The Very Slow Time Machine by Ian Watson

Author:Ian Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Science fiction, Short Stories
ISBN: 86190-3
Publisher: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Published: 1979-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Rosen stood before the blackboard in the seminar room of the Viral Cancer Research Unit attached to St. David’s Hospital and sketched the shape of catastrophe upon it with a stick of squeaky chalk that reminded him irresistibly of school days and Algebra lessons… The difficulty he’d had at first in comprehending X and A and B! His childish belief that they must equal some real number—as though it was all a secret code, and he the cryptographer! But once presented as geometry, mathematics had become crystal clear. He’d been a visualizer all along…

On the blackboard was the cusp catastrophe of René Thom’s theorem: a cliff edge folding over, then under itself, into an overhang impossible on any world with gravity, before unfolding and flattening out again on a lower level. The shape he’d graphed was stable in two phases: its upper state, and its lower state. But the sinusoidal involution of the cliff would never allow a smooth transition from the upper to the lower state; no smooth gradient of descent, in real terms. So there had to be discontinuity between the top and the bottom lines of the S he’d drawn—an abrupt flip from State A to State B; and that was, mathematically speaking, a “catastrophe.”

(There is no gravity in dreams…)

He waved a cigarette at his colleagues: Mary Strope, looking bewildered but defiant; Oliver Hart wearing a supercilious expression; Senior Consultant Daniel Geraghty looking frankly outraged.

“Taking the problem in its simplest mathematical form, is this a fair representation of the onset of cancer?” Adrian demanded. “This abrupt discontinuity, here? Where we fall off the cliff—”

Rapping the blackboard, he tumbled Gitanes ash and chalk dust down the cliff. The obsession with this particular brand had taken hold of him even before his trip to France, and he’d borrowed so many packs from the smoking room downstairs (where a machine was busily puffing the fumes from a whole range of cigarettes into rats’ lungs) that Dr. Geraghty complained he was sabotaging the tests and Oliver Hart suggested flippantly that Adrian should be sent to France tout de suite, Thibaud-wards, if only to satisfy his new craving…

“I suggest that, instead of a progressive gradient of insult to our metabolism, we abruptly flip from one mode to the other: from normal to malignant. Which is perfectly explicable, and predictable, using catastrophe theory. Now, the immune system shares one major formal similarity with the nervous system. It too observes and memorizes events. So if we view the mind—the superior system—as a mathematical network, could it predict the onset of cancer mathematically, before we reach the stage of an actual cellular event, from this catastrophe curve? I believe so.

He swivelled his fist abruptly so that the stick of chalk touched the blackboard, rather than the cigarette. Yet it still looked like the same white tube. Then he brought the chalk tip screeching from the cliff edge down to the valley floor.

Their eyes saw the soft cigarette make that squeal—a scream of softness. Adrian smiled, as his audience winced in surprise.

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