by Trevor Hoyle
While I waited for the end I took out my special brand, manufactured only for me, and at the same time remembered the crumpled piece of paper in my pocket: setting fire to it I inhaled deeply on the Nexus-T and watched the paper burn itself to flimsy grey ash.
10
Minus Time
Karla Ritblat was satisfied with the patient’s progress and on the seventeenth day he was transferred from Psycho-Med to one of the seclusion rooms into which sunlight could be introduced at any time of the day. Sometimes it was too much of a good thing and the omni-directional reflectors were turned away so that the room was bathed in cool pleasant shade.
He was less pale now, though his eyes still shone with a curious translucence; it would be at least a week before his metabolic rate returned to a level which could be regarded as normal.
On his first day out of intensive care Karla Ritblat told him that he would be allowed visitors but warned that if the Neuron Processor registered any abnormal activity, no matter how slight, she would have no hesitation in putting him straight back into hyper-suspension.
‘Another fortnight in the jelly bag,’ Queghan said, winking at her. ‘You’d like that.’
‘It’s for your benefit, not mine,’ Karla Ritblat responded primly. ‘You don’t suppose I do it for my own amusement.’
‘You’re all heart,’ Queghan said, watching her as she went to the door. Karla Ritblat set her lips so as not to smile. She went out of the room without looking at him, saying over her shoulder:
‘And no smoking. Those dreadful tube things upset the EEG and they’re positively bad for you.’
‘No ma’am. Yes ma’am.’
During the morning Karve came down from Level 40 and brought with him Pouline deGrenier and Léon Steele. The Director glided into the room and brought his chair to the foot of the bed, saying with a small cryptic smile, ‘Returned to the land of the living, I see.’
‘How long have you been ill?’ Pouline said. She couldn’t understand why he was in bed. ‘Did you know?’ she said to Léon.
Léon shook his head, and his eyes were so large and appealing, fully upon her, that Pouline had to turn away. She found it embarrassing to look at him: his entire manner implied a special intimacy that she herself didn’t feel. It was even rather insulting, for she had never given him cause to expect or hope for anything on a deeper, more personal level.
‘Chris suffers from a complaint that doctors used to call epilepsy,’ Karve said. ‘It can be controlled – sometimes – though it’s rather an erratic affair. In its controlled state we call it mythic projection.’
‘You’ve been into mythic projection?’ Léon Steele said, moving nearer to the bed. He studied Queghan closely.
‘So they tell me.’
‘Don’t you know yourself?’
‘It’s all rather vague, a bit dreamlike. Some details are clear while others are shadowy and unreal.’ He looked at Pouline. ‘Professor deGrenier knows what I mean.’
‘Do I?’ she said, startled.
‘Sometimes it’s difficult to separate what actually happened from what might have happened. You know the feeling.’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Pouline said uncertainly. She was frowning. ‘How long have you been here – in Psycho-Med, I mean?’
‘Couple of weeks.’
‘Weeks?’
‘Doesn’t time fly?’ Queghan said. His eyes, oddly illuminated from within, were fixed on hers with a peculiar intensity; so intense that for a moment the room swam inside her head and the slats of sunlight seemed to slide down the wall.
Léon broke in to say, smiling brightly, ‘Just as well we didn’t need your help.’ He held up a thick folder encased in a vinyl wrapper. ‘We sorted out the problem with RECONPAN.’
‘I’m glad to hear that,’ Queghan said, careful not to catch the Director’s eye. For the moment they avoided looking at each other.
Léon went on eagerly, ‘It wasn’t the hardware to blame at all, it was the program. I spotted it at once when I checked the Subject Profile. Some of the research input was wrong – the file on Dr Morell. You remember him?’
‘Vividly,’ Queghan said.
Léon sat down on the side of the bed. ‘What I did was this: I asked the facility to list the personnel in the Führerbunker from 22nd April to 1st May, 1945—’
‘And it missed someone out.’
‘No, no,’ Léon said. ‘It included someone who shouldn’t have been there: Theodor Morell.’
‘Morell wasn’t in the Bunker?’ Queghan said.
‘According to Archives he left the Bunker in the middle of April, the seventeenth I think it was.’ He held the folder aloft, gleeful as a schoolboy. ‘And this confirms it!’
‘Oh yes?’ Queghan said. ‘What is it?’
‘You recall how we couldn’t get the cyberthetic system to give us any biographical information on Morell? It occurred to me that what had actually happened was that somehow or other the system had become confused with real-life historical Morells and fictional Morells. Somehow a circuit had cross-connected itself and as a result we’d fed a lot of spurious and misleading data into the RECONPAN facility. Little wonder the brain was confused.’
‘Little wonder,’ Queghan agreed.
‘So what did you do?’ asked Karve.
‘Simple,’ Léon said, his face alight. ‘I asked the cyberthetic system to give me a fictional account by or about somebody called Morell. And it came up with this, no problem at all, pages and pages of it.’
‘Of what?’ said Queghan and Karve together.
