onto the trailing edges—this is the process taking place at the ocean ridges. These are called “constructive” margins. Margins that consist of plates slipping past each other are called “transform faults” and account for many of the world’s earthquake belts. The pressure across a transform fault is enormous and causes the plates to weld at the edges, with the result that they become progressively more deformed as the rest of each plate moves on regardless. Eventually something has to give. When the stress exceeds the strength of the rock, the weld fractures and the sides of the fault spring past each other in opposite directions to catch up with their respective plates. The movement may be only a few feet, but it can represent the explosive release in a matter of minutes of stress energy that has been building up for centuries—often, of course, with devastating results. Once the stress has been relieved, the pressure creates a new weld and starts the cycle over again. The San Andreas Fault through San Francisco is a margin of this type—between the Pacific Plate, which is moving northwest, and the American Plate, which isn’t.
The third type of margin occurs where two plates are moving toward each other, and again something has to give. What happens in this situation is that one plate is deflected downward beneath the other and plunges back into the molten material of the mantle whence it came. That’s how old crust is destroyed.
The deepest parts of the oceans are the long, narrow “trenches,” which can extend down to thirty-thousand feet. The trenches mark the margins between colliding plates and result from the bending downward of the surface of one plate as it is forced beneath the other. Examples are the Japan Trench and Marianas Trench in the western Pacific, the Tonga Trench north of New Zealand, the Peru-Chile Trench off the west coast of South America, and the Puerto Rico Trench east of the Caribbean. That’s where old crust is being destroyed. These are called “destructive” margins.
As a map will show, these deep-ocean trenches always lie alongside chains of islands. The islands are formed from the accumulated sediments on the upper surface of the descending plate, which are scraped off as it slides beneath the overriding plate. The friction between the two plates generates sufficient heat to melt the rocks involved in the process, and much of this molten material finds its way back to the surface, making them volcanic island chains. And finally, the plate movements do not occur smoothly, but as alternations of sticking and slipping as was the case with transforms faults; hence, we end up with earthquake-prone volcanic island chains. In fact it was the analysis of earthquake shockwaves and of the heat-flow patterns obtained in the ocean trench regions that enabled this process to be understood to the point that clear profiles can be reconstructed of descending cold slabs of oceanic crust material which today are melting back into the mantle hundreds of miles beneath the surface.
Sometimes two plates meet head-on that happen to be carrying continents on their backs. As we have already seen, continental crust is too light to sink down into the mantle with the descending plate. Instead, it remains on the surface and collides with the other continent to build mountains. Mountains form in long, thin chains because plates collide along long, thin margins. So when India drove underneath Tibet, the continental crust being carried from both directions piled up to form the Himalayas. Africa’s voyage northward drove Italy into Europe like a battering ram to create the Alps, and shocks radiated outward from the impact point to produce effects visible far away today—for example, the shallow folds that form the “Downs” of southern England. Hence, contrary to some ideas that were in vogue early in the century, it doesn’t look as if our planet is destined to be eroded down into an enormous billiard ball. New mountains are being built as quickly as the old ones are being worn away, and they’ll continue to be built for as long as the energy source that drives the plates lasts out.
So, what does drive the plates?
This brings us right up to date and into the area of much of the research going on today. Hess’s original proposal was that the upflowing material at the ridges pushes the plates apart, but later findings have made this improbable, or at least, insufficient in itself. A more recent idea is that deep-seated convection flows in the mantle give rise to horizontal currents beneath the crust that drag the plates with them. Another theory attributes the movements to the release of gravitational energy as the plates slide downward along the gradients between the ridges and trenches. No conclusive choice seems to warrant being singled out at present, but the causes are undoubtedly complex and could turn out to involve all three of these mechanisms and maybe more, perhaps operating in varying degrees in different places.
All in all, we’ve come quite a way from looking at a map of the world and wondering why a couple of coastlines should look vaguely similar, and in the process a fascinating story has unfolded. Who knows what other stories might emerge from the seemingly insignificant things that other scientific detectives are getting curious about today? . . .
Did you know that some points in the sky emit X-ray pulses that flash on and off thirty times a second? . . .
Afterword, 1996
Before the modern picture came together of slow, gradual geological change, the prevailing view was that changes took place in short spans of time, due to catastrophic upheavals that affect the Earth periodically. It could be that we were a bit over-hasty in our rush to do away with catastrophism completely, and that a full account of the conditions we find today requires an element of short-lived, violent cataclysms superposed upon the slowly unfolding record.
In the 1950s, Immanuel Velikovsky published several books claiming that major astronomical and geological changes have taken place within the timescale of recorded human history. His main conclusions, briefly, were that the planet Venus is a young body, not an old one, that originated as a huge comet ejected by Jupiter around 3,500 years ago, and came close to wiping Earth out in a near-collision. In the process, Earth’s axis was shifted and its rotation altered, its surface devastated, climates and seasons changed—all evidenced by revisions to calendars, timekeeping, and star charts introduced among human cultures worldwide, and by geological records.
The scientific community reacted with outrage and denunciation bordering on hysteria, particularly with regard to biblical quotations being cited as sources, which many saw as pseudoscience being used to prove religion (which wasn’t true—Velikovsky used Scripture simply as a historical source, and then only parts that were substantiated by the records of other cultures). The furor continued for decades, and Velikovsky died with his work banished to the kook fringeworld of science, where in the minds of most it remains.
Yet today, it’s eye-opening to go through the accumulating findings from space missions and recent work in all kinds of areas of science, and see how much is consistent with Velikovsky’s claims while flatly contradicting the assertions of the experts who maligned him.
Certain astronomers, for example, have concluded that none of the inner planets could have formed according to the traditional accretion or tidal models. A fluid-dynamic analysis of Jupiter’s core suggests that it will go unstable periodically and eject excess mass. Electrodynamic interactions between close-passing, planet-size bodies could induce precisely the slowing-down, followed by speeding-up-again of rotation that the experts dismissed as impossible (they took account of gravity only). Indeed, the effect has been observed and measured in minor form following large-scale solar storms. Venus is hot, its atmosphere and surface young. Comets can be rich in hydrocarbons, and their tails are highly energetic electrically. Earth records major geological and climatic upheavals in recent times. The moon shows evidence of recent surface melting and modification, seismic and volcanic activity, and a thermal gradient in the surface layers, none of which should be true for a body tectonically dead for 4.5 billion years. And so it goes.
I’d submit that Velikovsky’s work was meticulous and sincere. Irrespective of whether the final verdict vindicates his theories or not, they deserved to be heard with more respect than they were given. Orthodox science did not show itself in a becoming light on this occasion. And even if Velikovsky were, in the end, shown to have been mistaken, what an exciting and instructive introduction to science it would be for young people to have played a part in analyzing and critiquing such ideas. Science is the poorer for having excluded them.
“Could be them eyes,
Or maybe that smile,
But you’ve got the style
That drives me just wild.
Yeaaaah! Owwww!
Ooh-wah, ooh-wah, ooh-wah, ooh-wah . . .”
Arnie Brewster hummed along with the week’s number-one hit blaring from the car’s hexaphonic speakers, and shouted the “Yeaaaah! Owwww!” out loud as he left the San Francisco Bay Bridge freeway at the Berkeley exit. The lines of the black, maroon-trim, General Motors Leopard were low, sleek, and curvy—contrived by its designers to convey subliminal suggestions of phallic imagery and sexual potency. The dummy air-intakes and racing exhausts carried connotations of power and strength, laced with a hint of danger; the imitation wood-grain interior paneling, and leather-scented upholstery spoke of sophistication and taste; and the dash-mounted driving compass, padded steering wheel, and authentic-looking manual gearshift projected the qualities of competence, confidence, and rugged masculinity that the General Motors’ marketing psychologists had identified in the self-images of 72.3 percent of the males, aged twenty-five to forty, in the educational, occupational, and income groups at which the Leopard had been targeted.
Actually, the engine concealed inside the shell was a low-cost, four-cylinder model imported from Taiwan, and the mounting frame a modified chassis originally developed for a brand of golf cart. But Arnie Brewster was oblivious to anything like that as he came out of the exit curve at thirty-five miles per hour to the accompaniment of synthesized wind-noise and the tire squeals injected into the sound system. He pictured himself as Stephan Blane, the suave undercover CIA agent of the series Department Five, with a tense but trusting blonde flinching beside him as he raced to elude a hail of bullets from the blue Ford following behind.
In fact, Arnie thought that in looks and mannerisms he did resemble Stephen Blane. He wondered secretly if other people saw the similarities. To help them make the connection, he sometimes practiced nodding to himself in the slow, narrow-eyed way that Blane did when pondering a problem, or raising his chin defiantly with one eyebrow lifted, which always struck him as roguish and cavalier.
As the car’s computer quietly overrode the gas pedal to keep him safely back from the truck in front, he wondered if Mr. Myelow’s secretary, Patty, was listening to the same channel on her way home, and if she was, whether the tune was conjuring up a Blane-image of him in her mind also. He had no doubt she was one of the young swingers that the documentaries talked about, and he was sure, too, that she found him interesting—the way she pretended to ignore him was a sure giveaway. Perhaps she harbored a secret fascination for mature, self-assured men. The thought was tempting. . . . But as Dr. Korban, the senior psychiatrist in The Mind Menders had said in the episode about the ex-paratrooper who went berserk with a flamethrower and cremated everybody in the office because of their attitudes toward his affair with the computer operator, mature, serious-minded men keep their business and their private lives separate. Oh, the sacrifices that the wise and noble chose so selflessly to bear!
He arrived home in Berkeley and parked in the driveway, looking up automatically as he climbed out to see if there were any UFOs hovering overhead. There weren’t. So, slinging his two-hundred-dollar ski jacket—an essential part of the rugged and carefree, open-air man’s wardrobe—over his shoulder and hooking a thumb casually in his belt, he sauntered up to the door, at the same time stealing a nonchalant glance across the street to see if Laura Thompson was watching through her drapes—cars were frequently parked outside the Thompsons’ until the early hours, and there had been a program not long ago about spouse-swapping in suburbia. She wasn’t.
The sound of the TV greeted him when he entered the house. Light was showing from the living room. As he hung his jacket in the hallway, he noticed in the mirror that he had missed shaving that morning. With his partly unbuttoned shirt and fleece-lined leather vest, the shadowy chin and cheeks gave him a lean, work-hardened look that enhanced his features, he thought. It reminded him of the part that Vincent Calom had played in the movie Big Man’s Country—the scene where he returned home to his firelit cabin after a day of timber felling to find his devoted wife ladling stew from an iron pot, while their son hung his rifle over the fireplace after keeping watch over the homestead for the day. Arnie leaned closer to the mirror and narrowed his eyes to make them look hard and steely. Then, drawing himself up tall and savoring the feeling of hard-won pride that came with being Man, the Provider, the Protector, he turned and strode into the living room.
Beth was sprawled in the recliner before the six-foot wallscreen, dressed in red-white candy-stripe glitter pants and a yellow, cutaway tunic top as worn by female engineering officers in Galactic Command. She had made her hair orange with green stripes, put on dark purple lipstick and eyeshadow, and was eating onion dip and crackers. Arnie waited expectantly. Beth took no notice. After a few seconds he said, “Hey, it’s me, like, I’m home, you know . . .”
“Shhh! Joseph Donnelly has found out about Sylvia and Hank. He’s gone out and bought a gun. I gotta see what happens.” Beth scooped up some more dip and glanced at him. “Why don’t you go get a shave? Stan and Ella are coming over, remember? You look like an ad for a hangover cure or something.”
Arnie snorted and walked out again. There was no other sign of life. No doubt Kenny was shut up in his room, wasting his time as always with the garbage that kids filled their heads with these days. Mumbling irritably to himself, he stomped away to the kitchen to light a joint and pour himself a beer.
* * *
In the commercial showing on the screen an hour later, the couple who had arrived for dinner were average, healthily image-conscious people, he in a satin-edged coat, and wearing an iridescent wig of optical fibers, she in a Psi-Lady meditation suit, with a combination purse and video-game cartridge carrier. Ella and Stan were watching from the couch. “Wasn’t she in some kind of murder movie or something . . . after she got divorced from Tony Sentini?” Ella murmured, munching absently and keeping her eyes on the screen.
“Yeah—Terror in the City,” Beth said, still in the recliner. “She plays a clairvoyant who can replay murders in her head. She puts the detective straight after he’s run out of clues.”
“Johnathan Field,” Arnie added.
“Huh?” Stan said.
“Johnathan Field. He’s the detective on the case. That’s how she proves she can do it. Everyone thinks she’s a fake, see.”
“Oh.”
On the screen, the two guests were sipping before-dinner cocktails. Suddenly the woman nudged her husband and pointed to a faint finger-smudge on her glass. “Body-grease!” she whispered behind her hand. The husband put down his own glass hurriedly, glancing from side to side and looking apprehensively at the cutlery. Moments later the scene ended with a shot of the couple departing early on a pretext, and then the embarrassed host consoling his distraught wife.
“Donna Janson is psychic,” Beth commented.
“Huh?” Stan said.
“Donna Janson—she’s psychic . . . in real life. She can really do it.”
“Oh.”
“She was in that movie a couple of weeks back,” Ella said. “The one where the brain surgeon was supposed to put a computer chip in the general’s head, but the nurse switched the gurneys on the way to the operating theater, so they did it to the Russian spymaster instead.”
On the screen, the hostess’s wise and knowing mother was educating her daughter in the use of “Bodyguard.” After spraying fingertips and palms, they embarked on a tour of the house together, rapturously drenching drawer handles, doorknobs, lightswitches, toilet seats, phone buttons, and anything else carrying the risk of indirect contact with another human being. The ad ended with the husband and wife again, this time waving good-bye to their guests after a brilliantly successful dinner party, and then flinging their arms ecstatically round each other—presumably after taking suitable precautions by copious application of Bodyguard.
“She predicted that earthquake last year,” Beth said. “Where was it, India? Indianesia? Indi-something, anyhow. Her manager said so, too, so it’s true.”
“Donna Janson wasn’t in that movie,” Stan told Ella. “She was in the one where the doctor put his wife’s lover’s brain inside the gorilla after they had the car smash. That’s what you’re thinking of.”
“Was it? . . . Maybe it was.” Ella shrugged. “So what’s the difference? They were both brain surgeons, weren’t they?”
