Time Slave

by John Norman

  "Time and space are modes of intuition," had whispered Herjellsen. "Do they exist in their own right?"

  "Yes," had said William.

  "How do you know?" asked Herjellsen.

  "I perceive them," said William.

  "You have begged the question," said Herjellsen.

  "I do not know what space and time are in their own right," said William.

  "Do they pertain to things in themselves?" demanded Herjellsen.

  "I do not know," grumbled William. "Perhaps they do."

  "Yes," said Herjellsen, "perhaps they do—but perhaps they do not"

  Gunther had not spoken during this interchange, but had listened. He did not generally discuss this sort of thing with Herjellsen. He respected Herjellsen. Herjellsen was perhaps the only man whom Gunther respected.

  "All that you know," said Herjellsen, "is a succession of perceptions—indeed, you find even yourself, in so far as you dare to search—a perception and perceptions among others."

  "Perception requires a physical body—a brain," snapped William. William was normally polite. This time he was not.

  "And what is your evidence of a physical body—a physical brain?" inquired Herjellsen.

  William was silent.

  "Perceptions," said Herjellsen.

  William refused to speak.

  "A slender ribbon of perceptions flowing among mysteries," said Herjellsen, wearily. "All that we know are these conscious scraps, these sparks in darkness, and, to be sure, we fling out our speculations from them, reaching out, like hands to touch something real. From these scraps, these tiny pieces of paper, we try to construct a world, a time and a place, a map, a home in which we may feel secure. We build for ourselves, on these bits of sand, a world in which we claim to live."

  "We must do so!" said William.

  "To be sure," said Herjellsen. "That is not at issue."

  Herjellsen looked at William intently. "You know, as a rational man, from studies in logic and mathematics, that any given conclusion follows from an infinite diversity of sets of premises, even sets incompatible with one another."

  "Yes," said William.

  "And, too," pressed Herjellsen, "every event, accordingly, is subject to an infinite variety of explanations." "Theoretically," grumbled William.

  "Do you not see the consequence of these truths?" asked Herjellsen. "The world we construct, extrapolating beyond the stream of our data, to explain our ideas, our perceptions, is but one logical possibility among infinite alternatives."

  William looked away. His face was white.

  "I am simply saying," smiled Herjellsen, "let us not be dogmatic."

  William looked at him.

  "You see, my dear William, all I am asking you to recognize is that we may not live in the world—within the reality—you think we do."

  "But we may!" blurted William.

  "Yes," granted Herjellsen, "we may—and we may not."

  "Our view of the world," said Gunther, speaking for the first time, "has given us science."

  "You argue," said Herjellsen, "from the utility of science to the truth of its world picture."

  "Yes," said Gunther.

  "Ultimately," said Herjellsen, "the utility of science reduces to its capacity to reconcile, harmonize and predict perceptions. Theoretically, an infinite number of intellectual constructions would be equally efficacious in this regard. Suppose, for example, that we have a thousand sciences, each with its different world picture, each with its own theoretical entities, one making use of atoms, one not, and so on, would we then have a thousand truths, each incompatible with the other?"

  "No," said Gunther, "there would be only one truth."

  "But a thousand utilities?"

  "Yes," said Gunther.

  "What then," said Herjellsen, "of utility as a guide to truth?"

  "It is still," said William, "the best we have."

  "Yes," said Herjellsen, "I think that is true." He smiled at William. "Only I do not find your 'science' too useful. There are many things I find of interest which it does not explain."

  "You refer, perhaps," said William, "to reputed psychic phenomena, extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, and such?"

  Herjellsen shrugged, neither admitting anything nor disagreeing with William.

  "Such phenomena do not exist," said William.

  "Perhaps not," said Herjellsen, "but it is interesting to note that, even did they exist, science as it is presently constituted could not explain them."

  "So?" asked William.

  "So we must be wary," said Herjellsen, "that we do not take as our criterion for existence what science can explain. At one time science could not explain the functioning of a magnet, at another time the falling of a stone, the digestion of food, the circulation of the blood."

