There had been a problem: the Gods had only one name. Why had she called herself Pallas Athene? Yes, it was her name but that was insufficient so she had to concoct this story about her having devoured Pallas, which made her a twin Goddess, but of what? The ferocity made warfare obvious, but the second? When the image of an irate Dr Chu came to mind, she had said science, then added wisdom as an explanation. The blind poet was impressed and made her part of the tale. Then, to make certain of her immortality, she had recorded the colour of her eyes. Who had ever heard of a grey-eyed Greek of that period? Athene had thought that this was truly safe because the change was noticeable only to those in the temporal satellite at the time and who had heard of the original versions; she was currently the only classical scholar on board.
The effect was startling. With such inspiration Homer completely changed his stories, and where before they had been eminently forgettable, and only recorded much later by sheer accident and then largely ignored except by half a dozen scholars, suddenly history had two pieces of truly great literature. The problem was, those within the temporal satellite retained their old memories but could view the changed scenario, and because of the greatness of the stories her prank had been uncovered. The sudden change in the name of the capital of Greece was also a bit of a give-away. Nevertheless, it was worth the consequences. She could live with her name recorded in two of the most famous pieces of literature ever written, and having a major city named after her was an added bonus.
The lights dimmed, so much so that she could barely see. Pathetic! They thought they were punishing her! Now, she thought as she lay down on the bunk, with fame achieved and the dim light she would get a good night's sleep.
In that she was wrong. She heard footsteps, then the door opened. An android stood there and beckoned. "Collect your belongings and come with me. It will be easier if you comply."
Yes, it would be, she thought. If the android grasped her, it could quite easily break her arm. "I promise not to run," she said, as she collected her reading material and her electronic notebook. "After all, there's nowhere to run to on a satellite." A thought occurred to her and she added, "I also promise not to try to steal the shuttle."
"You couldn't, anyway, because there is no shuttle outside," the android replied as she entered the barely lit passageway. Behind her, another android dragged a screaming shape and flung it into the cell and shut the door.
"You mean it's gone without me?"
"It no longer exists," came the unemotional response. "Everything will be explained in the conference room."
With no reason not to, Athene strode towards the conference room. She might be in trouble, but she was not going to let them see any sign of concern. However, when she opened the door she found that easier said than done. In what little light there was she could see three ashen-faced people: Dr Chu, the physicist responsible for the temporal viewer, Professor Ralph Grenfell, the specialist in alien history, and Rodney Black, the satellite commander who seemed to be so dazed he was barely functional. She could also smell fear. Dr Chu nodded to her and pointed to a chair.
Athene stared at them in disbelief. Obviously something was wrong, but what? Most likely the news of her prank had been relayed to Earth, and these people were going to be fired. "Look," she started, "I know that what I did is going to have repercussions, but I promise I shall make a statement taking full responsibility, and. ."
"What you did was wrong," Dr Chu interrupted. "You might think it was harmless enough, but you never considered what might follow."
"I know. ." Athene started.
"I doubt it," Dr Chu interrupted again. "We have a problem, and we need you."
"What problem?" Athene asked cautiously.
"It appears that the wretch who now occupies your cell read your notes and decided to commit a crime with the perfect alibi, namely he was not born when it was committed. The crime was carried out on another planet, presumably to prevent our knowing about it, and that planet had to have space travel capability to get the reward to him. He chose Ranh."
The closest planet to Earth with a civilization. "And I'm going to be responsible for. ."
"Not in the sense you are thinking," Dr Chu gave a wan smile. "Let me explain. It appears that he changed something very profoundly on their system, and we suspect. ."
"Can't you use the viewer to find out?" Athene interrupted.
"Please!" Dr Chu said. "We suspect the beneficiary there was rewarded with power at another's expense, but that left him with the problem that the same could be done to him. His solution seems to have been to exterminate the human race to prevent the temporal viewer ever being constructed."
"But this afternoon all was. ."
"The problem with interfering with the past," Chu shrugged, "is that you can make changes that took hundreds of years for the participants in what is, for you a matter of seconds. Anyway, whether you believe that or not, believe this. As a consequence of his activities, we are now in a state of paradox. ."
Paradox! When the cause necessary to create the effect was prevented from occurring by the effect. The common example was killing your parents before you were born; the parents did not die unless you killed them, but if they died, you did not exist, hence you could not kill them, therefore they did not die, except if they did not die then you were born and hence you killed them.
"At that point, the amplitude of our time-line collapsed to zero, which means there is zero probability that what was there when we left survived. We can use the viewer to see Earth in the present, which is how we know that all civilization on Earth is effectively terminated, however we seem to have been shifted off any actual time-line, and effectively we are no longer connected causally with the rest of the Universe. We can guess when the critical event happened, because that is the time when we can no longer view Earth, other than at present, and we have to assume that was when we were shifted off that timeline. Unfortunately, the critical decision presumably occurred on Ranh, and we cannot penetrate sufficiently close to the act to guess what happened."
"That's probably because the decision was a mental one," Grenfell offered. "Once someone had decided to do something, that created the paradox, even though it may have taken some time to actually carry out the act, and we cannot watch every person's thinking process on another planet."
"Whatever happened," Dr Chu continued, "The practical result is that we can no longer communicate with anything other than through the temporal viewer, for example, or receive solar power, which is why we are trying to save every Joule of energy we can."
"So we have the choice of sitting around, running out of food, and dying," Athene mused, "or sacrificing ourselves to allow humanity to survive. Not that it's much of a sacrifice if we're going to die anyway."
"What have you got in mind?" Dr Chu asked. He might be puzzled, she noted, but Commander Black was terrified.
"Try to get a message to Lansfeld," Athene replied. "If you recall, he was going to give up physics to be a space pilot, but he failed admission to the academy when, during his test where he elected to study the magnetosphere of Uranus, he failed to realize that somebody else was using one of the pieces of equipment on the deep space array. If he corrected that, he may never have been a physicist, he would never have discovered temporal theory, and. ."
"To be honest, I thought of that too, but it won't work," Dr Chu said quietly. "A curious fact about multiverses is that when a cause has several possible outcomes, they all occur until eventually something happens, such as somebody making an observation, that collapses the probabilities to precisely one. Accordingly, you see one timeline because only one sequence of events actually happened that lead to your now. However, if somebody in history could have done something different that will resolve the paradox, the corresponding state vector now has a finite probability, proportional to the probability that it will resolve the paradox. There is one very faint alternative timeline, and while it eventually involves Lansfeld, there is no possibility that any such option commences with him."