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GENERATION GAP


Page 2 of 4

by Stanley Schmidt

This story originally appeared in Artemis Magazine Issue #1, Spring 2000, and is copyright 1999 by Stanley Schmidt, all rights reserved. This story may not be reprinted or republished without the express written permission of the author.
It is currently on the Hugo Award ballot for Best Novelette of 2000.


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Robert found himself fighting back tears. Not only had she really been what he'd been looking for, but she had been as interested in him as he in her. It could have been -- if they hadn't both been too shy and stupid and awkward to say so.

But none of that mattered now. It was water over the dam. And in the real now, not the might-have-been, he had a life to get on with.

So he squeezed the incipient emotions out, put Rachel's box back together, and returned to sorting through his closet so he could get back to Gloree and work. Five minutes later he came to the second bombshell: a sealed envelope addressed in his own hand.

To Rob Lerman
CONFIDENTIAL AND URGENT
To Be Opened On My 35th Birthday

A bit late for that now, he thought with amusement, since he was already past his forty-first -- but then, he'd long since forgotten he'd written it. He could only guess at what he'd written that he'd thought might interest him 20 or 30 years later. Well, he thought, slitting the envelope, let's see what the kid has to say . . .

The opening grabbed him and dragged him back to the past with unexpected force.

Dear Rob,

I don't know if you'll remember writing this, but please read it carefully. I'm writing because of a painful rift that's opened up between me and Mom and Dad lately. I guess it's that "generation gap" we're always hearing about. But I think I've figured out why generation gaps happen. . .

Sure you have, Robert thought -- but he kept reading, with unexpectedly close attention to every word.

. . . when you were my age. I trust by now you're well on your way to a Nobel prize, are happily married to the right woman (you know who!), have those kids, and are doing a better job with them than "our" parents did with "us." Even so, I want to give you some advice, for your own good.

Something happens to people, Rob; don't let it happen to you. Mom and Dad have forgotten what it's like to dream of making a better life instead of just accepting the one they inherited. They've forgotten that young love can be a strong, thoughtful thing, instead of trivial infatuation. They joke so much about "puppy love" that I'm afraid to let them suspect I care about somebody who might not care about me. They live through their kids instead of having interests of their own, helping their kids do the same, and sharing their different kinds of enjoyment. So when they lose their kids, whether to a stupid war or by drifting apart, they don't have much left. I see that happening already: it scares me to think how little will be left by the time you read this. If you have kids, remember they're people. Remember how you felt at their ages -- but keep a life of your own, too.

Perhaps worst of all, Mom and Dad have lost their senses of humor. They've forgotten how to have fun -- and that's tragic.

I still don't understand how these things happen, Rob, but be warned that they can. Watch out for the danger signs. Please don't let them happen to you. Try to remember what you knew when you were young.

The Ghost of Robert Past

That one did move him to tears. Reading it, he did remember how young Robby had felt when he wrote it. He could see a fair measure of truth and even wisdom in it -- and he could see more "danger signs" than he liked to admit in his present life.

And yet. . . .

OK, young whippersnapper, he thought, you've told me a thing or two that I needed to hear. But I've got a thing or two I could tell you, too. How I wish I could answer you, tell you all I've been through and all I've learned since then!

But of course that's impossible.


Or is it? he found himself thinking as he drove home two days later.

Robert had been glad to see Mom again, but even gladder to get away from the old house. That place was haunted, as surely as if it had been crawling with ectoplasmic ghosts!

As he put distance between it and him, the world seemed to return to normal -- except that a long drive alone provides a lot of opportunity for a mind to ponder what's been dumped into it lately. Part of that, of course, included the unnerving letters from himself and from Rachel, and the unhealthy speculations they'd stirred up about what might have been. But the theme he kept coming back to was his fleeting wish that he could answer young Robby's letter.

Obviously, he'd thought at the time, that was quite impossible, a mere idle fantasy. But now, headed back toward work, his thoughts returned to the crazily impractical research Pereira wanted to do. Was it really as crazily impractical as he'd been assuming?

Hadn't Pereira said something about its implying the possibility of motion in time as well as space?

He was going to have to have a serious talk with that man.


