Paul Levinson: The Chronology Protection Case

“I know about Hawking in general,” I said. “I’m not that much of an amateur. But not about his work in time travel.”

“You’re very unusual for a forensic scientist,” she said, with an admiring edge I very much liked. “Anyway, Hawking thinks that whatever quantum mechanics may permit, the Universe just won’t allow time travel —because the level of paradox time travel would create would just unravel the whole Universe.”

“You mean like if I could get a message back to JFK that he would be killed, and he believed me and acted upon that information and didn’t go to Dallas and wasn’t killed, this would create a world in which I would grow up with no knowledge that JFK had ever been killed, which would mean I would have no motive to send the message that saved JFK, but if I didn’t send that message then JFK would be killed—”

“That’s it,” Lauren said. “Except on the quantum level you might achieve that paradox by sending back information just a few seconds in time—say, in the form of a command that would shut down the generating circuit and prevent the information from being sent in the first place—”

“I see,” I said.

“And, well, because things like that, if they could happen, if they happened all the time, would lead to a constantly remade, inside-out, self-effacing universe. Hawking promulgated his Chronology Protection Conjecture’ —the Universe protects the existing time line, whatever the theoretical possibilities of time travel.”

“How does your husband fit into this?” I asked.

“He was working on a device, an experiment, to disprove Hawking’s conjecture,” she said. “He was trying to create a local wormhole with temporal effects.”

“And you think he somehow disappeared into this?” Jeez, this was beginning to sound like a bad episode of “Star Trek.” But she seemed rational, everything she’d outlined made sense, and something in her manner continued to compel my attention.

“I don’t know,” she looked like she was close to tears again.

“All right,” I said. “Here’s what I think we should do. I’m going to call in Ian’s disappearance to a friend in the department. He’s a precinct captain, and he’ll take this seriously. He’ll contact all the airports, get Ian’s picture out to cops on the beat—”

“But I don’t think—”

“I know,” I said. “You’ve got a gut feeling that something more profound is going on. And maybe you’re right. But we’ve got to cover all the bases.”

“OK,” she said quietly, and I noticed that her lips were quivering again.

“Will you be all right tonight? I’ll be back to you tomorrow morning.” I took her hand.

“I guess so,” she said huskily, and squeezed my hand.

I didn’t feel like letting go, but I did.

The news the next morning was terrible. I don’t care what the shrinks say: flat-out confirmed death is always worse than ambiguous unresolved disappearance.

I couldn’t bring myself to just call her on the phone. I drove to her home, hoping she was in.

She opened the door. I tried to keep a calm face, but I’m not that good an actor.

She understood immediately. “Oh no!” she cried out. She staggered and collapsed in my arms. “Please no.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and touched her hair. I felt like kissing her forehead, but didn’t. I hardly knew her, yet I felt very close to her, a part of her world. “They found him a few hours ago near Columbia University. Looks like another stupid, senseless, goddamned random drive-by shooting. That’s the kind of world we live in.” I didn’t know whether this would in any way lessen her pain. At least his death had nothing to do with his work.

“No, not random,” she said, sobbing. “Not random.”

“OK,” I said, “you need to rest, I’m going to call someone over here to give you a sedative. I’ll stay with you till then.”

The medic was over in fifteen minutes. He gave her a shot, and she was asleep a few minutes later. “Not random. Not random,” she mumbled.

I called the Captain, and asked if he could send a uniform over to stay with Lauren for the afternoon. He wasn’t happy—his people were overworked, like everyone—but he owed me. Many’s the time I’d saved his butt with some piece of evidence I’d uncovered in the back of an orifice.

I dropped by the autopsy. Nothing unusual there. Three bullets from a cheap punk’s gun, one shattered the heart, did all the damage, Ian Goldring’s dead. No sign of radiation damage, no strange chemistry in the body. No possible connection that I could see to anything Lauren had told me. Still, the coroner was a friend, I explained to him that the victim was the husband of a friend, and asked if he could run any and every conceivable test at his disposal to determine if there was anything different about this corpse. He said sure. I knew he wouldn’t find anything, though.

I went back to my office. I thought of calling Lauren and telling her about the autopsy, but she’d be better off if I let her rest. I was tired of looking at dead bodies. I turned on my computer and looked at its screen instead. I was on a few physics lists on the Internet. I logged on and did some reading about Hawking and his chronology protection conjecture.

“Lady physicist on the phone for you again,” Carl called out. It was late afternoon already. I logged off and rubbed my eyes.

“Hi,” Lauren said.

“You OK?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I just got off the phone with one of the other researchers in Ian’s group, and I think I’ve got part of this figured out.” She sounded less tentative than yesterday—like she was indeed more on top of what was actually going on, or thought she was—but more worried.

I started to tell her, as gently as I could, about the autopsy.

“Doesn’t matter,” she interrupted me. “I mean, I don’t think the way that Ian was killed has any relevance to this. It’s the fact that he was killed that counts—the reason he was killed.”

The reason—everyone wants reasons in this irrational society. Science in the laboratory deals with reason. In the outside world, you’re lucky if you can find a reason. “I know it’s painful,” I said. “But Ian’s death had no reason—his killer was likely just a high-flying kid with a gun. Happens all the time. Ian was just in the wrong place. A random victim in the murder lottery.”

“No, not random,” Lauren said.

She’d said the same thing this morning. I could hear her starting to sob again.

“Look, Phil,” she continued. “I really think I’m close to understanding this. I’m going to make a few more calls. I, uh, we hardly know each other, but I feel good talking this out with you. Our conversation last night helped me a lot. Can I call you back in an hour? Or maybe—I don’t know, if you’re not busy tonight—could you come over again?”

She didn’t have to ask twice. “I’ll see you at seven. I’ll also bring some food in case you’re hungry—you have to eat.”

I knew even before I drove up that something was wrong. I guess my eyes, after all these years of looking around crime scenes, are especially sensitive to the weak flicker of police lights on the evening sky at a distance. The flicker still turns my stomach.

“What’s going on here?” I got out of my car, Chinese food in hand, and asked the uniform.

“Who the hell are you?” he replied.

I fumbled for my ID.

“He’s OK,” Janny Murphy, the uniform who’d come to stay with Lauren in the afternoon, walked over. “He’s forensics.”

The food dropped from my hand when I saw the expression on her face. Brown moo-shoo pork juice dribbled down the driveway.