C*F*P!—ISMELLIFLUOUS. FOOLS FROM FUTURE’S FETIDFIEFDOMS FOLLOW FREELY IN MY FOOTSTEPS.BACKWARDS TIME IS IMPOSSIBLE, FORWARDS TIME ISABSURD. TRUTH TOLD TACTLESSLY TAKES COURAGE,LITTLE DUMPLING. TRUTH TOLD CUNNINGLY TAKESFENCHELWURST & TEA.
THE PULPIT FOR PREACHERS IN PAMĚT’ CATHEDRAL.DARLING MARTA! DO YOU FOLLOW ME? THEN SPIN MECOUNTERCLOCKWISE. PLACE YOURSELF PAST EVERYPRIMITIVE PROSCRIPTION. SILENCE, SYCOPHANTS! &LISTEN TO ME CLOSELY. JAN SKÜS IS THE NAME OF AFRIEND I ONCE MET, & SKÜS JAN IS A FRIEND I’LL MEETTWICE. SPACE & TIME AFFECT ALL, ARE AFFECTEDBY ALL. EACH FOOL CARRIES HIS OWN HOURGLASSINSIDE HIM.
TODAY IT HAS HAPPENED. TWELVE JUNE NINETEENHUNDRED & THREE ANNO DOMINI. TAKE THISLETTER—PRECIOUS DUMPLING!—& EXHIBIT NOMERCY. I’LL BE BACK FOR IT SOON. TODAY IT HASHAPPENED. TODAY IT HAS HAPPENED. THE LOST TIMEACCIDENTS. THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS. THE LOSTTIME ACCIDENTS. HAVE MERCY ON US ALL.
OTTOKAR GOTTFRIEDENS TOULA,TOULA & SONS SALUTARY GHERKINS, S.M.ZNOJMO, MORAVIA.
“Note the number in the bottom left-hand corner,” said Kaspar. “Page number four, do you see? It follows that there must also exist—or have existed—additional pages, numbered one through three.”
Knowing Ottokar—having known him, Marta reminded herself—she didn’t necessarily think the rules of logic could be relied on; but she didn’t see much point in disagreeing.
“We also have reason to believe—from certain statements of our father’s, in the days before his passing—that one of those missing pages contains an algebraic proof. It is this proof—not any personal or sentimental information—that is of interest to my brother and myself.”
Marta smiled and acknowledged that such a proof, if it existed, would indeed be of interest.
Waldemar, who’d been so sullen and withdrawn, did something now that flabbergasted her: he sat stiffly forward, like a suitor on the verge of a proposal, and took her damp pink hand in both of his.
“Esteemed Frau Svoboda, kindly listen to me now. For the past seven years, as you may or may not know, our father has been engaged in a series of experimental inquiries into the physical nature of time.” He stared at her until she bobbed her head. “Until recently, my brother and myself had been allowed to assist him in his research; a few months ago, however, he forbade us to set foot in his laboratory. From the comments he made—the merest of hints, really—we know he was on the cusp of a major discovery: a new understanding, not just of the nature of time, but of the possibility of motion—free motion—within it.” Waldemar sucked in a breath. “Given what has happened, you can see what an unfortunate decision it was to exclude us from his work. On the morning of his death—or so this note would seem to imply—our father finally achieved the breakthrough he’d been seeking.” He glared into her eyes as he said this, neither wavering nor blinking, like a mesmerist or a vampire or a prophet. “Can you appreciate what this means, Frau Svoboda? Most people couldn’t—not for the life of them. But I have no doubt whatsoever that you can.”
Marta glanced away from him then, but only for an instant. “Why did he forbid you from entering his laboratory?”
“He wanted us to concentrate on our schoolwork,” Kaspar said, reddening. “Over the last few years, our marks—”
“He’d become suspicious of everyone,” Waldemar interrupted. “He spent all his time in that damned cave of his. Our poor mother—”
“What we came here to ask you, Frau Svoboda, is this: Might you have those three pages? Might they be in this house?”