‘The Diaries of Dr Morell.’ Léon took the folder from the vinyl wallet and opened it. ‘It’s all here, the missing information. I fed it into the facility and it all fits perfectly. Isn’t that right, Pouline?’
Pouline deGrenier was looking at Queghan as though expecting the answer to a riddle to appear suddenly on his face.
‘May I see?’ Queghan took the folder and glanced at the first page. He almost smiled.
‘What does it say?’ Karve asked.
Queghan read:
‘“Berlin, July 1938. The trees looked lovely this morning as I walked along the Wilhelmstrasse on my way to the Chancellery. The city gardeners perform an excellent service in keeping the place neat and trim and shipshape. It was a pleasure to be abroad on such a fine morning.
‘“A tedious incident which took the edge off my good humour and benign disposition: one of the guards, presumably new on the duty roster, stood in my way and asked to see my papers. He obviously didn’t know who I was and remained obdurate when I informed him that I was a member of the Sanctum.”’
‘What do you think?’ said Karve. ‘Is it authentic?’
‘Absolutely.’ Queghan glanced through several pages and said to Léon, ‘Is there any mention of the atomic bomb?’
‘The Germans never got anywhere near testing it. They knew how to produce a radioactive material called U235 but they hadn’t the technology to make it in sufficient quantity for a bomb. It wasn’t till thirty years later that the technique was developed on a commercial scale.’
‘I’m glad that you’re convinced,’ Pouline said to Queghan.
Queghan handed the folder to Léon. ‘History is full of surprises. The reality is never how you imagine it to be.’
‘Do you mean the probability of history?’ Pouline said. There was a ghost of a smile on her face. ‘Isn’t it true to say that your being in Psycho-Med for the past two weeks is as much a probability as a fact? You might have been here and you might have been somewhere else. The number of places you might have been is infinite.’
‘I don’t follow that,’ Léon said, frowning. He absently pulled at a finger-joint. ‘Either he was here or he wasn’t here. A thing happens or it doesn’t happen.’ But even as he was saying this he thought of the night he had spent with Pouline. Had it really taken place or was it just his imagination? Sometimes fantasy was more vivid than reality. He wasn’t at all sure any longer.
‘We never destroy anything,’ Léon said. ‘Would you like to see it?’
‘I’m curious as to how far the mythical Führer got with his plans to drop an atomic bomb on New York.’ The Director smiled. ‘Should make a good story by the sound of it.’
Queghan said, ‘He was probably foiled in the end by the hero.’
Karla Ritblat came into the room and paused in mid-stride. She said warningly, ‘Remember what I told you. If the Processor registers the slightest shift you’re back in Psycho-Med.’
‘Yes ma’am.’ Queghan lay back against the pillows. He did look tired and washed out, Pouline deGrenier thought. His hands were like alabaster.
‘Karla can’t wait to try her new wonder remedy on me. Dr Koester’s Antigas Pills. Guaranteed to cure everything under the sun.’
‘What an odd coincidence,’ Léon said. ‘If you read the Diaries you’ll find that—’
‘We shouldn’t bother the mythographer with our tedious research,’ Pouline said to her assistant.
‘I’m sorry.’ Léon stood up and smoothed the covers. ‘I hope you get better very soon.’
They were about to leave, chivvied along by Karla Ritblat’s officious manner and bleak stare, when a woman came tentatively into the room and looked at them wonderingly. She had bright red lips, dark eyes ringed with blue shadows, and blond hair swept up on top of her head and held in place by a silver comb inlaid with onyx.
She said hesitantly, ‘Mr Spade?’
Everyone looked at her blankly.
‘The receptionist was out so I came straight in.’
‘I don’t think—’ Karla Ritblat began.
‘I was told I might find Mr Spade here.’
‘Yes,’ Queghan said. ‘That would be me. Sit down, sweetheart.’
Pouline deGrenier couldn’t understand why he was lisping.
‘What’s the problem, blue eyes?’ Queghan said.
‘Well, Mr Spade—’
‘Who is this person?’ Karla Ritblat asked.
‘Be quiet,’ Karve said.
‘It’s this man, he keeps following me.’ The woman took out a dainty lace-trimmed handkerchief and sniffed into it. There was a stifled sob in her voice which spilled out into: ‘I think he wants to kill me.’
‘Okay, okay,’ Queghan said. ‘No need to get upset. It don’t surprise me that some guy is following you. You’re a swell-looking chick.’
‘Thank you, Mr Spade.’
‘Call me Sam.’
‘I was told that you might be able to help me.’
‘I’m your man,’ Queghan said, stroking his lower lip and smiling at her lopsidedly. ‘I can help you all right.’ He crooked his forefinger under her chin and lifted her head. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘enough of that. Here’s looking at you, kid.’
Somewhere in the black wastes of space there is a species of sub-atomic particles which possesses cosmic intelligence. Collectively, in their billions, they have the ability to move through a region of minus time, to infiltrate entire galaxies, to affect energy and matter and the curvature of space itself.
