Chapter
One
“You’ve
Got It Exactly Right”
“Professor Socrates, I need your help.”
“That’s one perfectly good secret identity shot to
Hell,” said Professor Talbot Lawrence to the six students and two colleagues
who stood within earshot. It seemed as though two of the students lining the
corridor of Savage Hall were paying attention, the other four being earbudded
into another auditory dimension, but both of his colleagues were openly
interested. They goggled at the tall, fit man with the dark blue suit and
black-rimmed glasses who had addressed Professor Lawrence by the name of
Professor Socrates.
“Lawrence is Professor Socrates!” said Professor
Goolsbert, ancient and medieval economics. “Of course! And isn’t that – if you
took the glasses off and slicked his hair back –“
“Holy secrets of the universe, Leonard, you’re right!”
said Professor Kassock, ethnic bullwhip studies. “It’s Mr. Amazing!”
“He must be here to renew the Honor Patrol’s offer of
membership –“ said Goolsbert, raising his hand in a gesture of emphasis as if
expecting Kassock to disagree. He went on, but Lawrence didn’t hear any more
because he was shutting his office door, with a sad, understanding smile.
“Do you want me to pretend I don’t know who you are?”
he said to his visitor.
“No. Sorry,” said Lewis York, and tucked his
eyeglasses into his shirt pocket. “I understand all the reasons for secret
identities, of course; when you count up all the lies I’ve told my girlfriends
over the years, not to mention the police, co-workers, my pastor, the nice
couple who thought they were my parents … it’s really quite a list when you look
at it. Anyway, I wouldn’t have put you in this predicament if it weren’t an
emergency.”
“Of course, of course,” Lawrence acknowledged. He hung
up his sweater on one wall and pulled open the drawer of a desk on the wall
opposite, then rummaged through papers and pens for the ring that opened a
false bottom. The office was small enough that he didn’t have to move his feet
for either task.
“What is it this time – invaders from space? Time,
perhaps? Evil duplicate of yourself damaging your reputation?”
“You seem to know about it already!” said York.
Talbot pulled out a white linen toga-like garment and
a gold-and-ivory scroll case.
“Guesswork only,” he admitted. “I’d ask you to turn
your back, but your powers include 360-degree vision, don’t they?” he said.
“Only when I flex my eyes that way,” York replied.
“But you won’t need your costume for this. At least, I don’t think it will take
that long.”
“I like my costume,” Lawrence replied calmly. “I could
have accomplished more without it, some days, believe you me. Although the
public cooperation comes in handy. Still, your problem is urgent enough to
destroy my work life, but can be handled in too short a time to change clothes?
Now I AM intrigued, Mr. York. Or should I say … ?”
“Go ahead, Professor,” said York. “Call me Solarman.”
He crossed his arms and leaned against the door of the
office. His broad shoulders vibrated slightly with the rhythm of the frantic
knocking on the outside.
York – Solarman – touched the aluminum doorknob with
the fingertips of his left hand. The fingers, and then the knob, glowed dull
red as heat migrated from the hand into the metal. Small pings and hisses
testified to the destruction of small pins and tumblers in the lock, as the
heated metal fused into a useless lump. A wisp of smoke curled from the knob
from where it contacted the wood of the door.
“You ARE in a hurry,” Lawrence observed. He was now
dressed as Professor Socrates. “Very well, service first, then the situation.
What do you need me to do?”
“You were righter than you knew,” Solarman said. “It
does involve time, and an impostor darkening my reputation. I need to know if
there’s any way to detect an attack from the future.”
“I thought that fight between you and Paragon seemed
out of character,” said Lawrence. “So it’s the future, is it? Well, there’s
nothing to worry about for about four hundred years – first time machine isn’t
invented until 2390. At least, not that we know of. Unless you have something
more to go on?”
“Yes,” Solarman said. The doorknob rattled once, there
was a shriek of surprise from the other side, then footsteps moving away. The
knob was still hot to the touch.
“Apparently Paragon was not, as she had previously led
us to believe, from a distant part of our galaxy. She’s from the future. And
she has evidently been replaced, or modified, by a similar entity made of the
same liquid machinery, but interested in allowing the Astrogoth to plunder the
Earth. I was trying to stop the Astrogoth when she attacked me, to my great
surprise.”
Lawrence rubbed his chin with the back of his hand.
“So you don’t think there is any chance it was Paragon
herself, in her right mind?” he asked.
