Nut’s living body had existed for one hundred and sixty-one years. And so, when he looked back at his childhood, he saw it as an everstretching length. The older he got, the longer childhood seemed to him. If he should live to be a thousand, he would think that childhood had lasted seven hundred years; young adulthood, two hundred; middle age, fifty-nine; time since then, a year.
His companions had mentioned this phenomenon now and then, but they did not dwell on it. Only he, as far as he knew, had pondered about it. It shocked him when Frigate mentioned that they had been here only a few months. Actually, almost seven months had passed. Burton had put off going to his private world for a few weeks. Or so he had said. In reality, he had taken two months.
What made it easier for them—himself, too—to be unaware of the passage of time was that they no longer watched the calendar. They could have told the Computer to display the month and day on the wall every morning, but here, where time meant no more than it had to Homer’s lotus eaters, they had neglected to do so. They should have been shaken when Turpin announced that he was celebrating Christmas, but they had had no reference point to measure the passage of time.
It was this failure to notice the passage of time, this super-mariana attitude, that had caused them to put off something they had been eager to do shortly after getting here. That was the resurrection of those comrades who had died while trying to get to the tower. Joe Miller the titanthrop, Loghu, Kazz the Neanderthal, Tom Mix, Umslopogaas, John Johnston, and many others. These had earned the right to be brought to the tower, and the eight who had made it had intended to do that. They spoke about it now and then, though not often. Somehow, for various reasons, they kept putting it off.
Nur could not excuse himself for having been shot along with them in time’s millrace. He, too, had neglected this very important deed. It was true that he had been even busier than they with various research projects, but it would not take the Computer more than half an hour to locate them—if they could be found—and a few minutes to set up arrangements to raise them.
If you lived a million years, would your childhood then seem to have lasted seven hundred and fifty thousand years? And would the last two hundred and fifty years seem only a century? Could the mind play that sort of gigantic trick on itself?
Time, viewed objectively, flowed always at the same speed. A machine watching day-by-day activities of the people in the Rivervalley would see them as having, every day, the same amount of time to do whatever they did. But, inside these people, would not time have speeded up? And would they not be doing less and less with every day? Perhaps not in the outward physical actions such as eating breakfast, taking baths, exercising and so forth. But what about the mental and emotional processes? Would they be slower? Would not the process of changing themselves for the better, the ostensible goal set for them by the Ethicals, be slowed down, too? If this was so, the Ethicals should have given them more than a hundred years to achieve the moral and spiritual near-perfection necessary for Going On.
There was, however, one undeniable realistic reason why one hundred years was the limit for this group of people. The energy needed to fill the grails, to run the tower and to resurrect the dead, was derived from the heat from this planet’s molten nickel-iron core. The available energy was enormous, but so was the consumption of it. The Ethicals might have figured out that a hundred years for this group, people who had lived from 100,000 b.c. through a.d. 1983, and a hundred years for the next group, those who had lived after a.d. 1983, would eat up almost all the tappable energy. With all the heat that the thermionic converters drew, two hundred years’ withdrawal would cool off the core to the point where it could no longer supply the requirements.