Collision with Chronos

“Perhaps. But have you learned how their social system works? How they give up their children to be brought up as workers and technicians?” Heshke could remember the horror and revulsion he had felt when the system had first been explained to him. The two retorts were phased differently in time. The children of the Leisure Retort, taken from their parents at birth, were passed back twenty-five years in time. They grew up and usually, at the age of about twenty-five years, had children of their own … which were passed to the Leisure Retort. People gave up their babies and on the same day received a baby in return … their grandchild.

“I think it’s fascinating,” Ascar said, a rare smile coming to his features. “They play all kinds of tricks with time. They oscillate the Production Retort through phases, sending it on cycles not just forward and backward but sideways in some way, in other dimensions.… You know what this means? Here in the Leisure Retort you can order something that takes six months to make, and it’s delivered five minutes later. Shiu Kung-Chien does it all the time. Beautiful!”

“Beautiful if you’re Shiu Kung-Chien!” Heshke said angrily. “What if you’re the man who has to spend his life satisfying these people’s whims?” It all made the Titans’ plans for humanity – True Man, anyway – seem just and compassionate, he thought. At least the Titans believed in a kind of rough democracy. And they believed in culture – even for the workers.

“Oh, they do all right,” Ascar said vaguely. “They’re looked after, they’re happy. And anyway we’re not down there, so what are you worried about?”

“If you don’t mind,” Heshke said wearily, defeated by the man’s single-minded narrowness, “I’d like to get some sleep. We’re starting early in the morning.”

“Oh. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Ascar backed out of the room. He didn’t bother to say good-bye.

11

Outside the big room’s windows the murmur of traffic rose up from the busy street below.

By the general standard of Titan appointments the room – Limnich’s own private office – was not luxurious, almost drab. The Planetary Leader was renowned for his modest life-style, his retiring habits. His office was not even situated in Bupolbloc, but in a two-hundred-year-old building outside the newly-built administrative sector of the city. Here he kept his collection of skulls, his library of racist lore, and his other collections and paraphernalia.

In the past few days the office had been the scene of an unaccustomed surge of activity, disturbing the contemplative silences of its dark, varnished wood and its soft-piled carpets. Limnich himself confessed to being shaken to the core; there was no time for a dignified convention at the great castle. Everything had to be done now, on the spot. His office had become the nerve centre of the planet as he reorganised the Titanium Legions for the unprecedented struggle ahead.

Many of the old generals had gone, either retired or shunted to administrative roles requiring less initiative. Limnich had replaced them with younger men who had fresh, brilliant minds and newly-minted fervour – men like Colonel Brask (until the onset of the emergency he had been Captain Brask) who had been associated with the time project from the beginning. These were the type who now worked at the centre of things, preparing a colossal Armageddon in time.

Brask was with him now. On a wall screen behind Limnich’s desk he taped a time map that had been drawn up to show the advance of the alien time-system on their own. The map was a moving one, dramatically demonstrating the speed of approach and the estimated point of impact.

Limnich’s bones felt chill as he looked with awe upon that advancing wall of time. “So we have nearly two centuries?” he said.

“To total impact, yes,” Brask told him. “But the effects will be felt far before then. Our knowledge at this stage is still incomplete, but we estimate that the interference effects will become noticeable in about fifty years. After a hundred years, we aren’t sure what our operational status will be. Perhaps zero.”

“Thank God we discovered the truth in time!”

He turned from the screen toward Brask. In the room’s grey light the younger man’s oddly deformed eyelid looked almost grotesque. In a less talented man that eyelid would have excluded him from the Titanium Legions altogether, but the exhaustive genealogical investigation every applicant underwent had shown the defect to have no genetic origin, and Limnich had let it pass.