“If you’re about to propose a better method than the scientific one…?”
He shook his head. “A tool,” he repeated firmly, “that can deduce… everything. If we take a building block of the universe, the atom, say, and announce that it has certain observable effects–gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear, strong nuclear forces–and proclaim these to be the four binding forces of the universe, then, if this is so, should it not be theoretically possible to extrapolate from this one tiny object, within which the very basis of everything is contained, the entire functioning of creation?”
“I can’t help but feel we’re straying back into God’s territory,” I reminded him.
“What is science for, if not omnipotence?”
“Are you looking for an ethical answer, or an economic one?”
“Harry!” he blurted, jumping back to his feet and pacing the slim area of floor I’d carefully cleared some months ago for just this purpose. “Always you dodge the question! Why are you so afraid of these ideas?”
I sat up a little straighter in my chair, his indignation reaching almost unusual levels. There was something odd in what he was saying, a little warning at the back of my mind which slowed my speech, made me answer with more care than usual. “Define ‘everything’,” I said finally. “I assume that your… tool, if you like, your hypothetical, impossible tool, will, by deducing the state of all matter in the universe, be deducing both past and future states as well?”
“It would stand to reason, yes!”
“Allowing you to see everything that is, and everything that was, and everything that will be?”
“If time is considered to be non-absolute, then yes, again, I think that’s reasonable.”
I raised my hands, placating, thinking it through slowly. Alarm was growing at the back of my mind, seeping into my throat, trying to get past my tongue, which I moved so carefully. “But by the very act of observing the future, you yourself change it. And so we’re back with our time traveller who stepped from his machine and saw the past. You, in seeing the future, will model your behaviour differently or, if not that, the future will be entirely tempered by the single moment in which you came to know it, altered by the act of being observed, and we return again to a paradox, to a universe that cannot be sustained, and even if that were not enough, surely we must ask ourselves what will be done with this knowledge? What will men do when they can see like gods, and what… and…”
I put my whisky glass down to the side. Vincent was standing still in the middle of the floor, his back half-turned to me, fingers splayed at his side, body stiff and straight.
“And,” I murmured gently, “even if we were not worried about men obtaining godhood, I would raise this concern–that the strong nuclear force upon which your hypothesis depends won’t be posited for another thirty years.”
Silence.
I rose from my chair, frightened now by Vincent’s stillness, by the muscles bunching along his back and shoulder, locked tight.
“Quarks,” I said.
No reaction.
“The Higgs boson, dark matter, Apollo Eleven!”
Nothing.
“Vincent,” I breathed gently, reaching out for his shoulder, “I want to help.”
He jerked at my touch, and I think we both felt a rush of fight-or-flight adrenaline in our systems. Then he seemed to relax a little, head turning down, and smiled a distant smile at the floor, half-nodding in recognition at a thought unseen. “I wondered,” he said at last, “but hoped you weren’t.” He turned sharply, swiftly, staring me straight in the eye. “Are you one of them?” he demanded. “Are you Cronus Club?”
“You know about the Cronus Club?”
“Yes, I know about it.”
“Why didn’t you—”
“Are you? For God’s sake just answer me, Harry.”
“I’m a member,” I began to stammer. “Y-yes, of course, but that doesn’t—”
He hit me.
I think I was more surprised than genuinely hurt. I’d encountered violence and pain, of course, but in this life I’d had such a comfortable existence I’d almost forgetten the feeling. If I’d been braced, I might have stayed standing, but shock more than anything else knocked me back into a pile of books. I was aware of the taste of blood in my mouth and a tooth wobbling at the touch of my tongue which had not wobbled before. I looked up into Vincent’s face and saw coldness mingled with maybe–unless my mind imagined it–maybe a shimmer of regret.
Then he swung his fist once more, and this time surprise didn’t have time to get a look-in.
Chapter 29
“I hate to be the one to ask this,” she said. “But if the world is ending, what are we really expected to do about it?”