Collision with Chronos

3

At the city of Cymbel they transferred to a fast intercontinental rocket transport. On board Heshke was given breakfast, but Brask said little during the two-hour journey. Once he went forward to the guidance cabin to receive a radio message and returned looking pensive.

They had chased the twilight zone on their five thousand mile trajectory, so it was still early morning when they arrived at their destination. The rocket transport put down at what was evidently a private landing strip. A car drove up to take them to a low, massive concrete building a few hundred yards away.

Once inside the building Heshke found himself confronted with the usual Titan combination of efficiency and bustle. The corridors literally hummed – he didn’t know from what source. Symbols whose meanings he did not understand signposted the way to various departments. He turned to Brask.

“What is this place?”

“A top secret research station.”

“Is the artifact here?”

Brask nodded. “That’s why this centre was set up – to study the artifact.”

Heshke’s eyebrows rose. “Then how long ago was it found?”

“Just over five years.”

“Five years? And you’ve kept quiet about it all that time?”

Brask smiled distantly. “Patience, Citizen. You’ll understand everything shortly.”

They came to a heavy door guarded by two armed Titans. Brask presented a pass; the door opened with the sigh of a pneumatic lock.

Beyond the guarded door the atmosphere was quieter and more calm. “This leads to the main research area,” Brask told him. “I’ll introduce you to your new colleagues shortly. They begin the day here with an ideological session – would you care to drop in on it? It must be nearly over now.”

Resignedly Heshke nodded. Brask led him down a corridor and they entered a small auditorium. An audience of about two hundred white-smocked men and women faced a large screen which illustrated a commentary by means of a succession of pictures.

The visualisation, Heshke noted, was skilled and professional. The scene at the moment was a soulful one of the sun setting over the forest-clad hills; in the foreground a deep blue sea lapped against a rocky, encrusted shore.

But smoothly the picture merged into a slow collage of viruses and soil bacteria. The sudden transition from the expansive world of forest, sea and sun to the invisible, microscopic world at the boundary of life was, Heshke thought, effective. It caught his attention right away, and he listened with interest to the mature, persuasive voice that accompanied the vidtrack, knitting the brief scenes together into a coherent whole.

“Here we have the germinal essence,” purred the voice on the audtrack. “In these primary particles of life the spirit and essence of the planet Earth has concentrated all its being. By means of a mighty distillation from the potentiality of rock and soil, sun, ocean and lightning, were created these seeds of all future things. From this moment Earth, which before was barren, has produced DNA; and from this DNA, like a giant rising from the sea, there inevitably springs in due season the culmination of the entire process: the entity for which all the rest of Terrestrial life is but a platform. This is known as the culminating essence, or the human essence.”

The pictures that illustrated this speech were swift and dizzying. The virus forms vanished; momentary images of DNA helices, dancing chromosomes and dividing cell nuclei appeared one after the other, interspersed with a swift procession of diverse living species as the stages of evolution unfolded.

At the end of the sequence, to coincide with the speaker’s last words, appeared the image of a young, naked male, godlike both in proportion and feature (and posed no doubt by a suitable Titan). The figure stood with arms outstretched, light streaming around his silhouette from a point source in the background, slowly fading into a picture of Earth swimming in space.

“It follows,” continued the voice soberly, “that evolution is not a series of arbitrary accidents but a whole process, tending toward a predestined end. It follows that by nature Earth produces but one supreme species, this being her destiny, and it follows that this is a law holding for all planets throughout the universe. Earth is our mother, our home, our sustenance. From Earth’s soil we draw our blood. We are her sons; no one shall take her from us.”

With a sonorous orchestral chord the screen went blank. Heshke was fascinated. Blood and soil, he thought again. There was much in the lecture that, paradoxically, was both appealing and repellent: the mysticism, the blatant Earth-worship, the belief in destiny. But who knows, he thought, there might be something in it. Perhaps evolution does work like that.

The audience rose and filed out silently. Brask nudged Heshke. “Now you can meet the people you’ll be working with.”

Three members of the audience stayed behind, going over to a small table at the back. Brask and Heshke joined them.

Two of the men had the armbands and precise bearing of Titans. The third was a civilian, standing out from the others by reason of his sloppy slouch. He had a habit of glancing furtively around him, as if wishing he were somewhere else, and his mouth was twisted into a permanent expression of sardonic bitterness.

