Time Was by Ian McDonald

Author:Ian McDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

The train came out of the tunnel into a different darkness. Our faces were reflected in the night-mirrored window. The passenger opposite us had fallen into a doze.

“Not immortals,” Thorn said.

“No,” I said. “Time travelers.”

Shingle Street

A moment of beauty, now we are back in our separate worlds, separate corners of the pub. Ben and his Uncertainty Squad in Boffins Corner, me out on my window bench, writing, watching another autumn arrive hot and high. Thinking about him.

The bombers have shifted, the radar girls tell me; to night raids and the great cities of the North. Manchester has been badly blitzed. Ben is the scientist in a line of haberdashers and textile wholesalers: Seligman’s warehouse in Salford was reduced to ashes. His family is unharmed. This in a few clipped exchanges at the bar as we buy fresh pints.

And Lizzie raises her eyebrows and swivels her eyes towards Boffins Corner when she comes out of the snug to order a new tray or drinks, and I smile, and dip my head, and she beams.

The Bawdsey Players are casting for a Murder Mystery. I’ve gone for a role, but if one is offered I shall decline. Ben Seligman will not be running the lights. The Uncertainty Squad works every hour on their experiment. There’s to be a demonstration, on a grain of salt. Men are up from London, men from the Ministry. If it goes well they’ll move to a full field test.

“Explain it to me again.”

We dawdle back to Bawdsey, a straggle of beery souls strung out along for half a mile along the street. We share cigarettes. This was the celebratory pint: tomorrow the Ministry men come to watch a grain of salt vanish.

“We place an object in a state of quantum superposition,” Ben says. “The Heisenberg uncertainty principle sets a fundamental limit on what we may observe about physical systems. The more precisely an object’s momentum is known, the less accurately we can measure its position. Its location becomes statistically uncertain—to all intents and purposes unobservable.”

Ben has explained to me many times the principles of his work. His life is dedicated to the infinitesimal, the fragments of time, distance, matter. At the smallest levels, the universe operates according to very different rules from those of the sensual world. There are contradictions and impossibilities, paradoxes and strangenesses, a Lewis Carroll logic; yet this is the most accurate description of how reality works. There is nothing for me to hold to—no concrete truths, no sensory evidence, no inner visualization by which I might construct a meaning—but he appreciates my intrigue. I shared my world; he shares his. What I understand is that he sees a beauty—a sublime, something awesome and terrifying—that I do not.

I don’t have the soul of a scientist. But I feel his excitement, his anxiety, his pride, his love.

The Uncertainty Squad waits by the guard hut; I go a different way from here.

* * *

He comes bounding into the dispatch room, white coat flapping. His glee is evident as he casts around through the fug of cigarette smoke.

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