One weekday, Jim borrowed the Department car and drove up to Cambridge to collect some radiocarbon results and to see Diana, one of the post-docs in the group at the Cavendish that was working on the new dating technique. During the first two years of his research project, Jim had helped to develop the theory behind a new technique of radiocarbon dating, which gave every indication of being accurate to about one part in twenty thousand, giving an error of only a few weeks on felled timber and ash dating from classical times, and a couple of months or so on material from the Bronze Age. The new technique utilised a previously unsuspected attribute of carbon. But Jim and the Cambridge team differed in their interpretation of the experimental results that were now starting to emerge.
He found Diana in the Bullard Labs, where she had gone for coffee with a friend. They walked back to the Cavendish Laboratory together, down a lane that led from the Maddingly Road, on the outskirts of Cambridge, past a field of cows that belonged to the Veterinary School, discussing his ideas. It was late March and the sun shone through clear, cold air that didn't yet seem to hold very much promise of any warmth.
She could see a lot of problems.
'The further one goes back into the past, the less distinct the evidence becomes,' Jim explained, 'until in the geological sciences, it is hard to date anything to within a hundred thousand years. Everything is subject to decay, the decay of information.' She looked at Jim doubtfully as he pushed a glass door open and entered the building. 'But if I can find some historical records of indisputable accuracy that contradict the archaeological remains...'
'Like the blueprints for an ancient building whose ruins don't agree with those plans,' Diana interrupted.
'Yes...'
'But how could you be sure that the blueprints weren't superseded by others which haven't survived?' she asked. 'Doesn't the building itself prove that they were?'
Later, in a teashop in Cambridge, her boyfriend seemed quite enthusiastic about Jim's idea.
'"With many recognitions dim and faint,' he recited, 'and somewhat of a sad perplexity, the picture of the mind revives again. William Wordsworth,' he said. 'I did a third year project on him at Lancaster. Wordsworth stood by the banks of the River Wye, gazing upon a scene he had so often brought to mind, and found himself perplexed. I have often wondered why. It is possible that the scene he saw did not correspond exactly to the way he remembered it.'
He raised a scone and took a huge bite.
'Oh, for God's sake don't encourage him!' said Diana.
·
'Isn't she beautiful!' said Ariadne.
The museum was quite full. Jim avoided a running child and came over to the glass case where Ariadne stood gazing at a statuette of alabaster and gold. The figure was of a woman wearing a long painted skirt, rising in tiers to an apron which hung from her excessively slender waist. Above the apron she wore a blouse, open at the front to expose her breasts fully, and she held her fingers lightly beneath each nipple with a very slight pressure. It was a very sexy figurine. On her head she wore a tall pointed hat, and her long black hair fell down past her shoulders onto the forearms which supported those sensuous hands.
'c. 1600 BC', the card read. 'Minoan'.
'There was another like this in the museum at Iraklion,' said Jim. 'And the Palace of Minos was stunning. I loved it in there.'
But the museum was becoming a little too full of school children and Ariadne and Jim retreated to Ariadne's flat in Guilford Street. She was supposed to be working on her third-year project and starting to prepare for her finals but, in her eyes, Jim obviously needed some help and she had promised to give him moral support. He was beginning to look a bit frightened by the enormity of the thing he had taken on.
Ariadne held open the glossary. 'Labyrinth,' she read. 'Possibly derives from the Greek word "labrys", a double axe. House of the double axe.'
Jim looked down at the traffic. 'But there are no records of anything concrete that can be dated. There is no consensus even on what the Palace of Minos was. Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated it at the turn of the twentieth century was convinced that it was a royal palace. The Palace of King Minos of Crete. Others have argued quite convincingly that it was a mausoleum. They point to the soft gypsum flooring and to the huge labyrinthine tomb complex in Egypt that existed at this time. A clay bath tub that Sir Arthur Evans found in the palace is obviously not a bath at all but a sarcophagus, although when it was put there is anyone's guess. Others suggest again that the building might have been some sort of temple complex. They draw attention to the large numbers of religious things that were found buried there in the rubble. Ladies depicted everywhere with their bosoms exposed on rings and frescoes and figurines could have been part of a show of mourning, although they are so ubiquitous that the women depicted in this way are probably reflecting a more general fashion. It would be lovely to have some writing from that period, but what we have on the earlier clay tablets can't be read at all and the later ones written in ancient Greek contain only accounting records and lists of objects.'