“I’m just tellin’ ya, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t ask, did I? Why are you always picking on me?”
“I’m not picking. I just—“
“Did I ever tell you I was psychic?” Beth said. “That time after the dog got hit by the truck, I knew it was gonna happen. I always said it was gonna happen one day. And when the phone rang yesterday, didn’t I say, I bet that’s my sister, Arnie? And wasn’t it my sister?”
“Hell, you knew she was going to call because of the tickets,” Arnie said.
“YOU ARE!” Ella shouted suddenly as Wally Klein began introducing the news. She shook her head, flinging her hair from side to side, and gnawed at her knuckle. “You’re always picking on me, Stan. Why do you do this to me? You try to humiliate me and I don’t know why. What did I ever do to get treated this way? I don’t deserve it. You think you can do better for yourself? Okay, then go do it, but don’t come crawling back to me when she’s spent all your money. I’ve had it, see!”
Stan’s mouth was frozen half open in the act of biting at a pickle. He stared at Ella in astonishment. “Shit, all I said was—“
“Don’t you lay a finger on her in this house,” Beth warned him sharply. She sat up and put an arm around Ella’s shoulder. “There, Ella, it’s okay.”
“JESUS CHRIST!” Stan roared, leaping to his feet. He rushed across the room, banged his forehead against the side of the lounge doorway, and stood there, pounding a fist against the paneling. “You know you mustn’t do that, Ella,” he muttered. “I have this anger, see . . . and you gotta help me keep control of it. It’s from when I was in the Army . . . combat sickness—know what I’m trying to say?”
“You never went outside New Jersey and Arkansas the whole time you were in the Army,” Ella told him.
“GODDAMIT, WHY DO YOU HAVE TO CONTRADICT EVERYTHING I SAY?” Stan shouted, spinning round. “That’s what you think, huh? Well maybe there were a lotta things I did in the Army that I never told you about, okay?”
Arnie gave a slow, narrow-eyed nod. “Look, why don’t we all calm down and discuss this like sane, civilized people?” he suggested, rising to his feet.
“I AM BEING SANE AND CIVILIZED!” Stan bawled. “It’s her. She’s got paranoid delusions or whatever you call them things. It’s those pills. Ella, didn’t I tell you not to mix ‘em with the yellow ones?”
“SHUDDUP, ASSHOLE! WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ANYTHING?” Ella screamed.
“CUT IT OUT!” Beth shouted above both of them. Silence descended abruptly.
“Ahem,” a new voice said. All faces turned toward the hall doorway. Arnie groaned beneath his breath and covered his eyes with a hand.
It was Kenny, and as usual he was looking outrageous. It was embarrassing. He was wearing one of the tweedy jackets, with buttons and lapels, that were part of the latest teenage cult craze. He had pants with ridiculous creases that made them stick out from his legs, a pointed strip of colored material tied around his neck, and his head was shorn almost bald, with the little hair he had left brushed flat and parted; his face was like a ghost’s, without a trace of cosmetic, and his shoes were rubbed shiny like a pair of bathroom faucets.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I’m just on my way out,” Kenny said. “I didn’t realize we had company. Mr. and Mrs. Williams, hello.”
“I ain’t having you coming in here and talking to our friends like that,” Arnie growled. “You know what I mean—with all that talk you pick up outside. They’re Stan and Ella, see. They got names.”
Kenny grinned good-naturedly. “Oh sure, I forgot. Sorry, Dad.”
“How many times do I have to tell ya?” Arnie demanded. “I’m Arnie, see. And that’s Beth. Get that? We got names, too. Anyone’d think we’re things or something. It’s some kinda psychological problem with you. A deliberate, symbolic rejection. I know about things like that, see.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll try and remember how you feel,” Kenny promised.
“And don’t keep apologizing all the time,” Arnie told him. “You’re telling me it doesn’t matter, right? What’s wrong with you kids? It’s insulting to talk to people like that, without no feelings—like they don’t matter. People who are worth something are worth expressing feelings at, ain’t they? Well, what’s the matter with us? Aren’t we worth the effort of yelling and screaming at?”
“Sure you are . . . er, Arnie. But it’s just that—“
“THEN START YELLING AND SCREAMING AT ME FOR CHRISSAKES!” Arnie exploded. Kenny started to say something, then stopped, hesitated, and finally shook his head. Arnie flopped down into an armchair.
Ella stared silently at the floor. Then Beth said to Kenny, “It just ain’t right, the way you kids behave—turning your backs on the world and trying to run away from it. I mean, where’s it supposed to get you in the end? Okay, so you’re only fifteen, but you have to grow up some time. What about all the time you’ll have wasted, huh?”
Stan unglued his forehead from the side of the lounge doorway and turned. “Your ma’s right, kid,” he said. “I don’t know where you kids think you’re heading either, but let me give you some advice, and I’ve been around: Get wised up. You’ve gotta get in touch with the real world and start acting like real people.”
Kenny stared for a second, then shook his head incredulously and gestured at the wallscreen. “That has got something to do with the real world? You can’t be serious! When did you last look out of a window?”
“What do you know about anything?” Beth challenged, turning in the recliner. “You’re always shut up back there with your nose inside a book.”
“Books?” Stan looked nonplussed. “He reads books?”
“Hundred of ‘em,” Arnie said. He tossed out a hand wearily. “They’re all round his room, stacked on the shelves . . . everywhere.”
“We read a book just a couple of months ago, Stan, don’t you remember?” Ella murmured distantly.
“Sure, why not?” Kenny said. “All the kids collect books. You can find them in yard sales and flea markets. And a couple of stores that specialize in them have opened up in the city. They’re not that expensive, either.”
“Why would anyone bother?” Beth asked. “They can get all they want on TV.”
“The pictures are better,” Kenny said. Beth stared at him uncomprehendingly. “You go at your own speed, pause whenever you want to think about something, and you can go back over it if you need to.”
“But you have to spell out all them words,” Beth objected.
“Well, yes, there is that,” Kenny agreed. “But it gets easier after a while, with practice.”
“It was about astrology and birth signs,” Ella said, looking at Stan. “How tuning in to stars and planets and stuff can keep you healthy and make lots of money. You went out and bought that set of charts, and the personalized horoscope computer that cost eighty-five dollars.”
“Yeah, Kenny’s got lots of books like that, too,” Beth said.
“That’s astronomy,” Kenny told her. “It’s not the same thing.”
“Does it keep you healthy and make you rich, too?” Arnie asked.
“Not directly, unless you happen to be a professional astronomer or science writer,” Kenny replied. “But then I doubt if superstitions based on simplistic notions of cause-and-effect are likely to do much for you, either—except make you eighty-five dollars poorer, maybe.”
“It’s the same as them ‘mathematics’ that you and that Marvin Stewart kid are always scribbling on pieces of paper,” Arnie grumbled. “What do you think they’ll ever do for you?”
“Paper?” Stan repeated, blinking his eyes. “You mean with pens? They write things on pieces of paper with pens?”
Ella stared in disbelief. “You mean without any buttonpad, even? No screen?”
“They’ve even got a game they play without a screen,” Beth told them. “Chess, or something, they call it. They push pieces of wood around on a board.”
Stan gave Kenny a worried look. “You mean that’s it? They just move pieces of wood around on a board? Nothing else happens?”
“It doesn’t even have batteries,” Beth moaned miserably.
“That’s what you get for your trouble, Stan,” Arnie said in a hopeless voice. “You do your best, and all you get is rejection. No gratitude, no appreciation. And on top of that they have to be reasonable with you all the time, and discuss everything . . . and talk in that low-key kind of way that drives you crazy—as if you’re not worth arguing with.” He shook his head. “They don’t try to solve their problems, Stan. They think about them.”
“That’s bad,” Stan said. “You mean just sitting there, staring at nothing—not doing anything about anything?”
“Right.” Beth waved vaguely at the screen, which was showing baton-swinging police clashing with demonstrators in a street riot somewhere in South America. “It ain’t as if they don’t ever get to see the proper way to handle life . . . I mean, everyone has problems, right? But people need to do something positive about them—like they throw something, scream, smash things, go out and have a breakdown and beat up on somebody, or whatever. . . . But kids these days don’t do things like that any more. All they do is sit and talk, and then say the problem’s gone away, or maybe it ain’t so bad or something. They won’t face up to anything.”
“Hyperpassivity,” Ella pronounced. “That’s what Dr. Friedmann said was wrong with Alice’s daughter in Bayview Apartments. Too much thinking is the first sign of losing touch with reality. It’s a big problem everywhere with kids. There are some pills that will get him back up to a normal level of hype.”
“Thanks, but I’m sure I can manage fine without,” Kenny said hastily.
“Don’t keep thanking people,” Arnie complained. “It ain’t good manners. It sounds like people are doing you favors or something . . . as if they’re nobodies trying to get liked.”
“Well that god-awful music you play in there won’t get you anyplace,” Beth said to Kenny. She turned toward Ella and Stan. “You know the kind of stuff I mean—no beat or feel to it all, just noise.”
“The kids across the street from us are always playing it out the window,” Stan said, nodding. “It’s primitive, not even electronic. I went over there one night and set fire to their rose bushes.”
“What’s that place you were talking about the other week?” Arnie asked Kenny. “Beat Heaven or something? I mean, what’s it all about, huh? Where in hell is Beat Heaven supposed to be?”
“Beethoven,” Kenny said with a sigh.
“Same difference. So where in hell is that?”
“Is that where they wear all the freaky clothes, Kenny?” Ella asked, giggling and waving her hand at his general appearance.
“They don’t say anything, kid,” Stan told him. “Are you ashamed to be yourself? Is that what it is, huh?” He gestured down at his own crotch-hugging white pants with scarlet side-stripes, tucked into calf-length astronavigator boots, officer’s belt with Alpha Centauri Squadron buckle, and navy, white-trimmed blouse, complete with Strikefleet shoulder patch. “See. You should try to find yourself, and then tell the world who you are—like a starship admiral, for instance. It’s easy once you find yourself and make the effort to fit in.”
“But I never lost myself,” Kenny said. “And I’m not a starship admiral.”
“You have to be something sooner or later,” Ella insisted. “You can’t spend your whole life staring at books and listening to crazy music. You have to get involved eventually. It ain’t all gonna change to suit you.”
There was short pause. Then Beth lowered her eyes and said dismally, in the voice of someone finally revealing a long-concealed secret of congenital madness in the family, “He says he wants to be some kind of scientist.” She looked at Arnie. “What was it, a fizzy-something?”
“Physicist,” Kenny supplied. Arnie looked away to hide his shame.
“But that kind of thing is for nobodies, like schoolteachers, technical waddyacallits, or people who make things,” Ella protested. “Why would anyone wanna do something like that?”
Arnie showed his empty palms. “That’s the way they are, Ella. They want to work, and learn things. They say it shouldn’t be the government’s job to keep them. Something to do with ‘ethics’ and that kind of crap. . . . I don’t know.”
Kenny looked around and shook his head. For the first time his expression betrayed rising exasperation. He pointed at the screen. “Look . . . that idiot behind the desk is telling you how the U.S. is more respected in the world today because of the way we’ve strengthened our strategic forces, right? But they only voted the appropriation a year ago. They haven’t actually spent any money yet. They’re still only talking about what to spend it on. And even if they had spent it, it couldn’t have made any difference on that kind of time scale. It would be ten years at least before any new weapons ordered through last year’s budgets could be produced and deployed. But they’re talking as if it had all already happened, and taking the credit for it.
“Can’t you see what’s happening? Things in the real world don’t happen fast enough to be entertaining any more. So the media have created a make-believe world that runs at several times the speed of real time, with a crisis every half hour and always an instant solution.
“It’s the same with all the other ‘crises’ that they invent and then say they’ve solved. How could a crime wave of ‘epidemic proportions’ that nobody had heard of before suddenly materialize in two months, just before Ed Callones ran for governor—and with a program already worked out to fight it? . . . And then have been ‘successfully eliminated’ in just as short a time after he was elected? It couldn’t have. Things don’t change that quickly. The ‘economic recoveries’ that somebody or other is always supposed to be masterminding every six months are from slumps that never happened. The ‘environmental catastrophes’ that are always supposed to be imminent never materialize. And yet people everywhere believe it all and carry on paying . . .”
Kenny looked from one to another of the four faces staring blankly back at him. He exhaled a long sigh. “It doesn’t matter. . . . I guess I got carried away a little. I was going out anyhow. I’ll just be on my way. You folks have a good evening.” With that he turned away quickly and left, closing the door behind him.
An uncomfortable silence persisted for a while. Finally Stan said, “Gee, I didn’t realize you guys had it so bad. . . . I guess he’ll probably grow out of it, huh?”
“What was he talking about?” Ella asked, still dazed after Kenny’s outburst.
Arnie was still looking down at the floor. Beth came over and leaned her head against his shoulder. “Oh Arnie,” she sobbed. “We tried, didn’t we? Where did we go wrong?”
* * *
Outside, Kenny pulled his parka on over his jacket and walked around to the back of the house to pick up the backpack, suitcase full of selected books, and crammed briefcase that he had dumped from his bedroom window. He carried his things to the end of the street and waited in the shadows of the shrubbery by the corner streetlight. After about ten minutes, Marv Stewart’s battered ‘95 Chevy van appeared. Marv was at the wheel, with Bev Johnson and Harry wedged in next to him up front. Kenny slid open the side door and hoisted his bags inside. Then he climbed in to join the crush of young people jammed in the back amidst coats, rucksacks, suitcases, sleeping bags, and bundles of books. “Okay, Kenny?” Marv called from the front as the van pulled away. “Any problems?”
“No,” Kenny answered. He felt drained, now that the worst was over and he was committed. “It went okay. Did everyone else make it?”
“All here,” Tom Pearce’s voice said from somewhere in the shadows nearby. “You’re the last.”
Kenny gradually made out the forms as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Tom, who could read IBM microcode and wanted to get into AI research, was propped just behind him, next to Nancy, who had painted the murals in Giuseppe’s restaurant in Oakland. Sheila Riordan, who understood tensor calculus and wrote plays, was behind them, with Kev, the chess expert, and Charlie Cameron, who was into number theory and could recite pi to fifty places. . . . And yes, the others were all there, too, farther back. Kenny leaned back and made himself comfortable between his backpack and a pile of blankets. “So what’s the schedule?” he called out to Marv.
