|
"I
really wish you wouldn't
do that!"
Suzy's tone of voice was much
sterner than her face indicated. She was certainly disoriented
but, all in all, she was beginning to get used to it. It wasn't
the first time that Alec shifted from place to place in, what
appeared to be, less than a second. One instant he was in one
place, the next in another. It didn't make any sense.
"I'm sorry, you know..."
he started.
"Yes I know. But it's
still getting on my nerves. It's disconcerting."
"I'm..." he began
saying attempting to embrace her, "...sorry." This
time she sighed.
"At least I wish you
wouldn't do that when I am around. And especially when other
people are coming. Surely you can do that for me?"
On this occasion there was
a veiled threat in her plea. Not a threat of hell and damnation,
but a festering omen of her unpredictable temper which she still
managed to hold in relatively strong reins. Evidently, as he
well knew, Suzy had her limits.
Alec smiled. They sat vis-à-vis,
their eyes studiously avoiding each other.
The 'other people' were Suzy's
and Alec's parents. The occasion was his Master's degree in physics,
which he had just won at McGill University. Before leaving to
write his doctorate at Caltech, they decided to have a sort of
Coming of Age party. Alec wasn't all that keen on both pairs
of parents paying court to their easy-going existence. His mom,
Alicia, would repeatedly drop her usual hints such as: 'isn't
it time you two lovebirds tied the knot?' Dad would whisper suggestions
that it was time Alec made an honest woman out of Suzy. 'Not
for me, you understand son, but you know how mother is.' Dad
would follow this remark with a knowing wink.
All in all, Suzy didn't need
any moralizing.
After living together, on
and off, for some five years, they were as honest with each other
as anyone could be. Suzy's parents seemed more understanding,
or perhaps just more tolerant. At any rate, Suzy's mother usually
seemed more preoccupied with her make-up than with her daughter's
marital status. Only Mr. Norman, Mr. John Norman, with whom Alec
still found it impossible to get on first name terms, was as
discrete as any father could be. Alec strongly suspected that,
although Mr. Norman was well aware of their living together,
to him, the dotting father, Suzanna remained the eternal, and
eternally innocent, Vestal Virgin.
In a peculiar, indefinable
way, Alec thought that the old man was right.
There was a strange innocence
in Suzy that, in spite of her occasional bouts of temper, made
her almost child-like. This innocence combined with her complete
unabashed and almost overwhelming femininity made her totally
irresistible. At least to him. Suzy was the only woman who, on
a number of occasions, actually took sleep away from his eyes.
And this when he was thousands of miles away from her. Perhaps
that was why. Perhaps he needed her physical proximity. There
were other women who kept him awake, also on occasion, but they
used more practical methods to account for his insomnia. Alec
was no angel. As for Suzy, he wasn't so sure.
"I really don't find
your peek-a-boo tricks amusing," she threw over her shoulder
on her way to the kitchen. She still had to finish arranging
a large plate of canapés.
Her parting shot brought Alec
back to his purported if disconcerting shifting of position from
one chair to another, or from one end of the room to the other
side. He tried to explain to her, more than once, that, in spite
of the many assurances of various talented SciFi writers, there
was no such thing an instantaneous traversing of space, any more
that it was possible to travel through time. At least backwards.
We all travel through time forward. When we stop it's be-cause
we have just dropped dead, he tried explaining to her. As for
the first two cases, it is not just that science has not as yet
found a way of doing so, but it never would. Time travel would
create a paradox, which would forever remain irreconcilable.
The concept of time travel made for good fantasy stories, but
that's all they were. Stories. And traversing from one side of
the room to the other in-no-time-at-all would be equivalent to
travel in time. Backwards. In this material universe of ours
this could never happen, he repeated many times. Four years of
physics at McGill assured him of that.
It was the same paradox as
with the velocity of light. One couldn't exceed it for the simple
reason that it would take infinite force, i.e. all the force
of the entire universe, to move infinite mass. And any object
possessed of any mass at all becomes infinite if it approaches
the magic C. The velocity of light. Albeit the stretching into
infinity occurs only at right angles to the direction of travel
- but infinite is infinite, in whatever direction.
That being so, one could never
exceed or even equal this magic velocity.
Nevertheless, Alec did, on
occasion, appear to deny the laws of physics. At least in Suzy's
judgment. He denied the laws of physics he studied and loved.
continue reading
in the book...
|
