Gris stumbles his way to the tug's lounge, getting zapped repeatedly despite the insulating gloves he donned, where he finds Heller waiting for him (in a blue insulator suit and hood, because we must know what Heller is wearing at all times). Heller's playing a game of "Battle," a simulated intergalactic war, which Gris thinks is silly since "technology is not up to two galaxies fighting." Keep in mind that he belongs to a civilization that emigrated from another galaxy and has mighty engines capable of intergalactic travel. Though Gris mentions that the computer opponent is notoriously difficult, Heller seems to be winning.
But another electrical short makes the game crash, to Gris' silent delight. Rather than booting it up again, Heller decides to answer Gris' accusations of going too fast and complaints about not knowing how the engines work. So here's the description of the Will-be Was engines, Voltarian science, and the nature of the universe itself.
Physicists and other "hard" scientists may want to take some aspirin about now.
"You have to understand time," he said. "Primitive cultures think energy movement determines time. Actually, it's the other way around. Time determines energy movement. You got that?"
Frankly, no. I'm used to the Newtonian concept of time as a universal constant, a dimension like height or width. I'm aware that Kant thought time was a subjective, internal intuition that allowed us to make sense of events. But it sounds like the Voltarians think Time is a force like gravity.
Heller goes on to describe how athletes and soldiers are able to control time. You see, when you're boxing or fighting another guy, and things seem to slow down, and you enter a heightened state of awareness where you're better able to react to a hostile situation? That's not adrenaline altering your perception of time, that's you warping the fabric of spacetime with the power of your mind!
No explanation why time doesn't slow down for the other guy, or everyone else in the universe, or what the range of this distortion is.
And no, Heller isn't even close to finished. Gris is so stupid that he needs tutoring in elementary Voltarian science, so Heller explains how the universe works.
"First," he said, "there is LIFE." And that word appeared at the top of the screen. "Some primitive cultures think life is the product of the universe, which is silly. It's the other way around. The universe and things in it are the product of life. Some primitives develop a hatred for their fellows and put out that living beings are just the accidental product of matter, but neither do such cultures get very far."
We've moved past normal kinds of stupid to levels of dumbness preceded by profanity.
So LIFE, or physical organisms capable of reproducing, came before matter? Or even the universe in which they themselves exist? The sun exists because I'm alive, even though most empirical evidence suggests it's a great deal older than I am? Velocity exists becomes I'm alive?
Gris also has objections to this theory, though for other, much dumber reasons.
He was flying into the teeth of my own heroes: psychiatrists and psychologists. They can tell you with great authority that men and living things are just rotten chunks of matter and ought to be killed off, which proves it! Just try and tell them that there is such a thing as independent life and they'd order you executed as a heretic! Which shows they are right. I let him go on. Not too long from now, he'd get what was coming to him.
I have no idea where Hubbard got the idea that the people delving into the workings of the human brain were some kind of nihilist Darwinists. Shouldn't he hate biologists for suggesting that humans are just another kind of animal? Or scientists in general for having a non-romantic view of humans' place in the universe? But nope, he focuses this hatred on psychologists... with some to spare for others, obviously.
Heller goes on to arrange the order of things, with LIFE on the top, followed by TIME, SPACE, ENERGY, and MATTER. So much for spacetime and converting matter to energy and vice-versa. Since humans - excuse me, Voltarians - are LIFE, they can control everything lower than them on this scale. A society's technological level depends on how much of that scale they control - the Voltarians are a superpower because they can control time, while primitive societies who think that time controls them are doomed to failure. Gris mentally complains that "Any psychologist can tell you that man is totally the product of everything, that man can change nothing!"
Meanwhile I'm wondering why we humans, who have proven our mastery of Life by banging out more humans since we existed as a species, still can't control Time yet, or warp Space to our wills.
According to Heller, it is Time which determines "the orbits of the atom, the fall of the meteorite, and the behavior of a sun," not things like protons and neutrons, or gravity and atmospheric density, or mass and hydrogen levels. Time also ensures that things will exist in the future, but this determinism is measurable up to twenty-four hours thanks to harmonic "side bands." Hence the "time sights" Heller brought onto the ship.
