The GREAT IMPLICATION

Was there something contagious about ignorance? Pendelton wondered aloud that day. Was it inevitable, was it in the air the same as ideas were? He thought that might be the answer because what else could explain the fact that a couple of accomplished physicists were about to fall into a time-honored trap that was already gorged with old, rancid science fiction writers; and not only rancid, but crooked: they accepted pay for writing about a subject they knew nothing of and wasn't that stealing?

Pendelton wasn't actually trying to be obnoxious. In fact he liked to make good impressions. He smiled a lot, for instance. And he kept his hands in his pockets so he wouldn't point. He had a peculiar blunt-subtle mind, half of which could split hairs with a Jesuit while the other half couldn't distinguish between a pat on the back and a punch in the jaw.

He rolled right along, smiling and telling them they knew nothing about time travel. Nothing. They were babes in the temporal woods! Having a time machine under construction meant that they were in the possession of what he referred to as mathematical conceptuosity plus above average hardware skills. But that didn't necessarily raise them above the level of the science fiction writers when it came to applications. Or the editors. The readers too, for that matter, all blithely playing their cosy little after-the-fact parts in a fantastic world-wide conspiracy of ignorance.

Blackburn and Shaheen, of course, thought he was out of his mind. They'd only agreed to listen to him because he had a letter from the Humanities department head, that and a wild, intense expression on his face which made them think it would be easier to hear him out than throw him out, so they sat at their back-to-back desks glancing at each other occasionally while Pendelton rambled on about the Great Implication and how it was one day going to separate the logical men from the paradoxical boys—and after about twenty minutes of this they were actually listening to him.

So that six months later Blackburn and Shaheen got into a violent argument in the office of the university president, Dr. Freylinghuysen, the two mathematical-physicists completely unable to agree on the color of a girl's dress, a girl they'd not only never seen in their lives before ten that morning, but one who subsequently leveled charges of assault and malicious mischief and attempted rape at the university along with a civil suit for $50,000. Although it had to be said in Pendelton's defense that it wasn't his fault. It was Chaplain Rowan who sprinted across Voltaire Mall and attempted to strip Miss Ethel Chattinger, purely in the interest of science of course but the young lady couldn't quite see it that way, especially since Rowan, the university chaplain, had gotten away with quite a swatch, a large jagged piece of knit woolen dress which he later on triumphantly deposited on Dr. Freylinghuysen's desk, only to find that he hadn't really proved anything at all other than that perhaps Miss Chattinger—otherwise known as the either/or proposition—was not a quick change artist and the Humanities department's 35-year-old prodigy of an air conditioner repairman Leopold Pendelton wasn't a practical joker.

"The first thing," Pendelton said that first day, "is for you to forget about paradox. Paradox has nothing to do with time travel. Nothing. It's a monkeying around with words for purposes of profit and it has no place in the office of two experimental physicists. Anyone who answers an honest question with a paradox is a guaranteed shifty character and the chances are he's writing on the sly."

Preoccupied with not sounding obnoxious, Pendelton missed Blackburn's ostentatiously bored expression, didn't notice the enormous sarcastic attention that Shaheen was giving him. Instead, he remarked: "Feel free to interrupt me with questions. I want to finish off paradox so we can get on to the Great Implication. Will that be a satisfactory procedure?" He hovered over the desks staring at them with big eyes until they slowly nodded their heads up and down.

"Okay. Now. A man travels in time," he said. "He travels in time and fifty million years ago he steps on a moth. Fantastic. You wouldn't believe the effect one humble moth could have! The man returns to the present and finds to his guilty astonishment that the Empire State building is now flying the Bolivian flag and gargoyles are sticking out of the 79th floor. This is cute so be careful of it. Boy meets moth, boy loses moth—gargoyles! Except that all those not completely devoid of common sense or debauched by poetic license would know that if the gargoyles were there they were there before he went back in time. His own body is a part of a continuum of which those gargoyles are a prior sequential segment; his entire life is so inextricably wrapped up in those gargoyles that he couldn't possibly be surprised by them, or by any other change he'd caused. As he returned to the present his memory would alter. To take any other view of this—to close your eyes and hide behind paradox—is going to get us all in trouble because you've got yourselves a real time traveler now and it's about time you started thinking about these things."

("Well why didn't you say so," Blackburn murmured. "Be glad to think about it, give it every consideration. We'll be in touch."

"I don't think he heard you," Shaheen said.)

"I won't even bother discussing the suicide-by-killing-old-grandpa myth," Pendelton buzzed on with a great deal of imperturbability, "other than to point out there is no such thing as negative feedback as applied to human beings. I realize that's only a small nuance. But then, take care of the nuances and the breakthroughs will take care of themselves, I always say."

