Chapter Twenty #2
“I—I don’t know exactly. If I had to guess, I would say that someone could try to time travel in a wormhole, but due to the instability it wouldn’t be entirely possible to slip back into our time.
Maybe the best he could do was to interact with objects in our time, but there wasn’t enough of an opportunity to fully return, to completely time travel.
It’s like a tunnel that’s collapsing. Maybe you can stick your hand through an opening, throw something through it to the other side, yell through an opening, grab something, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your body can move through the rock.
There are limitations. Or maybe there aren’t.
No one knows because there is no known case of someone going through a wormhole, or even a guarantee that they exist. I wish I could tell you with more certainty, but no one can. ”
It was clear that the scientist in him was fascinated by the possibility, that he wanted to explore it further. It was also evident that he was terrified of giving her false hope and likely wished to be excused from the entire business.
“I’m sorry.”
He blinked behind his glasses. “Why are you apologizing?”
“I feel like I’m making you uncomfortable putting you in this position.
I apologize. I promise I won’t hold any of this against you if we’re wrong about the entire business and Joe didn’t go through a wormhole somewhere, and isn’t trying to communicate with me, and all of this is just a product of my grief. ”
“These objects you’ve discovered. The ones you think your husband is trying to use to communicate with you. What are they?”
She told him about the squawk box, and the boots, and the postcard, and reached into her pocket and handed him the two notes from Joe that resided together in the pocket of her dress.
She watched him study them with scientific precision, looking at the equations, the handwriting, placing the notes side by side before giving them back to her.
“And there’s no way that your husband could have slipped this in your pocket before he boarded the spacecraft?”
“I don’t see how. His friend said that he gave Joe the paper with the equations on it right before Joe boarded the spacecraft.
I didn’t even interact with him the morning of the launch.
We saw each other briefly the night before, but I was wearing a different outfit, and he didn’t put anything in my pocket.
Besides, the other note I found inside your book in our home. ”
Vivian looked at the notes again. “Why ‘wait for me’? Why would he write that to me repeatedly? If he needed to get a message to me, why would he choose that one? Why not ‘I’m stuck in space, and I need help, this is how to find me’ or something obvious like that?”
Cal hesitated. “Do you want me to answer that as a man or as a scientist?”
“Both, I think.”
“Well, as a man, I would say that he wrote ‘wait for me’ because he wanted you to wait for him.”
“I figured that much out,” Vivian answered, not unkindly.
“Because he loved you so much that he was determined to do everything in his power to come back to you, and that he was so certain in his ability to do so, that he asked you to wait because he knew that what you had, the love you shared, was the kind that a man would risk everything to get back to.”
Cal removed his glasses at the end of his speech, reaching into the breast pocket of his cream linen shirt and pulling out a handkerchief folded into a meticulous square, the corners so precise that someone had clearly ironed it for him into neat, incisive points.
Or had he done it himself? For some reason she didn’t envision him with a wife or significant other waiting for him at home.
Although, perhaps her assessment of him was incorrect.
Maybe he had a whole family waiting for him at home.
Vivian blinked, reordering her impression of him, wondering if she’d misjudged him as he cleaned the lenses in a habit that spoke to years of muscle memory.
His wrists peeked out from beneath the cuffs of his shirt, a fine sprinkling of hair there, and she glanced away, flushing a bit.
She hadn’t realized it, but somewhere in the interim between the inception of their conversation and now, they’d moved quite close to each other, his shoulder nearly touching hers, and at that realization, the warmth of his body closer than made her comfortable, she slid over on the bench, putting distance between them.
If he registered the movement, she didn’t realize it, so total was his absorption in the cleaning of his glasses, his hair a bit longer than was fashionable, looking as though a trip to the barber was in order.
“And your answer as a scientist?” she asked him.
Cal glanced up, sliding the glasses back into place, his eyes meeting hers. “You said that your husband used to read a lot of science fiction books, right? That he was interested in the science of space and time travel, that he believed in the possibility of such things?”
