Broken Bow - Diane Carey [49]
“I’d say the odds for that are good,” Tucker grumbled as he stuffed a pillow under the captain’s bad leg and bothered to fluff it. He straightened and surveyed his work. “Feel better?”
“Fine, I’m fine, Trip, thanks. Is it somebody more advanced than we are,” Archer contemplated, “trying to change the near past? Or are they in the far distant future? I’d like to ask T’Pol what she thinks. Do I dare?”
“I wouldn’t,” Tucker bluntly announced. “She’s always enjoyed a rigid thought process. Today I think you shook her with your free-roaming methods. Throw time tampering into the mix? I’m scared enough for both her and me.
“Higher level physics break down rationality,” Tucker continued. “Progress at that level comes from intuitive leaps, like Einstein imagining what it was like to ride a beam of light.”
“No Vulcan would do that,” Archer said. “It’s not possible to ride a beam of light.”
Tucker lowered his chin. “It is now.”
Archer smiled. “They think emotionalism, unchecked, will destroy. It’s made them afraid. But look at Hoshi. She’s terrified every time something happens, but she keeps moving. She always moves to the next step, past the point of fear. Humans might go off in forty wrong directions, but the forty-first might take us someplace new.”
Tucker contributed, “Vulcans never want to get off the trail.”
“Well,” he began instead, “you can sit inside and watch through the window while children play in the street, and say how they might get hurt out there. You can be the little old ladies of the galaxy, but you don’t have any fun, and before long nobody talks to you. The Vulcans have wrapped it in a shell of elegance. If I told her that, what do you think she’d say?”
Tucker’s face screwed up as he tried to pretend a Vulcan point of view. “Probably something about men in Earth history like Stalin and Li Quan—they were given the power to get anything they wanted, measured by their idea of ‘fun.’ ”
“Good point. I think we agree it’s dangerous for these beings from the future to help the Suliban, but it’s not so different from an advanced race like the Vulcans coming and helping Earth. If it’s so risky, why are they helping us at all? They didn’t help the Klingons, did they?”
“No, nor anybody else, if I read the subtle side correctly. I’ve never heard a single Vulcan talk about any other race they shepherded.”
Tucker laughed. “I’ll ask her that one myself.”
Archer nodded, agreeing with the sentiment but not the plan. “The idea of time travel itself is, on its face, illogical. Isn’t it?”
“No,” Tucker seized. “She’d have to agree with me on this. The illogical doesn’t exist in science. There is something we don’t yet understand that allows time travel to take place.”
Archer troubled to understand what Tucker had just said, and for a moment forgot about T’Pol. Instead, he found himself remembering Sarin. “If travel backward in time can take place, then causality doesn’t exist. If causality doesn’t exist, where is logic? ‘A’ plus ‘B’ causes ‘C.’ ”
“But causality does take a beating at a level of quantum physics. It seems to break down at certain points. Are we discussing whether or not time travel is possible?” Tucker asked. “Or why anybody would be stupid enough to try it?”
“Both,” Archer said. “First, is it possible, and second, why would anybody do it, because you can go back and destroy yourself very easily. If I go back and stop an Austrian farmer in the mid-1800s and ask him directions while he’s on his way to the market, he gets to the market five minutes later, and misses meeting the woman he was supposed to marry. She passes by. Because they never met, Adolf Hitler is never born. World War II never happens, or happens later for other reasons, and the technological rush of the mid-20th century is delayed thirty or forty years ... Zephram Cochrane doesn’t have the infrastructure he needs to invent warp drive, and we never meet the Vulcans.”
“Instead of meeting the Vulcans,” Tucker picked up, “we meet the Klingons instead. By now,