Alice Again
AT THE party on the night of the Florida Primary, the Clinton Campaign Headquarters in Tallahassee was filled with celebrants. Across the room George recognized a familiar face. He felt a rush of anticipation. He had been thinking about this moment for six years. Now he was terrified of bungling it.. He walked slowly over, drink in hand. “You’re Alice Lang, I believe,” he said, looking directly into her eyes.
The young woman smiled, then looked down, examining his adhesive name tag, “George Preston,” she read aloud. “Oh, yes, I recognize your name from our contributors list. I’m very pleased to meet you, George. You’re a valued Clinton supporter. Please call me Alice.”
“I must admit to you, Alice, that I’m not so much a Clinton supporter as a Bush anti-supporter,” he said. “I think it’s time for a change. I’ve also given a lot of financial encouragement to Ross Perot recently.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Perot? A friend of mine joined his local organization recently, but that little man scares me. Can you honestly say that you’d like to have Ross Perot as President of the United States?”
“No,” said George. “Of course not. I plan for him to divert votes away from the Bush/Quayle ticket so that Bill can get elected. You’ve studied political science, Alice. You must know that third party candidates always get other people elected, not themselves. Teddy Roosevelt and George Wallace are good examples of the phenomenon.”
Alice frowned. “I did take a class in political science this year, but how did you know that? We’ve never met, have we?”
“Let’s say, I knew you in another life,” said George. He didn’t smile.
Alice laughed, then looked at him carefully. “You’re not a friend of Shirley Maclain’s, are you?” She wrinkled her nose.
“No reincarnations,” said George. “This was real. I met you in Waxahachie, Texas in the year 2004, while you were there working on a story for Search magazine. You told me that you were born in Columbus, Ohio. You father was a lawyer, and you have two older brothers. You went to school in Columbus and always made good grades, whether you worked hard or not. In your senior year, you were the editor of your high school newspaper. You liked that and decided to major in journalism in college. You came here to attend FSU because they have a good journalism school, you wanted to get some distance from relatives you didn’t particularly like, and you wanted to escape the Ohio winters. You’re presently seeing a law student named Steve Brown, the Perot supporter you mentioned, but you haven’t decided yet whether it’s serious or not.”
Alice’s face turned a deep red. “I feel violated, Mr. Preston,” she said angrily. “You must have hired detectives to spy on me. That’s despicable.”
“Wait,” said George, holding up his hand. “Let me continue. Your best friend in elementary school was Jane Conway, but her family moved to New York, and you missed her very much for a while. You cut your hand badly on a broken bottle when you were 9 years old, but there’s only a tiny scar now. You had a problem with an ingrown toenail when you were 12, but it went away when you stopped wearing tight shoes. Your mother died of breast cancer while you were starting high school, and you’ve never quite gotten over that. Your cat, Boots, died the same year, and you’ve never had another cat.”
Alice slapped him with a resounding “whack” sound, then stepped back and put her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. Several heads turned in their direction.
George rubbed his face, winced, then smiled. “I suppose I deserved that,” he said. “I understand how you must feel, Alice ... what you must think. But you’re wrong. There are no detectives, no investigations. Everything I know about you, you told me yourself. We were lovers, and we told each other everything. How could an investigator possibly find out about your friend Jane, or the toenail, or Boots, or that you wanted distance from relatives?”
“Lovers!” said Alice. “That’s a filthy lie! How could you ...? How could we ...?”
“I’m a time traveler,” said George. “I came from the future, or perhaps I should say one possible future. We met and fell in love in the year 2004.” He handed her his Washington State drivers license and pointed to its issue date. The date of issue, sealed in plastic and protected by a hologram, was July 25, 2003.
She looked suspiciously at the picture on the license, then at him. “This could be faked,” she said. “It doesn’t prove anything. I admit that this man certainly looks like you, but he’s older, with a graying beard and lines in his face that you don’t have,” she said indicating the picture. “He looks like your older brother, and it says here that his name is ‘Griffin’, not ‘Preston’.”
He nodded. “You must agree that if I was simply going to produce a fake driver’s license, I would have used my present name and a better picture. I changed my name because I had to establish a new identity when I arrived here in the past,” he said. “You see, there’s already a previous copy of me here, and he’s using my old name. Dr. George Griffin is presently living in France and doing physics at the CERN laboratory in Geneva. I’m actually six years older, not younger, than the person in the picture, but I’ve had the advantage of some very good biotech repair work.”
Alice’s eyes narrowed, and then she grinned. “A face lift? Liposuction?” she asked with a conspiratorial whisper.
“Actually, something quite a bit more basic.” He laughed, then looked at the celebrating people nearby. Some of them were still watching him suspiciously in the aftermath of the slap. “Could we, um, go some place else to talk, Alice? This is a bit public for my taste and for what I have to say. Perhaps I could buy you a late dinner, if you know a nice restaurant that’s still open.”