Vivian nodded.
“Well, there’s a theory about time travel.
A concern that if you make a change in the timeline, it can have a ripple effect that reverberates in potentially catastrophic ways.
Your husband would have known that to be a consideration, a possibility.
So maybe he was afraid that if he told you too much, if he made too many changes, it could alter the timeline in a way that he would no longer be able to get back to you.
“Maybe ‘wait for me’ was the best he felt he could do to try to send you a message without disrupting the timeline. It’s an elegant solution to an unwieldy problem. For what it’s worth, I’d have done the same in his shoes.”
It made sense in a way if you suspended disbelief and believed that anything was possible, which wasn’t so hard considering the alternative was that she was being haunted.
She didn’t realize she’d voiced the thought aloud until he frowned at her.
“Ghosts aren’t real,” Cal announced.
He looked so insulted by the idea, so affronted by the very fact that she would have considered the possibility that she couldn’t help but laugh again.
It reminded her of the expression Joe had given her the night they met when she’d suggested that perhaps the United States shouldn’t participate in the Space Race.
“Ghosts aren’t real, but time travel is?”
“Time travel is an extension of physics, a mathematical equation to be solved. Ghosts are—I don’t know, something wholly unscientific.”
He said “unscientific” like it was a very bad thing indeed.
“If Joe has gone through a wormhole, and he’s in some weird space-time loop or living in an alternate timeline, do you think he’s aware of it?
Would he know and be panicked, actively trying to find me?
Or could he just be out there, living his life, with no idea that the life he’s living isn’t the real one? ”
“Who’s to say it isn’t the real one? That all those alternate realities aren’t just as valid?”
“If that’s true, if he’s just out there, aware or not—how do I find him, how do I save him? How do I reach him?”
“You don’t.”
“What do you mean, ‘I don’t’?”
“Mrs.—Vivian—you can’t follow him through a wormhole if that’s even what happened.
When his spacecraft encountered the wormhole, his fate was sealed.
Now if he was able to find a way to slip time, to interact with objects in his present timeline without being physically present, then I’d look at the clues he’s already given you—the strongest ones being those notes in your pocket. If it were me, I’d wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I know you’re looking for certainty, but this isn’t an established science and I’m afraid there are no certainties.”
She wanted to scream. If she were being honest with herself, she would admit that ever since she picked up The Mystery of Time, ever since she came across Cal’s writing, she’d been driven by the hope that she still had a shot at a happy ending, however improbable, however hard-won.
She’d been ready to beg and cajole until he would help her, to do whatever it took.
But to hear the man extinguish that hope—to understand how fragile time and space could be—
“What you’re saying is that you don’t think there’s a possibility that Joe could survive a wormhole and come back to me in this timeline as he was?”
The sympathy in his expression made her want to cry.
“I’m sorry, but no. Wormholes—if they even exist—are thought to be unstable.
They’re a rupture in space and time. They’re not navigable in the way that they would have to be navigable in order to bring your husband back to Earth in this timeline.
It just isn’t possible. And for you to somehow travel to him in his timeline—”
Cal shook his head. “Impossible.”
—
Vivian closed the motel room door behind her, her mind racing. Even as she considered going to the nearest library and checking out every single book she could find about space and time travel, she recognized the futility in it.
This was the end of the line.
It was time to accept that Joe wasn’t coming back.
She would probably never know for sure what had happened to her husband.
There would be investigations, and maybe they would yield some answers, but she realized that she would have to content herself with some measure of unknowing, that she could spend her life searching for some justification for what happened to Joe and never be satisfied.
She was stuck, had been stuck for longer than she wanted to admit, considering she’d been feeling this way even before she lost Joe, and now she needed to start moving forward, to navigate how she would survive the unthinkable.
There was at least one thing she could do—for herself and for Joe.
Vivian picked up the phone and called Graham Carlson.