“Cooperating with the Astrogoth? Not a chance!”
Solarman declared. “He plans to consume all the super-powers on Earth, Paragon
included. She’d have to have gone insane, developed suicidal compulsions. Can a
machine intelligence go mad? And wouldn’t it be programmed against suicide? No,
it’s someone else imitating her.”
“Intelligence seems to be an emergent property,”
Lawrence said. “We’ve never been able to build it, at least, and by ‘we’ I mean
all the intelligent races I’ve heard of. It always comes about as a surprise to
the creators. Leave aside the practical problem of sorting the effects of
billions of instructions on every other instruction for now. Starting with
first principles, the programming is the substrate on which intelligent
behavior depends, yes, but it isn’t perfectly predictive of that intelligence,
any more than the food you eat determines what words come out of your mouth. By
definition, an intelligent being cannot be so habit-bound that its response to
a situation can be perfectly predicted – for that being would be a machine, and
not what we mean by the word ‘intelligent’ at all.”
“Unless,” he continued, and Solarman perked up, “we’ve
been using the word incorrectly in regards to Paragon all this time. Might she
be, in fact, no more than a machine?”
Solarman shook his head.
“That isn’t the impression I’ve formed,” he said.
“We’ve worked on quite a few cases together. She’s more rational than anyone
else I know, but she’s not a machine.”
“Then she is assisting the Astrogoth for a reason,”
said Lawrence. “Can the other members of the Patrol shed any light on her
motives?”
“They’ve taken her side against me,” said Solarman.
“The Solar Sanctum’s been destroyed, and –“
“Destroyed! I can see why you’re in a hurry!” Lawrence
replied. “Sorry, continue?”
“I believe she’s told them that I’ve been replaced by
an evil duplicate,” Solarman said. “Which is, therefore, my working theory as
to what happened to her.”
“And you believe this change in her behavior was
caused by something from the future? Why?”
“Well, the future would be very different if the
Astrogoth ate all our superhumans –“
“No, why do you think her odd behavior comes from the
future?”
Solarman narrowed his eyes. They glowed dull red.
“I guess you’ve got me there, Professor,” he said.
“But she was subtly different in other ways. Different posture, word choice –
she demonstrated some new ways to use her powers – it’s hard to describe all
the clues that lead me to this conclusion, but I’m convinced. Something from
the future she came from originally has disordered her mind.”
“Let’s assume that and see where it leads,” said
Lawrence, rubbing his hands. “You want to detect anything that arrived recently
from the future, and to see if it is still operating?”
“Exactly. Do you have any way of doing that?”
“Not right this moment,” said Lawrence confidently,
“but it won’t take long to get something up and running. We’ll need to adjourn
to my Laboratory of the Mind … which I believe you’ve only seen once?”
“Yes, when I was out of my head from Red Antimatter
radiation!” Solarman exclaimed. “I don’t really remember that day very well …
you talked me down with some sort of geometric logic … do you have any Red
Antimatter? Because if that’s the only way, well …”
“No, no. We don’t need anything that dramatic,” said
Lawrence. He tugged a small whiteboard from behind the office’s lone bookcase.
“But you will need to wear these.”
He reached back into the desk drawer, felt around, and
held out a pair of green spectacles.
“I can tune my color vision to any frequency in the
spectrum,” Solarman said. He didn’t accept the glasses.
Lawrence was curious now.
“You don’t want to wear the spectacles?” he said.
“They just make my voice go up. It’s an old habit,”
Solarman said, the last word ending on a rising note as he slipped the glasses
on. “How’s, uh, how’s this?”
He pushed the glasses up slightly on his nose with the
tip of his finger.
“That should do admirably,” said Lawrence.
He took a green dry-erase pen from an inkwell on the
desk. Then he began to sketch a half-open door, set into a paneled wall not
unlike that of the office they stood in. He drew tables, benches, chemical
glassware, arcing electrical devices, and swinging pendulums in the space
beyond the door, all foreshortened and angled in proper perspective. He added
shadows, reflective highlights, smudges and areas of high gloss left behind by
cleaning. One by one, he added to the drawing every element that distinguished
the picture from an actual doorway into an actual laboratory.
When he capped the pen and stuck in into his trouser
pocket, he put on another pair of green glasses. Then he took hold of the
doorknob and opened the door the rest of the way.
Solarman followed him into the Laboratory of the Mind.
