Copyright ©1985 Kate Wilhelm

First published in Omni, May 1985

Judson Rowe stared at the screen where black lines and numbers and symbols chased one another over the green background like football players over Astroturf. The final equation appeared and the dance ended. He groaned. There had been no mistake. He pressed the Print button and continued to gaze dully at the equation that had the beauty and elegance of truth. When the printing was finished, he collected his disks and the printout, turned off the terminal, and stood up, realizing belatedly that he was stiff and hungry, and tired enough to assume that he had not slept for several nights.

Dazed with fatigue he left the laboratory, walked down the silent hall of the Mathematics Building and out into the cold. He stopped abruptly. There was a bare tree breaking up the light from a corner street lamp; no person was in sight. He heard footsteps and turned, saw a watchman approaching.

“How long has that tree been there?” he asked.

“What tree's that?”

“That one!”

The watchman glanced at the tree, at Judson, back to the tree that was being singled out. “Longer than either of us has been around, I'd say.”

“I guess I never noticed it before,” Judson muttered.

“Yeah. When the leaves go, it changes, doesn't it?”

Judson started to ask what month it was, but he bit the question back and said good night instead, and tried not to run to his car. In it he looked at his watch: two-thirty. No wonder the campus was empty. He drove home, looking at everything as if he never had seen it before, the winding campus streets, the intersection that was barren of traffic now, the all-night hamburger stand, empty. He drove without thinking of which streets he wanted, where he was to turn, which house was his. He felt as if he had been away a long time.

When he let himself into his house, he heard the television and followed the sound through the kitchen to the living room where Millie was on the couch covered with an afghan.

“I'm home,” he said staring at her. She was prettier than he remembered. Her hair was turning from gold to a light brown, nicer this way, and her eyes were bluer than he remembered, larger, and now, at least, meaner.

“Me too,” she said, and turned back to the television.

“How's everything?”

“Fine.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Of course not. Last week I told you I was leaving, running away with another man, and you know what you said? ‘That's fine, honey. Whatever you want.’ And you haven't said a real thing to me since. You haven't asked about our daughter, or the lawsuit, or the mortgage payments, or the leak in the bathroom.”

“Good God! What daughter?”

She sighed and stood up. “Have you eaten these last few days? Have you slept?”

“I don't know. I don't remember. Millie, you're kidding me, aren't you?”

“I'm kidding. Scrambled eggs? Are you finished with the new theory? Is that why I'm visible again?”

“Millie, it's ... I have to call the President or someone.”

“Like Chicken Little?”

“But the sky is falling!”

“With or without cheese and onions?”

He followed her into the kitchen; she took his hand and led him to a stool at the counter, pushed him down onto it. When she put a glass of milk before him, he tasted it as if he never had seen anything like it before.

“Time's slowing down, Millie.” She broke an egg into a bowl.

“I couldn't believe it at first. I've checked everything a dozen times. It's slowing down.”

She broke another egg. “There is no such thing as time.” She cracked the third egg. “Did you leave your coat at school?”

He looked down at himself. That's why he had been so cold. “It's slowing down at an accelerating rate and there's nothing we can do about it.”

She stirred the eggs gently. “Time is an abstract concept that we invented in order to talk about change and duration.” She added cheese and onions to the eggs, put butter in the skillet and watched until it started to sizzle, then added the egg mixture. “Time,” she said then, “has no independent existence of its own. Change can happen faster or slower, but there is no such thing as time that can change its own rate of passage.”

“And when it slows down enough,” Judson said glumly, “it's going to stop altogether.”

She put bread in the toaster and got out jam. “We invented time in order to talk about seasons, physical change, growing old and dying.”

The eggs were done at the same time the toast popped. It always amazed him that she knew to the second how long things took to get done. She never even glanced at a clock when she cooked. Instinct, he thought uneasily; it had nothing to do with real time.

She put the food before him. “If there are no events, there is no time,” she continued. “It's inconceivable without events that change, that evolve. It doesn't exist except as a figure of speech. Like time is of the essence. Essence of what? Another figure of speech.”