“Down the Interstate and on through L.A., bound for Phoenix. We’ll probably stop for breakfast somewhere near the Arizona border.”
“When do you think we’ll make Boston?” Kenny asked.
“Aw . . . should be sometime around Tuesday, I figure.”
“Uh-huh.”
Kenny settled back into the shadows and closed his eyes to rest. He wondered if it really was the way people said. Boston—home of the revolution of the New Wave generation, who were sweeping away the rejected, outmoded values of an era that was ending, and replacing them with new ways born of the rebelliousness of youth.
It was said that there were bookstores on every block there, galleries exhibiting paintings and sculptures, theaters, science labs, and symphony orchestras playing to packed halls. The University had allegedly closed down its faculties of paranormal phenomena and antitechnology to make room for arts, sciences, engineering, and business, and there were free public lectures on everything from differential geometry and molecular evolution to space engineering and nuclear physics. People ate real steaks with wine in restaurants with candlelit tables; portrait painters worked at easels set up on the sidewalks; and string quartets played in the streets.
It had been a tough decision in some ways; but sooner or later people had to take responsibility for their own lives, Kenny thought to himself—even if it did cause some upsets and misunderstandings in the short term. His folks would miss the money he’d been getting from working illegally at the computer store on Saturdays to supplement their phoney welfare checks, but they’d manage okay in the end. He was satisfied in his own mind that he had met his responsibilities to the best of his ability; he owed them no more. Eventually, the time came when you had to think of yourself. He’d explained it all as best he could in the letter that he’d left in his room. They’d come to understand in the end, he was sure . . . even though it might take them a while.
Patrick and Michael Flynn were twin brothers, the sons of a family doctor who practiced in a sleepy Irish village called Ballaghkelly. The village was little more than a crossroad buried in a huddle of houses and outlying farms, and boasted one church, a school, a few tiny stores, a newsagent’s that was also the post office, and three pubs. Little ever happened to change the routine of a typical day in Ballaghkelly. At six o’clock every morning, Willie Maherty’s one-horse dray would clatter off on its round of the farms to collect the churns from the previous day’s milkings before the day warmed. Twice in the day and once in the evening—exactly when was always a standby topic of conversation if the weather looked settled—the bus from Kilkenny would arrive and depart again. And after nightfall, the farmers would begin gathering in O’Toole’s, Mulligan’s, and O’Shaughnessy’s to nod and murmur over their pints of porter while they reiterated worldly wisdoms that had been handed down from father and grandfather for generations. Life had always been that way, and nobody—in the unlikely event of such a thought entering his head—could have conceived of its being any other.
Patrick was a voracious reader and did brilliantly in school. Kevin Halloran, the schoolmaster, became convinced that the boy was a prodigy and persuaded him to try for a scholarship to study mathematics at the university in Dublin. Patrick was accepted, gained a degree with honors after some years, and then departed to pursue postdoctoral studies in America, which was somewhere across the sea, in the opposite direction from England—whichever way that was. Michael, too, was studious, but his vocation lay in a different direction. He left home to train at the Catholic seminary in Waterford, and shortly after Patrick left for America, Michael was installed as the new parish priest in a town not far from Limerick.
Although the brothers corresponded, they did not meet again for several years. Then Patrick wrote from America to say that he had been offered a research fellowship at Cambridge, England, and that before taking up his new position he would come back to Ballaghkelly on a short holiday, which he referred to in his letter as a “vacation.” Michael, too, obtained leave of absence and came home for the big family reunion. There was a fine party at the Flynns’, as good as any wedding or funeral wake that even the oldest in Ballaghkelly could remember, and in the course of the evening it seemed that every pair of feet from twenty miles around had passed over the threshold, bearing some well-wisher to join the family in a glass of stout and perhaps sample one—or two, or maybe a few—of the choice blends of whiskey brought in for the occasion. At last, after it was all over, and their father had tottered unsteadily but contentedly away to his bed, with their mother closing the door after him and warning them sternly not to touch any of the mess until morning, Patrick and Michael found themselves alone with their glasses, staring at the logs crackling in the large brick fireplace in which, as boys, they had watched faces and dragons together, many years ago.
“Ah, ‘tis a wonderful place ye’ve been tellin’ me about, Patrick,” Michael said distantly. “With them Americans drivin’ their motorcars along roads as wide as ten boreens, and flyin’ around in the sky as naturally as the likes of us would take the bus into Kilkenny . . . and walkin’ around on the moon itself, if you’re not after pullin’ me leg.”
Patrick took a sip from his glass. “And that isn’t the half of it, Michael. There’s the size of the place. . . . Do you know, the nearest part of the U.S.A. is two hundred times farther away from here than Dublin, yet it’s still nearer to us than it is to the other side. Can you imagine that?”
Michael tried to visualize what it meant, but in the end shook his head with a sigh and sank back in his chair. “Anyhow, about yourself, Patrick,” he said. “Ye told us enough about America in the letters ye wrote. But there was never a time when ye said anythin’ about what ye were doin’ in that university.” His brow creased uneasily. “Ye wouldn’t have gone and got yourself mixed up with the makin’s o’ these bombs and things, now, would ye, Patrick? ‘Tis the devil himself’s work ye’d be doin’.”
Patrick gave a short laugh. “You don’t have to worry yourself about anything like that, Michael. There are some areas of research that aren’t connected with the weapons program, you know.” Michael looked relieved. Patrick went on, “In fact I’m not involved with any aspect of applied research at all. My work is all to do with pure mathematics—in fact, an area called number theory, if you’d really like to know.” Modesty had prevented him from saying much about this in his letters. Now, however, with the euphoria of being home again—and perhaps also from the effects of the party and the drink—he was unable to keep just a hint of a swagger out of his voice.
Michael seemed not to notice. “Ah, so that’s what it’s called, is it?” he replied, nodding slowly. “And what would ye be doin’ with the numbers? Is it some kind o’ computin’ with them electronic machines?”
“We use computers a lot, but that isn’t really what it’s all about,” Patrick said. “Number theory is simply the study of the properties of the whole numbers themselves, and of the rules for manipulating them.”
“And that could keep an honest man busy for a lifetime?” Michael sounded dubious.
Patrick laughed again. “A lot more than that, Michael, believe me. People have been developing it for centuries, and they’ve still only scratched the surface. My work only touches upon one little piece of it.”
“Is that a fact, now?”
“It has to do with the implications of something known as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. It, er . . . it deals with the inherent limitations of any formal system of rules, no matter how complex.”
“Ah.” Michael gazed silently into the fire for a few seconds. “Gödel, you say, eh?”
“Kurt Gödel . . . an Austrian mathematician. He formulated the theory in 1931. What it says is that all consistent axiomatic systems of number theory include undecidable propositions.” Patrick paused for a second. “Well, actually the original was expressed in more technical terms, and it was in German, of course . . . but that’s about what it boils down to.”
Michael squinted and rubbed his nose with the crook of a finger. “Well, it might as well be in German still, for all the sense I can make of it,” he confessed. “It’s havin’ a bit o’ fun at your brother’s expense, ye are, if I’m not mistaken. Now could ye imagine me in the pulpit on a Sunday, railin’ me congregation with that kind o’ talk? Why, wouldn’t Mother McCreavy from the village be down to the post office at the crack o’ dawn the next mornin’, writin’ letters to the Holy Father himself? Away with ye now, Patrick. If what ye just told me can’t be said in God’s own English, then it’s likely as not that it’s without any meanin’ at all. I’m thinkin’.”
Patrick grinned apologetically. “I guess I just couldn’t resist it.” He refilled their glasses from the bottle standing between them. “It concerns the systems of rules that govern mathematical proofs. What it says is that no set of rules can ever be complete enough in itself to enable every true statement to be proved. There will always be at least one statement that can only be proved by bringing in another rule from outside the system. And if you add that rule to make a new, bigger system, then the new system will contain at least one statement that would require yet another rule to prove it, and so on. There’s no end to the process. However big you make the system, it can never be complete enough to prove all true statements. That’s why it’s called the Incompleteness Theorem.”
A silence fell while Michael tasted his drink and sat back to reflect on this. Eventually he said, “You’d think, now, wouldn’t you, that rules and such would be somethin’ a priest would know all about, for isn’t every day of his life just a matter of passing on a few simple rules of livin’? But I’m blessed if I can tell the head from the tail o’ what you’re tellin’ me now, Patrick—blessed if I can at all.”
“Actually, that’s not a bad analogy,” Patrick said. Michael looked puzzled. Patrick sat forward and spread his hands to explain. “People, nations, society in general . . . they all have systems of rules—laws—that govern the ways they behave. Now this comparison is only a loose one, you understand, but it gives an idea—no system of social rules is ever complete, is it? For who writes the laws that govern the lawmakers? You see my point—such laws would have to be written from outside the system. But then the same questions would still apply: Who would write the laws to govern whoever wrote those laws? You could go on as long as you like, but you could never completely solve the problem.”
Michael considered the proposition for a while. “ ‘Tis a sad picture of the human race that you’re paintin’,” he commented at last. “Ye make it sound as if everybody in the world is unable to live a decent life without rules to stop them from robbin’ each other and cuttin’ each other’s throats.”
Patrick sighed. “True, but what can you do? That’s the way the world is out there. They’re all in a rat race, scrambling and trampling over each other to get a bigger piece of the cake. And when a bunch of them get into a position where they can write their own rules, it brings out the worst. Sooner or later they have to be regulated somehow, but that never solves the problem. All it does is shift it another level higher up.”
“How would ye be meanin’?” Michael asked.
“Oh, the legal system over there in America is a good example,” Patrick replied. “The lawyers make money by complicating the problems that they’re supposed to be solving, which suits them fine, but doesn’t suit the clients. They can get away with it because the rules let them, and they write the rules. It’s the same with price-fixing cartels in business, or the lobbying that corporations can do to get tariff laws and other restrictions passed to get an edge over their competitors. And it’s the wealthy who get to influence how loopholes are written into the tax code. You see—whenever a group can write its own rules, it writes them in its own favor. Everyone else loses.”
Michael shook his head sadly. “That’s a terrible thing . . . that with all these machines and all, and them fellas walkin’ around on the moon, they’d still be havin’ this kind o’ trouble with each other. Ye’d think, now, that with all their talk about puttin’ the Russians in their place, the government would have somethin’ to say about these carryin’s on. Have they no care at all for the people that’s payin’ the money for the motorcars for them to go paradin’ themselves around in with all their grand speeches and smilin’ faces?”
“That’s my whole point, Michael,” Patrick agreed, nodding. “You’re right—in theory the government ought to be able to prevent things like that through the power of law. But in practice it doesn’t work out, because the government in turn isn’t subject to any law but its own, and the same thing happens. The federal bureaucracy is out of control. A bureaucrat’s status and income are geared to the size of the department he runs and the number of people in it. Therefore they all want their departments and budgets to grow bigger. To justify that, they have to have problems that are getting bigger instead of being solved, and the legislation that emerges makes everything worse, not better. Take the welfare system as an example—it costs more than anything else in the government budget. If everybody in the country became self-sufficient, the agencies would be out of business. So laws get passed which guarantee that there’ll always be a bottom layer of dependents who’ll never able to climb out of the trap—such as minimum wages that make them unemployable, or housing standards that drive prices above anything they can afford. And then, of course, we’ve got the defense industry and the military—they don’t want any relaxation of tensions with the Soviets. And the banking system that finances the government also owns the contractors that the government spends the loans with—so they’re making money with both hands by billing the taxpayer for lending their own money to themselves. It’s a good deal—you sell a few billion dollars worth of sophisticated weaponry, put it down holes in the ground for ten years and wait for it to become obsolete, then scrap it all and start over again. And while the banks are owed money, they write the rules.”
Michael stroked his chin thoughtfully as he stared into the fireplace. “And there’s honest people toilin’ away the lives that God meant them to enjoy, just to pay for it all, eh? And to think, with all them machines and the clever fellas in the universities, couldn’t they all be livin’ like kings?”
“I guess so.” Patrick sighed. “But they won’t. Too many people would have to come down a peg or two, and they’re the ones who write the rules. Oh, I suppose you could think in terms of a world government or something one day, but the same would happen eventually because there wouldn’t be any rules to control them.”
“Maybe they should try lookin’ in that number theory that ye were tellin’ me about,” Michael suggested. “Wasn’t it all to do with writin’ rules within rules, and isn’t that what we’re talkin’ about now?”
Patrick frowned. “Number theory doesn’t apply here,” he said. He kept his voice even to avoid sounding as if he were talking down to his brother. “The analogy was only a loose one. Gödel’s theorem merely deals with sets of formal symbolic axioms. It doesn’t have anything to say about social rules and how people should behave toward one another. You’re reading too much into it.”
“I have to disagree with ye, Patrick,” Michael said. “It has everything to say—about some very good social rules that were written down a long time ago now, and very concisely.”
Patrick stared across with a puzzled frown. “I’m not with you, Michael,” he said. “What do you imagine Gödel’s theorem says that has anything to do with people?”
“Tch, tch.” Michael shook his head reproachfully. There was a faint smile on his face, and his eyes twinkled in the glow from the fire. “ ‘Tis a shame ye’ve never seen it, Patrick,” he replied. “It’s been all these years now, and ye mean to tell me that ye’ve never noticed what the first three letters of Gödel are?”
The phone on Professor Osbert Osternak’s desk rang. “Excuse me,” the snowy-haired chief scientist of the Erwin Schrödinger Memorial Research Institute said to the younger man sitting across from him. “Yes? . . . This is Professor Osternak, yes. Who is this, please? . . . Oh?” The old man’s eyebrows shot upward almost to his hairline. “Oh really? That is most interesting.” He settled back in his chair and sent an apologetic shrug across the desk. It seemed that this was going to take a while. “Yes, that is true, quite true. . . . Yes. That is so. But how do you . . . of course. Amazing! And so it happens. . . . So, what can I do for you?. . .”
