Collision with Chronos

by Barrington J. Bayley

  Yes, thought Heshke. Someone sent a package of photographs from three hundred years in the future to three hundred years in the past – a hop of six hundred years. That could have happened. But why?

  It was useless to speculate. There could be a thousand bizarre, trivial, or unguessable reasons.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I’m finding this all just a little bit too bewildering. Do you mind telling me exactly why I’m here?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Brask solicitously. “We hadn’t meant to call on your services until we had ironed the defects out of our time-drive system, but these photographs have thrown us somewhat into confusion. So we want you to take a trip back to the Hathar Ruins of three hundred years ago.”

  “Why?” Heshke asked.

  “Well —” Brask hesitated. “We’re working in the dark at the moment. Our most pressing need is to know whether our present capacity to travel through time is objectively real or merely illusory. The psychologists tell us that if it is illusory then there will be anomalies in the structures that appear to exist outside our own time – much as a dream fails to reconstruct reality with accuracy. There would be something to distinguish the ruins in the second set of photographs from the real Hathar Ruins.”

  Heshke glanced again at the two sets. “They don’t look much different to me.”

  “Agreed. But perhaps there’s a difference the pictures don’t show. Now you know the Hathar Ruins better than anyone: they’re your speciality. We just want you to go back and make a study of them; see if you can throw any light on the mystery.”

  “Those are pretty vague directives.”

  Brask shrugged. “Quite so. But Leard will be going with you; perhaps you can work something out together.”

  Heshke contemplated for a few moments. “This travel into a ‘fictitious past’: it would be like a descent into the subconscious mind, wouldn’t it?”

  “Possibly so,” Titan-Lieutenant Vardanian said. But Leard Ascar gave vent to a derisive guffaw.

  “Take no notice of all this nonsense, Heshke,” he said waspishly. “‘Fictitious past,’ my eye! The time-drive works!”

  “Then the ruins …?” Heshke inquired delicately.

  Ascar shrugged and then seemed to retreat into himself.

  Heshke turned to Brask. “When do we go?”

  “As soon as possible. If you feel up to it, today.”

  “I’ll need recorders, and a few tools.”

  The other nodded. “We’ve anticipated that. I think you’ll find we have everything you could require.”

  “You, mentioned danger. …”

  “Only because the unit is relatively untested. That’s the only source of risk.”

  “Apart from other aliens?” Heshke queried. “This business makes their technology look pretty formidable.”

  “Yes, but not necessarily in all-area advance of our own,” Spawart replied. “After all, we were able to copy their time-drive. That would indicate that we have comparable ability.”

  “That is, provided we have copied it,” Brask rejoindered, giving the other a sharp look.

  “Of course we have!” snapped Ascar.

  Heshke first inspected his equipment, and then was given a private room in which to rest. He slept for a couple of hours and then lay on the couch thinking over everything he had learned.

  The expedition, he gathered, was to comprise four men in all: himself, the physicist Leard Ascar, and two Titan technical officers to pilot the time traveller. Departure was timed for midafternoon, and as the day wore on his nerves began to fray.

  Shortly after lunch had been brought to him he was visited by Leard Ascar, who had spent the morning working on the time apparatus.

  “Hello, Heshke, feeling nervous?” the sour-faced physicist said.

  Heshke nodded.

  “No need to worry. It’s all quite safe and painless really. This is my third trip.”

  “How long will the journey take?”

  “We can manage a hundred years per hour. So say three hours there, three hours back.”

  “We’re rather a long way from Hathar, aren’t we – in spatial terms, I mean?”

  “No problem. While we’re travelling through time – strictly speaking we’re travelling through non-time – we can manoeuvre over the Earth’s surface at will. We’ll land slap on top of our target.”

  “From here to Hathar in three hours,” Heshke mused. “That’s not bad at all. This time machine would make quite a good intercontinental transport, then?”

  Ascar laughed shortly. “You’re quick on the uptake, but no, it wouldn’t. You have to trade space for time. To travel to the other side of the Earth you’d have to traverse about a hundred years. I suppose you could do it by moving back and forth until you matched destinations in space and time, but after you’d finished messing about you would have done better to go by rocket.”

  Ascar fumbled in his pocket, brought out a crumpled tobacco roll and lit it, breathing aromatic smoke all around. Heshke noticed that his eyes bulged slightly. “Mind if I sit down? Been working on that damned time-drive all morning. I’m kind of tensed up myself.”

  “Sure, be my guest.” Ascar took the room’s only chair and Heshke sat on his bed to face him. “I’m rather curious … how does the time traveller work?”

  Ascar grinned. “By detaching ‘now’ from ‘now’ and moving it through ‘non-now’.

  Heshke shook his head with a sigh. “That means absolutely nothing to me.”

  “It wouldn’t have to me, either, before we found the alien machine. And not even then for a long time. But I understand it now. That’s why I’m sure the Titans are wrong with this cockeyed notion of ‘subconscious time’ or whatever.” Ascar puffed on his roll as if tobacco were the staff of life. Heshke realised that the man was even more nervous than he was. “I’m sorry, Heshke, it’s just that I think this whole jaunt is a waste of time. The time traveller does what we intended it to do: to travel, objectively and in reality, back and forward through time. And I’m the one to ask because it was me, in the end, who cracked the problem. They’d still be fumbling.”

