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  IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME

  to change some devastating mistake you made—or to choose a different career path, or to save someone’s life—would you? Would you go back again if the future that resulted from this action was less to your liking than the original one? Would you be willing to journey back in history or into the future as a mere observer of events, and once there could you manage to resist the temptations of meddling? Would some small, thoughtless action have amazingly large repercussions? And would the stream of time prove capable of righting its flow back to the path it was intended to take, despite intervention by travelers out of time?

  These are just some of the concepts explored in such original time twisters as:

  “Jeffs Best Joke”—It started as just a standard archaeological dig in New Mexico, with some interesting finds and Jeff and Jim playing increasingly complex jokes at one another’s work sites. But all of that changed when the stranger appeared. . . .

  “In the Company of Heroes”—He was one of the wealthiest, most successful men in the world, but could even money and power help him reclaim the priceless treasure stolen from him in his childhood?

  “Palimpsest Day”—What if there are moments that are outside of time and space, moments when everything can change, when you can be given a “second chance”? Would you—should you—take that chance?

  PAST IMPERFECT

  More Imagination-Expanding Anthologies

  Brought to You by DAW:

  FAR FRONTIERS Edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff. Thirteen of today’s top authors—including Robert J. Sawyer, Alan Dean Foster, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Julie E. Czerneda, and Andre Norton—blaze new pathways to worlds beyond imagining from: a civilization of humans living in a Dyson sphere to whom the idea of living on a planet is pure mythology . . . to an ancient man so obsessed with an alien legend that he will risk ship and crew in the Void in the hopes of proving it true . . . to the story of the last free segments of “humanity,” forced to retreat to the very edge of the galaxy—in the hope of finding a way to save themselves when there is nowhere left to run. . . .

  STAR COLONIES Edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Heifers. From the time the first Homo sapiens looked up at the night sky, the stars were there, sparkling, tempting us to reach out and seize them. Though humankind’s push for the stars has at times slowed and stalled, there are still those who dare to dream, who work to build the bridge between the Earth and the universe. But while the scientists are still struggling to achieve this goal, science fiction writers have already found many ways to master space and time. Join Robert J. Sawyer, Jack Williamson, Alan Dean Foster, Allen Steele, Robert Charles Wilson, Pamela Sargent, Mike Resnick, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and their fellow explorers on these never before taken journeys to distant stars.

  MY FAVORITE SCIENCE FICTION STORY Edited by Martin H. Greenberg. Here are seventeen of the most memorable stories in the genre—written by such greats as: Theodore Sturgeon, C.M. Kornbluth, Gordon R. Dickson, Robert Sheckley, Lester Del Rey, James Blish, and Roger Zelazny—each one personally selected by a well-known writer—among them: Arthur C. Clarke, Joe Haldeman, Harry Turtledove, Frederik Pohl, Greg Bear, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Anne McCaffrey—and each prefaced by that writer’s explanation of his or her chocie. Here’s your chance to enjoy familiar favorites, and perhaps to discover some wonderful treasures. In each case, you’ll have the opportunity to see the story from the perspective of a master of the field.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Bob Warner.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1202.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead

  is strictly coincidental.

  If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  First Printing, October 2001

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  by Larry Segriff

  BLOOD TRAIL

  by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW MY FATHER KNEW

  by Peter Crowther

  JEFF’S BEST JOKE

  by Jane Lindskold

  IN THE COMPANY OF HEROES

  by Diane Duane

  DOING TIME

  by Robin Wayne Bailey

  PALIMPSEST DAY

  by Gary A. Braunbeck

  THE GIFT OF A DREAM

  by Dean Wesley Smith

  A TOUCH THROUGH TIME

  by Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch

  THEORY OF RELATIVITY

  by Jody Lynn Nye

  CONVOLUTION

  by James P. Hogan

  ITERATIONS

  by William H. Keith, Jr.

  MINT CONDITION

  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Introduction © 2001 by Larry Segriff.

  Blood Trail © 2001 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

  Things I Didn’t Know My Father Knew © 2001 by Peter Crowther.

  Jeff’s Best Joke © 2001 by Jane Lindskold.

  In the Company of Heroes © 2001 by Diane Duane.

  Doing Time © 2001 by Robin Wayne Bailey.

  Palimpsest Day © 2001 by Gary A. Braunbeck.

  The Gift of a Dream © 2001 by Dean Wesley Smith.

  A Touch Through Time © 2001 by Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch.

  Theory of Relativity © 2001 by Jody Lynn Nye.

  Iterations © 2001 by William H. Keith, Jr.

  Convolution © 2001 by James P. Hogan.

