Timescape

He walked back towards the colleges, letting this feel of the press of time seep into him. He and Jan had been to High Table at several of the colleges, the ultimate Anglophile experience. Memorial plate that gleamed like quicksilver, and crested goblets. In the after-dinner room of polished wood, gilt frames held glowering portraits of the college founders. In the great dining hall Jan had been surprised to find de facto segregation: Etonians at one table, Harrovians at another, the lesser public schools’ alumni at a third, and, finally, state school graduates and everyone else at a motley last table. To an American in such a citadel of education, after the decades of ferocious equality-at-all-costs politics, it seemed strange. There persisted a reliance on inherited advantages, and even the idea that such a system was an inherited virtue as well. The past hung on. You could be quite up to the minute, quite knowing about the zack-o latin riffs of Lady Delicious, and yet sit quietly and comfortably in choir stalls of King’s College chapel listening to cherubic lads in Elizabethan ruffs try to shatter the stained glass with treble attacks. It seemed that in a muzzy sense the past was still here, that they were all connected, and that the perception of the future as a tangible thing lived in the present, as well.

Markham relaxed a moment, letting the idea inside drift up from his subconscious. Walking was the gentle jog his mind needed; he had used the effect before. Something… something about the reality needing to be independent of the observer…

He glanced up. A swarming yellow cloud, moving fast and low over the gray towers, pressed shadows against the flanks of Great St. Mary’s church. Bells pealed a cascade of sound through momentarily chilled air; the cloud seemed to suck heat from the breeze.

He watched the curling fingers of fog that dissolved overhead in the trail of the cloud. Then, abruptly, he had it. The nub of the problem was that observer, the guy who had to see things objectively. Who was he? In quantum mechanics, the equations themselves told you nothing about which way time should run. Once you made a measurement, an experiment had to be thought of from that moment on as a thing which generated probabilities. All the equations could tell you was how probable a “later” event was. That was the essence of the quantum. Schrodinger’s equation could evolve things either forward in time, or backward. Only when the observer poked his finger in and made a measurement did something fix the direction of the flow of time. If the all-powerful observer measured a particle and found it at position x, then the particle had to be given a small push by the observer, in the very act of observing. That was Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. You could not tell precisely how much of a push the observer had given the wretched particle, so its future position was somewhat uncertain. Schrodinger’s equation described the set of probabilities about where the particle would appear next. The probabilities were found by picturing a wave, moving forward in time and making it possible for the particle to appear in many different places in the future. A probability wave. The old billiard-ball picture, in which the particle moved with Newtonian certainty to its next point, was simply false, misleading. The particle’s most probable location was, in fact, exactly the same as the Newtonian position—but other paths were possible. Less likely, yes, but possible. The problem came when the observer next poked his finger in and made a second measurement. He found the particle in one place, not spread out among a choice of spots. Why? Because the observer was always considered essentially Newtonian himself—a “classical measurer,” as the tech chat went.

Markham grinned broadly as he turned up King’s Parade. There was a trapdoor in that argument. The classical observer didn’t exist. Everything in the world was quantum-mechanical. Everything moved according to waves of probability. So the massive, untouched experimenter himself got pushed back on. He received an uncertainly known push from the outraged particle, and that meant the observer, too, was quantum-mechanical. He was part of the system. The experiment was bigger, and more complex, than the simple ideas of the past. Everything was part of the experiment; nobody could stand apart from it. You could talk about a second observer, bigger than the first one, who was unaffected by the experiment—but that simply removed the problem one step further. The final fallback was to regard the whole universe as the “observer,” so that it was a self-consistent system. But that meant you had to solve the entire problem of the motion of the universe at once, without breaking it up into convenient, separate experiments.

The essence of the problem was, what made the particle appear in only one spot? Why did it pick out one of the possible states and not another? It was as though the universe had many possible ways it could go, and something made it choose a particular one.

Markham stopped, studying the dizzy height of Great St. Mary’s. A student peered over the edge, a knobby head against the steel blue.

What was the right analogy?

The tachyon beam brought up the same problem. If his ideas were right there was a kind of probability wave traveling back and forth in time. Setting up a paradox kept the wave going in a loop, setting the system into a kind of dumbfounded frenzy, unable to decide on what state it should be in. Something had to choose one. Was there some analogy here, a kind of unmoved observer, who set time flowing forward rather than backward?

If there was, then the paradox had an answer. Somehow the laws of physics had to provide an answer. But the equations stood mute, inscrutable. As was always the case, the basic question answered by the mathematics was how, not why. Did the unmoved mover have to step in? Who was he—God? He might as well be.

Markham shook his head in frustration. The ideas swarmed like bees, but he could not pin them. Abruptly he growled and swerved across a lane of bicycling students, into Bowes & Bowes.

•  •  •

The selection was getting thin; the pubushing business was in trouble, retreating before the TV tide. A woman tending the register caught his eye; quite sexy. Beyond his age range, though, he thought ruefully. He was getting to the stage where ambitions nearly always exceeded his region of probable success.

The tachyon thing troubled him as he walked home, across the Cav and through the bathing grounds. A greensward, named Lammas Land for some ancient reason, lay beneath a moist, warm afternoon. There was a stillness, as though the year were poised motionless at the top of a long slope up which it had climbed out of winter’s grip, and from which it must soon descend. He turned south, towards Grantchester, where the nuclear reactor was still a-building. It seemed that with all the delays they would never finish the squashed ping-pong ball that would cup the simmering core. The meadows around it were a pocket of rural peace. Cows standing in the inky shade of trees swished their tails to banish flies. There were drowsy sounds, murmurs of wood pigeons, a drone of a plane, buzzings and clickings. The air was layered with scents of thistles, yarrow, ragwort, tansy. Colors leaped in ambush from the lush grass: yellow camomile, blue harebells, the scarlet pimpernel of literary fame.

Jan was reading when he arrived home. They made a lazy sort of love in the close upper bedroom, dampening the sheets. Afterward, the image of the woman in Bowes & Bowes flickered through his dozing mind. A musky fullness hung in the air. The long day stretched on to ten in the evening, holding off the night. Markham was reminded, as he checked a calculation in the pale late light, that elsewhere on the planet someone else was paying for these longest of summer days in the hard coinage of frozen winter nights. Debts mount, he thought. And as he read that evening of the spreading bloom, it seemed a vast one was coming due.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

APRIL 8, 1963

GORDON WAS LATE FOR A FACULTY SENATE COMMITtee meeting, and hurrying, when Bernard Carroway intersected his trajectory. “Oh, Gaw-dun, I need to speak with you.” Something in Bernard’s tone made Gordon stop.

“I heard about this thing you have on with Shriffer. Saw a diddle about it on the late news—one of my students rang me to have a look.” Carroway clasped his hands behind his back, the gesture giving him a judicial appearance.

“Well… yes, I think Saul went a little overboard—”