He relaxed a little – just a little: ‘You didn’t show it to anybody, did you?’
‘I showed it to Professor Keyser.’
Howe made an impolite sound with his lower lip and front teeth, ‘That jackass. What did he say?’
I turned the palms of my hands upward and Howe laughed. Then he said, in an offhand manner: ‘Well, that’s the sort of stuff I do.’
‘And what’s it all about? Put it so I can understand it.’
There was distinct hesitation. He said: ‘Now, look. This is confidential stuff. Even Pop’s other students don’t know anything about it. I don’t even think I know all about it. This isn’t just a degree I’m after, you know. It’s Pop ‘fywood’s Nobel Prize, and it’s going to be an Assistant Professorship for me at Cal Tech. This has got to be published before it’s talked about.’
And I shook my head slowly and made my words very soft: ‘No, son. You have it twisted. You’ll have to talk about it before it’s published, because Tywood’s gone and maybe he’s dead and maybe he isn’t. And if he’s dead, maybe he’s murdered. And when the department has a suspicion of murder, everybody talks. Now, it will look bad for you, kid, if you try to keep some secrets.’
It worked. I knew it would, because everyone reads murder mysteries and knows all the cliches. He jumped out of his chair and rattled the words off as if he had a script in front of him.
‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you can’t suspect me of . . . of anything like that. Why . . . why, my career—’
I shoved him back into his chair with the beginnings of a sweat on his forehead. I went into the next line: ‘I don’t suspect anybody of anything yet. And you won’t be in any trouble, if you talk, chum.’
He was ready to talk. ‘Now this is all in strict confidence.’
Poor guy. He didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘strict.’ He was never out of eyeshot of an operator from that moment till the government decided to bury the whole case with the one final comment of ‘?’ Quote. Unquote. (I’m not kidding. To this day, the case is neither opened nor closed. It’s just ‘?’)
He said, dubiously, ‘You know what time travel is, I suppose?’
Sure I knew what time travel was. My oldest kid is twelve and he listens to the afternoon video programs till he swells up visibly with the junk he absorbs at the ears and eyes.
‘What about time travel?’ I said.
‘In a sense, we can do it. Actually, it’s only what you might cal micro-temporal-translation—’’
I almost lost my temper. In fact, I think I did. It seemed obvious that the squirt was trying to diddle me; and without subtlety. I’m used to having people think I look dumb; but not that dumb.
I said through the back of my throat: ‘Are you going to tell me that Tywood is out somewhere in time – like Ace Rogers, the Lone Time Ranger?’ (That was Junior’s favorite program – Ace Rogers was stopping Genghis Khan single-handed that week.)
But he looked as disgusted as I must have. ‘No,’ he yelled. ‘I don’t know where Pop is. If you’d listen to me – I said micro-temporal-translation. Now, this isn’t a video show and it isn’t magic; this happens to be science. For instance, you know about matter-energy equivalence, I suppose.’
I nodded sourly. Everyone knows about that since Hiroshima in the last war but one.
‘All right, then,’ he went on, ‘that’s good for a start. Now, if you take a brown mass of matter and apply temporal translation to it – you know, send it back in time – you are, in effect, creating matter at the point in time to which you are sending it. To do that, you must use an amount of energy equivalent to the amount of matter you have created. In other words, to send a gram – or, say, an ounce – of anything back in time, you have to disintegrate an ounce of matter completely, to furnish the energy required.’
‘Hm-m-m,’ I said, ‘that’s to create the ounce of matter in the past. But aren’t you destroying an ounce of matter by removing it from the present? Doesn’t that create the equivalent amount of energy?’
And he looked just about as annoyed as a fellow sitting on a bumble-bee that wasn’t quite dead. Apparently laymen are never supposed to question scientists.
He said: ‘I was trying to simplify it so you would understand it. Actually, it’s more complicated. It would be very nice if we could use the energy of disappearance to cause it to appear, but that would be working in a circle, believe me. The requirements of entropy would forbid it. To put it more rigorously, the energy is required to overcome temporal inertia and it just works out so that the energy in ergs required to send back a mass, in grams, is equal to that mass times the square of the speed of light in centimeters per second. Which just happens to be the Einstein Mass-Energy Equivalence Equation. I can give you the mathematics, you know.’
‘I know,’ I waxed some of that misplaced eagerness back. ‘But was all this worked out experimentally? Or is it just on paper?’
Obviously, the thing was to keep him talking.
He had that queer light in his eye that every research student gets, I am told, when he is asked to discuss his problem. He’ll discuss it with anyone, even with a ‘dumb flatfoot’ – which was convenient at the moment.
‘You see,’ he said like a man slipping you the inside dope on a shady business deal, ‘what started the whole thing was this neutrino business. They’ve been trying to find that neutrino since the late thirties and they haven’t succeeded. It’s a subatomic particle which has no charge and has a mass much less than even an electron. Naturally, it’s next to impossible to spot, and hasn’t been spotted yet. But they keep looking because, without assuming that a neutrino exists, the energetics of some nuclear reactions can’t be balanced. So Pop Tywood got the idea about twenty years ago that some energy was disappearing, in the form of matter, back into time. We got working on that – or he did – and I’m the first student he’s ever had tackle it along with him.
‘Obviously, we had to work with tiny amounts of material and . . . well, it was just a stroke of genius on Pop’s part to think of using traces of artificial radioactive isotopes. You could work with just a few micrograms of it, you know, by following its activity with counters. The variation of activity with time should follow a very definite and simple law which has never been altered by any laboratory condition known.
‘Well, we’d send a speck back fifteen minutes, say, and fifteen minutes before we did that – everything was arranged automatically, you see – the count jumped to nearly double what it should be, fell off normally, and then dropped sharply at the moment it was sent back below where it would have been normally. The material overlapped itself in time, you see, and for fifteen minutes we counted the doubled material—’
I interrupted: ‘You mean you had the same atoms existing in two places at the same time.’
‘Yes,’ he said, with mild surprise, ‘why not? That’s why we use so much energy – the equivalent of creating those atoms.’ And then he rushed on, ‘Now I’ll tell you what my particular job is. If you send back the material fifteen minutes, it is apparently sent back to the same spot relative to the Earth despite the fact that in fifteen minutes, the Earth moved sixteen thousand miles around the Sun, and the Sun itself moves more thousand miles and so on. But there are certain tiny discrepancies which I’ve analyzed and which tum out to be due, possibly, to two causes.
‘First, there is a frictional effect – if you can use such a term – so that matter does drift a little with respect to the Earth, depending on how far back in time it is sent, and on the nature of material. Then, too, some of the discrepancy can only be explained by the assumption that passage through time itself takes time.’
‘How’s that?’ I said.
‘What I mean is that some of the radioactivity is evenly spread throughout the time of translation as if the material tested had been reacting during backward passage through time by a constant amount. My figures show that – well, if you were to be moved backward in time, you would age one day for every hundred years. Or, to put it another way, if you could watch a time dial which recorded the time outside a ‘time-machine,’ your watch would move forward twenty-four hours while the time dial moved back a hundred years. That’s a universal constant, I think, because the speed of light is a universal constant. Anyway, that’s my work.’
After a few minutes, in which I chewed all this, I asked: ‘Where did you get the energy needed for your experiments?’
‘They ran out a special line from the power plant. Pop’s a big shot there, and swung the deal.’
‘Hm-m-m. What was the heaviest amount of material you sent into the past?’
‘Oh’ – he sent his eyes upwards – ’ I think we shot back one hundredth of a milligram once. That’s ten micrograms.’
‘Ever try sending anything into the future?’