Alice studied him for a time, tapping her foot as she considered the problem he presented. “Your story is the most amazing line of bull I’ve ever heard, Mr. Preston. It has to be an outrageous lie. But I have good instincts about people, and somehow I trust you, up to a point. If you were a Ted Bundy clone, your line would have been a lot more believable. And I must admit that you’ve elevated my curiosity to the highest level it’s been in a long time. Sure, I know a place that’s open all night. It’s shockingly expensive, too, and I mean to eat well.” She gestured for him to lead the way.
They had been gone for half an hour when a athletic dark-haired young man arrived, a notebook and pair of law books held loosely in his arm. He scanned the room, then approached a tall girl dispensing punch. “Jane, have you seen Alice?” he asked. “The library just closed, and I thought I’d come over and help you people celebrate.”
Jane smiled. “Sorry, Steve. I’m afraid you’re a bit too late,” she said. “Alice left some time ago with a rich Texas oil man. He’s one of our big contributors.”
“Oil man?” Steve said. “Who is he?”
“I believe,” said Jane, “that his name is George Preston. You may have read about him in Business Week. He’s the founder and president of PetroGen. He’s supposed to be almost as rich as Bill Gates. Alice has already slapped him once this evening, but they seemed to be getting along fine when they left together.” She smiled after Steve as he stalked out of the room.
“I’m still not sure I understand,” Alice said as the tuxedo-clad waiter was removing the gold-rimmed plates. “The universe, this future you came from was deliberately destroyed, you said. Then how can you be here? Shouldn’t you have been destroyed along with it?”
“My friend Roger and I went through a wormhole as the future was being erased,” he said. “In a sense we’re an extension of the erasing process.”
“But how ... ?”
“The world has been given a second chance,” said George. “Have you ever played a computer game where you can save the game status and read it back in if you don’t like what happens afterwards? It’s rather like that, except with the real universe.” He paused, watching her reaction.
Alice was frowning with concentration. “But how can there be two copies of you here?”
“Because my friend and I came through the wormhole that destroyed the future universe, and when we arrived, an earlier version of each of us was already here. It’s really not much different from having an identical twin. Roger says that in order to conserve mass and energy, as we arrived the wormhole mouth lost an equal mass, allowing us to exist and the masses to balance. He’s derived some equations that explain the phenomenon, but I don’t understand them. Something about back reaction and annihilation of dark matter.”
Alice shook her head as if to clear her vision. “Why are you telling this to me, George?”
George looked deeply into her eyes again. “You’re the only person I’ve ever told, Alice,” he said quietly. “Perhaps that’s why I did it so clumsily. For the past six years I’ve thought about locating you and telling you what happened. I needed to tell you. In our world, the person you would have become was very brave, and I loved her more than I ever told her. She almost succeeded in stopping the Hive invasion, and she sacrificed her life in the effort. She was killed in a horrible way, and we were able to do what we did only because of her courage. I’m sure that she would have wanted you to know what happened.”
Alice nodded. “I suppose ...,” she said.
“And there is also another thing I need to tell you,” he flushed and looked down at the table. “I .... I’m still in love with that Alice, with her. At least ... I mean ... I feel ... Damn this language. It isn’t set up to talk about time travel. ... I think I’m in love with you.”
She stared at him, wide eyed. “But why now? Why here? You waited all this time. You’ve been here for six years. Why didn’t you ...”
He nodded. “In 1987 you were how old? Sixteen? Your mother had just died. You needed time to get over that. You needed space to grow, to become yourself. I couldn’t. Until I saw you tonight.”
She looked down. “You know, after Mom died I began having strange recurring dreams. There was an older woman, but she was also me. There was a man with a beard. You?” Again she stared across the table at him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I do know that I want you to join us. There are only Roger and me now, and there’s so much to do.”
“But I’m only a junior in college,” she said. “I need to graduate. I can’t drop out of FSU. That’s crazy.”
“You wouldn’t have to,” he said. “Your summer break is almost here. You can work with us this summer and decide later if you want to continue.”
She paused, looking thoughtful. “I have been writing letters and making phone calls trying to find a summer job,” she said. “But I had also wanted to continue helping with the campaign. You’re helping to get Bill Clinton elected? Is that part of the work you mentioned?”
“Yes, part of it.” said George. “But let me be quite clear about our support of him. Bill’s a very fine person, and I believe he’ll be a good President. But I must tell you that our support is a means to an end. We’re trying to keep the Superconducting Super Collider from being built. That’s the reason we came back here. If we can’t stop it, everyone on this planet will die in the year 2004.”
“I still don’t understand why you have to stop the SSC project,” said Alice. “Does its operation do something unexpected?”
