Collision with Chronos

He could remember the day – it had been his tenth birthday – when the full force of the enigma had first struck him. The dilemma, the paradox, the impossible, irreconcilable paradox. The transient present, moving from a past that vanishes into a future that appears from nowhere. And even more perplexingly, what he later came to know as the Regression Problem: how can time “pass” without having “time” to pass in?

These enigmas drove out all his other interests. He read everything he could understand on the subject, and then studied physics and mathematics so as to understand what was left. He was precocious, ahead of his class in all the subjects he took. He never made any friends, but could have had a brilliant career in almost any branch of physics, had he not preferred to devote himself to unsuccessful, self-financed researches into the nature of time. Among more conventional minds he gained a reputation as a crank, an oddball, and his experiments had regularly ground to a halt for lack of any further money.

Then he had come into contact with the scientific establishments of the Titanium Legions and they, to give them their due, had made it possible for him to continue his work. Following the victories over the deviant subspecies there had been a splurge of boastful expansionism in the sciences, a feeling that True Man could achieve anything. Not only Ascar but real cranks, near-psychotics with the most extraordinary and fanciful theories, had been allotted funds to bring their ideas to fruition. And so he had made some small progress, until that incredible day when the real nature of the captured alien vehicle had become evident.

That day had been a climax in Ascar’s life. A second climax came on the day he was introduced to Shiu Kung-Chien, the foremost expert on time in a city that had mastered nearly all its secrets.

That he had been trained to regard individuals of Shiu Kung-Chien’s race as subhuman did not bother him. He would gladly have sat at the feet of a chimpanzee if it could have taught him what he wanted to know.

He sat across from the master physicist, beside whom, on a lacquered table, was a pot of the steaming green tea the man never seemed to stop drinking. Around them was Shiu Kung-Chien’s observatory which, so he understood, explored both space and time: on one side a curving, transparent wall giving a view of empty, sable space, on the other a neat array of apparatus whose functions Ascar could not divine.

Shiu Kung-Chien himself Ascar would not have picked out among his compatriots – but then these Chinks all looked alike to Ascar. His dress and appearance were modest: a simple, unadorned silk gown tied at the waist with a sash, the long, silky beard worn by many of his generation. But his fingernails, Ascar noted, were unusually long, and painted. It seemed that Shiu did almost no physical work himself; all the equipment he used, though designed by him, was constructed elsewhere, and thereafter was set up and attended by the robot mechanisms that now busied and hummed at the other end of the observatory.

“Yes, that’s quite interesting,” Shiu Kung-Chien said. He had been listening politely while Ascar tried to give him a rundown on his own ideas and what had led up to them. They’d been forced to resort to verbal descriptions – Ascar’s own equations, as it turned out, were adjudged near-useless by Shiu, and those he offered instead were incomprehensible to Ascar. Seemingly the type of mathematics he used had no equivalent in Ascar’s experience, and even the acupuncture assisted language course was of no help.

Ascar folded his arms and sighed fretfully, rocking back and forth slightly on his chair. “Up until recently my mind was clear on the subject. I thought I’d got to the bottom of the age-old mystery. But since I discovered another ‘now’ – another system of time moving in the opposite direction – I’ve been in confusion and don’t know what to think. The picture I’d built up is really only credible if the Absolute Present is unique.” He shot Shiu a hard glance. “You tell me: is the universe coming to an end?”

Shiu’s seamed face showed amusement and he chuckled as if at some joke. “No, not at all. Not the universe. Just organic life on Earth. To be more precise, time is shortly due to stop on Earth.”

He waved a hand and a cybernetic servitor rolled forward with a fresh pot of tea. “You know, you haven’t quite disposed of the Regression Problem, although you appear to think you have.”