End of an Era

Boundary Layer

The traveler’s diary—the one that purported to tell the story of a trip back to the end of the Mesozoic Era—had to be a fake, of course. It had to be. Oh, it superficially resembled my writing style. In fact, whoever had put it together had obviously read my book Dragons of the North: The Dinosaurs of Canada. In preparing the manuscript for that book, I got sick of all the italics. See, Linnaeus established that biological naming would be in Latin, and non-English words are usually italicized in modern typesetting. Plus, Linnaeus said the genus part of the name should always be capitalized: Tyrannosaurus rex. Since there are no common English names for individual types of dinosaurs, popular books on the subject have slavishly followed this convention so that almost every tenth word is italicized or capitalized, bullying the reader’s eye.

I’d taken some flak from my colleagues for it, but in Dragons of the North I chucked out that convention. The first time I mentioned some Mesozoic critter, I’d use the Linnaean standard, but thereafter I’d treated the name as if it were a common English term, just like “cat” or “dog,” uncapitalized and unitalicized. Well, whoever had cobbled together this bogus diary had copied at least that much of my style.

Although I never used it, my palmtop had come bundled with a grammar-checking program. I had my diary from last year still stored on the Toshiba’s built-in optical wafer, so I called that up alongside the fake traveler’s diary. With each document in a separate window, I let the grammar checker run a stylistic comparison between them. The program produced a dozen charts—including “Flesch-Kincaid grade level,” “average number of words per sentence,” and “average number of sentences per paragraph.” The conclusion was inescapable: both diaries, mine and the supposed time traveler’s, were in almost identical styles.

The grammar checker had a feature that I’d never before found a use for: the ability to output an alphabetized list of all the words in a document. I had it do that for both diaries, then filtered and piped between the two lists until I had a new file containing only the words in the traveler’s diary that did not appear in my own diary from last year. I thought perhaps the forger would have tripped up by using words that weren’t part of my vocabulary.

I scanned down the list. There were a lot of words, including “archaeopteryx” and “hawked,” but almost all were ones I could see myself using. There were one or two—such as “firmament"—that didn’t sound like me at all, but, then again, I did have Roget’s Thesaurus loaded onto my optical drive.

No, it was clear. Without one of those new Japanese AI style replicators, and access to a lot of my writings in a machine-readable form, there’s only one person who could have written this time-traveler’s diary.

Me.

If the diary was genuine, then so likely were the people named in it. And the person who seemed to be in charge of all this nonsense was one Ching-Mei Huang.

I sat at my battered old desk at the ROM—it dated back to Gordon Edmund’s days as curator—and spoke to my desk terminal. “Default search engine,” I said. “Boolean: Huang AND Ching-Mei.”

“Please spell both search terms,” said the computer.

I did so, and my screen instantly filled with references. There were at least three Ching-Mei Huangs in the world: one seemed to be a leading expert on the potato-chip industry. Another was an authority on Sino-American relations. And the third—

The third was clearly my woman: a physicist, judging by the titles of the papers she’d authored, and…

Well, I had to read that one: “Professors Arrested in Campus Melee.” “Show me number seventeen,” I said.

A Canadian Press wire-service story from 18 November 1988 appeared. A Ching-Mei Huang, then a nontenured professor, was one of six faculty members arrested at Dalhousie University in Halifax during a protest over cutbacks in research funding. The article said she’d broken the shin of one of the campus police officers. Feisty woman.

“Back,” I said. The hit list returned to my screen. I kept scanning the results—and then I smiled. Apparently, like me, she’d also written a popular book, something called Time Constraints: The Tau of Physics, co-authored with one G. C. Mackenzie, published by Simon Fraser University Press in 2003.

The link was to the listing on Chapters.ca, which contained a review taken from Quill Quire (a publication I’d always liked, since it had been very kind to my Dragons of the North): “Mackenzie and Huang, both high-energy researchers at Vancouver’s TRIUMF, have put together a dry account of current…”

That was a decade ago. Still, it was worth a shot. I activated my PicturePhone and asked for directory assistance. “Vancouver, please,” I said to the perky computer-generated face that appeared on my screen. “TRIUMF. T-R-I-U-M-F.”

The image recited the phone number while simultaneously displaying it on my screen. The museum didn’t allow us to use the call-completion feature, since it cost an extra seventy-five cents, so I jotted the number down on a Post-it note, then dictated it back into the phone. After two rings, a man with what might have been a Pakistani accent answered. “Good morning; bonjour. TRIUMF.”

