This first attack upon the nature of time involved an immense
cooperative work, both theoretical and practical. It was from biology
that the first hint had come that the past persisted. And it would be
necessary to restate the whole of biology and the physical sciences in
terms of the new idea. On the practical side it was necessary to
undertake a great campaign of experiment, physiological and
psychological. We cannot stay to watch this work. Millions of years
passed by. Sometimes, for thousands of years at a spell, temporal
research was the main preoccupation of the race; sometimes it was thrust
into the background, or completely ignored, during epochs which were
dominated by other interests. Age after age passed, and always the
effort of man in this sphere remained barren. Then at last there was a
real success.
A child had been selected from among those produced by an age-long
breeding enterprise, directed towards the mastery of time. From infancy
this child’s brain had been very carefully controlled physiologically.
Psychologically also he had been subjected to a severe treatment, that
he might be properly schooled for his strange task. In the presence of
several scientists and historians he was put into a kind of trance, and
brought out of it again, half an hour later. He was then asked to give
an account ‘telepathically’ of his experiences during the trance.
Unfortunately he was now so shattered that his evidence was almost
unintelligible. After some months of rest he was questioned again, and
was able to describe a curious episode which turned out to be a
terrifying incident in the girlhood of his dead mother. He seemed to
have seen the incident through her eyes, and to have been aware of all
her thoughts. This alone proved nothing, for he might have received the
information from some living mind. Once more, therefore, and in spite of
his entreaties, he was put into the peculiar trance. On waking he told a
rambling story of ‘little red people living in a squat white tower’. It
was clear that he was referring to the Great Brains and their
attendants. But once more, this proved nothing; and before the account
was finished the child died.
Another child was chosen, but was not put to the test until late in
adolescence. After an hour of the trance, he woke and became terribly
agitated, but forced himself to describe an episode which the historians
assigned to the age of the Martian invasions. The importance of this
incident lay in his account of a certain house with a carved granite
portico, situated at the head of a waterfall in a mountain valley. He
said he had found himself to be an old woman, and that he, or she, was
being hurriedly helped out of the house by the other inmates. They
watched a formless monster creep down the valley, destroy their house,
and mangle two persons who failed to get away in time. Now this house
was not at all typical of the Second Men, but must have expressed the
whim of some freakish individual. From evidence derived from the boy
himself, it proved possible to locate the valley with reference to a
former mountain, known to history. No valley survived in that spot; but
deep excavations revealed the ancient slopes, the fault that had
occasioned the waterfall, and the broken pillars.
This and many similar incidents confirmed the Fifth Men in their new
view of time. There followed an age in which the technique of direct
inspection of the past was gradually improved, but not without tragedy.
In the early stages it was found impossible to keep the ‘medium’ alive
for more than a few weeks after his venture into the past. The
experience seemed to set up a progressive mental disintegration which
produced first insanity, then paralysis, and, within a few months,
death. This difficulty was at last overcome. By one means and another a
type of brain was produced capable of undergoing the strain of
supra-temporal experience without fatal results. An increasingly large
proportion of the rising generation had now direct access to the past,
and were engaged upon a great re-statement of history in relation to
their first-hand experience; but their excursions into the past were
uncontrollable. They could not go where they wanted to go, but only
where fate flung them. Nor could they go of their own will, but only
through a very complicated technique, and with the cooperation of
experts. After a time the process was made much easier, in fact, too
easy. The unfortunate medium might slip so easily into the trance that
his days were eaten up by the past. He might suddenly fall to the
ground, and lie rapt, inert, dependent on artificial feeding, for weeks,
months, even for years. Or a dozen times in the same day he might be
flung into a dozen different epochs of history. Or, still more
distressing, his experience of past events might not keep pace with the
actual rhythm of those events themselves. Thus he might behold the
events of a month, or even a lifetime, fantastically accelerated so as
to occupy a trance of no more than a day’s duration. Or, worse, he might
find himself sliding backwards down the vista of the hours and
experiencing events in an order the reverse of the natural order. Even
the magnificent brains of the Fifth Men could not stand this. The result
was maniacal behaviour, followed by death. Another trouble also beset
these first experimenters. Supra-temporal experience proved to be like a
dangerous and habit-forming drug. Those who ventured into the past might
become so intoxicated that they would try to spend every moment of their
natural lives in roaming among past events. Thus gradually they would
lose touch with the present, live in absentminded brooding, fail to
react normally to their environment, turn socially worthless, and often
come actually to physical disaster through inability to look after
themselves.
