October the First Is Too Late

Chapter Seven: Adagio

We were taken to what was obviously the headquarters of some intelligence unit. Men in uniform, men in civilian clothes, were walking around in a strained, taut way. The American officers were quickly separated from the rest of us. In fact only John and myself and the Australian crew were in civvies. We were shown into rough sleeping quarters. John took this without comment. With a grin he said to me, ‘They’ll soon change their tune.’

The following morning, after an unappetizing breakfast, two officers came looking for John. They asked him to follow them, or more politely to go with them. John insisted I should go along too. They were doubtful, but once he had told them I knew as much about the business as he did—a gross exaggeration—they made no further objections. We were taken to a waiting car. In the front, beside the chauffeur, was a fellow whom I took to be a plain-clothes officer of some species or other.

The car headed out into west London. It kept on into the country for an hour or thereabouts. At last we turned in at the gates of a pretty flossy place. The house was vaguely familiar.

‘Chequers,’ grinned John. ‘I told you they’d change their tune.’

We were received courteously by the Prime Minister himself. There were a number of other guests, quite a mob of them. The Prime Minister introduced us round. There was the Foreign Secretary, the Chancellor, the Minister of Defence, the Chief of Staff, and about half a dozen other high-ranking service officers. They were drinking sherry. A glass of the stuff was pressed into our hands.

John explained my presence by saying I had been making a complete record of everything that had happened. This seemed to please everybody, as if a record is equivalent to an explanation. I also noticed how easy it is for a scribe to get himself into even the most intimate conference. It comes I supposed from the laziness to which all flesh is prey. I also noticed the heavy preponderance of the military. It struck me wryly that whenever the unusual happens the stock of the military always seems to rise.

Before lunch John gave an excellent and precise account of what had happened in California, in Hawaii, and on the flight back across America. His narrative was put together so concisely and with such logical consistency that his audience listened without comment or question until it was finished. Then everybody waited for the Prime Minister to comment:

‘Obviously you’ve been thinking of explanations for all this. You’ve given us the facts. But what do they mean?’

‘It’s too early to say, sir. It’s common dictum I believe among lawyers that one must wait for all the evidence to be in before forming an opinion. I’ve been waiting for all the facts. You must have an awful lot of things we don’t know anything about.’

‘We’ve got plenty of facts, but I don’t mind telling you we haven’t the slightest idea what they mean. You’ve given us a pretty succinct account of the American situation. Here’s what’s happened to us. As far as we can make out everything is quite normal in Britain. From the American mainland we’ve had absolutely nothing, which doesn’t surprise me in view of what you’ve just said. From Europe too there’s been a blackout except in the last few hours.’

‘When did the blackout start?’

‘Oh, nearly two days ago.’

‘At 10.37 p.m.’

One of the officers had consulted a notebook. I felt there must be something wrong here. John was looking puzzled:

‘That’s only about thirty-six hours. It happened four days ago with us.’

It was their turn to look surprised.

‘You mean you lost contact with the American mainland four days ago?’ asked the Chancellor.

We both affirmed that this was so.

‘Very strange, very strange.’

The Prime Minister was drumming his fingertips on the table.

John went on, ‘That’s another interesting fact. You were talking about Europe, what’s going on there?’

‘We don’t know.’ This from the Minister of Defence.

‘You mean it’s just as blank as the American mainland?’

‘No, it isn’t. We’ve been getting wireless messages but they’re strange in every conceivable respect.’

‘Why haven’t you sent planes over?’ I broke in.

The Prime Minister looked at me for a few seconds. I saw his eyes were dark and troubled. ‘Of course we sent planes over. They never returned.’

On this new and sombre note we sat down to lunch. A short menu had been typed. I was engrossed in my own thoughts, hardly listening to the discussion, significant as it might be. Idly I looked at the menu. It was dated September the 19th. Of course it must be a mistake. I waited until there was a lull in the talk and then asked, feeling very foolish, whether the date on the menu was right. The triviality of the question riveted everybody’s attention. A few seconds went by in which I had the impression they were all ticking off the days in their minds. Then someone said, ‘I think it’s right.’ Another added, ‘Of course it’s right.’ The Prime Minister looked at me and asked, simply, ‘Why?’

‘Because according to my reckoning it should be somewhere in the middle of August. I think the 13th, certainly within a day or two of that. What’s your reckoning, John?’

‘Somewhere about that, within a day or two. I’ve been so heavily occupied that I’ve really lost precise contact. Yet there isn’t the slightest doubt we’re still in August. At least Dick and I are in August.’

