causality wave

The bullet train made an unscheduled stop at a small station on the way to the city. Warped tracks had derailed a freighter further on.

Railway employees herded the disgorgement of commuters along the little station's narrow platform to wait for a charter bus to take us the rest of the way. The atrium inside the station was a pleasant space. The passengers seemed agreeable to the idea of delaying their journey here, except one solemn young man looking deeply concerned about all this.

I was eating a cold hoagie in the food court. He bought a cup of coffee and sat at the next table. He produced a small beige plastic box from his beige canvas rucksack and set it square on the table beside the steaming styrofoam cup. It looked like a remote control for a model airplane or an old portable radio, but it didn't have an antenna. Mostly I ignored him, like everyone else, absorbed in my own world, gazing out the window, thinking about nothing, about trains....

"What's that?" A little girl approached him. She had been exploring the station while her parents browsed an embankment of tourist pamphlets.

"Oh, that's innnterrresting!" she exclaimed, but wandered off when he made no further conversation.

I leaned over to get a better look at the device. "Is it a causality wave detector?" I asked. "I thought this was only theoretical."

He sniffed. "Gravity is theoretical. Yes, specifically it is a Herring wave receiver."

"I read Herring's paper in Science - tried to - but it went over my head. I'll have to wait for Stephen Hawking to write the layman's version. Who is making these?"

"Actually I made this one for Herring. I'm on my way to bring it to her now. I mean, I was, but I don't think we are going anywhere, anymore."

"What...?"

"Look here," he said turning the box's front towards me. It had a black convex lens like an oscilloscope in the center and four dials and two  chrome toggle switches, one set to ON, the other OFF. "In normal spacetime you'd see the present wave output here," he said pointing to the blank 'scope. "But it's been dead since the train stopped we came within a kilometer of this place. So either it's broken, or we've slipped out of our normal spacetime."

"That, that can't happen," I said.

"No, it can't. Professor Herring could tell us for sure. I'm just an engineer. I think it's some kind of...pothole."

He abruptly got up and strode across the vacant atrium floor waving the box around, watching the 'scope and manipulating the controls. I left my hoagie and followed him. "It's not just a detector," he said. "It can transmit a very weak casuality wave into the near past."

"And what can that do?"

"It combines with the predominant pattern of events- look, there is a weak signal now. If I can pinpoint the source, I might be able to set up an amplifying wave to nudge us out of this hole." We followed the box back to our tables. He pointed it at my half-eaten hoagie. "Hm." He poked at my food, turned a dial, removed the top bun, picked off the pickle. A blip jumped on the oscilloscope. "Mkay!" He flipped a switch, paused, exhaled. "Good, good, good. Very interesting." He produced a battered composition book from his backpack and began scribbling. After about two minutes, he put down his pencil. "Alright, here goes nothing." He set the device beside my traumatized hoagie, turned a dial and flipped the second switch to ON. "In 32 seconds we'll see if I'm right." He watched the numbers on his digital watch advance.

A soft grey light permeated the station. I felt dizzy and nauseous. I thought it must be very bad to be stuck in a hole in spacetime, whatever that means. But the station, the passengers, and the little girl continued to exist as if nothing was happening - rather, as if everything was happening as is usually does.

Snap! He flipped the switch to OFF. A perfect sine wave in phosphorescent green appeared the 'scope. "It worked!" he said.

Just then I saw the charter bus arriving through wide glass windows at the front of the station. Passengers gathered up their bags and children and filed through the doors. The engineer resumed scribbling in his notebook. I left him there to join the boarding queue. He was the last to board, still scribbling, finding the seat next to mine near the back.

After the bus pulled into traffic on the main road, he leaned over to look out the window. "Oh. Look at that." The station and the trees and utility buildings and powerlines and the train behind it were shrinking towards a pinpoint somewhere in the middle of it all. I half-stood to see over the seat backs through the windshield at the front of the bus. We were still moving forward. But the city wasn't getting any closer.

Passengers began shouting at the driver and climbing towards the front of the cabin. Unable to make progress in that direction, I turned on the engineer, grabbed him by his jacket lapels and screamed, "What have you done? Do something!" But he couldn't speak, gasping for breath. A moment later he was torn from my grasp as the warp of spacetime began to pull and stretch the back of the bus.

I remembered the device. It must be in his backpack. Where? In the storage space above the seats. There! Another passenger crashed through the emergency escape window and I tumbled out after him with the backpack. I tore it open and emptied it on the tarmac. The device tumbled out amongst notebooks, pens, pocket caculators. The 'scope flashed furiously, I twisted the dials ineffectually, backing away from the advancing abnormality. Out of frustration and desperation, I smashed it on the ground, flung it in the direction of the collapse and ran in the opposite direction.

At a hundred meters I found the courage to look back. The bus was gone, the station was gone. The world had stitched itself back together seamlessly.

I stood there trying to put my mind back together. From somewhere in the muddle a name materialized, a purpose: Herring, find Herring. "I need a phone," I said, but I was alone; the other survivors had fled down the road out of sight. I found a battered Nokia in the pile from the engineer's pack and dialed the number for "judy h" from its address book.