Looking from one boy to the other, basking in the glow of their combined attention, Marta wanted nothing so much as to provide them with the purpose they so craved. She came close to inventing some clue, fabricating some relic, if only to keep them sitting at her counter. But the boys were too clever to be taken in by any trick of hers. The younger one, especially, seemed to dissect her with those chalky eyes of his, as if she were no more than a sack of fat and gristle. She permitted herself to think about Ottokar for a moment, and about what he’d told her of his conflict with time, a struggle he’d often predicted would end in his death. If he’d shut his boys out, as they claimed, then he must have had cause. For this reason—and for other, less defensible ones—she let her head hang and said nothing.
There was, in fact, something she wasn’t telling the boys, something that would have spared them and their future wives and children years of grief; but Marta had no gift of precognition. Their innocence is what makes them beautiful, she said to herself. Let them hold on to their innocence awhile.
“I’m sorry, boys,” she said at last. “There’s nothing I can give you.”
Kaspar was already on his feet, murmuring apologies for having imposed; but Waldemar stayed as he was. Those eyes of his, disconcerting at the best of times, now slid from feature to feature of her wide and cheerful face as though searching for a way to pry it open. The shop had never felt so hideously still.
“You’re lying, Frau Svoboda,” Waldemar said slowly. “You’re lying to us, you sausage-chewing sow.”
Even Kaspar seemed startled by the venom in his brother’s voice: he stepped hurriedly to the counter and pulled him up out of his chair. Waldemar put up no resistance, letting his older brother trundle him backward, his eyes resting on her like chips of gray slate. Marta stayed as she was. She felt incapable of movement. Nothing Waldemar did later, she writes in her journal, came as a surprise to her after that visit. Four decades on, when the long war had ended and the camps had been emptied and word of the Time-keeper’s experiments began to trickle back to Námestí Svobody, Marta would be the only one in town who wasn’t shocked. She’d known ever since that visit, she declared to whoever would listen. She’d seen the future in the blankness of those eyes.
“I understand you, Frau Svoboda,” Waldemar said. “I understand how you think. But that isn’t the same as forgiveness.”
“Don’t listen to him, please,” Kaspar stammered, hauling his brother out into the street. “I have no idea what he’s jabbering about.”
Marta knew quite well, but she said nothing.
III
I CAN’T GO any farther, Mrs. Haven, without a tip of the hat to Michelson and Morley. They’re not Tollivers, per se, but they’re just as instrumental to this history. We’d never have met without them, you and I.
Albert Abraham Michelson was a broad-shouldered, obsessively tidy Jew from the Kingdom of Prussia—by way of Virginia City, Nevada—whose career was defined by a lifelong obsession with light. The speed of light was Michelson’s particular passion, and his quest to quantify it brought him, of all places, to Cleveland, Ohio, where he met Edward Morley, the bucktoothed instructor of chemistry whose name would soon be linked with his forever. Michelson had invented a machine called an interferometer, a childishly simple and mind-bogglingly expensive contraption whose only purpose—as its creator liked to put it—was to measure the immeasurable. In a nutshell, Michelson’s invention was a system of pipes and mirrors that split a beam of sunlight, sent the two halves down tubes of varying lengths, then measured the difference between these two journeys as a series of pale and dark smudges. This might not sound so impressive, but it changed our understanding of light—and of time, and of the universe itself—forever.
More amazingly still, Mrs. Haven, Michelson and Morley’s machine did all of the above by accident.
In 1887, in the basement of a dormitory on the grounds of Case Western Reserve University, the two men built an immense interferometer out of glass and lead pipe, mounting the apparatus on a platform of marble, then floating that platform, in turn, in a pool of quicksilver, to insulate it from vibration. Michelson expected the speed of light to vary slightly, depending on whether the beam in question was traveling with the earth’s rotation or against it. To a passenger on a moving train, he reasoned, the apparent speed of a stampeding buffalo depends on which way the buffalo happens to be heading; why should