'And sheep,' said Ariadne.
'And lists of sheep,' agreed Jim. 'But no history. And nothing remembered of them at all, until Sir Arthur Evans dug into the mound at the beginning of the twentieth century.'
'Greek mythology remembered it,' said Ariadne. 'The story of Theseus and the Minotaur. The Minotaur lived in a huge maze called the Labyrinth on the island of Crete and Theseus had to kill this creature in order to save himself from it. He was helped by my namesake Ariadne with the aid of a thread to find his way out of the Labyrinth again. Theseus had been taken to Crete from Athens with thirteen other captive youths and maidens to be sacrificed to this Minotaur, a dreadful creature, the result of a union between a lady and a bull.'
'A creature conceived through the scientific and engineering skill of Deadelus, yes I know,' replied Jim. 'But the problem is that Greek mythology is not history,' he called from the kitchen.
'What about the bull leaping?'
'What that was is a complete mystery!' said Jim, returning with two cups of coffee. 'There are quite a few engravings on rings and a couple of frescoes, but they make no sense. Sir Arthur Evans consulted an American rodeo cowboy who thought the whole thing was impossible. He could see no way of seizing the horns of a charging bull and leaping over its back in a single movement. It might have been like a circus and the bulls were tame. One of the frescoes shows a performer at the front holding the bull's horns while another performer somersaults over its back. But that belongs to the latest phase of the Palace. It might have evolved into a circus act by then, mightn't it? Earlier engravings show only a single leaper and a very active bull.'
'There is no contradiction,' he said, sipping his coffee. 'Only uncertainty.'
·
Ariadne read the article to Jim. 'Farmers settled in Britain more than two thousand years before the completion of Stonehenge. Their weaponry included fearsome spears and the forerunner of the English longbow, fashioned out of yew even then. But the most vital piece of equipment they possessed was the axe; not the bloodied battleaxe of later times, but the woodman's axe. The gore on those blades was wood sap; the green blood of Nature.
'Faced with an uninterrupted expance of oak, lime, ash, beech, inpenetrable thorn and holly, a basketful of seed corn was useless without first having used an axe on Nature's forest. The forest had to be cleared of its trunks and underwood before planting could begin.
'Skilfully fashioned out of flint, and often of even tougher rocks obtained from as far afield as Cornwall and the Lake District, sharpened to something approaching a razor's edge and tied firmly with leather thongs to a stout baseball bat of a handle, the stone axe was the chain saw of its day. And the men using it were practiced and skilled.
'In a burial monument in Ireland, an axe of diorite, a hard igneous rock related to granite, was delierately buried near the entrance to the courtyard of the tomb. In Oxfordshire, a cremation was accompanied by a Cornish axe and some seashells. In Wiltshire, bone pins are all that remain of a shaman's coat which lay with its owner alongside an undamaged axe of dolerite, another hard igneous rock this time related to basalt. These possessions were valuable and perhaps symbolic.
'Jade was used in abundance, in Britain, in Brittany and along the Rhine; the stone originating, possibly, from as far afield as Switzerland or the Italian Alps. (Jade takes a good cutting edge, and was used in recent times by the Maori of New Zealand to decimate their own forest, before the coming of the European invaders).
'In Brittany, axe burials associated with standing stones have been discovered in their hundreds. In England, a beautiful axe head of pale green jade, in mint condition and without a handle, lay beneath a wooden causeway, constructed by Stone Age farmers in Somerset. It may not have been dropped, but placed deliberately.
'And later, at the time of Stonehenge, a tiny polished axe was worn as a pendant by its West Country owner; and at this time also, an axe was buried near the central stones of this great sarsen circle. Elsewhere in this henge, chalk axes were buried, to complement those carved on the stones, and at nearby Woodhenge, a chalk axe was buried.
'Chalk axes are functionally useless, and can only have had a symbolic value. Perhaps they stood for more than simply a means of transforming dark forest into open pasture, drove-roads and fields of waving wheat and barley. The axe as a tool had its origin in the need to create farmland and to collect fuel. The axe as a symbol might have had a wider imperative; the power to change the world.'
