A
SHORT STORY: THE MADNESS OF ZENO ANTON
by Del Turner (copyright 2007)
He sat there as he always did. It was the same at all meetings he attended, and he attended meetings all the time. In fact, his main occupation seemed to be to attend meetings. But, unlike doctrinaire followers of this or that political idea, he was eclectic in his choice of ideas. Or, at least I had thought he was.
His name was Zeno Anton, and whether you were an astrophysicist, an environmental biologist, an artists, or even a politician; you somehow thought you knew him, especially when he invariably stood up to speak. There would be a shuffle of a chair scraping the floor coming from the front row, and he would slowly stand and turn somewhat toward the audience while starting to present to the chair of the meeting.
He wore a suit which hung unkempt to the floor. There was always a red sweater-like vest contrasting with the baggy pinstripe of the suit, and his left hand would be held as a gesture of intervention until his words and the right hand came into play. He would then speak.
If the meeting concerned the colour yellow, then Zeno would speak in favour of blue, but it was his reason for doing so that held the audience. He often spoke for some ten minutes, carefully developing his point of view, until all were quite convinced that he was right and the meeting had been quite wrong.
That I came to know him out past this meeting context, was almost by accident, but of even that I am not sure.
I had dropped into a coffee bar just prior to attending one of the meetings we would both attend. I had my newspaper and was settling in to a table position where I could watch the street, when I saw him dash belatedly across the intersection, his tattered briefcase in hand, and overstuffed so that paper poked out its flap, and flickered in the wind. A car all but hit him just before he made it to the curb, but he merely leaned out of the way and continued through the door to slam his case on the counter while grubbing around in his pant’s pocket for his change. Even while still giving his order to the clerk, he was scanning the audience of the shop to eventually recognize me as one he thought he knew.
Coffee cup in hand, he landed in the chair opposite me, and smiled as if he truly knew me. “You going to the meeting next door?” he asked.
“Why, yes,” I stuttered, You, too. I assume.”
“Zeno. Zeno Anton.” he said while offering his hand. I hastily put down my coffee, and responded with a somewhat reluctant handshake.
“Doug Marshall,” I offered, “U.S.U. Physics.”
“Yes, I thought so,” he added, smiling with a skeptical twinkle in his eyes. “You are the one who believes that science is the answer to everything.”
His last comment sort of caught me off guard because I had never really met the guy before. “Err, yes. Science as a way of looking at the world if that is what you mean,” I said.
“Don’t worry, I have the same view,” he added as if to comfort me. “the view that science must some day replace politics and religion as the way we see our world.”
The introduction was immediately followed with a lot of chatter about how he thought the whole world was a mess soon to collapse into chaos. I didn’t get a chance to take part in his monologue because it was just that, a monologue. As neither my coffee nor my newspaper was being properly served, I was beginning to resent his intrusion. “Well, I must finish my coffee. The meeting will start in a few minutes.” I said. He responded with silence, and took to sipping from his own cup.
He followed me into the meeting room where I was scheduled to be a presenter, and sat in the front row as close to me as he could get. My former knowledge of this man who until now had been nothing more than an unusual stranger found in meetings everywhere, was now replaced with someone who might become an adversary in any discussion which arose. It was his way. But “his way” was now about to be applied to me.
Much to my surprise, he sat through the whole meeting not saying a word, and disappeared after the meeting was over. I admit that at that moment, I was relieved. However, I didn’t realize what was to come.
“You are saying that Time does not really flow, but persists in the state of this moment and all others that follow,” offered a student half way up the rows of theatre seats in front of me.
“Well, yes. The event of this moment can, theoretically, be retrieved at some future date. From what we know of physics, if time travel could be mastered, we could move back to the moment just gone by, or even to an event not yet experienced,” I offered and then added, “Time itself doesn’t flow, or move on, even if our knowledge of the moment is replaced by other events.” My explanation caught the imagination of all the faces I could see, but what started out as quiet reflection was suddenly interrupted by the noisy opening of the lecture room door to my left. We all turned to see none other then Zeno Anton clamber into the room.
“Mr. Anton!” I exclaimed. “Could I do something for you?” Even as he walked towards me, Zeno Anton was not interested in what I was saying, but was waving and smiling to the assembled students bringing on a confused amusement from them.
“No, no! Nothing for me. Just give me a minute or two with your students so that I may get a couple of volunteers from them.” I started to protest that I needed to know what the volunteers would do, but he wouldn’t hear of it, and turned his back on me to speak directly to the class.
“My name is Zeno Anton, and I come here today to test a theory I have about time travel. I have done an experiment whereby I think I traveled through time, but I am not sure I can trust my senses and need some help. Is there any of you willing to help me?”
