The Time Surgeons

Dr Ravan Harlington was a product of his times.

He was brilliant, yes. But brilliance was not celebrated, except as it served those less brilliant.

He was handsome, yes, with a face chiseled by fortunate genetics and muscles chiseled by hours of effort. The loose curl of hair with a habit of dangling down his forehead, the bright blue eyes and the cheerful smile merely added to the ensemble. But nor was beauty celebrated, at least not in public utterances, except as it served some common good.

But in private his beauty served his own good quite well. He had no need to visit the Houses maintained by the Protectorate to provide for the physical happiness and psychological health of those, whether male or female, who were unable or unwilling to satisfy their most personal needs by their own efforts. Enough women sought out his charms that his schedule was full, and would still have been full were his appetites fiercer. No doubt it was an accident that most of those he chose would also be considered beautiful, if one had the bad taste to notice or worse, to comment.

That was some time ago. Ravan was now in his middle age, and though he retained his beauty it was not as remarkable as it had once been. There was a little more paunch and somewhat less chisel, for one thing. This relaxation of his body sometimes brought him a twinge of regret, but it passed quickly. For a man his age he was still attractive. His power, position and fame were even more useful for attracting female companionship. In the evolution of his race, a handsome face and muscular body were a mere promise of things to come, while actual success was the proof of good genes and even more alluring.

In another age a man like Dr Ravan Harrington might be proud, placing himself on a pedestal in his own mind for possessing the unearned traits of brilliance and beauty. He may even have been conceited, an even lower and more ignoble form of pride.

But in this age he was humble. He knew his genius but did not dwell upon it. He knew he had not achieved it, merely been born with it, and it was his happy duty to do good with it. He knew his beauty but did not flaunt it. Some of it he had achieved by hard work, but he told himself that was mere prudent exercise: for a healthy body made one a more useful member of society and better servant of the Protectorate. To the extent that his beauty helped him personally, why, that was just an indirect way to help others. A healthy, happy man was better able to serve the Protectorate and do so cheerfully, content with his lot. And he was a healthy man, and the kinds of benefits he gained were the mutual kind.

All these things Dr Ravan Harrington told himself. And all these things were true.

His brilliant mind had given him a brilliant career. Though not unique, still he was an oddity in the history of science: as exceptional an experimental physicist as he was a theoretical one. His earlier work in relativistic physics had led to breakthroughs in wormhole physics, and he was still the world authority in the field, deferred to by his colleagues and advisor to the highest reaches of government.

An exceptional mind is often a difficult one for those in authority, as the ancient thinkers Socrates, Galileo and others had learned to their cost, too often fatal. But Ravan had an even temperament which was a match for even his intellect. There had been few ripples in the course of his life to disturb his contentment in his present or endanger the projected path of his future.

He could recall only one of any substance, an event from his university days. He rarely chose to recall it except as a lesson in the virtue of not repeating it.

It was in his first year at university, which he had achieved at the age of fifteen. He could have gone earlier with great success but his parents, heeding the advice of the psychologists, had decided that a slower progression would meet his social needs as well as his intellectual ones, and he would be better for it.

Older students, sometimes professors, would often give impromptu talks to the lunchtime crowds. These were popular events, as they were generally prompted by either exciting new discoveries or an urge to amuse on the part of intellectuals who may once have dreamed of being entertainers.

On one such day, a student in archaeology gave a remarkable speech. Apparently the student, who specialized in pre-War USA studies, had found a cache of books and translated them from their original pre-war English into modern language. His speech was filled with strange ideas and claims, delivered in a manner as if making his audience understand were the most important thing in the world.

Ravan had settled himself on the lawn too late to hear the start of the speech, having been happily ensconced in the library until hunger drew him forth. The out of context snatches he heard meant little to him and he remembered as little of the speech, except one phrase the student had translated, which had struck a chord in his mind:

The are no dangerous thoughts except one: the refusal to think.

He remembered much more of the aftermath. The audience were entertained if confused by this highly unusual speech, until men with the insignia of the security services on their shoulders and cudgels on their waists swooped down and carried the student away. They also barred the exits, allowing nobody to go on their way until they had been closely questioned about what they had heard. There was nothing brutal about either the abduction or the interrogations: this was merely an intervention for the psychological health of all involved in a possibly disturbing incident.

For there were many dangerous thoughts, especially the refusal to conform.

Ravan had little trouble with his own interrogation. It may have been his quick mind that saved him on this occasion: the wit and skill to blithely state that he hadn’t really been listening and the little he heard made no sense. Something about an atlas, he said, and Atlantis; though he confessed confusion on why an atlas including a mythical continent could inspire such unseemly passion. He suspected the student was drunk, or playing a prank. Neither the university nor the authorities thought it would be good for public order and tranquility to have too many people disappear, so only the worst affected students were in any danger of that. And the university had already marked Ravan’s great mind, and the authorities did not want to waste such a useful future citizen on such uncertain grounds.

Others were not so lucky. He never saw the archaeology student again, nor a number of other people he had known somewhat and seen in the audience staring at the speaker with rapt attention, as if he were breaking new paths of thought open for them.

The rumor spread that the books the boy had found had driven him mad, though clearly no book had such power and the flaw must lie in the man. Yet still it was more evidence that all must heed the wisdom of the authorities and focus on their service to their fellows, and not indulge in dangerous ideas of no value to society. It was dangerous ideas that had nearly destroyed the world, and they could equally destroy one man. Obviously the Protectorate had not harmed the student or any of the others who had vanished from university life. The Protectorate was beneficent, and held the true interests of all to its heart. They were merely being cared for, perhaps under therapy, perhaps transferred to a new location far from the place that might stir up disturbing memories. Such memories might disturb their personal tranquility and thereby the harmony of society at large.

