Time Heals

Hart followed the doctor down a long corridor where they were the only two in sight and their footsteps had a hollow echo. The fluorescent lights were almost pitilessly bright, and the hall was silent. Silent and empty as—death? No, as the Crypt at its end, as timelessness.

Hart’s lips were dry, his throat felt tight, and his heart beat with a rapid violence that dinned faintly in his ears. He was frightened. Why not admit it? The feeling was utterly illogical, but he was scared silly.

He asked inanely, as if he and all the rest of the world didn’t know, “There won’t be any sensation at all?”

“None,” replied the doctor with a patience suggesting he had led many down this hallway. “You’ll stand on a plate between the field coils, I’ll throw the main switch and—as far as you’re concerned—you’ll be in the future. Time simply does not exist, as a ‘flow’ at any rate, in a level-entropy field.”

Hart licked his lips. “It’s like dying,” he said.

The doctor nodded. “In a way, it is death,” he replied. “You’ll be leaving everything behind you—family, friends, the whole world in which you have lived. You can’t go back. When you’re released from the field—ten, fifty, a hundred, a thousand years hence maybe—you’ll be irrevocably in the future.” He shrugged. “But, of course, you’ll live, whereas your only choice in this era is death.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Hart. ‘‘I’m nervous sure but I’m not scared. I have every confidence in your machine. It’s just that I never did understand the principles of it, and of course one is naturally skittish in the face of the unknown.”

“It’s very simple,” said the doctor. “The newspapers have, as usual, made a horrible mess of trying to explain it to the public, and all the legal and moral argument it’s stirred up have further confused the issue. But the scientific basis is very simple indeed.” He adopted a lecturing tone: “Time, of course, is a fourth dimension in a more or less rigid continuum—that’s putting it very crudely, of course, but it shows that simple relativity gives no reason why time should flow, or if it flows, why it should do so in one direction only. That difficulty was resolved by suggesting that the increase of time was the general increase of entropy throughout the universe with respect to the ‘rigid’ time dimension. Again, that’s a clumsy way of putting it, but you get my general idea. I don’t pretend to understand the details of it myself.

“Anyway, just a couple of years ago, in 1950 I believe, Seaton found an effect, a field, in which entropy was held level. An object in such a field could not experience any time flow—for it, time would not exist. The generation of such a field turned out to be fairly simple once the basic principles were discovered, so that before long we had the Crypt.”

Hart nodded—although he didn’t understand it even now. Science had bored him; he regarded himself as a natural-born aesthete and observer of man, a pursuit which a medium-sized independent income made possible. He wrote a little, painted a little, played the piano a little, went to all the exhibitions and concerts, chose his friends and occasional mistresses primarily on a basis of conversational ability, and in general had a pretty good time.