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remembered the book fondly, but

it just didn’t look like current research.
    I was a guest, though, and a very curious one,

so I listened carefully to each explanation. Like a good student, or a

brownnose, I asked pertinent questions at each station, though I generally knew

the answers. Like a good first date, I acted fascinated with his lecture while

calculating madly behind a polite smile. The truly interesting thing was that

there wasn’t a computer in sight. Most of the scientists I knew, at Wash U or

in industry, did a lot of their work with computer modeling.
    We reached the end of the tour—and it was a tour, I realized. We had

progressed neatly through a catalogue of the various theories of space travel,

in progressive complexity.
    Even more interesting than the missing

computer—like the dog that didn’t bark, I thought, mildly hysterically—was the

lack of any active work. Every experiment in the room was a demonstration of a solved problem. Hmm

again.
    “Any questions?” Bert asked, with a look of

hope.
    “I think you’ve answered—” I began, and stopped

myself. It definitely was a look of hope on his face, but he didn’t look like a

first date who was hoping for general praise. He looked more…I had seen that

look more than once over the years, but not in social situations…he looked…he

looked like a teacher who thought he might have found a protégée. He was almost

leaning toward me in the intensity of his hope that I would ask the smart

question and confirm that I was the pupil he’d been

looking for.
    So I did. “I have no questions at all about the

displays here. They’re all quite easy to understand. I do have two questions,

though. One, where is your current work? And two, where is your computer?”
    He beamed. “Let’s finish our sandwiches, and

I’ll tell you about it.”
    “I notice you didn’t answer the very easy

questions. ‘Where’ doesn’t take a lot of explanation,” I said, smiling back.
    “It doesn’t, does it? They are both in a

separate laboratory.” He bit into a sandwich and seemed to think a bit as he

chewed. “At the risk of insulting you, I have had poor experiences with

allowing access to my work before confirming interest and understanding.”
    “Not at all,” I said. “I understand

completely.” That was a bit of an overstatement. I did understand hiding space

program stuff, or groundbreaking experiments that a rival might steal or

destroy, but something about Bert didn’t square with that sort of thing. He had

said that his specialty was odd, so it was unlikely he had any direct

competitors seething with jealousy.
    Still, research was research, and even if I

hadn’t done any myself in years, I understood the protective instinct.
    “Good.” He leaned in a little. “You did

understand all the experiments?” I nodded. “Completely?” I nodded again.
    “Did you see anything there, or in your own

studies, that ruled out the possibility of time travel?”
    “Time travel.” I took a moment to think. It

was easy to jeer at such science fiction/movie fantasy stuff, but at a very

basic level…hm. At a very basic level, in fact, all of what I had thought of as

space travel theory in the display could actually be the basis of time travel

theory. Einstein was said to have theorized about time travel, until he decided

it was impossible to exceed the speed of light. And tesseract theory was a time travel theory—it was just

that Star Trek and its competitors mostly used it as a method for traveling

fast enough to get to distant stars, and didn’t talk about the time factor

much.
    The fact is, you talk long enough to smart

enough scientists, and you begin to doubt the rules about possibility. And

didn’t Arthur C. Clarke say something about sufficiently advanced science being

indistinguishable from magic?
    Bert was watching me think, almost holding his

breath. I decided to answer the question he had