End of an Era

Boundary Layer

I sat alone in the TRIUMF staff cafeteria for a while, nibbling at one of my stale vending-machine donuts, trying to understand why Dr. Huang had run off. It didn’t make any sense.

I threw out the second donut and made my way out of the room. I had a whole day to kill waiting for Ching-Mei to finish reading the diary, so I decided to take a tour of the research facility. I identified myself to the old man at the front desk as a curator from the Royal Ontario Museum and suddenly found the red carpet being rolled out for “a distinguished visiting scientist.” That was great because it meant that I got to see areas normally closed to the public.

My guide, an enthusiastic young Native Canadian named Dan Pitawanakwat, wanted to be sure I understood everything I saw, but most of it still went over my head. He showed me giant 30,000-kilogram magnets that looked like yellow Pac-Man characters, a room full of bright blue consoles with models of famous movie starships, including the Enterprise-F, Starplex, and the Millennium Falcon hanging by fishing line from the ceiling, and a Positron Emission Tomography scanner, used to take pictures of the insides of people’s brains. But the most interesting thing to me was the Batho Biomedical Facility, where cancer patients received concentrated beams of pions. According to Dan, this method caused less general damage than conventional radiation therapy. I watched, riveted, as a man lay under the pion beam for treatment of a brain tumor. His face was held steady by a transparent mask. The plastic obscured his features and my mind kept superimposing my father’s own craggy visage onto the head. It brought back the suffering and the torture and the loss of human dignity that Dad was going through. When they finally did remove the mask, I saw that the hairless head beneath belonged to a boy perhaps sixteen years old. I had to look away from the effusive Dan to wipe my eyes.

Later on, I said, “Dan, do they do any studies here about the nature of time?”

“Well, the thrust these days is always toward practical applications,” he said. “That’s the only way we can get the grant money to keep coming in.” But then he nodded. “However, we’ve typically got four hundred researchers here at once, so some of them are bound to be doing work in that area. But it was really Ching-Mei’s—Dr. Huang’s—forte. She even wrote a book on it with Dr. Mackenzie.”

“Time Constraints: The Tau of Physics.” I nodded knowingly and was pleased to see that the young man was impressed. “But that was ten years ago. What’s happened since?”

“Well, when I came here in 2005, everybody thought Ching-Mei was going to make some kind of breakthrough. I mean, there was talk of a trip to Stockholm, if you catch my drift.” He winked.

“You mean her work was important enough to win her a Nobel Prize?”

“That’s what some people were saying. ’Course, she probably would have shared it with Almi at the Weizmann Institute in Israel—he was doing similar work. But he was killed in that freak earthquake, and nobody there was able to pick up where he left off.”

“That’s a shame.”

“It’s a friggin’ crime is what it is. Almi was the new Einstein, as far as a lot of us were concerned. We may never recover what he knew.”

“And what happened here? Why did Ching-Mei give up her research? Wasn’t it going anywhere?”

“Oh, it was going places, all right. There was a rumor that she was close to demonstrating a stopped-time condition. But, well, then she…”

“She what?”

“You’re a good friend of hers, aren’t you, sir?”

“I came all the way from Toronto just to see her.”

“So you know about her troubles.”

“Troubles?”

Dan looked uncomfortable, as if he’d put his foot in something distasteful. I held him in my gaze.

“Well,” he said at last, “don’t tell anybody, because I’ll get into a lot of trouble if you do, but, well, something bad happened to Ching-Mei about five years ago.” Dan looked over his shoulder to see if anybody was listening. “I mean, she never talked about it to me, but the gossip got around.” He shook his head. “She was attacked, Dr. Thackeray. Raped. Absolutely brutalized. She was in the hospital for a week afterward, and away on—you know what they call it—on ‘rest leave’ for the better part of a year. They say he attacked her for three hours solid and, well, he used a knife. She was all torn up, you know, down there. She’s lucky to be alive.” He paused for a long moment. “Except, she doesn’t really seem to think that.”

I winced. “Where did it happen?”