Dr. Rudi Gorfmann, Osternak’s deputy, wearing a black bow tie and dress shirt beneath his white lab coat, sighed impatiently. The old fool would be prattling on for half the evening now, and Gorfmann wanted to be on his way to Innsbruck for the Celebrity Club’s charity fund-raising banquet. He stood up and turned to face away across the office. With its antiquated wooden bookshelves and panelling—even a chalkboard!—it was as much of an anachronism as the mind it belonged to. Gorfmann paced across to the window of the Gothic “Keep,” which on its rocky eminence formed an incongruous focal point for the Institute’s modern laboratory blocks and reactor housings, and stared out at the peaks of the Bavarian Alps, frosty against the darkening sky. His reflection stared back from the glass: a clean-shaven face, neatly groomed blond hair, gold-rimmed spectacles. Meanwhile, Osternak’s voice babbled on behind. “This is unbelievable. When does he intend to do this?. . . Ach, so. . . . Can we get together and talk about this?. . .”
Old scientists should be forcibly retired at forty, Gorfmann fumed to himself. Newton, Einstein, anyone of brilliance . . . none had done anything useful beyond their twenties. All they had achieved after that was to place the seal of unchallengeable authority on ideas that had become outmoded, making further progress impossible until they died off and made room for new blood with new vigor. If it weren’t for such tyranny of age and tradition, Columbus would have landed on the moon, Watt would have harnessed fusion energy, and the Wright brothers would have built the first starship. And Rudi Gorfmann would have . . . He realized that Osternak had stopped talking on the telephone, and turned back to face the desk.
“I’m sorry,” Osternak said, gesturing for Gorfmann to be seated again. “But it was rather important. I know you have a dinner to get to. Now, where were we?”
Gorfmann remained standing. “I protest at this policy of indecisiveness and timidity that you are imposing on the Institute,” he repeated.
“But I’m not imposing anything, Rudi. The directors are in full agreement that—“
“On scientific issues they follow your lead, which makes it the same thing. My question is, are we scientists, dedicated to discovery in a spirit of boldness, with confidence in our own judgment . . . or old women cowed by superstitions and frightened of anything we don’t understand?” Gorfmann jabbed a finger in the direction of the window. “Outside, in that building down there, is what’s probably the most significant breakthrough in the entire history of physics, maybe in entire history, period—a tested, proven, up-and-running transfer gate. We are talking about a working time machine! . . . The implications are staggering. Everything we thought we knew about logic and causality will have to be revised. The very fundamentals of physics—space, time, energy, matter, charge—all take on new meanings. Unimaginable technologies will grow from it. . . .”
“Rudi,” the professor interrupted patiently. “I am aware of all this.”
“What I’m saying is that it is ours!” Gorfmann said, punching a fist into his other palm. “Us—the scientists here at the Institute. It was our work that made this a reality. The rewards and the recognition that it deserves belong to us.”
Osternak nodded. “And I’m sure that in time you will receive them.”
Gorfmann snorted derisively. “When, with the snail’s pace of the way things are moving? Fifty years from now? A century? What use is that to me? I am young, and I still have a life ahead of me that I mean to enjoy. I want the rewards and everything that goes with them, now. But all we get is restrictions, restrictions, this ridiculous blackout on publicity, and tests, tests, and more tests.” He waved a hand in Osternak’s direction. “Look, I’m sorry if this success has come a little late in life for you—there is nothing I can do about that. But it doesn’t have to be that way for me. I say we should go public now. I would like to make the first official announcement during my speech tonight.”
Osternak shook his head. “It is too early for anything like that. You said yourself a moment ago that the implications are staggering. It is precisely for that reason that we cannot risk the turmoil that this kind of news would unleash, until we understand all of the ramifications fully.” The professor waved at the equations strung across the blackboard on the wall. “We still don’t understand the effects on mass-energy conservation, or the intricacies of sequential nested loops. From the animal experiments it appears that two passes through the chamber in too short a time can severely disrupt the central nervous system. We have no idea why. I understand your feelings, but with things like that unresolved, our byword for the foreseeable future can only be caution.”
“Caution, caution, all I ever hear is ‘caution’!” Gorfmann exploded. He turned his hands upward appealingly. “It wasn’t caution that—“
“I’m sorry, Rudi, but I must insist.” For the first time there was an edge of sharpness to Osternak’s voice. “The consequences of inviting pestering and interference from outside would be catastrophic at this stage of the project. That position is final. I want your solemn word not to utter one word about it, either tonight or on any future occasion, without express official direction. Is that understood?”
Gorfmann marched across to the door and grasped the handle without saying anything.
“Rudi,” the professor called as he opened the door. Gorfmann turned and looked back. “Your assurance, please.” Osternak’s tone left no room for debating.
Gorfmann bit his lip in suppressed frustration. It was either that, he could see, or he’d be out of a job before he got out of the building. And that would mean an end to any chance of benefiting from his involvement with the project—ever. Not to mention the impossibility of getting hired by any other of Osternak’s cronies in the business, and a complete ban on publication. . . . It was true: The old fart could ruin him. He glared balefully through his spectacles and nodded his head once, stiffly. “Very well. But I protest.” With that he turned about and marched out of the office.
“Have a good evening, Rudi,” the professor’s voice called after him.
As he came out, he noticed a cloth lying on the floor on the opposite side of the corridor, outside the cleaners’ closet next to Professor Prandtl’s office. Such sloppiness offended him, and at another time he might have tossed it back inside. But at this particular instant he was too annoyed to bother and walked away, making a mental note to have a word with the cleaners about it tomorrow.
* * *
Feeling debonair and resplendent in his black tie and evening dress, Rudi Gorfmann walked up to the spotlit podium and smiled to acknowledge the applause following the toastmaster’s introduction. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” He paused and looked around the tables of white shirtfronts and glittering hands and throats. “I have something confidential to announce concerning our work at the Erwin Schrödinger Memorial Research Institute.” He looked from side to side ominously. An expectant silence fell. “Up there, in our castle-laboratory in the mountains, we are not really making a Frankenstein monster. But the image is one of the conditions that we have to meet under the terms of our contract. You see, we are funded by the proceeds from the will of an eccentric German billionaire who had a fixation about bats and cats.” Appreciative laughter came from around the room. “But seriously, thank you again for asking me to come and say a few words tonight. It is probably not often that a professional scientist gets an opportunity to speak on these occasions. Therefore I will make the most of that opportunity by saying a few words about science. . . .”
At his table afterward, he was the center of attention. “I thought that what you said about quantum mechanics was fascinating, Dr. Gorfmann,” the platinum blonde sitting on one side of him said. “I believe that quantum mechanics might be the explanation for telepathy and ESP. What do you think?”
“First one must be certain there is something that needs explaining,” Gorfmann replied profoundly.
“Oh, it’s been authenticated, no doubt about it,” a tall, thin-haired man opposite declared airily. “In fact I have irrefutable experience of it myself.”
“I am sure some people would consider it irrefutable.”
“But we have a lot of science in the world already, and a lot of people still aren’t happy,” a bejeweled, middle-aged woman said from farther along. “It can’t guarantee happiness, and that’s what counts.”
“What can?” Gorfmann asked. “That’s not what science ever set out to accomplish. Its purpose is discovery, no more.”
“But people don’t look at it that way,” the bejeweled woman’s husband said, as if that meant something.
“What I mean is, those people who spend lots of money on gadgets because they expect wonderful things, and then find out that they’re just as miserable.”
“More so. They’re broke,” a sandy-haired man said. The others smiled.
“Then perhaps they should re-examine their expectations,” Gorfmann suggested.
Buffoons, all of them, he thought inwardly. Functionally incompetent, overindulged children. If intellectual defectives like these could brainwash a society of drones into lavishing them with accolades and riches, what would those of genuine ability accomplish if they put their minds to it? It was the likes of Osternak, with their pathetic notions of modesty and professional ethics, who kept the glamour out of science and deglorified it, consigning themselves to second-class roles in the world when they could have been running it. Things would change when Gorfmann got where he was aiming.
“What do you think is the best way of teaching children to be rational and logical?” the brunette who was with the sandy-haired man asked.
“You can’t. They already are. But you can unteach them.”
The head waiter came to the far end of the top table, which was where Gorfmann was sitting, and asked the club secretary something. The secretary indicated Gorfmann with a motion of his hand, and the head waiter approached. Gorfmann looked up inquiringly.
“Dr. Gorfmann?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but there is a telephone call for you. You may take it at the table if you wish.”
“Oh?” Gorfmann looked surprised. He wasn’t aware of anything urgent. “Very well. Yes, thank you. I’ll take it here.”
The head waiter nodded in the direction of one of the doorways, and another waiter who had been waiting there came forward carrying a cordless phone on a tray. He deposited the tray beside Gorfmann’s plate and retired to a discreet distance. The other guests diverted their attention to leave Gorfmann a measure of privacy.
“Hello? This is Rudi Gorfmann speaking.”
“Just checking,” a man’s voice replied. There was a hint of a chuckle in it, as if the speaker was feeling pleased with himself and couldn’t quite contain it.
“Who is this, please?”
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s just say that, as I know you’ll be pleased to learn, you’re even cleverer than you think.”
“Look, I don’t—“ There was a click, and then a buzz came on the line. Gorfmann put the phone down and sat back in his chair, baffled. The waiter, who had been hovering, came forward. Gorfmann nodded, and the waiter took the tray away.
The platinum blonde next to him glanced around and saw that the others were still talking among themselves. She laid a hand lightly on his arm and leaned closer to whisper. “Some friends of mine will be getting together later at the Claremont. Do you know it?”
“The ski lodge, higher up in the pass, above the Institute? Yes, it’s very nice up there.”
“It will be just a few late-night drinks, and maybe a small party. If you’ve no other plans, perhaps you’d like to join us?” The blonde held his eyes pointedly. “It can be a very friendly atmosphere.”
Gorfmann considered the proposition. He had left his car at the Institute and driven down to Innsbruck with Dr. Hoetzer, since they had some technical things to discuss. So Hoetzer would have to drop him off at the Institute, but it was on the way to the Claremont, anyhow. “Thank you,” he said. “No, I have nothing else planned. Shall I meet you up there later?”
“I’ll be waiting,” the blonde said alluringly. “My name is Lisa.” Gorfmann smiled at her conspiratorially.
He sat back in his chair to sip his wine and surveyed the room with a satisfied eye. Yes, indeed, it was going to be a good life, he decided . . . once he had found a way to get around that doddering fossil, Osternak.
* * *
“I tried talking to Osternak about it tonight before we left,” Gorfmann said, gesticulating in Hoetzer’s wagon as they drove back from Innsbruck. “I wanted to say something at the banquet, in fact. But he wouldn’t listen. I think he’s getting past this kind of work. Perhaps we should start organizing ourselves to do something about it.” He eyed Hoetzer surreptitiously as he spoke, gauging his reaction.
“Well, let’s see what happens at the policy meeting next week,” Hoetzer replied tactfully. They came out of the last of the bends on the steep climb from the Weiderwasser bridge and saw the lights of the Institute’s main gate ahead. “Where’s your car parked, Rudi?” Hoetzer asked, happy to change the subject.
“In front, outside the Keep,” Gorfmann replied.
The general parking area for staff was inside the main gate, adjoining the maze of alleys and irregular-shaped yards between the various buildings, known collectively as the “compound.” At the front of the Keep, however, there was an enclosed gravel forecourt with a small parking area reserved for senior personnel, which opened onto the road via a separate gate.
“I wonder, could you do me a small favor?” Hoetzer asked.
“What’s that?”
“I need to pick up a generator set that I’m borrowing. It’s just behind the gate from the compound into the center parking area. I could use some help lifting it into the wagon.”
Gorfmann pulled a face in the darkness. He wanted to go home, change into more casual wear, and then be on his way up to the Claremont to meet Lisa as quickly as possible. But there was no way out of it. “Of course,” he said, forcing a genial tone.
“Thank you so much.”
“Not at all.”
They turned into the main gateway, and Hoetzer stopped to let the security guard know what they were doing—the guard seemed aware of the arrangement already. Then they drove across to the other side of the almost empty parking area, and Hoetzer reversed into a slot in front of the compound gate. “Hardly the best dress for this kind of thing,” Hoetzer said cheerfully as he climbed out.
“No,” Gorfmann agreed. He took off his topcoat, folded it, and put it on the seat before joining Hoetzer on the other side of the gate. The generator was mounted on a steel-frame base with a lifting bar at each end. Gorfmann looked it over and undid his tie before tackling it. They manhandled the generator through the gate and across the few meters to the wagon. “The guard seemed to know about this already,” Gorfmann remarked as Hoetzer opened the rear door.
“Oh yes. I cleared it with security this afternoon. I just didn’t want to drive all the way down to Innsbruck and back up again with the weight.”
“Very sensible.”
They heaved the generator up onto the tailboard, and the wagon sank on its suspension as it took the load. Hoetzer slammed the door shut and dusted his hands together in a manner indicative of a job well done. “Thanks so much,” he said again.
“Don’t mention it. Look, I’ll tell you what.” Gorfmann gestured in the direction of the compound gate. “Why don’t I just go through the Keep? It’ll be quicker than driving around, and you won’t have to stop.”
“It wouldn’t be any trouble. . . .”
“No, the walk would be quicker.”
“Well, if you’re sure.”
“Yes. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay, then. Good night, Rudi.”
“Good night. Thank you for the ride.”
Gorfmann walked back through the gate and began crossing the compound through the jumble of shadows cast by the surrounding structures and laboratory buildings. As he forgot about Osternak and Hoetzer and generators, and his mind turned to thoughts of the promise that lay ahead with Lisa, his pace quickened, and he began whistling to himself.
“Hey, Rudi,” Hoetzer’s voice called from behind him. Gorfmann stopped and looked back. Hoetzer was standing just inside the gate, holding something up. “You forgot your coat.”
“Oh, silly of me,” Gorfmann called back. He turned and retraced his steps.
“That won’t do. You’re turning into an absentminded professor already,” Hoetzer said, handing it over.
“I hope not. We’ve got one too many of those already.”
“Now, now, Rudi.”
“Thank you. Good night again.”
“Good night.”
Slipping his coat on as he walked, Gorfmann crossed the compound again and entered the rear door of the Keep, which to his mild surprise he found unlocked—but that happened sometimes. He walked along the darkened passageway that led to the front lobby and went out through the main entrance to the executive forecourt, feeling in his pocket for his keys. But at the bottom of the shallow steps outside the door, he stopped dead in sudden bewilderment. His car was not there.
