“That does it!” Antonia’s face was crimson. “You little tin gods can play your games with peoples’ lives by yourselves! I have nothing but the utmost contempt for you, and refuse to be a part of it!”
She stood up. “I resign from the Institute! Good-bye!” She glared at Robbins and sneered in a low voice, “You and your damn music!” Then she left the room.
“What a woman.” Billingsley said suddenly. He stood up. “I didn’t say anything before we voted because everybody had their minds made up already. Now, I’ll just say that a person can stand for a lot of pushing if they have to.” He paused. “But there are some things a person can’t take. I resign too.”
He moved toward the door. “It’s sad. I used to think we were the good guys. That we were Earth-One. Looks like we’re really Earth-Three.
“And for those of you who don’t get that one, here’s another twentieth century term that seems appropriate right now. A.M.F.!” Billingsley’s last words as he left the room were what that acronym meant.
Robbins blinked. He’d never seen the Chancellor blush before.
Recovering her composure she said, “Any more business? Then this meeting is adjourned.”
The others began to stand, say their own good-byes, and leave. Robbins stayed in his chair, alone with his memories and regrets. Faintly, deep within him, his mind played through the final Adagio of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony. As each instrument played its plaintive “auf Wiedersehen” and left, all the things he had hoped and lived for, everything that brought meaning to his life, seemed to go with them. Finally, as the two remaining muted violins closed the work softly in the distant, lonely key of F-sharp major, he got up and left too.
Back in his own apartment, he felt a little better. Harrison had sent a message for him to get a good night’s sleep before going back to deliver the vaccine-blocker in the morning. He sat down at the Steinway and, wincing occasionally from the pain in his upper back, began to play. But the pieces his fingers selected made him feel depressed again. The third movement of Chopin’s Sonata no. 2 in B-flat minor, then Haydn’s Variations in F minor. As the last questioning notes of the latter work’s coda faded away, the doorbell rang. Praying it was Antonia, he opened the door—.
It was Everett.
“May I come in?”
She sat down on the couch. He sat down beside her.
“Nice piano.”
“Thank you.”
Everett looked at him sadly. “You look depressed.”
“Of course I am!” Everett’s hair shimmered like spun silver in the muted light. Almost like an older version of—. “If I go to TCE and manage to undo all the damage I’ve done, Velikovsky and the others are going to use all those people as guinea pigs for their ‘experiments’!” But isn’t that what you did? No, I was trying to do something good for them and us! Tell that to all the people you killed. “And if it doesn’t work, I’ll still be responsible for the death of billions of people—the whole human race there! Either way, it’s all my fault!”
“No it isn’t. It’s more my fault than yours. I could have vetoed your proposal anytime. You wanted your music, I wanted to prove we could change TCE’s history without changing ours. We both got want we wanted. Just not what we expected.”
Everett moved closer. “How much of that report about TCE I sent out three weeks ago did you understand?”
Robbins rolled his eyes.
“Oh. That much. Well, I’m not very good at asimoving, but I’ll try. The key thing you have to understand is, at any instant in time, ‘choices’ are being made. At the smallest scale, a radioactive atom may ‘choose’ to decay or not decay. When you get up in the morning, you choose to part your hair on the right or the left. The “present’ is the sum of all the specific choices and decisions made in the past. Nearly all those choices are trivial,’ in the technical sense that they don’t lead to any ‘significant’ difference in the history of the Universe. They might affect only an atom or, at the macroscopic level, only a tiny portion of the cosmos. But, occasionally, one of them makes a ‘critical’ difference.”
She paused. “On September 17, 1666, someone, or something made a choice which—god, nature, whatever you call it—considered so important that it caused our Universe to split into two branches. In one branch, one choice’ was made, some event occurred—and in the other branch, it didn’t. On November 9, 1998, the same thing happened, due to some other choice. What we perceive as the ‘real world’ is just one of those latter two ‘branch’ universes. What we call TCE is the discreet timeline, the ‘history,’ between those two branch points in 1666 and 1998.
“If you’re wondering what the actual choices were that made the Universe split in those two particular years—well, I wish I knew, too. But I do have some guesses. In 1666 Isaac Newton—You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?—was doing some of his most important work.” She smiled wryly. “It’s supposed to be a myth but, maybe, in the other branch universe, the apple ‘decided’ not to fall.
“As for 1998—well, I’ve never told anyone this before. People think I have delusions of grandeur as it is. I was in my high school library that day looking for a copy of Little Women. I went down the wrong aisle, and happened to see a set of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.” A sad, faraway look came to her eyes. “Perhaps, in that other branch universe, there’s no transcosmology. Maybe, at this moment, I’m a retired English teacher playing with my grandchildren.”
She sighed. “We can’t physically travel to any of those other branch universes, or back into the past’—that is, from 1998 to ‘now’—of our own particular branch. Actually, we might be able to do it someday, if you believe in stable wormholes—which I don’t. On the other hand, folding space-time to travel to TCE, which is in a null energy state relative to our branch Universe, is fairly easy. It’s like temporarily reconnecting an umbilical cord between a baby and its mother. We use a—.”
She noticed the blank look on his face, then muttered a word that sounded like “reason.” “Never mind. You don’t really need to understand why this should work, just what you have to do.”
Her face moved closer to his. “I have a plan. It’s more dangerous than anything we’ve done so far. Depending on how strict nature is about violating causality, it might not even work at all. But it’s the only way we can make everything right on TCE, and here.”
Robbins’s eyes opened wide. “How?”
“As I said, we can’t physically travel back into the past of our own branch Universe and change things that have already happened. But, by using TCE, we might be able to change them by a less direct method.” She smiled. “Actually, this idea isn’t very original. I first read about it in some old science fiction stories when I was in college.”
“Science fiction?”
Everett looked at him quizzically. “Do you read science fiction too?”
“No, but maybe I should.” He started to ask her if the idea she was referring to was in “graphic novels” too, but thought better of it.
Everett reached up and took a book of piano music from the top of the Steinway. Taking a pen from her purse, she began writing on the book’s blank back cover. “This is what you need to do—.”
Robbins’s eyes opened wider as she explained her plan.
“But didn’t you say it was dangerous to—?”