Smart Simians

In pursuance of this theory he strove sedulously to teach the ape to distinguish colors, to recognize and fashion geometrical patterns, and to do many of the clever things with blocks and tinted paper that four and five year olds do in the kindergartens. Each new accomplishment he claimed as a triumph and a further vidication of his theory. I had my doubts, although I was willing to concede that Claybourne was a good animal-trainer.

After wading through years of fruitless research and encountering failures enough to make the heart sick, I accidentally got into communication with an intelligence whose home was no single sphere but the universe, one to whom human time was nought, as were also human fears, joys, sorrows and emotions. The fortunes of mankind meant no more to him that thosee of a tribe of insects, one year swarming over the earth, the next swept out of existence.

He would not let me address him in the language intercession. “I am like you,” he said, “but of a different sphere and a different power. I am not immortal; nothing is immortal. Neither the Earth, the Sun, nor the God who made them. Everything is passing away, or rather, dissolving, to be re-fashioned into other forms.”

Given the power to alter the future, have we the right to use it?

Uncle Charlie and Miss Catherine are engaged in important experiments at the lab, so don’t disturb their work.

In this temple as in the hearts of the apes for whom he saved the planet the memory of General Thade is enshrined forever

Wells: Yes, it’s possible, but problematic. Assuming you could create the conditions necessary to take that journey, that journey would then be fraught with potential pitfalls: the Novikov Principle of Self-Consistency, for example.

Joe: Wait—the what, now?

Barry: If you travel back in time to change something, then you end up being the causal factor of that event.

Cisco: Like . . . Terminator.

Joe: Ah!

Wells: Or is time plastic? Is it mutable, whereby any changes in the continuum could create an alternate timeline?

Cisco: Back to the Future.

Joe: Ah, saw that one, too.

No, that’s not how it works. In our timeline, Barry’s mother’s already dead, and her death is a fixed point. And nothing can change that.

As far as I could tell, I was the last person left alive. I never figured out what killed the human race. I did find something else: the date it happens. . . . The world ends in eight days, and I have no idea how to stop it.

Hazel to Five: If you want to live, come with me.”

Well, someone killed our mothers, so we shouldn’t exist, but clearly we do exist, and the universe can’t handle it, which is a problem.