Same setting as the piece I wrote the previous day, but someone different in the time chamber. Someone who would join the National Guard and instigate the tragedy. Someone who would have to face what he had done and eventually... well, I didn’t know what would happen to Bannister. As the story unfolded, as I got to know him better, I’d discover whether he went mad, found wisdom, became a soulless killer, whatever. Sometimes the reason you write a story is to learn how it turns out.

I spent most of Sunday morning on the Bannister story, but as time went on my doubts grew. By lunch I had to admit that my second try was just as corrupt as the first one. I was trying to reassure myself there was an underlying purpose to the events, that someone somewhere knew the price and made a choice. But I didn’t believe that. Furthermore, I didn’t believe in letting the National Guard off the hook by suggesting they were spurred on by an outside provocateur. As I sat in my study and comfortably sipped mint tea twenty years after the fact, it wasn’t my place to lay blame; but it wasn’t my place to make excuses either.

The Kerr-Newman model of a rotating black hole can be mathematically extended by recoordinatizing, using a scheme suggested by the work of M. D. Kruskal (1960). The result is a model where the black hole has a white hole on its flip side. Just as a black hole is a phenomenon that no slower-than-light object can leave, a white hole is a phenomenon that no slower-than-light object can enter. Light and matter can flood out of a white hole, but nothing can get back inside. Beyond the white hole, the extended model shows an area of space whose physical characteristics are the same as our own familiar space — “another universe,” if you want to look at it that way.