("Oh Lord," Blackburn whispered.)

"Another small point. I hate to verbalize the obvious like this but it clears the ground, don't you think? I realize you two might like to traipse back through time and have a friendly chat with, say, Mike Faraday. But that's exactly what you can't do. You know a little too much about time machines. He'd pick your brains in half an afternoon and beat you back to your own office. As I say that's only a nuance. It's a nuance that eliminates 75% of all time travel science fiction ever written but that's still only a nuance, wait till I get to the Great Implication."

It was a curious word for him to have used—nuance—because six months later in Dr. Freylinghuysen's office Blackburn and Shaheen were to tangle over the nuance of blue versus green, a matter of observation which compared in subtlety to apples versus bananas, Shaheen saying heatedly: "The dress was blue. I'm not color blind and I have twenty-twenty vision. I'll stake my reputation as an experimental physicist on it." Blue! And this was a lucid well defined statement of his position, a statement rivaled in lucidity only by that of Blackburn who had in all sincerity to insist that the dress was blue—but only 10:31 that morning at which time it turned green; and if that wasn't bad enough a panting red faced chaplain Rowan had to dash in, carefully locking the door behind him and taking out a huge swatch of dress which he plunked down on the desk shouting: "Green, green, green! Green as the envious devils of hell! Green I say! Green before, green after, green for eternity!"

"I think, in spite of all," Blackburn remarked, "you've managed to find a way."

"No, but that's interesting," Shaheen said. "Semantically, anyway. I will did. Curious."

"A grammatical revolution!" Pendelton was telling them that first day. "I do, I did do, I will do. I have done, I will have done. I do, I did do, I will do. I have done, I will have done, I should have done, I will did! They're all the same now! So you see, I'm not really wasting your time. The future and the past are now united in a fantastic tenseless embrace. At some time in the future I can in the past save Caesar's life. Thus, there being no more future and past, how can I be wasting your time?"

"More than curious," Pendelton replied. "Practical. The Greeks as you may know thought that no man could be sure he had a happy life until it was over. I on the other hand assert that Caesar's assassination is still in doubt because of the future-past equivalence, that he has not yet successfully crossed the Rubicon, that he is still swimming to the Alexandrian lighthouse, that he is not yet emperor of a Rome that has not yet fallen! Not emperor and yet ... emperor. Not yet fallen and yet ... fallen and gone like—what? The wind? No, not even the wind. Nothing is gone, it's all still there moiling and seething around in temporal abeyance. Waiting to be resolved! Give me a time machine and I can mold every second of Caesar's existence and, incidentally, by extension, my own. The Greeks therefore were wrong. A man can no longer be sure he was happy even when he's dead!"

Blackburn leaned back in his chair and inquired blandly: "Did we get to the great implication yet?"

"If you were listening we did," Pendelton answered. "Elementary theology: if man's fate is determined there must of necessity be a Determiner whom we will call for the sake of convention, God. Determinism without a God, needless to say, is eighteenth century mechanistic twaddle. But suppose now that a man can determine his own fate? Run it through your machine again and again until he gets it down the way he wants it with all degrees of freedom and irrespective of his merit or karma or sinlessness or however our cosmic report cards are supposed to be made out? In that case man becomes his own determiner, the individual conscious mind becomes the deity and that which we have heretofore referred to as God becomes what is known as an outdated archetype."

"Good God," Shaheen said.

"But spelled with a small g," Pendelton replied. "That is the Great Implication."

"You mean to say he was proposing to disprove God's existence?" Dr. Freylinghuysen said to them that day. "And with university equipment? Don't you gentlemen realize I have trouble enough with the trustees as it is?" And Chaplain Rowan, who had long since lost the ability to react spontaneously—slipping back and forth almost on schedule between catatonia and St. Vitus dance—said: "Why are you sitting there doing nothing? Why isn't the city being scoured? If that dress isn't proof enough for you, that man is loose somewhere with colored motion pictures of the whole thing. What more do you want?" "A little illumination is all," Freylinghuysen replied. "All I've heard so far is some rather loose discussion about free will and determinism and it wasn't very convincing. Didn't anyone bother to point out to this Leopold Pendelton that you can't prove or disprove anything about your own determined existence since the proof or disproof itself could be determined?" "Yes," Blackburn answered.

Blackburn had thought over the Great Implication for about two seconds. "You have been wasting our time," he said. "You cannot actively disprove determinism because the disproof—the experiment itself—could be a part of your own determined existence, arranged by your Determiner. God might, for instance, allow the experiment to be successful merely to test your faith in Him, the same way he allowed you to get the idea in the first place."

