James Blish - Common Time

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Common Time
". . . the days went slowly round and round, endless
and uneventful as cycles in space. Time, and time-pieces!
How many centuries did my hammock tell, as pendulum-
like it swung to the ship's dull roll, and ticked the hours
and ages."
Herman Melville, in Mardi
Don't move.
It was the first thought that came into Garrard's mind
when he awoke, and perhaps it saved his life. He lay where
he was, strapped against the padding, listening to the round
hum of the engines. That in itself was wrong; he should be
unable to hear the overdrive at all.
He thought to himself: Has it begun already?
Otherwise everything seemed normal. The DPC-3 had
crossed over into interstellar velocity, and he was still alive,
and the ship was still functioning. The ship should at this
moment be traveling at 22.4 times the speed of lighta neat
4,157,000 miles per second.
Somehow Garrard did not doubt that it was. On both
previous tries, the ships had whiffed away toward Alpha Cen-
tauri at the proper moment when the overdrive should have
cut in; and the split second of residual image after they had
vanished, subjected to spectroscopy, showed a Doppler shift
which tallied with the acceleration predicted for that moment
by Haertel.
The trouble was not that Brown and Cellini hadn't gotten
away in good order. It was simply that neither of them had
ever been heard from again.
Very slowly, he opened his eyes. His eyelids felt terrifically
heavy. As far as he could judge from the pressure of the
couch against his skin, the gravity was normal; nevertheless,
moving his eyelids seemed almost an impossible job.
After long concentration, he got them fully open. The
instrument chassis was directly before him, extended over his
diaphragm on its elbow joint. Still without moving anything
but his eyesand those only with the utmost patiencehe
checked each of the meters. Velocity: 22.4 c. Operating tem-
perature: normal. Ship temperature: 37 C. Air pressure:
778 mm. Fuel: No. I tank full. No. 2 tank full. No. 3 tank
full. No. 4 tank nine tenths full. Gravity: I g. Calendar:
stopped.
He looked at it closely, though his eyes seemed to focus
very slowly, too. It was, of course, something more than a
calendarit was an all-purpose clock, designed to show him
the passage of seconds, as well as of the ten months his trip
was supposed to take to the double star. But there was no
doubt about it: the second hand was motionless.
That was the second abnormality. Garrard felt an impulse
to get up and see if he could start the clock again. Perhaps
the trouble had been temporary and safely in the past. Im-
mediately there sounded in his head the injunction he had
drilled into himself for a full month before the trip had
begun
Don't move!
Don't move until you know the situation as far as it can
be known without moving. Whatever it was that had snatched
Brown and Cellini irretrievably beyond human ken was
potent, and totally beyond anticipation. They had both been
excellent men, intelligent, resourceful, trained to the point
of diminishing returns and not a micron beyond that point
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the best men in the Project. Preparations for every knowable
kind of trouble had been built into their ships, as they had
been built into the DFC-3. Therefore, if there was something
wrong nevertheless, it would be something that might strike
from some commonplace quarterand strike only once.
He listened to the humming. It was even and placid, and
not very loud, but it disturbed him deeply. The overdrive
was supposed to be inaudible, and the tapes from the first
unmanned test vehicles had recorded no such hum. The
noise did not appear to interfere with the overdrive's opera-
tion, or to indicate any failure in it. It was just an irrelevancy
for which he could find no reason.
But the reason existed. Garrard did not intend to do so
much as draw another breath until he found out what it was.
Incredibly, he realized for the first time that he had not
in fact drawn one single breath since he had first come to.
Though he felt not the slightest discomfort, the discovery
called up so overwhelming a flash of panic that he very
nearly sat bolt upright on the couch. Luckilyor so it
seemed, after the panic had begun to ebbthe curious leth-
argy which had affected his eyelids appeared to involve his
whole body, for the impulse was gone before he could sum-
mon the energy to answer it. And the panic, poignant though
it had been for an instant, turned out to be wholly intel-
lectual. In a moment, he was observing that his failure to
breathe in no way discommoded him as far as he could tell
it was just there, waiting to be explained . . .
Or to kill him. But it hadn't, yet.
Engines humming; eyelids heavy; breathing absent; calen-
dar stopped. The four facts added up to nothing. The temp-
tation to move somethingeven if it were only a big toe
was strong, but Garrard fought it back. He had been awake
only a short whilehalf an hour at mostand already had
noticed four abnormalities. There were bound to be more,
anomalies more subtle than these four; but available to close
examination before he had to move. Nor was there anything
in particular that he had to do, aside from caring for his own
wants; the Project, on the chance that Brown's and Cellini's
failure to return had resulted from some tampering with the
overdrive, had made everything in the DFC-3 subject only
to the computer. In a very real sense, Garrard was just along
for the ride. Only when the overdrive was off could he
adjust
Pock.