I was flabbergasted to say the least, but intrigued by the outrageous thing he was saying, intrigued enough to let him continue to have the floor. I looked to the students who were obviously in the same place as myself: intrigued by the outlandish assertion being made. The man was saying that he had traveled through time! However, when I saw several students answering his call for volunteers, I did intervene.
“Mr. Anton, Mr. Anton,” I said, “the period is over so maybe we can have a few students stay to discuss whatever you are proposing with you and me.”
“Yes. Yes.” He said.
Most of the students left to their next class, smiling, looking back, and chattering somewhat gleefully, but three of them did stay behind. While this was happening Zeno Anton started to unpack an assortment of papers from his over full brief case, setting this page here and that page there on my desktop. “Bring me a chair,” he demanded of one of the boys. The three students and myself assembled around the desk, curiously carried along by the events Mr. Anton had put into motion when he had burst into the room.
“This really happened. I know it did.” Anton muttered, and finally sat down almost exhausted by his own unbelievable announcements. He took a deep breath, bowed his face into his hands and sat almost whimpering for several moments. We, too, held our breaths wondering what was to come next.
“Start from the beginning,” I said. He looked up, took another deep breath, and then plucked one of the pages from the desk top.
“I play with theoretical physics and mathematics as sort of a hobby,” he said. “I knew that there is talk of several universes, and was playing with these formulas, these on the paper, when some sort of insight struck me, and I ran to my basement lab to directly test my thoughts. I needed an energy source, you see, and for some reason I foolishly thought there was something in my lab that I could use.”
“The man is a fool,” I thought. What could possibly be in a home lab that would provide enough energy to travel through time? However, this fleeting judgment was over run with more of Anton’s story.
“Cold fusion!” he said, and looked to each of us knowing there would be skepticism. “Cold fusion is possible! I don’t know how I knew, but I did. I batched together some electrolytes, tapped into the mess, and there it was: power to burn!”
“Oh, come now…” I tried to say.
“No. No. It is true. You can check it yourself. The power I got was enormous, but that wasn’t all I got. It was the time travel thing I really wanted. Let me show you,” he said as he reached for two other pages from the mess on the desk. “See this, here,” he said, “this is a diagram of the transporter I put together. I never intended to test the thing, but after the cold fusion thing worked, I couldn’t stop.”
The diagram did not impress me in the least. It showed some sort of coil tied into a power source, and there was a hole about the size of a baseball through the middle of it. But the mathematics surrounding the sketch did. My immediate impression was that he had applied some elliptical equations in a way I, at first, didn’t really understand. When I went over the math again, it became quite apparent that Zeno Anton was no fool, he knew what mathematics was all about. I looked up from the paper, looked to see if the man was truly connected to the paper and to what he was saying.
“It all sounds so bizarre,” he said, “but you must help me understand what I have done. The whole thing frightens me. I’m only an amateur, and the success of my experiment was unexpected. Unexpected, you understand.”
One of the students, Marie Estevan, blurted out what was on all of our minds, “What did happen?” she all but shouted.
“Yes. Yes. Well, when I hooked up the coil to the power source. At first I thought there wasn’t any power there at all because I really expected the amount of power that was registering to burn the wiring of the coil into pieces. The coil didn’t burn, though. It just sat there and hummed somewhat. I felt amused, and was ready to put the thing away, when I stooped down to table height to disconnect things, and saw something I still have trouble believing.” At that point, Mr. Anton sort of dreamed momentarily, recalling to himself the experience we were all quite anxious to hear.
“What did you see?” all four of us shouted in unison.
“You won’t believe me, I know. I don’t believe it myself. That is why I need your help.” We waited for him to continue, which he finally did. “Looking through the coil I saw another place, in fact, I think I saw another time!”
“You must come to my workshop and see for yourself,” he insisted. “It was me, I saw. It was myself that I saw through the hole in the coil! I know you think I’m crazy, but it is so!”
“You saw yourself,” I said, “through the coil, you saw yourself. Listen, Mr. Anton, just slow down, and listen to what I say.” The three students looked to me and then back to Anton, a certain skepticism growing on their faces. “To tell you the truth, what you saw might very well have been “you” as you say, but nothing more than some sort of reflection created, say, by the strong current you were using. Anything else is likely to be no more than conjecture visited upon you because of your excitement, your interest in time travel.”
Anton turned away from us and threw up his hands, “No. No. No!” he said, “you don’t understand. I am a scientist like you. It was not a mirror image, it was a real image of me doing things in what appeared to be a room identical to my own. And get this, Dr. Marshall, what this other me was doing was what I was about to do, and hadn’t yet done. The image was anticipating my every move by about four minutes! It was me! Four minutes later. In the future!”