Most who remained were content to learn the official lesson. Ravan was more perceptive, or less compliant, and the lesson he learned was that there were many dangerous thoughts, and refusing to think about them was the path to a long and contented life. But it is the curse of any person of talent to think that their particular talent is king of them all; and the peculiar curse of superlative intellect to feel itself immune from the intellectual risks and errors that lesser mortals should rightly fear.

Ravan knew to express no unauthorized thoughts. But he retained the privilege of thinking them in the safe silence of his own mind. For the good of society, somebody had to bear the risk of such thoughts.

There were few lessons Ravan had which he then forgot, and this one was no exception. That served him well later in his university days, when he was doing his postgraduate studies in the physics of wormholes.

At the time wormholes were an exotic study, of little practical importance but some theoretical interest. There was little to be said about them except that they were a theoretically possible implication of relativistic physics. Since to create one required negative energy, an exotic imagining that nobody had seen or even knew where to look, theory is where they remained.

This is where Ravan made his breakthrough and his name.

Others had made progress in this area before him. It is one of the advantages of being a student that there is more time, as well as inclination, for wide-ranging and indeed eclectic reading into every nook and cranny of one’s chosen field of interest. During this process, an obscure paper from many years ago had caught his interest. It speculated on the nature of time and proposed some novel transformations of spacetime equations which hinted at the possibility of time travel via wormholes.

The paper had been widely ignored. Even its author had put it forward more as a theoretical exercise than with any intent to pursue it seriously. It dealt, after all, with an analogy not a reality.

But when Ravan read it, it reminded him of other speculations he had come across. He took a closer look and noticed something odd. With the equations transformed into a more timelike perspective, the negative energy aspects were transformed into something even more exotic. But now they looked strangely like a mirror image of another part of the equations, if the latter were passed through a different but still appropriate transformation.

Even Einstein would have been impressed by the mental gymnastics involved in his insight.

Once on its trail, Ravan pursued this line of enquiry like a ferret after a rabbit. As is often the case, the rabbit stood no chance. By applying his transformations, under some circumstances the negative energy equations resolved to zero! But, he thought, that would not help if those ‘circumstances’ were even more bizarre than negative energy itself. So he took a closer look at what they meant.

Some days later, he sat back, exhausted but stunned. Oh my God. If this is right, the effect of forcing a wormhole back through time somehow creates something that mathematically looks the same as negative energy! We can’t build a wormhole to the moon, but we can build one into the past! Without needing actual negative energy!

He thought about it. The idea of moving into the past was exciting, and had been the theme of many a novel. But how could it evade the paradoxes of time travel? The famous ‘Grandfather Paradox’, in which you go back in time and kill your own grandfather: in which case you were never born, so who killed him?

He looked more closely. His intellect was enough that he had not only mastered the abstruse discipline of relativistic physics, but could have been considered worthy of the upper, though not the highest, tiers in the equally difficult world of quantum mechanics. You can do a lot with quantum mechanics, he thought. But can we do this?

Another week passed, and became a month, then two. Finally he was ready, and took his work to his supervisor.

“What is it, Harlington?” Professor Theraney asked with some asperity, Ravan having rushed into his office while forgetting to knock.

“Sorry Professor!” he cried. “But you have to see this!”

He thrust his work under the professor’s nose, and Theraney glanced at the dense set of equations. He gave Ravan a sour glance. “It is a dense set of equations.”

“But don’t you see what it means!?”

“Why don’t we save some time and you tell me? Then I can decide whether to check your work and see if it really means what you think.”

“Oh! Oh, sure! I should have thought of that!”

“First stop standing there hopping, Harlington. You look like a kid wanting to go to the bathroom. Sit down.”

Ravan sat, then launched into his explanation. “If I’m right, you can’t build a useful wormhole through space unless you can create negative energy, whatever the hell that is! But you can build one backwards through time, because that has an effect equivalent to applying negative energy!”

Theraney stared at him. “That would make you as famous as Einstein, if it’s true. But several objections occur to me right up.”

“The answers are all in the equations.”

“Perhaps. But first let’s dispose of the obvious. How do you avoid changing your own past, thus creating time paradoxes? That’s always been the trouble with time travel.”

“The simplest answer lies in quantum mechanics,” Ravan replied, unconsciously slipping into Lecture Mode: to the irritation of the professor, who regarded that as his bailiwick. “At a small enough scale, the quantum wave functions are self-repairing: any distortions you introduce are obliterated before they can have any effect on the future.”

“Then what use is it, beyond theoretical interest? We already know that wormholes are possible, it’s just that they are too unstable. This sounds like just another kind of instability; maybe even, given your ‘equivalent to’ statement, exactly the same instability, only viewed from a different perspective.”

“No, Professor. The scale that can be repaired is relatively large. Large enough that you can open a portal into the past and actually view what is going on. Obviously doing that has to remove information-carrying energy from the past – light, sound, that kind of thing – but causality kind of flows around it at that scale due to the reactive, compensating forces on the wave functions.”

“What about if you try at an even larger scale? At some scale, presumably your wave functions can no longer repair and must break into a new direction. Paradox. Say, for instance, you can open it enough to allow the passage of a bullet, and you shoot your grandfather.”

Ravan hesitated, having seen hints of ideas but unwilling to commit himself to words yet. “I haven’t taken it that far. I… guess… maybe it becomes impossible. But I thought now was the time to bring this to you.”

“Yes, this should be enough for now,” he deadpanned. “Leave it with me.”

Ravan stood, bowed in farewell, and left, almost skipping out like a boy in a playground. The professor looked at the equations speculatively, then went to work.

A couple of hours later, he rubbed his eyes, put his hand on the sheaf and stared into space.

“Well smythe me!”