Джек Макдевитт - A Voice in the Night

“Mark, might it be the edge of the bubble?”

“I think so. It’s at the right spot. Something else, too: The river beyond the drop-off is flowing normally. You aren’t looking at a hard surface.”

“Mark, it doesn’t look as if anybody’s moving on the bridge. There’s even a little boy with a balloon, and the balloon’s not even moving.”

“No.”

“What’s that just above the bridge?”

“I’m not sure. Let’s zoom in on it.”

“It’s a bird.”

“A gull, as a matter of fact. It’s maybe forty feet above the span. Wings spread in full flight.”

“But it’s just hanging there.”

“It doesn’t seem to be suspended from anything.”

“The law of gravity isn’t working on the bridge.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Something they said at the briefing.”

“Paula, the Robert Moses Power Plant on the Niagara has announced that water levels on the river have fallen so far that they’re going to have to reduce power. The Beck plant, on the Canadian side, is expected to follow suit. We all remember that this was where the great blackout of 1965 began. Meantime, the evacuation areas on both sides have been extended because of flooding fears. Professor Abraham Harding is a physicist at the University of Toronto. He joins us this afternoon from the university campus. Professor Harding, can you give us any idea at all what’s happening at Niagara Falls?”

“Yes, Leon. I believe I can. I have to confess that I’ve no idea why it’s happening, or how long it’ll last, but it’s quite obvious what is going on. A bubble has formed, about a mile and a half in diameter. And it looks as if it’s at least three-quarters of a mile high, although I’d suggest that aircraft give it a wider berth. It seems to be centered in southwestern Niagara Falls, and it includes parts of the city, the Falls itself, Goat Island, and a slice of the Canadian side. Inside that bubble, I would say that time has stopped.”

“ Time has stopped? How do you mean? Could you explain that, Professor?”

“I don’t know how else to say it, Leon. If you went inside the bubble, your watch would not work, your neurons would not fire, and you would cease to function.”

“That hardly seems possible, Professor.”

“Yesterday, at this time, I’d have agreed with you. But there’s no other explanation for what we’re seeing.”

“None at all?”

“Well, I suppose it’s possible that time has remained normal inside the bubble and accelerated out here where we are. (Laughs.) But, seriously, yes, that is unquestionably what has happened. It’s a time warp.”

“That sounds like science fiction.”

“It does indeed. I wish it were so.”

“Professor, some of our viewers would argue that time doesn’t really exist, except as something humans invented and measure with clocks. So how can it stop?”

“Oh, time is quite real. Just as space is a great deal more than simply the distance between two objects. This morning, for whatever reason, within that bubble around the Falls, the flow of time shut down.”

“Is the condition likely to spread?”

“I have no way of knowing. We’re in uncharted territory here, Leon.”

“Is there a way to counter this thing?”

“I can’t imagine how you’d go about doing it.”

“I assume there’s no way to know how long it’ll last?”

“I’d like to think there’ll be a tendency to compensate, for conditions inside the bubble to realign themselves with the surrounding continuum. But as I say, at the moment it’s anyone’s guess.”

“Would you be willing to hazard any sort of explanation how it could have happened?”

“I can’t imagine, Leon. If I were a betting man, I’d say that we’ve just discovered that time, like light, like radiation of all kinds, is quantized.”

“Explain, please.”

“People talk a lot about time flowing, being like a river. But it might be that time moves in something like packets. Think of movie film with thousands of tiny images, each slightly different from the next. Then imagine that the projector jams. The movie gets stuck. Something like that seems to have happened here.”

“All right. Let’s try another tack. The police are estimating there are upward of forty thousand people trapped inside the bubble on both the U.S. and Canadian sides. And the Maid of the Mist is stuck out there as well. If time’s not moving, then we can assume everyone’s safe, right?”

“For the moment, they should be in the same condition they were in when the event began. When it ends, if it ends, they should be all right.”

“That’s encouraging news for the families to hear, Professor. Thank you. We’ll ask you to hang on while we take a break. And then we’ll be back with this developing story.”

“Sherry Weinberg is at the FEMA base on Lockport Road. What have you got, Sherry?”

“Paula, this is Anna LeFluer, of Buffalo. She’s a physicist at the Main Cycle Research Lab in Syracuse. And she has an interesting story. Dr. LeFleur?”

“Hello, Paula. We were able to listen while Professor Harding was talking. I just wanted to add that this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. There’s evidence in the geological record of time warps. For example, during the Cretaceous—.”

“Hold on, Doctor. You’re saying this has happened before?”

“The evidence suggests it has. Three times that we can pinpoint. Maybe a fourth during the late Paleozoic.”

“Why haven’t we heard of this before now?”

“It’s not conclusive. And no one believed a time warp was actually possible. Until today. But if that’s what’s actually happening, it explains some puzzling findings.”

“How long will it last? The time warp?”

“We can’t be sure, Sherry. We think the most recent one had a duration somewhere between thirty and seventy thousand years.”

“Thirty thousand years?” (Another long pause.) “Professor Harding, are you still there?”

“I’m here, Anna.”

“You know each other?”

“Slightly. I know what Dr. LaFleur is referring to. It’s not my field but I wouldn’t be surprised if what she’s saying turns out to be accurate.”

“Do you think this could last thirty thousand years?”

“It’s possible. Anna, have you any sense of the geographical size of the earlier events?”

“I’d prefer to look at the research before getting into specifics.”

“There might be a correlation that would help us measure what we’re looking at.”

“Okay. Thank you both.”

“Paula.”

“Yes, Whit.”

“This is Roger Brockner. He’s from the Waycross Research Institute in Rochester.”

“Whit, I’m not saying it’s true, you understand.”

“I understand that, Mr. Brockner.”

“I mean, I’ve never believed it. It’s just that now I’m not so sure.”

“Please just tell the viewers what you told me.”

“Well. Ummm. They’re saying the center of the bubble is about a block north of Niagara Street, just off Whirlpool. That’s where she lives.”

“Where who lives?”

“Maggie Bennett. She’s been trying to build a time machine for as long as I’ve known her.”

“You think she succeeded?”

“Maggie’s a genius. She’s said for years it could be done, there was a way to do it and she was going to make it happen.”