At this very dramatic point the girl serving the food whispered something to the Prime Minister. He nodded and she went away. A moment later a young lieutenant in uniform appeared. He went to the Chief of Staff, stood behind his chair as if to serve some dish, saluted and handed him an envelope. The Chief of Staff turned and said, ‘Thank you. You can wait outside.’

Everybody watched the envelope being slit open very precisely with a knife. I would have ripped it open with thumb and finger myself. We watched the Chief of Staff reading with growing astonishment. Then he got up and took the papers to the Prime Minister. He stood behind the Prime Minister’s chair, waiting for them to be read through. Then the Prime Minister said:

‘It’s jibberish. Here’s a sample:

‘Where the devil did this stuff come from?’

The Chief of Staff handed the Prime Minister another sheet. The Prime Minister went on:

‘Apparently a man in uniform approached the Dover dock authorities this morning. He was in a distraught frame of mind. He insisted on being provided with transport to take him to London, to the War Office. Police took him in custody and found this letter on him. That all?’

‘That’s all I have here.’

‘Why the hell should we be bothered by some lunatic? There must be thousands of them around just at the moment.’

This point of view commended itself to me for every crackpot in the country would now be at work. I could see the ranters in Hyde Park predicting the end of the world.

‘There’s something very familiar about that passage,’ said the Minister of Defence in a puzzled voice.

‘Yes,’ nodded the Chief of Staff, ‘and I think I know where it comes from.’ He turned to the Prime Minister, ‘If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’d like to take a look in the library.’

We all followed him to the library. He looked at the shelves, here and there, for a while. Then with a satisfied grunt he pulled out a volume. He flicked through the pages until at last he came to what he wanted.

‘Here it is, the exact passage. You can see for yourselves.’

He held the book down on the table. It was indeed there, exactly as I remembered the Prime Minister reading out a few moments before. It was part of a letter, the rest of which I supposed the Prime Minister hadn’t bothered with. Then I noticed the volume was an official war history.

‘It’s part of a letter from Sir Douglas Haig to Sir William Robertson, written September 27th, 1917.’

Coffee was served in the library. We sipped it silently until John said:

‘I wouldn’t take this as a hoax.’

‘How would you take it?’ asked the Prime Minister.

‘That’s another matter. What I mean is our natural impulse is to take it as a hoax because that’s the way we’d like to see it.’

‘You’re not suggesting we should take it literally?’

‘I think we ought to know more about it. What about the man they got the letter from? You say he was dressed in uniform. What was the uniform? Surely the people in Dover can tell us. And where did he come from? Did he come from the sea? Why not find out before we get into an argument?’

The Chief of Staff went away. He came back half an hour later, his face ashen grey.

‘The man was dressed in a sergeant’s uniform, exactly as he would be in 1917. He did come from the sea. They found the boat. There were more than a hundred other passengers. They’re all dressed in the uniforms of 1917, or rather they were before they were moved en bloc to the local mental hospital. Every one of them swears we are in the year 1917.’

John banged his hands together for a few seconds, ‘That’s what I expected was going to happen. On a small scale it’s the only explanation that makes sense. There’s one thing I’d like to find out before coming to the point though.’

There was a phone in the library. In a bemused state of mind I heard John’s voice—apparently involved in a technical discussion. After the call was finished, he said:

‘Yes, there’s been a lot of Earth movement here too, not much below subjective threshold. The noise level is much higher than it was in Hawaii. Normally this is one of the quietest parts of the Earth.’

‘What do you get out of that?’

‘Nothing in itself. But that was the way it had to be for consistency. I think I know now what has happened, although I haven’t the slightest idea of how or why. In fact it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’

We were leaning forward in our chairs. John went on:

‘I’ll put it as crudely as I can. We’ve got ourselves into some kind of time-machine. Remember the old Wells story?’

The Chancellor smiled wryly, ‘You mean about the fellow who invented a black box in which you could travel either forwards or backwards in time?’

‘That’s right, a remarkable black box it was. But our time-machine is much more singular. It’s not just a case of our being precipitated into other moments of time. And I don’t think anybody else has been either. I think everybody, all over the Earth, will have the impression they’re living quite normally in the present, as they understand the present. Nobody has noticed any sudden shift of time and nobody will do so, except in the way Dick here did while we were at lunch.’

The Prime Minister pulled a face and threw out his arms in a wide gesture, ‘Let’s try to see through a glass a little less darkly. Is there any reality in the discrepancy of a month, or are you under some hallucination, or are we under an hallucination?’