“Hello,” I said, surprising myself at how nervous I sounded. “Ching-Mei Huang, please.”

“Dr. Huang is unavailable right now,” he said. “Would you like to leave a message?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, indeed.”

Ching-Mei Huang failed to return the three messages I left for her at TRIUMF, but I finally weaseled her unlisted home number out of somebody who answered the phone late one evening. My palms were sweating as I spoke the string of digits to my phone. Christ, I hadn’t been this nervous since the first time I’d called Tess and asked for a date.

Toronto was 3,300 kilometers from Vancouver; it was a little after ten in the evening my time, which meant it would be just after seven on the west coast. The phone rang three times before the round Bell Canada logo did its usual self-indulgent backflip off the screen. But instead of Dr. Huang’s face, all I got was this graphic:

Then, thinned by what sounded like fear—the distance shouldn’t have affected the quality at all, of course—a voice made its way across the continent to me. “Hello?”

“Hello,” I replied. “May I please speak to Ching-Mei Huang?”

A pause. Finally: “Who’s calling?”

“My name is Brandon Thackeray. I’m with the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.”

“I’m not interested in becoming a member. Good-bye.”

“Wait. I’m not from the membership department. I’m a vertebrate paleontologist.”

“A vert—? How did you get this number?”

“Then you are Dr. Huang?”

“Yes, I am she. How did you get my number?”

I tried to sound jaunty. “It wasn’t easy, believe me.”

“This number is unlisted for a purpose. Please leave me alone.”

I put as much reassuring warmth as I could into my voice. “You certainly keep a low profile,” I said with a laugh.

“That’s no concern of yours.” A pause, while we both tried to assess who should speak next. Finally, quietly, she said, “My phone says you’re calling from area code 905. That’s not Toronto.”

“No, it’s Mississauga, where I live. Just outside of Toronto.”

I heard a sharp exhalation of breath. “And you’re not on a mobile phone, right? So you’re not here in Vancouver?” Her voice brightened slightly, but she still seemed shaken, nervous—hardly the kind of speech I would have thought anyone would have characterized as “precise.” What was it the diary had said? Measured, monotonal, clicking over the consonants like a series of circuit breakers. That description seemed to belong to a completely different person.

“Do you have a PicturePhone, Dr. Huang? Could we switch to visual?”

“No.”

Did that mean, No, I don’t have a PicPhone, or No, I won’t turn on its camera? “Uh, fine,” I said at last. “That’s fine.” Suddenly I didn’t know how to continue. What I wanted to ask her about seemed so incredible, so inconceivable. If this was a practical joke, there’s only one person who could have done it: Klicks, now living in Toronto for his sabbatical. I’d kill him if this wasn’t for real. “I’ve been trying to track you down for some time, Dr. Huang. There’s a matter I’d like to discuss with you.”

She still sounded edgy. “Oh, very well. But please be brief.”

“Of course. Do you happen to know Miles Jordan?”

“I knew a Susan Jordan once.”

“No, that wouldn’t be any relation of his. Miles is another paleontologist. He’s with the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drum-heller, Alberta.”

“A great museum,” she said absently. “But what has this got to do with me?”

“Does the word ‘stasis’ mean anything to you?”

“It’s Greek for standstill. What do I win?”

“And that’s all it means to you?”

“Mr. Thackeray, I value my privacy greatly. I don’t wish to seem rude, but I am uncomfortable on the phone.”

I mustered my courage. “All right, Dr. Huang. I put it to you: are you, or were you, doing experiments involving the cessation of the passage of time—a process you referred to as stasis?”

“Where did you get that notion?”

“Please, it’s very important that I know.”

She was silent for several seconds. “Well, yes,” she said at last, “I guess ‘stasis’ would have been a good name for it, although I never called it that. Experiments? Hardly. I came up with a few interesting equations, but that was before—that was a long time ago.”

“So stasis is possible. Tell me: did your research give any indication that—that time travel would be a practical consequence of your equations?”

For the first time, the voice at the other end of the line had real strength. “I see now, Mr.—Thackeray, did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Thackeray, you are a crackpot. Good-bye.”

“No, please. I’m dead seri—”

Dial tone. I told the phone to redial, but the number in Vancouver just rang and rang and rang.