fade, they just fossilize.”
“Fossil lies are the stock and trade of fading paleontologists.”
“The hell you say.” Blair played the transcordion to this effect: “Desist and decamp, Joshua Kampa. Josh me no more, I pray.”
Joshua responded, “A prayer from Blair is hardly fair. It’s not the Darwinian Way.”
Aloud the Great Man said, “Rotten doggerel. And what does it prove, Dr. Kaprow? That fifteen feet apart we can send and receive like genuine radio men?”
Kaprow sat down on the edge of his desk and folded his arms across his belly. “It proves they’re operating, Dr. Blair. They’ll do just as well when you’re separated by time as well as space. Every set of transcordions shares a crystallographic harmony that’s independent of temporal considerations. They’d interresonate even if we sent Joshua to, God forbid, the Precambrian—so long as we didn’t displace him spatially, too. Then we’d have to put up with a radio delay like those familiar to astronauts. Between a Now and a Then that are spatially congruent, though, the transcordions provide virtually instantaneous communication.”
“Does ‘instantaneous’ mean anything under such circumstances?” Joshua asked.
“Call it a metaphor, then. The transcordions operate on a principle of physical correspondences rather than on the doubtful proposition of simultaneity. Simultaneity’s an assumption of no real usefulness when you’re dealing with persons sundered from each other by time. By definition, the past and the present do not, and cannot, coincide.”
Joshua said, “Or they’d be the same thing.”
Kaprow accepted Joshua’s remark with a distracted nod. “However, in another sense, perhaps they are.”
“Oh, God,” Blair interjected. “One hand clapping.”
“No, don’t worry. I’m not going to go Zen on you just yet. The instantaneousness I’m talking about derives from a metaphorical simultaneity based on the concord between the time-displaced receiver and its mate. In a physical dimension about which we are pathetically ignorant, the past does indeed run parallel to the present.”
Joshua slid his transcordion across the desk to Kaprow, who picked it up and fondled it absent-mindedly. If the past and the present ran parallel to each other, why, damn it all, they were simultaneous. At least insofar as Joshua could get a grip on the matter. What good was a metaphor that muddled your metaphysics past all rational recourse? In comparison, one hand clapping was altogether comprehensible. . . .
“Wait a minute,” Joshua cried. “Time travel involves movement in space, too, doesn’t it?”
“Of course it does. Every particle of matter travels along a world line consisting of three dimensions in space and one in time. Once we’ve transferred the physical components of White Sphinx to the Lake Kiboko Protectorate, Joshua, and once you’ve harnessed yourself to the Backstep Scaffold, we’ll reverse the equations of motion for the finite region of space enclosing you. Then we’ll transport that region backward along its various world lines to the destination dictated by your dreamfaring.”
“My spirit-traveling, you mean.”
“The terminology’s of no consequence. The dreamfarer is himself the key to the journey, because time, like our universe, is an attribute of consciousness. In fact, it’s possible that it has no significant meaning apart from consciousness. White Sphinx cannot shift inanimate objects—these transcordions, for instance—into the past without the intervention of a living psyche.”
The workshop, with its corrugated walls and cold concrete floor, its high fluorescent tubes and hanging pulleys, its snakelike electrical cables and blocky machine presses, seemed more than an ocean away from the grasslands, rhino wallows, and wattle huts of East Africa. Indeed, it was. It was a little cathedral to human progress, a memorial to the evolution of insight and ingenuity. It was a starting place. Joshua was not sure, however, that he liked it very much.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this, about my . . . my physical displacement into the past.”
“That’s natural enough,” Kaprow said. “And?”
“I’ll be going back to the general vicinity of Lake Kiboko’s eastern shore almost two million years ago.”
“The site of our most productive digs,” Blair put in.
“Okay. But I’m going to end up in an ancient Africa that occupies the same space-time coordinates as present-day Africa. Have I got that right, Dr. Kaprow?”
“Pretty much. I won’t quibble with your construction of the matter.”
“How?” Joshua demanded. “How does that happen? Our sun, the solar system, the whole damn galaxy—they’re moving, aren’t they?”
“Right. At a speed of approximately six hundred million miles a year, foot to the floorboard.”
“Then to what goddamn East African Pleistocene will I really be going? It won’t be the same one that existed two million years ago. The Earth supporting