short fiction
Yeah, well, I guess this is as much of a cliché of any of this whole trip has been since you guys showed up, but I told this to you five times already. I haven’t slept in thirty hours, you know? I’m not going to remember anything new at this point. You guys don’t have a big enough budget to afford tape recorders? Oh hell, yes, I know. Like I said, I told you this five times and you told me five times it was being recorded.
Never mind. I came in at six-thirty. No that’s not early for us. Different kinds of weather, magnetic disturbances, screw up the readings. It was a good window is all. No, what happened was not the plan for the day. The schedule was to run more automaton experiments. Yes, that’s like robots, but very simple. They don’t have any real programming or logic ability. They’re just electric carts with a start button on a timer and they roll through the mouth. We put them on the runway - that’s what we call the path between the mouths, yes.
I don’t think I can explain the the physics to you. It’s all just math to me. Jenkins does the lecture rounds, gives updates to the Board, he can probably dumb it down for you. I know what it does, though. The wormhole gate connects a passage through hyperspace that bridges a trivial physical distance in normal space. But the two openings, the mouths, are separate in time. It means that you can effectively travel into the past out of one mouth by entering the other. Yes it means for a period you’re in two places at once. I know it is, but I’ve seen it. With the carts, yes. And with him. I can’t explain it to you, but we’ve known the physics looked possible for centuries. When they sent the Einstein Rosen probe out part of it’s mission was to attempt to harvest suitable singularities - like tiny black holes, yes. That physics is seventy years old, and they suspected presence of a singularity concentration in that vicinity for half a century. Cosmology is always way out ahead of the applications, you know?
That’s why he did it. Dr. Drosdov, yes. No, not why he did that. Well. I don’t expect to every really know why he did that. I mean, why does anyone do something like that? I meant, it’s why he was in this field. He would talk about how scientists used to be called natural philosophers, how their mission was to understand the tools and materials of the architect of the universe. I don’t know if he meant anything like God by it. He said all society wanted anymore were overspecialized instrumentationalists to feed engineers the raw materials for the next crop of gadgets to prop up the economy. Oh, that’s pretty much a direct quote. He said it more than once. But this, this was edge of the universe stuff. What we were doing had never been done. It opened unimaginable possibilities. Interstellar travel, instantaneous communication. An exit mouth could be opened and it’s entrance maintained indefinitely far into the future. Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.
Don’t get me wrong, as a scientist there wasn’t any mumbo jumbo to the work he did. I mean, more than anything that’s why I just think he was crazy, something just broke upstairs, you know? Certainly it was dangerous, we had no proof the gravity receiver-transmitter would be able to rationalize the disturbances of the transmission of a live subject, so the gate could have been destroyed. Probably all of us with us, yes, probably most of the building. But more than that, it was just bad science. He’s lived this thing for thirty years, and he’s been thinking about it all his life. He wouldn’t have jeopardized everything in his right mind. That’s what I think, anyway. And he was a compassionate person. I don’t think the man I knew would risk all our lives.
Well, like I said I don’t think we’ll ever really know. All I know is, I came in at half past six and he was already there. The first thing I noticed was that Drosdov was on the runway. No, I didn’t realize the gate was open at that point. I would have had a hard time believing it if I hadn’t seen what I did. No, the second thing I noticed was that he had the gun in his hand. It looked huge. And it was so unlike him. It just looked - insane. Like a dream.
The cart had been rolled out into the staging area. We were going to do what we had been doing for weeks, setting it on the runway, setting the timer, watch it roll in through the far mouth, the watch it roll out through the near mouth. In between both are there. It seems to be the same cart. We’re not certain how it can be, except that the math works out. Jenkins thinks that when the cart emerges into the past, both may start oscillating in and out of statistical existence in oppositional phase with one another too quickly to observe. I don’t really know what that means. You can see them, they both look normal. No, we’ve never allowed them to interact. The most dangerous part of the translation is balancing the gravity effects of the exit and entrance. We’ve been very cautious about pushing into areas where the math of that gets too complex. We weren’t even contemplating living subjects. I mean, we discussed the implications but it was decades in the future. I doubt Drosdov expected to live to see it.
I’m sorry. Oh, hell. Do either of you have a handkerchief? I just still - he was a decent person, you know? A great scientist. A good man. A good boss.
I was the first one into the lab besides him. There was noone else there. I don’t know if he was expecting me. He didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t act, I don’t know, like he’d been caught in the act or anything. He just looked right at me and he said, “Anne.” No, everybody calls me that. We’ve been working together a long time, I call Jenkins Ikey, you know? He said, “Anne. There is only one question that it all leads to in the end, and that is paradox. “ Then he looked at a watch. Just a wristwatch, I suppose he wore it every day, but he was holding it in his other hand. And he said, “in a few moments I will come through the far mouth. And when I do -” and that’s the last thing he said. That’s when he came through. Yes, the second Drosdov, whatever you want to call it. Then Drosdov - yes the first, the one who was there when I came in. Then he looked surprised. The second one didn’t walk through, he was running, he almost fell out of the mouth. And when he saw himself standing there - he - he screamed. Shrieked, really. He sounded - terrified. And he - the translated one - after he screamed he pointed the gun at Drosdov and he shot him - shot himself - point blank, in the chest.
Drosdov didn’t say anything. He put his hand on his chest, and he started to back away. He was sort of gasping, gulping. Then he turned around and ran through the near mouth.
And when I looked back, Drosdov - the one that was left - was on his knees. He’d dropped the gun. He didn’t say anything. He was breathing very fast. He was looking down at his chest. His shirt was covered with blood. Then he fell over and stopped moving.
No, of course I didn’t go up to him. The gate was still open. Is still open. I still can’t believe we survived Drosdov’s translation, let alone what happened after - yes. Right after he fell over, just a few minutes later, I still hadn’t moved, I hadn’t even closed the door behind me - that’s when the others started coming through.
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