Nikka seemed to think this should be obvious. “A wormhole head can’t eat its tail.”
“Ummm?” Nigel didn’t follow.
“If one end of our wormhole gets too close to the other, there is a quantum-mechanical effect. Particles fry up out of the quantum foam, acting like a pressure. This forces the ends apart, so the loop can’t close.”
Benjamin was puzzled. “Particles? Why?”
Nikka thumbed in diagrams, which floated just below the polished tabletop. Airy confections: yellow light-cones intersecting scarlet, slanted planes.
“The wormhole head can’t get close to its tail, can’t get beyond what’s called the Cauchy Horizon. If it does—”
Frying radiance pulsed from the blue wormhole head. An answering hot shower pulsed from its tail. A storm of colliding radiation pushed the two apart.
Nigel would once have untangled these Euclidean graces, but he was content now to let Nikka ferret out the truth—
or theory, rather, he corrected himself. There was a big difference. Nikka said, “If they get too close, you could go back to where you started and stop yourself from beginning.”
Benjamin shook his head. “Why would I want to do that?”
Nikka laughed, eyes crinkling with myriad lines. “Physics doesn’t care about what you want. It’s about what you could do. Try to create paradoxes in causality and the universe will straighten you out—pronto.”
Nigel ventured, “Uh . . . how?”
Nikka gestured at intricate traceries of world-lines, slanting surfaces chopping through event-space. Nigel nodded as though he were following all this, and in fact some of it did come through. But he was struck by how the obliging simplicities embedded in the minds of primates who learned to throw rocks and joust with sticks on the flat dry plains of Africa could so deftly eye the warp and woof of the esty labyrinths. Presumption masquerading as physics . . . probably.
Nikka’s pale logics were almost persuading. Almost.
Their world peeled back to its essentials.
Beyond their compound the esty flickered. Events, eras, whole blighted histories shimmered and winked away.
Backward, sliding backward.
The worm was writhing now, curling through its convoluted course on its great ranging return. There was no clear concept of speed in this, Nikka pointed out, because the rate of progress through time could not be measured versus time. The human perspective did not encompass this, and Nigel’s rather classically stiff-lipped education resounded in memory: That you cannot measure you cannot know.
What they all did know was that the supplies for preserving Ito’s body and brain cells were running low. To keep him cooled to the critical range—below thermal damage, yet above the point around minus 110 degrees Centigrade, where shear stresses set in—took energy and circulating fluids.
“He can’t hold much longer,” Angelina said, circles under her eyes.
“Damn it!” Nigel slammed a fist onto the dining room table, where situation reports on Ito gleamed. “We’ll have to cobble something together.”
Angelina had sat in vigil beside Ito’s tank and was worn down, but she knew those systems better than anyone, and her slow, sad shaking head struck a heavy weight into Nigel’s heart. “No use. We need to get back to our own era. Then I could find supplies.”
“If we hit a longer pause,” Nikka said hopefully, “we could go out, forage—”
“No time, our pauses are getting short. And out there it’s strange.” Angelina dismissed the idea with a tired wave of her hand. “I wouldn’t trust anything I got.”
“That damned flickering is faster and faster anyway,” Benjamin said.
“I hope it means we are—” Nikka hesitated with the instinctive rectitude of a scientist, “in some sense, accelerating toward the wormhole mouth.”
“I hope, too,” Angelina whispered, “I do, I do.”
THIRTY
Comfy Doubt
Nigel had grown up in a properly skeptical English home. He doubted the polite glacial veneer that the Church of England had become, coating a flat disbelief in all things supernatural or superhuman, squashing all morality into a pale, thin social ethic. No God need apply in the C of E, the only faith known by its link to a country of the mind, Church of England, hallelujah. The comfy doubt of frayed religiosity, he thought.
The esty had taught him that space and time were malleable, folded forms of each other. Now they had transcended time as easily as one moved in space—a property ascribed in ancient texts only to God, and an omnipotent one at that.
If there was a God, then He or She or—more probably, he thought—It, acting in strict accord with physical laws (which presumably It had made—but there was an interesting argument there, too), could reach back in time. Could influence the past, even though to Nigel the events had already happened. This idea he had worked over in his mind until he began in a quiet and regular way to pray. Nothing could have surprised his younger self more, he was sure.
He had known and loved people who had died hard deaths. He asked God to manifest Itself in a previous time—not to change the course of events, but to enter into the minds of the dying. To drain from them the unbearable torments, the sharp pains, the cutting remorse, the freezing fears that forked into them in their last agonies.
Maybe it was possible and maybe the big It would do it. And maybe not. But having thought of it, he knew that he had to try. Alexandria, wife. Ichino, friend. Names now, people then. Agonies spent.
Then, quite illogically, he prayed for Ito. Whether his son’s fate lay in past or future was a riddle to him now. When he closed his eyes he saw Ito as he had been, returning from foraging while the family lay ill. His wind-burned face was dark, curly hair black and looking oily. A lopsided grin split the tired face and on an impulse Nigel had embraced the man his boy had become.
Now that was how he saw Ito. Not as the body floating in suspension here in their house, a thin hope.
The flickering sped up.
Blaring brilliance cascaded down upon them from wrenched timestone above—followed immediately, in a single breath, by utter sullen dark.
Nigel and Nikka were standing on their porch, he smoking a cigar out of sheer distraction, when the scene outside jumped again. Sparkled. Settled somehow into place.
“We’re back!” Nikka cried.
