The window still carried a sticker for the Judge and a NO ON 13. This was a good house to drop in on. And Lanroyd needed a drink.
Cleve answered the door with a full drink in his hand. “Have this, old boy,” he said; “I’ll mix myself another. Night for drinking, isn’t it?” The opinion had obviously been influencing him for some time; his British accent, usually all but rubbed off by now, had returned full force as it always did after a few drinks.
Lanroyd took the glass gratefully as he went in. “I’ll sign that petition,” he said. “I need a drink to stay sober; I think I’ve hit a lowpoint where I can’t get drunk.”
“It’ll be interesting,” his host observed, “to see if you’re right. Glad you dropped in. I needed drinking company.”
“Look, Stu,” Lanroyd objected. “If it wasn’t for the stickers on your window, I’d swear you were on your way to a happy drunk. What’s to celebrate for God’s sake?”
“Well as to God, old boy, I mean anything that’s to celebrate is to celebrate for God’s sake, isn’t it? After all . . . Pardon. I must be a bit tiddly already.”
“I know,” Lanroyd grinned. “You don’t usually shove your Church of England theology at me. Sober, you know I’m hopeless.”
“Point not conceded. But God does come into this, of course. My rector’s been arguing with me—doesn’t approve at all. Tampering with Divine providence. But A: how can mere me tamper with anything Divine? And B: if it’s possible, it’s part of the Divine plan itself. And C: I’ve defied the dear old boy to establish that it involves in any way the Seven Deadly Sins, the Ten Commandments, or the Thirty-Nine Articles.”
“Professor Cleve,” said Lanroyd, “would you mind telling me what the hell you are talking about?”
“Time travel, of course. What else have I been working on for the past eight months?”
Lanroyd smiled. “O.K. Every man to his obsession. My world’s shattered and yours is rosy. Carry on, Stu. Tell me about it and brighten my life.”
“I say, Peter, don’t misunderstand me. I am . . . well, really dreadfully distressed about. . .” He looked from the TV set to the window stickers. “But it’s hard to think about anything else when . . .”
“Go on.” Lanroyd drank with tolerant amusement. “I’ll believe anything of the Department of Psionics, ever since I learned not to shoot craps with you. I suppose you’ve invented a time machine?”
“Well, old boy, I think I have. It’s a question of. . .”
Lanroyd understood perhaps a tenth of the happy monolog that followed. As an historical scholar, he seized on a few names and dates. Principle of temporomagnetic fields known since discovery by Arthur McCann circa 1941. Neglected for lack of adequate power source. Mei-Figner’s experiment with nuclear pile 1959. Nobody knows what became of M-F. Embarrassing discovery that power source remained chronostationary; poor M-F stranded somewhere with no return power. Hasselfarb Equations 1972 established that any adequate external power source must possess too much temporal inertia to move with traveler.
“Don’t you see, Peter?” Cleve gleamed. “That’s where everyone’s misunderstood Hasselfarb. Any external power source . . .’ Of course it baffled the physicists.”
“I can well believe it,” Lanroyd quoted. “Perpetual motion, or squaring the circle, would baffle the physicists. They’re infants, the physicists.”
Cleve hesitated, then beamed. “Robert Barr,” he identified. “His Sherlock Holmes parody. Happy idea for a time traveler: Visit the Reichenbach Falls in 1891 and see if Holmes really was killed. I’ve always thought an impostor ‘returned.’ ”
“Back to your subject, psionicist . . . which is a hell of a word for a drinking man. Here, I’ll fill both glasses and you tell me why what baffles the physicists fails to baffle the ps . . .”
“ ‘Sounds of strong men struggling with a word,’ ” Cleve murmured. They were both fond of quotation; but it took Lanroyd a moment to place this muzzily as Belloc. “Because the power source doesn’t have to be external. We’ve been developing the internal sources. How can I regularly beat you at craps?”
“Psychokinesis,” Lanroyd said, and just made it.
“Exactly. But nobody ever thought of trying the effect of PK power on temporomagnetic fields before. And it works and the Hasselfarb Equations don’t apply!”
“You’ve done it?”
“Little trips. Nothing spectacular. Tiny experiments. But—and this, old boy, is the damnedest part—there’s every indication that PK can rotate the temporo-magnetic stasis!”
“That’s nice,” said Lanroyd vaguely.
“No, of course. You don’t understand. My fault. Sorry, Peter. What I mean is this: We can not only travel in time; we can rotate into another, an alternate time. A world of If.”
Lanroyd started to drink, then abruptly choked. Gulping and gasping, he eyed in turn the TV set, the window stickers and Cleve. “If. . .” he said.
Cleve’s eyes made the same route, then focused on Lanroyd. “What we are looking at each other with,” he said softly, “is a wild surmise.”
From the journal of Peter Lanroyd, Ph.D.:
Mon Nov 12 84: So I have the worst hangover in Alameda County, & we lost to UCLA Sat by 3 field goals, & the American Party takes over next Jan; but it’s still a wonderful world.
Or rather it’s a wonderful universe, continuum, whatsit, that includes both this world & the possibility of shifting to a brighter alternate.
I got through the week somehow after Black Tue. I even made reasonablesounding non-subversive noises in front of my classes. Then all week-end, except for watching the game (in the quaint expectation that Cal’s sure victory wd lift our spirits), Stu Cleve & I worked.
I never thought I’d be a willing lab assistant to a psionicist. But we want to keep this idea secret. God knows what a good Am Party boy on the faculty (Daniels, for inst) wd think of people who prefer an alternate victory. So I’m Cleve’s