Many more thousands of years passed before these difficulties and
dangers were overcome. At length, however, the technique of
supra-temporal experience was so perfected that every individual could
at will practise it with safety, and could, within limits, project his
vision into any locality of space-time which he desired to inspect. It
was only possible, however, to see past events through the mind of some
past organism, no longer living. And in practice only human minds, and
to some extent the minds of the higher mammals, could be entered. The
explorer retained throughout his adventure his own personality and
system of memory. While experiencing the past individual’s perceptions,
memories, thoughts, desires, and in fact the whole process and content
of the past mind, the explorer continued to be himself, and to react in
terms of his own character, now condemning, now sympathizing, now
critically enjoying the spectacle.
The task of explaining the mechanism of this new faculty occupied the
scientists and philosophers of the species for a very long period. The
final account, of course, cannot be presented save by parable; for it
was found necessary to recast many fundamental concepts in order to
interpret the facts coherently. The only hint that I can give of the
explanation is in saying, metaphorically of course, that the living
brain had access to the past, not by way of some mysterious kind of
racial memory, nor by some equally impossible journey up the stream of
time, but by a partial awakening, as it were, into eternity, and into
inspection of a minute tract of space-time through some temporal mind in
the past, as though through an optical instrument. In the early
experiments the fantastic speeding, slowing, and reversal of the
temporal process resulted from disorderly inspection. As a reader may
either skim the pages of a book, or read at a comfortable pace, or dwell
upon one word, or spell the sentence backwards, so, unintentionally, the
novice in eternity might read or misread the mind that was presented to
him.
This new mode of experience, it should be noted, was the activity of
living brains, though brains of a novel kind. Hence what was to be
discovered ‘through the medium of eternity’ was limited by the
particular exploring brain’s capacity of understanding what was
presented to it. And, further, though the actual supra-temporal contact
with past events occupied no time in the brain’s natural life, the
assimilating of that moment of vision, the reduction of it to normal
temporal memory in the normal brain structures, took time, and had to be
done during the period of the trance. To expect the neural structure to
record the experience instantaneously would be to expect a complicated
machine to effect a complicated readjustment without a process of
readjusting.
The new access to the past had, of course, far-reaching effects upon the
culture of the Fifth Men. Not only did it give them an incomparably more
accurate knowledge of past events, and insight into the motives of
historical personages, and into large-scale cultural movements, but also
it effected a subtle change in their estimate of the importance of
things. Though intellectually they had, of course, realized both the
vastness and the richness of the past, now they realized it with an
overwhelming vividness. Matters that had been known hitherto only
historically, schematically, were now available to be lived through by
intimate acquaintance. The only limit to such acquaintance was set by
the limitations of the explorer’s own brain-capacity. Consequently the
remote past came to enter into a man and shape his mind in a manner in
which only the recent past, through memory, had shaped him hitherto.
Even before the new kind of experience was first acquired, this race had
been, as was said, peculiarly under the spell of the past; but now it
was infinitely more so. Hitherto the Fifth Men had been like
stay-at-home folk who had read minutely of foreign parts, but had never
travelled; now they had become travellers experienced in all the
continents of human time. The presences that had hitherto been ghostly
were now presences of flesh and blood seen in broad daylight. And so the
moving instant called the present appeared no longer as the only, and
infinitesimal, real, but as the growing surface of an everlasting tree
of existence. It was now the past that seemed most real, while the
future still seemed void, and the present merely the impalpable
becomingness of the indestructible past.
The discovery that past events were after all persistent, and
accessible, was of course for the Fifth Men a source of deep joy; but
also it caused them a new distress. While the past was thought of as a
mere gulf of non-existence, the inconceivably great pain, misery,
baseness, that had fallen into that gulf, could be dismissed as done
with; and the will could be concentrated wholly on preventing such
horrors from occurring in the future. But now, along with past joy, past
distress was found to be everlasting. And those who, in the course of
their voyaging in the past, encountered regions of eternal agony, came
back distraught. It was easy to remind these harrowed explorers that if
pain was eternal, so also was joy. Those who had endured travel in the
tragic past were apt to dismiss such assurances with contempt, affirming
that all the delights of the whole population of time could not
compensate for the agony of one tortured individual. And anyhow, they
declared, it was obvious that there had been no preponderance of joy
over pain. Indeed, save in the modern age, pain had been overwhelmingly
in excess.
So seriously did these convictions prey upon the minds of the Fifth Men,
that in spite of their own almost perfect social order, in which
suffering had actually to be sought out as a tonic, they fell into
despair. At all times, in all pursuits, the presence of the tragic past
haunted them, poisoning their lives, sapping their strength. Lovers were
ashamed of the delight in one another. As in the far-off days of sexual
taboo, guilt crept between them, and held their spirits apart even while
their bodies were united.