he said.
And instantly I was ashamed. I was no longer sure exactly what I’d had in mind or why I’d followed her. It had been years since I’d first fled my death, and I had come to think of others as unreal, since nothing I could do would permanently affect them. My head was spinning. I slid down the wall and sat down, hard, on the sidewalk. What had I come to?
He helped me back into the bar, fed me orange juice and pretzels, and got me to talk. I told him everything. Why not, since I could unsay anything I said, undo anything I did? But I had no urge to. He listened to it all, saying nothing. No one else had ever listened to the whole story before. I can’t explain the effect it had on me. For uncountable years I’d been alone, and then, if only for a moment.… It hit me with the intensity of a tab of acid. If only for a moment, I was not alone.
We left arm in arm. Half a block away, Dancer stopped, in front of the alley. It was dark.
“Something not quite right here.” His voice had a puzzled tone.
I pulled him back. “Hold on. You don’t want to go down there—” He pulled free and walked in. After a slight hesitation, I followed.
The alley smelled of old beer, mixed with garbage, urine, and stale vomit. In a moment, my eyes became adjusted to the dark.
Lisa was cringing in a corner behind some trash cans. Her clothes had been cut away with a knife, and lay scattered around. Blood showed dark on her thighs and one arm. She didn’t seem to see us. Dancer squatted down next to her and said something soft. She didn’t respond. He pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around her, then cradled her in his arms and picked her up. “Help me get her to my apartment.”
“Apartment, hell. We’d better call the police,” I said.
“Call the pigs? Are you crazy? You want them to rape her, too?”
I’d forgotten; this was the sixties. Between the two of us, we got her to Dancer’s VW bug and took her to his apartment in The Hashbury. He explained it to me quietly as we drove, a dark side of the summer of love that I’d not seen before. It was greasers, he said. They come down to Berkeley because they heard that hippy chicks gave it away free, and get nasty when they meet one who thought otherwise.
Her wounds were mostly superficial. Dancer cleaned her, put her in bed, and stayed up all night beside her, talking and crooning and making little reassuring noises. I slept on one of the mattresses in the hall. When I woke up in the morning, they were both in his bed. She was sleeping quietly. Dancer was awake, holding her. I was aware enough to realize that that was all he was doing, holding her, but still I felt a sharp pang of jealousy, and didn’t know which one of them it was that I was jealous of.
NOTES FOR A LECTURE ON TIME TRAVEL
The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of intellectual giants, whose likes will perhaps never again be equalled. Einstein had just invented relativity, Heisenberg and Schrödinger quantum mechanics, but nobody yet knew how to make the two theories consistent with each other. In 1930, a new person tackled the problem. His name was Paul Dirac. He was twenty-eight years old. He succeeded where the others had failed.
His theory was an unprecedented success, except for one small detail. According to Dirac’s theory, a particle could have either positive or negative energy. What did this mean, a particle of negative energy? How could something have negative energy? And why don’t ordinary – positive energy – particles fall down into these negative energy states, releasing a lot of free energy in the process?
You or I might have merely stipulated that it was impossible for an ordinary positive energy particle to make a transition to negative energy. But Dirac was not an ordinary man. He was a genius, the greatest physicist of all, and he had an answer. If every possible negative energy state was already occupied, a particle couldn’t drop into a negative energy
And instantly I was ashamed. I was no longer sure exactly what I’d had in mind or why I’d followed her. It had been years since I’d first fled my death, and I had come to think of others as unreal, since nothing I could do would permanently affect them. My head was spinning. I slid down the wall and sat down, hard, on the sidewalk. What had I come to?
He helped me back into the bar, fed me orange juice and pretzels, and got me to talk. I told him everything. Why not, since I could unsay anything I said, undo anything I did? But I had no urge to. He listened to it all, saying nothing. No one else had ever listened to the whole story before. I can’t explain the effect it had on me. For uncountable years I’d been alone, and then, if only for a moment.… It hit me with the intensity of a tab of acid. If only for a moment, I was not alone.
We left arm in arm. Half a block away, Dancer stopped, in front of the alley. It was dark.
“Something not quite right here.” His voice had a puzzled tone.
I pulled him back. “Hold on. You don’t want to go down there—” He pulled free and walked in. After a slight hesitation, I followed.
The alley smelled of old beer, mixed with garbage, urine, and stale vomit. In a moment, my eyes became adjusted to the dark.
Lisa was cringing in a corner behind some trash cans. Her clothes had been cut away with a knife, and lay scattered around. Blood showed dark on her thighs and one arm. She didn’t seem to see us. Dancer squatted down next to her and said something soft. She didn’t respond. He pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around her, then cradled her in his arms and picked her up. “Help me get her to my apartment.”
“Apartment, hell. We’d better call the police,” I said.
“Call the pigs? Are you crazy? You want them to rape her, too?”
I’d forgotten; this was the sixties. Between the two of us, we got her to Dancer’s VW bug and took her to his apartment in The Hashbury. He explained it to me quietly as we drove, a dark side of the summer of love that I’d not seen before. It was greasers, he said. They come down to Berkeley because they heard that hippy chicks gave it away free, and get nasty when they meet one who thought otherwise.
Her wounds were mostly superficial. Dancer cleaned her, put her in bed, and stayed up all night beside her, talking and crooning and making little reassuring noises. I slept on one of the mattresses in the hall. When I woke up in the morning, they were both in his bed. She was sleeping quietly. Dancer was awake, holding her. I was aware enough to realize that that was all he was doing, holding her, but still I felt a sharp pang of jealousy, and didn’t know which one of them it was that I was jealous of.
NOTES FOR A LECTURE ON TIME TRAVEL
The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of intellectual giants, whose likes will perhaps never again be equalled. Einstein had just invented relativity, Heisenberg and Schrödinger quantum mechanics, but nobody yet knew how to make the two theories consistent with each other. In 1930, a new person tackled the problem. His name was Paul Dirac. He was twenty-eight years old. He succeeded where the others had failed.
His theory was an unprecedented success, except for one small detail. According to Dirac’s theory, a particle could have either positive or negative energy. What did this mean, a particle of negative energy? How could something have negative energy? And why don’t ordinary – positive energy – particles fall down into these negative energy states, releasing a lot of free energy in the process?
You or I might have merely stipulated that it was impossible for an ordinary positive energy particle to make a transition to negative energy. But Dirac was not an ordinary man. He was a genius, the greatest physicist of all, and he had an answer. If every possible negative energy state was already occupied, a particle couldn’t drop into a negative energy
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