Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 by Penny Publications Read Free Book Online Page B

soaked in boiling water. But powdery, vacuum-paced, mass-produced Chock Full o' Nuts? Nothing tastes like that except that." He sipped again. "And these oddly thick, hyperparaboloid-ish coffee mugs they have at Big Boy's and Denny's and college cafeterias and diners? These things are only mass produced because there's this one machine that spins a certain way to force the clay to form, made by one guy in 1948, because he couldn't get the straight cylinder he wanted. They're a total historical accident, and that guy thought up the spinning part when he was a goddamned ball-turret gunner. Seriously, how many contingencies is that to get one of these cups?" He cupped the mug in his hands like it was a chalice, like in that last
Indiana
Jones
movie. "I love these cups," he quietly admitted, almost shamefully. Then he spotted something at the wall-end of the booth and brightened.
    "And pencils!" he exclaimed. "Graphite pencils!" He marveled, picking up the Dixon-Ticonderoga someone had left shoved into the little metal rack of individually packaged servings of jelly. "Factories crank out a cuajillion of these every year, and they aren't worth a dime even, not individually, but do you know what a miracle it is to have these? You sharpen it," he pantomimed this, "You jot something down," he scribbled a swirl on his placemat, "you forget it," he ceremoniously straightened his arm and dropped the pencil in the aisle running between the booths and the two-tops, "and you don't give a crap. In some timelines, the pencil never happened. You wouldn't believe the ramifications of a thing like that. There's no Russian space program—no Mir, and so no ISS—in a world without pencils. In a world without pencils Lincoln's Gettysburg Address begins 'So, a while back...' I'm not shitting you," he marveled, "The pencil is a miracle."
    "Oooh-kaay," I said slowly. "But I'm worried about this," I scooted out of the booth in a half crouch and snatched the pencil off the floor. "Someone is going to slip on that." I laid it out on the table in front of us.
    "But who does Taylor—do you—really work for?"
    Old Taylor sipped more coffee, savoring the cheapassness. "Hunh? Oh, Young Taylor wasn't fronting: We're in the Department of Ag. I'm in the Department of Ag—although I'm not here on behalf of them, not right now—and Taylor is in the Department of Ag, and they really did license the portals from the place I used to work in order to culture samples and test preservatives and stuff. Except for a brief thing in China in the future—the future relative to where we started—we're basically with the Department of Ag for all eternity. I mean, so far." He sipped again, and it dawned on me that this guy might or might not be Taylor, and that he also might or might not be sane.
    "So what did you want to tell me about Taylor?"
    He set down his beloved chalice of Chock Full o' Elixir. "Listen: Taylor's lying to you. He's
in
the Department of Ag, but he was sent to you guys by the FBI. He doesn't think you can really change anything using the portal. The only reason the FBI sends guys like Taylor out to guys like you is to boondoggle you—the official position is 'let the baby have its bottle.' The math or physics or whatever they've got says that you can't travel back to your own timeline-of-origin, on account you never showed up there the first time around—it's a quantum-leap Catch-22 or something. You'll only ever pop into alternate timelines—pointless little bubble universes that are basically harmless, and disconnected from any meaningful continuity. This is their math. This is how they see it. Since everything you'll muck with is confined to its own li'l cul-de-sac timeline, they figure it's sort of a harmless zero-sum. You go back in time, do your little mission—some of which are pretty expensive and ornate—come back, and get super discouraged to see that all your work didn't seem to result in anything. Plus you sound like a lunatic if you