Transgression Page 6

  It took longer than he expected. His kidneys must have been in overdrive, he figured. When he got back, he immediately saw that he had made a slight mistake. The growth of the wormhole had slowed down to almost nil. He dialed up the feedback as high as it would go, but the wormhole made little response. He punched in a quick calculation on his calculator, and then swore. It would take another fifteen minutes at least to get the growth rate up again, and more than that to home in on the date he had chosen. It was already past seven. He would be doing very well to lock in the wormhole on target before eight. And he still had to pack his things.

  Ari would come in long before then, if he followed his normal routine. Then again, he might not follow his normal routine today. Last week, he had ditched work to go tree-planting with that girl, the smart one. She was supposed to come back this weekend. Damien resisted the urge to cross his fingers. He didn’t believe in superstitions, but he could only hope Ari had gotten lucky last night. If so, he might sleep in for once.

  Damien watched the monitor for a while. At last he saw what he wanted. The wormhole had begun advancing again into the past. And still no sign of Ari. Damien went to his desk and rummaged around for his victory cigar. He had seen that in a movie awhile back and decided that if his plan ever succeeded, he would smoke one, too, no matter how bad it tasted.

  The cigar wasn’t half smoked before he locked the wormhole down on target: May 27, A.D. 57. He shut down the feedback mechanism, ensuring that the wormhole couldn’t tunnel even one more millisecond into the past. Now the only way to change the wormhole was to destroy it—let it shrink back down to the Planck size where nobody could ever use it again.

  Damien stepped carefully to a reinforced doorway set in the wall. The wormhole lived inside this closet. He hesitated. It might be a good idea to take this slowly. Safety first. He had set the oscillating electric field at a level to just maintain the wormhole. It ought to be safe, but why take chances? And who knew how that exotic matter would behave?

  Cautiously, he grabbed the doorknob. Last night, it had led into an empty closet. Now, it should be a dream right out of H.G. Wells. He pulled the door open.

  Damien cursed aloud and took a step back, aghast. In front of him waited a great ball of…nothing. Blackness. Emptiness. He shut the door, his hand trembling.

  Wormholes diffused electromagnetic radiation. He knew that. You couldn’t see through them, though you should be able to walk through. In theory. Kip Thorne’s book showed a sketch of a wormhole, and Damien had thought himself prepared.

  But he wasn’t. Suddenly the victory cigar in his mouth tasted foul.

  * * *

  Rivka

  Rivka slowed as she reached the third floor of the physics department. What would Ari say when he saw her? Would he apologize? Ignore her? Start another argument?

  She guessed that he would at least be civil, especially if Dr. West were there. It would be nice if they could both agree that they had overreacted last night. For her part, she wanted to tell him she had some doubts herself. If she admitted she didn’t know everything about God, maybe Ari would back down a little and admit he didn’t know everything about Yeshua. Not that she held out any hope of him coming to believe in Yeshua, but at least he and she could be friends. You had to admire a man as committed to the truth as Ari.

  Rivka’s nose twitched as she wandered down the hallway. Why did people smoke those horrible-smelling cigars? And barely after eight in the morning!

  She pushed open the lab door and then coughed. It smelled thick in there, and her eyes watered. “Ari!” she said. “Put that thing out. The war’s over. Truce!”

  Dr. West’s laugh echoed from the far end of the room. “Oh, hello. I wasn’t expecting a lady this morning, so I thought I’d try something stronger than coffee to help me wake up.” He strode toward her, his face redder than Rivka remembered it, his blue eyes oddly bright. He stubbed out his cigar in a large brass ashtray. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to remind me of your name again.”

  “Rivka Meyers.” She held out her hand, and he shook it.

  “If you’ve come to see Ari, he’s not in yet. I have no idea why not.”

  Rivka tugged nervously at her right earlobe. “I hope he’s not too upset with me. We had…a bit of an argument last night.”

  “An argument?” Dr. West nodded. “He does that once in a while—flies off the handle. He usually forgets the next day. I expect he’ll show up any minute. Would you like some coffee?”