Fuming, he paced from one end of the forecourt to the other, thinking that someone might have moved it for some reason, but the reaction was a mechanical one—it was obvious just by looking that there was nowhere else the car could have been. Finally, accepting the inevitable, he stormed back into the lobby, slamming the door behind. “What in hell’s going on?” he muttered to himself as he crossed back to the passageway leading to the rear door. “Oh God, this is too much. Not at a time like this, of all nights!”
He went back through the compound, across the staff parking area, and reported the loss to the security officer on duty at the main gate. Then he signed for one of the Institute’s pool cars and used that to go home and change into casual wear before carrying on up to the Claremont. By the time he got there, he was beginning to get over his misfortune. It was quite late next morning when he left again, and he went straight to the Institute. By then he was feeling still irritable at the inconvenience, but much better.
* * *
In the transfer-chamber control room, Gorfmann typed the parameters for the test run into the supervisory console, verified the readback on the display screen, and confirmed the command. “Envelope profile verified and locked,” he reported to Kurt and Hilda at the other stations. “How are we doing on the interface?”
Hilda consulted another panel. “Override is released,” she said.
“Probe vector, Kurt?”
“They’re still adjusting the resonators.”
“Estimate another ten minutes to phase three,” Gorfmann said into a microphone on his console.
“Check,” a voice replied from a grille by the screen.
A phone rang at the back of the room. Moments later, Josef called from the desk by the door, “Reception calling for you, Dr. Gorfmann.”
“Put it through.” Gorfmann picked up the handset from the hook on one side of the console. “Hello, Gorfmann here.”
“Main Gate Reception. There is an Inspector Wenkle from the police department here, asking to see you.”
Gorfmann frowned, surprised. He had only reported a stolen car—hardly earth-shattering enough to warrant a personal visit, he would have thought. He sighed at the fastidiousness of plodding officialdom. “Very well. Show him into the visitor room there, would you. I’ll be over in a few minutes.”
“Very good.”
Gorfmann turned toward Kurt, who was entering numbers from a list into a keyboard. “Take over here, please, Kurt. I have to go and see someone at the main gate. And remember what I told you about the synchronizing calibration. It is most important for it to be accurate.”
“Sure.”
“Is it about your car?” Hilda asked.
“Probably, but that is a personal matter. You have your work to worry about. Kindly attend to it.” Gorfmann hung his lab coat by the door at the back of the room and left.
Kurt and Hilda made faces and exchanged shrugs. “Snotty today, even for him,” Kurt observed.
“Well, he has just lost a brand-new car,” Hilda said.
“What did he need a car like that for anyway?” Kurt asked. “Planning on moving to Hollywood or somewhere, is he?”
“Oh, he’s a big celebrity now, didn’t you know?” Josef said from the back. “Science guru of the trendy set. Big hit at the dinner in town last night.”
“I wonder if we could transfer him back to another century,” Kurt mused distantly. “How about the Dark Ages? I figure they could have used some help then.”
“Perhaps somebody already did,” Josef said. “That could be what turned them off science for a thousand years.”
* * *
Gorfmann entered the visitor room and closed the door behind him. A man wearing a tan raincoat and Tyrolean hat, and holding a thin leather document case under one arm, turned away from examining the exhibits in the display case on the far wall. He was of medium height and build, with a swarthy face, big nose, and thick black mustache. He nodded his head to indicate the caption FUSION PHYSICS over a section of the display. “It says there that if all the energy you could get from the fusion fuel in the oceans is represented by the distance across the Atlantic, then on the same scale Arabia’s oil reserves measure six thousandths of an inch,” he said.
“That sounds about right,” Gorfmann agreed.
“Amazing, isn’t it? And yet you still read things that say we’re about to run out of it.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything you read.”
“Is that the kind of work you do here?”
“Some sections of the Institute are involved in related areas. I myself am concerned with more fundamental aspects of physics. Inspector, look, I am extremely busy. We are about to begin an experimental run. Could we get to the point, please?”
“Of course.” Wenkle’s manner became more brisk. He removed his hat and sat down near the end of the table, which took up most of the room, motioning with a hand for Gorfmann to take the head chair, across the corner. Gorfmann did so. Wenkle put the document case down next to his hat and took out a manila folder, from which he produced several forms clipped together, and some handwritten notes.
“I take it this is to do with my car,” Gorfmann said after Wenkle had perused the papers in silence for a few seconds.
“Er, yes . . . Dr. Gorfmann.”
“Well, have you found it?”
Wenkle studied his notes for a moment longer. “First could we go over some of the information you gave when you reported the loss? The vehicle was left on these premises, is that correct?”
“Yes, but is this really necessary? You have just said that I’ve already given you this information.”
“We do like to double-check our facts, if you wouldn’t mind, sir. It will only take a few minutes.”
“Very well. Let’s get on with it.”
“Now, let’s see, you left the car here at the Institute, and went down into Innsbruck yesterday evening. How did you get there?”
“I drove down with a colleague—Dr. Hoetzer, from the plasma laboratory. We had some technical matters to discuss. It seemed opportune to use the time.”
“I see. And at what time did you leave?”
“At six o’clock.”
“Approximately.”
“No. Precisely.”
“Ah . . . I noticed when I arrived that the staff parking seems to be inside this gate. Is that where you left your car?”
“No. There is also a small parking area for senior personnel at the front of the Keep, where the offices are. It has its own driveway, leading directly out to the road.”
“So the thief wouldn’t have had to go past the security post here at the main gate?”
“That is correct.”
“What was the purpose of your trip?”
“I was a speaker at a fund-raising banquet given by the Celebrity Club at the Hotel Ibis. Is that sufficient?”
“More than adequate.” Wenkle added some comments to his notes and turned the page. “And you left the hotel in Innsbruck with Dr. Hoetzer at? . . .”
“Oh, I’d say about ten.”
“Precisely?” Wenkle’s tongue poked at his cheek for the merest fraction of a second.
Sniff. “Approximately.”
“And what time did you arrive back here?”
“Let me see . . . We left the ballroom at around ten, a few minutes to collect coats and get Hoetzer’s wagon from the garage . . . Oh, it must have been around ten-thirty, ten forty-five at the outside. I found that my car was gone, and I reported it. Now, if you’re completely satisfied, Inspector . . .” Gorfmann half rose, bracing his hands on the edge of the table to indicate that he was ready to leave.
Wenkle, however, shifted another form to the top of the papers in front of him and studied it, giving no sign that he was finished. Gorfmann held his pose for a few more seconds, then conceded with a sigh and sat down again. Finally Wenkle said, “Yes, we do have some information, Dr. Gorfmann. Your car was found this morning, at the bottom of a two-hundred-meter cliff less than a kilometer away, on the steep stretch of road between here, and the Weiderwasser bridge. From the impact point where it struck the rocks, it was evidently traveling at considerable speed, and the skid marks where it went off the road indicate that it was out of control.”
Gorfmann looked stunned. “My God! . . . Is it badly damaged? It was almost new.”
“Completely burned out, I’m afraid. I assume your insurance will take care of that.”
“And that driver? Was he? . . .”
“Oh, no doubt killed instantly. The body was burned to a cinder. We’re having to run checks on dental and medical records to try and identify him.”
“I see. . . . That’s terrible. . . . Have you been able to determine when this occurred, Inspector?”
“Not really. As I said, the car was found early this morning. But from the amount of burning and the degree to which it had cooled, the accident itself must have happened many hours earlier. It could have been at any time during the night or the previous evening. The car was in a gorge, invisible from the road. We were alerted only when somebody reported the broken fence and headlamp glass, after daybreak this morning.”
Gorfmann licked his lips as the full awareness sank in. “Well, if there’s anything else I can tell you . . .”
“Just one thing. Out of curiosity, do you have your car keys with you now?”
“Yes.”
“May I see them, please?”
Gorfmann reached into his trouser pocket and drew out a leather-tagged key ring containing as assortment of keys. “That one, and that one,” he said, separating out two of them.
“Thank you. Er, do you have another set, by any chance?”
“I do, as a matter of fact. I keep them in the desk in my office, here at the Institute.”
“When was the last time you saw them?”
“Oh . . .” Gorfmann made a vague motion in the air that could have meant anything. “I don’t know. You don’t really notice after a while, if you know what I mean. They’ve been there since I bought the car.”
“Have you been to your office this morning?”
“Well, no actually . . . I, er, I was somewhat later getting back down from the Claremont than I intended, and since we were due to conduct some rather important tests, I went directly to the lab. I was there until you arrived.”
“And you haven’t heard of anything unusual being reported from there today—somebody breaking in, for instance?”
“Breaking in?” Gorfmann looked surprised. “No, nothing like that at all. Why?”
In reply, Wenkle reached inside his document case again and drew out a plain white envelope. From it he took a key ring with just two keys on it, smoke-blackened and dulled. It also had a medallion attached, bearing a distinctive red motif and encased in a plastic coating that had been partially melted. “Are these the keys from your desk, Dr. Gorfmann?” he inquired.
Gorfmann stared in astonishment. “Why, yes. . . . Yes, they are.”
“Can you explain how they came to be in the thief’s possession?”
Gorfmann blinked rapidly behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. “No, Inspector, I can’t,” he replied, for once completely bemused. “I have no explanation to offer at all.”
* * *
One side of the road had been closed off for a short distance by temporary barriers, reducing the traffic to a single lane. A few cars waited at one end while a policeman wearing a Day-Glo orange overjacket directed traffic through in the other direction. Rudi Gorfmann looked on glumly from a rocky projection above the gorge, while from behind the barriers a tow truck from Innsbruck winched what was left of his car slowly up the precipice. Inspector Wenkle and several other officers, along with two men from the insurance company, were watching from in front of some cars parked in a line along the verge. A cold breeze was coming down from the mountains, and Gorfmann drew the collar of his fur-lined parka closer around his neck and face.
At least, whoever had taken it hadn’t had long to derive much pleasure from the act, he reflected with a twinge of satisfaction. Served him right. Too much riffraff on the loose altogether, these days—with no sense of decency or respect for other people’s rights or property. No discipline in the schools, that was what it was. Too many do-gooders hamstringing the police.
After Wenkle’s visit to the Institute the previous day to inform him about the accident, he remembered recalling that Osternak hadn’t been seen by anyone that morning, which was unusual because the professor went by strict habits. For a while, Gorfmann had wondered secretly if maybe—just maybe, for some reason—it might have been Osternak who had gone over in the car. Perhaps he had lost his keys, or forgotten where he’d parked his own car or something, and in some kind of emergency borrowed Gorfmann’s—he knew that Gorfmann kept a spare set of keys in his desk. Unlikely, admittedly . . . but not impossible. But then Osternak had reappeared later in the afternoon and shattered that fond hope. Now Gorfmann would have to go through the chore of choosing, buying, and getting them to fix all the problems and squeaks in another piece of moron-engineered incompetence that passed as a new car.
But it was a thought. . . . Maybe he could doctor the brakes of Osternak’s car one of these dark, slippery nights. . . . Tricky, though. Gorfmann’s position at the Institute would make him an immediate suspect. It wouldn’t do to simply leave a trap like that, which he could have set as easily as anyone else. It would have to be done in such a way that he’d have an absolutely foolproof alibi.
“It feels as if winter’s on its way,” a voice said. Inspector Wenkle had walked over and was standing next to him.
“Yes, quite a nip in the wind. Have you made any progress in identifying the culprit?”
“Not yet, but it’s still early. There’s information to come in from a lot of places. From the X-rays, it seems that he had a surgical pin in his knee—you know the kind of thing I mean?”
“Yes indeed. In fact I have one myself. It was from a climbing accident, many years ago.”
“They’re quite common. . . . Oh, and there was another thing. I talked to Dr. Hoetzer. Apparently he almost had an accident himself last night, immediately after dropping you off. He tells me that as he was driving out of the main gate, a car came out of the gateway higher up at the Keep, swerving all over the road at considerable speed, and almost collided with him head-on. It seems probable that it was your car, Dr. Gorfmann.”
“Good heavens! Then I must have just missed him by minutes.”
“So it would appear. But it does fix the time of the theft at around ten-thirty. If anything else turns up, of course I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you. I would appreciate it.”
“Well, I must be getting back. Good day, then.”
“Good day, Inspector.”
The solution occurred to him a half hour later, as he was leaving the site in his pool car after the wreck had been hauled away. Of course! With a time machine at his disposal, he had the means for constructing the perfect alibi! Literally perfect. For what better way could there be of establishing that he had been in another place at the time a murder was committed, than actually being there? He could arrange for there to be two of him! Let even the best Wenkle in the world find a hole in that if he could. Gorfmann was so pleased with the inspiration that he laughed and chuckled out loud to himself all the way back to the Institute.
For the alibi to be effective, Osternak would have to be done away with in a manner that required the killer to actually be there, physically, at the same time. That way, the incontestable demonstration that he, Gorfmann—i.e. his other self—had been somewhere else would prove his innocence beyond question. And the perfect occasion had been just two nights before, when he knew, moreover, that Osternak had been working late, alone, in his dingy office up in the Keep. He also knew that Osternak, being Swiss, kept a revolver in the middle drawer of his desk. As the police would reconstruct it, the professor would have disturbed an intruder who had discovered the gun, and in the ensuing confrontation been shot with his own weapon. The time would be known precisely, and Gorfmann would have been miles away, in full view of hundreds of people. It was perfect. There would then be one other key participant to be taken care of to avoid possible complications, of course, but recent events had even provided a means of accomplishing that.
* * *
By the evening of that same day, he had completed his plans. He waited until it was late at night, when the Institute was still. Then, wearing loose black clothing, his face darkened by streaks of greasepaint, and carrying a bag with a day’s supply of food and a flask of hot coffee, a kit of tools, and a formal evening suit with dress shirt, he materialized stealthily from the shrubbery by the executive parking area and let himself into the Keep. He crossed the lobby and went along the darkened passageway to the rear door that opened out into the compound, and from there, keeping to the shadows, made his way over to the dome containing the time-transfer gate. Inside the control room, he activated the supervisory console, and working quickly, primed the system for a simple transfer back to the early morning hours of the day before last—he couldn’t risk arriving later, when people might be around. That meant he would have to find somewhere to lay up through the day, but that wouldn’t be difficult.
