Stanley R. Lee

“ Chaplain Rowan had been Shaheen's idea.
It had occurred to him one day as he and Blackburn were crossing the campus and he had observed to his colleague that things were looking bad for God. "It's every man for Himself," Blackburn had replied. "If I'm not mistaken that's one of His own laws. After all, who invented survival of the fittest?"
"Seriously," Shaheen said. "A, we've got a time machine. B, having A, there's no reason that I can see why we can't change the past. ”

“ But suppose now that a man can determine his own fate? Run it through your machine again and again until he gets it down the way he wants it with all degrees of freedom and irrespective of his merit or karma or sinlessness or however our cosmic report cards are supposed to be made out? In that case man becomes his own determiner, the individual conscious mind becomes the deity and that which we have heretofore referred to as God becomes what is known as an outdated archetype. ”

“ Pendelton said that first day, "is for you to forget about paradox. Paradox has nothing to do with time travel. Nothing. It's a monkeying around with words for purposes of profit and it has no place in the office of two experimental physicists. Anyone who answers an honest question with a paradox is a guaranteed shifty character and the chances are he's writing on the sly."
Preoccupied with not sounding obnoxious, Pendelton missed Blackburn's ostentatiously bored expression, didn't notice the enormous sarcastic attention that Shaheen was giving him. ”

“ Not emperor and yet ... emperor. Not yet fallen and yet ... fallen and gone like—what? The wind? No, not even the wind. Nothing is gone, it's all still there moiling and seething around in temporal abeyance. ”

“ Give me a time machine and I can mold every second of Caesar's existence and, incidentally, by extension, my own. The Greeks therefore were wrong. A man can no longer be sure he was happy even when he's dead!"
Blackburn leaned back in his chair and inquired blandly: "Did we get to the great implication yet?"
"If you were listening we did," Pendelton answered. "Elementary theology: if man's fate is determined there must of necessity be a Determiner whom we will call for the sake of convention, God. Determinism without a God, needless to say, is eighteenth century mechanistic twaddle. ”

“ If that dress isn't proof enough for you, that man is loose somewhere with colored motion pictures of the whole thing. What more do you want?" "A little illumination is all," Freylinghuysen replied. "All I've heard so far is some rather loose discussion about free will and determinism and it wasn't very convincing. Didn't anyone bother to point out to this Leopold Pendelton that you can't prove or disprove anything about your own determined existence since the proof or disproof itself could be determined?" "Yes," Blackburn answered. ”

“ Put me in the possession of a random sampling computer and a time machine and I, Leopold Pendelton, would be the bigger God!"
"And the point was well taken," Shaheen had to admit, pouring off some of Dr. Freylinghuysen's ice water. "We could for example use a computer to select at random any one of all the phone books in the United States, then a page in that one book, then a line. That one name would then truly be randomly selected." "Assuming of course," Blackburn said, "that you had first used the computer to randomly select the country whose phone books were to be used." ”

“ He tossed a yellow box on the desk. "You see chaplain, I'm not anti-clerical after all."
Rowan's eyes flicked from Pendelton to the box and back again. "That's the film?" he said.
Pendelton nodded.
Shaheen wet his lips. "You develop it?" he said.
"Yep."
"He's playing with us," Freylinghuysen said. "Well, I can't say I blame him. After all, how many times in a man's life does he get a scoop like this? Look," he said, turning to Pendelton, "there seems to have been some disagreement about what happened on the Mall this morning. We've got eyewitnesses proving anything you want. ”

“ A young and conscientious man who spent a great deal of time telling budding undergraduate physicists that God was every bit as ubiquitous as Planck's constant, he listened without one word of complaint, not protesting that they'd put him in a theologically impossible position, a position in which the only two alternatives were to either refuse to look after His interests or else participate in a piece of sacrilegion the purpose of which was to demonstrate that the first alternative was not a valid one. ”

“ It's a nuance that eliminates 75% of all time travel science fiction ever written but that's still only a nuance, wait till I get to the Great Implication."
It was a curious word for him to have used—nuance—because six months later in Dr. Freylinghuysen's office Blackburn and Shaheen were to tangle over the nuance of blue versus green, a matter of observation which compared in subtlety to apples versus bananas, Shaheen saying heatedly: "The dress was blue. I'm not color blind and I have twenty-twenty vision. I'll stake my reputation as an experimental physicist on it." Blue! ”