“With the mainframe I'll be able to predict exactly when it will stop,” he said and began to eat.

“Darling, just tell me one thing. Did you use the square root of minus one to get your results?”

He nodded, his mouth too full to speak.

She smiled, broke off a piece of his toast and nibbled it.

“You shouldn't have waited up,” he said stiffly as soon as he could speak.

“I wanted to. I knew you'd come home eventually, hungry, tired, cold. Besides, I can sleep in tomorrow. Saturday, you know. No classes.” She taught medieval English literature.

“I know that,” he said, and wondered which Saturday, which month. He glanced over his shoulder at the calendar and saw that October was the month displayed.

“The twenty-eighth,” she said kindly. “This is the weekend that we change time. Do we set the clocks back, or forward? I never remember. When you lose an hour,” she mused, “where do you suppose it goes?”

“You don't have to make fun of me,” he said bitterly.

She put her arms around him and kissed his cheek. “I love you,” she said.

* * * *

Icy rains came, then snow, and more ice, then warmer rain that washed it all away. The trees were enveloped in a pale green haze that turned into a dense canopy that filtered the light, turned it green, then golden and red, and once more became bare limbs that broke up the pale illumination of the street lamps.

“You're going to be bored,” Judson said as he settled down next to Millie in the auditorium of the conference center. “Dukweiler's a bore even to me.”

“I wouldn't have missed this for anything.”

“Did you really listen when I gave my paper?”

“You know I did. You talked about epsilon and alpha and omega and there were those infinity signs here and there on the blackboard, and then you multiplied everything by the square root of minus one and the audience applauded. You were magnificent.”

“I've had good comments already. They're going over the figures with everything from hand calculators to the mainframe.”

“I told you not to worry. Of course, they'll take notice.”

Dukweiler was introduced and started to read his paper. He wrote down numbers and symbols on the board as he talked. He was an arid speaker, obviously too nervous even to glance at the audience. His presentation was too fast for Judson to follow and do the equations at the same time.

Judson felt a chill midway through and leaned forward intently. When Dukweiler finished, Judson turned to Millie. “Did you hear that? Do you know what that idiot is claiming?”

“It sounded a lot like your paper. All those epsilons and alphas and omegas, and then he multiplied—”

“I know what he did! The idiot! He's got it all backward!”

“He thinks time is speeding up?”

“I can refute his findings!”

She picked up her knitting again. “I think those men are coming to talk to you. I'll wait here.”

He left her and walked to the rear of the auditorium. A surge of attendees rushed for the podium and another group of people moved slowly in his direction, some speaking in low voices, some frowning in thought, a few working their calculators methodically as they walked. Half and half, he thought with satisfaction, and tried to see who had lined up in the enemy camp. He nodded to Whitcombe who was the first to reach him. As others drew near, they spoke in measured tones, choosing words carefully, and they were solidly on his side; they had been convinced by his proofs, by his rigorous logic. It was an inescapable conclusion, they agreed; time was certainly slowing down and a situation was developing that would prove to be of the utmost gravity.

Finally the two groups began to disperse; it was cocktail time, happy-hour time. The gang at the podium led the way to the bar in a near stampede; the other group followed more leisurely. When Judson freed himself, he looked at Millie, calmly knitting with a slight smile on her face. It was just as well that she did not understand the seriousness of the time problem, he thought as a wave of tenderness passed over him.

“Will we experience anything differently?” she had asked.

“Relative to what?”

“Ah well,” she had said. “Nine months will still seem like nine months.” And just like that she had dismissed one of the great mysteries of the universe.

“Judson,” Whitcombe drawled at his elbow, “we'll be sending you an invitation to speak down at Texas A and M. Have to get together about the best time before all this breaks up.”

Judson nodded. A life's work lay ahead of him. More than one lifetime. He smiled at Whitcombe. “Happy to come down,” he said, “if I can find the time.”