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Each observer has his own set of “nows,” and none of these various systems of layers can claim the prerogative of representing the objective lapse of time.
—Kurt Gödel
“Where’s Kitty?” asked Gödel.
“In the greenhouse,” replied Oppie. “Why?”
Feynman smiled. “Kitty is our group leader at Compact Cement, you know. She should hear this first—or, at least, at the same time you do.”
Oppie nodded and started shuffling toward the back of Olden Manor. But apparently his slow pace, the best he could manage these days, was not sprightly enough for his impatient visitors, who clearly didn’t want to wait for him to get Kitty and return; they fell in behind him, Feynman giving a lupine “Hey, there!” as they passed the Oppenheimers’ pretty maid.
There was a door going from near the kitchen into the greenhouse. Oppie led the way in, the warm, muggy air a sweltering contrast to the dry coolness of the mansion proper. Kitty was there, clad in blue trousers and a loose-fitting white blouse with the sleeves rolled up. She was using a hose to water beds of plants.
Neither Gödel nor Feynman had been in the greenhouse before, and Dick immediately went over to look at a long metal box filled with plants sprouting around a packing mixture of pearlescent beads. “What’s this?”
“Hydroponics,” replied Kitty, shutting off her hose. “That’s what I’ve been working on in my spare time: plants that we could grow on Mars or aboard a space habitat without soil. The ones I keep out here need a lot of sunlight, but I’ve got more in the basement that are getting by with just dim bulbs.” She smiled. “And speaking of dim bulbs, what brings you two here?”
Gödel merely blinked behind his thick glasses, but Dick laughed. “Well, you know what Kurt and I have been fiddling around with,” he said.
“Yes, of course,” replied Kitty. “Don’t tell me something’s actually come of it!”
“Yes,” said Dick. “I didn’t believe the numbers being spit out by Johnny von Neumann’s computer at first, but I had two of our younger members—that bright boy and girl you brought in from Stanford last month, Oppie—double and triple check everything, and it’s solid.”
“That’s amazing,” said Kitty.
“Wait a minute,” said Robert. “Guys, she may know what you’ve been working on, but I don’t.”
“True!” said Dick. “You will, but not yet—that damned linearity of time, eh, Kurt?” He nudged the shorter man.
“Except it’s not linear,” Gödel said. “It forms hoops—closed time-like curves.”
“That’s what he calls them,” said Dick. “But, as far as quantum electrodynamics is concerned, there’s no ‘like’ about it: they are loops in time—and we can, at least in theory, move material objects along a single loop, or through an interconnected series of them, to any point in the past.”
“So?” said Oppie. “I’ve read all of Kurt’s papers. He’s been saying that for eighteen years now.”
Kurt nodded. “It was my present to Einstein for his seventieth birthday: a novel solution to the field equations of general relativity.”
“Which,” Feynman said, a twinkle in his eye, “made Einstein doubt general relativity—his own creation!”
“Yes,” said Gödel. “But he would not doubt it now. Feynman and I have cobbled together a machine that will actually displace objects to any point along a closed time-like curve.”
“Seriously?” asked Kitty.
“Seriously,” said Feynman. His flippant voice wasn’t really up to giving credence to that word, but Oppie decided to take it at face value.
“You mean you can dial up, say, October fourth, 1957, and go there?” asked Robert, pulling the date the Space Age had begun out of the air. He sat down on the edge of a large planter, his mind racing even as his cancer-ridden body continued to fail him.
“The device works with relative rather than absolute dates,” said Gödel, “so that would be coded as negative nine years five months, but yes: you could go there.”
“Have you—my God, have you tested it?” asked Robert, and “Jesus, does it work?” Kitty asked at the same time.
“It seems to work,” said Gödel. “We tried putting some innocuous things into it—stones from deep in the Institute woods, and so on—and they did indeed disappear, but that doesn’t prove they actually traveled in time.”
“Did you send them forward or backward?”
“Backward,” said Feynman. “We haven’t figured out how to send anything forward. Of course, if time is circular, you should be able to send things back so far that they wrap around to the future, but we’ve got nowhere near the energy required for that.”
“That’s incredible,” said Kitty. “I’m—wow, I’m just flummoxed. But that’s amazing. Good work, boys!”
“It is amazing,” allowed Oppie, “but I don’t see how it’s applicable to the solar-purge problem.”
Feynman laughed. “Spoken like a true administrator. ‘Dammit, Smathers, I sent you to Ford’s Theatre to review a play—what’s all this crap about the president being assassinated?’”
“It’s the answer to everything,” said Gödel. “But, come, can we get out of all this humidity? We’re going to catch something, I’m sure.”
Feynman moved toward the door that led back into the house. “We’ll be happy to explain,” he said, stepping inside. “And maybe you can get that cute maid of yours to bring us that champagne?”