Eric Flint - Time spike

Very dangerous years. But, maybe, their children and their children and their children would have forever. If they started the right way.

"Yes, I think you're right." That evening, before the soldiers started their usual separate campfire, Watkins went over to Sergeant Kershner. "Why don't you and your men start eating with us from now on?" he suggested. "We cook better than you do, anyway." He gave their tents a glance. "And starting tomorrow, we should build you a real cabin. Who knows? Winter might be coming." Kershner's smile was a lot more serene than you'd expect from such a young man. "Good idea. I was just thinking the same thing myself."

Chapter 23 After they were ushered into the room-chamber, it might be better to say-that served The Project as its operations center, Nick Brisebois and Timothy Harshbarger spent a minute or so looking around with interest. Their companion, Harshbarger's police partner Bruce Boyle, even lost the apprehensive expression that had been on his face since he arrived at the site in northern Minnesota.

Eventually, Boyle whistled softly. "This looks like something right out of a sci-fi movie." He gave the big table at the center of the chamber that the scientists used as a conference table a somewhat reproachful look. "Except you oughta have a captain's chair and a pilot's chair." Richard Morgan-Ash chuckled. "And how, exactly, would you fly an iron mine?" Boyle shrugged. "Don't ask me. But it wouldn't seem any stranger to me than the rest of this does." "Why'd you put it down here in the first place?" asked Harshbarger. "We didn't, actually. This facility was originally built back in the 1980s to study proton decay. That phenomenon was assumed to be so infrequent that they could only detect it if they could filter out the cosmic rays that would otherwise flood all the observations. Cosmic rays are so penetrative that you need an incredible amount of shielding to filter out their effects. Enough water would do the trick nicely, but it was more practical to use half a mile of earth." "Yeah, I can see that. Especially when the half mile is iron." "There's not much iron ore left, actually. Most of the rock above us is Ely greenstone.

That's ancient rock, dating back almost three billion years. But it doesn't really matter what the exact substance is, as long as there's enough of it. Water would have done just fine, except that building a laboratory at the bottom of Lake Superior or somewhere in the ocean would have cost a fortune. This was expensive enough, even as it was."

"So how many decaying protons did they find?" Brisebois asked. Richard smiled. "Not one, as it happens. Eventually they decided there was something wrong with the theory that predicted them. The whole thing would have been a bit of a boondoggle except the facility could be modified to study neutrinos and look for the postulated dark matter of most current cosmological theories." He nodded toward his colleagues.

"That's what they were doing here when the Grantville Disaster happened, and their equipment picked up traces of it." "Traces of what?" Leo Dingley snorted. "Good question. We're still trying to figure that out. Me, I'm partial to a WIMP side effect of some kind.

That's capital W-I-M-P, not slang. It stands for 'weakly interacting massive particles.' They're one of the proposed solutions for the dark matter problem." He gave his own nod toward his colleagues in the chamber. "Most of them, however, think that what we're observing will eventually be explained by some variant of string theory." Nick held up his hands. "Folks, I'm a trash-hauler and Tim and Bruce are cops.

Can you put this in layman's terms?" Most of the scientists looked very dubious at that proposition. Morgan-Ash smiled. "You have to make allowances. They've lived their whole lives in academia. I, on the other hand, once had to be able to explain things to paratroopers.

Even more valiantly"-here he puffed out his chest-"I have to explain things to a teenage daughter." Nick grinned. "Tough, isn't it? I had two of them. Thankfully, they're now both off to college." "So I'll do my best. You can think of what's happening this way. Our planet regularly gets hits by objects from space. Many of them are simply isolated occurrences, but many others are part of more concentrated impacts." "Like meteor showers," said Boyle. "That's one good example, yes. Most of these bombardments are barely noticed, beyond a show in the sky, because the objects are too small to have much effect when they hit the Earth. If they hit it at all, which most of them don't because they burn up in the atmosphere. You're with me so far?" The three visitors to the lab all nodded. "Well, we're looking at much the same thing. Exceptthese objects seem to be oriented along a different dimensional axis. If you think of time as a fourth dimension, perhaps that one. If you believe, as most of us do, that string theory is onto something, then we could be looking at as many as eleven dimensions."

Dingley jeered. "All of which except the first four-even you admit this much-don't get beyond the string itself. Or exist in some hypothetical multiverse that we're just a tiny four-dimensional part of." Morgan-Ash looked patiently long-suffering. "Leo, can we hold off on the debate for a moment? I'm simply trying to explain to our guestswhat we think is happening. Nothow it's happening. The point is, gentlemen-regardless of what's causing it-the way these objects strike the Earth has most of its effects along a time axis instead of a spacial axis. Where a normal bolide from space that strikes the Earth-a meteorite or an asteroid or a comet-would expend its energy moving mass through space, these objects move it through time. They don't leave three-dimensional craters, they leave time craters."

Brisebois scratched his chin. "In other words, you think Grantville was destroyed by what amounts to a time comet." Richard shrugged. "If it was destroyed at all. It's far more likely that it was simply carried back in time and left somewhere in our past." "But-" Margo interjected. "Somewhere ina past, he should have said. That much we're certain of. No matter which way you calculate the problem, there's no way to account for what happens without assuming that a separate universe is created by the impacts. Or separate timelines, if you prefer. Anything else produces insoluble paradoxes." Nick shook his head. "That's not what I was getting at. I know the old saw about time travel being impossible because you might kill your own grandfather or just do something by accident that has the same effect. What I meant was-" But he got no further, because Harshbarger exploded. "Wait a fucking minute! Are you telling me that Joe Schuler is stillalive?"

"Yeah," said Nick. "That'swhat I was trying to get at." The scientists in the room looked at each, even more dubiously than they had before.

So did Morgan-Ash, this time. "Well…" he said. Margo stood up. "I think we need to quit beating around the bush. It's not as if we haven't all been kept up nights wondering the same thing." She turned to face Harshbarger. "Tim, we can't tell you whether or not your friend is still alive. The truth is, he might very well be dead. What we can tell you-and we're pretty sure of this, now-is that the time impact wouldn't have killed him." Harshbarger's face, flushed red a few seconds earlier, was now rather pale. "How sure are you about that?" Margo hesitated, but O'Connell now spoke up. "As sure as we can be short of meeting the transposed people and talking to them."

Harshbarger stared at him. "Why?" asked Nick. "Two reasons. First of all, there's no mathematical reason they should have been destroyed.

As cold-blooded as it sounds, I can give you an exact mathematical explanation of why someone gets killed when he gets hit by a bullet in the right place or has a big rock dropped on him. It's just a matter of mass and energy, really." He turned and pointed to the diagrams that were displayed on a big board toward the far end of the huge chamber. "The same is true here-and it doesn't matter which way you calculate it. The point is, whatever these bolides are, almost their entire impact is along a time axis. They're no more capable of shredding three-dimensional objects like a human body than a bullet from a gun or a falling rock is able to send someone back in time."