David Epperson - The Third Day

The mention of Everest was not altogether reassuring. Back in my Army days, I had trained with a New Zealander whose brother had spent years as a Himalayan guide.

The bars of Kathmandu resounded with complaints about would-be adventurers who believed that payment of their $60,000 fee entitled them to an ironclad guarantee that they would reach the summit, regardless of poor weather or their own limited mountaineering abilities.

“I mean it, Ray. This isn’t a joke.”

“Bill, on Everest, when the guides talked, I listened. It was the same when I learned to fly helicopters, and I’ll do the same here. Trust me.”

As Markowitz stepped away, I glanced over to see Lavon slide next to Sharon.

“I hate to ask this, but it could be important,” he said. “Are you close to, um, your time of the month?”

She smiled, though more at his hesitation than from the nature of the question.

“Happened last week,” she said.

I just sat there and shook my head. A woman’s monthly cycle; such a simple thing, yet I had not thought of that.

We didn’t have any more time to reflect, though. Bryson knocked on the back door of the chamber. A few seconds later, a geeky kid in coke-bottle glasses opened it from the other side.

“Allow me to introduce my assistant,” she said. “This is Scott Ellison. He’s one semester away from completing his Ph.D. I’m serving as his informal dissertation advisor.”

“What is your specialty?” asked Markowitz.

The young man’s eyes lit up. “I’m writing about Non-Abelian Anyons and Topological Quantum Computation.”

He waved his hands excitedly as he launched into a description of his work. “It is inevitable that the next generation of quantum devices will depend on the existence of topological states of matter whose quasiparticle excitations are — believe it or not — neither bosons nor fermions , but instead are particles known as non-Abelian anyons, meaning that they obey non-Abelian braiding statistics.”

I nodded as though I understood more than a single word he had just spoken.

“I’d expect that to be obvious,” I chuckled.

“You lost me at ‘is’,” said Lavon.

The young man laughed, though a bit uneasily, since he seemed unsure what the rest of us found so humorous.

“How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?” I said.

“I turn 23 next week.”

“I brought Scott here to explain some of the transit procedures,” Juliet said; “to give you an idea what to expect.”

“I hoped you knew that,” said Lavon.

“Yes, I do,” she said, “but much of Scott’s work is out of the mainstream. To progress in this field, he will need to become more comfortable making presentations to skeptical audiences, so this seemed like a good opportunity for him to get some practice speaking to total strangers in at least a partially scientific context.”

Ellison coughed and led us over to another thick plexiglass window. Looking through it, we saw an adjoining room about the size of an average bedroom, though the walls had been polished perfectly smooth and the corners were rounded. At the center, we could see a cube delineated by what appeared to be thin yellow twine.

“The walls are coated with a specialized ceramic,” said Ellison. “They are essentially frictionless, for reasons it would take me hours to elaborate.”

“We don’t have hours,” I said, hoping to avoid a long, incomprehensible lecture. “What’s all that string at the center?”

“I believe that Dr. Bryson has already described to you the limits of the transport apparatus. That marks the departure point.”

I considered this for a moment. “So we have to go back one at a time?”

“That’s correct. You sit on the floor within those string markers.”

Lavon turned to face Bryson. “You told us the return key would bring back all mammalian life forms within a two meter radius.”

“Our calculations point to that conclusion. That’s why the transit room itself is larger.”

“But you’ve never really tested it?”

“Only Henry went back. How else would we have had the opportunity to do so with more than one person?”

I glanced at the kid. He seemed competent enough; but I had enough experience with human nature to realize that under the right circumstances, this young man would be perfectly capable of stranding his benefactors in the past and seizing their invention as his own. Bryson’s real reason for sending only one person back wasn’t hard to figure out.

“So we’re the guinea pigs,” Markowitz said to Bryson.

“We believe our device is completely safe. You can always elect not to go,” she said.

Markowitz shook his head and chose not to argue.

“How do we know exactly where we’ll end up,” asked Lavon.

She and Ellison walked to the other side of the room, where the Brysons had hung a topographical relief map of ancient Jerusalem and the surrounding area.

The kid pointed to a hilly spot about ten miles west of the city walls.

“Dr. Bryson selected this location because he thought the hills meant that fewer people would be likely to spot him when he first entered the world.”

I studied it carefully. It was not far from where Lavon and his crew had discovered the skeleton.

“I would have started out ten miles east of the city,” I said, “in the desert where the likelihood of someone spotting me would be next to zero — and where any strange sights could be attributed to a mirage.”

“He considered that, but he worried about the flux variation,” Ellison replied. “He didn’t want to be stranded in such a desolate area without water.”

No one spoke for a brief time. Finally, Markowitz voiced our thoughts: “are you saying error bands on this thing are that wide?”

“It is a precisely tuned scientific instrument,” said the young man.

Bryson raised her hand. “What Scott is trying to point out is that probability functions are a foundation of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg demonstrated this nearly a century ago, when he concluded that an observer could not simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of an electron.”

“I can’t speak for the others,” said Lavon, “but I’d like the probability of arriving in one piece to be one hundred percent.”

“Your anatomical structure will not change,” said Bryson. “I can assure you of that. What we are referring to as probabilities only apply to the temporal and spatial dimensions of your arrival in the past world.”

Lavon stared into her eyes, trying to determine if she was telling the full truth.

Juliet continued, “Given the time to be crossed and the distance to be traveled, our calculations based on our latest modifications of the device indicate that the spatial standard deviation will be 12.3 meters. This means that you have a 95 % chance of ending up within a 25 meter radius of our target, which is just outside the entrance to that cave.”

Lavon thought of the buried skeleton. “What if it puts us inside the cave, say wedged between a couple of rocks or something?”

“The transit system is designed to require at least a two meters of clear space in all directions,” said Ellison. “If you don’t have it, you’ll automatically return here, to the present. Don’t worry; we won’t bury you in a ditch or anything like that.”

“And the time parameter?” asked Markowitz. “How accurate is that?”

“Henry set the coordinates to arrive mid-morning of the Tuesday before Passover. He chose this point because it would give him most of the day to get oriented, with a lesser possibility of surprising anyone in the darker early morning hours.”