  “No, I’m wide awake.” An awkward silence hung between them. “Maybe you could show me the famous wormhole that you’ve been working on,” Rivka offered.

  Dr. West’s face took on an odd expression.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  He shook his head, and then a broad smile creased his face. “No, it’s just…I’m a little nervous. I’ve got the power supplies all ready to charge up for a shot, as soon as Ari gets in. I don’t want to touch anything until we fire.”

  “I won’t get too close,” Rivka said. “I never did like electricity much.”

  Dr. West led her toward the far end of the room and pointed toward a doorway. “That’s the portal—”

  “A doorway?” Rivka said. “That’s it? Just a doorway?”

  “Not just a doorway,” Dr. West said. “It’s wired up to carry some heavy juice through it, and there’s a special conduit for exotic matter. Don’t ask what that is—I haven’t the foggiest. But Ari goes on about it for hours if you let him. Anyway, the doorway’s reinforced pretty well to resist the transient forces.”

  “Where does it lead?”

  “Right now, it goes into a closet,” Dr. West said. “If Ari’s theory works as we think, when we throw the switch, a wormhole will develop inside there that leads to whenever you want.”

  “When would you like to go to?”

  He grinned again. “Last October, so I can bet on the World Series. I lost a lot of money last year. This time I’ll earn it all back and maybe break Las Vegas just for grins.”

  Rivka laughed. “Ari says you can’t change the past.”

  Dr. West shrugged. “Who knows? Nobody’s ever tried. Do you believe you can change the future?”

  “You mean, do I have free will?” Rivka said. “Sure, I believe that. Most people do.”

  “Well, if you can change the future, why not the past?” Dr. West said. “Same thing, from a physicist’s point of view.”

  “I’m not a physicist,” Rivka said. “I’ll let you and Ari argue that one out.”

  Dr. West smiled. “Ari always wins our arguments,” he said. “But once in a while, even a dumb experimentalist like me can prove a smart theorist wrong. In physics, the experiment gets the final word.”

  Rivka turned around. “Speaking of Ari, where is that guy?”

  “He should be here any minute,” Dr. West said. “Would you like to play that game Avatar we were demoing last week for your friends?”

  That sounded interesting. “Sure,” Rivka said. “That’s the kind of journey into the past I can understand.”

  * * *

  Damien

  Damien could hardly believe his luck. Five minutes ago, he had thought he had lost everything. The wormhole looked like the high dive to nowhere, and Ari might show up at any minute.

  But now, here came Rivka with excellent news. She’d had an argument with Ari. Knowing Ari, Damien guessed he would go plant some of his stupid trees for a few hours.

  Furthermore, if he played his cards right, maybe he could maneuver Rivka into serving as a guinea pig. Would she bite?

  Rivka looked up from the computer. “Okay, it’s finished booting up. Where’s this Avatar game?”

  Damien put on his happy face and came around the table to stand behind her. A few mouse clicks later, he stepped back. While the program loaded, a graphic splashed up on the screen—a fly-through of the Temple in the year A.D. 66. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

  Rivka nodded. “How does this game work
?”

  Damien picked up the virtual reality headset. “You put this on over your eyes, and it shows you a 3-D view of wherever you’re at in the computer-generated world. The headset has motion sensors, so as you walk around or turn your head, the computer rotates your world or moves you through it, just like you’re really there. It’s pretty standard as far as graphics go, but the archaeology boys did some really neat stuff with artificial intelligence. You’ve got a mike in the headset, so you can talk to characters, and they’ll respond. Sorry, but right now, it only works if you speak Hebrew.”

  “That’s no problem,” Rivka said. “Is there a wire I’m going to trip over?”

  “It’s got a digital wireless link,” Damien said. “The range is something huge, like a quarter mile, but you can’t go more than fifty feet in this room, so you won’t go out of bounds. By the way, the motion sensor amplifies your forward motion. Even small steps will move you pretty fast, so you don’t have to go very far in real space to move a long way in the virtual world.”