  Mint Condition © 2001 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Larry Segriff

  It’s been fun watching science fiction grow up. A small caveat here: I don’t go back to the early days of SF; I first started reading it seriously in the Seventies—the Nineteen Seventies—but I’ve seen an awful lot of change in the field in the past thirty years.

  We started out as a literature of ideas. Reading the Golden Age of SF is like opening a veritable primer on the wonders of the universe: faster-than-light travel, bug-eyed monsters, ray guns . . . and time travel. Over time, though, the genre grew up and started paying more attention to style, characterization, and storytelling. This was, I think, a good thing for science fiction. We gained a richness of story, though we lost, I feel, something of the sense of wonder that had driven the genre from its birth.

  Still, a funny thing happened while a part of the genre, at least, was exploring other elements of storytelling: science started catching up to fiction. Much of what was predicted by the early SF writers—submarines, spaceships, radio satellites, computers, lasers . . . the list goes on and on—has come true. Oh, we still don’t have faster-than-light travel, and we haven’t discovered any alien life-forms, but mankind has done
many wondrous things that only a few years ago were considered pure fantasy. We’ve left the comfort of our little planet and looked down on the Earth from space; we’ve stood on the surface of the moon and planted a flag; we’ve even sent Voyager beyond the edges of our solar system; we’ve broken the atom and harnessed its power, both for good and for ill; we’ve cloned life and decoded the human genome.

  And we’ve discovered a magical branch of science known as quantum physics, which has, I think, forever tom down the thin veil that separated science fiction from fantasy.

  My working definition of the difference between the two has always been that science fiction stories were built upon known laws of physics and strove never to break those laws; fantasy, of course, was free to violate as many laws as desired, as long as it did so in a rigorous and internally consistent fashion.

  Quantum physics has changed all that.

  Want to move an object with just your mind, or read someone else’s thoughts? That, to me, would have been fantasy . . . until scientists found that two particles, physically unconnected and separated by vast differences, can influence each other. Change the spin of one particle, and the other will change its spin, too.

  There’s even a theory involving negative energy which allows for faster-than-light travel—and by that I mean true, practical, move a ship along the same course as a beam of light and have the ship get there first, faster-than-light travel. I mention this because up until recently science has assumed that you could effectively go faster than the speed of light by using a wormhole—but that’s not really going faster than light. That’s using a shortcut to get somewhere faster than light would if it took a longer route. To me, though, that’s like taking several million miles of fiber optic cable, looping it and coiling it up so that the two ends were mere inches apart, and then racing a beam of light from one end to the other. The light would have to travel millions of miles of cable. All I’d have to do is take one small step for man . . . and yet I’d be able to say I went faster than light, just because I got there first.

  Not really fair, if you ask me. But negative energy, at least according to some theorists, allows for true faster-than-light travel (okay, purists would find fault with this, because it still uses a manipulation of space-time, shortening or contracting space-time in front of the ship and stretching it out or expanding it behind the ship). But even this was considered impossible up until fairly recently.

  And no discussion of quantum physics would be complete without a mention of Schrodinger’s cat . . . without a doubt my favorite thought experiment. The experiment went like this: put a cat in a box. Hook up a Geiger counter to a radioactive isotope, so that there is a fifty/fifty chance that the Geiger counter will detect the decay of the isotope. If the Geiger counter does detect decay, kill the cat. If it doesn’t, the cat lives for another experiment. Outside of proving that he was a dog lover and not a cat person, Schrodinger’s question was, at the moment of the experiment, before the box is opened and the cat’s status checked, is the cat alive or dead?

  The answer was: both, and neither. Essentially, from the moment of the experiment until the box is opened, the cat is in a quantum state that encompasses all possible outcomes of the experiment. Further, Schrodinger showed that it was the act of opening the box—or, more accurately, it was the act of observation itself—that forced the quantum state to resolve itself into the final outcome, with a fifty/fifty chance that the cat was still alive.

  What’s even stranger, and more wondrous, is that Schrodinger’s experiment has been shown to be true (and no, they didn’t use cats in proving it). It’s true, the act of observation itself resolves a quantum state.

  Pretty cool, huh?

  So why all this talk about quantum mechanics in a book about time travel? Because one of the other formerly impossible things that quantum physics allows is time travel. Oh, there are some limitations, some of which are pretty cool, too, like the fact that no time machine can travel back in time further than the moment of its own creation. And there is still a lot of discussion and disagreement. For example, some people point to the so-called “grandfather paradox”—you can’t travel back in time and kill your own grandfather because then you wouldn’t have been born so you could have gone back in time, and so on—as proof that time travel can’t exist. Others say that quantum physics requires the creation of separate universes every time an action occurs, such as the decay of a neutron, for which there are different possible outcomes, and that time travel is only permitted across universes. Proponents of this theory believe that when you travel backward in time, you arrive in a parallel universe.

