1975

The drug war flowed into the West End for one violent evening and, while in the area following up a lead linking the activity to a case in his own district, Cash stole an hour to drop in on a physicist at Washington University,

Dr. Charles DeKeersgeiter seemed awfully young for the high-powered reputation his secretary imputed, though he was sneaking up on forty.

Cash had never heard of him.

The age thing had always bothered him. Even now, though a grandparent, he unconsciously expected successful, powerful men to be much older than himself. During his early thirties he had gone through a bad crisis in which he had suffered deep depression and self-doubt each time he had heard of, or read about, someone who had become a substantial success at an age younger than he was then.

But the whole race couldn't consist of Alexanders or Napoleans, or even Al Capones. In time he had made a shaky peace.

"I'm not sure I understood why you wanted to see me, Sergeant," said DeKeersgeiter, after Cash had been shown into his office.

"I'm not either. What I want is for you to tell me about Time." Briefly, he presented the apparent facts of the Groloch-O'Brien case. "The only handle we can get on it is an impossible one: time travel."

"What we call the least hypothesis." DeKeersgeiter showed more than the polite interest Cash had expected. "That's the simplest theory that'll include all the known facts. Sometimes you come up with something outrageous. This time, though, I submit that the facts aren't all known." He made a steeple of his fingers beneath his chin, stared at the ceiling. "Time: The popular view is that it's like a river, flowing one direction at a steady pace. In physics we know this isn't necessarily true. Time's a phenomenon associated with space and matter. And motion. Velocity and the shape of space can cause differences in observed time flow. Especially in the matter of motion. It's my own feeling that matter, or the mass thereof, also directly correlates to time in any given frame. We know it does at the event horizon of a singularity. With better math, we might find gravity even more important than commonly thought."

He spoke slowly, pedantically, as if unsure he could express himself in terms Cash could understand.

"That is, time flow on the surface of a neutron star should differ significantly, not only from here but from current mathematical predictions, because of the proximity of disparate masses." He glanced at Cash as if to solicit an opinion. When none was forthcoming, he went on.

"A few years ago there was a flap over a hypothetical particle called a tachyon. At first it was supposed to move faster than light and have negative mass. Then it was supposed to have positive mass and a velocity below that of light, but was supposed to be moving backward in time. Some of my colleagues also feel there's a movement of mass backward in time from a black hole or singularity to a white hole or quasar, extremely violent stellar events so far away that what astronomers see are events which took place almost back at the beginning of the universe. But I was talking about tachyons. Since nobody's been able to detect them, and their proponents have been heavily criticized by their opponents, the excitement's pretty well died down. I haven't heard a thing recently. But I'm so damned busy pushing paper-federal grant, you know-that I don't have time to keep up with the literature."

DeKeersgeiter's mind seemed to jump tracks for a minute. He treated Cash to a critique of federal grant practices that would have endeared him to Lieutenant Railsback. Then, as suddenly, he skipped back, leaving Cash momentarily bewildered.

"We have fads in physics, too. Tachyons. Gravitons. The latest is the Hawking Black Hole." As the physicist sneered at the impossibility of BB-sized or gram-weight singularities left over from the explosion of the primal egg, Cash began to wonder if he were going to get any sense from the man at all. Then the man's mind skipped another track.

"There's only one way your corpse could've moved in time, so far as we know. The usual. Unless…" He steepled his fingers and studied the ceiling once more. "I almost overlooked something. Fell into the obvious trap. When you think time travel, you always think of going back. It's a powerful, almost archetypal human drive, to go back and put things right. But your man came forward. And that's possible. There's a shortcut.

"The mechanism is that of Fitzgerald-Lorentz. When an object with mass nears the velocity of light, its time reference relative to slower objects grows retarded. If we could put a man into a spaceship and whip him up to ninety-nine point-nine nine percent the velocity of light and send him off to, say, the nearest star and back, to us it would seem like it had taken him about nine years to make the trip, but for him only a few months would pass. Of course, that's not humanly possible. But the theory's sound. It's been proven with atomic clocks in satellites and fast planes."

Cash caught the stress of "humanly." "You mean a flying saucer could've gotten him?"

Embarrassed, DeKeersgeiter nodded. "It fits the least hypothesis as neatly as your time machine. There's more evidence that they exist. And it doesn't conflict with physical law."

All Cash said was "Thanks," but thought, A whole new can of worms. What else would he come up with before they closed the case? Suspended animation? Perpetual motion machines? How about deals with the devil? Sister Mary Joseph had suggested that one already.

He got the hell out. Politely, but out.

And got hell.

The dispatcher had been trying to get in touch. Annie had called. Major Tran was on his way in from Fort Chaffee to look them over. She wanted Cash to meet him at the bus station. She was afraid to handle it herself. But Railsback, because he hadn't let the dispatchers know where he would be, wouldn't let him go.

Cash caught John leaving as he himself went into the station. They hadn't seen much of each other recently. "You heard?"

"About the gook? Yeah."

"Hey!"

"Sorry. Railsback's been on my ass."

Beth was trying to get his attention. He held up a. finger in a wait-a-second gesture.

"I just wanted to know if maybe you could come over tonight. Maybe ease things a little. You know these people better…"

"Now who's doing it?"

"You know what I mean."

"If he spent time over here before, he can cope. Probably better than we did over there. But I'll stop over." He started on. "Oh. I'll come by myself. You'd better keep Nancy and the kids away, too. Let Annie get settled before you sic the whole gang on him."

"Right. Good thinking." Cash didn't think his daughter-in-law would cause a problem, but the grandchildren might.