'Not much use,' said Jim. There are no records from that era to match with the archaeology. And it is only opinion, anyway.'
Jim looked at Ariadne as she perused another article, and as the light caught the side of her face he confirmed once again to himself that although she was no beauty, she possessed a plainness that he found captivating. She noticed him looking at her; her lips moved involuntarily into a smile and her eyes sparkled.
'How is your paper coming on with Dr Mckenzie?'
'Not very well, really. He has taken a completely different approach from me. He teaches quantum electrodynamics and solid state physics but has spent years collecting eye witness accounts of things which happened a long time ago, and knows everything there is to know about the psychology of memory. He has quite a dossier containing inconsistencies in accounts of climbing accidents and military campaigns and the details of divorce settlements and things like that. Things which were recorded at the time, so he can check his interviews not only against other eye witnesses but against contemporary documentary evidence. But the sort of inconsistencies he is looking for, and finding, are complicated by the way people remember things and reconstruct their memories, so he tells me. And nobody's memory is expected to be perfect.
'So not much use?'
'The problem is,' replied Jim, 'that inconsistencies are very subtle within the span of living memory. Fifty years ago it might only be the difference in a conversation or the ownership of a tennis racket. The dating system I'm working on offers to look back thousands of years, where the effects should be much more amplified.'
·
'Have you seen Ron?' asked Carl. Ron was Jim's supervisor. 'He was looking for you earlier.' Jim had just returned from the library with a huge volume of back-issues of a scientific journal from which to photocopy a paper, and he cast it down heavily onto his desk.
'I'll catch him when I go down to copy this,' he said.
It was the 31st March and the approach of the deadline for submission of his PhD thesis in September had brought with it the dreadful realisation that he had run out of time for thinking and had to get it all down onto paper before his funding ran out. This had concentrated his mind and reduced the situation to this: he could either bluff his way through a train of argument that he did not believe, or he could try to bring into focus an idea that still hung in front of him like a compelling but veiled garden, unwilling to show him clearly what it contained; a statue to a fine scientific achievement or an abattoir ready to receive his infant career for the slaughter? He had incarcerated himself in the library the previous month, trying to see if the idea was truly ludicrous. Perhaps to his downfall he had found little anomalies, small encouragements, all leading him towards the gate into this tempting garden and preventing him from taking the easy route around it - tempting because its lawns seemed untrodden and every aspiring young scientist likes to think that she or he is breaking new ground. And Jim knew that the pressure to take the easy route would become intense.
There were anomalies, contradictions, the beginnings of paradox. In pursuit of these, Jim had spent much of the winter reading ancient history. But it is a vast subject and he felt completely out of his depth. His proper work was getting behind schedule and now, only a few months before his submission deadline, he had to decide whether or not to abandon the idea completely.
Many interesting things had emerged from his reading. And as the coffee machine gurgled, Jim tried once again to weigh them.
The walls of a gallery of the Ramesseum in Upper Egypt record the military adventures of the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II, in splendid detail. No longer would his people be troubled by armies from the north, as they had been. Egypt was strong. A line had been established against the Hittites at the battle of Kadesh, north of the lands of Israel and Judaea, in present-day Syria, in 1300 BC. Possibly. Or perhaps as late as 928 BC, if a new dating system for that region and era was to be believed.
The Ramesseum library. Diodorus Siculus, a Roman historian of the first century BC describes it. Nobody knows how big this library was. The ruins of the Ramesseum suggest that it was not very big at all. In fact, no trace of a library can be found. It may well have been only a series of shelves fixed onto the wall of one of the galleries. This is plausible.
But the Library of Alexandria, built by Alexander the Great, housed a collection of all the books known to the civilised western world, perhaps five hundred thousand scrolls, and there is evidence that it was modelled on the Ramesseum. Accounts of its demise vary, and are contradictory.
Thucydides described the appointment of ten men, elected after the loss of an Athenian fleet in Sicily during the war with Sparta, to draft a new constitution for Athens. Aristotle makes it clear that these men were thirty in number.
Small scraps, mere fragments of confusion, but enough to make it impossible for Jim to give his idea up.
