Asenion’s saturnine face was a study in changing emotions as Fletcher spoke. He seemed bored and irritated at first, then scornful, then, perhaps, furious; but not a word did he utter, and gradually the fury ebbed, turning to distant curiosity and then, finally. a kind of fascination. Or so Fletcher thought. He realized that he might be altogether wrong in his interpretations of what was going on in the unique, mercurial mind of the other man.
When Fletcher fell silent Asenion said, “What are you most afraid of! Critical mass? Or cumulative electron loss?”
“We’ve dealt with the critical mass problem by powdering the stuff, shielding it in graphite, and scattering it in low concentrations to fifty different storage points. But it keeps on coming in-they love to send it to us, it seems. And the thought that every atom of it is giving off positrons that go around looking for electrons to annihilate-” Fletcher shrugged. “On a small scale it’s a useful energy pump, I suppose, tungsten swapped for plutonium with energy gained in each cycle. But on a large scale, as we continue to transfer electrons from our universe to theirs-”
“Yes,” Asenion said.
“So we need a way to dispose of-”
“Yes.” He looked at his watch. “Where are you staying while you’re in town, Fletcher?”
“The Faculty Club, as usual. “
“Good. I’ve got some crosses to make and I don’t want to wait any longer, on account of possible pollen contamination. Go over to the club and keep yourself amused for a few hours. Take a shower. God knows you need one: you smell like something out of the jungle. Relax, have a drink, come back at five o’clock. We can talk about this again then.” He shook his head. “Plutonium-186! What lunacy! It offends me just to say it out loud. It’s like saying-saying-well, Billbergia yukonensis. or Tillandsia bostoniae. Do you know what I mean? No. No. Of course you don’t.” He waved his hands. “Out! Come back at five!”
It was a long afternoon for Fletcher. He phoned his wife, he phoned Jesse Hammond at the laboratory, he phoned an old friend and made a date for dinner. He showered and changed. He had a drink in the ornate lounge on the Fifth Avenue side of the Club.
But his mood was grim, and not merely because Hammond had told him that another four kilograms of plutonium-186 had been reported from various regions that morning. Asenion’s madness oppressed him.
There was nothing wrong with an interest in plants, of course. Fletcher kept a philodendron and something else, whose name he could never remember, in his own office. But to immerse yourself in one highly specialized field of botany with such intensity-it seemed sheer lunacy. No, Fletcher decided, even that was all right, difficult as it was for him to understand why anyone would want to spend his whole life cloistered with a bunch of eerie plants. What was hard for him to forgive was Asenion’s renunciation of physics. A mind like that-the breadth of its vision-the insight Asenion had had into the greatest of mysteries-dammit, Fletcher thought, he had owed it to the world to stick to it! And instead, to walk away from everything, to hole himself up in a cage of glass
Hammond’s right, Fletcher told himself. Asenion really is crazy.
But it was useless to fret about it. Asenion was not the first supergenius to snap under contemplation of the Ultimate. His withdrawal from physics, Fletcher said sternly to himself, was a matter between Asenion and the universe. All that concerned Fletcher was getting Asenion’s solution to the plutonium-186 problem; and then the poor man could be left with his bromeliads in peace.
About half past four Fletcher set out by cab to battle the traffic the short distance uptown to Asenion’s place.
Luck was with him. He arrived at ten of five. Asenion’s house-robot greeted him solemnly and invited him to wait. “The master is in the greenhouse,” the robot declared. “He will be with you when he has completed the pollination.”
Fletcher waited. And waited and waited.
Geniuses, he thought bitterly. Pains in the neck, all of them. Pains in the
Just then the robot reappeared. It was half past six. All was blackness outside the window. Fletcher’s dinner date was for seven. He would never make it.
“The master will see you now,” said the robot.
Asenion looked limp and weary, as though he had spent the entire afternoon smashing up boulders. But the formidable edge seemed gone from him, too. He greeted Fletcher with a pleasant enough smile, offered a word or two of almost-apology for his tardiness, and even had the robot bring Fletcher a sherry. It wasn’t very good sherry, but to get anything at all to drink in a teetotaler’s house was a blessing, Fletcher figured.