Brask made introductions. “Titan-Lieutenant Vardanian, Titan-Lieutenant Spawart, Citizen Leard Ascar. Gentlemen, this is Citizen Rond Heshke.”

All made brief bows.

“Are you gentlemen archaeologists also?” Heshke asked as politely as he could, since he did not recognise their names.

“No, we are physicists,” Leard Ascar said shortly. His voice matched his face, ironical, mocking.

Brask motioned them to chairs. “It’s time to put you into the picture, Citizen,” he said to Heshke. “I hope you’re able to absorb strange facts at short notice, because you’ll need to.”

He flicked a switch on a small console on the table. The big screen lit up, but for the moment remained without a picture.

“We told you earlier that we had discovered an alien artifact in working order. You probably imagined it had been found in a dig or something of that sort. In point of fact it was discovered lying in the open on a grass field, quite accidentally, far from any known alien remains. Moreover it was obviously of very recent manufacture.”

He flashed a picture on the screen. The background was as he had described: a grassy meadow, with a line of trees in the distance. Lying in the foreground was a silvery cylinder, rounded at both ends and with dull, rather opaque-looking windows set fore and aft. A Titan stood by it for size comparison, revealing it to be about seven feet in diameter and about twelve in length.

“As you see, it’s a vehicle of some sort,” Brask continued. “Within were two aliens who appeared to have died shortly before of asphyxiation. As these were our first complete specimens they have increased our knowledge of the enemy to quite an extent.”

The screen blanked for a moment and then flicked to another picture. The cylinder had been opened. The two occupants, seen partially because of the awkwardness of handling the camera through the opening, were strapped side by side in narrow bucket seats. They were small furry creatures with pointed snouts and pink mole-like hands, being perhaps the size of young chimpanzees. After a few seconds the picture flickered and the same two corpses were shown more completely, pinned to a slab in a Titan laboratory.

Despite his excitement, Heshke found time to be pleased that the specimens resembled quite closely the reconstructions that had been attempted from skeletons.

“So it was a spaceship,” he said.

“That was naturally our conclusion, to begin with. But we were wrong. Only gradually, by experimenting with the vehicle’s drive unit, were we able to piece together what it did.”

Heshke noticed that the physicists were all looking at the floor, as though hearing the subject talked about embarrassed them.

“The equipment aboard the vessel used a principle completely unknown to us,” Brask went on. “Movement through space – through comparatively short distances of space, not interplanetary space – could in fact be achieved as a by-product, but that was not its main purpose. Its main purpose is to move through time. The artifact we had stumbled on was a time machine.”

The physicists continued looking at the floor. Heshke let the bombshell sink into his mind.

Time. A time machine. The archaeologist’s dream.

“So they’re from the past,” he said finally, staring at the picture of the alien time travellers.

Brask nodded. “That would be the assumption. Presumably they developed the means of time travel during the final stages of their sojourn on Earth, but too late to do them any good. We can only hope the secret is not known on their home world, but frankly I think we would have felt some effect from it if it was.”

“Yes, indeed,” Heshke muttered. “The whole thing is – frightening.”

“You’ve said it,” Brask responded.

Heshke coughed nervously. “This field trip I’m going on,” he said after a pause. “It’s a trip through time?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

“I don’t understand.”

Brask looked at Titan-Lieutenant Vardanian. “Would you care to explain?”

The tall Titan physicist nodded and turned to Heshke.

“You’ll appreciate that we had no intention of risking our only time machine in reckless jaunts. We’ve spent five years of hard work trying to grasp the operation of the time traveller so that we could duplicate it. Finally we completed our own operational traveller – so we thought – and have made some trips in it. But the results are such that we need your expert advice; we’re no longer sure that our traveller works properly.”

Heshke didn’t understand what he meant. The Titan turned to the screen, reached for the control box and eliminated the image of the dead alien pilots. “Watch carefully. I’m going to show you some pictures our men took.”

A flurry appeared on the screen, then an impression of racing motion as if some colourful scene were swinging wildly to and fro and passing by too swiftly to be grasped properly. After some moments Heshke discerned that the only stable element in the picture was a sort of rim on the upper and lower edges; he realised that this was the rim of another screen or window through which the camera was taking the sequence.

