Read Online If at First by Peter F. Hamilton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Peter F. Hamilton
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him about it he just said one day you’ll see the joke. I’ve got a good memory, Detective, very good. All those little details kept adding up over the years. But it was the iPod that finally clinched it for me. How in God’s name could he know about iPods back in ’71?”
Now I understand, I told him: time machine. Jenson gave me this look, like he was pitying me. “But Marcus was twelve, just like me,” he said. “We’d been at prep school together since we were eight, and he already possessed the kind of suavity men don’t normally get until they’re over thirty, damnit he even unnerved the teachers. So how did an eight-year-old get to go time traveling? That was in 1967, NASA hadn’t even reached the moon then, we’d only just gotten transistors. Nobody in ’67 could build a time machine.”
But that’s the thing with time machines, I told him. They travel back from the future. I knew I’d get stick from Paul and Carmen for that one, but I couldn’t help it. Something about Jenson’s attitude was bothering me, that old policeman’s instinct. He didn’t present himself as delusional. Okay, that’s not a professional shrink’s opinion, but I knew what I was seeing. Jenson was an ordinary nerdish programmer, a self-employed contractor working from home, more recently from his laptop as he chased Orthew ’round the world. Something was powering this obsession, and the more I heard the more I wanted to get to the root of it. “Exactly,” Jenson said. His expression changed to tentative suspicion as he gazed at me. “At first I thought an older Marcus had come back in time and given his young self a 2010 encyclopedia. It’s the classic solution, after all, even though it completely violates causality. But knowledge alone doesn’t explain Marcus’s attitude; something changed an ordinary little boy into a charismatic, confident, wise fifty-year-old trapped in an eight-year-old body.”
And you worked out the answer, I guessed. Jenson produced a secretive smile. “Information,” he said. “That’s how he does it. That’s how he’s always done it. This is how it must have been first time ’round: Marcus grows up naturally and becomes a quantum theorist, a cosmologist, whatever … He’s a genius, we know that. We also know you can’t send mass back through time, wormhole theory disallows it. You can’t open a rift through time big enough to take an atom back a split second, the amount of energy to do that simply doesn’t exist in the universe. So Marcus must have worked out how to send raw information instead, something that has zero mass. Do you see? He sent his own mind back to the 1960s. All his memories, all his knowledge packaged up and delivered to his earlier self; no wonder his confidence was off the scale.”
I had to send Paul out then. He couldn’t stop laughing, which drew a hurt pout from Jenson. Carmen stayed, though she was grinning broadly; Jenson beat any of the current sitcoms on TV for chuckles. All right then, I said, so Orthew sent his grown-up memory back to his kid self, and you’re trying to find the machine that does it. Why is that, Toby?
“Are you kidding?” he grunted. “I want to go back myself.”
Seems reasonable, I admitted. Is that why you broke into the Richmond lab?
“Richmond was one of two possibles,” he said. “I’ve been monitoring the kind of equipment he’s been buying for the last few years. After all, he’s approaching fifty.”
“What’s the relevance of that?” Carmen interjected.
“He’s a bloke,” Jenson said. “You must have read the gossip about him and girls. There have been hundreds: models, actresses, society types.”
“That always happens with rich men,” she told him, “you can’t base an allegation on that, especially not the one you’re making.”
“Yes but that first time ’round he was just a physicist,” Jenson said. “There’s no glamour or money in that. Now, though, he knows how to build
Now I understand, I told him: time machine. Jenson gave me this look, like he was pitying me. “But Marcus was twelve, just like me,” he said. “We’d been at prep school together since we were eight, and he already possessed the kind of suavity men don’t normally get until they’re over thirty, damnit he even unnerved the teachers. So how did an eight-year-old get to go time traveling? That was in 1967, NASA hadn’t even reached the moon then, we’d only just gotten transistors. Nobody in ’67 could build a time machine.”
But that’s the thing with time machines, I told him. They travel back from the future. I knew I’d get stick from Paul and Carmen for that one, but I couldn’t help it. Something about Jenson’s attitude was bothering me, that old policeman’s instinct. He didn’t present himself as delusional. Okay, that’s not a professional shrink’s opinion, but I knew what I was seeing. Jenson was an ordinary nerdish programmer, a self-employed contractor working from home, more recently from his laptop as he chased Orthew ’round the world. Something was powering this obsession, and the more I heard the more I wanted to get to the root of it. “Exactly,” Jenson said. His expression changed to tentative suspicion as he gazed at me. “At first I thought an older Marcus had come back in time and given his young self a 2010 encyclopedia. It’s the classic solution, after all, even though it completely violates causality. But knowledge alone doesn’t explain Marcus’s attitude; something changed an ordinary little boy into a charismatic, confident, wise fifty-year-old trapped in an eight-year-old body.”
And you worked out the answer, I guessed. Jenson produced a secretive smile. “Information,” he said. “That’s how he does it. That’s how he’s always done it. This is how it must have been first time ’round: Marcus grows up naturally and becomes a quantum theorist, a cosmologist, whatever … He’s a genius, we know that. We also know you can’t send mass back through time, wormhole theory disallows it. You can’t open a rift through time big enough to take an atom back a split second, the amount of energy to do that simply doesn’t exist in the universe. So Marcus must have worked out how to send raw information instead, something that has zero mass. Do you see? He sent his own mind back to the 1960s. All his memories, all his knowledge packaged up and delivered to his earlier self; no wonder his confidence was off the scale.”
I had to send Paul out then. He couldn’t stop laughing, which drew a hurt pout from Jenson. Carmen stayed, though she was grinning broadly; Jenson beat any of the current sitcoms on TV for chuckles. All right then, I said, so Orthew sent his grown-up memory back to his kid self, and you’re trying to find the machine that does it. Why is that, Toby?
“Are you kidding?” he grunted. “I want to go back myself.”
Seems reasonable, I admitted. Is that why you broke into the Richmond lab?
“Richmond was one of two possibles,” he said. “I’ve been monitoring the kind of equipment he’s been buying for the last few years. After all, he’s approaching fifty.”
“What’s the relevance of that?” Carmen interjected.
“He’s a bloke,” Jenson said. “You must have read the gossip about him and girls. There have been hundreds: models, actresses, society types.”
“That always happens with rich men,” she told him, “you can’t base an allegation on that, especially not the one you’re making.”
“Yes but that first time ’round he was just a physicist,” Jenson said. “There’s no glamour or money in that. Now, though, he knows how to build
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