  "That is different," said William.

  "Surely it is an obvious fallacy to argue from the inexphcability of a phenomenon to its lack of existence."

  "Not always," said William.

  "Explain to me," said Herjellsen, "the fact of consciousness, the fact that when I wish to move my hand, my hand moves."

  William said nothing.

  "Of these things," said Herjellsen, "I am more certain than I am of the existence of the world, and your science cannot explain them."

  "Do you demean science?" asked William.

  "I only require it," said Herjellsen, "to be adequate to the whole of experience." Then he looked at William. "I am confident," he said, "that whatever may be the nature of the reality it cannot be as our science maintains it to be."

  "Why not?" asked William.

  "Because of the radical discontinuity of mind and matter," said Herjellsen.

  "I do not understand," said William.

  "I am confident," said Herjellsen, "that the same power that causes water to flow moves in the dreams of a sleeping lion, that causes fire to burn and worlds to turn guides the equations of Descartes, the stick of Archimedes, drawing its circles in the sand, that causes a seed to germinate and a flower to open its petals to the sun moves in your mind and mine."

  "Perhaps," said William.

  "The reality and the power is one," said Herjellsen.

  "What do you propose to do about it?" asked William.

  "The power is in me," said Herjellsen, "as much as in any seed, in any leaf, in any tree, in any world."

  "But what are you going to do?" asked William.

  "I am going to touch the reality," said Herjellsen.

  William was silent. Then he said, "And with what tool are you going to do this?"

  "With the only tool I have," said Herjellsen, "with that which is most akin to it, most unexpected, most alien to science's accustomed modalities."

  "And what tool is that?" asked William, skeptically.

  "My mind," said Herjellsen. "My mind."

  Hamilton could not take her eyes from the cubicle.

  It was some seven feet in height, and some seven feet in length and breadth.

  The walls were of clear, heavy plastic. Access to the cubicle was by way of a small, sliding panel, some eighteen inches in width, some four feet in height. It was closed now.

  It seemed very primitive, somehow. But Hamilton understood its primitiveness as one might have understood the primitiveness of the first steam engine. It was simple, and crude, and yet the wonder of it was what was herein, per hypothesis, harnessed. It would have been simpler, more reassuring, could one have seen a wheel turn, a valve lift and fall, but there was little to note within save an odd play of light, a photic anomaly, now at the fringes of the cubicle, now like beads of bright water at its edges, pulsating, corruscating, then in small threads darting across the heavy plastic to join other threads, other ripples of light across the cubicle. These beads, and leapings, and threads increased. But the light was not the phenomenon, but its accompaniment. It was no more than the footprint of a summoned force, an impression, not the force, marking its passage. It was a crushed leaf, a snapped branch in
its path, that was all, not the beast, not the power, but the sign, the sign of the beast, the power, the force which Herjellsen called P.

  P was present.

  In the cubicle was P.

  Hamilton was terrified. She was a little girl crying in the night.

  "Do not be afraid," said William. He was tense.

  "It is tomorrow!" cried Hamilton suddenly.

  "No," said Gunther. "No. It is like the light. It will pass. It is a subsidiary effect, meaningless."

  Hamilton shuddered. William held her arm.

  "It is tomorrow," said Hamilton. "I know it is tomorrow."

  "It is a disordering of your sense," said William. "Part of your mind senses the presence of P."

  "It is today, too," wept Hamilton.

  "Do not be frightened," said William. "This is similar to a temporary drug-induced schizophrenia. It is irrelevant to the experiment, the substance of the work."

  William's eyes were closed. He smiled. "I now have the consciousness of an afternoon, when I was six, in London, on a holiday. It is real."

  "It is a memory," whispered Hamilton.

  "No," said William. "It is not like a memory. It is real, and it is now."

  "It cannot exist at the same time as now," whispered Hamilton. "This is a different time."

  "Two times exist now," said William. "Each is real. Both are real."

  "No," said Hamilton.

