“Yes, and we’ve found that you need a living presence to make a time machine work,” Ascar agreed. “That would follow, too.”
“Only because your machinery is primitive. In Retort City we can dispatch inanimate objects through time as well.”
“Yes … I see. …”
Ascar strained to grasp in entirety the vision Shiu Kung-Chien was presenting to him. “So let’s put this together,” he said with difficulty. “The universe consists of a static four-dimensional matrix –”
“Not four-dimensional,” Shiu corrected. “Your whole theories about dimensions are erroneous: there are no dimensions. But if you want to use them as a descriptive tool, that’s all right. In that case a six-dimensional matrix would suffice to describe all the possible directions that exist. Time-waves, when they arise, can take any one of these directions – from our point of view, forward, backward, sideways, up, down, inside-out – directions impossible to envisage. But the wave-front always abstracts, as it proceeds, a three-dimensional environment to anyone who is inside it. And it always creates, for an observer trapped in it, a past and a future.”
“And the Regression Problem,” Ascar reminded him. “What happens to that?”
“There is no Regression Problem. The problem only arises when time is thought of as an absolute factor in the universe. But it’s an incidental factor only, a triviality. The universe as a whole doesn’t notice, is indifferent to, time, as well as to all the phenomena such as living creatures which it produces. Therefore there’s no contradiction about before and after, past and future, or the moving moment. There is, as far as the universe is concerned, no change; non-time swallows it all up without a whisper.”
Considerately, Shiu gave Ascar time to mull this over. The Earth physicist placed his chin on his hand, gazing at the floor.
“And so this is what’s happened to Earth?” he said finally. “Another time-system has taken root on it, creating another process of evolution … but travelling in the reverse direction to ours. And they’re going to collide.”
“Correct,” affirmed Shiu in a neutral voice.
“I still have difficulty with this. With the idea of time travelling in reverse, but producing the same effects as our own time. I’ve been used to regarding physical laws, such as chemical reactions and the laws of thermodynamics, as working only one way. The laws of entropy, for instance … that would seem to give time a definite direction irrespective. …”
“That’s because you’re accustomed to looking upon time as an absolute function. To take the law of entropy – the law that disorder increases with time – the time-wave itself produces this effect. There are two contrasting modes in every time-wave: first, the tendency toward increasing disorder, and second, the tendency toward increasing integration, which results in biological systems. These tendencies are due to the yin and yang forces which are present in the time-wave, but battling against one another instead of harmonising. Yin brings the tendency toward integration, and yang brings the tendency toward disorder. When they cease to war with one another, time dies away.”
“But that’s not how it’s going to be on Earth?”
“No. Your civilisation is most unfortunate, as also is the civilisation which is going to collide with yours. It will be a violent, catastrophic conflict between irreconcilable powers – the weirdest, most fantastic event, perhaps, that can happen in this universe.”
“What will happen?”
“Almost certainly the end result will be that time will cease. The two wave-fronts will cancel one another out in a sort of time explosion.”
“What I really meant was,” Ascar said, avoiding Shiu’s eye, “what will it be like for the people on location – caught on the spot when the wave-fronts came within range of one another?”
“You want to know what it will be like?” Shiu said. “To a certain extent, I can show you.”
He rose and walked toward the other side of the laboratory, making for a transparent sphere about eight feet in diameter. “Retort City once suffered a similar incident.”
Ascar sprang to his feet and joined him. “And you survived?” he exclaimed.
“It wasn’t quite as disastrous as it will be with you,” Shiu told him mildly. “For one thing, the angle of approach was small – the entity we encountered was moving obliquely to us through time, not in head-on collision as will be the case with you. For another, we gained an advantage from our situation here in interstellar space. We were forewarned and were able to move ourselves, so that there was no actual physical contact. Nevertheless the wave-fronts did interfere with one another, and the effects were extremely unpleasant. It’s the closest we’ve come to annihilation.”
He halted before the transparent sphere. “At the time some all-sense tapes were made of the event. Do you have all-sense recording on Earth?”
Dumbly Ascar shook his head.
“As its name implies, it gives a record covering all the senses – all the external senses, and besides that the internal senses as well, such as body feeling, and so on. Where the senses are, the mind is; therefore you won’t be able to distinguish the experience from the real thing.”
He turned to his guest. “I’ll play you one of these sense-tapes if you like. I warn you it will be somewhat disturbing.”
“Yes, yes,” Ascar said eagerly. “I want to know what happens.”
Shiu nodded, his expression withdrawn and unreadable, and directed Ascar to enter the sphere by a narrow hatchway which closed up behind him. Once Ascar could no longer see him he smiled faintly to himself. He was unexpectedly pleased with the Terran visitor; despite his barbarian origin he was proving to be an apt pupil.
From within, the walls of the sphere were opaque. There was a dim light, by which Ascar saw a chair fixed to the floor. He sat on it, and as he did so the light went out, leaving him in pitch-darkness.
For a few moments nothing happened. Then light sprang into being again. But he was no longer in the glass sphere. He was sitting in a similar chair in a typically light, airy room in Retort City. The air carried a mingle of faint scents, and from somewhere came strains of the jangly, hesitating music that was popular here.