‘Neither. We’re both right. There is no inconsistency in its being September 19th here in Britain, and the year being 1966. And there would have been no inconsistency to us in the time being the middle of August if we had stayed in Hawaii. It was only when we got together that the discrepancy came out.’

This touched them all off into animated comment. The Chancellor’s voice stood out above the rest, ‘You mean there are different times in different places on the Earth?’

‘That’s right. That’s the way it must be. In Hawaii it is the middle of August 1966, in Britain it is September 19th, 1966, on the American mainland I would guess it is somewhere before the year 1750, in France it is the end of September 1917.’

This was enough for the Prime Minister. ‘If there’s any possibility you’re right we’ve got a lot of things to do, and without delay. I’m going to suggest we meet back here in four hours, shall we say?’ There were nods around the room. Without further ado the Chief of Staff got up and went out. He was followed by the other officers. It was clear the Chief of Staff, the Chancellor, and the Minister of Defence, also felt the need for action, so John and I went out into the garden. After pacing around for a while we decided to go for a walk.

‘I see everything fits together, that way. But every instinct, every emotion I’ve got, rebels against it,’ I said with some warmth as we strode out along a country lane.

‘Because, like all of us in our daily lives, you’re stuck with a grotesque and absurd illusion.’

‘How’s that?’

‘The idea of time as an ever-rolling stream. The thing which is supposed to bear all its sons away. There’s one thing quite certain in this business: the idea of time as a steady progression from past to future is wrong. I know very well we feel this way about it subjectively. But we’re the victims of a confidence trick. If there’s one thing we can be sure about in physics it is that all times exist with equal reality. If you consider the motion of the Earth around the Sun, it is a spiral in four dimensional space-time. There’s absolutely no question of singling out a special point on the spiral and saying that particular point is the present position of the Earth. Not so far as physics is concerned.’

‘But there certainly is such a thing as the present. Without the ideas of the past, the present, and the future we could make no sense at all out of life. If you were aware of your whole life at once it would be like playing a sonata simply by pushing down all the notes on the keyboard. The essential thing about a sonata is the notes are played in turn, not all at once.’

‘I’m not really trying to say the present is without validity. Rather that it can’t have any validity in physics.’

‘Then physics isn’t everything? A big admission for a physicist, isn’t it?’

‘Remember the night we were out walking, back in Hawaii? I said then there were parts of our experience which simply defied physical law. I can develop those ideas a lot further. In a way I’d sooner get it off my chest now, rather than later. It sounds too crazy to put before a lot of people. Yet I’m sure something along these lines must be right. I’m going to put it in terms of a parable. Suppose you have a lot of pigeon holes, numbered in sequence, one, two, and so on… up to thousands and millions, and millions of millions if you like. In fact the sequence can be infinite both ways, if you prefer.’

I said that I didn’t mind. John went on, ‘All right, let’s come now to the contents of the pigeon holes. Suppose you choose one of them, say the 137th. You find in it a story, as you might find one of those little slips of paper in a Christmas cracker. But you also find statements about the stories you’ll find in other pigeon holes. You decide to check up on whether these statements about the stories in the other pigeon holes are right or not. To your surprise you find the statements made about earlier pigeon holes, the 136th, the 135th, and so on, are substantially correct. But when you compare with the pigeon holes on the other side, the 138th, the 139th,… you find things aren’t so good. You find a lot of contradictions and discrepancies. This turns out to be the same wherever you happen to look, in every pigeon hole. The statements made about pigeon holes on one side are always pretty good, those made about pigeon holes on the other side are at best diffuse and at worst just plain wrong. Now let’s translate this parable into the time problem. We’ll call the particular pigeon hole, the one you happen to be examining, the present. The earlier pigeon holes, the ones for which you find substantially correct statements, are what we will call the past. The later pigeon holes, the ones for which there isn’t too much in the way of correct statements, we call the future. Let me go on a bit further. What I want to suggest is that the actual world is very much like this. Instead of pigeon holes we talk about states.’

‘I understand what you’re saying. You have a division into a number of states. Choice of any one of them constitutes the present. My problem is, who decides which pigeon hole to look in, the one that constitutes the present?’