The students started to giggle, quite sure that what was being said were the words of a madman, a madman named Zeno Anton. At this point a buzzer sounded to warn all of us to exit the classroom to let in the next class. I ushered Mr. Anton into the hallway, with all but one of the students ahead of us, but it was only one student, Marie, who remained with us all the way down the hall into my office.
Anton still had his bundle of papers in his hand when he flung himself into the swivel chair beside my desk. Marie hovered near the door obviously wanting to see the incident through to some sort of resolution. “You’ve got to come to my lab,” Mr. Anton stated quite emphatically. It’s the only way. You can see for yourself. Yes, you will see for yourself, and then there will be no doubt. Can we go immediately, Doctor, or will I have to suffer through a few more hours thinking that I am out of my mind?”
He was insistent, and I was somehow or other getting terribly curious about the whole affair. “You can use my car,” Marie suddenly intervened, which made Anton jump up and pull my sleeve and me towards the door.
“Okay, let’s get it over with,” I smiled at Marie who returned a smile letting me know that she, too, was in on the conspiracy to put the incident to the test of reality.
That Zeno Anton lived in a basement suite, and that his “lab” was in the garage he also rented from his landlord who lived above him, came as no surprise. It was a Mr. Anton sort of place. We went down a couple of steps, through to his kitchen, and then through a locked door into the garage. My immediate surprise was that the garage was, indeed, a fully equipped physics lab, all sparkling with new furniture and obviously only well used by its creator, Zeno Anton.
“Over here,” he said dropping his coat on the floor as he headed toward the bench in the middle of the room. “Here it is,” he said as he glanced back to see if I was attending to him. “Here it is.” It was just as he had said: there was his power source with its tank of electrolytes, and there, on the bench was the famous coil. “Stand back, and I’ll power things up. It will take only a minute or two, and then you can see for yourself.”
Marie hung back from the bench, but I wanted to see the details Anton had in place, while recalling the many cases of phony perpetual motion machines I had read about over the years. Although his claim of “cold fusion” power source was the most suspicious aspect of the system, I could deal with that even if his power came from the local power company, but it was the coil I wanted to see, the so called porthole to the future.
The hum of power shook the whole bench and could be felt even through the cement floor of the garage. The coil also seemed to move, or sort of shudder as the power reached it. There was also a distortion of the air and an aurora surrounding the coil. I waited beside Zeno Anton about five feet from the bench where he held me back as the thing fired up. After a few minutes, the humming settled to a lower level, and the coil settled down losing both its shudder and its effect on the air around it.
“Okay. Stand here,” Anton said. “If you get too close the static will make your hair will stand on end. I have raised the coil up so we can see through it without bending over. I use this cardboard tube to let me aim right on the coil’s aperture. Here, take a look,” he said.
I did as I was told, and there did seem to be people on the other side of the coil. I was having trouble accepting what I was sure could not be. I was trying to create a thesis to explain what I thought must be an illusion as I focused more intently on the coil. It must be an illusion, I thought. What I saw was, indeed, the room we were in, and there were three people in that room, as there was with Anton, Marie and myself. Mirror images of us? But no! They were images of us, but not mirrors of us because they were doing things we were not doing. The other me was handing the cardboard tube to Anton, and then Anton was handing the tube to Marie. What the hell was going on?
I looked at Anton who smiled back a “told you so” look. “It can’t be!” I said.
“But it is, “ Zeno Anton said.
AN EXPERIMENT
“Are you sure, Doctor Marshall?” Marie said, “Are you really sure?” she repeated.
“Dammit, there must be some explanation,” I muttered.
“Give me the tube,” Anton ordered, “Here, look for yourself,” he said passing the tube to Marie.
“Good God, Marie,” I said, “the sequence that just happened is what I saw! Anton takes the tube from me, and then passes it to you!” Anton stood between us, just grinning. “Hold it, Marie, let’s test this thing out once again. Here, Anton, you hold on to the tube while Marie and I join you.” The three of us posed as if for a camera, smiling at each other in kind of a silly conspiracy.
“Wait about four minutes, before you look again,” Anton instructed while holding out his arm to keep Marie away from the coil. It was a long four minutes while we waited for the future appear in the past time on the other side of the coil. I felt myself starting to believe that we were actually playing with time in another place from where we were.
“Go,” Anton shouted at Marie who immediately put the tube to her eye and aimed it at the centre of the coil.
“It is true! There we are, the three of us holding on to the tube. What does this mean, Doctor Marshall?”