He stared at the room’s fittings for a while before he began to see that there was something odd about his surroundings. The proportions of the room were wrong, and seemed to become more wrong by the second. The angles of the walls, floor and ceiling … they didn’t add up, he realised; they were an impossible combination, as if space itself were altering its geometry.
The music, in the middle of a complicated progression, became stuck on one chord which elongated and prolonged itself, wailing and wavering, unable to escape its imprisonment in one moment of time.
Ascar watched with bulging eyes as a slim vase left the shelf on which it stood and moved through the air on an intricate orbit. This in itself was not so amazing; but the vase itself was deforming, going through a variegated procession of shapes. Finally Ascar found that he was looking at the vase transformed into a four-dimensional object – something akin to a klein bottle, impossible in three-dimensional space, with no inside, no outside, but comprising a continuous series of curved surfaces all running into one another.
He felt stunned to think that not only could he visualise such a figure but he was actually seeing it.
Everything else in the room began to deform in the same way. Alarmed, Ascar tried to rise from his chair – but couldn’t. Dimly, he tried to remind himself that he was being subjected to a recording, not an actual event; presumably the sense-tapes inhibited the power of movement in some way. Soon he stopped even trying, for the deformations, quite horribly, were acting on him, too.
Ascar let out a long, howling scream. Pain — Pain — Pain.
Then the room collapsed and was replaced by something indefinable. Ascar became aware of his nervous system as a skein, or network, floating like a rambling cloud, without tangible form, drifting through a multidimensional maze. Nothing was recogni
sable any more, and neither was there any proper sense of time. But his nerves, perhaps because the intruding time field had compromised their chemical functioning, were signalling pain: agonising, sharp, irresistible.
And into his consciousness was intruding something that, it seemed, was imminently going to end that consciousness. Thump, thump, thump, it went, like a living heart, or like a hammer that had his soul on the anvil.
Around him, his surroundings seemed to crystallise into some sort of form for a few moments. He saw more than the room in which he’d been seated: he saw a whole section of Retort City, deformed into bizarre non-Euclidean geometries so that its walls were no longer impediments to vision. Trapped in that nightmare were thousands of people, themselves transformed beyond semblance of humanity, like flies in a sticky jungle of spider-web: protruding through walls, floors and ceilings, combined with pieces of furniture, broken up into fragments of bodies still connected by long threads that were drawn-out nerves.
Then the city was on the move again, folding, distorting, sliding together like some shapeless, living monster from the ocean’s ooze.
Shiu Kung-Chien, watching a monitor of the tapes on a small screen set into the sphere’s pedestal, chose that moment to cut the playback, before there was any risk of Ascar suffering psychosomatic damage.
He switched on the sphere’s internal light and opened the hatch. Leard Ascar staggered forth, his face haggard and his breath coming in gasps.
“I think that will do,” Shiu said mildly. “It gets worse, but we don’t want to make a psychiatric case out of you.”
“It gets worse?”
“Yes. What you experienced were the effects of the initial approach of an alien time field. By the time it was all over our population had actually been decimated. We might not have got off so lightly, had the Oblique Intelligence itself, being also able to manipulate time, not taken steps to alter its direction.”
Ascar hung onto the edge of the hatch. “And this is what it’s going to be like in Earth?” he wanted to know.
“Oh, on your planet it will be incomparably worse than anything that happened here. Ours was merely a glancing blow, scarcely more than a close passage. What it will be like for you is scarcely conceivable.”
“Holy Mother Earth!” whispered Ascar hoarsely.
10
Hwen Wu’s cabinet ministers sat gazing impassively at the two Earthmen, their expressions mild, faintly supercilious. Rond Heshke found this detached look, which the people of Retort City invariably wore, somewhat unnerving. It was as if they weren’t really interested in one at all.
“So you understand, I hope, the situation that faces your planet,” Hwen Wu said calmly, conversationally, as though he were discussing how they might spend an idle hour or two. “We in Retort City have been aware of it for some months, ever since Shiu Kung-Chien made a chance survey in that direction. That’s why we put a space-timeship in orbit around Earth to make detailed observations.”
“How come our people never detected your ship?” Ascar asked sharply. “Our tracking stations keep watch on the whole solar system.”
“Its orbit was elliptical in time, I believe,” the Prime Minister told him, “swinging not only around the planet in space but also from the past to the future and from the future to the past. Your surveillance stations would never have picked it up.”
“Ingenious,” Ascar murmured to himself.
Hwen Wu continued. “Recently we decided to offer Earth what assistance we could afford. For this, since we’re racially unacceptable to your ideology, we needed emissaries your government would trust. That explains your presence here in Retort City: our observers watched your tragic journey through non-time and decided you’d be most suitable. You’re both eminent personages on Earth and were already to some degree acquainted with the facts.”
“What is it you want us to do?” asked Heshke.
“Merely return to Earth and make representations to your government, advising them of the facts and the help we can offer.”
“And just what form of help is that?” Ascar demanded, frowning doubtfully.