Antonio Joćo Pereira looked like a carefully assembled blend of half a dozen races, which was hardly surprising for a Brazilian: broad nose, high cheekbones, straight brown hair with a hint of red in it and combed straight back. He also looked a little uncomfortable in Robert's guest chair, which was how Robert preferred it. He was supposed to be in control here, and that would happen more easily here in his big executive office than in Pereira's lab.

"I want to make it clear at the outset," Robert said carefully, looking the physicist right in the eye, "that I'm not saying we're going to pursue this thing of yours. You're well aware of my reservations about it. But I am willing to talk about it just a bit more, just on the off chance that we could find a way to do some part of it. Your idea, in layman's language, is to create a chamber in which you can force the evolution of a confined quantum system so that the wave functions peak at a desired point in spacetime?"

"Yes, sir," said Pereira, in a soft voice that caressed English into something vaguely resembling his native Portuguese. "Think of it as loading the dice by the application of carefully selected fields to the system in the chamber. The practical result -- and I emphasize practical -- is to cause the system you put in the box to appear whenever and wherever you wish it to. In effect, it offers the possibility of a completely new kind of space travel, potentially much better than rockets. If we can reduce this to practice, it will be more like an aimable matter transmitter -- with no need for a receiver. And since everything is a quantum system, in principle the transmitter could move whatever we want to. It could make rocketry obsolete, and give us the stars directly."

Robert frowned hard. "But will it work? You've admitted it would cost a bundle to set up even your prototype, and I can't afford to gamble that unless the odds are quite favorable. I've read some of the thinking other physicists have done along these lines, and they all seem to stress that what they're describing is simply a thought experiment, beyond the reach of present technology."

"They're wrong," Pereira said matter-of-factly. "They haven't pursued their thoughts far enough. Let me remind you, Mr. Lerman, that just a few years ago essentially no physicists talked seriously about the possibility of any form of teleportation, time travel, or faster-than-light travel. Now the journals are full of those things. Just 'thought experiments,' as you say, but nonetheless serious discussions of real possibilities that might someday be practical.

"The remarkable thing is that none of those proposals even depend on radically new physics. They're new possibilities that have been implicit all along in theories that we've had for decades. I've simply gone a little farther down one such path than anyone else. If you get me the funding, I can reduce it to practice. That will make Rocketech the undisputed leader in space, so far ahead of everyone else that they'll never catch up except by buying a ride on our technology."

Put that way, it sounded almost irresistible. It sounded like the sort of breakthrough that Robert, back when he was Robby, had dreamed of someday announcing to a CEO from the other side of the desk. The credit he could take by supporting it from this side could be almost as satisfying, but he had to be very careful. He hadn't reached this position by succumbing easily to glowing speeches. He would have to subject the hard details of Pereira's proposal to review by his peers -- or as close to his peers as they could come up with. But if their report was favorable, it just might be a good enough bet for him to back without unduly jeopardizing his job. "So what would you need?" he asked.

"A place for the enclosure and the associated lab equipment. Preferably not too close to anything else. Funds to build all that--"

"How big?" Robert interrupted. "Would it fit in an ordinary house?"

"That would be about the minimum," said Pereira. "The actual size would depend on how big an object we wanted to move. Eventually, for practical applications, we'd need something bigger. But for a proof of principle, with a very small test object. . . yes, I think, that would do."

"I see." Robert leaned back in his leather swivel chair. "Well, Pereira, let me tell you how it looks to me. I do have some discretionary funds that I can use for 'blue sky' research. I must confess this has always seemed a bit too blue sky to me, and I'm still a little leery of it. But if a review panel -- don't worry, it will all be in house -- thinks it has a fighting chance, I'll agree that the potential rewards seem worth a bit of a gamble. Give me a package I can show them, and we may -- just may -- give you a chance at that proof of principle."

Pereira beamed. "You'll have it this afternoon, sir, and you won't regret it. Thank you, Mr. Lerman!"

"Don't thank me yet," Robert cautioned. Pereira was almost to the door before Robert worked up the nerve to add offhandedly, "Did I understand you to say that your gizmo might move things in time as well as space?"

Pereira turned around as if looking for a trap, then grinned. "As a matter of fact, it does. I didn't want to stress that unless you brought it up. If anything sounds 'blue sky'. . ."

"I won't mention it to the Board," Robert promised. "Out of curiosity, though, what kinds of things could it move in time? People?"

"Oh, I don't think so," said Pereira. "Certainly not the little prototype I'm asking to build. Maybe never, though it would be rash to say that. We might be able to handle small objects."