“In a way,” said George. “The accelerator will work very well and will do just what it was designed for, but in the process it will make a signal that, um, will allow an enemy to find us and destroy our world. The only way to prevent the signal is by stopping the project.”
“But Bill has already gone on record as supporting the SSC project,” said Alice.
“He should support it,” said George. “Except for the unpleasant side effect I mentioned, of which Bill could have no knowledge, it’s an excellent science project that should be supported. But realistically, his support won’t be as deep-rooted as Bush’s, who is interested in anything in Texas and sees the SSC as a Republican project. Al Gore is interested in technology, but he also doesn’t have a strong interest in fundamental physics or any commitment to the SSC. And Bill’s new Science Advisor, whoever he will be, almost certainly won’t be as effective as Alan Bromley. Besides, our projections show that a lot of first term Democrats should be swept in with Bill, and those people, with no baggage of commitments and no particular understanding of science, should almost all vote to kill the project.”
“Your projections show that?” asked Alice. “But no one can ... What kind of projections are you running?”
“My colleague Roger did them. Um, Roger is, ... how shall I put it? ... extremely smart to begin with, and on top of that he’s had his intelligence boosted by the advanced biotech I mentioned. He’s developed a new kind of projection technique that no one else has even heard of. And he has the advantage of knowing what happened, will happen, might happen, dammit, in our future. He has two histories against which to calibrate his technique. That turns out to be an enormous advantage.”
“And what does, uh, did happen, in the universe you came from?” Alice asked.
“Bush was re-elected, the SSC was built, and the universe was destroyed,” said George.
“And how did that involve you, ... and me?”
“That’s a very long story,” said George.
“I’ve got time,” said Alice, looking at her watch. “Tell me about it.”
After George had finished and was sipping his cognac, Alice remained quiet for a time.
“If I can believe you,” she said finally, “you literally have the power in your own hands to cure all human ills. You can cure cancer, hemophilia, MS, AIDS, anything. And you can transfer that ability to anyone else. Yet so far you’ve only used that power to make money and to tinker with politics. Why haven’t you done more, George? How could you not do more?”
“Ah,” said George, “you have arrived at the place where Roger and I have been living for the last six years, the central dilemma. Of course, you’re correct. We don’t have to keep the techniques to ourselves. We could spread Reading and Writing through the entire population of the world in a few months. We could put the Makers’ download on the Internet for anyone to access, and we could mount a multi-million dollar advertising campaign to publicize it. And what would the consequences of that be?” He paused, looking at her.
“I don’t know,” Alice said finally.
“That’s the correct answer, Alice. I don’t know either,” said George. “And Roger doesn’t know. But his attempts at predicting the outcome are frightening. Riots, revolutions, wars, terrorism, you name it ... It would be too much of a change too fast. The human race is smart and adaptable, but probably not that smart and adaptable.”
“But what’s the alternative?” Alice asked. “You can’t just do nothing.”
“Oh, we are doing things,” said George. “But we’re proceeding slowly and carefully. We’ve prodded a few selected physicists and mathematicians in what we know are the right directions. We’ve encouraged them with research money. We’ve also done similar things on the molecular biology front. And in a few instances, we’ve acted more directly. No one has noticed yet, but the last flu virus to make the rounds leaves its recovered victims a bit smarter and with an improved immune system.” He smiled.
“But you could cure cancer,” said Alice. “Every year thousands of people die of cancer while you do nothing. My mother died of cancer, dammit.”
“I know that,” said George. “Look, we could save some people. In fact, we have, in a few cases. But releasing a general treatment in the correct legal way takes time because of federal government drug regulations. A biotechnology company I own is now in the middle of FDA testing of a drug that provides a fairly general cancer cure, but it won’t be available outside of test groups for perhaps ten years. We’re sure it works, but the FDA will only be convinced by clinical tests that take a long time. That happens to be the way our present medical system works.”
“I still don’t understand,” said Alice.
“Look,” said George, “Roger and I spent much of the first year we were here deciding how to proceed. We can’t do everything. Our top priority is to stop the SSC project in order to gain more time. We have to prevent the Hive from finding us in 2004. We’ve been focusing mainly on that.”
“But you know how to do so much more,” said Alice.
“Not really,” said George. “We didn’t have enough time to receive much instruction from Iris on how to use WRITING before the Hive arrived. Consequently, we don’t have enough experience to use the technique now with confidence. It has too much potential for mistakes, for doing things that are harmful and irreversible. We have to be careful, so we’ve only used WRITING in very limited ways so far. We’ve only made viruses and nanomachines that are guaranteed to stop reproducing and die out after a fixed number of generations. To do more, we need teams of the best people working full time on learning the subtleties of WRITING, not just two preoccupied people with only limited time to dabble at it.”
“It must be frustrating,” said Alice, “having to move so slowly when you could do so much.”
“If you join us, you’ll learn just how frustrating it is,” said George.