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"Common Time" is a 10,000-word story by James Blish, about an astronaut on a starship, whose body and mind begin to experience time at very different rates. It was first published in the August, 1953 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

Garrard is the lone astronaut on board the DFC-3, an experimental faster than light spaceship on its way to Alpha Centauri. The pilots of the first two ships in the series had died, and no one knew why. Now, as the ship approaches its maximum speed, Garrard notices some strange effects inside the ship; he can see the instruments on the control panel, but everything is moving very slowly, including his own body. Garrard realizes that his consciousness is moving in a different time-frame from the rest of the ship, while his body is still in sync with the ship. He can barely move, but he has a view of the clock, and so he counts off the movements of the second-hand, and concludes that for every one second of time that the ship (and his body) experience, his mind experiences about 2 hours. Doing some calculations in his head, he realizes that he will experience about 6000 years of consciousness on the trip to Alpha Centauri. He figures he might use that time to work on the great, intractable problems of mathematics and philosophy, and possibly have them all solved before his trip is finished.

As he is thinking through these problems, he soon realizes that the ship’s clock is speeding up, and his mind is coming back into sync with the ship’s time. But the acceleration of time does not stop. Soon the clock is ticking by at an accelerated rate, and now Garrard’s mind is moving along at a speed much slower than the ship, which Garrard experiences as a kind of pseudo-death. His ship arrives at Alpha Centauri, and Garrard is still feeling the effects of this ‘pseudo-death’ when he encounters (or thinks he might have encountered) a race of aliens from Alpha Centauri, who call themselves the Beademungen. They communicate with Garrard, and then his ship turns around and heads back to Earth. Arriving back home, Garrard reports everything that has happened to him, but is still not entirely sure if the aliens were real, or just a figment of his imagination.

Reprints

This story has been reprinted in Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 15 (1953).

Comments

Isaac Asimov cites this as one of his favorite James Blish stories. "Science fiction writers play games with time and a new game is hard to find. Jim found one here and I'll bet it took a lot of hard thought to explore the different angles of this particular game."

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