‘If I could answer that question I’d be a good half-way towards solving everything. Before I say anything about it let me ask you a question. Suppose that in each of these states your own consciousness is included. As soon as a particular state is chosen, as soon as an imaginary office worker takes a look at the contents of a particular pigeon hole, you have the subjective consciousness of a particular moment, of what you call the present. Think of the clerk in an office taking a look, first at the contents of one pigeon hole, then at the contents of another. Suppose he does this, not in sequence, but in any old order. What is the effect on your subjective consciousness? So far as the clerk himself is concerned, he’s jumping about all over the place among the pigeon holes. So your consciousness jumps all over the place. But the strange thing is that your subjective impression is quite different. You have the impression of time as an ever-rolling stream.’

We walked on for a while. I saw that if the contents of a pigeon hole could never be modified then John was right. It would be possible for his clerk to look into a particular pigeon hole a dozen times or more and you’d never know about it. All you could be aware of, on his idea, was the contents of a pigeon hole, not when or how it was sampled. But there was one thing that bothered me:

‘Doesn’t the idea of a sequence of choices on the part of your clerk itself imply the flow of time? If it does, the argument gets you nowhere.’

‘I’m sure it does not. A sequence is a logical concept in which time doesn’t really enter at all.’

I saw in a general sort of way what he meant. Yet I was troubled. ‘But if you have a rule that requires you to pass from one pigeon hole to the next, like passing from one number to the next, isn’t it really exactly the same as a smooth flow of time?’

‘If the rule were the one you say, yes certainly. But you could have rules that didn’t require the next number to be the succeeding pigeon hole. Look, suppose we do it this way. We could choose number 1, then number 100, then number 2, then number 99, and so on until we’ve had every pigeon hole from 1 to 100. Then we could do the same thing from 101 to 200. That would be a different kind of rule. In fact there are infinitely many ways in which you can lay down rules, if the sequence itself is infinite. Any particular rule establishes what we call a correspondence between the pigeon holes and the choices. If every pigeon hole is chosen exactly once we have what mathematicians call a one-one correspondence. If every pigeon hole is chosen many times we have a one-many correspondence. The crux of my argument is that you get exactly the same subjective experience whatever the correspondence you choose. It doesn’t matter what order you take the pigeon holes, it doesn’t matter if you choose some or all of them a million times, you’d never know anything different from the simple sequential order. All you can know is the original contents of the pigeon holes themselves.’

‘So really the choices could be an incredible hotch-potch. You could have youth and old age interlaced with each other and you’d never know?’

‘Not only that, but you could experience your youth a million times over and you’d never know. If the clerk were to put a note in a pigeon hole whenever he used it, then of course you could know you’d had a certain experience before. But as long as he leaves no note you can never know.’

‘I suppose so. Where have we got to now?’

‘Quite a way. We’ve got our sequence of pigeon holes, that’s the physical world. We don’t think of one pigeon hole as having any more significance than another, which agrees with what I said before. We don’t think of one particular state of the Earth as having any more significance than any other state of the Earth. We’ve completely eliminated the bogus idea of a steady flow of time. Our consciousness corresponds to just where the light falls, as it dances about among the pigeon holes. It lights up first one, then another, in some sequence that is quite irrelevant.

‘Now let’s come to the hard part. What is this light? I’m no longer talking in terms of a clerk in an office, because I don’t want to get bogged down in human images. All our pigeon holes are in darkness except where the spot of light falls. What that light consists of, where it comes from, we know nothing. It lies outside our present-day physics.

‘You remember I told you that it’s possible to defy our own present-day physical laws and still to make a clear gain in our assessment of the world. You remember the radioactive nuclei with the counters surrounding them? We wanted to know whether or not in a certain period of time a nucleus had undergone decay. I said there was only one way to find out. By looking. In other words by using the spot of light in our pigeon hole. My strong hunch is that it’s the spot of light that permits decisions which lie outside the laws of physics. This is why I’m so sure something else must be involved. It doesn’t need to be anything mystical. It may be subject to precise description, to law and order, the same as in our ordinary physics. It may only be mysterious because we don’t understand it.’

‘There’s certainly a lot of things I don’t understand. This light of yours, or whatever you like to call it, how does it decide that you are you and I am me?’

‘That could be another illusion. Look, along one wall of our office we have one complete set of pigeon holes, all in their nice tidy sequence. Along another wall we have another set of pigeon holes. Two completely different sets. But there is only one light. It dances about in both sets of pigeon holes. Wherever it happens to be, there is the phenomenon of consciousness. One set of pigeon holes is what you call you, the other is what I call me. It would be possible to experience both and never know it. It would be possible to follow the little patch of light wherever it went. There could be only one consciousness, although there must certainly be more than one set of pigeon holes.’

I found this a staggering idea. ‘If you’re right it would be possible to be a million people and never know it.’