An odd smile crossed Pendelton's face. "You really think so?" he asked. "You figure He'd try and cross me up like that? Let's go back and take this a step at a time. Specifically, why can't I play God with Caesar's life?"

"Wouldn't prove anything," Shaheen said. "God could have determined you in the selection of Caesar's name. The change would therefore be His doing, not yours, it would still be old God playing God with Caesar's fortunes."

"But it doesn't have to be Caesar. That was only an example, it could be anyone. Control anyone's destiny, anyone at all, and you've proven the point. We could select our man by means of a computer, by random sampling over which only the physical laws of the universe had control, thus eliminating determinacy in the selection."

"But God could alter the laws of chance. After all, they are His laws. A second-rate miracle would force you into selecting His man."

"You mean," Pendelton asked, "that if I selected a name every morning at 10:04-1/2 God would do a miracle at the same time?"

"Ye-es," Shaheen answered.

"But if one morning I changed my mind and waited until a quarter past two to select the name, He'd hold off and wait for me, wouldn't He?"

There was rather a long silence.

"He couldn't very well perform His miracle until I'd picked my name, could He?"

"Hmmmmm," Shaheen said.

"And if I decided to wait until 3:15, He'd have to wait too. And if I decided not to pick a name we'd do without a miracle that day. The fact is, I'd be telling Him what to do. Put me in the possession of a random sampling computer and a time machine and I, Leopold Pendelton, would be the bigger God!"

"And the point was well taken," Shaheen had to admit, pouring off some of Dr. Freylinghuysen's ice water. "We could for example use a computer to select at random any one of all the phone books in the United States, then a page in that one book, then a line. That one name would then truly be randomly selected." "Assuming of course," Blackburn said, "that you had first used the computer to randomly select the country whose phone books were to be used." "And also the particular year's edition," Freylinghuysen murmured. "It was fairly ingenious," Shaheen said, "especially when you consider that knowing how to do it meant you didn't have to bother. It was enough just to know we could. The only point that needed experimental verification was: could we in fact alter the past? Change something, anything at all and everything else followed, including the death of God." "You mean the death of the concept of God," Blackburn added. "Ah yes," Shaheen answered, glancing guiltily at Chaplain Rowan. "The question was, what were we going to change and how were we going to know it changed?"

Chaplain Rowan had been Shaheen's idea.

It had occurred to him one day as he and Blackburn were crossing the campus and he had observed to his colleague that things were looking bad for God. "It's every man for Himself," Blackburn had replied. "If I'm not mistaken that's one of His own laws. After all, who invented survival of the fittest?"

"Seriously," Shaheen said. "A, we've got a time machine. B, having A, there's no reason that I can see why we can't change the past. And C, if we do, well, they'll be using cathedrals for bowling alleys."

"Maybe now we'll see what kind of a loser He makes."

"Look here Blackburn, you needn't parade your atheism so ostentatiously. I'm well aware of it. In fact that's what's bothering me. You're an atheist whereas I ... well, I never did make up my mind about God. That's not very astute of me, I suppose, but I haven't. I'm betwixt and between, and so I was wondering if it wouldn't be only fair to have a representative of the other side in on this."

For a few seconds there was only the sound of their shoes on the bluestone walk that threaded across the stunted fall grass of the campus.

"Fair? You're using the word fair in connection with a scientific experiment?"

"Only because its outcome seems so obvious to us. We have strong preconceptions and because of them we're liable to overlook possibilities. I think we should have someone with us who expects the experiment to work out differently, someone who believes implicitly in His existence."

Blackburn thought about it as they rose in the Physics building elevator. "Well why not," he said, smiling in his peculiar catastrophic fashion. "You and I have an aggregate of 70 years experience in the laboratory, why not bring in a clergyman to check our techniques, be in keeping with the general tone of this whole thing. Hell, yes!"

Later that day Brokley L. Rowan listened with a frozen serious face as they declared their intentions to him. A young and conscientious man who spent a great deal of time telling budding undergraduate physicists that God was every bit as ubiquitous as Planck's constant, he listened without one word of complaint, not protesting that they'd put him in a theologically impossible position, a position in which the only two alternatives were to either refuse to look after His interests or else participate in a piece of sacrilegion the purpose of which was to demonstrate that the first alternative was not a valid one. And when he met Pendelton a week later in the Physics building, Pendelton told him: "You and I'll get along fine. I want it to be clearly understood that I have nothing against the church."

Chaplain Rowan took his glasses off and began cleaning them.