“The only solution for your civilisation lies in the style of life we’ve adopted.” Hwen Wu said. “By that, I mean a life in space, lived in artificial cities. You must get off the planet before the disaster strikes.”
Heshke was aghast. “But that’s practically impossible. We can’t possible take everyone off!”
“Not everyone, true. But we’ll be able to help you. Our productive facilities are as great, if not greater, than those of your civilisation. We’re able to put our Production Retort – the lower half of our city – through cycles of time, so that it can go through several production periods where an Earth factory would go through only one.”
“We’ll show you how to construct your space cities,” an aged, venerable minister put in, “and add our resources to your own.”
Hwen Wu nodded in agreement. “The two time systems won’t meet for generations yet. We should be able to establish, perhaps, two hundred million people in space. It might even be greater, but” – he waved a hand negligently – “we’ll also be making a similar offer to the civilisation which unhappily is to be in collision with yours, and probably the Production Retort will be working to capacity.”
“Two hundred million people – that’s only a fraction of the population of Earth.”
“But enough to allow your culture to continue, surely. We’re motivated, in part, by a desire not to see interesting cultures destroyed needlessly.”
“Interesting cultures?” echoed Heshke in bewilderment. “But do you not realise that by the norms of my culture you are biological perversions? Freaks? And should be exterminated? And you want to help us?”
“Your religious beliefs don’t influence us in any way,” replied Hwen Wu in his usual cold but cultivated voice. “We’re swayed by reason, by what’s possible, but not, I hope, by passion.”
“It won’t work,” said Ascar, an acid, final note in his voice. “The Titanium Legions just won’t hear of it. The Earth is a goddess to them. They won’t desert her in any circumstances.”
“I fear Ascar may be right,” Heshke sighed. “Is there no other way? You’re masters of time: can’t you do something to prevent the collision from taking place at all?”
“You ask the impossible,” Hwen Wu said. “We’re not masters to that degree! We’re able to control a time field large enough to cover this city, yes – but one so large and powerful as either of the two on Earth? It would be like trying to move the Earth itself. It that not so, Leard Ascar?”
“So Shiu Kung-Chien informs me,” complied Ascar dully.
“And what if my government does refuse?” Heshke asked.
Hwen Wu gave a small, delicate shrug. “Then that’s their affair. We’ll take no further interest.”
He rose to his feet and waved his hand, signalling a cybernetic servitor. The machine rolled to a flimsy screen door and slid the panel aside.
“You won’t return to Earth alone,” Hwen Wu said. “One of our people will come with you, naturally, as our liaison. If your mission is successful he’ll stay on Earth to help to coordinate our joint efforts.”
Into the room walked Hueh Su-Mueng.
Heshke reclined on a low couch, wiping his brow with ice cubes wrapped in a cloth. His head ached and he was tired. He needed a long rest; he was scheduled to leave for Earth tomorrow.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. …
Time’s illusion.
Nearby was a decanter of a light, peach-tinted wine, of which Heshke had taken a draught. It was refreshing on the tongue and had an invigorating effect, but he was in no mood to drink any more of it.
Ascar, however, sloshed it back with gusto. “I think it’s very bad of you,” Heshke reproved him, “to back out at a time like this. In spite of your past actions, which have been awful enough, I’d have expected you to show a greater sense of responsibility, in the circumstances.”
<
br /> The physicist had announced that he wouldn’t be returning to Earth with Heshke. Shiu Kung-Chien had accepted him as a pupil; he washed his hands of Retort City’s entire scheme for the sake of an academic career under the great master.
He guffawed to hear Heshke’s protest. “You know what the Titans are like,” he said. “The whole enterprise is a lost cause. I’m too old to back any more lost causes – you’re quite capable of conducting the fiasco by yourself.”
Perhaps he’s right, Heshke thought to himself. I’ve suffered enough mental upheavals myself lately. Someone as unbalanced as Ascar probably would react by turning his back on everything, his whole race, his whole planet.
Not that Heshke could count himself as a racist any more. As an archaeologist, he had taken good care to delve into Retort City’s version of Earth history. Theirs wasn’t archaeological inference, it was recorded fact. And the fact was that there never had been an alien interventionist invasion, never had been such a thing as True Man. Human civilisation had risen and fallen into barbarism again and again of its own accord, that being its pattern. The elders of Retort City claimed that theirs was the only system that wasn’t subject to that pattern, the only one that could preserve itself for millennium after millennium. As for the deviant subspecies, Heshke knew now that Blare Oblomot’s version of their arising had been the correct one. It was a natural tendency for species to radiate into diverse subspecies. Usually, when there were global communications, so much interbreeding took place that the different strains all merged. But some time ago, after one particularly violent collapse, geographical groups of men had been isolated from one another for a lengthy period. The natural mutation rate had been accelerated by radiation left over from a series of nuclear wars, and they had evolved into distinct races.
And the subspecies to which Heshke belonged – known in Titan racial science as True Man – didn’t particularly resemble the homo sapiens that had existed, say, thirty thousand years ago, any more than the others did. It was simply the one that had come out on top.
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