It was a soft, low-pitched noise, rather like a cork coming
out of a wine bottle. It seemed to have come just from the
right of the control chassis. He halted a sudden jerk of his
head on the cushions toward it with a flat fiat of will. Slowly,
he moved his eyes in that direction.
He could see nothing that might have caused the sound.
The ship's temperature dial showed no change, which ruled
out a heat noise from differential contraction or expansion
the only possible explanation he could bring to mind.
He closed his eyesa process which turned out to be just
as difficult as opening them had beenand tried to visualize
what the calendar had looked like when he had first come out
of anesthesia. After he got a clear andhe was almost sure
accurate picture, Garrard opened his eyes again.
The sound had been the calendar, advancing one second.
It was now motionless again, apparently stopped.
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He did not know how long it took the second hand to
make that jump, normally; the question had never come up.
Certainly the jump, when it came at the end of each second,
had been too fast for the eye to follow.
Belatedly, he realized what all this cogitation was costing
him in terms of essential information. The calendar had
moved. Above all and before anything else, he must know
exactly how long it took it to move again . . .
He began to count, allowing an arbitrary five seconds lost.
One-and-a-six, one-and-a-seven, one-and-an-eight
Garrard had gotten only that far when he found himself
plunged into hell.
First, and utterly without reason, a sickening fear flooded
swiftly through his veins, becoming more and more intense.
His bowels began to knot, with infinite slowness. His whole
body became a field of small, slow pulsesnot so much shak-
ing him as putting his limbs into contrary joggling motions,
and making his skin ripple gently under his clothing. Against
the hum another sound became audible, a nearly subsonic
thunder which seemed to be inside his head. Still the fear
mounted, and with it came the pain, and the tenesmusa
boardlike stiffening of his muscles, particularly across his
abdomen and his shoulders, but affecting his forearms almost
as grievously. He felt himself beginning, very gradually, to
double at the middle, a motion about which he could do
precisely nothinga terrifying kind of dynamic paralysis. . . .
It lasted for hours. At the height of it, Garrard's mind,
even his very personality, was washed out utterly; he was only
a vessel of horror. When some few trickles of reason began
to return over that burning desert of reasonless emotion, he
found that he was sitting up on the cushions, and that with
one arm he had thrust the control chassis back on its elbow
so that it no longer jutted over his body. His clothing was
wet with perspiration, which stubbornly refused to evaporate
or to cool him. And his lungs ached a little, although he could
still detect no breathing.
What under God had happened? Was it this that had killed
Brown and Cellini? For it would kill Garrard, tooof that
he was sure, if it happened often. It would kill him even if it
happened only twice more, if the next two such things fol-
lowed the first one closely. At the very best it would make a
slobbering idiot of him; and though the computer might bring
Garrard and the ship back to Earth, it would not be able to
tell the Project about this tornado of senseless fear.
The calendar said that the eternity in hell had taken three
seconds. As he looked at it in academic indignation, it said
pock and condescended to make the total seizure four sec-
onds long. With grim determination, Garrard began to count
again.
He took care to establish the counting as an absolutely
even, automatic process which would not stop at the back of
his mind no matter what other problem he tackled along
with it, or what emotional typhoons should interrupt him.
Really compulsive counting cannot be stopped by anything
not the transports of love nor the agonies of empires. Garrard
knew the dangers in deliberately setting up such a mechanism
in his mind, but he also knew how desperately he needed to
time that clock tick. He was beginning to understand what
had happened to himbut he needed exact measurement
before he could put that understanding to use.
Of course there had been plenty of speculation on the
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possible effect of the overdrive on the subjective time of the
pilot, but none of it had come to much. At any speed below
the velocity of light, subjective and objective time were
exactly the same as far as the pilot was concerned. For an
observer on Earth, time aboard the ship would appear to be
vastly slowed at near-light speeds; but for the pilot himself
there would be no apparent change.
Since flight beyond the speed of light was impossible
although for slightly differing reasonsby both the current
theories of relativity, neither theory had offered any clue as
to what would happen on board a translight ship. They would
not allow that any such ship could even exist. The Haertel
transformation, on which, in effect, the DFC-3 flew, was
nonrelativistic: it showed that the apparent elapsed time of a
translight journey should be identical in ship-time, and in the
time of observers at both ends of the trip.
But since ship and pilot were part of the same system,
both covered by the same expression in Haertel's equation,
it had never occurred to anyone that the pilot and the ship
might keep different times. The notion was ridiculous.