  “My father would love this,” Rivka said. “How do you put this gear on?”

  “Step over here, away from the computer table, so you won’t bump into anything,” Damien said. He put the headset on her head and carefully strapped it under her chin. She was about to perform a great service to the world.

  “Awesome!” Her voice came through the computer’s speakers. “I can’t believe this.” She turned her head left, right, and then straight up.

  The image on the computer monitor showed a 2-D rendition of everything Rivka saw inside the headset. She stood in the outer courts of the Temple. Thousands of people milled around her, dressed in the garb of ancient Judea. Looking at the display, Damien could hardly believe how much punch computers packed these days—more than a Cray only twenty years ago. “Okay, now just take a small step,” he said.

  She did. The image on the screen seemed to zoom forward.

  “Take it easy,” he said. “The software amplifies forward motion.”

  “What a terrific teaching tool!” she said. “I’ve got to get this for my machine at home.”

  “Here’s something really cool,” Damien said. “Try talking to one of the people passing by you.”

  Rivka spoke to one of the female passersby in Hebrew.

  The woman stopped, turned, and said something in response.

  Damien caught a few words, but his Hebrew was pretty rusty. He knew enough for his purposes, so why learn more?

  Rivka began walking, taking small steps. The inner Temple zoomed toward her on the monitor.

  Damien tiptoed toward the doorframe leading into the wormhole. Quietly, he opened the door and pulled it all the way around until it latched, wide open. He couldn’t see through the wormhole, but he knew perfectly well what lay on the other side—a cave he had located precisely a month earlier using a global positioning device. The wormhole tunneled through both space and time. It had to. Even Damien understood that theorem. The cave actually lay a couple of miles away, on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, a convenient place for Damien to emerge into his Brave Old World. But only if it were safe.

  Damien returned to the computer monitor. Rivka had made it into the inner Temple and was engaged in a conversation with a fierce-looking priest with a bushy beard and piercing eyes. The man looked a bit like Ari, Damien noted with amusement.

  When Rivka finished the conversation, Damien picked up the joystick. He had neglected to tell Rivka one important detail. The program could also be controlled by the joystick. When both the headset and the joystick were in use, the computer simply added both movements together to determine the view. Which allowed Damien to steer Rivka—albeit awkwardly. He had discovered this feature last week when Ari’s cousin played the game.

  Guiding Rivka was both hard and easy. Hard, because Rivka didn’t want to walk in a straight line for very long. Easy, because she took baby steps, allowing him to correct any errors before she got far.

  It took several minutes to get her near the door. Then she sneezed.

  Damien held his breath, thinking she might have smelled the cave. Would she take off her headset before she went through the door?

  She didn’t. Instead, she began moving toward one end of the courtyard in the Temple, where steps led up to a huge altar and, beyond that, to the inner sanctum. Damien wasn’t very familiar with the Temple geography, but he guessed that all the gory stuff happened in there. Rivka made a beeline for that altar.

  Damien rotated Rivka’s world just a bit with the joystick. She corrected for this by changing her own direction a hair. Bit by bit, he got her pointed toward the wormhole. Then he used the mouse to gradually lower the sensitivity of the forward motion sensors. This forced her to move her feet more to get the same motion in her imaginary world.

  In a few minutes, Rivka stood in the doorway.

  Damien held his breath. Anything could happen here. Would she be zapped by stray electric fields? Would magnetic fields stir up eddy currents to fry the metal in her cutoffs? Would some weird gravitational gradient rip her apart by tidal forces? He simply hadn’t worried about all this until a few minutes ago. Nobody had ever done this before, and nobody would ever do it again. Unless Ari was wrong about only being able to build one of these beasts.

  Even then, Damien would make him right by the simple expedient of rewriting the last twenty centuries of history with a magic bullet into Paul’s brain. With that minor revision, nobody would ever make a wormhole again. There wouldn’t be enough science left to blow your nose with.

