What had gone wrong?
The woman had returned with a priest, the pair chattering at one another crazily. The cleric hadn't believed a word-till he entered the hut.
Whatever it was about them, he had sensed it without a word having been spoken.
The creature would babble the last gram of truth if ever she got the opportunity.
She knew, then, that there never would be peace between them. They were too alien.
The priest's eyes had widened startlingly. He had thrust the woman behind him, shielding her with his body, and had compelled her retreat while brandishing his crucifix. He had stammered something about bringing in the bishop and an exorcist.
Fian had grimly chuckled and said they had best depart before villagers gathered with torches and wooden stakes.
They had grabbed a few things and had gotten out immediately, before the villagers could react. Fial they had had to support between them till he recovered. Only after they were a half-dozen kilometers from the village did they begin planning, once Fial, with his historical background, had recovered enough to make them fully aware of when they were.
Where was no problem. Fial explained that Lidice had at one time been a national shrine. Later, the Central Committee had chosen it as the site of the headquarters, Agency for State Security.
There had been no spatial displacement.
Fial and Fian would invest man-months trying to develop a mathematical model of a chronon field capable of linearly linking a site despite all the motion of a planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe over two centuries.
Fiala concentrated on medicine. It would be critical if they were to survive this medically primitive era. At least they hadn't come in their own bodies, to a world where all the viruses and most of the bacteria would be alien, deadly, able to overwhelm their bodily defenses in no time.
XIII. On the Y Axis;
1975
The drug war flowed into the West End for one violent evening and, while in the area following up a lead linking the activity to a case in his own district, Cash stole an hour to drop in on a physicist at Washington University,
Dr. Charles DeKeersgeiter seemed awfully young for the high-powered reputation his secretary imputed, though he was sneaking up on forty.
Cash had never heard of him.
The age thing had always bothered him. Even now, though a grandparent, he unconsciously expected successful, powerful men to be much older than himself. During his early thirties he had gone through a bad crisis in which he had suffered deep depression and self-doubt each time he had heard of, or read about, someone who had become a substantial success at an age younger than he was then.
But the whole race couldn't consist of Alexanders or Napoleans, or even Al Capones. In time he had made a shaky peace.
'I'm not sure I understood why you wanted to see me, Sergeant,' said DeKeersgeiter, after Cash had been shown into his office.
'I'm not either. What I want is for you to tell me about Time.' Briefly, he presented the apparent facts of the Groloch-O'Brien case. 'The only handle we can get on it is an impossible one: time travel.'
'What we call the least hypothesis.' DeKeersgeiter showed more than the polite interest Cash had expected. 'That's the simplest theory that'll include all the known facts. Sometimes you come up with something outrageous. This time, though, I submit that the facts aren't all known.' He made a steeple of his fingers beneath his chin, stared at the ceiling. 'Time: The popular view is that it's like a river, flowing one direction at a steady pace. In physics we know this isn't necessarily true. Time's a phenomenon associated with space and matter. And motion. Velocity and the shape of space can cause differences in observed time flow. Especially in the matter of motion. It's my own feeling that matter, or the mass thereof, also directly correlates to time in any given frame. We know it does at the event horizon of a singularity. With better math, we might find gravity even more important than commonly thought.'
He spoke slowly, pedantically, as if unsure he could express himself in terms Cash could understand.
'That is, time flow on the surface of a neutron star should differ significantly, not only from here but from current mathematical predictions, because of the proximity of disparate masses.' He glanced at Cash as if to solicit an opinion. When none was forthcoming, he went on.
'A few years ago there was a flap over a hypothetical particle called a tachyon. At first it was supposed to move faster than light and have negative mass. Then it was supposed to have positive mass and a velocity below that of light, but was supposed to be moving backward in time. Some of my colleagues also feel there's a movement of mass backward in time from a black hole or singularity to a white hole or quasar, extremely violent stellar events so far away that what astronomers see are events which took place almost back at the beginning of the universe. But I was talking about tachyons. Since nobody's been able to detect them, and their proponents have been heavily criticized by their opponents, the excitement's pretty well died down. I haven't heard a thing recently. But I'm so damned busy pushing paper-federal grant, you know-that I don't have time to keep up with the literature.'
DeKeersgeiter's mind seemed to jump tracks for a minute. He treated Cash to a critique of federal grant practices that would have endeared him to Lieutenant Railsback. Then, as suddenly, he skipped back, leaving Cash momentarily bewildered.
'We have fads in physics, too. Tachyons. Gravitons. The latest is the Hawking Black Hole.' As the physicist