  “What’s this, professional jealousy?” Heshke smiled.

  The other waved his hand and looked annoyed. “Why should I be jealous? The Titan scientists are good at their work – on straightforward problems. Give them a premise and they’ll take it right through to its conclusion, very thoroughly. But where creative thinking is called for they tend to fall back on their ideology – and we all know what a lot of bull that is.”

  Heshke looked around uneasily, wondering about hidden microphones. “I never thought I’d hear anyone talk like that in a Titan stronghold,” he said.

  The physicist shrugged. “They tolerate me. I’ve been with this project from the start, five years ago. Things were more easygoing in the old days. I’m sick of it now, though.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  Ascar sneered. “I’ve built them their time traveller and they say it doesn’t work, just because they don’t like what they’ve discovered in the past. They’re disappointed that the aliens didn’t seem to have played any part in the wars of collapse, that’s what it all comes down to. And we’ve hardly even done any exploring yet. Maybe the aliens were around, somewhere or other.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  Ascar pulled on his roll. “Just tired. Five years spent trying to understand time has unhinged my mind. Take no notice of my grumbling, Citizen. It’s all part of my personality syndrome.”

  “But the ruins,” Heshke reminded him. “If we were to take the evidence at face value they are growing newer as time passes, instead of older. That just can’t be, can it?”

  Ascar shrugged. “How the hell would I know? Nothing looks impossible to me now I know that time’s mutable, that the individual’s ‘now’ can be detached from absolute ‘now’. There must be an explanation.” He smiled. “How about this? Thousands of years ago the aliens flew over here and planted some seeds – spe
cial kinds of seeds. Ever since they’ve been slowly growing, not into plants or vegetable matter but into structures of stone and metal. The ruins we see are like trees maturing over centuries into full-blown houses, cities, castles and whatever. When they are fully grown the aliens will come down and live in them.”

  Heshke laughed, thinking over the idea. He was tickled by Ascar’s quick imagination, by his readiness to face impossible facts and draw daring inferences from them. “But there are skeletons, too,” he reminded. “The seeds wouldn’t grow those.”

  “Why not? Maybe a few skeletons were included to fool future archaeologists.” But Heshke could see that the physicist wasn’t being serious.

  There was silence for a while. Ascar smoked noisily and shuffled his feet, staring at the ceiling. He seemed to have become unaware of Heshke’s presence.

  “Has any attempt been made to contact people in the past?” Heshke asked then. “Probably they could answer a good many of our questions.”

  “Huh?” Ascar’s attention jerked back into the room. He stared at Heshke with glazed eyes. “Oh. Oh, you don’t know about that, do you?”

  “Don’t know about what?” asked Heshke in some exasperation.

  “About what it’s like in the past. You can’t talk to the people there because they don’t hear you. They don’t see you, either. What’s more you can knock them down and they don’t react in any way at all, just lie there squirming and eventually get up again. It’s as if they were robots going through motions which time has already ordained.”

  Heshke stared at him.

  “Oh, I know it sounds weird,” Ascar said with a wave of his hand, “but that’s how it is.”

  “Do you mean they have no consciousness?”

  “They act like they have no consciousness. Like robots, predetermined mechanisms,” Ascar repeated.

  “That sounds … sort of dream-like. Are you sure the Titans couldn’t be right?”

  “Oh no, it accords with my theory of how the time traveller works very well. You’ve probably read fictional stories about time travel and got your ideas of time from them. They always make the past or the future sound no different in essence from present time; but we know now that they’re very different indeed.”

  The physicist finished his tobacco roll and threw away the end, groping in his pocket for another. Heshke gave him one and helped him light it. “How?”

  “I’ll explain. Think of the universe as a four-dimensional continuum – three dimensions of space, as is our ordinary experience, and an additional dimension which we call time, extending into the infinite past and the infinite future. If we take the moving ‘now’ out of the picture we, could just as easily call it a universe of four dimensions of space. So now we have a static four-dimensional matrix. That’s basically what the universe consists of, but there’s one other factor: the fleeting present moment, sweeping through the fourth dimension like a travelling wave.”

  Heshke was no physicist but he had read widely and to some extent was already familiar with what Ascar was saying. He nodded, picturing it to himself. “The ‘now’ that we seem to be trapped in, being moved on from one moment to the next.”

  “That’s right. What is this ‘now’? Does anything exist outside it? For centuries the philosophical question has been whether the past and the future have any existence, or whether only the present that we experience has existence. Well, we’ve found out the answer to that question all right: the past and the future do exist, but they have no ‘now’. In effect, they have no time. No differentiation between before and after. They’re both dead, as it were.”

  “So that’s why the people in the past act like robots?”

  Ascar nodded. “The travelling ‘now-wave’ has passed them by. Consciousness can only exist in the ‘now’ – somehow or other it appears to be a function of it.”

