Charles L. Fontenay

“ If the future is fixed as is the past, they wouldn't necessarily be coincidences: things like Summer—in the reversed time in which she lived—stripping off her clothes, donning Gus Adams' raincoat over her nakedness and going with us out to the park, to that rendezvous with the lightning and Wyn.
One of the details I can't take is that it's hard to believe that, even in such strange twistings and turnings of time, any creature can initiate itself and, in effect, spring from nothing—though Wyn says it's done at the sub-atomic level in simple terms of conversion of energy to matter. ”

“ I didn't try hypnosis again.
During these first few years, Wyn and Summer gradually lost that identity of appearance which had made them look so much like twins the night I found them in the park. Wyn aged, not excessively but as any adult man would age in a few years. Summer, on the other hand, seemed to have found the secret of eternal youth. She grew ever more delicate and beautiful, and her fair skin seemed to take on a translucent glow. ”

“ I said. "Wait a minute here, Wyn. If she can't remember the past even a minute ahead, you couldn't even talk with her. She'd remember what you were going to say, instead of what you had said. Not only that, she'd talk backward! You'd never be able to understand her."
"People are adaptable," he replied. "She evidently learned to talk backward—to her; correctly, to us. People learn to talk so others can understand them. And as for conversation, do you remember Summer ever answering a question directly?" ”

“ But picture the plight of a man who has in his home a young and beautiful woman, the realization growing on him, day by day, that he has loved her for six years. And it was Summer's fault, as much as my own. Perhaps more. Despite Wyn's words, I could not be sure that he would return to her, and certainly she must have known that he would. ”

“ So, if Summer's time reversal occurred or will occur after birth, she may be existing somewhere else, as a younger girl, right now; besides being here in the house with us."
"Your example is, as you say, at the atomic level," I said. "How can you transfer that into terms of human beings?"
"The only thing I know to do," he said, "is to create an energy explosion which I know won't hurt Summer physically, but may reverse her back to a normal direction. It would be like the energy explosion that meets the positron at B and forces it to continue existence as an electron." ”

“ I protested, still unwilling to accept it, "if the past is the future to her, her actions could affect the past."
"Exactly," he said. "I told you, this means you have to accept the principle that the past is just as mallable as the future, and the future is no more mallable than the past."
Wyn had known all this before he left. He had gone, not just to avoid seeing his wife revert to childhood before his eyes, but to delve into studies on the nature of time itself. Where he had been, how he had supported himself I didn't know. I still don't know. ”

“ My guess is that, a few years in the future, there will occur the most unique birth ever known to man—a birth in reverse. Some couple, somewhere—perhaps someone we know here in Allertown—will live through the experience of the daughter they never knew reentering the mother's womb and retracing her steps through the embryo stage to the moment of conception. ”

“ Well, we had Summer examined. Old Doctor Lodge is no psychiatrist, but a man isn't a general practitioner for as long as he's been at it without learning something about the way a person's mind ticks. He said there was nothing wrong with Summer, mentally.
"She acts like she's still suffering a little from some sort of shock," he said. "If she was right next to a lightning bolt when it struck, I'm not surprised. It's lasting a little longer than such things usually do, but it'll clear up."
It didn't clear up, but Wyn and I got used to it. ”

“ The only actual time reversal we know, scientifically, is at the sub-atomic level. The theory was advanced by Feynman that annihilation of an electron-positron pair upon contact might be, not actual annihilation, but a 'time reversal' of the electron. The emission of a photon of energy, in such cases, is powerful enough to cause a recoil in time, and the positron is merely the electron traveling backward through time after the energy explosion. ”

“ It may upset your conception of the future as a fluid thing of limitless possibilities, but Summer's experience is pretty good evidence that it is as frozen and stable as the past. As the Orientals say, what is to be will be. ”

“ He got a good job, this time as engineer at the Allertown Mill Industries. During all his spare time, he worked at converting my precious den and my basement into something completely beyond my understanding.
There are some people who accept misfortune and live with it—or die with it. Others battle it angrily to the bitter end, even when there is no evidence that anyone ever conquered their particular misfortune before. Admittedly, there was little precedent for Summer's case; and this made the prognosis even less optimistic. Still, Wyn was constitutionally the latter type of person. ”

“ Shaken, I picked myself up from the floor of the bandstand, still not sure I hadn't been struck. Blue smoke was boiling away from a wrecked tree about thirty feet away, in the midst of a clump of charred, waving shrubbery. ”

“ At left is the past, at right the future. This electron, E, is moving normally along at the top of the diagram when it runs into an energy explosion at A. It reverses itself, going back through time as the positron, P, until it hits another energy explosion at B. Then it is reversed again into the right time direction, continuing as the electron E, at the bottom. You follow the line, as the pencil point does in making the Z, and it's a single body. ”

“ He had torn my bookcases out of one wall of the den and installed a control board with a television screen where the fireplace had been.
"The experiment will be controlled from here," he said. "The energies that are going to run around all over the basement would make it pretty dangerous for anyone down there. I'm sorry you can't watch, but somebody's got to keep the children away from here."
When he said "children," he meant Summer and Mark. Summer now looked as much a twin to her nine-year-old son as she had looked to her husband when I first saw them. ”

“ It just goes to show that he must have been right, when he said the future is as fixed as the past.
It took Wyn four years to get his equipment ready for a test. He explained to me what it was supposed to do, but I never did get more than a general idea of the principle involved. The heart of the thing was a heavily wired chamber in the basement.
"The human body can take a lot of electricity, if it's administered in the right way," he said. "If it's administered in the wrong way, you've electrocuted somebody. ”

“ She may have lived to a ripe old age, for all I know.
"But we know that she has only a few years to live, the way she is now—perhaps twelve or thirteen. That's her physical age, and she is living backwards toward babyhood."
"What will she do?" I asked curiously. "Just fade away?"
"She has to be born," he answered solemnly. ”

“ To us, the energy explosion at B happens before the one at A. Suddenly at B, a positron and an electron are created out of nothing. The electron at the top apparently has nothing to do with either of them. ”

“ So I went to the house at 138 March Street often in the early evenings, to help Summer in her studies.
Their son was born about six years after they came to Allertown. It was a peculiar thing. There was no noticeable sign of pregnancy. Summer was sure she was pregnant, but Doctor Lodge scoffed at her, right up to the time of the birth.
"Sure, she has milk," he told Wyn and me, tugging at his white mustache and giving us a wise smile. "It's not unusual. She isn't carrying a child, though. It's a false pregnancy." ”

“ The other is that year that I was Summer's lover. If she was living backward biologically, wouldn't that apply, too, to the growth of an unborn child while it was still part of her. And Wyn left Allertown right after Mark's birth.
I've heard of virgin mothers. I'd rather believe in a "virgin father" than human creation from nothingness. ”

“ It was, except when they were trying out their various original ideas on it.
"Thomas is our first heroine—or martyr," said Wyn, and swept the cat up from the floor. Over the protests of the children, he stripped off the doll clothing. "You youngsters go out on the side lawn and play. Uncle Don will take care of you for a while."
Caring for the children had been my chore for so long I was accustomed to the peculiarities involved. Mark was as much a problem as any normal, active boy—no more. ”

“ Gus looked into that angle very thoroughly during the next few weeks, and reported failure.
Wyn got a job as clerk at McClellan's Dry Goods Store and, for reasons he did not confide to me, enrolled in night classes at Slayden College. He and Summer soon were established in the neighborhood as "that nice young couple that Don Gracey brought in from somewhere out West." How the townspeople got started on that Western origin theory, I don't know; I suppose it's natural for people to tack some sort of an origin on strangers. ”