Free End of an Era by Robert J. Sawyer Page A

to output an alphabetized list of all the words in a document. I had it do that for both diaries, then filtered and piped between the two lists until I had a new file containing only the words in the traveler’s diary that did not appear in my own diary from last year. I thought perhaps the forger would have tripped up by using words that weren’t part of my vocabulary.
    I scanned down the list. There were a lot of words, including "archaeopteryx" and "hawked," but almost all were ones I could see myself using. There were one or two — such as "firmament" — that didn’t sound like me at all, but, then again, I did have
Roget’s Thesaurus
loaded onto my optical drive.
    No, it was clear. Without one of those new Japanese AI style replicators, and access to a lot of my writings in a machine-readable form, there’s only one person who could have written this time-traveler’s diary.
    Me.
    If the diary was genuine, then so likely were the people named in it. And the person who seemed to be in charge of all this nonsense was one Ching-Mei Huang.
    I sat at my battered old desk at the ROM — it dated back to Gordon Edmund’s days as curator — and spoke to my desk terminal. "Default search engine," I said. "Boolean: Huang AND Ching-Mei."
    "Please spell both search terms," said the computer.
    I did so, and my screen instantly filled with references. There were at least three Ching-Mei Huangs in the world: one
    seemed to be a leading expert on the potato-chip industry. Another was an authority on Sino-American relations. And the third -
    The third was clearly my woman: a physicist, judging by the titles of the papers she’d authored, and…
    Well, I had to read that one: "Professors Arrested in Campus Melee." "Show me number seventeen," I said.
    A Canadian Press wire-service story from 18 November 1988 appeared. A Ching-Mei Huang, then a nontenured professor, was one of six faculty members arrested at Dalhousie University in Halifax during a protest over cutbacks in research funding. The article said she’d broken the shin of one of the campus police officers. Feisty woman.
    "Back," I said. The hit list returned to my screen. I kept scanning the results — and then I smiled. Apparently, like me, she’d also written a popular book, something called
Time Constraints: The Tau of Physics
, co-authored with one G. C. Mackenzie, published by Simon Fraser University Press in 2003.
    The link was to the listing on Chapters.ca, which contained a review taken from
Quill Quire
(a publication I’d always liked, since it had been very kind to my
Dragons of the North
): "Mackenzie and Huang, both high-energy researchers at Vancouver’s TRIUMF, have put together a dry account of current…"
    That was a decade ago. Still, it was worth a shot. I activated my PicturePhone and asked for directory assistance. "Vancouver, please," I said to the perky computer-generated face that appeared on my screen. "TRIUMF. T-R-I-U-M-F."
    The image recited the phone number while simultaneously displaying it on my screen. The museum didn’t allow us to use the call-completion feature, since it cost an extra seventy-five cents, so I jotted the number down on a Post-it note, then dictated it back into the phone. After two rings, a man with what might have been a Pakistani accent answered. "Good morning;
bonjour
. TRIUMF."
    "Hello," I said, surprising myself at how nervous I sounded. "Ching-Mei Huang, please."
    "Dr. Huang is unavailable right now," he said. "Would you like to leave a message?"
    "Yes," I said. "Yes, indeed."
    Ching-Mei Huang failed to return the three messages I left for her at TRIUMF, but I finally weaseled her unlisted home number out of somebody who answered the phone late one evening. My palms were sweating as I spoke the string of digits to my phone. Christ, I hadn’t been this nervous since the first time I’d called Tess and asked for a date.
    Toronto was 3,300 kilometers from Vancouver; it was a little after ten in the evening my