"And there's absolutely nothing for you to worry about. Even if we do disprove Him there'll always be doubters. You count on a certain percentage of people who won't believe our evidence. You'll get all the skeptics showing up on Sunday morning as usual."

Shaheen spoke with compensating soberness. "What I thought we'd do," he said, "is hold daily discussions on strategy. That way you can question any assumptions we make, check our logic, object as you see fit."

"What we're trying to be about this thing is fair," Blackburn said.

"Of course," Rowan replied.

"Now the first point I wish to raise," Shaheen said, "is in regard to the gargoyles. They're very important, the gargoyles."

Chaplain Rowan sat down on the window sill.

"If the gargoyles are a product of the past-change," Blackburn put in, anticipating the problem, "how are we going to know it? How are we going to perceive the change? That the question?"

"Aren't you going to ask what gargoyles have to do with this?" Pendelton said to Chaplain Rowan.

"I don't believe I will," Rowan replied, lighting up his pipe.

"The answer," Blackburn said, "is this: the experimental observer, not the one who takes the time trip, must be standing in plain view of the building. He must be expecting gargoyles to appear. When they do, he will not be tempted to call the phenomenon a miracle. When the gargoyles suddenly pop out—in apparent defiance of various physical laws—he can intelligently conclude that a specific time experiment has been performed and that a change in the past has in fact occurred, a conclusion that will restore the appearance of the gargoyles to the realm of non-miraculous events."

"Then the change we make must be so specific, must have such easily deducible consequences, that we'll be able to anticipate our equivalent of the gargoyles."

"Sort of like an either/or proposition," Blackburn said. "Find an event that can go only one of two ways. Switch this event from its already proceeding alternative to the bypassed, the not-used, the temporally-no-longer-existing possibility. The independent observer, watching the one disappear and the other take its place, will then know that the past has changed. It will prove the principle that man can determine his fate and is therefore alone."

Rowan nodded, chewing on his pipe. "I'll wait'll it's over, though," he said.

President Freylinghuysen filled a glass with ice water.

"'You cannot take God's photograph,'" he said. "Surrealism. Sheer surrealism. Was he smiling when he said it?"

"Of course he was smiling," Blackburn replied bleakly. "He's always smiling."

"After making man's first trip through time," Freylinghuysen said, "he stepped out of the physics building to find your either/or proposition yelling its head off and Rowan here standing in the center of Voltaire Mall with half a dress in his hand. So I'm surprised he was smiling. But what was he talking about?"

"And why," Shaheen said, "did he push Blackburn into the shrubbery and run off with the camera? I don't understand that at all." He turned away. "Oh, I suppose there's plenty I don't understand."

"What about on the trip," Freylinghuysen offered. "Could something have happened—"

"What?" Blackburn replied. "He went back in time exactly one hour. He was to walk to Ethel Chattinger's apartment." ("That fabulous woman," Freylinghuysen murmured.) "All he had to do was spill india ink over one of the two new dresses she'd bought. Apparently, the most trying problem of her recent existence was to decide which of the two to wear to her Spanish coach this morning. But he'd be ruining the dress he'd already seen her wearing an hour later on the Mall."

"And that's as subtle a way of getting a girl's dress off as you're likely to find," Freylinghuysen remarked. "Although tearing them off has its points too," he added, looking at the ceiling.

"Then what could have gone wrong?" Blackburn asked.

"As far as I can see," Freylinghuysen answered, "the only flaw in this experiment was the scientists themselves. Your observations positively reek with subjectivity. To Rowan, the dress was green, always green. This just happens to prove Rowan's original belief, namely that the past can't be altered and therefore He exists. The atheist on the other hand," he glanced at Blackburn, "has seen what looks like a miracle—a material object changing a basic physical quality right before his eyes. Strangely enough this miracle goes to prove that there are no such things as miracles. Blackburn's case is also proven. You saw what you wanted to. Take Shaheen here. He was positive the dress was blue all the time—until he saw Rowan's experimenter's sample—and so now he's back at his old stand: the fence."

There was an embarrassed silence, since two scientists had quietly to own up to the crime of subjectivity in the laboratory while the theologian had to somehow dispose of a piece of spurious rationality that might be forgiven but would never be forgotten.

And then the door opened and a smiling face appeared.

"What'd everyone run away for?" Pendelton said.

The president was the first to recover.

"Everyone will please remain seated and calm," he said to the others.

"Calm be damned!" Blackburn answered. "This one has a punch in the nose coming—and where the devil's my camera?"

