Collision with Chronos

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Shiu nodded, his expression withdrawn and unreadable, and directed Ascar to enter the sphere by a narrow hatchway which closed up behind him.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.

Ascar let out a long, howling scream. Pain — Pain — Pain.

Then the room collapsed and was replaced by something indefinable. Ascar became aware of his nervous system as a skein, or network, floating like a rambling cloud, without tangible form, drifting through a multidimensional maze. Nothing was recognisable any more, and neither was there any proper sense of time. But his nerves, perhaps because the intruding time field had compromised their chemical functioning, were signalling pain: agonising, sharp, irresistible.

And into his consciousness was intruding something that, it seemed, was imminently going to end that consciousness. Thump, thump, thump, it went, like a living heart, or like a hammer that had his soul on the anvil.

Around him, his surroundings seemed to crystallise into some sort of form for a few moments. He saw more than the room in which he’d been seated: he saw a whole section of Retort City, deformed into bizarre non-Euclidean geometries so that its walls were no longer impediments to vision. Trapped in that nightmare were thousands of people, themselves transformed beyond semblance of humanity, like flies in a sticky jungle of spider-web: protruding through walls, floors and ceilings, combined with pieces of furniture, broken up into fragments of bodies still connected by long threads that were drawn-out nerves.

Then the city was on the move again, folding, distorting, sliding together like some shapeless, living monster from the ocean’s ooze.

Shiu Kung-Chien, watching a monitor of the tapes on a small screen set into the sphere’s pedestal, chose that moment to cut the playback, before there was any risk of Ascar suffering psychosomatic damage.

He switched on the sphere’s internal light and opened the hatch. Leard Ascar staggered forth, his face haggard and his breath coming in gasps.