"Like this?" Robert waved a Federal Express package from his desk.

"Well, maybe. It's a long shot, but it's really too early to tell."

"Yes, of course. That's not our main goal anyway." Officially. "Well, thanks for your time, Pereira. You give me a quick answer, and I'll try to give you a quick answer. Please close the door on your way out."

As soon as Pereira was gone, Robert called his mother in her new apartment. "I may have good news for you," he said after the obligatory pleasantries. "You haven't sold the house yet, have you? Well, don't. Put it on hold for a few days. I may have a buyer for you. Me."


It took a few years to get the prototype ready to test, but they were invigorating years -- the best Robert had spent in a long time. Pereira's proposal sailed past the review panel (four company physicists, all sworn to secrecy) with surprising ease. Since the blue sky fund would cover most of it, at least at the beginning, Robert didn't have to tell the Board much about it. And then it was underway.

It felt wonderful, after years of bidding on trivial subcontracts for a lethargic and unimaginative space program, to be working on something with mind-stretching potential. Not having to report every detail to a committee, and even the risk of failure with disastrous consequences, added spice and made it still better. Robert was soon having more fun with his job than he'd ever had before, and that increased enjoyment spilled over into all aspects of his life.

Even so, through the daily exasperations and occasional minor triumphs, he never forgot his personal reason for pushing this project. From time to time he would jot himself a note, in a high-security file on his office hard disk, about what he was going to say in his letter. He wanted to get it just right, and it became increasingly clear that he was going to have to do it within strict wordage limits.

Putting the lab in his family's old house helped -- it reduced the need for both energy and precision in the spatial part of a transmission -- but the fact remained that temporal translations were going to be a lot more demanding than spatial ones. So when they eventually tried what he privately thought of as The Big One, he was going to have to put whatever he said into a very small, light package. Floppy disks were no good; young Robby would have no way to recognize, much less read them. Microfiche could carry a lot of message -- far more than Robert wanted to send -- but even that required special equipment that Robby might or might not bother to track down. So Robert was leaning toward simply typing what he could on an ordinary aerogramme -- one of those flimsy blue sheets that folded up to form its own envelope for airmail. With a 15-pitch typewriter, or one of the smaller fonts on his printer, that would be good for 1300 words or so.

Which 1300 words to type was the crucial question, but one he still had time to consider. To provide input to his subconscious, he occasionally read over some of the papers he'd dug out of the closet of his past -- including the clipping that detailed Rachel's accident, which Mom had insisted on digging up and giving to him before he left.

As the time drew nigh, and the first small spatial tests succeeded, Robert found himself thinking more and more about just what he was hoping to accomplish. He had convinced himself that the project actually had enough potential for space applications to maybe justify it to the Board and the stockholders; but he'd only become convinced after seeing the potential for answering Robby's letter. At times he worried that it was becoming an obsession. And he often wondered, What if I do get a message back to him? Just what will that accomplish?

When he tried to get Pereira's thoughts on the subject, he did it circumspectly, couching his questions in hypothetical terms. "So," he said casually one day over lunch, "suppose somebody sent a message back to somebody at an earlier time? What effect would it have on the present?"

Pereira shrugged, chewing the question as he chewed his asparagus. "We're really not sure," he said finally. "There are a number of possible interpretations of the formalism of quantum mechanics, and people still think of new ones from time to time. Personally, I lean toward the 'many worlds' model. At a particular point in time, there are two possibilities for the next instant. The guy gets a message from the future, or he doesn't. Each of those becomes a new branch of the original world-line, growing a whole new future."

"But which one's real?"

"Each of them is -- to the people who live in it. They're two separate universes existing and evolving side by side -- but not parallel, because they're diverging from a common origin."

Robert made a low whistle. "That's awesome, to think that our simple little experiment could create a whole new universe."

"Happens all the time," said Pereira. "Every time anybody or anything makes a choice. Take that guy who gets the message from the future. Does he do anything about it? If he tosses it and forgets it, that gives you one future. If he does what it says, that's another. If he thinks its advice is wrong and does something different, that's still another. They're all there, history branching and rebranching."

Robert had read things like that before, but he still found the answer vaguely unsatisfying. "So you're saying that it has no effect on the present the message was sent from, but just creates others that somehow exist alongside it but out of touch?"

