Reginald withdrew her hand. Professor Hilbert’s fingers tingled after touching her. It must be the power of the boundary, he thought.
“How can we see Rathford?” asked Maria. “We shouldn’t be able to. It’s night, and anyway Rathford is quite far from Biddlecombe. We can’t even see the church spire during the day.”
“You can see
“We’ve become unmoored from reality,” said Professor Stefan. “I believe that a dimensional shift has occurred, and we’re just fractionally off-kilter with the rest of the Multiverse.”
“But what’s on the other side of that boundary?” said Brian.
“Perhaps a version of Rathford, once you bring it into being by its observation, or nothing at all,” said Professor Hilbert. “Then again, you might thrust your fingers into another dimension, and who knows what could be waiting on the other side? Or your fingers might end up between dimensions, which could be just as bad. It might be like wearing fingerless gloves in space, which would be very unwise.”?49
“Did we do this?” asked Brian. “I mean, all that fiddling around with particle accelerators and the nature of reality: could it have caused this?”
Professor Hilbert found something interesting to look at beside his right foot. Professor Stefan whistled and peered at the fathomless depths of space.
Eventually Professor Hilbert said, “This is not the time to go around blaming people for what may or may not have happened, Brian.”
“When would be a good time, Professor Hilbert?” said Brian.
“When I’m not here,” said Professor Hilbert, “but preferably when I’m dead and can’t get into any trouble. I’d advise you to think very hard about your part in all of this as well, young Brian. You’re an important part of our team, which means that you can be blamed, too.”
“But I only made the tea!” said Brian.
“Yes, but it was very good tea,” said Professor Hilbert. “If it had been bad tea, then we might not have been so productive, and none of this might have happened or, if it did, then it might have happened much more slowly.”
“Don’t forget the biscuits,” Professor Stefan chimed in.
“Oh yes, the biscuits,” said Professor Hilbert. “Don’t get me started on the biscuits. All I can say is that you’re up to your neck in this, Brian, mark my words. If the world comes to an end because of our experiments, you’ll be in big trouble. They’ll throw the book at you, or they will if there’s anyone still around to throw books, or anything else, which there probably won’t be. You know, now that I come to think about it, everything is fine at our end. If the world doesn’t get destroyed, we’re free and clear, and if it does end, then there’s not much anybody can do to make us feel bad about it.”
Professor Hilbert smiled happily.
“There, glad that’s sorted out. Still, all things considered, it would be nice if we could prevent the end of the world from happening. With that in mind, onward we go.”
He began to lead them back to the car. Brian didn’t move. He just stood where he was, looking confused.
“But I only made the tea,” he said.
Professor Stefan steered him toward the car.
“Never mind,” he said. “Try looking on the bright side.”
“Is there one?”
“Not really.”
“Oh.”
“But if you come up with one, do let us know, won’t you?”
And high above their heads the stars were swallowed, one by one.
47. Boadicea was the queen of the Iceni tribe in Britain who led a rebellion against the Roman Empire in A.D. 60 or 61. Three settlements were destroyed during her war, including the young city of Londinium, or London. She was finally defeated in a battle in the West Midlands, but died without being captured. The Roman historian Dio said of her that she was “possessed of greater intelligence than often belongs to women.” Mind you, he said that after she was safely dead and gone, otherwise she’d have cut his head off and stuck it on a spike for saying stupid things about women.
48. Look, this is going to get very confusing. Unless someone decides otherwise, let’s call Dorothy “Reginald,” but stick with the use of the feminine pronoun. That way, she’ll be Reginald, and we can still refer to her as “her,” if you see what I mean.
It’s very troubling when characters take a funny unplanned turn in a book. They really should do what their creators tell them to do, but that brings us to the whole thorny subject of the problem of free will. If I knew what was going to happen at the end of this book—which, at this point, I don’t—then characters like Reginald/Dorothy would have to do whatever I told them to do, because that would be what was needed to make the plot work.
But right now I’m not sure what’s going to happen, and I’m discovering the plot of the book as I write it. This makes me a bit like a god, in that I created these characters, but not the type of god who knows everything in advance. The thing is, if I was that kind of god, and characters like Reginald/Dorothy were, in fact, real, would the fact that I knew what was going to happen to them mean that they had no free will of their own?
Some philosophers have argued that, if there is a god, and he knows everything that will happen in the future, then free will doesn’t really exist. I’m not sure that’s the case because, if it is, then we are all like characters in a book being written by a writer who knows the ending. Maybe it’s truer to say that, if there is a god, then he just happens to know how our story ends, and the choices we make are the ones that will lead to that particular ending.
So can we ever really predict what people will do? Perhaps on one level we can: we are biological machines, each of us made up of—remember?—atoms, and those atoms are made up of—yes, that’s right— quarks and gluons. If we can predict how each of these particles will behave in a given situation, then we can predict how lots of them packed together into a single human body will behave, right?
Yes, theoretically. In practice, it’s a bit harder. We like to think that we’re something more than just a collection of atoms. We use the term
Right, I want you all to club together to buy me a yacht. You can send it care of my publishers. Thank you. After all, even an imaginary yacht is better than no yacht at all.
49. Deepest, darkest space is very cold, so cold that all molecules stop moving. This is called “absolute zero” and is calculated as ?273 degrees Celsius, although the temperature in space is probably closer to ?270 degrees Celsius because of three degrees of background microwave radiation.
So how long could you survive in space if you weren’t wearing a suit? First of all, you shouldn’t try to hold your breath, as that will cause the air in your lungs to expand and burst things that shouldn’t burst, so you’d die painfully but quickly. If you didn’t hold your breath, you’d probably have about fifteen seconds before you passed out. You wouldn’t get frostbite at first, as you would in cold temperatures on Earth, because there’s no air in space, and frostbite is a result of heat transfer accelerated by air. But your skin would start to burn because of ultraviolet radiation, and your skin tissue would swell.
Overall, then, you’d probably have a good thirty seconds before serious, permanent injury occurred, and a minute or two before you’d begin to die. In 1965, a spacesuit leaked in a vacuum chamber at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center. The gentleman involved, who was rescued and recovered, remained conscious for about fourteen seconds. His last memory of the incident was of the saliva on his tongue beginning to boil. I just thought you’d like to know that.