‘It would be possible to be much more than that. It would be possible to be every creature on every system of planets, throughout the universe. My point is that for every so-called different creature, for every different person, you need a separate set of pigeon holes. But the consciousness could be the same. There could even be completely different universes. Go back to my decaying nucleus. Hook up a bomb which explodes according to whether you have decay of a nucleus or not. Make the bomb so big that it becomes a doomsday machine. Let it be capable—if exploded—of wiping out all life on the Earth. Let the whole thing go for the critical few seconds, you remember we were considering whether a nucleus would decay in a particular ten seconds? Do we all survive or don’t we?

‘My guess is that inevitably we appear to survive, because there is a division, the world divides into two, into two completely disparate stacks of pigeon holes. In one, a nucleus undergoes decay, explodes the bomb, and wipes us out. But the pigeon holes in that case never contain anything further about life on the Earth. So although those pigeon holes might be activated, there could never be any awareness that an explosion had taken place. In the other block, the Earth would be safe, our lives would continue—to put it in the usual phrase. Whenever the spotlight of consciousness hit those pigeon holes we should be aware of the Earth and we should decide the bomb had not exploded.’

We walked on and on. There were weird implications here. ‘You speak about completely different worlds, different universes. Do you think there was a world in which everything went normally? I know I’m not using words perhaps in the way you’d like me to, but I think you can get the idea. Was there a world in which none of these queer things happened?’

‘I don’t have any doubt about it. There was certainly a world in which, on September 27th, the men in the trenches in Flanders had Lloyd George as their Prime Minister. We know what happened in that world. It remains to be seen what will happen in this one.’

I thought about this for a moment and then burst out, ‘You don’t mean to say those men out there are going through the same experiences that men actually went through in 1917? All the mud and the shellfire?’

‘Yes, of course. We’re not in a pretty world.’

‘But don’t you see what it means? Damn it all I had an uncle killed in those Flanders battles. For all I know he’s out there now.’

‘For all you know he may not be killed this time. For all you know you may see him. It’s fifty years on or thereabouts, so I don’t suppose there’ll be many queer cases. I mean of men being alive twice.’

Incredulously, I realized what he meant, someone who had survived the trench battles might still be living. There might be two of them, a young man out there in 1917 and an old man here in 1966.

‘But it’s fantastic. There can’t be two of you.’

‘You don’t seem to take much notice of what I’ve been talking about. Remember the states of consciousness, remember the subjective impression of consciousness is not the same thing as the pigeon holes of the physical world. The consciousness of the man in the trenches is not the same as the old man living over here. The pigeon holes are different and they can never be lighted up by the same spot of light.’

‘You mean the spot could dance about between the two of them but so long as the pigeon holes are different there would be the subjective impression of their being totally different individuals.’­

‘Exactly the same as you and I have the impression of being different.’

We walked back in silence. I think both of us were overwhelmed, not only by these ideas, but by the situation that was soon to develop.

We got back to the garden. Then an odd detail occurred to me, ‘What was all that stuff about seismic disturbances?’

‘My idea, only a fancy if you like, runs something like this. I’ve told you we’re living in a new physical situation. A new bunch of pigeon holes. The game, as I see it, is that the new pigeon holes are similar in most respects to some of the pigeon holes in the other system. It’s as if the present world were built out of copies of bits of the old world. Do you remember the day on the moor below Mickle Fell? Don’t you realize it was a copy that came back to the caravan that night. Not quite a perfect copy, the birthmark was missing.

‘Well, this whole world is a copy of some of the bits from another, the more normal world. This world may be queer by every standard we’re used to but the bits must have a proper relation to each other.’

‘You mean there’s nothing supernatural in it?’

‘You might put it that way. Well, look what’s involved. Think about the Earth. Things change slowly as the years pass. Landforms are not quite the same now, in 1966, as they were in 1866. So if you copy the part of the Earth that corresponds to the England of 1966, and try to fit it to the Europe of 1917, and to the America of 1700 or 1800, things won’t exactly match.’

An idea was working itself around in my head. ‘You’d need a lot of information, wouldn’t you, to make copies like that?’

John paused as we entered the house. ‘Right you are, Dicky my boy. A lot of information. Remember what I said about that infra-red transmission. It was taking an awful lot of traffic.’

‘Traffic needed for the copying.’

John nodded and added in a whisper, almost as if he were afraid of being overheard, ‘Needed for the copying. We still don’t know how it was done but at least we know why. Different worlds remembered and then all put together to form a strange new world. We shall find out more as we go along. This isn’t the end of it.’