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“Book of Light,” he said. “Book of Luck.”
“Book of Light could be a superpower,” Yasmin said.
Wagner bobbed his head back and forth as he debated that. “There are several books that could fit in more than one category. But I am a physicist. Light is a fundamental property of the universe, so I want to place it here, ja?” He smiled at Yasmin. “But we are making this up; this whole categorization might be an exercise in futility.”
“Keep going,” Drummond encouraged. He had no idea if there was any value in categorizing the books in this way, but he was enjoying it. “What other books play with the laws of the universe?”
They thought about the question for a few moments, the silence filled by the crackling of the fire and the scattering of rain against the windows.
“We don’t know all of the books,” Lily said, opening her eyes. She pushed herself off the window with a grunt and meandered across the room to sit in the chair next to Yasmin. “There are still books out there to be found. Maybe we will find a Book of Gravity or a Book of Time.”
“The Book of Doors,” Drummond said, and Yasmin and Lily both smiled at him. It was the story that started it all for the Fox Library, the mythical Book of Doors.
“If there really is a Book of Doors that would let you travel in time,” Wagner agreed. “If you could open any door, that would be any door anywhere.”
“There is a lovely English phrase...” Yasmin said, trying to remember the words. “Ah... yes... time travel jiggery pokery.”
Drummond grinned at her. “Jiggery pokery” sounded funny in her accented English.
“If it exists,” Lily said.
Drummond knew that Lily was unconvinced of the existence of a Book of Doors. “It is too much of a fairy tale,” she had told him once, on his first visit to her in Hong Kong several years earlier. He had gone to Hong Kong with some notion of perhaps finding the Book of Doors. “Feels like something someone has made up.”
“If you could travel in time,” Yasmin wondered, “imagine what you could do. You could change history, change world events. Maybe it is better that such a book remains hidden.”
“Nein,” Wagner said, picking up his mug of coffee from the table. Wagner didn’t drink alcohol, for reasons Drummond had never discovered. He seemed to exist solely on coffee and water. “I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t believe what?” Drummond asked.
“That you can change history with time travel. I am a physicist. I understand the laws of the universe. I don’t believe time travel would work that way. There is still cause and effect.”
“Oh, you have to tell us how it would work, dear Wagner,” Lily said. “Come, put the blackboard away and talk about time travel.”
Wagner dropped the chalk into the holder on the side of the blackboard and returned to his seat. “Of course this is all conjecture, nobody will know until we do travel in time, but it seems to me that time is fixed. The past cannot be changed.”
“Why?” Drummond asked.
“Look,” Wagner said, crossing his legs, his elbow on the arm of the chair and his hand in the air, bouncing as he spoke as if emphasizing his words. “There are two ideas about time travel. There is the open model of time travel and the closed model, ja? In the open model, you can travel into the past and change events so that your present is consequently changed also. This is what you see in science fiction stories. You go back and do something and history changes.”
Yasmin nodded. “But you don’t believe that would happen.”
“Nein,” Wagner said. “Because the past is the past, events have already happened. If you go back and have any effect on the past, that will contribute to the present you already experience. This is the closed model. You cannot change events from what has already happened. If you go back and do something in the past, then that already happened in the past, and is part of history. It is part of what made your present be the present that it is, the present that you departed from when you went into the past.”
“I am trying really hard to understand this,” Lily murmured, her eyes narrowed slightly. “But I have too much rich food to digest and only so much energy.”
“So you are saying you can’t change events,” Drummond said. “Even if we had a Book of Time, or the Book of Doors, if we tried to change anything in the past, nothing in the present would change?”
“That is correct,” Wagner said. “Because it has already happened. The things you have done in the past have already happened, before the you in the now goes back to do them.”
The three of them considered that in silence as Wagner sipped his coffee placidly.
Drummond felt his mind wrestling with the ideas Wagner was describing. He felt about three steps behind Wagner at the best of times, but now he was scrabbling and running to keep up with a man who was sauntering.
“But it is only a theory,” Wagner said, shrugging amiably. “We will not know until we discover that time travel is even possible.”
Lily’s eyes had glazed over, and Yasmin was looking at the plate of shortbread as if wondering if another biscuit would be a bad idea or not. Drummond found himself still trying to make sense of Wagner’s words.
“Have you ever thought of doing science to the books, Wagner?” Lily asked.
