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.Such will be the end of the universe.So we have the answer to questions previously hidden from us – while of course we no longer know what we thought we knew, such as how the Earth began – not to mention how life began.“You will see from this that all the basic tenets of our thought, painfully acquired over the millennia, are thus stood on their ear.Every natural law is reversed or shattered.We observed wrong, and we did not know what we were doing.All our celebrated scientific accuracy and detachment was one hundred and eighty degrees out of true.The celebrated second law of thermodynamics, for example – we now begin to see that heat in fact passes from cooler bodies to hotter: suns are collectors of heat, rather than disseminators.Even the nature of heat thus appears changed.Energy accumulates from less organized to more highly organized bodies: piles of rust can integrate into iron rods.“Some of our painfully acquired scientific laws will still stand.I can’t see why Boyle’s law, about the volume of a gas varying inversely as the pressure when temperature is constant, should not remain intact.What can be made of relativity, I don’t know.But classical mechanics are invalidated; think of Newton’s first law of motion, about an object continuing in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless acted on by a second force! Imagine what the true state of affairs is! A football is lying in a field; suddenly it starts rolling, gains speed, shoots to the boot of a footballer!”Silverstone was interrupted by Captain Howes saying, “You’re mad!”“Yes, I believed I was mad at first.Wenlock believed I was mad when I first tried to tell him something of my thought – that was when we quarreled.Now I believe I am not mad.The madness is in the human generations of history.”Howes clamped a hand in disbelief over his bald head.He said, “You’re asking me to believe that from now on a beam of lasered light could shoot out of some wretch’s body and into my light-gun when I press the button? You are mad! How could you ever kill anyone in such a universe?”“I don’t see that either, I must admit,” Borrow said.“It’s extremely difficult to see, agreed,” Silverstone said.“We live in a generation that is to be consumed with paradox, because we happen to be at revelation point.But, you see, you are wrong, Captain, when you say that the light will shoot out of a body into your gun from now on.I must impress on you that nothing has changed in the external world at all; it obeys the same eternal natural laws it always has done and always will do.It is only our perception that has suddenly changed, is suddenly clear.What has always happened is that light has flashed from bodies into your gun; then you have pressed the button and had the intention to do so.”“It’s mad! It’s utter madness! Bush – you can hear him! You know he’s raving and things just don’t happen like that!”Bush said, “No, I begin to see it as the professor explains it.The action happens as he says; it sounds like madness only because the perceptions of the overmind are so twisted that Newton got – will eventually get, that is – his law reversed.Entropy works in the opposite direction to what we expected.It also sounds crazy because we had cause and effect twisted up, for the same reason.The lawyers in the law courts had their post and propter hocs the wrong way round.”Howes made a wide angry gesture of hopelessness.“Okay – then if it happens the way you and Silverstone say, why don’t we see it that way? “Sighing, the professor said, “We have explained that.Our perceptions have been strained through a distorting lens of mind, so that we saw things backwards, just as the lens of the eye actually sees everything upside-down.” He turned to Borrow, who was gnawing some beef twigs Ann had passed round.“Are you grasping all this, my friend?”“I find this shooting business easier to grasp than the idea of the universe closing in on us.Suppose you divide the shooting up into a series of scenes like a comic strip, and number them.The first shows a dead body, horizontal; the second, body half off ground; third, body almost upright, ray coming from it; fourth, ray going back into gun; fifth, gun button being pressed; sixth, resolution forming in gun-owner’s mind.Those six scenes all exist in space-time – and with our experience of mind-travel, we know they always exist, can be revisited over and over like any other event in history.Okay; they lie there like six pictures of a strip on a page.They can be read from one to six or from six to one, although only one way is the right way.Just happens we always read them the wrong way.Am I right, Professor?”“Yes, yes, a good analogy.We experienced them the wrong way, since our very memories were distorted.Do you see it more clearly now, Captain?”Howes scratched the back of his neck and shrugged.“Give me another cup of coffee, will you, Ann?”They had reached some sort of a pause.Silverstone and Bush looked rather hopelessly at each other.Perhaps because of tiredness, Bush’s first spurt of intellectual excitement had worn thin.He had hardly touched his food.He stared grimly at the massed ranks of shadowy people about them, many of them, in the illusions of mind-travel, seeming to stand half in the ambiguously shaped rocks.“Ann – I’d like another cup of coffee!” Howes repeated sharply.She was sitting with her knees drawn up, her rations lying beside her, staring into the grey rock ahead of her, a totally blank expression on her face.In alarm, Bush leaned over and shook her shoulder gently.“Are you all right, Ann?”By dragging degrees, her head came round and she stared at him.“Are you going to point your gun at me again, Eddie, and demonstrate the new system? I think you’re all in a dream – this awful place has hypnotized you.Can’t you realize that what you are saying is just tearing human life up by the roots and – and laughing at it? Well, I don’t want to hear a word more! I’ve heard enough, and I want to go back – back to the Jurassic or anywhere , rather than hear you men talk this frightening stuff in this frightening dump! It’s like a terrible dream! I’m going back – or forward – or wherever the hell you think it is!”“No!” Silverstone jumped up.He could see she was on the verge of hysterics.Anxiously, he took her hands.“Ann, I can’t let you leave! I need – we all need a woman’s common sense on this.Don’t you see? We’re – sort of disciples, a band of disciples.We must go back to 2093 when we’ve got things clear and explain to other people – ““Well, you won’t catch me explaining, Norman! I’m not your kind and you know it – I’m just an ordinary person.”“We are all ordinary persons, and all ordinary persons are going to have to face the truth.”“Why? I’ve passed thirty-two years happy enough with a lie!”“Happy, Ann? Really happy? Not frightened at heart, aware as several generations ahead to the twentieth century have been that some immense and awful revelation was about to burst? People have to know the truth!”“Leave her to me, Professor,” Bush said.He put his arm round her.“Please stay and listen, Ann! We do need you here.You’ll be okay.I know how tough you are.You can take all this.”She almost managed to smile at him.“I’m tough, am I? You men are all the same, whichever way round things are! You so love something new, theories, all that stuff! Look, all this that you were saying about bolts going back into guns, all explained in six scenes – ““Roger made that pretty clear.”“God, clear!” She laughed scornfully
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