The Time Armada

Blair inhaled on the cigarette, laughed a little and felt better. Sometimes he knew he sounded like a college kid trying to tell his father what was wrong with the world, but that was why he liked Carl. Carl let him talk, knew it was his way of blowing off the pent-up steam.

"You know what, chum?" They were running smoothly along the highway now, the engine a reassuring hum of power, the interior of the sedan warm and relaxing. The rain was letting up a little, but dirty banks of fog had started gathering at the roadside like ghosts of all the work of the day, tenuous, without substance.

"What, Carl?"

"You should've stuck with the M.I.T. degree after all. Hell with your brain you'd've made that try for the Moon a success last month instead of another near-miss."

"Maybe you're right. Those boys know what they're doing though. I'll stick to puttering."

"Puttering the man calls it. 'He hath a lean and hungry look--such men are dangerous....' Myself, I think that gadget you 'putter' with in that cellar of yours is some kind of a gismo to hypnotize all the states-righters into doing something intelligent like dropping dead without being told!"

"With ingenuity such as yours, my friend, I think I could really accomplish something in that cellar of mine at that! That's the trouble. You writers and newsmen have all the good ideas--slide-rules don't think worth a damn! Instead of a wonderful creation such as you suggest, what have I got? A pile of junk that may, if it works in any degree at all, turn out to be a fairly good television set...."

"You wouldn't kid an old friend. That martini you were putting away the other night said that it was an experiment with something called tired light."

"Exactly. Television."

"Look, the quality of curiosity is not strained, it droppeth as a gentle ten-ton truck from twenty stories up! You said--or the martini said anyway--that if this little gimcrack of yours works, it'd be able to bring back pictures of things that happened in the past. You're guilty until proven innocent, Galileo. Start talking."

"Off the record--"

"I should broadcast it and get dunked in a witch's chair."

"Well--the martini had it a little balled up, but the essential idea's there I guess. Anyway, it isn't everybody who has a space-warp for a household pet."

"Or Einstein for a hobby."

"Blah, this is strictly Blair. That's why it won't work, and I'd be only sensationally nuts if I ever thought it would. But some men take Scotch for their nerves, and I take Scotch with electronics. More of a jolt that way."

"Yuk, yuk."

That was why it was good to have Carl for a friend. No matter how sorry you got to feeling for yourself, he could usually snap you out of it one way or another. Right now, Doug thought, Carl was diligently at work with that peculiar brand of psychology that all newspapermen strive ceaselessly to acquire that makes people blab when they ought to keep quiet. But why not--Carl wouldn't know what the hell it was all about and he wouldn't care, if he thought it would take some of the pressure off.

"Well, listen then. Ever look through an observatory telescope and have somebody tell you you were focused on some star or other a couple of thousand light years away? Maybe it was in the process of blowing up and becoming a nova or something like that. Anyhow, it would be explained to you that you were seeing that star as it was two thousand years ago. You were seeing, for instance, an explosion that happened twenty centuries in the past. Reason, of course, is that it took the light that long to get from the star to you. More simply, the light that strikes your back porch in the morning left the sun about nine minutes before."

"Very clear. Only how come, if the universe is a closed form of infinity like it says in all the new books, this light never doubles back on itself--gives you two or even a million images of the same star?"

"That's where the tired light comes in. After a certain length of time--unthinkable aeons of it--it, like all other forms of energy, peters out. Runs down. Quits. Kaput. They call it entropy. It constitutes, actually, a gradual running down, growing old of the universe. As far as anyone knows, this happens before it 'doubles back' on itself, as you put it. You can't catch it coming around the second time to see what you looked like umpteenillion ages ago. So, if you want a second look at yourself, you've got to go out and catch the light which you reflected in the past--"

"Oh brother. You mean anybody on a planet, say, forty light years from Earth with a supertelescope looking at us would be watching the battle of Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood! A hundred and eighty light years away he'd see us slugging it out against King George III at Saratoga and Valley Forge!"

"You've got it. In other words, the light reflected from Earth then is somewhere deep in Space now. If you could haul it in on some kind of a receiver, you could see everything all over again--you could watch the land masses of Earth as they shifted to form the continents as we know them today."

"You'd need something faster than light to trap the light itself--and I thought that was against Fitzgerald or somebody."

"If you followed the same space warps the light did, it would be. But if it were possible to operate your receiver through the fabric of space-time, instead of along it--a kind of short-cut--you might turn up with what you're after."

"I am sorry I got into this."

Blair smiled tiredly. "Me too. Hell, I'm fooling around with things I don't pretend to know anything about. Just enough to putter. Just enough to keep my mind off all-day-long. God knows what I'll get when I turn the damn thing on. Probably not even snow so I'm not worried. Turn left at the next stop-light--they've got that new cut-off finished." He started buttoning his coat. Grayson turned left as ordered.

"But suppose it works?"