It seemed to stretch to infinity in all directions, except the way they had
come, of course. That had a wall and a door. Everything visible from the door
was green, in many different shades, but away from the door objects had every
other color imaginable. There was a swath of tables off to the right which was
all in shades of gray; perhaps Professor Socrates had used a black marker to
enter from that direction at some point.
Solarman slipped the glasses down his nose and focused
his distance vision on a set of dots on the edge of visibility. They were cars
from various decades, apparently including decades in which penny-farthing
bicycles formed the basis of four-wheeled, two-seater vehicles.
“As a matter of
fact, I’ve been working on a Time Catapult for Paragon,” Lawrence said. “Just
theoretical work, so far, which is why it’s in here. She contacted me three
weeks ago, more or less … no, let me see, it was nineteen days because this is
the 10th, correct? And September has 31 days.”
“It’s the 12th,” Solarman said. “There are
30 days in September.”
“Of course, of course,” said Lawrence. “That really
should be my catch phrase, I say it so often. Well, in any case, she wanted to
visit a particular century, which led to the Time Catapult concept. And here it
is!”
He pulled a smooth cover, which had a sheen like that
of a whiteboard, off a large machine. It was dominated by two spherical balls
of tubing, with a curved flat surface lying between them. Wires connected it to
the ground, the ceiling, and brass poles angling up some distance away on the
left and right.
“We move through time every day,” Lawrence continued,
gesturing at the coiled tubes. “At a rate of one second per second, in the
direction of the future. Now, that vector is very difficult to change; there is
a great deal of inertia behind our time-experience. But there are other dimensions
to time, and we have no velocity through them. What does that imply?”
“I don’t know, Professor. But if we travel to another
dimension, isn’t that someone else’s future? I don’t see how that will help.
Paragon’s not from another dimension, she’s from our future.”
“Sorry; that’s not what I mean by dimension. You pros,
who do the impossible every day, visit alternative worlds which you call
‘dimensions’, like the Pastel Dimension, for example. But I’m talking about
another direction in which time extends, at right angles to normal time. We
don’t ordinarily move through those dimensions, so we have no inertia or
momentum in those directions to overcome.”
“Thus, the Time Catapult. It accelerates you up out of
normal time, through a perpendicular time dimension. This would, I thought, put
you forever beyond the reach of our normal world-line, banishing you to unknown
time realms whose properties cannot be more than vaguely predicted. But, as it
turns out, there is a force which attracts objects toward our time-line. You
full-time heroes run into intruders from other time-lines every month or so,
don’t you?”
Solarman nodded, as if acknowledging the weather.
“But people don’t fall out of our time-line very often
at all. That implies a force which I have chosen to call the Force of Fate. It’s
as if we were at the bottom of an ocean. Everything tends to fall toward our
own time dimension, which may have something to do with why it’s so difficult
to change the past.”
“Or the future?” said Solarman.
“It’s all one,” Lawrence assured him. “We cannot storm
the ramparts of Time, so we go over them. And this Force of Fate I mentioned,
in a manner similar to gravity, pulls us back down so that once our impetus is fully
expended, we drop back into linear time without having experienced the entire interval
between launch and landing. I don’t know if the passenger will feel any time
passing at all, or just suddenly be there, in the future. But if you do experience
duration, it will be no more than one second per year. Possibly much less, if
there are more than three time dimensions.”
Solarman looked over the machine, trying to gauge how
it was controlled. He didn’t make any serious effort to understand what made it
work; he could fly to the edge of space, but Professor Socrates was still way
over his head.
“So these coils discharge into this frame with the
seats on it. You know, you could call it the Time Trebuchet,” Solarman said.
“It’s snappier.”
“But it does not operate by dropping a weight to
propel a cord on a rigid lever,” Lawrence said, smiling. “It’s nothing like a
trebuchet.”
“It doesn’t put cords under torsion, does it? So it’s
no more a catapult than a trebuchet,” Solarman retorted.
“No. No, it doesn’t … you really don’t have much sense
of humor, do you?”
Solarman scowled slightly.
“With the stakes I play for, I can’t afford it”, he
said.
“No, I suppose not …” said Lawrence, “… being tightly
focused all the time would be good for preventing mistakes. That is, if your
personality is strong enough to take it. A sense of the absurd helps normal
people deal with stress, especially the fear of failure.”
Lawrence adjusted a test tube rack, avoiding eye
contact, then went on:
“But then, you’re not a normal person, are you? You
aren’t human, however well you simulate it. Do you act like us to put us at
ease, or do you really want to be human?”