  Hamilton shook her head. Herjellsen sat silent, his head beneath the steel hood, his heavy fists clenched. He was leaning forward, tense in the wooden chair. His shoulders were hunched. The toes of his heavy shoes pressed at the boards of the floor, the black, rubber heels lifted. His body, powerful, muscular, squat, seemed then like a rock, but a rock that might contain a bomb, a cart of granite that might explode. His large head was bent, his eyes closed. He was alone under the steel hood, with the coils and receptors, with the darkness, with the tension, the straining of that large, unusual, maddened brain.

  Hamilton knew that the brain emitted waves. These could be empirically verified.

  They were real.

  "The reality and the power is one," Herjellsen had claimed.

  "Why then," had asked William, "do you not think you might touch the reality with electricity, or magnetism, or even the blow of your fist?"

  "They are crudely intraphenomenal," had said Herjellsen. "They are relative to the perceptual mode."

  "I do not understand," had said William.

  "They are the furniture of the room," had said Herjellsen. "They are not the key to the door."

  But the waves of the brain were crudely physical.

  But, Hamilton recalled, Herjellsen had cried out that the simplistic dichotomy between the physical and the mental was an intellectual convenience, not corresponding to what must be the case. "The dichotomy is false," had said Herjellsen. "If it were true, the mind could not move the body or the body affect the mind. If it were true, then I could not move my hand when I wish. If it were true, I could not feel pain when my body was injured."

  "What then is true?" had asked William.

  "A more useful distinction, though itself ultimately dubious," had said Herjellsen, "is that between the phenomenal and the nonphenomenal, that between the categories and sensibilities of experience and that which exceeds such categories and sensibilities, that which is other than they."

  "Which is?" asked William.

  "The reality," had said Herjellsen, "and the power."

  "The distinction, you said," commented William, "was ultimately dubious."

  "I think so," had responded Herjellsen, "because the phenomenal is itself a mode of the reality; it is a way in which the reality sees itself, a perspective, perhaps one of an infinite number in which the reality chooses to reveal itself. Thus, I see no complete and categorical distinction between ourselves and the reality. Indeed, the distinction itself seems relativized to our modes of consciousness. In the reality itself such a distinction would be, one supposes, meaningless."

  William had shaken his head.

  "Oh, we are quite real!" had laughed Herjellsen. "We are as real as anything that is real; it is only that there are other manifestations, other truths, other dimensions, that are quite as real as ours."

  "How do you know?" demanded William.

  "I do not," said Herjellsen. "But it seems to be likely. It seems implausible, does it not, that our handful of categories, our tiny, evolving package of sensibilities, our tiny phenomenal island of awareness, emerging from sensed, but uncharted seas, should be unique." Herjellsen had then leaned back. "Rich as we are, I suspect," he had said, "we are only one penny in the riches of reality."

  "What is the reality in itself?" demanded William.

  "We are one thing, I suspect," had said Herjellsen, "that the reality is in itself—but what other things the reality may be in itself I do not know."

  "Is the reality to be distinguished," had asked Gunther, "from the totality of its diverse phenomenal representations or manifestations?"

  "I think so," whispered Herjellsen. "I think that it is in itself these manifestations, but that it is, in itself, too, more."

  "This seems contradictory," said William.

  "I do not think so," said Herjellsen. "Representations or manifestations are not like shells or costumes in which something else hides; they are a way in which reality, in itself, truly, has its being; they are not other than the reality but a way in which it is; but, too, it seems probable that reality's riches, in their unmanifested profundity, exceed phenomenal expressions. It is not that the phenomena are not reality, but that there are realities beyond phenomena. Reality contains, I suspect, depths and inexpressibilities beyond those of any set of phenomenal configurations."

  "This is hard to understand," said William.