Asenion waited until Fletcher had had a few sips. Then he said, “I have your answer.”
“I knew you would.”
There was a long silence.
“Thiotimoline,” said Asenion finally.
“Thiotimoline?”
“Absolutely. Endochronic disposal. It’s the only way. And, as you’ll see, it’s a necessary way.”
Fletcher took a hasty gulp of the sherry. Even when he was in a relatively mellow mood, it appeared, Asenion was maddening. And mad. What was this new craziness now? Thiotimoline? How could that preposterous substance, as insane in its way as plutonium-186, have any bearing on the problem?
Asenion said, “I take it you know the special properties of thiotimoline?”
“Of course. Its molecule is distorted into adjacent temporal dimensions. Extends into the future, and, I think, into the past. Thiotimoline powder will dissolve in water one second before the water is added.”
“Exactly,” Asenion said. “And if the water isn’t added, it’ll go looking for it. In the future.”
“What does this have to do with-”
“Look here,” said Asenion. He drew a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket. “You want to get rid of something. You put it in this container here. You surround the container with a shell made of polymerized thiotimoline. You surround the shell with a water tank that will deliver water to the thiotimoline on a timed basis, and you set your timer so that the water is due to arrive a few seconds from now. But at the last moment the timing device withholds the water.”
Fletcher stared at the younger man in awe.
Asenion said, “The water is always about to arrive, but never quite does. The thiotimoline making up the plastic shell is pulled forward one second into the future to encounter the water. The water has a high probability of being there, but not quite high enough. It’s actually another second away from delivery, and always will be. The thiotimoline gets dragged farther and farther into the future. The world goes forward into the future at a rate of one second per second, but the thiotimoline’s velocity is essentially infinite. And of course it carries with it the inner container, too. “
“In which we have put our surplus plutonium-186.”
“Or anything else you want to dispose of,” said Asenion.
Fletcher felt dizzy. “Which will travel on into the future at an infinite rate-”
“Yes. And because the rate is infinite, the problem of the breakdown of thiotimoline into its stable isochronic form, which has hampered most time-transport experiments, isn’t an issue. Something traveling through time at an infinite velocity isn’t subject to little limitations of that kind. It’ll simply keep going until it can’t go any farther.”
“But how does sending it into the future solve the problem?” Fletcher asked. “The plutonium-186 still stays in our universe, even if we’ve bumped it away from our immediate temporal vicinity. The electron loss continues. Maybe even gets worse, under temporal acceleration. We still haven’t dealt with the fundamental-”
“You never were much of a thinker, were you, Fletcher?” said Asenion quietly, almost gently. But the savage contempt in his eyes had the force of a sun going nova.
“I do my best. But I don’t see-”
Asenion sighed. “The thiotimoline will chase the water in the outer container to the end of time, carrying with it the plutonium in the inner container. To the end of time. Literally. “
“And?”
“What happens at the end of time, Fletcher?”
“Why-absolute entropy-the heat-death of the universe-”
“Precisely. The Final Entropic Solution. All molecules equally distributed throughout space. There will be no further place for the water-seeking thiotimoline to go. The end of the line is the end of the line. It, and the plutonium it’s hauling with it, and the water it’s trying to catch up with, will all plunge together over the entropic brink into antitime.”
“Antitime,” said Fletcher in a leaden voice. “ Antitime?”
“Naturally. Into the moment before the creation of the universe. Everything is in stasis. Zero time, infinite temperature. All the universal mass contained in a single incomprehensible body. Then the thiotimoline and the plutonium and the water arrive.” Asenion’s eyes were radiant. His face was flushed. He waved his scrap of paper around as though it were the scripture of some new creed. “There will be a tremendous explosion. A Big Bang, so to speak. The beginning of all things. You-or should I say I?-will be responsible for the birth of the universe.”