What is the probability of A, who abhors mirrors, being contacted by p-A, who appears in one and cannot exist without it?
You always spare me your pain, dear Alec. But are you well enough?
I can’t quite resist a remark about your solitary virtue. You are wrong about relationships, I think, because you have not taken our species’ adaptability into account. An odd omission, I think you’ll be forced to agree. M. Baudelaire is quite right in all that he says about the inner life, though he does not complete his derivation of proof viz. lonely thinkers and bustling crowds.
The crowd is the complete set of boring demands made on a loved friend, A, or his loving friend, J. But A and J, in mental seclusion, in the middle of the crowd, are indeed free of it, and having a lovely time!
Darling, time turns out to be infinitely expandable. The more I do of the awful drudgery (and it is fairly awful, I admit), the more I find myself thinking of the real work I still want to do and coming to a strange conclusion. The thinking is the work, and the trick is to catch it on the wing, while one does the washing-up or ironing. Or, in your case, while you attend appointments and meetings with your hoodoo Freudian. To be serious, what I mean is, we are creatures, you and I, of salutary distraction. I love Bill, but he has no understanding of a very important part of me. When he is chatting, I am thinking, solving puzzles, fretting. And yet, his conversation is so important, because in the kindest way it sends me back into myself. I could not be reminded of myself without his chatter. Let the set of demands on A, or his friend J, be like the man in the mirror: a mysterious liberation. Oh, let it, darling, for all our sakes.
I do believe he is trying to tell you something.
PS Trentham’s field awareness: I wasn’t aware of it. Send it? Send him?
It is always possible for the computer to break off from his work, to go away and forget all about it, and later to come back and go on with it. If he does this he must leave a note of instructions (written in some standard form) explaining how the work is to be continued.
The Miscreants
Acoustic dark: voices and squeaks, the slide and shunt of forms. The darkness has a leathern softness, lit by brass flashes. The brightness of a buckle or the ring of metal round an inkwell permits me the briefest of glimpses of faces, shoes, socks, ties, and desks—before I’m on the move again, on the back wall, rising through polished wood. Wainscoting. Painted initials, glorious lists scroll down before me. I’m behind the sad letters (Atkins, B. S., Atkins, J. T.), scanning from right to left until a sort of dawn breaks and I’m clear.
A boy with parted hair and brown perceptive eyes looks through me, through the pane: Alec Pryor, the name just visible in an upturned collar. Beside him sits a paler, neater blond boy, C. C. Molyneaux (according to a red notebook), fully absorbed in the lesson, unlike his friend, who yawns and mists the glass so that my view of both boys is obscured. When the mist clears, Pryor stares with a new intensity. He whispers, “Absolute…” and presses with his dirty shoe on the much cleaner toe of C.C.M. Turns back to face the front seconds before the master stops chalking equations on the board.
“Hindsight,” the master’s high and drifting voice declares, “may have a scientific use. Physical measurements that we make now, of particles in flight, affect the story we can tell about the past.”
The thirty lives in this cold room, seen from some distant vantage point, are like the hopeful lanterns of a struggling ferry.
“That is the world of quantum measurement advanced by Mr. Schrödinger. But note: the past itself is still secure. Pryor, I saw you roll your eyes. I heard you say, ‘Nonsense.’ These marks of insolence are fixed. While I may change the story that I tell of them, should any mitigating information come to light, I may not change the marks themselves. On a related matter, we may not go back. We recollect our own past and form impressions of history in general. But to revisit any part of it is out of the question, unless we are unhinged and can mistake the fact of being able to imagine Agincourt for Agincourt itself.”
“Sir.” The blond boy raises his hand only to lower it again. He has a way of interrupting and then hesitating that wrong-foots authority. Masters forget to chide or punish him. They like him. He has interesting things to say.
“Molyneaux.”
“What if you could really go there, sir, the past, I mean? Observing, not acting. But be there, knowing it, much more than if you were just looking back?”
“Charming hypothesis.” The master smiles. The other boys begin to yawn or look bemused. “Alas, here we intrude upon the realm of fantasy.”
“You’d need a machine,” Pryor says, his shoe pressing on Molyneaux’s.
“As I was saying, Pryor, here we part company with the real. If you could build such a machine, then Mr. Wells and Mr. Hilton, not to mention Mr. Wilfrid Ashley of the Ministry of Transport, would be breaking down your door. Now—”
“But, sir,” Pryor objects. He’s come alive and speaks quickly. “It only need be hypothetical. We only need to know what sort of machine it would be, for now. To have an abstract idea.”
He laughs softly. One dissipating “ha!”, the wheeze of a harmonica.
Seated, holding his chalk, the master says, “Go on.” It isn’t what the boy says that matters. It is the boy himself, his shyness overcompensated for by chatter, dares, and intellect.
Pryor explains. A group of individuals have an idea, work hard, give way to others, who refine the problem in a different way until it’s solved or, probably, transformed. The abstraction evolves until it can be made. It takes a certain quantity of time. “It’s just an algorithm, sir. Like anything. Like any set of instructions. A time machine to build another time machine!
“And then, as well, of course”—it’s strange the way his nerves produce a cry, as though he were wailing “listen to me”—“you don’t have to build anything to time-travel. If you are here, in Wargrave, and I’m far away—”
“How far?” says someone else.
“Oh, I don’t know. Ten billion—”
“Ten billion!”
“—light-years. And I am there, and I walk just a few steps on, away from you… well, doing that, I turn into your past. My ‘now’ is long before you’re even born. Or if I walk toward the Earth, my now is your future, in which a time machine exists. In which we use them—well, sir, all the time. Quite commonly.”
Master and Molyneaux and thirty other pairs of eyes bend light toward the figure by the window, with its face half-cut by shadow and half-blinking in the sun. It is a humorous face, eager. He looks so young, dark hair and brows, heavy as cornices, sharpened by sudden growth, the jacket on broad shoulders waiting to be filled. His lips are parted wide enough for me to see the hint of supernatural incision—small and backward-sloping teeth.
“I’m very taken with that idea,” says Pryor, when the bell goes and the boys rise, muttering. “Of yours,” he adds, his eyes still bright and anxiously moving, aware of Molyneaux’s silence. “Very taken indeed. It’s like telepathy. The silent understanding. And so Roman, the two-headed god—”