“In her house.” Dan sounded sad. “She’s never been the same since. Frankly, she doesn’t do much of anything anymore. Her job is mostly scheduling other people’s access to the cyclotron, instead of doing any original work of her own. They keep her on here, hoping that one day the old Ching-Mei will come back, but it’s been five years now.” He shook his head again. “It’s tragic. Who knows what she would have come up with if that hadn’t happened?”

I shook my head, too, trying to clear the mental picture of that defenseless woman being violated. “Who knows, indeed?” I said at last.

I went to TRIUMF again first thing the next morning. This time, strangely, Dr. Huang did invite me into her little office. There were awards and diplomas on the walls, but none with recent dates. Books and papers were piled everywhere. As soon as I’d entered, we realized there was a problem: the office only had one chair in it.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Thackeray. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a visitor here.” She disappeared out the door and returned a few minutes later wheeling a stenographer’s chair in front of her. “I hope this will do.”

I sat down and looked at her expectantly.

“I’m sorry about you and your wife,” she said abruptly.

“We’re still together.”

“Oh. I’m glad. You obviously love her immensely.”

“That I do.” There was silence for a time. “You’ve read the entire diary?”

“I have,” she said. “Twice.”

“And?”

“And,” she said slowly, “based on dozens of little details that you couldn’t have possibly known, I believe it is genuine. I believe it really does describe what my studies would have made possible.”

I sat up straight. “Then you could go back to your research! You could make stasis and then time travel possible. Hell, Ching-Mei, you could win your Nobel Prize!”

“No.” Her face had lost all color. “That’s over. Dead.”

I looked at her, still not comprehending. She seemed so delicate, so fragile. Finally, softly, I said, “Why?”

She looked away and I could see that she was rallying some inner strength. I waited as patiently as I could and, after a minute, she went on. “Physicists and paleontologists,” she said. “In a way, we’re both time travelers. We both hunt backward for the very beginnings.”

I nodded.

“As a physicist, I try to understand how the universe came into being. As a paleontologist, you’re interested in how life began.” She spread her arms. “But the fact is, both fields of endeavor come up short when you go right back. The origin of matter has never been satisfactorily explained. Oh, we talk vaguely about random quantum-mechanical fluctuations in a vacuum somehow spontaneously having given rise to the first matter, but we really don’t know.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And,” she continued, “you can read the fossil record back to almost the beginning of life, but as to how life actually arose, again, no one is really sure. We speak nebulously about self-replicating macromolecules supposedly arising spontaneously through some random series of events.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, baffled by where all this was going.

“I’m talking about time travel, Dr. Thackeray. I’m talking about why time travel is inevitable.”

She’d lost me completely. “Inevitable?”

“It had to come into existence. The future must be able, with hindsight, to rewrite the past.” She leaned forward slightly in her chair. “Someday we’ll be able to create life in the laboratory. But we will only be able to do it by reverse-engineering existing life. Something as complex as the universe, as complex as life, has to be reverse-engineered. It has to be built from a known model.”

“Not the first time, obviously.”

“Yes,” she said, “especially the first time. That’s the whole point. Without time travel, life is impossible.”

“You mean someone from the future went back into the past and created life?”

“Yes.”

“And he knew how to do it because he had the lifeforms from his time as models to study?”

“Yes.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, it does. For years, physicists have bandied about something called the strong anthropic principle. It says the universe must—must—be constructed in such a way so as to give rise to intelligent life. The purpose of the anthropic principle was to explain the existence of our unlikely universe, which has a number of remarkable coincidences about it, all of which were required for us to be possible.”

“For instance?”

Ching-Mei waved her hand. “Oh, just as one of a great many examples, if the strong nuclear force were even five percent weaker than it is in this universe, protons and neutrons couldn’t bind together and the stars wouldn’t shine. On the other hand, if the strong force were just a little more powerful than it is in this universe, then it could overcome the electrical repulsion between protons, allowing them to bind directly together. That would make the kind of slow hydrogen burning that stars do impossible; instead, hydrogen clouds would explode long before they could coalesce into stars.”

“I think I’m getting a headache.”

She smiled ever so slightly. “That goes with the territory.”