Their intelligence is not of the human order: it is timeless and infinite, aware of the space surrounding it only in the way that neurons in the human brain are conscious of the permeable fluid membrane which contains them.
These particles are the Hadrons. Their life-cycle is the history of the universe, from the beginning to the end of time. Their consciousness is beyond good and evil, above moral sway. They are the purest form of intelligence extant in the whole of Creation.
At some point in the distant past – and in the mythical future – the Hadrons have and will come into contact with human life-forms. Their influence is negligible and catastrophic.
The Hadrons can distort spacetime, upset the earthbound order of cause and effect, alter historical sequence, and enter into human consciousness. They manifest themselves in ways beyond the compass of man-made technology and comprehension – but not, occasionally, of human intuition.
The Hadrons are alive in the universe, somewhere in space-time. Beware the next coincidence.
Appendix
Causality
In the everyday world we are so used to the phenomenon known as causality (Cause and Effect) that it takes a real effort of the imagination to visualize how the universe could function sensibly without it. For example we would think it ludicrous for someone to sustain an injury and then to have the accident which caused it. Or for a cup to shatter before it fell to the floor. Yet in the sub-atomic world of quantum mechanics similar strange happenings do occur – leading to even stranger theories as to the nature of time (linked indissolubly with causality), the ultimate reality of energy and matter, and the ‘laws’ of probability.
The theoretical work which first questioned our unthinking acceptance of causality was carried out in the 1920s by physicists whose inspiration had come – of course – from Einstein. The line of thought passed through Bohr, de Broglie, Bose, Dirac, Schrödinger, and came to fulfilment in a twenty-three-year-old German physicist, Werner Heisenberg. He proposed that the quantum world – the world inside the atom – is by its very nature unobservable. If we wish to know, say, the position and momentum of a single particle we must bombard it with photons (particles of light) in order to observe it. But by doing so we are changing the nature of that which is being observed. Heisenberg concluded that we cannot at the same time know precisely where the particle is and how fast it is moving. One or the other – not both together.
This in itself is not world-shattering. But extend the idea and what do we find? That if we lack information on where a particle is and how it is moving we also lack the means of predicting where it will be later on. The future of that single particle is thus not definite but probabilistic, and therefore causality is in doubt. This has become known as the Principle of Indeterminacy and is the cornerstone of much of the thought in theoretical physics and metaphysics in the mid-Twentieth.
When the theory was put forward Einstein instinctively rebelled against it. He couldn’t believe – he refused to believe – that God could create a universe of probability in which the fate of each individual particle was left to chance; he summed up his belief in the famous phrase ‘Gott würfelt nicht’: ‘God does not play dice’.
Another concept which has had a profound effect on our everyday notion of causality came as a direct consequence of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The mathematics are difficult to understand and so we have to take on trust the physicist’s conclusion, which is indeed world-shattering. Briefly stated, it is that there is no universal time providing a universal simultaneity. In other words time is not a universal constant but, by its very nature, is relative to the position and velocity of the observer. What this means is that two observers, A and B, moving at different speeds, would find that events which are simultaneous for A are not simultaneous for B, and vice verse.
Thus we might find that while A strenuously maintained that event x happened before event y, observer B, with equal fervour, would say that event y came before event x. Which one is right? The answer is that both of them are – because the simultaneity of separated events moving at different speeds is relative. There is no universal constant by which we can measure who is right and who is wrong.
And once we go along with the theory we find some extremely bizarre happenings which outrage our everyday common sense. Just as time is relative to the individual observer, so are length, distance, speed, acceleration, force, and energy. We can only measure any of these accurately as they pertain to our own frame of reference. To another observer they will appear quite different – and again both sets of measurements are equally valid. This leads to such baffling contradictions as A observing the time-scale of B and finding it slower than his own (which is what would happen if they were moving at significantly
different speeds); yet when B observes the time-scale of A he too finds it slower than his own. And both are correct within their individual parameters of observation.
As someone once said, ‘Everything is either constantly relative or relatively constant: and it don’t matter much which.’
(* ‘To the left and down a bit. Ah, that’s better!’)
* Sweetness.
* For a technical explanation of the E.M.I. (Electromagnetic Interference) Field and the effects of time dilation, readers are referred to the first book in the ‘Q’ Series: Seeking the Mythical Future.
* World domination or ruin.
* My poor sick calf.
* Poor sweet baby.
* ‘Wolf’s Lair.’
* ‘Eagle’s Eyrie.’
* Crap!
* See Appendix: Causality.
* My little dungheap.
* Sickly man-child.
* My little duckling.
Contents
Prelude
1 The Discrete Charm of the Quark
2 RECONPAN
3 The Diaries of Dr Morell
4 Proemptosis
5 Shades of Deadly Night
6 U235
7 Brain of the Führer
8 The Anti-Matter Man
9 In the Führerbunker
10 Minus Time
Appendix: Causality
