that geological epoch no longer exists. That Earth is a ghost-Earth a giga-zillion miles behind us somewhere, and there’s no way to set me down on it without some sort of zippy, faster-than-light contraption. Right?”
“Right,” Kaprow acknowledged.
“Well, I don’t think that”—he nodded at the buslike vehicle beside Blair—“qualifies. In fact, I’m sure it doesn’t. So where the hell exactly am I going to end up?”
Blair’s expression betrayed surprise, dismay, chagrin. Joshua’s objections, as Joshua himself could see, were ones that he had never considered. The idea that time travel has a spatial dimension was a novelty to him, a revelation. It gave the paleontologist pause. If Joshua did not emerge from Kaprow’s machine into a primeval world of hominids, dinotheres, and antlered giraffes, but instead into a formless void like the clock tick before Creation, Blair had no hope of obtaining any concrete proof of his theories about human origins. Further (no small consideration), Joshua might gasp for breath, draw none, and die. Was it possible that Blair had delivered his developing third-world country into the arms of the Americans for a trade-off of dubious long-term benefit? Had he been duped?
“Listen,” said Kaprow, addressing both men. “My previous work—some of it in West Germany, so that I know I’m not dealing solely with a local phenomenon—has demonstrated that common to every Earthbound site all along its distribution across the time axis, there’s a kind of persistent . . . well, call it a geographic memory. That memory, Dr. Blair, is objectifiable. In other words, it’s visitable.”
“A pseudoscientific rationale for ghosts?”
“For ghosts, hauntings, and a few other supposedly paranormal phenomena. If calling that rationale ‘pseudoscientific’ pleases you, be my guest.” He crossed the workshop and removed the transcordion from Blair’s hands. “The point is that Joshua is already psychically geared to a specific set of these geographic memories. When we drop him back to the Pleistocene—with his active cooperation—he’ll find himself in a physical dimension congruent with that epoch as it actually occurred. Joshua’s name for what he does in his dreams—spirit-traveling—is a good name for what White Sphinx is all about, too. Like my term dreamfaring, though, it does ignore the important aspect of bodily displacement. But there’s really no reason to —”
“We’ll be installing him in a bloody diorama of the Pleistocene! A simulacrum of East Africa two million years ago! That’s not time travel, Kaprow—that’s a contemptible fraud!”
Kaprow’s eyes seemed to bob in their almost transparent whites. “That’s what my government thought, too. To begin with.”
“Until they discovered they could sell Zarakal a worthless bill of goods for a couple of military bases. That’s what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?”
“You’re also receiving several hundred million dollars of direct American aid. That played a rather substantial role in President Tharaka’s decision to permit the bases, wouldn’t you say? Besides, he’d made up his mind on that point a month or two before White Sphinx was part of your working vocabulary. We’re gravy, Joshua and I. Why are you making ugly accusations?”
“Gravy or no gravy, Kaprow, it doesn’t forgive the duplicity of this diorama business.”
“Please listen to me, Dr. Blair. Joshua may be going back to a ‘diorama’ of the Pleistocene, or a ‘simulacrum,’ to use another of your words, but it’s going to be a living diorama, a perfect simulacrum.”
The Great Man’s forehead wrinkled skeptically.
“Time travel as H. G. Wells envisioned it is an utter impossibility. The future is forever inaccessible because it hasn’t happened yet. It has no pursuable resonances. The past is accessible only because of adepts like Joshua here, a person whose collective unconscious—whose psyche, if you prefer—establishes an attunement to a particular place at a particular time. This is an extremely rare talent.”
“Curse,” Joshua said.
“All right, curse. I’m afraid I agree with you. But it permits time travel of a vivid secondary sort, and it’s not to be spurned as either worthless or trivial.”
“A dream fossil is a worthless fossil, Kaprow.”
“Dr. Blair, you should count yourself lucky that one of the people afflicted with this curse—I know of only three others, although worldwide there may be a few hundred—happens to be a young man with an attunement to the time and place of your own researches. Had his spirit-traveling taken him to the Trojan War, say, I’d probably be talking to a high-ranking classicist from Asia Minor. And you could have kissed this entire project goodbye.”
“Name another,” Joshua said.
“Another what?”
“Another person afflicted with the curse.”
“Well, I’m one, I’m afraid.” Kaprow pulled a folding chair