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uniformly expanding, all its galaxies spreading out from each other, creating
an entropy that was running down at a uniform rate. But now the pattern had
been expanded too far. It had been stretched too thin, and now it was
beginning to break down in places. Here and there, galaxies were beginning to
fall back into the pattern, to reapproach each other; and where this was
happening, entropy had reversed itself. In those places, entropy was
increasing, side by side and conflicting with those still-expanding patterns
in which entropy continued to decrease.
The result was stress, a chaos of laws in conflict, spreading like a network
of cracks fracturing a crystal, spreading through the universal space, riding
the tides of movement of the solid bodies through space. It was stress that
concentrated and generated new fractures at the points of greatest mass,
primarily at the center of the galaxies; and where the fracture lines ran,
time states changed, forward or back, one way or another.
Four billion years ago, the first stress crack had touched our galaxy. My
point of view turned time back to that point and I saw it happen. An
accumulation of entropic conflict near the galaxy center. A massive star that
went nova-but unnaturally, implosion nova.
There was a collapse of great mass. A collapse of space and time, followed by
an outburst of radiating time faults, riding the wave patterns of the stellar
and planetary movements within the galaxy, until at last the time storm
reached far out into the galactic arms and touched our own solar system.
What had gone wrong was everything. What was falling apart was not merely this
galaxy, but the universe itself. There was nothing to tie to, no place to
stand while the process could be halted, the damage checked and mended. It was
too big. It was everything, all interconnected, from the particles within my
own body to the all- encompassing universe. There was no way I or anyone else
could stop something like that. It was beyond mending by me, by humanity,
beyond mending by all living intelligent beings. Facing it, we were less than
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transitory motes of dust caught up in a tornado, helpless to even dream of
controlling what hurled us about and would destroy us at its whim....
I woke in my own bed and with the feeling that I had been through this once
before. For a moment, I could not remember when; then I recalled my earlier
experience with the universe tank and bow I had passed out after getting
caught up in what I saw there. I felt a momentary quirk of annoyance. If I was
going to fold up every time I tried to see things in that tank....
But the annoyance faded as I remembered what I had, seen. Here, lying hi the
familiar bed in the familiar room with everything simple and usual about me,
the memory seemed impossible, like nothing more than some bad dream. But it
was not a bad dream. It was reality; and in spite of the comfortable
appearance of everyday security that surrounded me, the fact of the time storm
as I had seen it loomed over us all like some giant, indifferent mountain that
might crumble and bury us at any moment, or might let us live a thousand years
hi peace.
But still... for all that I could feel the shadow of the storm still dark on
me, I was not quite as destroyed by it as I had been when I had first seen it
hi its full dimensions, imaged in the tank. A reaction had taken place inside
me* a stubborn reflex against utter despair and hopelessness. There was no way
I could even begin to dream, as I had for so long, of controlling the storm.
And still... and still... something inside me was refusing to give up. Some
strange and snorky part of my being was insisting that the situation could
stiU be fought and perhaps overcome.
It was impossible. Perhaps a thousand more individuals like myself, armed with
powers beyond the powers of gods, might have stood a chance of achieving
control, but
I was alone and had no such powers. Only, there it was. I could not let go.
Something in me refused to do it
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