I shrugged. “Guarantees of anything are beyond us in this situation. The best we can hope for are probabilities—that’s how the QM realm operates anyway, isn’t it—likelihoods of our success, statistics in favor of our survival. As for your effects, well, effects don’t have much impact outside of a supportive context of theory. Psalm 51 says Cleanse me with hyssop and I shall be clean’—the penicillin mold was first identified on a piece of decayed hyssop by a Swedish chemist—but none of this led to antibiotics until spores from a mold landed in Fleming’s petrie dish, and he placed them in the right scientific perspective. Scientists thought they had evidence of spontaneous generation of maggots in old meat, until they learned how maggots make love. Astronomers saw lots of evidence for a luminiferous ether, until Michelson-Morley decisively proved that wrong. You’re working on the cutting edge of physics with your wormholes. No one knows what to expect—you said it yourself—yours were the best minds in this area. You can create the context. No one’s left to contradict you. Let’s face it, if you word your paper properly, it will likely go unnoticed. But if not, it will point people in the wrong direction—and once pointed that way, away from time travel, the world could take years, decades, longer, to look at time travel as a real scientific possibility again. The history of science is filled with wrong glittering paths, tenaciously taken and defended. That’s the path of life for us. I’m not happy about it, but there it is.”
Our food arrived. Jennifer looked away from me, and down at her veal.
I hadn’t completely won her over yet. But she’d stopped objecting. I understood how she felt. To theoretical scientists, pursuit of truth was sometimes more important than life itself. Maybe that’s why I went into flesh-and-blood forensics. I pushed on. “The truth is, we’ve all been getting along quite well without time travel anyway—it could wreak far more havoc in everyone ’s lives than nuclear weapons ever did. The Universe may not be wrong here.”
She looked up at me.
“It’s all up to you now,” I said. “I’m not a physicist. I can’t pull this off. I can take care of the general media, but not the scientific journals.” I thought about Abrahmson at Newsday. He hadn’t a clue which way was up in this thing. He’d just as soon believe this nightmare was all coincidence—the ever popular placeholder for things people didn’t want to understand. I could easily pitch it to him in that way.
She gave me a weak smile. “OK, I’ll try it. I’ll write the article with the mental spin on the exotic effects. Physics Review D was given some general info that we were doing something on exotic matter, and is waiting for our report. It’ll have maximum impact on other physicists there. The human mind in control of matter will be catnip for a lot of them anyway. ”
“Good,” I smiled back. I knew she meant it. I knew because I suddenly felt very hungry, and dug into my own veal with a zest I hadn’t felt for anything in a while. It tasted great.
Two particles of humanity had connected again. Maybe this time the relationship would go somewhere.
It occurred to me, as I took Jennifer’s hand and squeezed it with relief, that maybe this was just what the Universe had wanted all along.
As they say in the Department, an ongoing string of deaths is a poor way to keep a secret.
Illustrations by Joseph Griffo