“Dr August,” he said firmly, “I wish to discuss the multiverse.”
As opening statements go, this was rather unexpected, and I was painfully aware that every second Vincent stood in my doorway was another in which the warmth of my carefully nurtured fire would be expended in true entropic principle for no one else to enjoy. Seeing, however, that he was not about to move, and in light of the thickening snow falling outside, I invited him in, though I was hardly in the mood.
Vincent Rankis. The first time we met, he was young, barely eighteen years old, but already he had the physicality of the perpetually middle-aged. Somehow, despite rationing, he was chubby without being fat, rounded without being particularly overweight, though he would never be described as muscle-bound. His mouse-brown hair was already thinning at the crown, the promise of a bald patch to come, and a pair of grey-green eyes looked out from within a face moulded by a busy sculptor from rather wet clay. His trouser legs were even then rolled up in a manner designed to disencourage social enquiry, and he wore a tweed jacket that I was never to see him out of regardless of the time of year. His claims that the jacket would last a thousand years I can perhaps tolerate; his insistence that the rolled trousers were in aid of cycling I would rebuff, as nothing wheeled was getting through the blocked Cambridge streets on that night. He sat down in the more tattered armchair by the fire with a great huff of effort, and before I had even settled opposite him, attempting to drag my brain out of silent warmth and back into the realms of modern science, he exclaimed,
“To permit the philosophers to apply their banal arguments to the theory of the multiverse is to undermine the integrity of modern scientific theory.”
I reached for the nearest glass and bottle of Scotch, buying time to answer. The teacher within me was tempted to play devil’s advocate; the teacher lost.
“Yes,” I said. “I agree.”
“A multiverse has no relevance to individual responsibility for action; it merely extends into a rather simplified paradigm the Newtonian concept that for every action there is an opposite action, and the concept that where there can be no state of absolute rest there cannot be understanding of a particle’s nature without changing the thing observed!”
He seemed very indignant on the subject so once again, I said, “Yes.”
His eyebrows waggled furiously. He had an uncanny knack of talking with his eyebrows and chin, while the rest of him remained to a good degree static. “Then why did you waste fifteen pages of your last paper discussing the ethical implications of a quantum theory?!”
I sipped my drink and waited for the eyebrows to descend to their natural–but not absolute–state of rest. “Your name,” I said at last, “is Vincent Rankis, and I am only aware of this fact because when the beadle challenged you for cutting the corner of the grass you gave him this same name while informing him that in this changing society his role would soon be not merely redundant, but mocked by the imminently approaching future generations. You were wearing that very same olive shirt, if I recall, and I—”
“Blue shirt, grey socks, dress robe, heading at high speed towards the gate in a manner which I can only assume meant you were late for a lecture, it being five minutes to the hour and most of your lectures occurring more than ten minutes away.”
I looked at Vincent once again, and this time made conscious note of all the characteristics I had already unconsciously perceived. Then, “Very well, Vincent, let’s discuss ethical musings and the scientific method—”
“One is subjective, the other valid.”
“If your view is so absolute, I hardly see what good my view will serve.”
A flicker of a smile occurred in the corner of his mouth, and he had the grace to look, briefly, ashamed. “Forgive me,” he said at last. “I may have had a little something to drink on my way over here. I know I can come across as… firm.”
“A man travels back in time…” I began, and at Vincent’s immediate flinch of distaste I raised my hand and said placatingly, “Hypothetically speaking, a thought experiment if you like. A man travels back in time and sees the events of the past unfolding like a future before his eyes. He steps out of his time machine–”
“Immediately altering the past!”
“–and his very first act is to post his younger self the winning riders at Newmarket. Result?”
“Paradox,” declared Vincent firmly. “He has no memory of having been posted these numbers; he never won at Newmarket. If he had, he may not have built the time machine and gone back in time to post the numbers to himself to begin with–logical impossibility.”
“Result?”
“Impossibility!”