He hands one to Gris, who aims it at the lounge door and twiddles with the knob on the device. He gets a grainy image that could conceivably be him, looking rather defeated, slinking through about six and a half minutes from now, so Gris resolves to not leave the room looking that pathetic. Heller explains that time sights are needed to steer ships traveling faster-than-light - since you can't see the normal way, you look ahead through time and alter course if you see yourself colliding with something, thus showing how Life masters Time.
Heller makes a comparison to how mathematicians can predict an object's movement by calculating its velocity and whatnot, which raises the question of why you can't use star charts and computers to plot your faster-than-light route like in just about every other sci-fi setting, rather than using a crystal ball and some trial-and-error steering. I'm also wondering if changing lanes to avoid a slow-moving garbage truck counts as Life mastering Time, or deciding to go inside when you see a storm rolling in.
But on to those Will-be Was engines.
"Now, in the center of a Will-be Was there is an ordinary warp drive engine just to give power and influence space. There is a sensor, not unlike this time sight, but very big. It reads where time predetermines a mass to be. Then the engine makes a synthetic mass that time incorrectly reads to be half as big as a planet. The ordinary power plant thrusts this apparent mass against time itself. According to the time pattern, that mass, apparently HUGE, should not be there. Time rejects it. You get a thrust from the rejection. But, of course, the thrust is far too great as the mass is only synthetic. This causes the engine base to literally be hurled through space.
To recap:
1. Time knows when you're leaving a room, and if you'll be colliding with a sun, measurable up to a day ahead of you
2. Time is a physical force that you can bounce an artificial mass off of to propel yourself forward, because Time just can't accept a small planetoid seeming to appear out of nowhere
3. Bouncing yourself off Time is a more powerful propellant than, say, projecting an artificial mass ahead of you and letting gravity pull you forward, or using an artificial mass to warp space and shorten your voyage that way
4. Time is precognitive and predeterministic, but you can dupe it and defy it
Those jolts Gris had been feeling? That's Time bouncing the ship forward each time the engines project a false mass. "'Will be,' says the mass synthesizer. 'Was,' says time. Over and over. And the speed simply tries to rise to infinity." I have no idea why tenses suddenly matter, but I'm having trouble seeing straight at this point, so I'll just go along with it.
The frequent static zappings are a byproduct of this faster-than-light travel. Since the ship is passing through so many photons and "force lines of gravity you wouldn't ordinary detect," the vessel is picking up a lot of excess energy. Heller briefly turns on a viewscreen to reveal the ship's yellow-green (color adjusted since English has no terms for hyperluminal phenomena) energy wake flaring up all around the spaceship and trailing behind for a hundred miles, which Gris compares to a speedboat kicking up an ocean spray, except this terrifies him.
Gris worries if this is what killed Tug Two, but Heller brushes aside such concerns. Since the former Tug One is traveling at an average speed of 516,166,166 miles per second (2,775 times the speed of light, according to my calculator), its gravity synthesizers are keeping its passengers from feeling the effects of 1,289,401.409 G's. Heller thinks Tug Two's gravity failed and pancaked the crew, leaving the ship to careen on as a stream of plasma. He expresses his hope that the technicians got Tug One's gravity synthesizers set up nicely, since they were so rushed to depart, but doesn't seem too worried.
Finally, Heller explains his planned arrival time - he wanted to get to Earth at sunrise to make an early start of it, while The Actual Captain Stabb is more cautious and wants a full day to ensure security before moving in at nightfall. Then he advises Gris to get some sleep so they can talk shop the next day.
So Gris, shaken and crushed, slinks out of the cabin in exactly the same way the time sights saw he would. Which could raise questions about whether or not you can really avoid the fates revealed by the devices and if they're safe to pilot your ship by, were I capable of walking in a straight line after so much mind-boggling Hubbard Science.
Back to Chapter Three
There are Scientology references in this part, especially MEST (matter-energy-space-time), and the "Scientology point of view that life is senior to matter, energy, space, and time." These are actual Scientology beliefs.
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