He found it hard to believe that all this was really happening. Here he was seeing pictures from the past while an efficient, intelligent Titan officer calmly explained something he would have thought to be impossible. It made even the death of Blare Oblomot seem a shadowy, dream-like event.

Suddenly the picture stilled. They looked out over an even landscape, the sun high in the sky. In the middle ground stood clumps of ruins stretching for several miles. Though so corroded and overgrown as nearly to have blended into nature, to Heshke’s trained eye they clearly showed their alien origin.

“The Verichi Ruins, approximately nine hundred years ago,” Vardanian said quietly. “Not what you would expect, is it?”

No, thought Heshke, it certainly wasn’t. Nine centuries ago the Verichi Ruins – ruins in the present century, that is – should have been in their prime: an inhabited, bustling city. He watched an armoured figure stumbling about some heaps of stones. “It’s more like what they’ll be nine centuries in the future,” he agreed. “Maybe you were headed in the wrong direction?”

“Our conclusion also, at first,” Vardanian told him. “Initially we made five stops, all inside a bracket covering two centuries. We failed to find any living aliens at all, merely ruins such as you see here. However, it didn’t take long to ascertain that the wars of collapse – the death-throes of classical civilisation – were in progress simultaneously with the existence of these ruins. So we were in the past after all.”

“But that doesn’t make sense,” Heshke objected, frowning.

“Agreed. According to everything we know there was a large alien presence at the time of the wars of collapse. Could we be wrong? Could the alien presence have been much earlier? That would explain the dilapidated condition of the ruins – but it would not explain their much fresher condition today. Frankly, none of the historical explanations make much sense. So we were forced to draw other, more disappointing conclusions: that the time traveller was playing tricks on us, that we weren’t travelling through time at all.”

“You’re beginning to lose me. Where were you going?”

Vardanian gestured vaguely, as though searching for words to express thoughts he only understood as abstract symbols. “There are some peculiarities about the time-drive that suggest other possibilities. In order to work at all it has to be in the presence of a wakened consciousness; an unmanned, automatic time traveller simply wouldn’t move. So a living pilot is one of the essential components. Bearing this in mind, we were able to formulate a theory that the traveller – the one we have built, at any rate, even if not the alien one – fails to move through objective time. It enters some region of ‘fictitious time’, and presents to the consciousness of the observer elements from both the past and the future blended together, probably drawing them from the subconscious imaginations of the pilot and passengers.”

“It’s all an illusion, you mean?”

The other nodded doubtfully. “Roughly speaking, yes. Though the time traveller obviously does go somewhere, because it disappears from the laboratory.”

Heshke noticed that throughout the latter part of this explanation Leard Ascar scowled and muttered under his breath. Vardanian glanced at him pointedly. “That, with one dissenting vote, was the explanation we had adopted until yesterday.”

“And then you showed us those photographs,” Brask put in. “That upset things somewhat.”

Yes, the photographs. The pictures that showed the Hathar Ruins three centuries ago, and showed them in worse condition than they are today. The pictures that obviously – perfectly, clearly, obviously – were faked. The pictures that could not possibly be true.

“It was too much of a coincidence,” Brask said. “Here was independent, objective evidence of the findings that we had thought were subjective and illusory. We immediately dispatched the time traveller to Hathar at around the time these photographs were presumably taken, and took a corresponding set of photographs from the same viewpoints.” He opened a drawer underneath the table and withdrew a sheaf of glossy prints. “Here are copies of both sets. Check them: you’ll find they match, more or less.”

Heshke did as he was told, looking over the prints. One set was in colour, the other – the old ones – in monochrome. He pushed them away, feeling that he was being surrounded by too much strangeness for one day.

“Yes, they look similar. What does that prove? That you did travel back in time after all?”

“Yes,” said Leard Ascar fiercely, speaking for the first time.

And the other Titan, Spawart, also spoke for the first time. He adopted an expression of meticulous care, choosing his words slowly. “It may not necessarily mean that. We can’t really take these photographs as substantiating our own findings. They could have been faked. Or, knowing now that time travel is possible, they could have been displaced in time, owing their origin to our future. There are a number of possibilities which do not rule out a malfunction in our time traveller.”

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 – special 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 sat contemplating that vast, dead emptiness.