  My point is that fifty years ago science said that time travel was impossible. Today science says that time travel may be theoretically possible, though extremely difficult, and only within certain limitations. The question is, what will science say about time travel fifty years from now?

  Time travel. Like much of our science, it was once thought of as pure fiction. Like much of our SF, it was once thought of as pure fantasy. And if such things are possible, if particles can influence each other over distance, if cats can exist in quantum states until someone opens a box and looks inside, if time travel is possible, what other magical discoveries are Waiting to be found?

  Science fiction has grown up a lot over the years. Its stories are richer, its characters more complex. And now that science has caught up to much of its ideas, I suspect that our field will start pushing out again, testing the boundaries of fact and fiction, exploring the ideas that lie at the intersection of fact and fantasy, and giving science more ideas to prove right.

  BLOOD TRAIL

  by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch is an award-winning fiction writer. Her novella The Gallery of His Dreams won the Locus Award for best short fiction. Her body of fiction work won her the John W. Campbell Award, given in 1991 in Europe. She has been nominated for several dozen fiction awards, and her short work has been reprinted in six Year’s Best collections. She has published twenty novels under her own name. She has sold fortyone in total, including pseudonymous books. Her novels have been published in seven languages, and have spent several weeks on the USA Today Bestseller List and The Wall Street Journal Bestseller List. She has written a number of Star Trek novels with her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, including a book in this summer’s crossover series called New Earth. She is the former editor of the prestigious The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, winning a Hugo for her work there. Before that, she and Dean Wesley Smith started and ran Pulphouse Publishing, a science fiction and mystery press in Eugene, Oregon. She lives and works on the Oregon coast.

  THE blood trail started at the front door. A light spray covered the wallpaper, so fine that it almost looked like part of the design. Then the spray became a spurt, and finally great arching lines of blood that had dripped down the walls into the baseboards.

  Wheldon stepped inside the apartment, mourning the destruction of evidence. The crime scene was the entry itself. Even if he hadn’t seen the body—face down in the area where the foyer opened into the living room—he would have been able to tell from the blood that the crime had been committed here.

  He could even guess, without examining the body itself, how the wounds occurred: a preliminary stab wound on the left side of the back, into some blood vessels but nothing major; other stab wounds lower, at least one somewhere vital; and the last in a major artery which caused death quite quickly.

  The attack started when the victim arrived home and unlocked her apartment door. Her attacker followed her inside, stabbed her, pulled the door closed, and continued to stab until she was dead.

  “Is there another way into this place?” he asked the patrolman outside the door.

  “Nope.” The patrolman was young, his face green. He’d been standing in the hall when Wheldon arrived, arms crossed, as if he were guarding the place. But Wheldon had seen enough rookies to recognize the reaction: the young man was trying to
keep his lunch down and look official in the process.

  “Who’s been through?” Wheldon asked.

  “The roommate—she’s the one who called—my partner, me, the detectives, and the forensic guys.”

  Wheldon nodded. “Keep everyone else out until I give permission. And I don’t want you guys to leave until we bag your shoes.”

  “Excuse me?” The patrolman looked at him with a mixture of shock and confusion.

  “Your shoes,” Wheldon said. “This is the fourth entryway stabbing I’ve worked on in the last two months. The problem with all of them is that critical evidence gets destroyed from the get-go. I’m making sure that won’t happen this time.”

  “I gotta give you my shoes?”

  “I’m afraid so, Officer,” Wheldon said.

  “But how’m I supposed to finish my shift?”

  Wheldon shrugged. He walked farther inside, careful to avoid the spatter that had reached the floor. There was a smear near an end-table, probably from a shoe. But the prints led into the living room and ended near the feet of the woman who sat on the sofa, twisting her hands together.

  The roommate, the one who’d called the police.

  She was talking to one of the detectives, her head down, eyes averted. She was making a studied attempt not to look at the body sprawled near Wheldon on the scuffed hardwood floor.

  He studied her for a moment. She was thin—with a body style that would have been fashionable thirty years before, in the affluent ‘90s. He doubted her thinness had anything to do with diets and exercise. Judging from the apartment, she remained thin thanks to lack of cash.

  Forensics was taking photographs using a hand-held computer, two different digital cameras, and then the standard camera required by regulation. Scientific changes, which had brought so much to police work, were still hampered by regulations; good work was getting tossed out in court because it didn’t meet guidelines set before the turn of the century. In the last twenty years, Wheldon’s job had gotten harder, not easier.