He set the initialization routine on automatic with a delay of thirty seconds, then hurried through to the transfer room itself, climbed inside the safelike, metal-walled chamber, and closed the door. A few seconds later his head seemed to explode in a riot of colors, and he felt as if his body was fizzing from head to toe, like a can of shaken-up soda. Then the sensation passed, leaving only a tingling in his fingers and a mild feeling of nausea, which quickly passed. He opened the door carefully. All outside was dark and still. He went through to the control room and the console display verified that the time and date were as he had intended. Satisfied, he crossed back to the Keep and made his way up to one of the attic rooms, hardly ever visited, which was used to store old office machinery, archived documents, and some pieces of surplus furniture that even included a comfortable four-seat couch. Yes, he would be fine here for a day, he decided, looking around. He’d even brought himself a couple of books to read. And the wait would be well worth it.
* * *
It was early evening when Gorfmann emerged and crept down to the floor on which Osternak’s office was situated. Policemen were always making such a big thing about how thorough they were. The way to prevail against them was to be even more thorough. And how could such pedestrian, one-dimensional minds stand a chance against thoroughness combined with scientific training?
The corridor ran from front to back of the building, between doors leading to stairways at both ends. He waited behind the door to the rear until he saw his earlier self come in at the other end from the front stairs and go into Osternak’s office. After a few minutes’ wait, he tiptoed along to Professor Prandtl’s office, which would suit his purpose nicely—it was opposite Osternak’s, and Prandtl was away on a lecture visit to the U.S. until the following week. He turned the handle gently, eased the door open, and slipped inside . . . and instantly recoiled back out again. There was somebody in there—lying on the sofa beneath Prandtl’s window, wrapped in blankets and seemingly asleep. Gorfmann didn’t know what to make of it. Somebody with domestic troubles staying away from the house, perhaps? But he didn’t have time to wonder, for he was out in the open in the corridor, and anyone could appear at any moment. He looked around for an alternative, spotted the cleaner’s closet next to Prandtl’s office, and quickly hid himself inside. It would give him just as good a view of Osternak’s door, anyway.
The secret was to be thorough and check everything. He waited, watching, through the crack from the closet. The first thing was to be absolutely certain that the time sequence he was on was as he remembered.
And then the handle of Osternak’s door rattled and turned a fraction. Gorfmann brought his eye close to the crack to observe. Osternak’s door had opened partly, and through it he could see the version of himself that had been two days ago, standing with one hand on the door handle and looking back into the room. “Your assurance, please,” Osternak’s voice demanded sharply from inside the office. And then Gorfmann’s eyes drifted downward, and he saw to his consternation that a cleaning cloth was lying on the floor, right outside the closet. He must have dislodged it from one of the hooks inside the door in his hurry to hide himself. Instinctively, he crouched down, pushed the door open a fraction, and started to reach out.
His other self nodded his head stiffly. “Very well. But I protest.” It was no good. There wasn’t time. Gorfmann pulled the door to again and watched, petrified, through the crack as his other self came angrily out of Osternak’s office.
“Have a good evening, Rudi,” Osternak’s voice called out.
His other self closed the door, glanced down at the cloth, hesitated for a split second, then snorted and walked away. Gorfmann straightened himself up slowly, shaking with relief and silent laughter. Of course . . . it had to work out that way. It had already happened!
His speech at the banquet had ended at about ten minutes after eight. It was now almost six o’clock. He emerged from the closet and went along to the accounts office, which overlooked the front parking area, and just to be doubly certain, watched himself depart at six exactly with Hoetzer in Hoetzer’s wagon. Then he went up two floors and along to Hoetzer’s office, where he switched on the large graphics printer that Hoetzer used for generating enlarged particle-trajectory diagrams from detector photographs, and set it to high-resolution mode. If left in that condition all night, the circuits would overheat and burn out. He didn’t want to damage the machine, but a couple of hours would give it time to warm up nicely. Happy that all was going according to plan, he went back up to his hideout to wait. The secret was to be thorough, thorough . . .
He emerged two hours later at eight-fifteen, wearing thin cotton gloves now, and went down to the pay phone located in an alcove off the front lobby—that way there wouldn’t be any record of the call on the Institute’s telephone account.
“Thank you for calling. This is the Hotel Ibis, Innsbruck.”
“Hello. I believe you have a banquet there tonight, being given by the Celebrity Club?”
“Yes, sir, we do.”
“I need to speak with one of the guests, please. It is most urgent.”
“One moment.” Gorfmann thought he heard somebody come in through the back door from the compound. He leaned out from the alcove and peered along the darkened passage leading to the rear of the building . . . but there was no one. He remembered the figure on the couch in Prandtl’s office and prayed that something wasn’t about to go wrong now, through factors he couldn’t possibly have anticipated. That would have been too unjust. But there seemed to be something strange afoot in the place. . . . Then the operator at the Ibis came back on the line. “The guests are all eating at the moment, sir.”
“I’m sorry, but it is important,” Another pause.
“Whom did you wish to speak to, sir?”
“I wish to speak to somebody there called Gorfmann. A Dr. Rudi Gorfmann.”
“Who is calling?”
“Just put me through, please.”
“One moment. I’m transferring you to a table phone.”
“Thank you.” Jubilation surged through him. It was all working!
Than a voice on the line said, “Hello? This is Rudi Gorfmann speaking.”
He didn’t believe it himself. “Just checking,” he said, smothering the impulse to laugh.
“Who is this, please?”
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s just say that, as I know you’ll be pleased to learn, you’re even cleverer than you think.”
“Look, I don’t—“ He hung up.
The next thing to do was get Osternak out of his office for a few minutes to allow himself to slip in. That was why he had switched on the printer a couple of hours previously. He inserted more coins and punched in the number of the direct line to Osternak’s office. Through the deserted building from the floor above, he caught the muted sound of a telephone ringing. Then a voice in the receiver said, “Hello?”
“Professor Osternak?” Gorfmann said, roughening his voice.
“Yes.”
“Sorry to trouble you, Professor, but this is Security at the main gate.”
“Yes?”
“We’ve just had a call here from Dr. Hoetzer, in Innsbruck.”
“Oh?”
“He says that he was in a hurry to leave this evening, and that he left a piece of equipment switched on in his office—a graphics printer, I think he said.”
“Oh dear. That could be unfortunate.”
“So I understand. But apparently a certain procedure has to be followed to turn it off. I offered to take the directions down over the phone, but Dr. Hoetzer was short of time. He said you were up there tonight, and your office is only two levels down from his.”
“Oh, I see. You’d like me to go up and turn it off for him.”
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, Professor.”
“Oh, good heavens, no. No trouble at all. I’ll attend to it right away.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Not at all. Good night.”
“Good night, Professor.” Gorfmann replaced the phone. “Heh, heh, heh. And good-bye, Professor,” he murmured in his natural voice. Since Hoetzer’s room was at the far end of the building, Osternak would use the rear stairs. Gorfmann moved swiftly across the lobby and went up the front staircase by the elevators. He halted at the double doors into the corridor leading to Osternak’s office and peeped through in time to see Osternak’s door open and the professor emerge and disappear through the doors at the far end. Gorfmann waited until the far doors had swung shut then walked quickly to the open door of Osternak’s office. Inside, he went straight to the desk and rummaged through the drawers. The gun was there. He checked the chambers. It was loaded. That was the final thing that might have gone wrong. He went through the drawers, rifling them and scattering the contents the way an intruder would, swept the papers off a side table, tossing down a few books from the shelves for good measure. Then he turned over a chair and a small table to give the appearance of a struggle, and threw down a candlestick, a figurine, and the clock from the mantleshelf over the fireplace, making sure that the clock was broken and showed the correct time. Finally he turned off the desk lamp, loosened the bulb in the ceiling light until it went out, turned it off at the switch by the door, and stood back in the shadows to wait.
He heard the door from the rear stairs open and Osternak’s footsteps approaching less than a minute later. The professor appeared in the doorway, hesitated when he saw the darkness inside, then advanced a pace into the room and flipped the wall switch. Nothing happened. Then he did exactly what Gorfmann had anticipated: He came into the room to try the desk lamp.
There would be no melodramatics or gloating speeches, Gorfmann had decided. Besides being rather distasteful, they provided an additional opportunity for things to go wrong. It would happen just as if he were a real intruder. When Osternak was halfway across the room, Gorfmann stepped forward to be sure of his aim and fired twice at the heart. Osternak cried out in shock and reeled away, clapping a hand to his chest, crashed into a chair, and fell over it in a heap. Gorfmann moved forward cautiously and waited, but the form lay motionless, picked out in the light from the doorway. Gorfmann reached up and tightened the ceiling-lamp bulb. The light came on to reveal the professor staring upward with glazed eyes, with a mess of blood covering his hand and chest, and spreading onto the carpet. Gorfmann grimaced to himself and walked over to turn the light off again at the wall switch. From the doorway he surveyed the scene for anything he might have overlooked. Finding nothing, he pocketed the gun—an intruder would hardly have left it; it would be found later in a place where it would seem to have been thrown away—and went back up to his hideout room for the tools that he’d brought. Now it was time for the really diabolical part of the whole thing.
For the remaining problem now, of course, was that there were two of him in existence—a situation that would cause impossible complications and which obviously couldn’t be permitted to last. And since the mind of his alter ego could be guaranteed to work in the same way as his own—it was the same mind, after all—it wouldn’t take long for the alter ego to figure out what was going on—again an intolerable state of affairs. Therefore the alter ego would have to go. The world was only big enough for one Rudi Gorfmann, anyway.
However, the beautiful thing about it all was that chance had already provided him the means. Wenkle had pinpointed the theft of his car as having occurred no earlier than ten-thirty. It was not yet eight forty-five. Hence he had over an hour and a half to do a sabotage job on his car, parked out front in the executive parking area. Then he would wait for the thief to appear, and force the events that followed into a different sequence. For if he prevented the theft from occurring, then obviously the car would still be there when his other self returned from Innsbruck. The accident would still happen, but with the subtle difference that the body recovered would be his unwanted other, unsuspecting self’s, not the thief’s. That meant, of course, that he would be on a new timeline and things would proceed from there on in a different way—but that would be no different from playing life by ear in the normal way that people did every day. In other words, he could handle it. The important thing was that Osternak would have been killed after surprising an intruder, who stole Gorfmann’s car and in his panic to get away went over the cliff. An unidentifiable body would be recovered from the wreck, and a very alive Gorfmann—himself—would reappear to deplore the tragedy. Brilliant!
He worked deftly and surely, fixing the primary braking system in such a way that it would feel normal the first couple of times the pedal was depressed, and then fail catastrophically. And just to be sure there would be no chance of recovery, he disabled the emergency brake. He finished well before ten, and feeling pleased with himself, cleared away his tools and settled down to wait well back in the shadows of the shrubbery for the thief. After Hoetzer dropped him off upon their return from Innsbruck, he had come through the Keep and out the front door. The thief might come from that direction, or from another.
And then a light came on in one of the windows one level up, overlooking the forecourt—in the accounts office, Gorfmann ascertained from its position relative to the front door. A face appeared inside, pressing forward to peer down and shielding its eyes from the reflected light off the glass. Gorfmann remained motionless, deep under the shadow of the shrubbery. What was somebody doing in the accounts office at this hour? The face withdrew, and a moment later the light went out again. Was this something else to do with the figure on the sofa in Prandtl’s office? Something strange was going on. Less than a minute later the performance repeated: the light in the accounts office came on once more, and the same figure came to the window and peered down, went away, and the light went out again. Perhaps somebody on the staff was using the premises for nocturnal romantic trysts, and getting some sleep in Prandtl’s office in anticipation of an active night. How disgraceful. Gorfmann would have something to say about that if he found out who it was. At least it might explain the presence of the thief, he reflected. But the thing to remember for now was the need to be careful with others around.
And then he heard footsteps approaching in haste, not from anywhere near the front door, but on the gravel path coming around the corner of the building from the side door by the library. Moments later, a figure came running around the corner, clad in a light-colored sweater. Gorfmann waited until he was certain that the figure was indeed heading for the car, then stepped out into view—but without getting too close for comfort—and called out sharply, “Who are you? What do you want?”
The figure stopped abruptly, recoiled, and fled back around the building. Gorfmann blinked behind his spectacles in the darkness, his hand feeling suddenly very slippery around the gun he’d been holding in his pocket as a precaution. Exit one thief. Was it really as easy as that?
And then he heard more footsteps coming across the lobby inside the main door and barely had time to duck back under the shrubbery before the door opened and a different figure appeared, this time wearing a topcoat over evening dress, its tie loosened as he had loosened his before helping Hoetzer with the generator. It was his alter ego. There could be no mistake about it. Fascinated, he watched himself climb into the car and start the engine. The lights came on, and the car backed out, changed into forward gear, and disappeared along the driveway and out onto the road. Then he heard it accelerating away downhill in the direction of the Weiderwasser bridge.
So, it was done. The timeline had been changed. A strange feeling of elation and sudden weariness came over him as he moved forward into the light from above the entrance and stood for a while, savoring the fresh night air and looking up at the stars. At the same time, he experienced an inner wonder at this new, awesome power that he had glimpsed, there for those with the nerve to grasp it. Yes, it was going to be a very new world, indeed.
Now it was time to become the Gorfmann who would go back to the main gate and report the stolen car. But that Gorfmann was supposed to have just come back from a banquet. He went in through the main door, and a patch of brake fluid on one of his shoes caused him to slip on the tiled floor of the vestibule. He cursed reflexively as he almost lost his balance and then went through to the men’s washroom a short distance along the passage leading to the backdoor to clean up. A few minutes later he emerged, carrying the soiled coveralls, and moving cautiously since he was still mindful that there were others in the building, made his way back up to the attic to put on the evening dress that he had brought with him for the purpose. As he straightened his tie and pulled on his topcoat, he grinned at himself in the mirror in fond of anticipation of replaying the same night with Lisa all over again. Time machines could be worth millions! The last thing he had to do was clean up the attic room to remove all traces of his occupancy, bundle up the gun and the other things he had used, and on the way downstairs, lock them away in his own office until he had a chance to dispose of them properly.
On his way down, he almost ran into Osternak.
Neither the professor nor his clothes had a mark on them.
Gorfmann stopped dead and stood, paralyzed. His eyes widened behind his spectacles. His head shook from side to side in a barely discernible motion of protest. “It can’t be,” he whispered.