“You’re saying someone from the future went back in time four billion years and created the first life on Earth.”

“That’s right.”

“But I thought the Huang Effect could only go back—what did the diary say?—a hundred and four million years.”

“The Huang Effect was a first-generation time machine, created for a very specific purpose. It might not be the only or the best solution to the problem of time travel.”

“Hmm. Okay. But it’s not just the creation of life you’re talking about.”

“No.”

“You’re also saying that someone from the future—the very far future, I’d guess—went right back to the beginning, back some fifteen billion years, and created matter.”

“That’s right.”

“Created it, with exactly the properties needed to give rise to us, having learned how to do so by studying the matter from his or her own time.”

“Yes.”

I felt slightly dazed. “That’s mind-boggling. It’s like—like…”

“It’s like we’re our own God,” said Dr. Huang. “We created ourselves in our own image.”

“Then what about the Sternberger?”

“You’ve read the diary. You know what that other version of you does in the end.”

“Yes, but—”

“Don’t you see?” she said. “The Sternberger mission was only one of many instances in which time travel was used to set things right. The flow of events requires periodic adjustment. That’s chaos theory for you: you can’t accurately predict the development of any complex system. Therefore, you can’t just create life and leave it to evolve on its own. Every once in a while you have to give it a push in the direction you want it to go.”

“So—so you’re saying that someone determined that the timeline had to be altered in order to give rise to us?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“But the time-traveling Brandy wrote that he could hunt dinosaurs, or do anything else, with impunity—that any changes he made wouldn’t matter.”

“I’m sure he believed that—he had to, of course, or he never would have done the things that needed doing. It was crucial that he believe that lie. But he was wrong. There was a mathematical string between the Sternberger in the past and the launch point in the present. The changes he made did indeed work their way up that string, altering the timeline as they did so, rewriting the last sixty-five million years of Earth’s history, making our world possible. By the time the string had been hauled all the way back to 2013, the conditions that had given rise to the Sternberger had been eliminated, and our version of the timeline existed instead.”

I sagged against the padded back of the steno chair. “Wow.”

“Wow, indeed.”

“And the other you who invented the time machine?”

She looked down. “I’m clever, but not that clever. I think it was more likely that its birth was induced.”

“Induced?”

“Made to happen. The technique must have somehow been given to me from the future, perhaps by little clues or experiments that went a seemingly serendipitous way.”

“But why you? Why now?”

“Well, here near the beginning of the twenty-first century we’re probably at the very earliest point in human history at which a time machine could be built, the very earliest that the technology existed to put the parts together, even if we couldn’t really understand the theory behind those parts. In fact, it was necessary that we not fully understand it, that the time-traveling Brandy believe that he’d spin off a new timeline, which he would then abandon, rather than actually change the one and only real timeline.”

“So you don’t know how to make a time machine anymore.”

“No. But there was one. It did exist. The Sternberger did go back into the past, did change the course of prehistory in such a way as to make our present existence possible.”

“But then what happened to that other Brandy? That other you?”

“They existed long enough to make a midstream correction, to steer the timeline in the way it was meant to go.”

“Meant to go? Meant to go by—by the powers that be?”

She nodded. “By what we will become. By God. Call it what you will.”

My head was swimming. “I still don’t get it.”

“Don’t you? The trip by the Sternberger was necessary to adjust things, but it also means that there’s no way another time-travel mission from this present to that part of the past could ever be made to happen again. Once the correction had been made, once the temporal surgery had been performed, the—the incision, shall we call it?—the incision would be sutured up, to prevent any further tampering, lest the correction be undone.” She sounded wistful. “I can’t ever build another time machine, and you can’t ever travel in time again. The universe would conspire to prevent it.”

“Conspire? How?” And then it hit me. “Oh my God. Oh, Ching-Mei, I’m sorry. I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.”

She looked up, a tightly controlled expression on her face. “So am I.” She shook her head slowly, and we both pretended not to notice the single teardrop that fell onto the desk. “At least Dr. Almi was killed quickly in that earthquake.” We sat in silence for a long, long moment. “I wish,” she said very softly, “that that had been what had happened to me.”