"Maybe -- if that version of the many-worlds model happens to be right. Of course, it may not be. Maybe one of the other models is closer to reality -- or maybe the truth is some new one that nobody's even thought of yet. I can't even rule out the possibility that it would act like some kind of iterative process, where throwing a monkey wrench back into the past just changes the initial conditions and runs off a new version of the same future. But that one doesn't seem very likely to me. Of course, that could just be personal bias -- because that one would mean we physicists would have a lot more work to do, rebuilding our fundamental conceptual models." He looked thoughtful, then grinned. "That might not be so bad, at that. It ought to mean lots of employment opportunities!"

"If," said Robert, "anybody in that future thought that work was worth paying for." He didn't mean to be nasty, but Pereira's answer wasn't the one he'd hoped to hear. He could see now that an influential part of his mind was hoping that a letter to his younger self, suggesting actions that looked better in hindsight, might somehow change his present circumstances to ones more like his original goals. Circumstances, for instance, in which he, not Pereira, was the one doing the real physics that might lead to a Nobel and the stars.

Okay, it was a long shot -- but even Pereira wasn't ruling it out. Robert would try not to get his hopes up, but he was more determined than ever to go through with the experiment.


Four months after that conversation, it was almost ready to go. Robert went to a stationery store, bought a package of aerogrammes, and rented a small electronic typewriter with a 15-pitch daisy wheel. He wrote the letter in his den, at home, when Gloree and the kids were out -- because some of the things in it could hurt them if they read it, and he didn't want that. He read it over once, then sealed it securely, stuck it in his jacket pocket, and went off to the lab.

He patiently endured a good deal of mild-mannered ribbing there. Everyone knew by now that he had insisted on providing the specimen for transmission, and when the technicians saw that it was an envelope addressed to a name suspiciously like his own, they were dying to know what it said. He fended off their requests gracefully but firmly. "Never mind what it says," he told them. "Just keep an eye on me afterward. If it can change the present, the results should affect me more than anybody else. So maybe you'll be able to tell if I've changed."

Not that he expected any such thing. The more he thought about it, the harder he found it to believe that dropping a new element into his past could do anything to the subsequent years he'd already lived. Nonetheless, he felt just a twinge as he watched the final preparations for the test. What if it could -- and the new life it created for him was one that had already ended before this moment?

Fortunately he didn't have time to dwell on it. Pereira had prepared his crews well. The countdown went off without a hitch, and the crucial instant was remarkably anticlimactic. Nothing obvious even happened outside the chamber.

But when the clock said enough time had elapsed, and Pereira was satisfied with several instrument readings, they reopened the chamber -- and found it empty.


III. 1969

Robby's answer came on a particularly fine day in the spring of his senior year. Even though the war was still on and looming closer and more personal than ever, Robby felt good when he came home from school that bright, flower-scented afternoon. School was going well; he had acceptances to two good colleges and two more pending; and he was no longer cowering passively before the menaces he saw around him. The war had grown increasingly controversial, dividing the country sharply between its supporters and its opponents. But Robby no longer felt like a lone voice whispering in the wilderness; now he often met with friends to demonstrate against the ongoing evil. There was a certain exhilaration in the mere fact of having taken a stand and gone forth publicly to defend it.

That afternoon he arrived home in high spirits and opened the door quickly, planning to change into something more comfortable and spend some time outside -- maybe take a walk down by the stream, where the willows had already leafed out nicely. But the door didn't open quite as quickly as expected, and the pile of mail it pushed across the carpet reminded him that Mom had gone shopping and must not be back yet. He looked quickly through it for more college acceptances or scholarship offers, then checked the door slot to make sure nothing was stuck there. Finding nothing of personal interest, he dumped the whole stack on Dad's desk and ran upstairs to change.

When he came back down, twenty minutes later, he saw the thin blue envelope in the middle of the living room floor.

He frowned; he was sure he'd picked up all the mail before. He picked it up and frowned even more. It was an aerogramme -- something he seldom saw. It was addressed to him, and it had no return address. It did have a stamp; but it wasn't canceled, the postage was ridiculously high, and the picture on it looked like some sort of spacecraft.

What was this thing? A joke?

Sunshine and willows forgotten, he flopped down on the couch and used his pocket knife to open the letter. Then he began to read.


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