The professor stared back at him, seeming equally bemused for a second or two, then his features relaxed, almost as if he thought something was funny. “Oh, but it can,” he said.
“How is this possible?”
“I don’t understand it. You don’t understand it. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you Rudi, but you wouldn’t listen. Do what you will. You can’t win.”
Something snapped inside Gorfmann’s mind then. An insane look came into his eyes, and he shook his head again, violently this time. “Oh, but I can.” Gorfmann produced the gun from inside the bundle he was holding. “So, I can’t win, eh? We’ll see about that.” He motioned for Osternak to walk ahead of him, down the stairs. “And don’t try anything clever, you old goat. I didn’t hesitate to shoot you before, and I won’t again.”
“There’s nothing you can—“
“Save your breath.”
They reached the ground floor and went out the back of the Keep into the compound. Gorfmann was breathing rapidly and heavily, his eyes darting fearfully this way and that. The older man moved warily, avoiding provocation. They entered the transfer dome and went into the control room, where Gorfmann activated the supervisory console and began flipping switches with one hand, all the time keeping the gun in the other trained on Osternak.
“What do you think you are doing?” Osternak asked.
Gorfmann’s voice was by now little more than a hiss through his teeth. “As you say, I don’t know what went wrong. But we are going to do it again, and this time I will get it right.” He motioned toward the door through to the transfer chamber. “In there.”
“Rudi, for heaven’s sake, listen to me. You don’t—“
“Shut up.”
“A second pass through the process will—“
“Move, or I’ll shoot you now and take you through dead. It’s all the same to me.”
Osternak stepped into the chamber. Gorfmann squeezed in with him, keeping the muzzle of the gun jammed against the professor’s ribs. He closed the door. Moments later, Osternak felt a brief dizziness as the transfer proceeded, nothing more. But Gorfmann screamed suddenly, sounding hideous in the confined space, and the gun clattered to the floor as he clutched his hands to the sides of his head. He slumped against Osternak, and his body slid downward as far as the narrow chamber would permit. The door opened, and Osternak struggled to heave the inert form onto the floor outside. He stepped out behind and stooped over it. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. . . .” But there was no point. Gorfmann was unconscious.
Osternak hurried through into the control room and scanned the instrument readouts. Through some fluke nobody seemed to be around, although it was still late in the working day. He thought back, replaying the events of the last several hours in his mind as accurately as he could. Yes, there was still time. He picked up the telephone handset from the hook on the side of the console and tapped a number.
“Yes,” a voice acknowledged at the other end.
“Professor Osternak?” he queried, just to check.
“This is Professor Osternak, yes. Who is this, please?”
“I am a version of your later self.”
“Oh. . . . Oh really? That is most interesting,” the other Osternak’s voice said.
“There isn’t a lot of time. Now, if my guess is correct, Rudi Gorfmann is there with you at this moment, and you are having a rather disagreeable conversation about going public with the program. Am I right?”
“Yes, that is true, quite true.” The other Osternak was doing a commendable job of managing to sound casual.
“And it is true, is it not, that you have been fearing that an illicit transfer will be made sooner or later?”
“Yes, that is so. But how do you—“
“I know what you think, because I am you, you see. But then again, I don’t have to tell you, because you are me.”
“Of course. Amazing! And so it happens.”
“It has happened—a transfer. We have a problem.”
“So, what can I do for you?”
“Not me, for yourself. I am you, from about five hours in the future. Five hours ago, I was you, sitting in that chair and taking this call.”
“This is astounding. I—“
“Listen. Gorfmann is a lot worse than you think. He’s insane.”
“You are serious, yes?”
“Later this evening he is going to murder you.”
“This is unbelievable. When does he intend to do this?”
“After eight, while his other self is at the banquet.”
“Ach, so. . . .”
“I haven’t worked out all the details, but he seems to have set up another self as an alibi. He’ll leave your office in a few more minutes, which will give us a couple of hours. I think we might be able to stop him.”
“Can we get together and talk about this?”
“That’s why I’m calling you.”
“How?”
“Right now I am in the transfer control room. There is another version of Gorfmann here, too, but he is unconscious. He has gone through two transfers in too short a time, and I think the stress has deranged him completely—exactly what we have been worried about. There’s no one else here at the moment, but I’m going to move him into the motor room in case anyone comes back. As soon as the one that’s with you leaves the office, get over here as fast as you can and give me a hand to move him somewhere safer. Then we can talk about what to do.”
“I shall be most interested to meet you.”
* * *
The two Osternaks used a dolly from the materials store to cart the still lifeless Gorfmann across the compound and into the Keep, where they took him to Professor Prandtl’s office, since Prandtl was away for a week, and laid him out on the sofa by the window. They loosened his tie and made him comfortable with blankets and a pillow borrowed from the medical room on the floor below. As an afterthought, Osternak Two removed the car keys from Gorfmann’s pocket. “I think as a precaution we’ll hang on to these,” he said. “It wouldn’t do to let him go driving if he got out.” Then they closed the door and went across the corridor to their own office to discuss what to do next.
The second Osternak—the one who had come back through the machine with Gorfmann—had a better idea of what was going on and assumed the initiative, taking the chair behind the desk. The other sat down opposite. “Fortunately, since we already share most of our thoughts, we don’t have to waste a lot of time talking,” Osternak Two said. In other words, Osternak One was already aware of the logical uncertainties surrounding this kind of situation. He didn’t know if the events already established on a timeline could be altered; whether the situation involved parallel universes, branching universes, or heavens alone knew what; or what the complexities would be of skipping from one line to another. On the other hand, everything might be predetermined. That was precisely what the experiments currently in progress were designed to find out. Also, double passes through the process within too short a span of time caused disorientation of the central nervous system, and what the effects might be on somebody in Gorfmann’s already unbalanced condition was anybody’s guess.
“Agreed,” Osternak One said. Which took care of the hours they could have spent debating things like that.
“I suggest that we play it safe until we’re out of this wretched loop that Gorfmann has initiated,” Osternak Two said. “Having two maniacs around is more than I know how to handle. So I say, let’s play everything as it happened until the time that Gorfmann transferred back the first time to commit the murder. After that version of him goes back, there will only be one of him left, which will be a much simpler situation. We can worry about what to do next at that point.”
“What time was that—when he went back?” Osternak One asked.
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure when he arrived. But since there have been people working in the transfer dome all day, I suspect he’s already here somewhere. My guess is that he arrived last night or early this morning, and is holed up somewhere until the time he has picked.”
Osternak One nodded slowly. “Ah, I see . . . which will no doubt coincide with the time his other self is publicly visible at the banquet in Innsbruck.”
“Exactly,” Osternak Two said.
“Hmm.” Osternak rubbed his chin. “Which one of us is going to get murdered?” he asked uncomfortably.
“Well, I’ve already been who you are right now, so it will have to be you.”
“Oh.” Osternak One didn’t sound overthrilled. Then his expression changed as the implication struck him. “Wait a minute, Osbert. If you were me, and you’re not dead, then you can’t have been killed.”
“Yes, I know you feel slightly stupid for having taken so long to see it, for I felt the same thing myself at this moment. So don’t worry about it. The next question is, how are you going to stop him doing it?”
“You could tell me, of course.”
“Which is what I said, too, when I was you, of course. But I also know that you realized while you were saying it that it wouldn’t do. It has to be your idea, to keep things the way they happened. We can experiment later with what happens when you deliberately change things—but let’s get out of this situation first. Which I remember is what you are thinking yourself at this moment, anyway.”
“Well, if he is hiding in the building somewhere, we could search the place and . . . No, that wouldn’t work, would it? That can’t have happened with you.”
“You’re catching on.”
“Why? Did you start to say the same thing?”
“Yes.”
“But I assume I must come up with something, since you evidently did.”
“I hope so. If not, God alone knows what happens.”
Osternak One ran his fingers through his halo of white hair. “Well, the only think I can think of is that we—I, that is, must fake it. Where do I get shot? Nothing gruesome, I hope.”
“Twice, in the chest.”
“Whose gun does he use?”
“Yours, from the desk. He makes it look as if an intruder was disturbed.”
Osternak One thought for a moment, and then his expression lightened. “Ah, yes, well, in that case I could reload it with blanks. The sticky red solvent they use in the plating shop should make a passable blood substitute. . . . Er, does this happen in good light?”
Osternak Two beamed and nodded approvingly. “No, right here in the office. He lures you up to Hoetzer’s lab for a few minutes with a bogus phone call, and when you get back he has fixed the lights. Complete darkness, apart from the light from the corridor.”
“So a handful of the stuff carried in and smacked to the chest when he fires? . . .”
“Splendid, splendid!” Osternak Two said. He had a painful bruise on his hip from where he had fallen over the chair, but saw no need to say anything about that. “Now, you have to stay here to take the phone call, which will come at about eight-thirty. Before then, I will have left a jar of red solvent from the plating shop on the table by the graphics printer in Hoetzer’s office—you’ll find out why when Gorfmann phones you. Also, I intend to install a hidden camera in the transfer-chamber room, running off a timer, to record when Gorfmann makes his first transfer back. Once that has occurred, we shall be out of the loop.”
“He could have come back from several days ahead,” Osternak One pointed out. “But of course, you are already aware of that.”
“Yes. And that’s why I’m going to set up a camera and not risk dying of cramp and cold trying to maintain a vigil there in person.”
They stood up and regarded each other curiously. Finally Osternak One said, “Well, time is getting on. I have my preparations to make, and so do you. Is there anything useful I can do when I’ve cleaned up after being shot?”
“I’d just keep an eye on our sleeping friend across there,” Osternak Two said, nodding his head in the direction of the door.
“Yes, well, I don’t know if we’re supposed to meet again, but in case not . . .” Osternak One held out a hand. The other shook it. “It’s been . . . an interesting encounter.” Osternak Two came around the desk, and walked toward the door. “One thing,” Osternak One said. Osternak Two turned. “I don’t know when I’m supposed to go back to become you.”
“Oh, I think that will take care of itself,” Osternak Two assured him. He turned away again and left through the door.
* * *
Outside in the corridor, Osternak Two looked briefly into Professor Prandtl’s office to check on Gorfmann. The body was still out cold, but breathing more regularly now. Satisfied that there was no immediate call for medical help, he left the Keep through the rear entrance and went into the instrumentation lab to collect the things he needed to set up the camera. He carried the bits and pieces to the control room and found a suitable hiding place that commanded a good view of the transfer room and the door into the chamber. The camera and film were designed for extended-duration scientific work and would silently capture a frame every five seconds for twenty-four hours. There would be no trouble in coming back to change the magazine once a day if need be. He worked slowly and meticulously, his mind wandering over the peculiarities and apparent contradictions of the situation. How could the same object be physically present twice at the same time? What happened when somebody deliberately undid what had been done? Were memory patterns somehow altered to correlate with the changed circumstances? There were questions that he didn’t have the beginnings of answers to yet. Time drifted on, and he became completely preoccupied with his thoughts. . . . And then his attention focused with the sudden realization that it was approaching eight-thirty . . . and his heart missed a beat. Oh God, the solvent!
He dropped what he was doing and hastened out into the compound and over to the plating shop. There, he scooped a glob of the red goo from its container into an empty can, stuffed the can in a plastic bag, and hurried over to the Keep and in through the rear door. Just as he was about to ascend the rear stairs, he heard a voice coming from the passage leading through to the front lobby. Fearful that it was the other Osternak looking for him after failing to find the solvent—which would have meant that he’d missed his cue and ruined everything—he changed course and charged into the passage. But as he came closer to the lobby he recognized the voice as Gorfmann’s and ducked hastily into a darkened doorway. Gorfmann was speaking under the canopy of the pay phone in the alcove at the end of the passage.
Gorfmann must have heard him come in, Osternak was certain. Yes, he could see Gorfmann’s shadow form leaning out of the alcove to peer along the passageway toward the back door. Osternak froze in the doorway, not daring to move a muscle. And then, to his relief, Gorfmann moved back into the alcove again, and his voice resumed, “I’m sorry, but it is important. . . . I wish to speak to somebody there called Gorfmann. A Dr. Rudi Gorfmann.” Osternak frowned to himself in the darkness. He had guessed that Gorfmann must have made his call from somewhere nearby. The time was right, but the call wasn’t. Why was Gorfmann calling himself? Was there a conspiracy being enacted between the two Gorfmanns, which he had never suspected? A sinking feeling of impending disaster came over him. From the alcove, Gorfmann’s voice continued, “Just put me through, please . . . Thank you . . . Just checking.” Gorfmann sounded as if he was trying not to laugh. Then, “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just say that, as I know you’ll be pleased to learn, you’re even cleverer than you think.” There was a click as Gorfmann hung up.
Osternak agonized in the darkness along the passage, wondering what to do. Then he realized that Gorfmann was making another call.
“Professor Osternak?” Gorfmann said, in a thick voice which the Osternak along the passage recognized instantly as something he had heard before. “Sorry to trouble, you, Professor, but this is Security at the main gate. . . . We’ve just had a call from Dr. Hoetzer, in Innsbruck. . . . Yes. He says that he was in a hurry to leave this evening, and . . .”
It was all still on track! He hadn’t caused a disaster after all. Osternak drew a deep breath to recover his wind after his rush across the compound and the tension he had experienced since, and then emerged from the doorway and backed quietly away along the passage. From the front of the building, he heard Gorfmann finish his call, leave the alcove, and go running up the front stairs. Osternak paused again for breath at the bottom of the rear stairs. Oh God, three flights.
When Osternak Two got to Hoetzer’s office, Osternak One was already there, searching frantically under the table by the graphics printer and along the shelves above just as Osternak Two had realized he would be. But Osternak Two was too breathless to explain, and besides there wasn’t time. He opened the bag containing the can and held it while the other dipped his hand, and then waved weakly toward the door to send Osternak One on his way. Then he leaned against the printer for a while to regain his breath and composure. Just as he was coming back out onto the stairs, the sound of two shots in rapid succession came up the stairway from below.
