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.”
Ascar frowned. “Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. The Regression Problem points out the apparent impossibility of passing time. It’s defined thus: take three consecutive events, A, B and C. One of these events is occurring ‘now’ and the other two are in the past or the future. Let’s say that B is ‘now’, so that A is in the past and C is in the future. But there must have been a time when A was ‘now’ and B and C were in the future, and likewise there will be a time when C is ‘now’ and the other two are in the past. So we can draw up a table of three configurations of these three events, giving nine distinct terms in all. But we can’t stop there: if we did there’d be three simultaneous ‘nows’, and there can only ever be one ‘now’. So we must select one of these configurations and assign our own ‘now’ to it – this gives us a second-order ‘now’ related not to a single event but to a dynamic configuration of all three events: the one containing the real location of ‘now’. But we can’t stop there, either. Each one of the three configurations can in turn claim a second-order ‘now’, by virtue of the fact that the ‘now’ is moving. So we have to draw up a new table where the first table is repeated three times, the A-B-C groups number nine, and the single events themselves are permutated to twenty-seven, all this being encompassed by ‘third-order time’. The process can be repeated to the fourth-order, fifth-order, and ad infinitum time.”
Shiu waved his hands at Ascar, suddenly impatient with the exposition. “I’m fully conversant with all the arguments,” he said. “But what made you think you’d resolved the paradox?”
“Well,” said Ascar slowly, “when we actually travelled into the past and into the future and discovered there was no ‘now’ there, I simply assumed that the whole argument was fallacious. The facts showed that there was no regress.”
“But did you not bother to ask yourself why the regress did not occur?” said Shiu acidly. “No; you merely rushed in like a schoolboy and forgot about the matter.”
Ascar was silent for long moments.
“All right,” he said, “where did I go wrong?”
“Your basic mistake was in presuming time to be a general feature of the universe,” Shiu told him, bringing out his words carefully and emphatically. “You imagined the Absolute Present as a three-dimensional intersection of the whole of existence, traversing it everywhere simultaneously, much like a pickup head traversing a magnetic tape and bringing the images it contains to life. Agreed?”
“Yes,” said Ascar, “that’s a pretty good description.”
“But don’t you see that if you adopt that picture then the Regression Problem remains?”
“No,” Ascar answered slowly, “because the time intersection passes each instant only once –”
He stopped suddenly.
“Yes, you’re right,” he resumed heavily. “I can see it now. There’d have to be an infinite number of identical universes, one for each instant in our own universe, varying only in that the Absolute Present – the time intersection – was in a different part of its sweep. Every instant, past, present or future, would at this moment have to be filled by an Absolute Present somewhere among those universes.”
“And beyond that,” Shiu continued for him, “would have to exist a further set of universes numbering infinity raised to the power infinity, to take care of the next stage in the regression. Already we’re into transfinity.”
Ascar nodded hurriedly. “All right, I accept that. I also accept that the facts have shown my model to be wrong. So what’s the truth?”
“The truth,” said Shiu, “is that the universe at large has no time. It’s not ‘now’ everywhere simultaneously. The universe is basically, fundamentally static, dead, indifferent. It has no past, no future, no ‘now’.”