One-and-a-sevenhundredone, one-and-a-sevenhundredtwo,
one - and - a - sevenhundredthree, one - and - a - sevenhundred
four . . .
The ship was keeping ship-time, which was identical with
observer-time. It would arrive at the Alpha Centauri system
in ten months. But the pilot was keeping Garrard-time, and
it was beginning to look as though he wasn't going to arrive
at all.
It was impossible, but there it was. Somethingalmost
certainly an unsuspected physiological side effect of the over-
drive field on human metabolism, an effect which naturally
could not have been detected in the preliminary, robot-
piloted tests of the overdrivehad speeded up Garrard's
subjective apprehension of time, and had done a thorough
job of it.
The second hand began a slow, preliminary quivering as
the calendar's innards began to apply power to it. Seventy-
hundred-forty-one, seventy-hundred-forty-two, seventy-hun-
dred-forty-three ...
At the count of 7,058 the second hand began the jump to
the next graduation. It took it several apparent minutes to get
across the tiny distance, and several more to come com-
pletely to rest. Later still, the sound came to him:
pock.
In a fever of thought, but without any real physical agita-
tion, his mind began to manipulate the figures. Since it took
him longer to count an individual number as the number be-
came larger, the interval between the two calendar ticks
probably was closer to 7,200 seconds than to 7,058. Figur-
ing backward brought him quickly to the equivalence he
wanted:
One second in ship-time was two hours in Garrard-time.
Had he really been counting for what was, for him, two
whole hours? There seemed to be no doubt about it. It looked
like a long trip ahead.
Just how long it was gong to be struck him with stunning
force. Time had been slowed for him by a factor of 7200. He
would get to Alpha Centauri in just 72,000 months.
Which was
Six thousand years!
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Garrard sat motionless for a long time after that, the
Nessus-shirt of warm sweat swathing him persistently, re-
fusing even to cool. There was, after all, no hurry.
Six thousand years. There would be food and water and
air for all that time, or for sixty or six hundred thousand
years; the ship would synthesize his needs, as a matter of
course, for as long as the fuel lasted, and the fuel bred itself.
Even if Garrard ate a meal every three seconds of objective,
or ship, time (which, he realized suddenly, he wouldn't be
able to do, for it took the ship several seconds of objective
time to prepare and serve up a meal once it was ordered; he'd
be lucky if he ate once a day, Garrard-time), there would be
no reason to fear any shortage of supplies. That had been one
of the earliest of the possibilities for disaster that the Project
engineers had ruled out in the design of the DFC-3.
But nobody had thought to provide a mechanism which
would indefinitely refurbish Garrard. After six thousand
years, there would be nothing left of him but a faint film
of dust on the DFC-3's dully gloaming horizontal surfaces.
His corpse might outlast him a while, since the ship itself
was sterilebut eventually he would be consumed by the
bacteria which he carried in his own digestive tract. He
needed those bacteria to synthesize part of his B-vitamin needs
while he lived, but they would consume him without compunc-
tion once he had ceased to be as complicated and delicately
balanced a thing as a pilotor as any other kind of life.
Garrard was, in short, to die before the DFC-3 had gotten
fairly away from Sol; and when, after 12,000 apparent
years, the DFC-3 returned to Earth, not even his mummy
would be still aboard.
The chill that went through him at that seemed almost
unrelated to the way he thought he felt about the discovery;
it lasted an enormously long time, and insofar as he could
characterize it at all, it seemed to be a chill of urgency and
excitementnot at all the kind of chill he should be feeling
at a virtual death sentence. Luckily it was not as intolerably
violent as the last such emotional convulsion; and when it
was over, two clock ticks later, it left behind a residuum of
doubt.
Suppose that this effect of time-stretching was only men-
tal? The rest of his bodily processes might still be keeping
ship-time; Garrard had no immediate reason to believe other-
wise. If so, he would be able to move about only on
ship-time, too; it would take many apparent months to
complete the simplest task.
But he would live, if that were the case. His mind would
arrive at Alpha Centauri six thousand years older, and
perhaps madder, than his body, but he would live.
If, on the other hand, his bodily movements were going
to be as fast as his mental processes, he would have to be
enormously careful. He would have to move slowly and
exert as little force as possible. The normal human hand
movement, in such a task as lifting a pencil, took the pencil
from a state of rest to another state of rest by imparting to
it an acceleration of about two feet per second per second
and, of course, decelerated it by the same amount. If Garrard
were to attempt to impart to a two-pound weight, which was
keeping ship-time, an acceleration of 14,440 ft/sec' in his
time, he'd have to exert a force of 900 pounds on it.
The point was not that it couldn't be donebut that it
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