  "The words 'in itself' are hard to understand, perhaps unintelligible," said Herjellsen. "Perhaps they are misleading. Let us forget them. Let us think what might be meant, not trouble ourselves with a particular semantic formulation. I am saying that there is no adequate distinction, in this matter, between real and unreal. All that exists is equally real. All that I wish to say is that there is a reality—doubtless identical with all that exists—but that this reality far exceeds our perspectives upon it, or those of other perspectives. It is, perhaps, infinitely profound and inexhaustible. There is more to it than we see. It is not that it is not as we see it, but that it is also other than we see it. And perhaps, if we held other perspectives, we would see that it was also other than we conceived it."

  "Granted these things, supposing them intelligible," said William, "is it not your belief that in extraphenomenal reality, reality as it is apart from our particular, or some particular, mode of experience, time and space do not exist?"

  "Certainly not as we conceive of them," said Herjellsen. 'Time and space, as we conceive of them, are irrational. It seems irrational both that space should be infinite, that it should have no end, and irrational, too, that it should at some boundary terminate, for what would be on the other side?"

  "What of an expanding, finite space?" asked William. Hamilton's mind had swept to a speculative conjecture common in astrophysics.

  "Irrational," said Herjellsen. "What is it expanding into?"

  William looked angry.

  "What if it were closed and static?" asked William.

  "What would lie outside its sphere?" asked Herjellsen.

  "That question would be answered 'nothing,'" said William.

  "Yes," said Herjellsen, "but scarcely answered rationally." He smiled. "A sphere requires place," he said.

  "What of the Moebius strip?" demanded William.

  "It, too, requires place," smiled Herjellsen.

  "I suppose there are difficulties," admitted William.

  "Too," said Herjellsen, "consider time—it is irrational both to suppose that it had a beginning and that it had no beginning—each hypothesis affronts the intellect, challenges sanity itself."

  "So, the
n," said William, "space and time are irrational?"

  "Space and time, as we conceive of them," said Herjellsen, "make little sense."

  "So what should we think?"

  "We should think at least," said Herjellsen, "that they may not be as we conceive of them." He smiled. "They are relative, in my conjecture," said Herjellsen, "to our mode of perception—I think it quite unlikely that they characterize, or characterize in the same way, the reality as it is apart from our sensibility. It may be that what we experience as space and time is, apart from our experience of it, quite unlike space and time."

  "This sort of thing," volunteered Gunther, "is quite common in science, though seldom extended to space and time. The distinction between the sensibility-dependent and the sensibility-independent property is germane. Sound, for example, considered as physicalistic atmospheric concussions is quite unlike the auditory phenomenon of listening, say, to a symphony. The reality is like blows; the auditory phenomenon is music. Similarly with other properties. Consider color, as the physicalistic property of a surface, selectively absorbing and reflecting waves of light. This is quite different from the painting one sees or the blue sky. The world of physics is one of particles and motions, of invisible motions, silent, unlit, dark, hurried. But our world of experience, the human world, is bright with sound, with feeling, taste and touch, with odors, with light and color. Our sensors dip into alien spectra. Our brain is a transducer that transforms physical energies into a human experience, one congruent with the world of the physicist, and yet quite different from it."

  "You are familiar, are you not," asked Herjellsen of William, "with the distinction between the sensibility-dependent property and the sensibility-independent property?"

  "Any educated man is," said William. "That distinction dates from the time of Galileo."

  "From the time of Leucippus and Democritus," corrected Herjellsen.

  "Very well," said William.

  "It is then my belief," said Herjellsen, "that time and space, as we conceive them, are sensibility-dependent, a mode of our sensibility, a condition for experience, given whatever we may be. That we experience the reality spatially and temporally does not imply that the reality apart from our experience is as we conceive it to be. That we experience a bright yellow does not imply that in the physicist's reality such a yellow, apart from our experience, exists. That we experience a symphony of Beethoven does not imply that in the physicist's reality such music, apart from our experience, exists as we experience it. Rather it would be only a pounding on the skin. For the lobster, for the sponge, for the spider, it presumably would not exist, not as music. Similarly, of course, for them there might be beauties and rhythms that would be lost on us, we lacking the appropriate sensors, the appropriate sensibility."