  “This time-wave – what does it consist of?”

  “We’re not really sure. Some form of energy that travels through the four-dimensional continuum like a shock wave. We know its velocity: it travels with the speed of light. And as it goes it has the power to make events happen and to organise matter into living forms. You know in olden times they used to talk about the ‘life force’? This is the life force.”

  A thought occurred to Heshke. “You say there’s no time in the past. But what if you went back in time and changed something? What happens to the past as it was before you changed it? There’d have to be a kind of time there because there’d be a before you changed it and an after you changed it. …” He broke off in confusion.

  The physicist grinned. “What you’re talking about used to be called the Regression Problem, and it exercised us too when we first realised time travel was possible. Actually, in a slightly different form, it’s an ancient philosophical riddle: how can time pass without having another ‘time’ to pass in? One instant ‘now’ is at one point and the next instant it’s at the adjacent point, passed on to the next event, and so you seem to have a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ associated with the same moment – one where ‘now’ was there and one where it wasn’t.”

  “Yes, I think that’s what I mean,” Heshke said slowly.

  Ascar nodded. “These paradoxes have largely disappeared now that we’re able to make on-the-spot observations. Theorists used to posit an additional fifth dimension to accommodate these changes, but we know better than that now. The universe is indifferent to all artificially imposed changes, as well as to where ‘now’ is situated. It doesn’t distinguish between one configuration and another: therefore any changes you make don’t alter anything.”

  Heshke didn’t understand him. “But there’s still the old riddle, what if I went back and murdered my father before I was born …?”

  “It would probably turn out that your father was somebody else,” Ascar said acidly. “Joking apart, if you did succeed in ‘killing’ your father, you’d find that he was still alive … later. Cause and effect, as we understand it, only takes place in the travelling now-wave – what we call the Absolute Present. We’ve established that experimentally. Elsewhere the universe behaves indifferently, and if you do force changes on the past, then the consequences die away instead of accumulating.”

  “You’re beginning to lose me,” Heshke said slowly. “I find it hard to grasp … that even when tomorrow comes I shall still be here today, smoking this roll … only I won’t be aware of it.”

  Ascar rubbed his jaw and yawned tiredly. “That’s it: you’ve got it exactly. Now we are here; shortly the Absolute Present will have moved a few minutes further on, taking our consciousness with it. But the past doesn’t vanish, it’s merely that you can’t see it – just as you can’t see the future yet, even though it exists up there ahead of us. The time traveller acts like a lever, detaching a fragment of the present and moving it about independently. If that fragment has your consciousness attached to it you can then see the past, or the future.”

  “How far have you been into the future?” asked Heshke suddenly.

  Again Ascar looked sour. “Only about a hundred years, no further. There’s no point.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Because do you know what you find in the future? Just an empty desolation! There are no living forms – no people, no animals, no grass, no birds or trees or anything. Not a virus or a microbe. Just one second futureward of where we’re sitting the world is void of all life, and these chairs we’re sitting on are empty.”

  Horrified, Heshke blinked at him. Ascar smiled crookedly. “It’s logical, if you think about it. There’s life in the past, even if it does behave like clockwork, because the now-wave has already swept over it and the now-wave creates life. But it hasn’t reached the future yet. Everything we’ve constructed out of inorganic matter – our buildings, our machines, and so on – are there, but without the hand of man to maintain them they fall into a state of decay. And as for the substance of our own bodies, that’s dust, just dust.”

  And Heshke s
at contemplating that vast, dead emptiness.

  4

  The Titan time traveller was considerably larger than its alien prototype. Instead of the latter’s cylindrical form it had a cagelike structure, being square at both ends and ribbed with louvres. One end contained the cabin for the crew and passengers, the other the bulky drive machinery. It did, however, borrow some features from the alien design: the windows were of a thick nearly-opaque material possessing the quality of image-control, capable of being adjusted so as to admit or block light, and the control system copied the alien concept in its entirety.

  Initially the machine’s departure from the present was assisted by a second, even larger apparatus from whose maw it currently projected like a tongue, but once dispatched it flew under its own power and had no contact with the home base. This fact was nagging at Heshke’s consciousness as he tried to fight down his fears and allowed himself to be helped into the stiff combat armour the Titans had insisted he wear.

  “Are you comfortable?” the young com-tech asked.

  He nodded, though he was far from comfortable since the leather-like suit restricted all his movements.

  For some minutes the Dispatch Room had been filled with a loud whine as the launcher was warmed up. Ascar was already in his suit, as were the two technical officers who were to pilot the time traveller. Ascar beckoned him forward.

  “All set? Your gear all ready?”

  “It’s on board.” Not that he anticipated using much; he didn’t really know what he would do when he reached the ruins.

  “Then let’s take our places.”

  He followed Ascar into the time traveller. The cabin was comparatively large, about nine feet by nine. He sat down beside the physicist, strapping himself in. The tech officers came in, wearing their combat suits with more grace and style, and settled into the pilots’ seats in the front of the cabin. The whine from the Dispatch Room was cut off as the door slid shut: the time traveller was soundproof.