When he was halfway back across the compound, it came to him that there were now not two, but three Gorfmanns loose: one at the banquet, one on Prandtl’s couch, and the one who had just shot the other Osternak. So even when one of them made the transfer back through time, it would still leave two. The situation wouldn’t simplify itself in the way he had imagined. He shook his head wearily, unable to grapple with any more of it and feeling like a piece of flotsam being carried along on a tide of events that was long past any ability of his to control. Resolved at least to complete what he had set out to do, he went back into the transfer dome to finish setting up the camera.
* * *
Professor Osternak One waited until he was sure that Gorfmann had left, then picked himself up slowly from the floor. His hip ached from the knock he had taken from the chair when he went down. Osternak Two could have warned him about that, he reflected huffily. Since he had no intention of lying there for the rest of the night, it followed that Gorfmann would know anyway that the murder attempt had failed, should he choose to come back to the office for any reason. Therefore, Osternak reasoned, he might as well use some of the time he had to tidy things up. But first, he went to his lab to collect the spare shirt, tan sweater, and pants that he kept there in case of chemical spills and other accidents—the same clothes that Osternak Two had been wearing, he had noticed with curiosity, but it now made sense—and then proceeded to the washroom to change, and to sponge the worst of the stains from the clothes he had been wearing. Then he bundled up the wet clothes, returned to his office, and stowed them in a cupboard for sending to the cleaners the next day. That chore taken care of, he spent the next hour righting the furniture, returning the books to their places, and picking up and sorting through the papers that had been scattered all over the floor. It was a shame about the broken clock and the figurine, he reflected ruefully as he put them back in their places. Then he sat down and poured himself a brandy—he had just been murdered, after all. That deserved some compensation.
Only then did he remember that he was supposed to be keeping an eye on the Gorfmann in Prandtl’s room across the corridor. Muttering a reproach to himself for his forgetfulness, he went out of the office, pushed open Prandtl’s door, and looked in. And his jaw dropped in shock and dismay.
The couch and the room were empty. There was no trace of Gorfmann to be seen.
White-faced, Osternak One ran back into his own office and called the transfer-chamber room on an internal line. The ringing tone seemed to go on interminably, while all the time he tried frantically to think of the most likely places that Gorfmann might have gone. But with a madman, who could tell? Then the ringing stopped and his own voice answered cautiously, “Yes?”
“I’m in our office. He’s gone. Gorfmann has gone. He’s loose somewhere.”
“I was just coming back. I’ve finished on the camera here. I’ll be over there right away.” Osternak Two hung up.
The car! Gorfmann mustn’t be allowed to get to his car—in his state he could cause a massacre. He usually parked it in the executive area in front of the Keep, Osternak knew. The thing was to check if it was still there. He went back into the corridor and along to the accounts office at the front of the building, which overlooked the executive parking area. He turned on a light, crossed the room to a window, and peered down, shielding his eyes with a hand. Gorfmann’s car was still down there. That was something at least. And then he remembered that Gorfmann couldn’t use the car anyway, because Osternak Two had taken his keys when they put him in Prandtl’s office. Silly of him to have forgotten. Where, then—Keys! Gorfmann kept a spare set of keys in his desk!
Osternak ran out of the accounts office and up the stairs to the corridor where Gorfmann’s office was situated. Sure enough, there was a shadowy figure at the far end. He started running toward it, expecting it to flee; it ran toward him, evidently expecting the same thing. It was the other Osternak, who, not surprisingly, had thought the same thing.
“His car’s still there. I checked from the accounts office window,” Osternak One panted.
“I know it is,” Osternak Two replied. “So did I.”
The door of Gorfmann’s office was open, the light was on, and the top drawer of the desk had been pulled out. There were no keys in it.
“He must be on his way down. We have to try and catch him in the lobby,” Osternak One cried. “You take the back stairs. I’ll take the front.” He rushed out again to the end of the building and scampered back down the front stairs. When he was almost down to ground level, he saw a figure in a topcoat and evening dress, its tie loosened, reeling drunkenly some distance away from him in the open lounge area outside the upper floor of the library. There could be no mistake this time. He started in that direction, and in the same instant Gorfmann saw him. “Rudi, stop,” he called. But Gorfmann vanished down a side staircase. Osternak followed as fast as he could, but when he reached the bottom of the stairs, Gorfmann had gone. There were several directions he could have taken, but the two most probable, if he was going for his car, were either through to the lobby or out the library side door. Osternak picked the latter and followed the gravel path outside around a corner of the building to the parking area. Yes, there was a figure under the shrubs, near Gorfmann’s car. Osternak started running toward it.
But instead of trying to escape, the figure stepped forward and called out, “Who are you? What do you want?”
Osternak halted in sudden confusion. It wasn’t Gorfmann at all, in dinner dress, but somebody else in a black, single-piece garment that looked like a jump-suit. The last thing that Osternak wanted now was further complication. He turned and ran back around the corner and in through the side door. Inside, he vacillated over which way to go and finally went through to the lobby and down the passage to the back door to check the compound.
As Osternak disappeared down the passage from the lobby, the crazed figure of Gorfmann came out of another opening behind him, staggered across the lobby, fumbling with his car keys, and disappeared out the front door.
Out in the compound, Osternak One halted uncertainly. Gorfmann, in evening dress, was approaching from the gate that opened through from the general staff parking area. But he was behaving in a suddenly very different manner, walking jauntily and whistling to himself. And although his tie was untied, all of a sudden he didn’t have a topcoat. Aware that something odd was going on, Osternak faded back into the shadows by the rear door of the Keep. And then another figure appeared at the gate behind Gorfmann. “Hey, Rudi,” it called. Gorfmann stopped and looked back. It was Hoetzer’s voice. “You forgot your coat.”
“Oh, silly of me.” Gorfmann turned and retraced his steps to the gate.
And then it dawned on Osternak what was happening. This wasn’t the Gorfmann he had been chasing at all, but the original one, back from Innsbruck. Osternak exhaled his breath slowly at the thought of the collision that had almost occurred, and let himself quietly back into the building. He walked quickly back along the passage to the front lobby, and just as he got there a car engine started up outside. A moment later, he saw headlamps through the lobby windows, then Gorfmann’s car backing out of its parking slot and roaring away. He ran toward the door, although the gesture was already futile, but then stopped dead as he was about to open it. The figure in the black jump-suit was still out there, standing in full view in the forecourt, now, looking up at the sky. Then the figure began crunching across the gravel toward the door. Osternak backed off and drew himself up into the darkness at the foot of the front stairs. The figure in the jump-suit came in through the door and then skidded on the tiles just inside the vestibule, almost falling over. Osternak heard him curse, and then watched him walk across to the passage at the back and go into the men’s washroom a short distance along.
No sooner had that door closed when the sound of another door opening came from the far end of the passage, followed by footsteps approaching briskly. Osternak moved higher up the stairs, deeper into the darkness. It was the Gorfmann back from Innsbruck, no doubt going through to pick up his car. Hoetzer must have dropped him off in the general staff area for some reason instead of bringing him directly around to the front. Osternak was past trying to figure out what was happening now, or when, or with whom, or why. He waited in the stairway, totally bemused.
Gorfmann disappeared out through the front door. Osternak heard his footsteps come to a sudden halt outside on the gravel, then go stamping back and forth from one end of the parking area to the other. Finally they came back to the entrance, and Gorfmann burst through, slamming the door behind him. “What in hell’s going on?” Osternak heard him muttering aloud to himself. “Oh God, this is too much. Not at a time like this, of all nights!” His voice faded away along the passage. The sound came of the back door opening, closing again with a bang, and then all was quiet.
Osternak waited a while longer, but everything remained still. He turned and went slowly up to his office, thinking that perhaps his other self might have gone there, too. But he found it deserted. He went over to his desk, sat down, took the flask from the cabinet below his terminal, and poured himself another large, straight brandy. He sat there for a long time, trying to make sense of it all, but he was too tired. Tomorrow he would write it all down. But for now . . . there was nothing more to be done for now. He replaced the flask, switched off the desk lamp, got up wearily, and walked over to the door. After one last look around and a final, baffled shake of his head, he turned out the light and walked the corridor to the front stairs. Just as he got there, a figure coming down the stairs fast almost ran into him. It was a Gorfmann. Osternak had no idea which one. He was wearing evening dress and a topcoat, but had his tie tied.
For a second Gorfmann just stood there, paralyzed with shock and looking as befuddled as Osternak felt. His eyes widened disbelievingly behind his spectacles, and his head shook protestingly. “It can’t be,” he whispered.
Suddenly the pieces fell together in Osternak’s mind, and despite the circumstances he couldn’t contain a thin smile. “Oh, but it can,” he assured Gorfmann.
“How is this possible?”
“I don’t understand it. You don’t understand it. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Rudi, but you wouldn’t listen. Do what you will. You can’t win.”
“Oh, but I can.” Gorfmann drew out the gun. Osternak could have taken it, since it contained only blanks . . . but that would have spoiled everything.
As they walked away down the stairs, Osternak ahead and Gorfmann following a short distance behind with the gun, another figure who had been listening came down from the level above. He followed them at a safe distance across the compound and watched as they entered the transfer dome. He waited outside for a few minutes, and by the time he went inside, the control room was empty. He went over to the supervisory console, which had been activated, and read from the displays that the transfer countdown was just twenty seconds from zero. He moved quietly over to the door and peered around it into the transfer room just in time to see Gorfmann step into the chamber behind Osternak One and close the door. There was a brief humming noise, and then silence. Back in the control room the displays went through the posttransfer routine, and the system shut itself down.
Professor Osbert Osternak Two came back outside and stood looking around at the silhouettes of the Keep, the silent laboratory buildings, and the lights from the main gate area on the far side of the compound. He drew the set of Gorfmann’s car keys from his pocket and stared at them for a long time, thinking to himself and wondering at the subtleties of the universe. Then he walked slowly back across the compound and into the Keep. Ten minutes later, wearing his overcoat and hat, he came out through the front entrance, climbed into his car, and left for home. It had been a long night in more ways than one. He had been awake an extra six hours, and his body was beginning to feel it. Tomorrow, for once, he would sleep in late, he decided. Very late.
* * *
Inspector Wenkle made a sweeping motion with his hand over the papers spread out on the desk in Professor Osternak’s office. “The thing that puzzles me, Professor, is that the dentition of the victim matches Dr. Gorfmann’s records perfectly. Also, we found traces of unburned hair that also matched samples from a comb found in Gorfmann’s desk.”
Osternak returned a what-am-I-supposed-to-say-to-that look. “Surely you’re not suggesting that it was Gorfmann in the car, Inspector? How could it have been? You said that you interviewed him yourself the day after the accident happened.”
“Also, they both had surgical pins in the same knee.”
“Lots of people have surgical pins.”
“But the dental records . . .”
“I’m afraid that’s not my department, Inspector. Can’t two people have similar dental histories?”
“Identical? I’ve never heard of it.”
Osternak raised his eyebrows and held a prolonged shrug for a moment longer, and then placed his hands palms-down on his desk in a gesture of finality. “Well, all I can suggest, Inspector, is that you take a leaf from the practice of science,” he said breezily.
“And what might that be, sir?”
“Hypotheses are built upon the best data available, but they are never inviolate. When incontrovertible facts are established which contradict the hypothesis, then the hypothesis must be revised. In this case, the hypothesis based on previous experience is that no two individuals have identical dentition. . . . I trust you take my point.”
“I see.” Wenkle rubbed his nose and seemed about to say something, then thought better of it. “This will cause quite a sensation among forensic circles,” he remarked.
“Hmm? . . . Oh yes. Yes, I suppose it will.”
“Well, I suppose there’s no need to take up any more of your time, Professor.”
“If you’re sure I can be of no further help . . .”
“Oh, I think we’ve covered everything.” Wenkle began collecting his papers together. “Where did you say Dr. Gorfmann went, again?”
“To Australia. He was a rather headstrong and unusually ambitious young man—very capable, mark you, but he thought he wasn’t getting enough of an opportunity here. He resigned and went off to . . . oh, I forget the name of the place. One of those billabong-sounding, Aborigine words, out in the desert.”
“A bit abrupt, wasn’t it?”
“Remarkably so. It caused us a few headaches, I can tell you. But he was very temperamental. Terrible, the lack of consideration among young people these days. Terrible.”
“It seems strange that he didn’t wait to collect the insurance money.”
“Didn’t need it. His family’s dripping with money. They own gold mines or something out in Australia. That’s probably why he went there.”
“Why would he have bought a new car so recently if he was going abroad?”
“Who knows? As I said, he was an extremely headstrong young man. It was probably an impulse that came out of the blue. He was like that. It doesn’t surprise me at all. I only wish I had the money and freedom to be able to do things like that.”
“I see.” Wenkle zipped up his document holder and rose from his chair. “Just one more thing, Professor.”
“Yes?”
“To enable us to close our file on the case, I suppose there’d be no objection to letting me have copies of the relevant documents—his resignation notice and termination papers?”
Osternak stared down at the desk for a moment. “You mean right now?”
“Well, if it wouldn’t be any trouble, since I’m here anyway. . . .”
“Hmm . . .” Osternak sniffed and scratched his temple. “That might be difficult. I’ve just remembered that our secretary who handles all those things is off this afternoon.”
“Well, maybe in the next couple of days?”
“Oh, in that case . . .” Osternak showed his palms in a gesture of magnanimity. It would mean a long session with Hoetzer’s high-resolution graphics printer, but he could survive another late night, he supposed. “Certainly, Inspector. Give me a couple of days, and I’ll let you have all the documents you like.”
“Very good, then. Good day, Professor Osternak. And thank you again for being so cooperative.”
“Not at all. I like to do my best for another profession whose objective is uncovering the truth, eh? Good day to you, Inspector.”
Osternak got up and escorted Wenkle to the door. Then he came back and stood for a long time staring at the equations on his chalkboard. The recent events demonstrated an even greater need for care than he’d imagined. But when he went over the things that had happened and examined them again in terms of symbolic relationships . . . yes, yes, he could see a strange kind of logic beginning to emerge. Intrigued, he moved nearer the board, picked up a piece of chalk, and began to write.
Thanks for joining me in this somewhat erratic voyage of rediscovery around an archipelago of thoughts from 1988. For those who are so disposed, I look forward to meeting you again in Rockets, Redheads, and Revolution. I welcome hearing from readers with thoughts to share, hopefully a compliment or two, or grumbles that need airing. My e-mail address is jphogan1@ibm.net. Web site http://www.global.org/jphogan
James P. Hogan