Carl was not impressed. 'But this is a small detail,' he said, referring to the discrepancy between Thucydides and Aristotle, 'and rather than throw away our entire conception of time, isn't it much simpler to assume that one of them was simply mistaken? The Principle of Least Astonishment!'
Jim passed another one by him. 'Near the Ramesseum,' he offered, 'was a village where the families of the men who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings all lived together. A scribe of this village, one of the elders and a respected man, spent many months recording the progress of work on the tomb of Rameses IV. But a sketch he made of the passages of this tomb, and the decorations they contained, left to us on a roll of papyrus found in his village, does not tally very well at all with the tomb itself, as we now find it.'
'Perhaps he wasn't very good at recording things,' said Carl. 'Or perhaps he did the drawing from memory, or in a hurry.'
·
Jim's field area, the spot that he had collected all his experimental samples from, was in Crete. A fire had once occurred at a Roman villa whose newly-discovered remains had been visible from the archaeologist's campsite where Jim had stayed during a very enjoyable three weeks' sample-collecting field trip at the beginning of his project, nearly three years ago. Just down the road had been the spectacular Minoan palace of King Minos, excavated by Sir Arthur Evans in the 1900s. During the Roman Civil Wars between Caesar and Pompey, when the Minoan building had been just a mound, the Roman villa had been attacked and burned to the ground. That was in 37 BC. Recorded and described by an eminent and contemporary historian, the fire indisputably took place in 37 BC. There could be no doubt about this.
The results that Jim had obtained for the ash from this fire converted to 44 BC. Equally indisputably. There could be no doubt about this.
Carl was reading a scientific paper and deigning not to be drawn into the conversation. Jim turned to Robert and tried to explain. 'Supposing that we were able to go backwards in time. The quantum mechanical wave function is symmetrical in time. Only the collapse of the wave function gives any sense of the direction in which time is going; the collapse occurs - well, after the time that was prior to its collapse.'
Robert seemed to enjoy his difficulty.
But if this so-called collapse.' Jim persevered, 'is a choice made between a great number of possibilities which all coexist in some way while the wave function is evolving, then a journey backwards in time will involve exactly the same uncertainty as our normal journey forwards in time. If time could be made to run backwards, and nobody is suggesting that it can, but if time-travel was possible, then the wave function would spread out into a landscape of alternative histories which would have to be chosen from, by chance or in any other way, in order to travel backwards in time; in an identical way, backwards and forwards, we have to collapse an evolving wave function. So if in the distant past the future was a spread of coexisting possibilities and everyone had had a free choice about what happened next, then going back in time should involve these same possibilities. It makes time travel possible actually, because you could render all your ancestors infertile and it wouldn't matter at all, because you would already be on a new timeline with a new future ahead of you and no way of getting back to where you had once been.
'Are you saying that just like the past, then, the future exists already,' said Robert, 'only there are lots of different versions of it, and some of these might require a lot of fancy steering to get to?' Jim said that he was, and they settled back to their work.
'What about this,' said Robert suddenly. 'We exterminate a lot of animals and plants in our world, but in the plane of complex mathematical time ahead of us, and a little to the right, these animals have not been exterminated. What prevents us from steering into this region and having these animals spontaneously revive from extinction?'
'Not a problem,' Jim replied. 'The animal, thought to be extinct, is discovered to be alive in some obscure corner of the globe and we, now repentant and full of a desire to take care of the planet properly, do all we can to enable it to repopulate normally, which it does. Perhaps even a breeding pair of Dodos could mysteriously appear on an uninhabited island somewhere, like the salmon that reappeared in the Thames.'
'Don't be ridiculous!' exclaimed Carl, putting down the scientific paper that he had been reading. 'There are no unexplored islands for them to mysteriously reappear on.'
'There must be some!' insisted Jim.
'And are you suggesting that a herd of Woolly Mammoths might suddenly appear in a remote region of Siberia?'
'Panthers have lived in England giving only fleeting glimpses of themselves. The Jamaican Iguana, thought to have become extinct in 1895, reappeared again.'
'But a Mammoth!' objected Carl.
'If a herd was found in some remote valley in the sub-Arctic...'
From the look he gave, Jim detected a loss of patience in Carl.