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Blundell cleared his throat nervously. "Captain Stirling will be joining us for a bit. He wanted to meet everyone, this evening. I'd love to hear about the breakthrough, Ceddie. I'll, ah, just go and arrange the captain's lodgings, then rejoin you."
Blundell fled, leaving Stirling to cope with social niceties on his own. He shook hands all round as introductions were made. Bre
"Sit down, Captain," Ba
The barmaid took one look and broke into a broad smile. "Trevor Stirling! Whatever brings you home, luv? Does your mum know?"
"Ah, no," he cleared his throat, aware of stares from every quarter. "I'm on duty, as it happens. How've you been, angel?"
Cassiopia McArdle had blossomed in his absence, filling that barmaid's uniform to an improbable degree, looking, at eighteen, like a soldier's favorite wet dream. He remembered her in braids and orthodontic braces. She winked. "I've been lonely. You look to need a bit of R and R, Trevor. I'm off at eleven. Pint of stout?"
"You are an angel. Give my best to your mother."
She gri
Cedric Ba
"Beg pardon?"
Fairfax Dempsey, one of the graduate students, leaned forward eagerly. "He's done it, Captain! Went back in time! Full translation for sixteen minutes, right into the court of King Henry II, he said. He listened to Henry discussing the invasion of Ireland with his privy council! Beckett's bloody well made history today!" The young man chuckled as he realized the double meaning. "Twice, in fact. Once going into it, once making it."
"Why he chose that time and place to visit," Bre
Stirling scarcely heard her, wondering if the sickening lurch in his gut were disbelief or terror. "D'you mean to say, you've actually perfected time travel?"
"Perfected it?" Bre
Stirling tried to digest that, while wishing the room would stop lurching about as his equilibrium played catch-up. "Perhaps," he cleared his throat and tried again. "Perhaps someone had better explain all this in more detail?" Like it or not—tired or not—he needed to absorb the science now.
Zenon Mylonas, who'd remained silent until now, nodded. "Very well, Captain."
Dr. Mylonas was one of those perpetually mournful-looking chaps one expects to find in a mortuary, but seldom does. Sitting in the crowded pub, with his lesser colleagues ranged about him, he reminded Stirling of a gawky adolescent, all elbows and knobby shoulders and a discomfited awareness of not quite fitting in properly. His eyes held the look of a man who's faced the worst humanity has to offer itself and has not come up on the wi
Realization struck like an electric shock: Mylonas was utterly terrified. By his own research.
The implications were sickening, like a bottomless hole opening out under his feet, when he hadn't expected so much as a crack in the pavement. What the IRA could do with real time travel... The crowded pub crashed back into Stirling's awareness with a roar of voices raised in laughter and snatches of drunken song, the perpetual clink of glassware, the blue haze of cigarette smoke, all combining like the clattering of an unseen train roaring past in the fog. An ominous tremor began in the pit of his stomach, worse than pre-combat jitters. Stirling unfroze long enough to completely drain his glass in one long gulp, before gesturing for another. "All right," he finally managed. "Give me a lesson in time travel, professor."
"We'll begin with the basic physics of the project," Mylonas leaned forward, rolling his own empty bar glass between his hands. "You understand, surely, the concept of infinite potential futures? If I do x instead of y and you respond with b instead of c and so on, multiplied by all the physical factors in the universe? A crushed butterfly that robs some bird of its di
"Well, I suppose so," Stirling frowned, "but look here, this doesn't make logical sense. How can both x and y have happened, when clearly, only x did happen?"
"It's a matter of quantum physics," Mylonas said patiently, "or rather, a matter of fractural physics, which is not something even your average quantum physicist has begun to grasp."
"Fractural physics?" Stirling echoed. "What the devil is that?"
"A bloody Nobel Prize," Cedric Ba
Mylonas shot Ba
"Go on, please," Stirling said quietly, sipping from his second glass of stout. "What is fractural physics?"
"A mathematical way of describing, of accounting for, the impossibilities in observation which neither quantum physics nor its mathematical system can explain. Surely you knew, already, that the simple act of observation literally brings a thing into being, at the quantum level? Observation equals creation. If you ask the right question, in other words, the universe obliges you by providing a previously nonexistent answer. And if a thing exists, it can be fractured into something else; time is no exception. In fact, without fractural physics, nothing would—or could—exist."