“I’d prefer another topic, if you don’t mind,” said
Solarman.
“Of course, of course. No intention to offend,” Lawrence
said hastily. “So the Honor Patrol is convinced you’ve gone rogue?”
“You don’t read much news, do you, Professor?”
Lawrence shrugged.
“None of it seems to affect me, one way or the other,”
he said.
“Fair enough,” said Solarman. “Yes, I’m on the run from
my colleagues, but only until I prove my innocence. But with Paragon controlled
from the future, I’m afraid whoever is behind this can just anticipate my every
move by consulting his history books.”
Lawrence chuckled. “You think you’ll be in the history
books?”
“I was voted Most Consequential American Ever by the
New York Times,” Solarman said.
“Yes, well, their opinion certainly means something,”
Lawrence agreed. “And if you count the Honor Patrol, then yes, you’ve saved the
world countless times over. I suppose future generations will indeed find that
worthy of comment.”
“You could be one of us any time you want,” Solarman
said then. “The Patrol encounters a lot of strange things that could expand
your knowledge of the universe. And we’d be glad to have your help.”
“We’ve had this discussion before,” said Lawrence
without rancor. “But I appreciate the compliment. Let’s reunite you with your
comrades’ good opinion, then, and you can get back to your calling. How far in
the future do you think your enemy is?”
“Well, the last time Paragon went to the future for
repairs, she shut herself down for seven hundred years … but then, that’s what
she told us. If we can’t trust her, that might be bad information. In fact, it
could be a trap.”
Professor Lawrence smiled.
“How long ago was this?”
“Sixteen months,” answered Solarman at once. “I can
run down my memory chains if you need it in seconds …”
“No, I just meant to point out that if she’s been evil
for that long, there’s not much she couldn’t have done. You have perfect memory
in addition to your other powers?”
“Sure,” said Solarman.
“I don’t believe I’ve heard that mentioned before,”
said Lawrence.
“I don’t make my powers public knowledge,” Solarman
said. “As long as I have enemies at large – “
“Of course, of course. The problem is, the Time
Catapult – you don’t mind if I continue to call it that? – exerts all its force
at the moment of launch. You can’t select your destination in flight, any more
than a cannonball can steer itself.”
“Missiles can steer themselves.”
“Well, that’s the danger in analogy, isn’t it?
Although … if you launched an entire Time Catapult from another, larger Time
Catapult … then you would have the ability to adjust your trajectory. How
critical is it that you do this right away?”
“Paragon can use any digital device as a sensor
platform. I think she can use all of them at once … I don’t think we can wait
to build a second catapult. Let’s try 700 years, and if it’s not enough, I can
hold my breath at the bottom of the ocean for a few years more.”
“Now, you know you can’t use this to come back,”
Lawrence cautioned.
“I was going to ask about that. You can’t use it in
reverse to bring me back when I’m done?”
“No, it isn’t that sort of device. Could you use a
cannon to bring a cannonball back to yourself?”
“Sounds like an analogy, Professor.”
Lawrence smiled.
“It does, doesn’t it?” he admitted.
“And the catapult doesn’t leave any trace or trail
which can be used to follow me and bring me back?”
“No, I’m afraid not. If you don’t find another way
back, you could be stranded in the future forever.”
Solarman nodded.
“That’s what I thought. Okay. And can anyone else
build a second catapult, if something happens to you?”
“No-o, it’s my own invention … what’s going to happen
to me?”
“Why can’t anyone build another? Don’t you have notes,
blueprints, computer files?”
“Don’t change the subject. Why do you think something
might happen to me?”
“Paragon’s got a lot of friends – clones, too,
apparently. They’d stop at nothing to get her back … and without Paragon, all I
have to worry about is second-stringers like the Prosecutor and Flak-Jack.”
Lawrence took off his spectacles, rubbing his
forehead.
“Wait, I think I missed a page,” he said. “You’re
going to catapult Paragon into the future, instead of yourself?”
Solarman looked at the Time Catapult, scanning it with
yellow rays from his eyes. Steam, then smoke, curled up his face toward the
ceiling. When he looked back, his eyes were too bright to look at.
“Don’t worry, Professor,” he said, “you’ve got it
exactly right.”
Professor Lawrence Talbot threw up his arm to protect
his eyes. The Laboratory of the Mind filled with searing light.
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