  Damien wiped the sweat off his palms and waited.

  Rivka walked through the doorway and into the wormhole. And vanished. Damien kept his eyes glued on the computer monitor. Good! The radio link hadn’t broken. Rivka stopped to talk to some fool musician, halfway up the steps into the inner sanctum of the Hebrew god.

  Damien slowly exhaled. It worked! The wormhole was safe! Which presented another problem. How would he get Rivka to turn around and come back? She wandered on, oblivious to the fact that she had just walked into a different century. And still, she kept moving.

  Somebody knocked at the door of the lab.

  Damien’s heart began racing. Now what? He made a snap decision. Silently, he glided to the wormhole and eased the door shut. He would leave Rivka alone in her little world for a few minutes, and then he’d come back and figure out some way to get her back into the present. He didn’t need her anymore. She had jumped off the high dive first. The water was safe. Damien felt ready to dive in himself.

  The knocking continued, hesitant and unsure.

  Damien hurried to answer it.

  When he opened the door, he saw the mousy new postdoc who had just arrived from China. The young man stared shyly at the floor and then poured out his question in very bad English. “So very sorry to disturb. Laser printer out paper. Where is more?”

  Damien put on his most genial smile. “I’m afraid I don’t know,” he said. “I suggest you try the department secretary down on the first floor. She knows more than God.”

  It took three repetitions, with much smiling and gesturing on Damien’s part, to get this message into the postdoc’s brain. Then the young man mistook Damien’s smile for friendliness and asked if he came from the United States, and if so, where?

  Damien tried a short answer, but there seemed no way to explain in a few words where Northwestern University was located. No, not in the Northwest. In the Midwest, just north of Chicago. No, he did not know Bill Gates. No, he had never been to the University of Washington, where the postdoc had a friend. And all of this had to be repeated several times.

  Damien began getting worried. How long had Rivka been alone? Five minutes? Six? Seven? He didn’t know for sure, but he wanted to check up on her. Finally, he simply sneezed three times, right in the postdoc’s face.

  The young man stepped backward.

  “Sorry,” Damien said with a smile. “Sick.” He pointed at his nose. “Bad cold.”


  The postdoc nodded and kept backing away. Damien smiled, waved a friendly good-bye, and shut the door. He turned and ran back toward the wormhole. When he reached it, he took a few seconds to catch his breath. Then he eased the door open, stepped into the wormhole, and walked through to the other side.

  In the dim light in the middle of the cave, a man lay retching on the ground. Rivka was nowhere in sight.

  Damien backed through quickly and pushed the door shut. His face suddenly felt very hot. What had happened? Something bad. Something very bad.

  But no time to worry about that. He had to move quickly—finish packing, set the wormhole for a delayed shutdown, and then go. If he found Rivka soon, he could send her back.

  Otherwise…that would just be too bad for her. He couldn’t afford to let anything screw up his plan. As the Unabomber had pointed out, in order to gain one thing, sometimes you had to sacrifice something else.

  Or someone else.

  Part III

  Avatar

  Summer, A.D. 57

  If I have a time machine (wormhole-based or otherwise), I should be able to use it to go back in time and kill my mother before I was conceived, thereby preventing myself from being born and killing my mother. Central to the matricide paradox is the issue of free will: Do I, or do I not, as a human being, have the power to determine my own fate?

  Kip Thorne

  Black Holes and Time Warps, chapter 14

  Chapter 7

  Rivka

  JERUSALEM. OLD JERUSALEM!

  RIVKA KEPT wondering if she were crazy. Or hallucinating.

  The world around her looked painfully real, and yet painfully different. The sky had that brilliant blue hue that she had only seen in parts of the world untouched by the internal combustion engine. The smell of wood smoke hung in the air, just like her San Diego neighborhood at Christmastime. Another smell assaulted her nose too. She stepped around a large pile of mule dung. And straight across this valley, the walls of the Temple Mount rose up high, looking fresh and new, like the model at the Holyland Hotel, but life-size.