"Should have told me you were going to take pictures," Pendelton said, gingerly handing it over. "Would have saved us a lot of trouble. And if you're interested in facts it wasn't me that snatched it, it was a law student. I guess he figured it might have some legal use. There's some interesting footage in it starring Chaplain Rowan and a disturbing young creature named Ethel." He tossed a yellow box on the desk. "You see chaplain, I'm not anti-clerical after all."

Rowan's eyes flicked from Pendelton to the box and back again. "That's the film?" he said.

Pendelton nodded.

Shaheen wet his lips. "You develop it?" he said.

"Yep."

"He's playing with us," Freylinghuysen said. "Well, I can't say I blame him. After all, how many times in a man's life does he get a scoop like this? Look," he said, turning to Pendelton, "there seems to have been some disagreement about what happened on the Mall this morning. We've got eyewitnesses proving anything you want. You've seen the film, maybe you'd like to tell us." He thumbed the desk top, trying to think of a decorous way to phrase it. "Oh hell, is He or isn't He?"

Pendelton pursed his lips and thought a moment.

"I'm not in a position to say at this time," he said.

Four of the five men sat frowning because, in conversations with the fifth, time had continually to be allowed for recovering. Then Rowan's eyes brightened and he jumped up.

"I take it you mean by that the dress was green all the time," he said, giving a rhetorical answer.

"But don't start ringing bells over it," Pendelton said, smiling. "I ought to explain that it had to be green. Not because there's a God, but because it had to. Couldn't be anything else. Except always blue, of course. Always blue, always green, but nothing in between. It rhymes." He shrugged his shoulders. "Because when you change the past, why then you change the past and that includes cameras and film which are often also a part of the past."

"Green all the time," Rowan said, looking around at the others. "Green."

"Green and immaterial!" Pendelton replied. "Green and irrelevant, green and so what! We took the wrong approach. I didn't realize it until I saw Blackburn getting it down on film. Film is part of the past, so it changes. But our heads are also a part of the past. They change too." There was a flash of white teeth against his flushed face as he said: "Depressing, isn't it?"

"Wait a minute," Shaheen said.

"But it's true. The man watching the gargoyles pop out of the Empire State Building would not have noticed anything. Quite suddenly the gargoyles would always have been there. The human mind can be toyed with as though it were a piece of film, a coating of silver nitrate crystals on celluloid. It's positively degrading!"

"Wait a minute," Shaheen said, pressing his head between his fists. "Something's wrong. You spilled ink on one of that girl's dresses. The blue one apparently."

"I spilled ink on a co-temporally-earlier edition of the dress the girl was wearing on Voltaire Mall," Pendelton said, "but can you guarantee she wasn't wearing the green dress to begin with? You can't. Now I'll say this slowly. If you change the past then you can have no memory of what it was before you changed it and therefore you can never prove that you have changed it." He sighed and sat down. "I'd like that to be known as Pendelton's Exclusion Principle."

"It's a shame really," Rowan remarked, "you went to an awful lot of trouble."

"Well," the president said slowly, "I don't know but that it might be better to keep physics and metaphysics apart after this. Like church and state. Metaphysical questions, after all, are those that don't have answers."

A frown passed briefly over Pendelton's countenance. "Wait a minute," he said. "As I recall it, I said something about the wrong approach, I don't remember saying the jig was up. As far as I'm concerned, we've only tried the past so far, we haven't scratched the future.

"Take the year 2068 for example," Pendelton said, smiling at them, trying not to sound obnoxious. "If existence is really determined the events of that year are already written down ... sort of."

He suddenly whirled on Rowan. "There is no question of God changing his mind between now and then since there is nothing that could possibly happen between now and then that would surprise Him, give Him a reason for changing His mind, because if He did He would be violating His own definition which includes absolute knowledge of all events past and future."

Rowan, immovable, stared back at him.

"But we need two time machines," Pendelton resumed. "I know, these things are expensive but if you're really interested you'll ram it past the trustees."

"Stop!" Freylinghuysen said. "No, go ahead. Damn!"

"I won't go through this again," Rowan shouted, rising. "All he's going to do is play more tricks with words!"

"Won't hurt to listen to him," Freylinghuysen replied.

"Now we send one time machine back to 1868 by means of the other. Then one of us travels to 2068 from 1868 while another goes to that allegedly same year 2068 from the present, from 1968. See what I'm getting at?"

Shaheen slowly nodded his head and then closed one eye.

"If there's free will," Blackburn mumbled, "they won't meet."

"Let's look for exclusion principles," Freylinghuysen commented, putting the balls of his fingers together and staring at the ceiling.

Rowan, ignored, watched them for a few seconds and sat down again. After a while he began to wonder how many experiments it would take before Pendelton found the proof he was looking for.

THE END