Barrington Bayley - Collision with Chronos

“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.