“I don’t know, Marie, I really don’t know.”
PASSAGE THROUGH TIME
Zeno Anton was delighted with our visit to his lab, and insisted that both Marie and I become his collaborators, collaborators who would keep his findings a secret. Under protest, I agreed. I was still not satisfied with the theory that we were actually looking back through time, and, by agreeing to the secrecy, I would get a chance to find out what was really happening when we “looked through the coil”.
I had trouble sleeping that night, and even more trouble facing my students the next day when I knew I would have to put off their questions about Mr. Anton who had obviously stirred up a lot of curiosity by his classroom visit. It was even harder for Marie who had to keep the secret about our visit to the lab. She was waiting at my office door right after classes.
Once in my office, the two of us kicked around the possibilities. Marie was a first class student, and I was lucky to be able to share my doubts with her. We talked for over an hour, and would have talked another hour if it had not been that the madman Zeno Anton once again, burst into a room I was occupying. “The latest, you must hear about the latest,” he said. “Listen to this, Doctor,” he started and then unraveled an even stranger story about his latest experiment with his coil. “I reversed the orientation of the coil for no reason other than I felt it might work better if I looked through it from the other side of the bench. Doctor Marshall, the results of doing so let me see into future time! Into future time…” he pronounced slowly to make sure I was following him.
“How do you know it was the future?” Marie asked. “Mr. Anton, what did you see that made you think it was the future?” she restated.
“Ah, Miss Marie, that question must be answered for yourself. We must go to the lab right now so you can find the proof for yourself. Right Doctor?” he stated, knowing very well that the bait was set and we wouldn’t be able to refuse him.
“Watch through this end of the coil, Doctor, the opposite from where we watched yesterday.”
“Let Marie go first,” I said.
She took the tube and aimed it at the aperture, and waited. “I see three people,” she said, “the three of us. We are standing around the bench, this bench. But how do I know it is future time, Mr. Anton?”
“Wait, just wait, and tell us what happens.”
“Well, in the scene, I am watching you using the tube, and
Doctor Marshall is on his cell phone talking to somebody. Everything looks
normal to
“Okay. Give me the tube, Marie, and we’ll wait some more.
We didn’t have to wait long, four minutes almost to the second and my cell phone started to ring in my suit pocket: the future event as predicted by Marie’s observations was coming true. Anton was right, we were seeing into the future! Anton started to dance using the tube as if it were flamenco prop. I became quite confused with excitement and found myself sitting in as chair while Marie looked back and forth between Zeno Anton and me.
“But what about the time travel paradox,” I said.
Marie interjected, “What do you mean by ‘paradox’, Doctor Marshall?”
“Well, the thesis has been that time travel would create a paradox because an object from one time would modify events in another time. Remember the film, “Back to the Future” where the hero worried he might change his future by interfering with the past. For instance, if you murdered your mother in the past, it would create a paradox if you continued to exist in the here and now.
“Well, let’s test it!” Anton shouted, “Just tell me how, Doctor, tell me how.”
“I guess we could try to pass something through the tube.” I mused, “Maybe dangerous, but if we were careful, say, use some sort of pole to push it through…” I speculated while Zeno immediately rushed around the lab looking for just such a pole. I, myself, started to panicked when I saw him acting so quickly. I had to think the thing through. We were playing with time travel, and unknown consequences.
I looked at Marie, and saw that she, too, wanted less haste in the events underway, “Wouldn’t it be best to experiment with past time?” she somewhat timidly asked.
“No! no,! It must be a future event,” Xeno exclaimed “then we will know the consequences immediately. They’ll take place here four minutes later, right here,” he said more soberly than a minute before.
“It must be an object we can see clearly from this side, from the present time. For example, if we use a marker on the bottom of this tray and turn it on end, we’ll see it clearly when we look through the coil.”
“What will that prove?” Xeno questioned quite firmly. “We have the marked object here, and we see it there. How the Hell will that tell us anything?”
“If it is future time we are seeing, then the event we
create will take place on the other side of the coil before we actually
perform it here. Would that be proof enough for you, Anton?”
“Not much fun in that,” Xeno muttered not really understanding the idea put to him. But a scream from Marie brought him back to reality, and Anton and the Doctor peered into the coil, the three of them now almost cheek to cheek as they jostled to get the view.
“Look! Look!” she shouted, “There is the proof. There it is, Mr. Anton, the marked tray that we haven’t yet marked!”
It was as she said: the tray they intended to mark was already posted in the other world. “But as a future event, what might happen if we now decided not to mark and place the tray,” Anton mused. The three exchanged glances, and two of them turned to the doctor. The doctor did not answer.